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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?"
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!
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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.
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.
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
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.
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!"
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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Isn't nationality somewhat meaningless for these big super-corporations? What does nationality actually mean for businesses that operate multinationally?
Except that hurricanes spread the heat from the equatorial regoins toward the polar regoins. Thus providing much more livable contions across much of the planet. While hurricanes can be bad, they are localized problems. Removing/controlling/reducing them would be a globalized problem.
If people are willing to live where these localized problems occur, they need to accept the consequences and not scream that they're having these problems. Hurricanes, earthquakes, flooding, drought, heat and cold are all known problems. Either deal with them or move. But don't try to affect the rest of the planet just to solve your shortsightedness.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Whatever chemical/physical jujitsu you want to try a "reasonableness test" isn't passed with this.
So from a human perspective it would be pissing in the wind trying to change a hurricane. You might as well have the population near the gulf coast go to the beach and yell and the storms to stay away.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
I'm not suggesting it, the makers of that compound are, and they are actively trying to get government contracts as hurricane dispersers.
Amazing isn't it? Imagine the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico covered in an inch layer of insoluble jelly...imagine it washing up on shore...It's a nightmare, and yet, they are totally serious.
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But now, try to express the power of a race car engine expressed as butterfly-wing flaps/second!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
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.
There certainly is a large amount of land in this world that is above sea level. Unfortunately, most of it is not clustered around the economic centers of New Orleans. A lot of these people can't afford cars, they don't have any reliable transportation, so moving out to the higher suburbs has never been an option for them. Perhaps you don't understand the geography of the area, and the way that cities tend to work. That's ok, I'm just trying to inform you.
All the land above sea level around New Orleans already has people living there. There's no more above the water New Orleans left. So we're left with a few questions. First off, can the remaining parts of New Orleans economically succeed without rebuilding the rest? I don't believe that it can. So if we don't do some rebuilding, which will unfortunately be below sea level, we'd basically be letting the city die. So the next question is, are the remaining parts of New Orleans worth saving? That's a big question with a lot of economic, social, and cultural factors. Without really having that discussion, let me just say that I think that, yes, the city is worth saving. And if that means building some new structures below sea level, then so be it. I think there are other ways to deal with the problem, ways that the city as a whole and individual structures could be designed to better cope with the problems.
There are probably parts of the city that are better left unbuilt. Places that got 20 feet of water are going to be prohibitively expensive to protect. But any place where something was destroyed should not automatically be a write-off. Pragmatism, by definition, can be cold. If you want to look at this equation purely in terms of dollar signs and probabilities, that's your call, but don't pretend that doing so makes peoples' lives irrelevant. Logic is probably the best reason out there to be heartless, but it's still heartless. Just call it what it is, and we'll admit that our priorities are different.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
"there are no small changes in a complex system"
(( (CRAYON) )) >
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.
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.
"So from a human perspective it would be pissing in the wind trying to change a hurricane."
The theory states two things (from the article)
1. We are using chaos theory. This states that small changes in the beginning of an event can perbutuate and cause large changes later on. Even so, it would take so much power to change the hurricane even in its first steps, that it is not feasible to think about this as a practical theory today.
2. The theory also states you need to accuratly be able to predict weather patterns before this will work. Otherwise, how would you know what to change in order to get the hurricane to go where you want it to?
So, yes, we MIGHT be able to do this far in the future, but today, no.
~100 miles to the West - it would have impacted Galveston/Houston
~100 miles to the East - it would have crushed Mobile and impacted Talahassee
Why is this better?
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
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.
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