Book Review 116: Extreme Weather

EXTREME WEATHER: A Guide & Record Book, by Christopher C. Burt. 304 pages, illustrated. Norton, $25.95

“Extreme Weather” is a chatty and amusing compilation of the hottest, coldest, wettest, driest, stormiest, foggiest places in the United States, with references to the rest of the world.

But it turns out that the United States has more extreme weather than any other country. Author Christopher Burt says it is because America is big enough to encompass both cold northern air and warm southern air, without the east-west mountains that Eurasia has to keep them apart. Most American extreme weather champions are west of the Mississippi, with another concentration around the Gulf of Mexico.

Burt has the character to write about weather without reference to climate alarmism, a rare feat these days. He states, correctly, that even if the globe were warming, we would still get new records every year at both ends: cold and hot, warm and dry.

Although he takes pains to isolate his weather enthusiasm from climate change controversy, that doesn’t mean the reader cannot draw his own conclusions. Most amusing is the list of F5 tornadoes.

We have been promised, repeatedly, that emitting carbon dioxide will result in more and more violent storms. The worst tornadoes, called F5 (more recently EF5) occur only in the United States, thanks to our curious topography. Burt has a list by decades.

From 1900-1909, there were 4. In the following decades, the totals were 5, 6, 5, 6, 13, 15, 13. Well, well, well, this is looking quite promising for the Chicken Littles, nearly three times as many in the second half the 20th century as in the first half.

Oops! Only 3 in the decade of the ’80s. Then 10 in the ’90s. But, oops again, we have concluded the Oughties withonly 2.

The record series are well organized, and it is easy to see that extreme weather events are randomly distributed. You cannot use them to detect climate change. Not on the scale of a couple of centuries, anyway.

Burt takes a sensible approach by simply accepting the local records as observed at the time, without trying to adjust or normalize them. Some may have been less precise than others, but we just have to live with that.

All in all, a balanced and humane book, illustrated with well-chosen pictures and well-organized maps, charts and graphs.

There have been two editions so far 2004 and 2007, and there is a Website, www.extremeweatherguide.com that updates with new record-breaking events.

The first edition, 2004, included this prediction: “Although dikes protect the city (of New Orleans) from the waters of nearby Lake Ponchartrain, these would almost certainly be overwhelmed by a Category 4 or 5 storm surge. Should this occur, much of downtown New Orleans, including the French Quarter could be swamped under 20 feet of water.”

The next year was Katrina, only Cat 3 and it wasn’t storm surge as much as bureaucracy that did in the city, but Burt looks like a prophet.

I was surprised to learn than the maximum temperature ever recorded in Florida is lower (by a degree or two) than the maximum temperatures in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee. The reason seems to be the moderating effect of the ocean, but still, southern Florida is a lot farther south than Tennessee. I’d have thought that at least once in a while being a thousand miles south would have trumped the cooling effect of the ocean.