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Controlling Hurricanes?
Phil Shapiro writes "With the cost of hurricane Katrina running as high as $100 billion, the thought of trying to control the severity of hurricanes should be mulled. Dissipating the energy of hurricanes as they're forming might be within the range of the feasible.
Scientific American tackles this topic in an article last year, as does this crank. (I admit the crank is me.) Is this type of thing feasible, or is it best not even tried at all?"
blows, it really blows
This strikes me as the perfect segue from Bad Science in the Press.
-ShadowRanger
You're the one who's written the long article about it, so shouldn't we ask the professional - you tell us!
What would the global impact be? Are we not trying to control something which is not ment to be controled? We don't even understand global warning 100% yet, now we want to do this?
I would rather concentrate on building technology and common sense (don't build a city below water level - for example).
My 2c
PS: My prayers still go out to all victims of natural disasters - I can't imagine being in that situation. May God bless you all!
Need an ISP in South Africa?
Could we use massive wind energy plants to remove energy from the weather system?
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!
Jeez. This was on the news what 3 day ago? Anyway.. I don't know if this is an up and coming theonion.com but here it is - a pretty twisted article about how the Yakuza & the KGB are behind it. I give the article 4 stars just based on the WTF factor alone.
Stop creating the warm-water conditions that feed them. That'd help for starters.
..
Yes, America, that means walking your fat ass to work more often than you currently do. It means less celebration of rampant excess (SUV) and more smarter management of your technology (hybrids).
Forget this hurricane problem. Fix the society which fosters global warming
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
How things like this only get pushed when it's too late. Where is the forward thinking/planning? What are the governments doing about the oil problems? Why must we keep paying more and more for oil when there are other viable alternatives (uranium, solar power etc.). Interesting that 4 out of 6 of the world's richest companies are American Oil Companies, and by pushing the price of oil up they will only get richer and richer.
The world is full of stupid people.
An ICEBERG!!!
How about a hurricane *generator*.. but make it go in the exact opposite of the target storm.. now that'd be something I'd wanna see
Find it here. That way you don't have to click through to 6(!) pages just to read one article. And it's advertising free, in plain text.
Perhaps we should just try to take predictions of hurricanes more seriously? Katrina was predicted, both as a long-range risk and some days before it hit. The damage would have been considerably reduced if the levees hadn't broke.
I recall reading that the energy expended by a hurricane like Katrina contained more energy than all the energy man has ever created in the history of, well, history. Does it seem likely that the energy we would expend in dragging an iceberg south or having a few submarines trawling about for a day even begin to compare?
If they dropped a few MOABs in the middle of a hurricane, could that possibly disrupt the wind flows, etc so that it won't pick up steam and become a full-fledged hurricane?
1. Building cities above sea level
AND
2. Away from hurricane prone areas
AND
3. Investing in *capable* flood defences
AND
4. Making proper arrangements for mass evacuations.
Your ideas are laughable. Nuclear submarines plowing the gulf of mexico? What the fuck are you smoking?
Trying to stop a hurricane is a moronic idea. Almost as stupid as what seems to have happened in New Orleans.
Perhaps you should run for Office.
Why does the taming hurrican person have some love of submarines. To tow large structures you dont have to use submarines you can use other small and cost devices like nano bots or maybe a large airplane? Wouldn't a tanker be much better
We are already 'customising the climate' with gloabal warming.
/. article I read earlier today: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/11/171 6205&tid=172&tid=218/ The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security
What's to say that this sort of 'controlled' weather manipulation won't cause more long term damage than it'll save.
Any manipulation to something not fully understood is probably going to cause more harm than good.
Money would be better spent rebuilding city's infrastructure less vunrable in the first place
This reminds me of a
This is a common question and there were indeed some experiments at hurricane modification. Most of the common ideas, including some of the ones that the original author proposes, are explained it the NOAA FAQ on tropical storms in the section TROPICAL CYCLONE MODIFICATION AND MYTHS.
and Katrina happened to get so large so fast just because we hadn't had other hurricanes to bleed off the heat in the Gulf's water. What everyone seems to forget is that if Global Warming were causing more hurricanes, which it isn't as we are on or below average across the last 20 or so years, is that the number of cyclones and typhoons would have to increase as well, which they haven't.
As for the hybrid versus SUV debate. Keep your damn hybrids, veritable ecological disasters on wheels. The current generation are nothing more than marketing gimmicks.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Without actually doing the arithmetic, the shear volume of ice you'd need to move to cool an appreciable area of the Gulf of Mexico simply doesn't bear thinking about. You'd basically have to cool the entire surface mixed layer, which extends tens of metres downwards.
That's a *lot* of energy to extract through latent heat of water.
Really, a hell of a lot.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Far better to build houses that aren't so badly affected by a hurrcane - rebuilding New Orleans somewhere else that was not at flood risk would be a good start.
No, this should not be attempted. Not now, not ever. Weather has one of the key properties of a chaos: Sensative dependance on initial conditions. This property gives rise to the proveriable butterfly flapping it's wings in China could cause a hurricane in the US. People make the mistake of thinking that if we could just introduce a tiny change to counteract the butterflies wings we could easily avoid the hurricane. This is wrong headed. Sure, me breathing on my keyboard right now may well stop a hurricane occuring in the US but I have no way of knowing this. The same errors that make weather prediction so difficult also apply to weather prevention. You can't really predict how your changes will effect the weather any longer than a few days in to the future and this makes it essentially useless.
That's not all. Think of the political implications. Say the US was unable to stop a hurricane but could divert it in to Mexico instead. This could be considered an act of war. A hurricane's energy is equal to detonating a low yield nuclear war head every second for hours on end. Diverting this incredible destructive energy to impact on another country would almost certainly lead to war.
Finally, hurricanes occur naturally. Even the strong ones, like Katrina, are a neccessary saftey valve on global climate. If you could in principle dissipate the energy of a strong hurricane that energy has to go somewhere and I bet it stays in the Atmosphere. It's like the fire safety camapaigns in the states where they put out forest fires all through the 60-80s. Eventually, there was so much debris on the forest flaw that when it inevitably caught fire we got huge "superfires" that were very difficult to put out and damaged a lot of property. I would conjecture that if we did somehow manage to stop hurricanes, eventually, we'd get a super hurricane of incredible strength that releases all that unspent energy. Not a nice prospect..
Simon
You could just try and get your president to agree to the Kyoto agreement.
-- "Can't sleep, clowns will eat me!"
Ever hear of Chaos theory . .(warning :Sarcasm soon to come) ..A small change in a dynamic systems initial conditions can result in a wide variations later in the cycle . .. we shoot all the butterflies in the world.
the butterfly effect in specific
Well to summarise
Edward Lorenz's theory was beautifully analogised to the butterfly effect .
so as a more sensible solution , I advise that if we want to stop hurricanes
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
and strikes in hard ....
... after the nuclear dust has cleared, it will probably be ok pretty fast in terms of universe time.
A small quote
--- Consider the math involved in such "ocean plowing." Nuclear powered submarines can travel as fast as 25 miles per hour. Let's assume that these submarines would be dragging an ocean plowing apparatus that slows the submarine down to 15 miles per hour.
If the ocean plowing apparatus stretched a half mile wide, that means that a single submarine could plow 180 square miles of ocean in any 24 hour period. (The plowed surface area equals 15 miles per hour times 24 hours times 1/2 mile wide.)
---
does the word aerodynamics say anything to you ? submarines are shaped like cigar cells for a good reason, so they would have any chance to move at all, if you make the submarine drag-push just about anything, it wont slow down 10mph. it will just stop (in mph measures at least). 1 cubic metre of water still weight 1 ton, if you want to lift it, it takes a lot of power.
however, you can use the submarines to wipe out 6 billion homo sapienses and stop the massive world pollution and save the earth that way
otherwise than that, we're too late to save the planet anyway, we should start to look for a new outpost and start building some rockets to get us there (that sound pretty familiar from movies, doesnt it ?)
I'd tell you the chances of this story being a dupe, but you wouldn't like it.
That's some of the stupidest crap I have ever heard. Ocean plowing? Wind powered pumps? ICEBERGS?
This sounds like bad sci-fi.
Why not use common sense, as in, DON'T LIVE IN A CITY THAT IS UNDER SEA LEVEL IN A HURICANE PRONE AREA! If are stupid enough to ignore that first peice of common sense, at least get the fuck out of the way if a hurricane comes.
Suppose we were able to steer a hurricane in a limited way using any of these water temperature techniques.
Suppose also that there is a hurricane headed for a major city - say, Miami or New Orleans. And we employ this steering mechanism.
The result is now that some agency decided that a smaller community - say, Mobile AL or Pensacola - bears the brunt of a hurricane instead of the larger city.
Wouldn't the residents of the affected area have some serious legal recourse against whomever "steered" the storm toward them? Is this steering ethical, given that we're essentially choosing one group of people to sustain hardship and death over another?
What about military use of this technology? Instant economic catastrophe for regimes you happen not to care for, whether you're in a shooting war or not. Or even political - making sure a red state gets the storm rather than a blue state. Given the current polarity of American politics, I could certainly see such a decision being made in a smoky backroom somewhere - buried so deep it'll never see the light of day.
Until these storms can be eradicated completely - the ethical and moral questions related to affecting a storm's path and the potential for misuse of that technology would seem to outweigh its usefulness.
Weather Modification Research and Technology Transfer Authorization Act of 2005 (Introduced in Senate)
thomas.loc.gov
S 517 IS
109th CONGRESS
1st Session
S. 517
To establish the Weather Modification Operations and Research Board, and for other purposes.
IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
March 3, 2005
Mrs. HUTCHISON introduced the following bill; which was read twice and referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation
A BILL
To establish the Weather Modification Operations and Research Board, and for other purposes.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the 'Weather Modification Research and Technology Transfer Authorization Act of 2005'.
SEC. 2. PURPOSE.
It is the purpose of this Act to develop and implement a comprehensive and coordinated national weather modification policy and a national cooperative Federal and State program of weather modification research and development.
SEC. 3. DEFINITIONS.
In this Act:
(1) BOARD- The term 'Board' means the Weather Modification Advisory and Research Board.
(2) EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR- The term 'Executive Director' means the Executive Director of the Weather Modification Advisory and Research Board.
(3) RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT- The term 'research and development' means theoretical analysis, exploration, experimentation, and the extension of investigative findings and theories of scientific or technical nature into practical application for experimental and demonstration purposes, including the experimental production and testing of models, devices, equipment, materials, and processes.
(4) WEATHER MODIFICATION- The term 'weather modification' means changing or controlling, or attempting to change or control, by artificial methods the natural development of atmospheric cloud forms or precipitation forms which occur in the troposphere.
SEC. 4. WEATHER MODIFICATION ADVISORY AND RESEARCH BOARD ESTABLISHED.
(a) IN GENERAL- There is established in the Department of Commerce the Weather Modification Advisory and Research Board.
(b) MEMBERSHIP-
(1) IN GENERAL- The Board shall consist of 11 members appointed by the Secretary of Commerce, of whom--
(A) at least 1 shall be a representative of the American Meteorological Society;
(B) at least 1 shall be a representative of the American Society of Civil Engineers;
(C) at least 1 shall be a representative of the National Academy of Sciences;
(D) at least 1 shall be a representative of the National Center for Atmospheric Research of the National Science Foundation;
(E) at least 2 shall be representatives of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the Department of Commerce;
(F) at least 1 shall be a representative of institutions of higher education or research institutes; and
(G) at least 1 shall be a representati
Any obvious attempt to alter a hurricane (or any weather phenomena) would immediately open one up to all kinds of liability. Even if you had 100% success today you'd be blamed for any ill effects down the line. Prevented that hurricane from destroying a coastal city? Congratulations -- too bad you've upset some farmers suffering a drought farther inland. However, if you hid your true motives (e.g. eliminating destructive weather patterns) behind some commercial activity (e.g. mining gold from the ocean) you'd no doubt be untouchable.
Where are the numbers? I get so pissed off everytime somene presents facts they've heard somewhere.
1. Hear about it
2. Check it out
3. Post it with links to sources
And btw: Energy makes things go faster e.g. a car or a hurricane....and heat is form of energy...(I won't provide sources to this as I assume americans used to learn this in school)
Found this interesting reply to the parent, from our good friends at NOAA...
Why don't we try to destroy tropical cyclones by (fill in the blank)?
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5f.html
There have been numerous techniques that we have considered over the years to modify hurricanes: seeding clouds with dry ice or Silver Iodide, cooling the ocean with cryogenic material or icebergs, changing the radiational balance in the hurricane environment by absorption of sunlight with carbon black, exploding the hurricane apart with hydrogen bombs, and blowing the storm away from land with giant fans, etc. (Some of these have been addressed in detail in this section of FAQ's.) As carefully reasoned as some of these suggestions are, they all share the same shortcoming: They fail to appreciate the size and power of tropical cyclones. For example, when Hurricane Andrew struck South Florida in 1992, the eye and eyewall devastated a swath 20 miles wide. The heat energy released around the eye was 5,000 times the combined heat and electrical power generation of the Turkey Point nuclear power plant over which the eye passed. The kinetic energy of the wind at any instant was equivalent to that released by a nuclear warhead. Perhaps if the time comes when men and women can travel at nearly the speed of light to the stars, we will then have enough energy for brute-force intervention in hurricane dynamics.
Human beings are used to dealing with chemically complex biological systems or artificial mechanical systems that embody a small amount (by geophysical standards) of high-grade energy. Because hurricanes are chemically simple --air and water vapor -- introduction of catalysts is unpromising. The energy involved in atmospheric dynamics is primarily low-grade heat energy, but the amount of it is immense in terms of human experience.
Attacking weak tropical waves or depressions before they have a chance to grow into hurricanes isn't promising either. About 80 of these disturbances form every year in the Atlantic basin, but only about 5 become hurricanes in a typical year. There is no way to tell in advance which ones will develop. If the energy released in a tropical disturbance were only 10% of that released in a hurricane, it's still a lot of power, so that the hurricane police would need to dim the whole world's lights many times a year.
Perhaps some day, somebody will come up with a way to weaken hurricanes artificially. It is a beguiling notion. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could do it ?
Perhaps the best solution is not to try to alter or destroy the tropical cyclones, but just learn to co-exist better with them. Since we know that coastal regions are vulnerable to the storms, building codes that can have houses stand up to the force of the tropical cyclones need to be enforced. The people that choose to live in these locations should be willing to shoulder a fair portion of the costs in terms of property insurance - not exorbitant rates, but ones which truly reflect the risk of living in a vulnerable region. In addition, efforts to educate the public on effective preparedness needs to continue. Helping poorer nations in their mitigation efforts can also result in saving countless lives. Finally, we need to continue in our efforts to better understand and observe hurricanes in order to more accurately predict their development, intensification and track.
Personally, I think you're right. Let's stay above sea level and out of hurricane/flood prone areas but that's not always a simple task.
I think his ideas are interesting, maybe not plausable, but interesting.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Seems kind of ironic don't you think? :-P
Seriously though.. I think I remember reading somewhere about "sowing" clouds for rain.. and that it had unpredictable results, I imagine that Toying with events as large as a Hurricane would be like taming a pit-bull with a cattle prod...
"Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn't been good to you so far
I thought someone had already done this kind of thing with direct X-rays on cloud cover?
Funny how some people think that manipulating the world as we see fit to maximize profit will fix our problems, when that's the cause of most of our problems already!
Making weather-control equipment will only bring us bigger problems later on. We need to work with earth and eachother, not patch the problems as they arise with artificial means on a natural earth we haven't even begun to really understand yet. Now that's real forward-thinking.
Death is part of life. We can begin with that.
I've read Slashdot for a couple years now and never had an account. Your ideas to [stop,prevent,weaken] hurricanes are so horrible that I had to sign up. Seriously, I would rather have read about a new AOL disc being released. Or, some other lame thing. I cannot stress enough how awful this is. Seriously. Even 1995 you should have known better. Even if you were only 10... and educated by treegod worshippers. I don't think we should try to control nature, in general. I think we should lessen hurricanes through architecture. Now, if someone did have a way to just stop hurricanes, that would be great! Your ideas are just retarded.
Double-Click here for instant highlight.
Hurricanes generally don't know what they're going to do more than a few hours/days beforehand; how can we know, let alone control them?
Look at Ophelia, for instance. It's sitting there off the Carolinas, and still doesn't know what it wants to do with itself. Maybe it'll go towards Myrtle Beach. Or maybe it'll go towards Hatteras (some days I think the Wright Brothers memorial is really a hurricane magnet.) Or maybe it'll loop-the-loop like Hurricane Jeanne did last year, and swing back just when everyone thinks it's headed out to sea to die.
I'm sure we could make one do *something* different, but I doubt anyone could ever say with definite precision whether the something was better or worse than what it would have done in the first place. It'd be like shuffling a deck of cards again. You'll get different results, but wouldn't be able to ever say whether different == better.
Then again, if we put money into this, we won't be able to say that it's *not* working, either -- and politically (especially after Katrina) it might be hard to cut funding for this sort of thing.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
You're confusing hybrids with hydrogen/electric cars, methinks. Those require electricity from the grid or a hydrogen fuel cell charged elsewhere to run, and do, indeed, simply move the problem away from consumers (and largely onto the power plants, which I believe run much dirtier than your average auto these days...).
Hybrids, on the other hand, at least as I understand the science, still run on ordinary old gasoline--they just use a lot less of it, 'cause they use some fancy techniques with generators and batteries and a purely electric motor that, when looked at closely, seem awfully like last century's technology...but end up increasing the efficiency of the car a lot.
So points for effort, but no, you're wrong.
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Let's do the math. MAth is FUN! As I figure it, to raise water from 10 feet down in the ocean, using 100 subs, each with 100,000 horsepower, you can do 28,000 sq miles per day. Sounds huge, but the earth has an awful of of surface area. If you assume that we can narrow down the "bad" areas to plow to 1% of the earths oceans, you still can only do 2.1% of those areas each day, even with 100 subs. ANd don'tforget, the subs are each putting out over 100 megawatts of heat each!
What's the difference between a cyclone and a tropical storm? Organization. Destroy the storm's organization and it falls apart. Release a large amount of energy all at once at one spot in the eyewall, say a few hundred petajoules, and the storm should lose its cohesive spinning eye.
Its made out of a polyacrylamide and they have been granted a patent.
Seeing a demonstration of this compound is astonishing; a small sachet sprinkled into a large bowl of water instantly turned the entire volume of liquid into a jelly.
My only question is this; what will all the fish think of it?
ATH0 Bitcoin: 1DnwFLXczVZV8kLJbMYoheUrpqHesjxrSi
What makes you think that this is not already being done. For both Good and Evil.
If there were groups with the knownledge and resources to produce and control hurricanes why tell everyone else. You now have the big stick of all.
There have been reports that the russkies developed some weather tech during the cold war (and beyond)..
What if Katrina was deliberate???
Pablo..
Phil Shapiro seems to know very little about submarines, or boats in general.
First of all, nuclear submarines are a lot faster than what he says (25 mph, less than 20 knots). Even in 1995 when he wrote the FA.
But most of all, he imagines that a 0.5 mile wide "plow" would only slow them down by 40% -- from 25 mph to 15 mph. My guess (based on experience from commercial fishing on not from submarines) is that a 0.5 mile wide plow would slow the sub down to 0 mph (or 0 knots, for that matter).
If the rest of his ideas are as sound as that one, well...
Congratulations! Now we are the Evil Empire
I think a large nuke dropped into the ocean about one third the radius from the eye would kick up enough cold water that it would make a significant change to the progression of the storm.
Not that I advocate dropping large nukes into the ocean.
In other news, scientists are working hard on airplanes that can't crash, pens that can't forge signatures and music that can't be copied.
Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
Could six billion people use thought to control the weather?
Considering the amount of people that die from Hurricanes every year then it's definitely worth trying.
From my understanding hurricanes only occur when a dozen or so meteorological conditions are "perfect". It should not be impossible to affect enough of these to ensure the hurricane never happens, or it's strength is vastly reduced.
As to the relationship between global warming and hurricanes, there is none. Hurricane frequency occurs on a natural cycle of warmer SSTs (sea surface temperatures) in the Atlantic. This is a real phenomena that is not understood but does occur. When SSTs rise by 1 degree C on average in the above the equator in the eastern Atlantic, you get more hurricanes. Plain and simple. This rise in temperate occurs on roughly 20-30 year cycles. This is nothing new. The problem is, coastal building in the US occured during a natural "low" in hurricane activity. The intensity picked up in the 1990s and we're right in the middle of that "high" intensity phase now. When SSTs in the Atlantic cool (sometime in the next decade and head south of the equator), hurricane frequency will fall. We are talking thousands of square miles of ocean here that feed these storms. You think an iceberg and a couple of subs trolling the waters is going to affect that?
Articles like this are so comedic. Despite being a race that has created nuclear weapons, we have nothing on Nature when it comes to brute energy expenditure. "Stupidity" does not even begin to describe the simplistic and child-like thinking that produced this article. Only human arrogance in thinking that we can solve or alter anything to suit our desires can produce tripe such as this article.
Money and time is best spent on prediction, warning, disaster planning and recovery and further research into hurricane genesis so we can better understand how these storms come to be and how we can live with them better. And even then, it is an inexact science. People are better served by showing some awe and humility towards nature as history has shown, whenever Man tries to mess with Nature, Nature wins.
Weatherwars.info
Weather manipulaton is a real technology, been happening for a long time.
How about just diverting it while its developing? If you could create some kind of area of 'attraction' or 'repulsion' right next to the hurricane you might be able to change its path, maybe divert it over the southern states so it doesn't hit anything important?*
Creating these areas could involve spraying something or heating something, yes its still a big area to cover/lots of energy to use even with the start of the storm but diverting it at the source seems far more feasable than stopping a full grown storm just before it enters territorial waters?
*I'm not American so I can say that, kinda, look! an eagle!
--
Firefox 1.5 broke my spell checker
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Or if the Governor of Louisiana had specifically asked the federal government for certain kinds of assistance...
She said "We need your help, we need everything." but she did not specifically request federal military support. Her press secretary said that she believed that such a specific request was not necessary.
I'm pretty sure that there are rules which regulate the deployment of federal troops within state borders. I think that it is indeed something that must be formally and specifically requested.
CNN.com has free video now, but it's free video that you can't link to (hardly "free" if you ask me). Go to CNN's homepage and watch the clip "Miscommunication Delayed Response" to hear the governor say to her press secretary in what looks like a rehearsal or perhaps a moment that the governor believed the cameras were not yet recording. She said on Wednesday (to her press secretary in a whisper while being recorded): "I really need to call for the military, I should have started that in the first call." These are pretty damning words to be said on tape.
Katrina was indeed predicted, and one of the bureaucrats said "We need your help, we need everything you've got." which meant to her "send planes, trains, buses, boats, food, water, shelters, etc" but she did not communicate such requests specifically.
And let's not forget the fact that Louisiana's National Guard are mostly deployed over in Iraq. They were not even in place or ready to help the state cope with the disaster, because the Federal government thinks they can be put to better use overseas. Let's also not forget that since 2003, the levy budget has been but a pittance due to lack of contribution by the federal government because of, specifically, needing to fund the Iraq war.
One more thing we can't forget is that a man can make a phone call and order thousands of people to be killed instantly by napalm, but that same man cannot make a phone call and order thousands of water bottles dropped on a city ravaged by a hurricane? Think about this one real carefully: We can more quickly and capably kill our purported enemies than we can help our own citizens. Is that the kind of nation you want to be a part of?
We do not need to control hurricanes, we need to control our government.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
Can hurricanes and other severe tropical storms be moderated or deflected?
blame the next hundred years of hurricanes on the idea that we did not approve it soon enough?
Between your post and the fat american SUV post it makes me wonder if insightful is should be inCITEful here.
In other words, nothing will satisfy those who seek to blame everything either on Global Warming or America.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Why bother with hurricans when you have shock and awe?
stuff
since i heard that its possible to breaking up large hailstones into smaller pieces with a chemical called 'Silberjodid' (in German) http://www.atmosp.physics.utoronto.ca/people/list/ ctech.htm
i have no idea what else is possible.But what does most of the
U.S. policians say in these days mostly ....? ...this is one of the things that could be discussed later....
cheers
For some time now I have heard people joking that the next thing Bush would declare war on was the weather.... Now I'm not so sure it was a joke...
-.sig sauer-
Like, building a populous city below sea level. The worst damage caused by a hurricane is bcos of the water level, not the wind speed. If the water can drain in a couple of days, not much damage (as in life) will be caused.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
The Hurricane Research Division of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory has a section of their FAQ dedicated to "Tropical cyclone modification and myths".
As for the submitter's ideas, well, I don't think NOAA will be sending him the Segway he asks for on his home page. Take his "plowing" idea. Please. (Thanks, I'll be here all week) I haven't done the math but I'd think that towing a device a half mile wide that extends several feet below the surface of the water would slow a submarine more than 10 mph. But let's say you had an army, er, navy of submarines to plow up a square 465 miles on a side over a month. The mixing wouldn't last that long, and such an area is miniscule compared to the area of tropical cyclone formation.
The sprinkler idea has problems on many fronts. Even if you could deploy hundreds of such sprinklers the amount of water brought up would not effectively cool the surface. The cooler water would be rapidly warmed by the sun.
The iceberg idea is dealt with in the FAQ linked above. He sure seems to have a thing for submarines though. Submarines are probably the worst choice craft to accomplish his scheme. They're not designed for surface travel. Better to use surface craft for all the towing (plows, sprinklers, icebergs) required.
And yes, I am a meteorologist, though not a tropical meteorologist, and none of these answers required meteorological answers. Kudos to the submitter on getting his home page posted on Slashdot!
Vin Schaefer figured this out decades ago - but it's not used to control weather.
Imagine you make it rain here when it was going to rain there.
The people deprived of the rain there will sue your rainmaking keister when they don't get their rain.
Hurricanes happen. They destroy what we put in their path (sometimes I imagine we name them because it helps ascribe blame). But the rain they bring after they run out of steam is needed moisture somewhere.
How about we stop building vulnerable things in well known paths of bad storms? It'll cost lots less and it will mostly work.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
It means less celebration of rampant excess (SUV) and more smarter management of your technology (hybrids). Forget this hurricane problem. Fix the society which fosters global warming ..
I think SUV drivers are morons. I think any technology that truly decreases our energy consumption (including hybrids) is fantastic. I think global warming is real, man-made and bad.
What I'm trying to say is, I agree with your energy conservation philosophy. What I disagree with is your cavalier attitude toward assigning blame for a hurricane. Your spouting of your radical position that soccer moms' SUVs are causing hurricanes does more harm to the energy conservation cause than good. Where is your evidence? How do you refute the argument that hurricanes have been happening for at least hundreds of years?
Unfortunately, your argument is no more scientifically valid than the the people think it was caused by an angry god. And anyone that hears you spouting such nonsense only thinks less of you and the cause you stand for. That's bad for everyone.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Tell that to the Dutch.
A lot of commentary I've read about the Hurricane Katrina disaster has shown total ignorance of how the dutch people have overcome their problems with sinking land and rising sea levels. Over half of the Netherlands is under Sea level ( as you can see here) and the Dutch haven't just build a massive defense system against flooding, but have continued to push back the shoreline and claim more land from the sea. They claimed 1650 Km^2 back in the 1930s!
To say that New Orleans is a city that should be left flooded and forgotten just because it happens to be below sea level is nonsensical, as the Dutch have almost an entire country (and one of the richest countries in the world) operating from below Sea level with a far larger border with the Sea to protect against.
All it takes is a little innovative engineering.
Just so we're clear on this: I've done graduate level work in Atmospheric Science. Actually, just for fun I'm working on my PhD right now and I've worked as a research contractor for a bunch of years. And in my time I've picked up a few useful nuggets of information.
A couple of relevant tidbits to the topic at hand:
1. Hurricanes are big. Really big.
2. Humans are little. Really little compared to hurricanes.
3. So are ships, planes, icebergs and nuclear weapon detonations.
The question is not whether we can change hurricanes but rather whether we can do anything at all that a hurricane could even notice. I think there's a story about some crazy king-guy ordering the tide to stay out (and getting rather wet), but I'm sure that's not relevant to the topic at hand.
nb: There is of course a side issue, specifically whether anyone other than the most flagrantly stupid people would screw around with the dominant mechanism by which excess energy is re-distributed throughout the atmosphere and what incidentally may be a major source of fresh water to the US south east. But nevermind.
It is best not even tried at all. Hurricanes have a valid purpose in the scheme of things. The real problem, money/loss wise, is development in low lying coastal areas. I've lived through 30 years of hurricanes here in Wilmington, NC. Got one coming right now.
Thats about it, controls were simple on WWII fighter planes.
I think the spitfire was more difficult to fly than the hurricane.
A hurricane's total energy is equal to that of many atomic bombs. That's a lot of energy to have to dissipate safely. It's already disbursed over a wide area.
If you really want to control the severity of hurricanes, the best way is to overengineer your buildings, and refrain from putting buildings in areas that are prone to flooding and are over-exposed to the shore without natural barriers to lessen the storm surge. This will lessen the severity of the storm damage, but won't affect the strength of the storm.
If you really want to try to control the intensity of the storm itself, reverse global warming. Cooler ocean waters will result in smaller storms. Of course, cooling the oceans will have broader environmental effects which may well be worse than preventing monster hurricanes.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The full article suggests that the first testbed for the technology would be enhancing rainfall. It is to be assumed that this would mean enhancing rainfall in areas that don't get enough of it -- the American midwest, drought-stricken areas of Africa, etc. Realistically, that would probably help more people overall than hurricane prevention, although hurricane prevention would probably win as far as preventing property damage goes. It's hard to argue with the idea of keeping the world's breadbaskets well hydrated, am I right?
HAARP anyone?
But, as has been pointed out elsewhere, ocean temperature does affect hurricane strength.
Seems to me all such storms, including typhoons and tornados, are the most efficient way to dissipate energy from a given area, or nature wouldn't do it that way. So my thinking leads me to believe that if we stop a lot of these storms then nature will find other ways to dissipate the energy and one of those ways could be that the energy builds up to a point where we cannot prevent it and we get a super-destructive monster storm. That or we have other very significant and destructive release of that energy, like huge waves. I say we focus on reducing the energy available to such storms, i.e. reducing "global warming".
Ouch! The truth hurts!
If the message of the lengthy SciAm article is that minor perturbations in atmospheric and ocean conditions might affect the course and strength of a hurricane, then why not employ space mirrors to heat the upper atmosphere to adjust the course of formative hurricanes? Assuming that a hurricane would follow the path with more energy, we could use space mirrors to heat up the atmosphere in front of the forming hurricane and steer it into the north Atlantic towards colder waters where it would fizzle out.
Our government can't possibly control the weather!
It's seriously time to wake up, people!
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
Don't some hurricanes just skim along the coast, dumping heavy rain and winds as they gradually lose power? I always thought that was how hurricanes made it to the Canadian maritime provinces (by which time they are usually just tropical storms).
Next on news... !!!Breaking News!!! Scientists have just invented a machine that will not only break up a hurricane but also re-direct it(like a url) to an enemy country.
Java Oracle Linux Enthusiast
...I've been seeing this kind of thing popping up all over the Web in the last week or so, with one of the main proponents apparently being this guy, a particularly sophisticated crackpot who I remember having read about a few years back.
;-)
The online kook population seem to be going into a feeding frenzy with regards to Katrina, even moreso than usual. FEMA's recent screwups in New Orleans are also apparently being seen by the Lone Gunmen demographic as validation of the schizoid claims they've been making over the past 15 years, namely that FEMA have been busily carpeting the US with concentration camps, presumably for a time when Shrub will grow tired of all the criticism he's been receiving, throw some giant switch, and have said critics (and most of the rest of the population along with them, apparently) rounded up.
We can only hope they're wrong.
Does anyone else find time and time again that reading these long Scientific American or PopSci articles leaves you wondering why you just wasted so much time on it?
I always end up wondering why the author couldn't have just condensed it down to a few paragraphs without losing anything.
So many words, so little said.
Buzz
I remember reading about planning in the Army Corps of Engineers or maybe it was just the AEC about the use of a small yield "clean" device to disrupt a hurricane by denotating it at the eye wall or something like that.
Unfortunately its 8:00, I haven't had coffee, and it was probably five years ago I was reading about it, so thats all the detail I can give. Someone more awake might know what I'm talking about...
That's right - not one US Senator voted for it.
Not one Democrat voted for Kyoto.
Suffice to say, the whole point of most technology is make life better for people, and diverting hurricanes would seem to qualify. The whole history of the human race is a gradual removal of ourselves from the inequities of the natural world. Bad weather is no different from disease or tiger-attacks in that sense.
We don't even understand global warning 100% yet, now we want to do this?
That should be,
We don't even acknowledge global warning 100% yet, now we want to do this?
Understanding is not very difficult. What we don't understand are the consequences of global warming. Consequences like more violent weather.
As for controlling hurricanes, well, sorry, but those people are a bunch of crackpots. Once it forms, you can't affect it without screwing up the world even further. The cost of a hurricane is NOT the weather's fault, it is peoples fault for building where the hurricane WILL flood and thus destroy all.
To control hurricane's destruction, you only need to control where people build and how. That should be easy, eh?
PS. Taiwan is struck with these types of weather systems all the time yet you don't much destruction. Even Florida is getting slightly better over the years as people replace crap trailer parks with better housing.
Florida is even going to reflood some of the marshes which will provide ample protection against tropical storm floods over the next few decades.
nuclear warheads
How about forest fires?
We've begun to learn that forest fires are a natural part of the forest lifecycle, and that by suppressing the normal small fires, we've really messed things up royally.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I take it you have issues with Monsanto as well, then? Talk about playing with big systems we depend on.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
Build some oil rigs a few miles out from the coast. Strategically place some oscilating fans on the deck of each of them and turn them on out of sync. This should be enough to disrupt the harmonic flow of the tropical storms that build into hurricanes.... just an idea anyway...
It would be ironic if it was found that the intensity of these hurricanes has been made worse by the lack of US participation in the Kyoto Policy, or their lack of any serious environmental policy.
I admit that The Day After Tommorow is possibly a bit of an extreme case, but there was a message the film makers were trying to send.
While I may land up with bad karma for this on /. it's nothing like the bad karma the US will have when the whole world starts having to deal with the agricultural difficulties of changing climates and weather patterns.
You got the butterfly's location wrong:
In other news: Bin-laden claims that a specially bred butterfly raised on a farm in Afghanistan caused the hurricane as part of his war against the West. He warns: Blair & Chirac that he is breeding British & French varients.
"During each hurricane season, there always appear suggestions that one should simply use nuclear weapons to try and destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea."
Storm's a brewin', betta' launch the missiles...
According to this story, the Japanese can already control hurricanes.
(And no, I don't take this seriously.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Several years back now (1995) Hurricane Opal did considerable damage as far inland as Atlanta. I know just in my neighborhood at the time the smashed trees wiped out quite a few houses. This was not any sort of minor event.
Hurricanes start to dissipate over land, but it is a huge variable how much this really is, it isn't near total or immediate, and they also have the potential to spawn a lot of tornadoes.
I am all in favour of using icebergs to cool the temperatures around where a hurricane is forming. After two or three hurricane seasons, global sea levels would have risen enough to see if we would start growing gills like they Costners in WATERWORLD. by the way the rest of the planet would be flooded, but hey no hurricanes!
Yeah, but your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.
Well, maybe not that funny. After all, I live over a subduction zone that due for a city-levelling Earthquake any century now. But at least I can count on a quick, painless death!
your result is a radioactive hurricane.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
"They attempted to accomplish this goal by seeding the clouds there with silver iodide particles dispersed by aircraft, which would serve as nuclei for the formation of ice from water vapor that had been supercooled after rising to the highest, coldest reaches of the storm. If all went as envisioned, the clouds would grow more quickly, consuming the supplies of warm, moist air near the ocean surface, thus replacing the old eye wall. This process would then expand the radius of the eye, lessening the hurricane's intensity in a manner akin to a spinning skater who extends her arms to slow down." Just how much silver iodide is needed and what adverse effect does this have on the environment?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Nuclear powered submarines can travel as fast as 25 miles per hour. Let's assume that these submarines would be dragging an ocean plowing apparatus that slows the submarine down to 15 miles per hour. If the ocean plowing apparatus stretched a half mile wide...
How much power does the submarine you are refering to have? Can we move a half mile wide swath of inches of water with one of them? How much does that much water weigh? You need to figure this stuff out before you start theorizing, crackpot. Lets instead assume the plowing apparatus stretched 50 miles wide! Problem solved!
Why stick up for big business?
since i relocated from los angeles to homestead, florida the site which was ground zero for hurricane andrew in 1992.
firstly, without hurricanes this place will rot. sediment builds up, pesticides, fertilizers from agricultural runoff, etc. or just waste. hurricanes are a cleaning process and an evolutionary pressure on this area. invasive species are killed off in hurricanes easily while nonnative plants thrive. the stir up of sediment in the ocean which hurricanes then dispurse to the sea allows the coral to grow closer to the shore which is currently being pushed out farther and farther due to pollution. at least florida needs hurricanes or youll watch the everglades die.
secondly, hurricane damage on this scale only happens once. it happened here in 1992 with andrew. it was a whole bunch of trailer parks before that. i have talked with coworkers quietly in miami who say it was the best thing to happen because it was such a dump and now everything is brand shining new. i live in one of those new complexes. when katrina came by us as a strong category 1 our complex had almost no damage at all but surrounding cities were flooded. see my pictures at http://www.cixel.com/photos/katrina/
wood construction down here is illegal now. if the gulf coast rebuilds with concrete block (and concrete roofs) they will never have a problem again. you could throw a category 5 at our complex and it wouldnt flinch. also all the vegetation is nonnative so as much as it will get beaten and thrashed about it will recover and also not create alot of flying projectiles. new orleans is another matter, the area below sea level they should abandon.
What im saying is though. this scale of damage only occurs once. with modern building techniques this sort of thing is a problem of the past.
how often do you hear puerto rico whining about hurricanes and they get hit by them all the time?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
...they don't have any hurricanes. ;-)
A guy walks into a bar... well, I forgot the joke, but the punchline is that he's an alcoholic.
a flourescent tube held up by a tesla coil.
The increased output of the sun right now is charging the earth and pouring more charged particles down upon us. Is it any wonder we have more hurricanes with the earth trying its best to redistribute that extra energy?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
What about you?! Where's your numbers?
Coward...
Probably torrential lightning.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Senate Bill S. 517, introduced by Senator Kay Hutchinson (R-TX), on March 3, 2005 is pretty interesting:
S. 517: A Bill to Establish a Weather Modifications Operations and Research Board, and for other purposes.
Huh? Can this be for real? You bet: Clicky.
Also interesting, this is supposed to take effect on October 1, 2005! It has only been introduced, so this is unlikely at this point. But still the timing is creepy.
Thanks to Richard C Hoagland's Enterprise Mission web site for the information. Richard is way out there sometimes, but he definately has great credentials.
-- Note: If you don't agree with me, don't bother replying. I won't read it.
All I'm worried about is how this might adversely affect my surfing and otherwise generally rough-housing in the exciting waves these storms produce!
There was an article several years ago in the science-fiction/science-fact magazine ANALOG titled, "Defeating the Son of Andrew". It suggested building a huge tall tower designed to transport warm moist air near ground level (of ocean) upward, where condensation and wind-generation would happen inside the tower (source of fresh water and energy!), and because it is supposed to draw warm moist air from miles around, any approaching hurricane will be out of luck -- the energy that would have helped feed the hurricane has already been extracted.
Isn't nationality somewhat meaningless for these big super-corporations? What does nationality actually mean for businesses that operate multinationally?
on another planet first. A change of this scale has the possibility of globally altering weather patterns and is not something we can undo. Even on a single storm, if we prevent it and there are bad consequences, there is no way to reverse our interference. I would be happy to see them try this on another planet for several reasons, not the least of which is that it will be many many years in the future.
On another note, if they had invested a few million dollars in reinforcing the dikes that protected New Orleans it would have prevented 95% of the damage (i.e. almost all due to flodding). Compare that to the cost of weather control even on a single instance, it seems more cost effective to defend against it.
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
but it'll amount to nothing than American fad!
/.! But in the end it'll just be empty words and nothing can be done in the end.
it's fun to speculate and theorize. we all love math here at
for one thing your gov't isn't really interested, not like busting out terrorism in the hopes of securing oil. maybe until an alternative is found.
i'm really impressed with you Americans, you have all the brains! you can do almost everything you want + the #1 economy in the world. but often times, you get side-tracked...
Can this be done? It seems if buildings (including superscrapers!) can be built to withstand earthquakes, bomb blasts, and serious fires, withstanding hurricanes and floods ought to be within reason.
Ok those are some of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard. First of all, a hurricane is "nature's way" of restoring the balance in energy. A decent size hurricane releases energy equivalent to a 10 megaton bomb every 10 minutes. Maybe it's just me, but I dont exactly want start pissing around with that type of energy. Even if "ocean plowing" or any of those other wonderful ideas would impact a hurricane, they are not at all feasible. Yeah ok let's just call up Russia and tell them we want to borrow a dozen subs to plow the atlantic ocean during hurricane season. Do you even have any idea how much it costs to even get a sub out of "port" let alone have 40 of them drive around in circles for 5 months out of the year. And I for one am not paying those taxes. If you got a couple trillion lying around and want to spend it on that go for it, or feel free to send me some of it. I could go on but I will spare /. and cut things off there. Bottom line, these ideas are absurd.
I love my marketing gimmick! It's a 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid (my previous 1995 Civic was hit by a semi-truck - with me and my wife in it) and I've only had to put gas in the tank twice since buying it in June.
I've got to hand it to Honda, making a car that uses less gas is quite a gimmick!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
... gotta nuke something.
I read a hurricane researcher's account of the crank theories he gets mailed for hurricane control, one of which involved nuking the storm as it was forming, supposedly to disrupt its formation. Which, of course, would do nothing other than make the hurricane radioactive. Great improvement.
The parent comment conveys a typical myth about New Orleans. It is a very valuable shipping and commerce city, true, but the part which flooded is NOT the shipping and commerce district - that's a ways upstream, and is NOT built below sea level. The parts which were hugely damaged were almost exclusively the residential districts. There's no legitimate commerce or business need to rebuild the flooded structures on the exact same spot.
In my opinion, Louisiana should move all the people to higher ground, and pass laws forbidding the new construction of a building or business in a levee-protected area that lies at or below sea level.
Note that I don't care about stuff behind a levee - it's perfectly reasonable to build a protective levee - just don't use it to justify building below sea level.
But then, Louisiana never asked me, and they really don't care what I think, so in all probability my taxes will again someday go to hurricane or flood relief for the idiots who choose to put themselves right back in harm's way.
Oh, and in case you think I'm being cold and heartless, I'm not - as soon as the situation has stabilized a bit, I intend to do a missions trip to put my construction skills to good use, by helping to build houses with Habitat for Humanity in the Mississippi or Alabama areas - but I intend to refuse any request to help rebuild New Orleans, out of pure principle.
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Perhaps they could use biodegradable oil?
There's an old sailors' tale that pouring a teaspoonful of oil on troubled waters soothed them. Turns out that 1 teaspoonful of oil would cover 100 square metres. And for really troubled waters, they would use a whole barrel or more.
And there's actually a scientific reasoning behind this. The oil helps increase the surface tension of the water preventing the wave crests from disintegrating and throwing spray all over the place. And this spray acts as a fluid layer between the atmosphere and the ocean, reducing air friction and allowing winds to gain speed.
This happens around 5 on the Beaufort scale
New Scientist had an article on this subject, with a followup:
The 1937 US Naval Academy textbook Modern Seamanship by Austin M. Knight gives specific instructions on the use of oil, with illustrations. It notes that the practice was so valuable that "all United States Registered machinery propelled ships of over two hundred tons must carry from 30 to 100 gallons (amount dependent on tonnage) of oil..."
But all of this would only work for the local vicinity of a single ship. You would need a considerable lot more to cover an entire ocean.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Why, didnt he cause Katrina to speed into new Orleans to devistate the black population?
Its a joke, sarcasm..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
CD players take 45-200 Watts, and power supplies on PCs take 250-400 Watts (these are some numbers I got from Google - they could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure they're in the ballpark). That means if you're listening to your CD player while posting to Slashdot for, oh say, 24 hours in a row, you've consumed 86,400 seconds * 600 Joules/second = about 52 MJ. (A Watt is a Joule/second.)
OTOH, a gallon of gas has 125 MJ. The average daily commute (one-way) in the US is 24.3 minutes (2003 numbers). From what I can tell, the corresponding distance is 37 miles. So, someone in an SUV with 13 MPG will burn 37/13 * 125 MJ = 356 MJ. Driving a hybrid that gets 45 MPG (my recent MPG in a Civic Hybrid) for the same distance will use only 37/45 * 125 MJ = 103 MJ. That's a saving of 253 MJ - in one day of driving.
Keeping in mind that (almost) no one slashdots 24 hrs/day (while listening to their CD player), these are obviously quite different numbers we're talking about here.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Because hurricanes form over warm ocean water, it is easy to assume that the recent rise in their number and ferocity is because of global warming.
But that is not the case, scientists say. Instead, the severity of hurricane seasons changes with cycles of temperatures of several decades in the Atlantic Ocean. The recent onslaught "is very much natural," said William M. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University who issues forecasts for the hurricane season.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I prefer scientists over religious wackos (ahem, "spiritual leaders") and politicians. Imagine if the situation were reversed and religious conservatives were trying to convince the world of the harmful effects of global warming. Even if they knew these hurricanes were part of a natural cycle, I am 99.9% positive they would not resist the opportunity to say "see! I told you it's global warming! Repent!".
But look at this... is it... no! It can't be! It looks like scientists are trying to give the most straightforward interpretation of the data even though a more twisted one would CLEARLY help to sway public opinion in their favor.
When I titled my post "Breath of Fresh Air", I was referring to that conspicuously absent of all traits: Intellectual Honesty.
But that's just me.
No the number will no change, what it will be more probable is that the Big and Strong Hurricanes that hits Florida, Cuba, Haiti, etc every year will hit more at nothern places.
Hurricanes have always served some nature purpose. We may not like them, but they are here since the very first beging of life. Playing "god" is not the best strategie for dealing with this.
Anyone know the impact that such measures can posses on the wild life under seas and in the earth? Sure, it may work in the beginning but what is the price to pay in the future?
A better strategie is to not allow any constructions on areas of high danger, and if it is not possible to forbidden, then at least ensure some proper safety rules are followed to avoid further disaters
But now, try to express the power of a race car engine expressed as butterfly-wing flaps/second!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Because until the cost of using oil exceeds the cost of using other sources (and is forecast to remain more costly for a long enough period), the economics of switching is prohibitive. That is, when hydrogen fuel cells become cost competitive (or rather, when the cost of using oil/gas/etc. increases significantly) *relative to the other alternatives*, then the economic incentive will be sufficient to migrate. Think about it some more for homework.
The answer is obviously OTEC generators. Cool the surface of the ocean slightly while generating large amounts of electricity. This won't stop hurricanes completely - you still want the rainfall - but it will greatly reduce the severity.
win/win.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
Unfortuantely, you have inadvertantly undermined your argument with that fact. New Orleans is (or was) an impoverished city, and there will not be the political will to rebuild the way there was in the Netherlands after the flooding of 1953.
Certainly Holland is an amazing show of what is possible, given the economic impetus.
New Orleans does have a rich cultural heritage and a romantic image, but can that be turned into the billions of dollars necessary for such a project? Personally, I think perhaps New Orleans should turn away from the example of the Netherlands, and look to Venice. Instead of fighting back with bigger and bigger walls, New Orleans should embrace the water and let it comingle with the city. Sure, Venice has flooding problems, but everyone just moves upstairs. It is still a romantic, beautiful city. As the Louisiana ports become more and more automated, the jobs have dried up, and there is less and less economic reason for New Orleans to be there. It's saving grace is it's culture. New Orleans should build on that, and rebuild a city of art and beauty.
I know dissipating a hurricane at its source is different and if possible is probably a good idea overall, but sometimes mucking with natures ways can have nasty side effects.
:-(
For example, there is a town I know of that used to suffer flooding so they spent millions on a flood bypass thing to carry the excess water and dump it back into the Thames downstream from the troubled town. It worked perfectly, they had no more flooding. The problem was, however, that all this extra water that would normally be land-locked and in peoples houses was now dumped further downstream. This resulted in other towns, that did not previously have a flooding problem, to now get flooded, badly.
As the 2 towns in question are from different counties, the former (that built the anti-flood thing) didn't care one bit about the town that now gets flooded.
I lived in the downstream town
Now I know this isn't the same as a hurricane, but it goes to show that any messing with nature can have side effects. I don't know what they would be for stopping a hurricane, if any at all, but its an interesting point. I hope they consider that.
I am not a meteorologist or a planetologist so I may be a wrong, but I think that hurricanes are one way that Earth our planet deals with different temperatures accross the globe. It thus compensates for colder southern hemisphere vs warmer north hemisphere in the summer months of June-August by transferring winds and clouds by air and water by ocean currents.
So if you put out a hurricane, the Earth will have to compensate somehow. As a result we might see stronger ocean currents with their adverse environmental effects as el nino brought, or we might just see a much stronger hurricane develop. It is an either or situation with many possible weather, environmental, political and you-name-it effects.
I don't pretend to be an authorative source for meteorology or global climates....
6 27_050627_oceancurrent.html
First off, I don't believe we have the power to change the ocean temp by that much over such a large area.
Second, if we did, I think it would have some major effects on the ocean currents we RELY on (100%) for our climates around the world... (quick google link)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/06/0
Why do we keep trying to stifle nature? It's been making hurricanes for YEARS. People have been try ing to control nature for the longest time. Might it occur to people that this is just the way the world works?
If we succeed in stopping hurricanes, it's possible that we would bring upon ourselves an early Ice Age. And that seems like a bigger problem to "fix".
and Y2K have taught us that proactive caution is never rewarded. When Y2K didn't actually bring civilization as we know it to a halt, the PHB's and other dimwits figured the IT industry took the world to the cleaners with all that mumbo jumb hoopla about two-digit dates and all that crap and how you needed smart, expensive people to avert certain disaster and save the world.
If Katrina had weakend significantly or turned before landfall but after evacuation, the critics would have bitched and whined about how the fearmongers cost us all that money and inconvenience for nothing.
Make it difficult, why don't you?
So the poster is the crank... I'm supposed to knock down some guy's theories in a frivolous way, with him reading it? No way, man. Too much pressure.
Besides, taking this theory down is too easy to do. Reduce the water temperature of the oceans? Give me a break! There just isn't an ice cube tray big enough for the job. Materials science has a looong way to go before that puppy gets born.
And who's going to crack the sucker when it's out of the fridge? And what about the FRIDGE? Huh???
Smart guy...
Just have Superman stand in the middle and spin really fast in the opposite direction!
The actual vortex of a hurricane is actually very unstable. You could probably collapse the stack using a MOAB.
Simon, I agree with you, what a lot of people don't realize is that hurricanes actually keep our weather system stable. By controlling hurricanes, it keeps this atmospheric energy in the tropics, which will cause more and more powerful hurricanes to spawn. And assuming we develop the system to controlling weather from a pipe dream to the real thing with this fact in mind, there will be a public outcry to wipe out every hurricane before it makes landfall.
Interesting fact, but weather control has been something that we have been playing with since world war two. I'm having difficulty finding trustworthy sources out there because of Katrina and the popularity of the topic. Britain tried using a chemical for a condensation agent on rain clouds in the 40's, and it ended up causing a deadly acid rain, killing scores of people and destroying communities. We now use substances that occur in nature to "seed" clouds over the plains to hopefully make rain, but nothing too crazy.
Finally, the scary part is hurricane control is possible. A scientist has invented an agent made of biodegradable materials. These agents are held together in fine crystals that could be used to sprinkle hurricanes and the path in front of it, when these crystals come into contact with liquid water, it forms a thick gelatin layer, which would significantly halt evaporation, therefore cutting of the energy supply of the hurricane, it will act as if it just made landfall.
Unfortunately, sources are hard to come by at the moment, but these facts were featured on the discovery channel or one of their other networks on a special within the past year. If anybody would like to try to find it and post it, that may help somebody out.
Interesting fact, but weather control has ben somthing that we have been playing with since world war two. i'm having difficulty finding trustworthy sources out there because of Katrina and the popularity of the topic. Britian tried using a chemical for a condensation agent on rain clouds in teh 40's, and it ended up cauing a deadly acid rain, killing scores of people and destroying communities. We now use substnaces that occur in nature to "seed" clouds over th plains to hopefully make rain, but nothing too crazy.
Finally, the scary part is hurricane control is possible. A scientist has invented an agent made of biodegradable materials. These agents are held together in fine crystals that could be used to sprinkle hurricanes and teh path in front of it, when these crystals come into contact with liquid water, it froms a thick gelatin layer, which would significantly halt evaporation, therfore cutting of the energy supply of teh hurricane, it will act as if it just made landfall.
Unfortunately, socurces are hard to come by at the moment, but htese facts were featured on the the discovery channel or one of theirother networks on a special within the past year. if anybody would like to try to find it and post it, that may help somebody out.
"10001110101 - periodic table with a centerpiece of mind" -Clutch
It won't be too long till somebody figure how to make a hurracane as weapon or even making one themselve. Lets see, cleaner and no radiation, but more powerful than an Nuclear bomb.
Not to mention they can launch the weapon with little or no consequence, since no one will know who made it/did it/ or even if it is man made.
We get the hurricane controller and we hold the world ransomed for.....One MILLION DOLLARS!!
You may be correct.
Maybe we should be seeding clouds and taking other actions to promote storms, in ways that do not increase the energy in the system. It seems to me that 2 category 2-3 storms would be a lot better than a category 5.
Of course this would be very hard to prompt since the people in charge will be blamed for both storms and get no credit for the storm that did not happen. (They are now being blamed for not responding to the storm that did happen, but not for the storm). And just wait for the created (or for that matter redirected) storm that hits some other government's people.
Charles Puffer
The levees surrounding this lake in South Florida are also only rated for a cat 3, and in fact the SFWMD states that if the water level in the lake goes up above ~21 feet there is a likelyhood of imminent failure.
The last time that happened there were 5,000 to 8,000 deaths at a time when South Florida wasn't nearly as populated.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
You're forgetting one big concern with hurricanes that swing up to the upper east coast. Most of them that make it north of Cape Hatteras accelerate northward, occasionally reaching speeds of 50+ MPH. This isn't wind speed... this is the storm's motion. This gives very little time to prepare, and also means that a storm will plow a good distance inland very fast.
Hurricanes have hit Nova Scotia, and caught them off guard. Nobody, from Texas to Maine, is "safe" from a hurricane, even those who aren't right on the shore.
I've lived in Connecticut my whole life, and I remember 2 storms that did a good deal of damage. Hurricane Gloria, and Hurricane Bob.
Studies in a lagoon in Rhode Island (behind the beach dunes) show that at roughly once every 100 years, a Category 3+ hits New England. It could easily damage, Providence, and Boston, too. Remember, we've only been here for roughly 300 yrs. The last time, the cities weren't nearly what they are now. Providence is in trouble if we get a Cat 3 coming our way.
I shouldn't say "if." I mean "when."
"No fair, you changed the outcome by measuring it!" - Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth
Until the US president stops Americans polluting the atmosphere so badly, these localised side-effects of global warming will only get worse for all of us.
Its not gonna happen with Bush though, as he has such strong personal ties with the oil industry.
Did anyone else read Phil Shapiro's article that was linked to this post? Does anyone else see a problem with stirring ocean water? Lets ignore the technical fesiblity of pulling a 1/4 mile stir stick at 15 miles per hour. (I don't care if you use a nuclear tub boat.. you're talking about a HUGE anount drag here). Stirring the top layer of ocean water to make it 2-3 degrees colded would kill nearly all of the plankton and other microorganizes that rely on the fragile thermalclines (layers of different temperature water) to survive. Killing this life would be like killing all plants on land and would wipe out a huge percentage of all ocean life... sounds like a great plan to me.
It was long considered a Good Thing to put out forest fires in the national forest ASAP. But it turns out that there is an inverse relationship between fire frequency and intensity: would you rather have a lot of little forests fires (that basically clean out the underbrush and don't do much damage to the forest) or a few horrendous crown fires, that wipe the forest clean as a plate and sterilize the soil? An extreme example of a big fire might be the Tillamook burn, where the firestorm was so intense that 200 foot flaming trees were being tossed a half mile through the air.
Now, view the hurricane cycle as a natural system of energy dissipation. If you squelch the natural process of energy dissipation, where does that energy go? Are you breeding super-hurricanes? The possibility seems strong enough to make this a somewhat dubious venture.
We should attempt things like this because they are a good idea, not because they might be a good idea.
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world...
Simply train huge numbers of carrier pigeons to fly clockwise in large circles, and drop them from planes flying over hurricanes. The pigeons' attempts to fly upwind will slowly but surely dissipate the energy of the hurricane.
...or the next thing you know, he will declare "War on Hurricanes", appoint a Hurricane Czar, demand Congress pass his $50B spending bill without review, and immediately start construction on 40 new nuclear submarines to "keep the scourge of Hurricanes from our shores." Anyone criticizing the effort will be attacked ("Why do you want Americans to lose their homes, Congressman? Why do you want them to die?").
Remember, after Katrina everything is different. Now more than ever. We have to take the fight to the Hurricanes or risk facing them on American soil.
Oh, and you'll probably have to give up a few more of your rights. We'll let you know which ones.
"Can I finish? Can I finish?
I wish this article included the information. I've been searching for an article printed in a newspaper (tossed by ex) regarding a man that had found that dropping a bio-degreagable desiccant in a storm, absorbing the water, making it heavy and taking it down into the ocean, could lower a storms intensity by a category or two.
... preventing tropical waves in the east atlantic from becoming hurricanes in the first place...
This seems to be most reasonable to me. Hurricanes are part of a natural global cycle. Just changing the corse of a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico would accomplish what? Move a Cat 4 like Ivan to TX, rather than FL? Who makes *that* call?
The drying out of a storm seems to be possible. If you have seen this years tropical weather being affected by Saharan dust storms kicking up dust into the atmosphere
Can you imagine the lives saved, if Ivan or Katrina had been dried down even a little?
Who else could have come up such crazy ideas?
Has anyone heard of a US government project called HAARP?
http://www.haarp.alaska.edu/Of course, many of the sites that list HAARP as capable of controlling the weather also suspect that it can control your **MIND**, and then go into a series of prophesies, alien channelings, etc.
Hurricans are a way of restoring balance to the planet's weather. It would be insane to try and screw with these things.
.02
Just my
"It's not stealing if you don't get caught!"
Actually hurricanes and flooding were common in the Netherlands until the late 1500's when abbeys started building the dykes. A big storm submerged several areas for decades in 1530. The worst storm and flood was in 1952 when 1836 people drowned. They started to completely rebuild the dykes and the first piece was finished in 1986...yes it took that long. Their dyke system is estimated to have cost 1.5 trillion in todays US dollars over the last 500 or so years. Remember though that their dykes protect a huges chunk of their country, not just one city.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
The ones that died went to heaven!
They are the lucky ones, the true benficiaries of God's will!
According to legend anyway.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
But why not tackle problems that we know we can solve? Why not just build levies that can stand up to level 5 hurricanes and institute building codes that force buildings to at least be hurricane resistant if not proof. Make those codes retroactive (though I'd wager that if you looked at most of the buildings that are 100+ and properly maintained along the gulf coast, you'd find that they were already 'up to code' because the builders realized, without CNN and the weather channel, that hurricanes rip through there regularly). It's not like we need to invent new technologies to do this sort of thing...and it makes a great deal more sense to do that than to start messing with major natural systems just so Trent Lott can have his poorly and cheaply constructed McMansion protected from a hurricane.
it covers exactly this topic (written in 1979)
ISBN: 0441876900
Exactly what Bearden says,
http://www.cheniere.org/correspondence/082705.htm
..we need to authorize the secret project "The Weather Paradigm".
While in the short range of the area affected by the hurricane, the hurricane releases a tremendous amount of energy. What will happen OVERALL if that energy is NOT allowed to be released?
And, why is it that tropical areas (except for places like Bangladesh) seem to deal with much stronger hurricanes...er, typhoons, with less apparant fanfare, than the US? Maybe because they end up being like really strong out-of-season monsoons?
Go ahead, asia countries, do a little superiority dance. And, yes, I'm aware that the topography of the SE united states isn't quite the same as most of the relatively non-flat SE asian islands and coastal areas...
How would you decide whose house should be flattened, whose river flooded?
Let mother nature do her choosing on her own.
Doing a little google research bears out your claim (to my surprise). Of course, the Prius is rated at 60 mpg, without using diesel engines. A big difference (between the Prius and my Civic) is that the Prius is primarly an electric motor with gasoline support and the Civic is primarily a gasoline engine with electric support.
Perhaps a electric-diesel hybrid would be a great way to go. GM has developed e-d hybrid buses to national parks, but of course comparing their mpg to a car wouldn't exactly be fair.
Nevertheless, every additional car with good mpg strikes another blow for the environment. I've even heard Ford bragging recently on a commercial about having several cars with mpg greater than 30!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I don't know if I'd want to mess with Mother Nature. We pissed her off before.
good point on the smaller community but to evacuate 1000 people is a lota easier than 1000000 people. but then again the insurance companys would not be happy... then again they would be more happy a small town got hit than a Large one. less claims that way and trailer parks are a lot eaiser to fix than mansions...
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
Even if this worked, it would almost certaily lead to another example of William H. McNeill's "Conservation of Catastrophy" thesis. McNeil's principle sates that when you build a system to prevent small catastrophies, you end up with infrequent large one.
Examples are:
Supressing local forest fires leads to buildup of debris on the forest floor which feed huge uncontrolable fires.
Region wide electrical grids prevent frequent small local blackouts, but contain instabilites which lead to region wide blackouts.
Flood control on rivers leave no room for the waters to rise and exacerbate large floods.
If we did supress hurricanes, all that excess atmospheric energy would have to do something. What is anyone's guess.
Because all Star Trek technobabble will eventually become true, someone will inevitably invent a device to control the weather on the Earth.
Jeff Albertson
This is my way to stop a hurricane once it has formed. People never listen to me on this but I think it is a feasible way to disrupt the hurricanes. We (USA) have certain types of nukes available which do not give off radiation. At least the kind of radiation that would kill anyone. I say we develop the nuke so that it explodes in such a way to contridict the direction of the hurricane thus causing the explosion to spiral in the opposite direction of the hurricane and thus disapating it. All that would be left would be some rain. We would of course have to fly into the eye of the hurricane but people do that all the time, drop the nuke and then get out of there, ignite, and no more hurricane. (We would also have to call all of the world leaders to let them know what we were doing so that they wouldn't think that we were trying to shoot with nukes and it went off prematurely). What do you guys think?
* PLEASE DO AT LEAST READ THROUGH THE PATENT LIST LINKED TO BELOW BY SEEKTRESS (PATENTLY OBVIOUS), THAT SHOULD CLEAR UP A LOT OF STUFF FOR YOU, DO NOT GO AROUND SPOUTING NONSENSE JUST BECAUSE BUSH TOLD YOU LIES!!! DO NOT FEEL BAD HIS FAMILY DO THAT AS A MATTER OF COURSE IMPEACH AND EXECUTE BUSH *
GLOBAL WARMING STORY CREATED FOR ARCTIC DRILLING ENDEAVOR
ENMOD Radiation Science and Earthquakes
GLOBAL WARMING IS JUST ONE PART OF A FARCE WHOSE TRUE PURPOSE IS TO SECRETLY DEPLOY ENVIRONMENTAL MODIFICATION SCIENCE TO MELT THE ICE CAPS (oil and mineral wealth galore!) AND TO TERRORIZE ANY COUNTRY WHO WILL NOT GET IN LINE WITH THE CULT OF DEATH WHICH THE NWO IS.
MELTING THE ICE CAPS WITH ENMOD AND GETTING THE OIL AND MINERALS IS WHAT THE WHOLE GLOBAL WARMING SCENARIO WAS ABOUT AND ITS A LIE...PLUS bUSH ZION GOT TO TEST A BUNCH OF WW2 MK TECH FROM PAPERCLIP DUDES ON THE WHOOOOOOOOLLLLLEEEEE WORLD
AN REMEMBER! THE BUSH CRIME FAMILY WILL GLADLY BLOW OUT HOLES IN THE ATMOSPHERE, THEREBY IRRADIATING THOSE BELOW, THEY HAVE DONE IT MANY TIMES ALREADY IN FACT, TO JUSTIFY THIS CRIME SCIENCE OF MIND CONTROL AND DIS-EASE.
Republicans fleeing Bush on Arctic drilling issue
Taken from http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/7695/1/285/
Todd Tollefson , 10.09.2005 14:48
Two dozen House Republicans, including three committee chairmen, have directly opposed the Bush administration's effort to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil drilling by sneaking it through the budget approval process.
"An effort to include the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the [budget] reconciliation will further complicate an already difficult situation," they wrote last month in a letter to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, House Resources Committee Chairman Richard Pombo and Budget Committee Chairman Jim Nussle.
Rep. Jeb Bradley (R-N.H.) asked moderate Republicans to join him in signing the letter, calling on the Republican House leaders not to include language that would allow oil and gas exploration in the wildlife refuge.
The GOP signers said they "would have serious concerns about any budget bill that contains provisions authorizing the development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge." They continued, "As you know, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge represents one of the last large pristine natural environments left in our country. In 1980 Congress recognized the need to protect this national treasure and prohibited any oil and gas drilling or exploration on the coastal plain. We believe that the debate on opening this unique land to oil and gas exploration should be done outside of the budget process, not as part of an omnibus bill."
The ANWR group is notable because it includes a trio of committee chairmen: Science Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-N.Y.), Judiciary Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.) and Government Reform Chairman Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.).
Several of the signers were prompted to sign through a successful e-mail campaign initiated by the Sierra Club in July. Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.) said in a reply to constituents who contacted him through the e-mail campaign that he is and will remain strongly opposed to any legislation that would authorize oil and gas exploration of the Arctic Refuge.
The Senate voted in March to remove the Arctic drilling provision from the budget, but the House failed to do so in April by only three votes. While the House has approved drilling in ANWR in the past, GOP leaders have little room for error on budget measures, which typically pass with a two- or three-vote margin. Opposition from such a significant bloc of House Republicans underscores the difficulty GOP leaders face in putting together a package that can pass in both chambers.
The House Resources Committee will decide the outcome by Sept. 16.
commiett@yahoo.com
e-mail pww@pww.org
--
THIS WAS DEFEATE
Light Happens.
What are the odds that three hurricanes intersect in single season? What are the odds that in an era of terrorism, when the "homeland" is under attack from shadowy Al Qaeda types, that the tiny town of Homeland Florida is "attacked" by a mathematically unlikely event such as three intersecting hurricanes?
Amateur weather site skeetobite.com plotted the three hurricane intersection from data from the National Hurricane Center. Then in January 2005 the NHC data was updated and the three hurricanes moved off of Homeland, five miles to the east. All three hurricane tracks moved the same distance to the east.
Weather control is not a far off, decades away goal.
I fully expect the scientific dictatorship to mod this post out of existence.
Greetings to all the fine folks in high places.
But to get the power necessary to do so we would need to attach shoulder bands to Superman and The Flash and have them race eachother around the world for charity.
This article made me think of an oft neglected factoid between the United States and Russia. Oddly enough in the official Anti-Ballistic-Missile-Treaty there is a clause that states that America is not allowed to use / deploy their weather changing weapons including HAARP against the old Soviet Union.
There is also a UN treaty circa 1976 that basically says the same thing but in more general terms, while again naming the US and Russia.
Now I hate to be 'that guy' but knowing that in all the: legalese, time, preperation, and double checking that went into the ABM treaty that the inclusion of a weather weapon cant be purely speculative or coincidental.
Ok, im taking off the tinfoil hat now (but it does make me wonder sometimes why Bush is so sure that global wearming isnt due to greenhouse gas emission.....)
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just not build cities in the middle of a freaking hole between a river, a lake, and the sea?
The best I have ever heard the idea of an omnibenevolent God explained was by a Jewish religious philosophy professor. It is tied up w/ a misunderstanding a lot of people have about omnipotence. Namely, God CAN NOT do anything. He can only do that which is logically possible.
For instance, He can not make a married bachelor. Just isn't possible, such a thing can not exist, due to the definition of the two words. So, my professor went on to explain, God can't both give Man freewill, and also costantly intefere in Man's life. This inncludes sheltering people from their own (or other's) poor decisions, sheltering people from the world around them, etc.
So, from this we can conclude that God allows bad things to happen to good people b/c otherwise He would not be able to allow us free will. Presumably, free will is a greater good than not being trampled, or drowned, or what have you.
Of course, I'll admit the perceived phenomenon of bad things happening to good people could also be explained by an indifferent or non-existant or even malicious God. However, it is also not completely incompatible w/ the idea of a benevolent God.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
"there are no small changes in a complex system"
(( (CRAYON) )) >
Yes, control, or better, tickling the sphinctor of the hurricane is possible.
Check out HAARP, be wary of the crazies though.
to control the location of future cities?
Just a thought.
Despite your depressing analysis, things are not getting worse.
I live in Mexico, and this year it rained almost everyday, there were a lot of hurricanes hitting our coasts. 20 years ago, the weather wasn't as crazy as it is right now. And by crazy i mean not knowing if we should carry umbrellas, jackets, or loose clothes and sunglasses for tomorrow.
The weather has DEFINITELY changed.
Could it be HAARP or similar technology?m l
http://www.coasttocoastam.com/shows/2005/08/17.ht
One of my favorite things about the bible is that you can find something in it to back up just about any position you want to take on anything.
Let's use atom bombs to control hurricanes. Atom bombs can be used peacefully. Look at Hiroshima. It was pretty peaceful after it was bombed. I think we could extend that benefit of pacification to Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, Iran, Saudi, Arabia, North Korea, and France. Atom bombs may not peaceful enough. We may have to use hydrogen bombs to pacify the more powerful hurricanes.
Yea I immedietly thought of HAARP. This project has been funded for about 30 years now? They should have some effect on weather by heating the ionosphere.
*DrugCheese rants*
native plants thrive. invasive species are butchered in hurricanes. thousands of australian pines were slaughtered in hurricane andrew both from their inability to handle high winds and their susceptibility to salt spray.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html/
NOAA does NOT suggest the detonation of nuclear ordenances to slow or stop hurricanes.
Thing is, the link above is NOT a joke
Nothing to see here.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
Surely investing in building stronger Levee's would make more sense. Wasn't the Levee's breaking that caused this problem?
I'm just waiting for the levees around our dutch friends here in Europe to take a beating and be considered insufficient.
In my opinion, clear out all areas around New Orleans that are below sealevel and rebuild on higher ground. The problems are bound to happen again. Could be tomorrow (except that no further significant damage will occur if it's tomorrow), next year or next century.
Well this opinion will probably cause my karma to go down the sink B->...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
That's actually more valid of a point than you think.
For instance, if we were bound and determined to stop large hurricanes:
To try to stop a hurricane once it starts is almost impossible. But while it's forming, it's definitely possible. Or, at least you could try to steer it away from cities. Now, the earlier you make the adjustment, the less of an adjustment you need to make. That means, the more computing power and more accurate the computer models, the easier it would be to decrease the massive destruction of the hurricane. For instance, if you're trying to balance a broomstick on your finger, the earlier you make adjustments for small instabilities, the smaller the adjustments will have to be.
So, by greatly multiplying the effective prediction of storms through more accurate and timely storm prediction, one could much more easily control their behavior with a reasonable amount of resources. I mean, considering the lives and the money that could be saved by such a greater prediction of hurricanes, it's really a wonder that one of the top 10 supercomputers isn't used to provide up-to-date storm forecasting.
Celia hit Corpus Christi in 1970. It was an odd hurricane that most residents and weathermen thought was going to stall and dye out before it hit. Three days before it hit it was a tropical depression, when it made landfall it was Category 3 130 mph with gusts to 180 (officially), some stations reported gusts of 210 (probably tornadoes)
Around the same time there were experiments going on in the Mid-West with cloud seeding and it was speculated that someone had tried seeding the tropical depression to see what effect it had on it.
Many of the people they are trying to force out have water and power.. they also have pets they are being told they can't take with them... One lady had her guide dog taken from her! Her GUIDE DOG!!!
The people there now, that are fighting to stay, to begin rebuilding their homes, are being treated like Iraqi insurgents! In our own country!! Our leaders are literally taking a dump on the bill of rights and no one has the balls to scream about it!
Cops from CA are breaking down doors of these people and are taking them out of their perfectly safe homes.. leaving the homes unsecured for looters and animals to take their property, or burn it, and shit all over their homes, that until the cops showed up, were fine/safe/secure.
I'm just as ashamed of this BS as I was of the airlines stranding tourists and the local gov. not filling the school busses with people with no way out.
My grandfather always said that before my dad died, we'd see civil war/class war.. God help us all, I'm beginning to think he was right.
Even if the levies were continued funded since 2003, would there have been enough time to fortify them for a Category 5 hurricane? 2005 would have likely been the second year of the project.
Yes, it probably would have saved most of New Orleans -- not because the levees would have been ready yet to protect against Category 5 hurricanes, but because Katrina didn't surge over the top of the levees -- the levees failed to hold back water levels that were lower than the top of the levees, after Katrina was gone, when New Orleans thought it had escaped the worst-case scenario of devastating floods.
If the levees had been strengthened before Katrina hit, this failure might not have occurred, and the limited flooding in New Orleans originally reported would have been a brief national news story and thereafter an issue of local concern.
Instead, because of failures in leadership at all levels (especially the governor of Lousiana and the mayor of New Orleans, who should both be charged with involuntary manslaughter for their incompetence) and a penny-wise, pound-foolish shortsightedness (having saved $150 million on levee maintenance, we may now have to spend $150 billion to rebuild New Orleans), we now have the "natural" disaster of the century...
Deven
"Simple things should be simple, and complex things should be possible." - Alan Kay
Why do you think Katrina was so successful in destroying New Orleans? It was a secret military project, and George Bush ordered it.
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
A) People die.
B) Things happen, we do not live in a controllable environment.
C) The second you stop one thing from happening, something nastier will come up and take its place.
D) Maybe messing with something as large and complicated as THE WEATHER isnt such a good idea.
E) People Die. Thats how it works. We're not going to able to ever change that. Some of us are just unlucky enough to have to die horribly.
s'wut i sed.
By the way, I suppose I can't blame people on /. for getting this wrong, since almost every major media outlet did: Not a single levee broke. All 4 breaks were in canal walls.
Levees are massive earthworks - they aren't easily "breached" but would have to be worn away (long time) or overrun.
The breaks were in the canal flood walls.
Maybe we should build more sturdy canal flood walls, but maybe it should be done by people who know what they hell they are talking about, not people who don't even know what actually broke. A lot of journalists seem to think they are experts on everything under the sun. Every time I read an article or watch a report on something in which I'm even a rank amateur I notice MAJOR inaccuracies/simplifications/lies.
Don't count on news-people to even get right reporting what the problem is, let alone the solution.
[PS. Yes - this isn't a solution either - perhaps we should talk to people in Florida, who say that after they got hit by Andrew finally learned how to evacuate properly. Get that fixed, then talk about trying to defeat hurricanes by building bigger walls...]
Lose essential liberties to get temporary safety = get only hassles and security theater.
The winds and rain of Katrina didn't do most of the damage to New Orleans - the subsequent flooding because the leeves failed (with massive holes opening in them) did.
Katrina was the trigger.
The failure of the leeves was due to a failure to maintain and upgrade them as needed.
It is easier to control the politicians than the weather.
Vote out those that failed the people of New Orleans.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
The peoples inhabiting the Gangetic delta have never been nomadic. To say that 80 million people migrated EVERY YEAR when Bangladesh was part of India is incorrect. Property documents can be traced back to the 1st century AD, showing that the land has been continually farmed and occupied for well over 2000 years. Movement to the higher grounds you speak of has never been an option because said high ground happen to be occupied by tribes that are extremely hostile to 'low landers'.
Has anyone tried this?
j pg
http://lppf.iespana.es/tlz_grabs/4acv08/408nl-17.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
This is a "What the Hell is wrong with you?" wake up call. Haven't we done enough?
Hurricanes have many purposes, one of which is heat transfer. Elevated levels of CO2 increase global temperatures. The heat must be balanced or entire ecosystems will be destroyed. People laugh and doubt the reality of global warming. "Oh, it is a natural phenomenon." It happens cyclically. It certainly does happen naturally and guess what--Nature can manage the process all by itself. How do you prevent large portions of the planet from turning into warm liquid goo? You transfer the heat with globally significant events: hurricanes.
Nature has been balancing the Earth for millions of years. We have had our hand in it for a few hundred (on a global scale). I have been doing my job for 15 years. Guess what happens when some new kid comes in, wet behind the ears, with a thousand great ideas, a prodigious intellect, and an unshakable determination to make his mark and improve things? That's right. Disaster.
It is the same lesson over and over again and we never, as a population, seem to learn. Until we are faced with death on a massive scale. Then we learn for a while if there is time. Then we forget. Well some of us don't forget. Some of us Cassandras will warn and remind you for all the good it will do us.
Leave the damn Hurricanes alone. Stop building coastal cities under sea level and stop building the houses out of sticks. "But it costs less!" Less than the 100 billion in damage and loss of life we currently see? No. Fix the problem. Don't "fix" Nature's way of really repairing the damage we do.
End of Rant.
Hey, I got an ideal. Why don't we stop trying to control nature and start living with it? Haven't we learned anything in the last 1,000 years? When you try to control anything that is a product of Chaos by introducing our version of Order to it, all we do is fuck it up and make it worse.
So, instead of trying to control Nature, why don't we just learn to live with it. Build buildings that are designed to stand up to the local climate. Stop building in flood plains. Destroying the natural buffer wetlands.
But most important when something big and ugly is coming, get the fuck out of the way.
I don't buy all this Gods revenge shit ether, but you know? I can start to see where he would be coming from.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
...already control hurricanes. After all, didn't Bush create and steer Katrina to New Orleans so he could wipe out all them democrats?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
How about trying to stop a storm all together. What would happen if we detonated a bomb inside he wall of a storm? Hell we have tested bombs over the ocean before....why couldnt this work? Admitedly, I dont know what the ramifications would be, but i think its a legitament question.
Don't ya hate it when the correct spelling of your favorite screen name is taken?
Sure. They tried to stop nature with technology in Hawaii during WWII. When the volcano erupted and threatened Hilo town on the Big Island, the US army bombed the lava and maybe even the volcano. The volcano won. W Bush was not derelict about calling in the military during Katrina. Hell, he should have called the miltary before Katrina to stop that pesky wind before it hit the coast. And I am not trying to belittle the man made tragedy of that natural disaster. Just the jerks that let it happen.
You underestimate the power of our new Hydrogen Bomb. We'll nuke the hurricane, and then laser the remaining pieces with the Star Wars defense system. Nature has been enslaved.
I would argue that if we had the power to do so, it would be immoral to not divert the storm towards the smaller community.
Let me make an analogy. A train is hurtling down the tracks towards a group of 10 people who are on the tracks. You stand at a switch that can divert the train along another set of tracks where only a single person stands. What do you do?
If you do nothing, 10 people will die, and if you pull the switch, a single person dies. Which is the more moral action?
I say we skip trying to find the individual butterfly responsible and eradicate the entire lot of them.
They are an Order of hate.
I'm not a Troll, it's reverse psychology.
just find a way to convert the power of the hurricane (or tropical depression as they start out as) into useful energy? It has to be at least as feasible as your ideas. I'm thinking big giant floating windmills, lots of them...
A train is hurtling down the tracks towards a group of 10 people who are on the tracks. You stand at a switch that can divert the train along another set of tracks where only a single person stands. What do you do?
Declare a National Day Of Prayer for God to Intervene while passing a massive tax cut for the wealthiest 1% of the population so that economic prosperity will Trickle Down and benefit the victims.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Great, once we can control hurricanes we can start to direct them toward our enemies! Those Commie Cubans and Venezeulans better watch out!
There is a UN treaty from 1979 which bans geo-physical warfare (creating earthquakes, redirecting whirlwinds, making artifical tidal waves to eraze your enemies). Thus, any attempt to influence natural disasters is highly suspicious.
Make no mistake, if the HAARP sends the next hurricane back to Cuba and flattens Havana, the russkies will nuke the USA out existance as agreed back in good old Khruschev-JFK days.
Please tell the Weather Forecast Teller to find another toy, we don't need Wind Wars and Storm Bombs. The world is a much better place without Teller!
I know it is out of the scope of this article but I think that Barrier Islands need to be talked about when talking of reducing the damage from Hurricanes.
- katrina-photos.htm The Barrier Islands off the coast of Louisiana took a beating. However without them the damage on the coast could have been even worse.
http://www.nwrc.usgs.gov/hurricane/post-hurricane
The administration gambled their peace as in - not having to evacuate N.O., possibly against the will of its inhabitants - against - a disaster - and the disaster won.
It's probably the same choice you and me would have made, but that doesn't make it a great choice.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Nope, cars left were left by the people that couldn't afford the gas to drive far enough out of the hurricane's path to be worth it. They knew they couldn't afford enough gas to get far enough away and hunkered down and hoped for the best. I have neighbors in my area here that would prob do the same.
If you only have enough cash to buy gas to get you 100 mi away from home and the hurricane's damage extends over 300 mi, would you rather stay in your home, (or a nearby shelter) or stranded on the road somewhere?
If we consider hurricanes as huge engines with the warm ocean water as a fuel, then it seems logical that by cutting off the warm water, we can in theory at least reduce the organization of said hurricane. Water a few hundred feet below the surface is orders of magnitude colder than water at the surface. All we need to do is bring this water to the surface in the path of an approaching hurricane. How we do this is left as an exercise left to the reader.
'Or else pizza is going to order out for you'
Finally, it might be possible to design artificial icebergs, specially streamlined for easiest possible transportation to the southern climes. These artificial icebergs would be manufactured in the late winter, along the coast of Greenland, by pouring water into a hollow ship mold. The ship's shell itself, then, could be built of ice. These ship-shaped icebergs could then travel under their own steam to warm water regions off the coast of West Africa.
Man. This guy really IS a crank. He thinks that ice is made of steam! I think it'd be better to put a giant bar of soap on the back of the boat. It works in the bath tub!By ABM treaty, I can only assume he means the SALT II proceedings, which is about nuclear weapons, not weather control. Parent's author does not cite any treaty text. Also, HAARP is a rather straightforward, unclassified HF radio experiment that will not affect weather patterns. The conspiracy theories about HAARP have always been funny -- controlling weather with some static HF antennas connected to a diesel generator -- the weakness of this argument truly boggles the mind.
Can you imagine the liability if you screw up in controlling a hurricane? You could essentially be sued for the entire damage done by the hurricane. That might cost high.
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
Also, one of the likely effects you might have if you messed with the hurricane is that instead of hitting land in one place, it hits somewhere farther east or west of its original track. The people who got missed might thank you for it, but the people whose homes you've just destroyed will sue you, and either you're responsible because you knew what you were doing well enough to predict the results and *decided* to send a hurricane to trash their houses, or else you *didn't* know what you were doing well enough to predict the results and were grossly negligent and therefore still responsible.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I remember seeing this one in a cartoon 10 or 15yrs ago, possibly on Captain Planet. Someone made a big gravity ray gun that could move the moon and change the path of storms. The other random idea was detonate a clean nuke in the storm, possibly in the eye. The idea was somehow the sudden extreme temperature change would somehow disrupt the storm.
F7 doesn't work, ignore spelling and grammar
It would be ironic if it was found that the intensity of these hurricanes has been made worse by the lack of US participation in the Kyoto Policy, or their lack of any serious environmental policy.
Sorry. As much as the leftist environmental crowd would love to pin this on the U.S. non-ratification of Kyoto, the scientific data does not back up such a conclusion. Hurricane seasons are cyclical, and they have been for centuries with fairly good predictability. For that matter, our climate is cyclical because our Sun is cyclical. Solar maxima and minima proceed in regular cycles and have for millions of years. We are in the midst of a global rise in hurricane frequency after being in a global lull for the last few decades. This is not unusual, it has happened before, and it's been happening for much longer than the U.S. has even existed.
This so-called "global warming" claptrap has only one root in reality: the planet is indeed getting warmer. What the enviro-nuts fail to take into account is the fact that the planet has gotten warmer in the past. It's also gotten cooler. It's more than a bit silly to say the U.S. is the cause of the planet getting warmer when it is much more likely the planet is warming as part of a cycle that's been going on since the stabilization of the solar system. Of course, it's fun to blame the U.S. for all the world's woes these days, which is why the environmental crowd has tried so hard to pin this on America. It's not true, but they get a lot of fun and a lot of press out of their babble.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
10 people are intentionally sitting on the railroad tracks. They all know that trains frequent these tracks - 5 of them even know that a pretty big train is coming, but they still decide to sit there and hang out. Meanwhile, 1 guy is sitting on the grass eating a pie. He's enjoying his pie. He knows that where he sits, trains really don't frequent. Now sure, there's always an outside chance that a train could come his way, but it's pretty unlikely.
You're standing at the switch. Do you pull the switch, saving the 5 people that aren't smart enough to get off of the damn tracks to save themselves from the train that they know is coming and the other 5 people that realize that they're on the tracks, a train is possibly coming, so maybe they should keep an eye out for one? Or, do you just leave this poor guy, that was sitting in the grass, out of the train's way, eating his wonderful pie, alone..
I think that Nature is as Nature is. People should realize that if they live in certain areas of the country, they're going to deal with different elements of nature. If they don't want to have to evacuate due to hurricanes, etc - they should probably avoid the gulf coast region and, if they're really worried - most of the eastern shore.
If we're going to start messing with nature, let's make sure it never snows in the North again - I mean, think of the car accidents the snow causes. Or the missed days of work/school!?!?!
That's right - not one US Senator voted for it.
No senator believed in Jor-El, but we all know what happened to the planet Krypton.
Why was it he said hurricanes come into being?
... how many more things are there?
Oh yeah, to dissipate the heat differential between the equator and the poles.
What is the consequence not dissipating the heat differential? how long can you not dissipate it before you generate the mother of all storms that you don't have enough energy to control?
Point is there are a huge number of other unknown environmental factors here that aren't even being considered. Hurricanes cause a lot of destruction but they also.
1) help regulate global temperature
2) help clean pollutants out of the atmosphere
3) help forest by destroying them so the can re grow.
4) help animal populations but reducing overpopulation.
5) distributed needed nitrogen to both through out the ocean and coastal plains.
I'm not sure but I'd want to know for sure before I started messing around with them.
Just because you CAN do something is usually a really stupid reason TO do it. Seeking immediate gratification and elimination of temporary hardship and pain (AKA the American way.) can often times be a recipe to find ultimate disaster
much greater then either of the first two would have warranted unchecked.
It is an interesting thought experiment, but I'm not sure it is something we should even want to do little lone try to do.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
That song scared me shitless when I was little.
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
But also consumes roughly 25% of all the output. Does it give the goods and services away to the rest of the world? And by maintaining its lifestyle, produces 25% of CO2. It doesn't sound fair to me...
Save the bandwidth. Don't use sigs!
Everytime we may "think" we control something but we end up screwing things worst than it was before. Also if we good people could control the storm wouldn't that same technology be used be bad in the opposite manner to destroy people and property. It is no problem learning about the technology but there is always pitfalls we need to understand. Maybe nature is doing what it is supposed to do and we the ones that mucking it all up.
Either you're Robert Tracinski or you didn't write that post yourself.
First and foremost let me say this, wasting money on hurricanes is stupid, period .
We know what areas get hit "repeatedly" and we know they cost billion of dollars to clean up from .
Putting a trailer in the death zone just begs for destruction . This does not account for lost lives, and lost productivity .
I think the cost of all the major modern day hurricanes needs to be computed, and then all the ppl living in the death zone need to be moved to higher ground .
The industrial/commercial needs that can be moved, get moved, those that cannot are not moved, and basically battle hardened .
Make it a 20 year time table, any housing in the area will be like bldg requirements in california for earthquakes .
You get a permit, you build it to code, it is inspected at many steps along the way . It is built hurricane proof, period .
The first floor of all bldgs is a parking garage , roof access is secure but can be unlocked by multiple responsible ppl .
Killing a hurricane: If you want "any" chance of stopping a hurricane you first have to consider it gets its power from the sun in the form of heat .
Doing this would cost many many billions of dollars , and is not worth it except as a exercise in theory of the possible . The warm water feeds the hurricane .
Thus your best chance to "kill" a hurricane or weaken it is at night . At night its only heat fuel is the water .
Dragging icebergs 5,000+ miles is not only a bad idea, but getting "several" slow moving mountains of ice in front of the hurricane at "just the right time" is ludicrous .
Submarine ploughing was on the right track, but I think it would need to be deeper colder water brought top side, and could be done if subs used a scoop to feed lines that were dragged topside .
However, when u introduce this kind of drag into a sub it is going to slow down a great deal, and were not designed with this in mind .
Look at the screws on a modern aircraft carrier and u start to understand what is need to counter massive drag . The best bet is to use what is all ready in place . In the gulf are many large oil platforms, hundreds in fact . Some are in VERY deep water, over one mile deep in fact . The water temperature down there is more than just cooler, it is "seriously" cold .
Excerpt: No matter how warm the surface layers are, between 300 and 1,000m beneath the surface the temperature falls to about 5C ****
**** http://www.fathom.com/course/10701050/session1.htm l (temperature paragraph)
So just several hundred meters is water 5 Celsius above freezing. So the issue is how do you move the cold water top side . That is where the oil rigs come into play .
The oil rigs if started a few days before the hurricane hit could "not" pump enough water to "drastically" reduce surface temperature .
This would require a automated , unmanned , computer controlled response to the changes of the storm .
It would require tremendous amounts of cold water to be dispersed top side at night as it closed in .
So the oil platforms would need cold water storage, and dispersion lines similar to lateral lines on a septic system .
If the storage was above the water level during daylight it would be heated by the sun, insulating it would add more expense to what would already be a massively expensive project .
Thus u temporarily submerge it, I am thinking u might use the new super barges, or super tankers that are no longer sea worthy .
The ballast would be flotation air bags, with extras in place in case of failure , and make them independent of each other in case of systemic failure .
The tanks stays on ocean floor and the automated monitoring system waits for the storm to move in .
The tank is not crushed as it is full of water, thus equalized pressure .
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
Should we give up trying to cure cancer or treat heart disease because, well, as you mentioned twice, people die, that's just how it works? Some of us get malaria or tuberculosis because we are unlucky and that's just too bad for us.
We shouldn't even bother trying to make people better because, if we do, who knows what god awful thing might happened to them. Probably something worse than the original illness.
So to recap, your (A) is true, (B) is not true, (C) was pulled out of your ass, (D) is superstition, and (E) uses (A) to justify not intervening to save people's lives, which is also known to some as a circular argument.
Rescue Heroes: The Movie. For big ass storms, build a big ass lighting rod.
Why control weather? I, for one, welcome our new hurricane overlords.
This sig is false.
I thought George W., George H.W., and Jeb stood in a circle praying that Katrina would careen into those evil poor black people in the Big Easy which caused it to change course all the while sending all of the aid workers to fight in Iraq so the Bushies could profit off of all of the destroyed oil refineries?!?
Oddly enough in the official Anti-Ballistic-Missile-Treaty there is a clause that states that America is not allowed to use / deploy their weather changing weapons including HAARP against the old Soviet Union.
There is also a UN treaty circa 1976 that basically says the same thing but in more general terms, while again naming the US and Russia.
Now I hate to be 'that guy' but knowing that in all the: legalese, time, preperation, and double checking that went into the ABM treaty that the inclusion of a weather weapon cant be purely speculative or coincidental.
ASsuming this language actually exists, I don't see why not, actually. It's like the standard copyright notice you see on books, that lists various means of reproduction, then says "...or any other means of recording or storage..." It doesn't mean there's some super-secret means of data storage that "they" aren't telling us about. In this example, I'm sure the stereotypical paranoia on both sides about the other's military and intelligence operations led them to list everything that could even remotely conceivably ever be used or developed during the length of time the treaty was in force. On the off chance that we (or they) developed actual working weather control, neither side wanted the other to be able to say "Haha, SALT II doesn't say anything about weather, EAT OUR CATEGORY 6 HURRICANE MOSKVA, BITCHES!" (Insert suitable evil laugh here; white cat optional but recommended.)
I recently saw a conspiracy-theory site make much of language in some type of new law or regulation that forbade US military to do certain kinds of weapons tests in the vicinity of cities without notifying local authorities. Among the listed weapons was chemtrails. This was cited as Absolute Proof that chemtrails existed and were regularly used by the US military in civilian areas. Same thing applies -- it's just being safe, OK? (Or in that case, was more likely a misguided attempt at reassuring the tinfoil-hat brigade.)
-- Old Man Kensey
Dissipating a hurricane will cost way too much money. Since the most killer aspect of a hurricane is the flooding, this is what needs to be addressed. All coastal cities in hurricane belts should look at absorbing (some of) the water into subterrainian shafts, pockets or storage tanks with air escape vents. At least then you can deal with the water (pump it back into the ocean?) once things have settled.
When will we stop punishing the poor for being lazy and over-rewarding the cunning for appearing not to be? God bless Sean Penn!
And with all their worldly knowledge in hand they came unprepared.
-- Word Is Bourne
If you knock an ant hill over, chances are it will be back in the same location the next day. Americans are like ants, they are determined to overcome any obstacle even mother nature. The problem with moving new orleans to a more logical location is that it would no longer be new orleans to the people that live there. All the culture would be gone. You are probably right, the best option would be to build it elsewhere. I'm betting though that the city is rebuilt in the same location and probably more safeguards put in place because Americans refuse to accept defeat.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
b.s.
i, personally, know a great number of people who are living off from the dole, here in the u.s.a.
sometimes, one, or another, of them will get a job. sometimes, they will actually keep at it long enough to collect more than one paycheck.
unsurprisingly, these people also tend to live in filth and squalor, with e.g. food rotting on dirty dishes piled in the kitchen sink, &c.
i say unsurprisingly, because the squalor is symptomatic of the base cause of their poverty. these people are lazy. they are parasites.
all that they contribute to society are disfunctional, developmentally scared children, and medical test subjects.
</rant >
OTOH, as a child, i grew up in rent controlled housing; my mom got food stamps, and her college tuition was paid for by a government vocational rehab program. she has been a professional educator for the past quarter of a century - not only supporting herself, but maintaining a reasonably comfortable middle class lifestyle. i worked my way through college, and am working in research - also relatively comfortable. so not everyone who is on the dole is hopeless... but a lot of them are pretty far gone.
Ok, so what happens to the energy when you dissappate it? It has to GO somewhere.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
In fact there was a written evacuation plan. It might have even worked if it was followed, but it was ignored. I'm not sure if nobody knew it existed, or if it was too complex for them to understand. Not that this matters as the decision to do anything wasn't made until it was too late.
People from high levels did in fact urge an evacuation, far enough in advance, but their advice was ignored by those who have the power to make the decision.
Conservatives talk show host love to talk about this, because the local governments are responsible for activating the plan, not the federal government[1], and the local governments are mostly Democrats.
[1]This is very different from how countries such as Holland works. In the US the federal government isn't all powerful over local governments. President Bush cannot order an evacuation.
Arguments about controling the weather (my amature chaos theory knowledge says no) or blaiming the politicians (always a good idea but off topic) just follow the current slashdot trend of bad science and sectarianism. What I wanna know is ....
Are there any techie ideas out there for building a 'New Kind Of City'tm that could:
1) Withstand a 500 year storm.
2) Be energy efficent, ergonomically friendly, and support a more localized agriculture.
I read somewhere (had to be here, don't read much else) that the Dutch levees are rated for 1,000 years(?). In a perfect(er) world, what building technologies would you use on the coast?
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
So the best way to go about this is. . .squish butterflies (preferably ones on the other side of the planet)!
Can't believe no one has mentioned the obvious conspiracy theory:
http://www.weatherwars.info/Katrina.htm
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
I remember reading the perfect solution to this problem ... back in the early 50's, in one of those "Popular Science"-type magazines, they predicted that in a few years we would never have to worry about hurricanes again.
If a hurricane started to form, just set off an A-bomb or H-bomb inside the eye. This would disrupt the wind patterns and destroy the storm before it could do any damage.
Now, fifty-odd years later, they are still screwing around trying to predict the weather instead of implementing this simple and effective idea. Why don't they get with it?
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Well, we will develope better models. So that's not an issue.
but the people whose homes you've just destroyed will sue you,
This seems a pretty difficult problem. Maybe use eminent domain to seize the most threatened property. Sounds pricy even for people who steer hurricanes.
Not that it's reasonable to chalk up Katrina specifically to global warming, but there is now solid scientific research that suggests that global warming is not increasing the number of cyclone-type storm systems, but is increasing their strength, longevity, and overall energy level.
t /abs/nature03906.html
Please refer to: "Increasing destructiveness of tropical cyclones over the past 30 years" by Kerry Emanuel, an established researcher in the field.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurren
This is a new direction in research, and the overall data in hurricanes is not overwhelmingly extensive, but the data does not look inconclusive.
In short, global warming may well cause an increase in destruction caused by hurricanes in an ongoing and increasing basis. This is especially true when you combine their flooding potential with the rising oceans.
-josh
Just dont fucking live in these places.
Seriously folks.
There are reasons why we have droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, forest fires, floods, and the like.
They all are part of a natural balance.
As proven when we killed off most of the wolves in the northwest, suddenly deer overpopulated and were dying of starvation. not to mention causing other problems. now we have to kill off numbers to try to re-establish that number.
The recent fires here in Southern California were because of another attempt at man trying to control nature. We kept putting out the natural fires that kept forests weeded out and made sure the strongest trees would remain to prevent overcrowding in the forests. So eventually we had these overly lush forests filled with dry brush and too many trees, once something ignited, what you had was a hellish inferno which could not be extinguished, and destroyed just about every tree in the forest. I live near the mountains where this happened, they were black and brown before the rains hit, then just brown. they no longer had a green hue because EVERYTHING WAS DEAD. All to "protect" the forests. not to mention the other effects of the fires. The thick smoke clouds that put deadly toxins into the air, made the temp drop and made trees start going into hibernation early, etc.. The runoff which washed out TONS of ash and cinders into the ocean, which you could find on beaches months after the fires and the rains that were near outlets.
All because we thought we could control mother nature. We ended up doing more damage than the natural causes did.
Nature will balance itself out, even if that means taking us out of the picture.
I remember kids shows in the early 90's that pointed out trying to control nature would lead to even more severe consequences. THESE WERE KIDS' SHOWS.
So, why even consider fucking with nature?
It's already known it's bad.
Like my science teacher said once. This is all shortsighted emotional reaction.
We, as a race need to get the chip off our shoulders and get out of nature's way. Instead of trying to show how superior we are to it.
Hurricanes, bad, but like people in response to this article have said, you stop them, worse effects could happen. Seeing as they bring warm currents to the polar regions, stopping them could start a new ice age. they also bring moisture to various areas of the world. if hurricanes didnt hit the south, you could bet that in a decade, the south would be a desert. A lot of species would die out as well. Plus other chain reactions due to this.
Dont fuck with nature. just get out of its way.
People who live in the areas damaged by it, get out or shut up.
People in drought ridden areas, get out while you can. throw aside the whole "but it's our homeland" thing because home aint what it used to be. Nature has pretty much said that it's going to be a drought ridden wasteland and that's that.
umm, have you heard of positive feedback cycles? I think those are cyclical too...
Seriously though, there's no doubt that hurricanes are cyclical and that has nothing inherently to do with Global Warming in the political sense. It has everything to do with global warming in a climatological sense (ie it happens during a warming cycle).
Warming is happening. The only debates are about the extent and the cause...and there isn't a lot of debate about the latter in genuine scientific circles either.
The crazy king guy was Canute who ordered the tide not to come in. The modified revisionist version I heard was that he actually did this to prove to his advisors that he was not superhuman and that it was a gesture of humility rather than one of hubris. In any case he got wet...
Modifying the environment must be done carefully, yes. But there are good reasons to do so. Connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans by the Panama canal was a pretty serious environmental modification, but it's considered a relatively worthwhile one. Diverting the courses of rivers to provide irrigation has major consequences on the river's ecosystem, both up and downstream; the same goes for damming rivers to provide power or prevent flooding.
Only in a fantasy world can humans thrive without affecting the planet. They key is make sensible, well-planned changes. That's why there's so much talk about simulations and modelling with regard to these hurricane prevention ideas.
Nuke it. One well placed tactical ICBM with a 50 megaton warhead shot right into the gawdamn eye. That oughta dissipate that bastard.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Your thoughts about steering weather phenomena have already been tested and proven in a different venue -- river flooding. I live on the Ohio river, and last winter the remnants of hurricane Ivan settled over Ohio/WV/PA and dumped nearly 10 inches of rain on the upper Ohio watershed. Whereas the Corp of Engineers is adept at stating that the series of about 15 major dams on the Ohio are intended "For Navigational Aid Only", any idiot knows that the dams are also capable of flood control, or more specifically flood diversion. The dams at New Martinsville and St. Marys opened their gates wide, but for some reason (Cincinnati?), there was a decision, or perhaps lack of a decision, to leave the gates at the Belleville dam at their standard setting. Hence, Marietta, OH, suffered a "50 year" flood. This flood was certainly not (all) our water, but a silent decision (or lack of decision) was made to have this section of river be the flood plain buffer for the vast majority of the rainfall. When the decision was made to open the locks at Belleville, the rate of drop in water level in Marietta was so great that a vacuum was created in a culvert, which subsequently imploded and caused a cave-in. The flood literally went from +30 feet above normal river level to about +10 feet above normal level in about 6 hours.
I can only hope the plan going forward is to "assign" the flood to Galipolis or New Martinsville, as they haven't had a big one in quite awhile. Wheeling, Powhatan Point, and us (Marietta) have all had our flood allocation for recent memory.
In conclusion, the idea of diversion has been deployed, however, the ethical and moral questions have (in our case) been carefully sidestepped, under the "For Navigation Only" ruse. Amazingly, with only a few exceptions, the public has largely not questioned this system of flood assignment. In fact, some folks from the National Weather Service were paraded into Q/A sessions to take the heat for poorly predicting the event, and I can only assume that they were under strict orders not to even mention the level of control available to the Corps of Engineers to affect the outcome. Corps of Engineers complicity in causing the event was never mentionned at all in the public sessions.
Warming is happening. The only debates are about the extent and the cause...and there isn't a lot of debate about the latter in genuine scientific circles either.
Pray tell what "genuine scientific circles" are you referring to? Accredited experts on both sides of this issue have presented quite compelling evidence to support their claims. If you think there's anything remotely close to scientific consensus on this subject, you're restricting your circle of observation too much. Try going out and purposefully seeking those who disagree with your preconceived notions. Despite popular opinion, you can be wrong, and it does not hurt you in the slightest to see some new facts regarding these matters.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Who says the Bush administration doesn't support science?
Meh.
Jesus Christ, how low have Slashdot's moderators sunk?
Note to trolls: you know you may as well pack up and go home. There's no point biting a man who's chewing on his own intestines.
fish and pipes
What follows is a posting Jim McCanney placed on his blog dated january 03, 2005.
... in addition to the extreme solar conditions i have now clear evidence of manipulation of weather by what appears to be a military satellite that is either geo stationed over the pacific ocean or is on an orbit that allows regular pulsing of the atmosphere or can be moved into non-geo semi-stationary orbits by a station keeping propulsion system ... the following information i personally gathered at an altitude of 45,000 feet from a location approximately 200 miles west of San Francisco over the Pacific Ocean ... a clear signature of a laser was observed and triangulated that was inducing the cyclonic storm approximately 200 miles off the west coast of Oregon and has since forced that storm center to move in a southerly direction and is now off the coast of northern California ... the purpose of this man made storm is to draw moisture off of what at first seemed a naturally occurring central Pacific tropical depression but i am now becoming more convinced that this second storm center also is being manipulated and maintained in location as it has been stationary over the exact same location in the Pacific ... NOAA computer predictions are totally incorrect and have been incorrect over that past weeks for not only this area but also for the affected areas which includes much of the south west USA ... the storms that were predicted to bring water to arizona for example were supposed to be drawing water from a jet stream coming down from alaska according to NOAA weather models (the water in fact is coming from the west and the south pacific) ... this is because the normal flow of the storm cells would have them moving in a totally different manner ... this all started to become obvious some time ago when the storm cells off of Oregon were forming and just setting there ... many times this same storm cell would form and dissipate in a matter of hours ... weather manipulation was clearly occurring... not following the normal seasonal progressions ... i made arrangements to place myself in a position where i could directly measure what i had since become convinced was weather manipulation of these pacific storm centers ... especially after the Florida Hurricane season ... when hurricane Jeanne did the loop de loop in the Atlantic and then headed for the same land fall location as hurricane Frances (i have been watching closely for signs of weather manipulation that i could measure and verify ... i was also confounded by the complete inability of NOAA computer models to predict the hurricane paths and weather in general ... those computer models are pretty bad to begin with but statistically for short range predictions they should have had a fairly good prediction record for the four major hurricanes of last fall and also for immediate weather of the pacific region ... all of this has been clear signs that the left hand did not know what the right hand was doing and is so typical of American Black Ops ... when i began noticing this weather "strangeness" i made arrangements to move into position to make direct measurements of what i now had become convinced were satellites sending laser beams to earth to ignite and move storms ... this was also confirmed when the strange Brazilian Hurricane of last March showed definite signs of manipulation ... on JANUARY 01, 2005 I MADE THE DIRECT MEASUREMENT AND CONFIRMED THROUGH MULTIPLE READINGS BY TRIANGULATION THE LASER SIGNATURE THAT WAS DRIVING THE STORM OF THE WEST COAST OF OREGON as i said from an altitude of 45,000 feet approximately 200 miles west of San Francisco ... as you will see from the attached video clip the cent
Yes you can stop hurricanes. They're being strengthened when they encounter warmer surface water temperature. All you have to do is 1) clean all the pollution from the water that's acting as solar traps... or 2) several large floating platforms sitting in strategic places would shade the water, alter the entire dynamics that now favors highscale hurricane growth. It wouldn't be cheap. I've already designed some tentative floating cities. The tops would be flat for a heliport, include a lot of solar panels or solar ovens. I'll hire on reasonable. I think the project would take 7 to 10 years to complete. It would be a sight cheaper to do than watch the Gulf coast be obliterated every year (soon to be every couple months). http://www.newpath4.com/ .
Mao had a very similar idea. Miles wide chain of chinese ladies and gentlemen to jump together into the pacific. The resulting tidal wave was supposed to swamp the Japanese and the west coast of America. Don't know what happened to the idea though. Perhaps somebody suggested that he had a nice nap. Perhaps a similar suggestion should be gently pushed in Mr. Bush's direction - can't do any harm.
How many beans make five, anyhow ?
...you may also want to check out "Heavy Weather" by Bruce Sterling. Mmmm, lung enemas and tornado hacking.
...doesn't the hot chick die?
We sure don't need any more science projects killing hot chicks..
(Nevermind that natural disasters probably kill hot chicks, and lots more, too)...
Yes, I know, making light of a serious matter. Like it.
http://undecidedgames.blogspot.com
Maybe we can just make them look pretty on the satelite pictures,
like those hedges they trim in the shape of poodles.
yay, modded troll
stupid moderators! you know I'm right!
Stop trying to buy your way out of this mess with technology and get to the root of the problem global warming. That's a bit harder isn't it, and requires you guys to give up your gas guzzling cars. Just remember you guys are responsible for between a fifth and a quarter of the entire world's greenhouse emissions! The worst thing is it's rubbing off us in the UK as well we're getting just as bad!
Martley, Near Worcester UK.
I was just wondering how you come up with these names of hurricanes.
Katrina is the name of a hot model here in India, and one morning I read a headline in the front page of a newspaper saying Katrina had created havoc in New Orleans", (you see our newspapers cover global news) I seriously wondered what did our Katrina Kaif do in New Orleans that created such a news.
My take is we should not try to "control" the hurricanes per se. It is Mother Natures way of moving heat from the Tropics to other areas to keep the climate in balance. Their is a Meteorologist that I know who is a hurricane expert that has mentioned the "seeding" of huricanes when they get very large (CAT 3 or better). Hurricanes go through what is called "EyeWall replacement" during their life. This is typically when the pressures rise and winds slow down.... Essentially the Eye breaks down and then rebuilds. He has talked about planting some type of explosion that would essentially break down the Eye. This would cause a decrease in strength. HE also suggests that this is done only near land..... Let the thing run wild in the open ocean... Another option is placing material in the area to promote dry conditions which would breakdown the convection in the hurricane and that would also break down the eye.... These are just theories... no proof or anything... But I think they may have merit......