A Geo-Fix?

“Category Five – Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them” by Porter Fox, 2024

This is a romantic and terrifying story of the power of the world’s oceans as they respond to global warming. The oceans that cover most of the earth, combined with the sun’s flares and the turning of the globe, provide the main forces behind the wind, rain, drought and severity of the world’s weather.  And yet much more is spent on Martian-type space research than ocean research, a typical ‘head in the clouds’ move, now compounded by Trump’s defunding of NOAA.  Fox describes individual super-storms, hurricanes, typhoons, supercells and cyclones to make his points.  They are nature unleashed in all its fury, resulting in damaging effects, especially to landlocked and coast-dwelling humans and any poor souls in its watery path. While this book mostly focuses on northern and central American oceans and seas, it references events in the Indian, Arctic and Southern oceans too.   

It is told through the eyes of Fox, who spent a lot of salt time on the Atlantic even as a youngster.  It is also an homage to his father, who built an advanced boat in his Maine garage, and started a boat business which later failed.  It includes an extremely experienced storm sailor; a dogged English mariner who logged old written storm data into a valuable book; a U.K. researcher organizing the inputting of hand-written data from the 1800s into a digital database; a private inventor of a sea drone gathering electronic ocean data; NOAA oceanographers working on current buoys, datasets and software and a world-wide ocean emergency crew leader describing the disasters he has seen.

Ah, POLITICS?

The book is not political in the sense that Fox thinks that only ‘money and data’ are the things stopping an understanding of global warming and attendant climate change action.  Right. He has no concept of politics, which is especially relevant after global warming denialists have been put in charge of the U.S. government.  With the defunding of NOAA and the ending of any climate change initiatives and policies in other parts of the federal government to benefit the carbon capitalists, the situation is dire. It is not just the carbon firms or banks that stand in the way, now the government is openly in the way.  Stories, first person interviews and data won’t change this.

As a landlubber whose contact with water and weather is through freshwater canoes, kayaks, a 10-horse motor on a rowboat, a small sailboat and occasional piloting of a pontoon or speedboat, I can say this book is very exotic stuff.  The ocean is another beast entirely. These folks are fascinated by the ocean in all its moods, but mostly hellish and difficult turns of weather.  They can pilot sailboats with ease, or at least competency, in the face of storms and towering seas.  Winds howl and waves are stories tall.  At 8 pounds per gallon of water this adds up to tons in a wave crashing on a deck. The experienced ‘rough seas’ sailor took a group of trainees straight through a near hurricane and they did not sink, with only one man being injured. 

But this is not just some adventure story.  The sailors, as amateur oceanic scientists, noticed the increases in waves, rain and wind years before the IPCC, Al Gore, the Paris Accord or 350.org. They saw these changes picking up speed and becoming more extreme.  The ‘ocean-atmosphere flux’ is a key ‘border’ location that moves CO2 in an ocean conveyer belt up, down and sideways.  This interface between air and water was, unsurprisingly, first measured by Exxon in the 1970s as it was trying to estimate the impact of burning fossil fuels.  The data was not good for Exxon and they hid the results.  As Fox emphasizes, ocean data is the missing piece of the environmental picture.  Unfortunately an un-manned surface sea drone discovered several years ago that the Southern Ocean around Antarctica was now emitting carbon, not storing it.  This is a telling fact if true.

Rescue outfits that arrive after hurricane storm damage report complete devastation in areas.  The 9^th Ward in New Orleans is still 25% of what it was before 2005’s Hurricane Katrina.  Especially in the Caribbean, many island nations encumbered by poverty and hit by cyclones have never recovered. Even in the U.S., after the headlines move on, the people left behind are forgotten and devastated for years.  Yet people are still moving to Florida and the Gulf Coast - though that ‘tide’ seems to be shifting, partly due to the bean-counting exigencies of the U.S. insurance industry.

Fox has a vision of an apocalyptic storm that directly hits New York City in 2100, powered by warm ocean water, salt content, a sinking eastern coast, prior sea level rise and horrendous 200 mph winds, all combining to overwhelm the massive newly-built ‘gates’ to New York harbor, flooding Manhattan. It is no little Superstorm Sandy. Buildings collapse on Manhattan and for 48 hours the slow-moving storm ravages the city and its boroughs.  What is left is uninhabitable.  This is no movie, it is the future for every city on the coasts of the world until something drastic is done.  And it might happen long before 2100.

Saved by the Ocean?

A Geo SOLUTION?

Fox’s solutions? It is a technical one, at least to him. He sails his father’s first boat far down the Hudson from its moorage, then around Manhattan, up the East River and into Long Island Sound to Woods Hole, Rhode Island. It is an extremely weather-impacted trip to find out the rumored geo-solution. He has to face one of his greatest fears in Long Island Sound – a storm that he cannot handle if he is to reach his destination. For the first time his level of confidence in his training and his father’s boat give him relative peace, with this storm at least.

Fox meets two oceanographers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.  They think the solution to reducing climate carbon is in the deep ocean and the multiple life forms hidden there, almost unmapped by science. This lightless area is called ‘the twilight zone.’  According to Fox, they are in a race against the brutal industrial fishing industry, which will destroy many of these life forms using miles-long nets.  Because no one owns the ocean, it is still the ‘wild west,’ a lawless bonanza.  So here it is.  The biological carbon sink of the deep ocean via various forms of plankton up to giant whales sequesters far more carbon than some high-electrical engineering fix, or land-locked soil, trees, mangrove swamps, bamboo or hemp.  It sequesters 15-20 times as much. And it is mainly through fish ‘poop,’ or as it’s scientifically called “marine snow.”  Fox details how the ocean has prevented the worst effects of global warming – so far.

Woods Hole maps this ‘twilight-zone’ of zooplankton, fish larvae, gelatinous organisms, tons of microorganisms, along with organic waste and detritus at the bottom of the ocean through submersible drones, robots, cameras and sensors.  As Fox puts it, they are ‘following the CO2’ into the ocean, which even the IPCC hasn’t done.  So here are their preliminary findings:  the deep ocean contains 10 times more organic life than originally thought.  In 2014 a study of this mesopelagic zone estimated 10-20 billion tons of fish, shellfish and microorganisms exist there, which is far more than on land. Here is where climate change and your diet connect once again.  Capitalist commercial plans to drag and harvest everything in the ocean like this could drop these numbers to the point where this carbon sink is … sunk.  But thank you sushi!

To increase the amount of carbon sequestration given the amount of fluctuation in different geographies, one scientist wants to use iron fertilization in the ocean, which increases the amount of CO2 making it to the deep, dark ocean floor.  Seaweed is another method, though how that works is left unexplained. These are ‘geo’ solutions and no one in the book mentions if scattering iron in salt water has blowback effects.  That is Fox’s fix.

A tidbit from this somewhat lyrical book reminds us that Ernest Hemingway wrote a story for the New Masses called “Who Murdered the Vets?” It was about war veteran construction workers left on an island in the Florida Keys that died after a vicious 1935 hurricane hit.  The story led to a scandal, and later, federal legislation under F.D. Roosevelt to establish the National Hurricane Center.  So socialists even had a role in that. 

I got this book at the library.  However May Day Books has a good selection of books on climate change and science from a left-wing environmentalist point of view.

Prior blogspot reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “global warming,” “climate change,” “science.”

Red Frog / June 22, 2025