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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?"
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I understand that the risk that the levees could break was well-known, and that governments (at various levels) decided to do nothing about it. For that reason, the disaster that was caused when the levees broke, was partly a human engineerd disaster, not a natural disaster. Of course, many government officials talk about it as a "natural disaster" to avoid them being blamed for it. To a large extend it politics played a large role than technology. In that case politics needs fixing!
Agreed. That's the first thing I thought when I read the headline. It's sort of like how we don't like the icky nasty river overflowing and messing up our farms that we decided to make right next to the river because the best soil is there due to the ovious fact that the river overflows and deposits nice rich silt there. So we build Dams (Aswan on the nile) or levees (lower Misissippi) and everything is hunky dory until the river delta starts to go away. In the case of New Orleans it caused the city ro sink, the delta to disappear and ultimately removed its only defense (I just read a interesting piece from 2002 about what's going to happen in a few years if it doesn't get fixed - surprise it happened just like they predicted). Anyway, rather than messing up the normal cycle why not get out of nature's way and let it do its thing. That means dealing with the normal flooding , fires, hurricanes, tornados and other disasters. This stuff isn't new folks! Hurricanes aren't a new development that suddenly appeared because of global warming or sunspots or migrating birds. It's a natural process and a way for the atmosphere to expend energy. Oddly enough it reminds me of parents who want their precious little darling to have everything they didn't have when growing up so the kid never learns anything. "do not deny your children the experiences that made you who you are" - spoken by a very wise person.
We don't even understand global warning 100% yet, now we want to do this?
.don't build a city below water level. . .
Oh, I don't know. I think I understand it pretty well. The sun does it. To prevent hurricanes just put out the sun. This may raise some side issues, but I'm sure that sometime in the future technology will be able to deal with those.
. .
On the delta of one of the world's great flooding rivers in the hurricane belt. It's the confluence of the three factors that really causeses the trouble. We're not likely to see similar events in the Netherlands or Death Valley.
I wrote a post about the similar problems faced by Bangledesh a few years ago. Since the problems faced by that country are largely geographical in origin the world can send them aid year after year for all eternity and nothing will ever change. Of course there the problem is also political. In the old days, when the country was simply a region of India, the peasanst would come down from the hills in the spring, plant their rice, go back up hill when flood season started, and come back to harvest the rice when the floods had receded. Now they've placed an international frontier right where the high ground starts.
The Big Easy doesn't have that problem. It exists where it exists for perfectly legitimate reasons and will be rebuilt because it has to be, but most of the people in the area aren't there for that reason and the people who are should go uphill when the prevailing conditions make such a wise move.
Doctor, it hurts my city when the volcano blows up. . .
There is a simpler, easier, and more cost effective way of dealing with the above than putting out the volcano.
KFG
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.
Despite your depressing analysis, things are not getting worse. At least not in the sense you think they are. The only reason the damage is worse is because the population along the coast is getting larger. We're not seeing more storms and more powerful storms and they are not part of some "Earth is dying" or "Global Warming" scenerio. When Andrew hit, for instance, it was in a relatively low year of only about 7 storms. This is all normal and a normal part of nature. Whether we should "do" anything is a matter of ethics and science but not a matter of "things are getting worse."
I understand that the risk that the levees could break was well-known, and that governments (at various levels) decided to do nothing about it.
It's worse than that. The levees were specifically only designed to be able to withstand a category 3 hurricane. In other words, the science/math/engineering all basically says that the levees would break in a category 4 hurricane - they were breaking as designed, they didn't just "break by chance" ... in fact there was no way the levees could really have held up to a category 4 hurricane, by design they were too weak to do so. If you have a truck that is designed to carry a maximum of, say, 3 tonnes, and you load it with 4, then it's not "random chance" when it breaks - you expect that it will break. The limitations of the levees have been known since they were built decades ago, and the dangers that they were going to break known. The problem is that nobody in power (this adminstration or previous ones) has been willing to make the funds available to upgrade the levees, on a 'gamble' that a major hurricane would not hit during their terms. The Bush adminstration gambled again, and lost (even worse drastically cutting funding for the levees).
The politicians have been playing Russian Roulette with New Orleans. In Russian Roulette, if you keep playing, you KNOW for a FACT you're going to get fscked, you just don't know when. This is 100% a human-engineered disaster. You can't tell me Taiwan can build the world's tallest building to hold up in an area that gets many earthquakes and typhoons, but the US doesn't know how to build a levee that can withstand a category 4 hurricane? It's not an "act of God" when the world's tallest building does or doesn't fall down in a 7.0 earthquake - it's an "act of Engineering" (and funding). Likewise for the levees.
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.
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
But now, try to express the power of a race car engine expressed as butterfly-wing flaps/second!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?