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To a certain degree, any statement from the scientific community—including those on global warming—comes with some level of uncertainty. “What matters today,” writes New Orleans native and author Chris Mooney, “is we know enough to be worried.”

Given that his previous work is titled The Republican War on Science, Mooney was sure his latest effort, Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming, wouldn’t win many fans on the right side of the aisle.

But it turns out his research revealed a complex and nascent debate among scientists, one that reminds Mooney of the argument over global warming in the early 1990s.

Not that Storm World is a sequel to the science journalist’s first book. It’s more like the next step in answering much tougher questions: How should politicians approach new scientific information? And what role do scientists themselves play in translating their complex knowledge into something policymakers can use and the public can understand?

Storm World calls for scientists to become better communicators and leaders, warning them not to let their intramural arguments over interpreting data distract people from the big picture. The media too, Mooney says, should write about policy more than any on-going scientific debate.

Perhaps due to the relatively tame 2006 and 2007 hurricane seasons (for the Gulf Coast, anyway), much of the healthy fear and passionate calls-to-action that defined post-Katrina America have been replaced by old cavalier attitudes toward coastal living without regard for enhancing New Orleans’ defenses against floods, much less those of Tampa Bay, Miami, Houston or New York City. Whether global warming has a measurable effect on hurricanes or not (Mooney sites scientific arguments on both sides) this negligence is the author’s chief concern. And it should be ours, too.

“Two years later we can only conclude that Katrina wasn’t nearly the wake-up call that it should have been, and that it’s only a matter of time until we see another hurricane disaster of comparable, or even greater, magnitude,” Mooney says. “Sure, everybody remembers Katrina, and always will. But our subsequent actions suggest that we haven’t learned the right lessons from that disaster.”