SCIENCE AT HIGH SPEEDS: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming Chris Mooney Thursday, October 18, 2007 8:00pm, Beckman Institute Auditorium, Caltech This event is free and open to the public; no tickets or reservations are required.

Book-signing after the event. Storm World available courtesy of the Caltech Bookstore.

It may be the most fraught issue in meteorology today: is global warming increasing the ferocity of hurricanes? In this talk, Mooney introduces the relatively new science of "hurricane climatology" and surveys the political, social, and meteorological context that made it matter so much. In the process, he explains what scientists can learn from such high-profile conflicts, about how to communicate their knowledge to a media and public desperate for it.

Chris Mooney is a Washington correspondent for Seed magazine, senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and author of the bestselling book The Republican War on Science, dubbed "a landmark in contemporary political reporting" by Salon.com and a "well-researched, closely argued and amply referenced indictment of the right wing's assault on science and scientists" by Scientific American. The Republican War on Science was named a finalist for the 2005 Los Angeles Times book prize in the category of Science and Technology. Mooney's 2005 Mother Jones feature story about ExxonMobil, conservative think tanks, and climate change was nominated for a National Magazine Award in the "public interest" category, and his 2005 article for Seed magazine on the Dover evolution trial was included in the 2006 volume of Best American Science and Nature Writing. In 2006, Mooney also won the "Preserving Core Values in Science" award from the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals.

Mooney's second book, entitled Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, has just been published by Harcourt Books. In early mentions, the Boston Globe calls it "riveting" and Library Journal writes that the book "brilliantly and compellingly explains the complex relationships among global warming, climate modeling, government science, and hurricane forecasting." The Caltech Y Social Activism Speaker Series student-run organization of Caltech (California Institute of Technology, CIT). Caltech is in Pasadena, California, near Pasadena City College (PCC), Past Speakers include: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Margaret Mead, Tim Wise, Saul Alinsky, Betty Friedan, Senator Barry Goldwater, Ted Sorensen, Dolores Huerta, Nikki Giovanni, Carl Rogers. Also Jody Williams, William F. Buckley, Jr., Huwaida Arraf & Adam Shapiro, Theodore Postol, Tahmeena Faryl, Amy Goodman. And recently: Scott Ritter, Adam Werbach, Julian Bond, D.C. James, Peter Camejo, Rahul Mahajan, Gerard Ungerman, Bernie Sanders, Mike Farrell, Peter Dreier, Chuck Collins, Ka Hsaw Wa, Kurt Gottfried, Steve Barr, Nikki Giovanni, Chris Mooney, Jack DuVall, Maquiladora workers, George Regas, Reagan Demas, Kevin Sites, Invisible Children.