I both love and hate the amount of fantastic writing there is about climate change out in the world. I have read in the last decade a number of carefully researched, clearly presented arguments about a variety of angles on climate change, all of which are as catastrophic as the next. Excellent fuel for books, terrible for the world.

Porter Fox does a great job taking on the angle of superstorms caused by climate change. In approachable language, needing little previous knowledge of the subject matter, Fox breaks down how these superstorms are fueled by rising ocean temps and explains the ways in which climate change has shaped our earth.

For fans of The Heat Will Kill You First, Under a White Sky, and the Great Displacement, Category Five in another stellar installment in a genre I wish we didn't so desperately need more of.

Thanks to NetGalley and Little, Brown and Company for the eARC of this book!

I'm not the most passionate person when it comes to the ocean, weather, or climate change. I believe all of them are important, but I don't consider myself to be the most knowledgeable advocate. In his book, Porter Fox explains SO many aspects of all three of these things and some of it blew my mind! The OCEAN can help us manage CARBON emissions and have a DIRECT EFFECT on climate change?! I would have NEVER thought!!! But now that I know, I think it's SO COOL!!! 🤩 Personally, I find sailing and the ocean in general terrifying, so I can't say I'd ever navigate directly into a storm cell developing over open water like Fox chronicled at one point in the book, but kudos to him for doing it haha! I came into this book knowing very little about the earth's climate and the way our society is changing it, but Fox's informative book taught me so much about the ways superstorms occur and the internal mechanics of how they function.

I'd highly recommend this book to anyone interested. As a novice on this topic, I felt this book was approachable and manageable; there weren't a ton of words and jargon I didn't understand or explanations that went over my head. I was able to comprehend what Fox was sharing and I'm coming away from this read feeling informed and with a new sense of awareness, but hopeful that there's still more to come in Earth's story.

The author of this book is a sailor who has spent a lot of time on the ocean. Because of this, many of the people he spent time interviewing were also sailors. This meant that there were many first person accounts of actual ocean storms and their changing ferocity. I thought the storm anecdotes were fascinating but honestly got a little bored by the sailing facts. Personally, that’s not an interest of mine. Otherwise, I thought this well-written and timely.

Received a digital copy via NetGalley.

Category Five: Superstorms and the Warming Oceans That Feed Them addresses the consequences of climate change and warming oceans on the weather, primarily on the hurricanes and typhoons that develop over these warmer waters. The result is bigger storms, deadlier storms, reaching parts of the earth that don't normally see such storms. I love reading about the science behind these storms.

I read Porter Fox's last book, The Last Winter, and really enjoyed it. He's a very good writer: mixing the autobiographical with the biographical with the science but also writing about nature in such a beautiful way. I would say this book is even more autobiographical given his family history. His father built ships, and Fox has a long history of sailing. He has first-hand experience with disastrous weather while out on the ocean. I do think there was more of that than I was expecting in this book. There are entire chapters dedicated to him sailing around New England. They are well-written don't get me wrong, but it wasn't what I was expecting from a book about superstorms and climate change.

As for the possible solution proposed in this book, carbon sequestration, it was more of a hint than an actual exploration of the potential consequences of that solution. Essentially, our oceans' food chains feed on phytoplankton who absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As this carbon dioxide gets fed (pardon the pun) further up the food chain, the creatures produce "marine snow" in the form of carbon that lands on the ocean floors. Yes, it's just poop. The proposed solution is to inject iron into the oceans, thus encouraging algal blooms, causing a feeding frenzy that increases the amount of carbon dioxide that is absorbed into our oceans. It seems like a great idea. Something to think about, though, is whether absorption of carbon dioxide through this method would increase the other problem: ocean acidification. When carbon dioxide is absorbed, it doesn't always just become carbon. It also produces carbonic acid when combined with water. The increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the world's oceans has caused increased acidity, which will also impact the very food chain carbon sequestration that Fox proposes as a solution to our carbon dioxide problem. I'm sure the scientists will work it out and Fox can write about it in his next book!

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley and the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

Combination travelogue, sailing manual, history guide, and science book – focusing on where oceanography and climate science meet. This book was both a fascinating read as well as an adventurous one. Written in first person narrative, the author takes us through his childhood through his boat building, academic career, and his investigations traveling mostly by a motorized sailboat to talk with renowned scientists.

Oceanography has a dearth of data, with only a small amount of interest from the populace, government or private funding sources. The ocean will likely give us what we need to solve many global problems – although we know but little about it. It drives climate, yet much of what it can or will do are merely educated guesses – as climate models are criticized to be.

What is happening with the weather and climate? How have things changed up until now? Can we stop or reverse it? Importantly, how can the oceans save us – and what do we have to do to help them or what are we likely to do to slow that down?

I really enjoyed Porter Fox's article "Hurricane of Data" in the New York Times last year, so when I heard that he had published a book based on the reporting in that piece, I immediately wanted to read it.

I found the whole book interesting, although I liked some parts of it more than others. While I usually like travelogues, the author lost me in the sections describing his own voyages - I think he used too much sailing jargon for my taste. But I loved all the chapters on fascinating people who dedicated their lives to discovering the secrets of oceans and hurricanes.

Thanks to the publisher, Little, Brown and Company, and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book.

As someone who was once a marine biology major and lived near oceans for over half of my life, storms have fascinated me. Porter Fox uses his love of sailing and intertwines it with science to show how storms are getting bigger and bigger. Overall thought this book was well written and well constructed fun read with thoughtful insights from different sailors and scientists.

I received a free advanced copy of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.