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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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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Exactly what you'd expect, considering that the US makes about a quarter of the world's stuff. Measure pollution versus output, and I think you'll find that the US is quite a bit more efficient than many countries.
ABSURDITY, n.: A statement or belief manifestly inconsistent with one's own opinion.
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.
But now, try to express the power of a race car engine expressed as butterfly-wing flaps/second!
Ben Hocking
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