Listening to most people talk about the weather is pure torture. Three minutes can seem like three hours. (Sorry, mom.)
Fortunately, Michael Lewis isn’t most people. If anything, the author of “The Big Short” and “Moneyball” has the opposite problem: After listening to him go on about the weather for two hours and 27 minutes straight, it seemed over all too quickly.
This marathon weather talk arrives in the form of “The Coming Storm,” a near-novella-length recording of narrative journalism read by the author and released exclusively by audiobook giant Audible.com. (Lewis is one of the first writers to sign on for the audio-first publication strategy being pushed by the Amazon AMZN, +0.12% subsidiary.)
“The Coming Storm” tells the story of the scientists and bureaucrats at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) responsible for collecting and analyzing troves of data in order to predict tornados, hurricanes and rainy days — and the ongoing effort to undermine their efforts in the name of profit. The Audible format and Lewis’s upbeat narration are perfect for this story, and one can only hope the medium helps to restore the type of very-long-form magazine journalism that no longer has a home (or many readers).
Lewis, as always, assembles a cast of iconoclastic characters determined to paddle upstream on a river of stupidity, blindness and conventional wisdom. These include Kathy Sullivan, an astronaut–turned–NOAA official obsessed with understanding why Americans aren’t heeding tornado warnings. (At one point she likens life in government to figuring out how to get things done while being tied down like Swift’s Gulliver. And there’s DJ Patil, the data scientist and former Obama official who early on saw the untapped potential of NOAA’s decades’ worth of data collection.
A five-day weather forecast is now as accurate as a one-day forecast was just a little over a decade ago.The encouraging news is that weather forecasting has become significantly more sophisticated and accurate in just the past 15 years or so — a five-day forecast is now as accurate as a one-day forecast was just a little over a decade ago.
NOAA and the National Weather Service, which fall under the U.S. Department of Commerce, may employ 11,000 people and a fleet of satellites, but the agency operates in obscurity — in fact, it’s forbidden by law from promoting itself or the accuracy of its forecasts.
Instead, and this is the crux of Lewis’s argument, private companies like AccuWeather take the government’s data and repackage it and sell it to corporations and hedge funds.
Donald Trump’s nominee to take over NOAA? AccuWeather CEO Barry Myers. This may seem to be a logical choice, until you hear that Myers has little background in meteorology, and his company has a long history of lobbying to make the government data less available to the general public, and even helped block a plan by the National Weather Service to release an app. Myers, who has yet to be confirmed, declined to talk to Lewis.
ALSO SEE: Audiobooks found to elicit a greater emotional response than movies or television
Even if AccuWeather’s predictive models are occasionally more accurate than the government’s, as at least one study has shown, Lewis wonders whether, when lives are at stake, the top priority of such forecasts should be to help give hedge funds an edge or to save human lives.
By Lewis’s account, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross seemed to have (to a comical degree) no clue that his new job was less about overseeing the nation’s business than managing its scientific and census data. In fact, “The Coming Storm” is really sort of a teaser trailer to Lewis’s upcoming book about Ross’s department since the Trump transition.
It’s a testament to Lewis’s stature and talent that he can get a book published on the Commerce Department — a subject that might sound even more torturous than the weather — and that people will eagerly buy it.
