Slashdot Mirror
Scientist Are Working to 'Steer' Hurricanes
E++99 writes "In the wake of Katrina, two teams of climate scientists have been working to steer hurricanes. Both teams are using the technique of removing power and speed from strategic points in the hurricane, effectively refracting its path. The American team is approaching this by warming the areas of the tops of the hurricane clouds, either by dropping ash to absorb heat from the sun, or directly beaming microwaves on those areas from space. The Israeli team is taking the approach of cooling the bottom of the hurricane by releasing dust along its base."
Now, steering hurricane from space, that's pushing the concept of MWD to a brand new level. And you can always deny that it's you who did it. Wonderful...
One shall speak only if what one has to say is more beautiful than silence
The problem they are trying to avoid it appears in the article is how to avoid all the states between the Gulf Coast and Redmond, WA
Really. It sounds dangerous. It's not best to mess with Mother Nature. Especially when it comes to climate and weather. IMHO, weather control such as steering hurricanes will create more problems than it solves. Do you know what the results would be? Do you know what the long-term effects of hurricane steering would be? No, no one does because it hasn't been done.
My blog
CBC just did a program on this last night:
http://www.cbc.ca/doczone/hurricane.html/
The linked page includes a program excerpt.
Conclusion: none of the *nine* different methods considered will work on their own.
Used all at the same time, they might make a difference.
I hope they have good liability insurance.
Who needs economic sanctions against Cuba when you can steer every hurricane that comes down the pipe into downtown Havana? As if the conspiracy theorists don't have enough to do...
I think the lawyers got this one right. There's no way any legal counsel would ever approve something like this. WEAKENING, perhaps, but not steering. I know I would sue if someone steered the next Katrina into my house.
This presents a huge ethical dilemma.
If you steer the hurricane away from the big city, but it still hits a small town 100 miles away, and kills 100 people, have you just murdered those 100 people? And at that rate, the ones who survived are going to be pretty pissed that the government shot a HURRICANE at them.
What if we screw up, and send a Category 5 Hurricane on a collision course with Havana or Mexico City? That would have disastrous consequences.
This sort of technology has terrifying military applications as well. Send a hurricane at *insert insular communist dictatorship here*, wait til it's passed, and then invade the nation while they're picking up the pieces.
I'm generally for the advancement of science, but in this case, we're coming a bit too close to "playing God" for our own good.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Be very afraid.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This sounds familiar. I think some people tried this about a decade ago with jet turbines...I'll have to research this... Even back then I wondered what the consequences of doing this would be. Directing that much energy is not without thermodynamic consequence, and all that energy has to go somewhere.
They are worried about getting sued by the small towns they direct the storms to in the effort to avoid large cities. But if the space-based approach can be done efficiently, and we methodically steer all tropical storms over a certain size, couldn't we theoretically get them all to end up harmlessly in the North Atlantic?
Also for a gratuitous Star Trek II reference, "we are dealing with something that could be perverted into a dreadful weapon."
They've tried cloud seeding too and they even though about detonating hydrogen bombs in the hurricane. Hurricanes are very large heat engines that work off of a temperature gradient. Upset that gradient enough and the storm breaks up or destroys its self. DO it wrong and you can inadvertantly steer the hurricane the wrong way or make things a whole lot worse by actually strengthening it. That isn't to say we haven't tried before though, we've used cloud seeding on storms for years [started as a military weapon, flood the battlefield and mud keeps the tanks from moving much] it ended up killing I think about 30 people in the resulting flood. We really don't want this to be a part of anyone's arsenal. The political effects alone are something to shudder about.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Why don't we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?
This sounds completely crazy. Unfortunately, it's impossible to prove it's crazy since you will never know where the hurricane would have gone if someone hadn't introduced these relatively small temperature differences.
But I guess there's no harm in letting these scientists think they moved the hurricane. What's the worst that could happen, the universe slaps them?
Hugo Chavez, the Bush Administration will get you yet!
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
So how much carbon black or soot does it take to warm a hurricane to the point it changes direction? I'm picturing a hurricane that is redirected using this method dropping gobs of black rain on my car, house, driveway, yard, etc. That'll be fun.
Other than this text, there is no discernible information contained in this sig.
We're not exactly standing on the beach and yelling "You shall not pass!" It's more like we're throwing it's steering out of alignment. Small changes applied appropriatly should have drastic effects on course, landfall strength, etc. It's part of what makes weather so hard to predict. Of course, that also means to we need to prepare for unforseen consequences...
Demented But Determined.
Will the two teams be cursing and abusing each other when they steer their respective hurricanes into the other one's path?
I suppose they're wondering too. Which is why they're doing the experiments.
I know that the whole point is to save lives and all, but we really shouldn't be doing this. As it is we have screwed up the planet a lot. I'm sure there is some natural benefit to hurricanes (not that I know what it is) and by trying to control them, we are screwing with the ecosystem even more than we already have. At some point we're going to figure out how to control it and some guy is going to wipe out all of Florida in one big swoop because something didn't go exactly as planned. Don't screw with nature. Karma bites.
Software Reviews>
They are powered by huge amounts of energy, which is why weakening them substantially may never be possible; but the path they take is largely determined by small imbalances of energy.
Sounds awfully like a scam to get government funding for research, actually.
;-)
A typical hurricane packs a punch worth an "ordinary" atomic bomb exploding every minute. It would take an insane amount of energy to add/remove to even make a statistically significant difference.
Mother nature is *really* powerful and not to be messed with!
Ah, now if they could figure out how to remove some energy and convert into electricity, now THAT would be useful... a season's worth of storms can solve whole world's energy problem
- mritunjai
NO! Don't say that!
*runs to grab Companion Cube and proceeds to bomb shelter to wait out the reign of Yet Another New Overlord.*
I for one welcome our new hurricane-steering overlords.
it'll give Oil traders one less excuse to increase the price of oil on whim..
I don't think the unpredictability of the path of hurricanes is because we don't understand them, but because their path is largely dependent on the accumulation of very small differences in energy interacting with it that simply cannot be predicted very far in advance in a chaotic weather system. During the 4 or 5 days that Mitch was stationary, it would presumably be very difficult to know where the first imbalance of energy was going to come from. But if we could provide that first imbalance of energy, it's no longer a mystery. Agreed, we had beter make darn sure we know what we're talking about before we do anything.
I was downloading the NOAA satellite image sequence for Rita when it was making landfall. About two hours from landfall, while it was still far offshore, there was about a one hour gap in the feed. After the gap Rita was no longer symmetrical and had obviously lost a lot of power. I've seen image sets and animations on the web since then, but they're all for before or after the gap.
Attacking the hurricane is futile - and with increasing ocean temperatures due to global warming, the frequency and strength of hurricanes is only going to get worse.
The real question is: what are they doing about the butterflies in Brazil?
Weather forecasters are expecting a ten-fold increase in hurricane activity.
Strangely, they claim climate-change isn't to blame.
Say what you want about Richard Hogland, but he has an outdated blog about this very same subject. http://www.enterprisemission.com/weblog/weblog.htm
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
is to get a bunch of people on the shoreline and have them all blow really hard(Sorry, I couldn't think of a way to phrase the previous sentence that WASNT a double entendre.)
Monstar L
Because you seem to be so good at handling them yourselves.
Seems like the link you provided has issues (I.E. bad rendering, video link bad, etc.) because of the forward slash after it. Just remove the slash, and your good :)
Sounds like Forest fire prevention to me. Looks good on paper, works for a few years.
But a 100 years later, whooops we made it worse.
It has been two weeks since scientists first tried to take the offensive with hurricane Murphy, and it seems the worst is yet to come.
Murphy was threatening the east coast as a, then, category 4 storm when scientists unleashed an assault of new techniques intended to thwart a disaster by gently steering the hurricane to a less populated portion of the coast. It became immediately clear that the efforts worked. Too well, in fact!
Hurricane Murphy took a steep turn to the northeast into the Atlantic, preventing all but the slightest landfall and causing practically no loss of life. The unintended consequence of this was that Murphy was now back in warm waters building power once again, something scientists hadn't predicted due to their underestimation of their initial efforts to divert it.
After about two weeks, Murphy has since looped back around to its original course aiming straight for northern Florida and Georgia. But the push back into the ocean has left it with a much higher force, so far reaching the higher end of the category 5 range and begging scientists to create, for the first time, a new category 6 level.
It has been decided that nothing will be done to coerce the hurricane this time as it makes landfall. Even if scientists were once again ready to release a barrage of new-tech weather weapons, they are not sure that they wouldn't exacerbate the situation.
<disclaimer>I am not a meteorologist, nor do I have a decent understanding of how hurricanes work due to my living in catastrophe-proof West Texas.</disclaimer>
Adapt, adopt, or get out of the way!
Think of the potential abuse by insurance companies. They hire private companies to steer the hurricanes to consistently hit a certain area, and then refuse to insure that area. The insurance companies get "free money" from everyone else for storm/hurricane insurance on the off chance the hurricane cannot be redirected.
when it comes to 'handling your own affairs', Israel is the last country to be getting advice from.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
Listen, the hurricaine was only half the problem. The reason Katrina was a disaster was not because of direct hurricaine damage that this kind of thing may prevent. Moving the hurricaine to the east or west would not stop the water surge that caused the levees to break! This is not the direction we should be heading as a society.
Why not spend this money on infrastructure and first responders? Or people to check to make sure mandatory evac's are carried out? Or insurance reform? If you had a hurricane coming at your house, would you rather have trained people to help you, make sure you get away safely and securely, and that your material things are protected... or would you rather count on beams from space? Are you kidding?
Not me; it didn't teach me a thing about Unix...
It's one thing to change the course of a hurricane -- it is quite another to do so in any sort of predictable fashion. Even storms that are (for now) unaffected by human intervention have a substantial margain of error on their predicted path. (That's why the maps show the classic "cone" instead of a straight line.) Remember that Katrina would have struck an even more devastating blow to New Orleans had it not veered from the predicted course at the last minute.
So, what if the storm, left alone, would have veered away from a populous area at the last minute on its own, and by screwing with it you have now caused it to strike a more direct and deadly blow?
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
... the massive drought impacting the south east of the USA this year.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
From Butterfly Effects.
I hope they fail.
I lived in Honolulu in 1992 and up until about 45 minutes before landfall, forecasters said Hurricane Iniki was going to go right over us. Fortunately for Oahu and unfortunately for Kauai, the hurricane went west. Messing with storms of this magnitude in the ways being contemplated is going to have disastrous results.
That's very kind, but (in a probably vain attempt to keep this on topic) suppose a technology exists that could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of dollars worth of property. You will refuse to use it just because it was developed by an Israeli researcher at an Israeli university?
Interesting how reality is finally catching up to fiction.
Now we just need for them to start building a giant dome over New York City...
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
In 1994 I met a guy that told me this story. He was out of a masters program in argicultural science and wanted to do someting about the chicken problem whereby you have to feed them antibiotics when they're in close quarters otherwise they get sick. He reasoned that it was filty air that was doing so built a coup that had two walls charged with -15kv to electrostatically clean the air. He said it worked; the ait was clean, the chickens never got sick and there was a 4" thick coating of white fluffy dust.
One day the coup was wiped out by one of the rare hurricanes up here. Specifically the one in the Fergus/Guelph corridor.
He didn't think much of it other than "dammit".
Not long after he got a visit by a bunch of government types (he never said who, but said he was scared from the moment they said "hello".
They explained to him the hurricane was tracking a straight line then took a 10 mile south diversion, wiped out his coup then went back to it's original course. They wanted to know what on earth he had in that coup.
He said "hey, if I could divert the course of a hurricane would I me messing around with chickens?" and they want away.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Nothing says "screw you" like, given the opportunity, steering a tornado *into* a major naval port or major industrial region of an economic or military enemy.
Satellites could also heat the cloud tops by beaming microwaves from space.
I'm a bit concerned with this recent obsession to beam microwaves from space. First, it's some hare-brained plane for solar energy, now steering hurricanes. Give it up already: it simply is not going to happen.
They generally form in the Northern hemisphere on the eastern costs of large continents, and in the Southern hemisohere on the Western coasts of continents, due to the coriolois forces.
..........FULL STOP.
I can see the CIA wanting to dump lots of ash by Cuba to wreak havoc on Havana.
..........FULL STOP.
As long as both teams want the hurricane to go the same way we could have winner here.
How much you want to bet, once this is possible, suddenly we'll find that hurricanes only hit blue states and majority democrat neighborhoods/counties?
What better way to ensure victory, then to obliterate your competition's voters?
Brielle
Man owns that bitch Mother Nature.
Yup, this has all the makings of yet another success.
Why the fsck is the PP modded troll? Looks to me like legitimate concerns, very similar to many other posts on the topic.
Pointing out something that might go wrong does not require wit, only a desire to obstruct or to appear wise. Even less is required to point out that something vague and unspecified might go wrong. Even less, to refuse to notice that something massively valuable is likely to go right.
Imagine the Slashdot posts on the "Man invents fire" story.
Eyewall Science: We do what we must, because we can.
What, you think the logo is a coincidence?
For what are [desert-dwelling] Israelis doing hurricane researching?
Maybe they figure if they can't have the land, NOBODY will. Bwaa haa ha ha!
Table-ized A.I.
Claiming that they can "steer" a hurricane implies that they can ultimately control where it goes and when. That is not what they are doing... and as mentioned elsewhere, it also implies responsibility for the outcome.
"Diverting" is a much better term. It implies only that you are changing the current course, and includes an implied purpose to prevent its collision with something or someone.
Those who attempt to do this should keep in mind the "Butterfly Effect". They had better be careful that they know what it is they do.
I don't really have any use for the Pally Stamper 2000, the Land Grabber MK2, or the Automatic Arab Detecting Vehicle for Amazingly Ruthless Killing (AARDVARK).
If you have the technology to steer the hurricane away from the big city, but are paralysed by tough ethical choices into inaction, and so allow the hurricane to hit the big city and kill 1,000 people, have you just murdered 1,000 people? Or just the 900 difference in body count? If failing to prevent a death is less ethically unsound than causing a death in the course of preventing ten other deaths, how MUCH less ethically unsound is it?
Causing death while endeavoring to save lives is not murder. It's something I expect most people would have a lot of trouble coming to terms with, of course, and shouldn't be done without due consideration, but if I were put into the unenviable position of choosing which people live and die, and had nothing else to base the decision on, I'd go with the fewest deaths possible even if those deaths wouldn't have happened if I did nothing. Then drink myself insensible. Possibly every day for the rest of my life, hurrah Winston Churchill.
Fidel Castro: watch your back!
As much as it seems like a good idea to save people from the danger of hurricanes, I've always dreaded what could come from messing with natural processes. Namely what effect it would have on the El Nino Southern Oscillation. Atmospheric energy has to go somewhere, so one has to ponder just what could come from stopping hurricanes from running their course. In my opinion nothing good has ever come from disrupting natural processes.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
Tom Beardon posited this kind of activity way, way back. He says that 'scalar waves' are generated by crossing phase-opposing transmissions, and with it, you can pull or push energy from the intersection. This is work that Tesla was contemplating to put a huge solar cell on the moon (where there is always sunshine) and beam it back to Earth.
I couldn't confirm his quantum-physics (duh!) but everything else he said was either something I'd seen, something I'd heard from other sources, or questionable-but-likely.
If he's still at his address, you might contact him at tbeardon@aol.com. (Better yet, look for "scalar waves" on Google.)
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
And their enemies, wow, the many opportunities to devastate them with hurricanes, yeh, that will teach them a thing or two.
Infuriate left and right
You can steer hurricanes and tornadoes reliably and easily. You use a heavy lifter like an old B-52 and you approach the storm and drop mobile homes along the path you want the storm to travel. Anyone who has ever seen a TV story on these storms will understand the strong scientific basis for this method.
You just had to get some butterflies to flap on the other side of the world.
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
That's a pretty low score. Perhaps you were thinking 4.1 out of 5 max.
Infuriate left and right
This is front page of the Enquirer material. It ranks right up there with that guy who thought blowing up the moon was the only way to save the earth. Meteorologists, weathermen, whatever you like, can't even predict accurately what the weather will do on a day to day basis.
Off topic rant: It always amazes me how people take NASA so seriously when it comes to "climate modeling" with their dire predictions and vagaries saying things like we're at a "tipping point" climate-wise, and yet how many times have shuttle launches been delayed due to weather? Since when did NASA become an authority in climatology? You would think if they had a good grasp of macro-scale climate trends, they would at least have an idea of what weather conditions to expect based on all the measurements readily available to them. Satellite imaging, atmospheric pressure readings, air and ground level temperature, pinpoint Doppler radar, all of it working together and they still can't predict with much accuracy what the weather will be like tomorrow. Why don't scientists come out and tell us with unblinking certainty what caused the Ice Ages, or the hot spells in the past?
People in the middle ages numbered only in the millions and had no discernible CO2 emissions, yet there was a huge spike in the temperature then? What caused that, if it wasn't people? The truth is we've had only maybe 50 years of good technology with which to record weather data, 20 years of satellite imaging, and less than 10 years of CPU power to even pretend to be accurately modeling anything. The debate is over? The debate has just started to get interesting. The facts we need for the debate are JUST NOW coming in.
Simcity anyone? Many a fun time had destroying cities, now I can steer them for real?? ;-)
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
Seeding a storm with a million boxes of powdered soap right before it makes landfall. Hmmm,What could possibly go wrong.
>> For what are Israelis doing hurricane researching?
To provide a solution where there is a financial, humanitarian and moral demand, you idiot.
If only people in your country would have directed their efforts into something constructive like this rather than into bitching about how bad of an idea this is, you'd have been getting the same respect.
I guess that's a no.
That says one of two things:
Either you're an idiot Westerner who has fully assimilated with an idea endorsed by many Arabic regimes - we will gladly slaughter hundreds of thousands of our own, just to save our national pride in our imagines penis-size pissing contest,
or you're an Arab who was taught that approach from his beloved home.
Why don't you crawl back into the cave you crawled out of? People are trying to do something productive here.
'for what is [bigoted asshole] guy doing comments on slashdot'?
So, really, it's mainly the United States and Central America that need to worry (and occasionally Europe). It didn't say that the technology would work on typhoons or tropical cyclones, after all...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
It is highly doubtful whether human meddling will have a discernible influence on the morphology of any given hurricane. Hurricanes are simply too big and the amount of energy involved is too large. Have you ever seen a kid kick dust into a dust devil? The sucker continues merrily on its path. Think of the scale of dust-devil-to-kid and then think of the scale of a bunch of puny airplanes spewing dust to a hurricane!
I am highly skeptical of any conclusions drawn from simulated data. As a cloud modeler running at very high resolutions (much higher than hurricane simulations since I am studying much smaller individual thunderstorms) I can tell you that even the most sophisticated cloud microphysics parameterizations are extremely crude. Clouds and rain are represented not by droplets, but mixing ratios, and gross assumptions are made about drop size distributions, transfer rates between species, etc. So, to say "we dropped some parameterized soot in the model and it made a difference" is not saying much.
Small perturbations in a highly unstable chaotic simulations such as a hurricane simulation will result in noticeable changes in the simulation days down the road. This is not a surprise. But even a small perturbation in a model would involve a huge amount of matter or energy in the real world, and whether these perturbations could be orchestrated to create a predictable change in course is very highly doubtful.
Another problem that plagues all forms of weather modifications is that you'll never know for sure if the modifications themselves caused a shift in storm evolution, or if an observed shift was something that would have happened anyway. Causality is the hardest thing to prove - even in a model where you know the state of your system to seven decimal points of precision.
I really hope federal money is not spent on this kind of research. Is there a limit to the hubris of mankind?
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
"directly beaming microwaves on those areas from space"
Hmmmm, me thinks this will NOT end well.
I would rather play a "Nice game of Chess".......
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
You mean like when we invented electricity, split the atom, and rode a rocket to the moon?
Or when we learned how to make fire, for that matter? I somehow doubt that the first caveman to start a blaze had any idea wtf he was doing.
Block it? Are you kidding? They'll probably invest in it. Insurance companies aren't about avoiding disaster. They make more money when they can best predict what will happen because they can charge everyone for precisely the cost of being who they are (and now, "where they are"). Insurance is no longer about sharing risk--now it's all about eliminating risk ... at least for the insurer. The more things are predictable or, even better, controllable, the better for them. Look at health care: They want to have tests for things... but not so that they get you better treatment, rather so they can exclude you from things they know
you will get.
And what if insurance companies decided it oughtn't based on numbers of lives but aggregate value of insured property. For example, having funded it, they might then demand a right to nudge hurricanes one way or another. Let's say, just hypothetically, away from highly insured private lands and toward large communities of uninsured people. (Probably the presentation would be different, that would just be the effect.) It's a rich new form of Gerrymandering just waiting to be staked out.
Just look at how big business handles product recalls, by calculating the likely cost of a lawsuit for not doing something and comparing it to the actual cost of doing something. Why would hurricanes be any different?
It's obvious that everyone will want to optimize the outcome. The only question is what people's valuation function is. (Even the people who are for "not meddling" are optimizing their fear of science or their fear of the untested or their trust in God. Others may value this or that furry thing, or this or that family member.) All of us want to optimize value in one way or another, we just don't all value the same things.
When it comes to deciding about a hurricane's path, many will be affected no matter what happens. If a big city is spared, it will probably be at the expense of a few suburbanites. And expect the insurance companies to rush in writing checks happily because they know they dodged a big bullet and the last thing they want is for someone to say "let's not do that again".
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
To be honest, every time there is a hurricane, I am more relieved if it is headed towards the Florida Keys instead some where else that doesn't usually get hit by one. People who grew up in the Keys know about hurricanes. Our houses are mostly steel reinforced concrete and built on stilts. The flood water has to be a story high before it can reach the living room of my parent's house. Keys residents will laugh at anything that's category 3 or less. We know how to stock up on food and when to evacuate because it's something we have to do every couple of years.
My point is that directing a hurricane else where will likely cause more damage and deaths because the places where hurricanes hit have developed "defenses" against them. This is not an useful idea if they're intending to do good. Plus a great deal of natural life actually depends on the occasional hurricane to replenish itself. Hurricanes are natural events in those areas and people and wildlife have adapted to them.
EvilCON - Made Famous by
I remember reading up on HAARP just before katrina hit and hearing how it could be used to heat atmospheric regions for JUST this purpose:
eg, in one film I watched, one group of US researchers (likely this one) were interviewed and were talking about IF they could put decent but not extraordinary amounts of energy (heat) where they wanted, they could steer hurricanes, as they had been doing it in computer models, using data from previous real hurricanes, successfully. But (they said) they had no way to place this energy in real life...
Then the next bit of the film showed people at HAARP saying how they could use this tech to heat chosen parts of the atmosphere but when asked about weather manipulation they stated that the mega/gigawatts involved in haarp was nothing to the many orders of magnitude more energy involved in weather systems... which IS true.. but we are not talking about CREATING a hurricane, only steering it (crappy analogy: you cant personally put out 100 kilowatts to push a car up to speed, but the small amount of energy you put into your rack and pinion steering is capable of steering it just fine..)
The next thing I read a few months later (after katrina) was a disturbing analysis of a short radar view of katrina, supposedly obtained from a commercial weather website subscription service, which showed absolutely no doubt in my mind artificial hotspots forming near katrina (they looked kind of like fingers) and apparently steering the hurricane which was about to miss its "target" right into new orleans... Of course, this radar footage could be faked, but the rest of the story still stands: one group of researchers DID have the theoretical ability to steer hurricanes IF they had a device to conveniently place energy, Another group had JUST such a device, and given the, I would call it, deliberate negligence and willful pain and destruction allowed to occur in new orleans in the "clean up" operation (plus less reputable but certainly possible claims of deliberate levy destruction, negligence in levy maintanance etc) it seems quite likely to me that someone high up had a motive to let new orleans rot, therefore they also had the motive to destroy it, and apparently, the means
I will now try to find the "fingers of god" "hand of god" I think it was called radar sequence to (slightly) back this up (the HAARP film was called "angels dont play this haarp" or something like that, find it on google video) although I know the original website I saw it on disappeared very quickly after I saw it
watch "the money masters" on google video
Finally, something plausible!
For years, folks who speculated that the government might be conducting research involving the use of microwaves to influence the weather were characterized as tin-foil-hat-wearing conspiracy theorists...and now, the very same techology is going to save us from global warming?
To paraphrase a Futurama scene from the Star Trek episode:
American: We can affect the hurricane's path from the top, but sadly not at all from the bottom, which would be such a great complementary way to do things. ... and you can affect things from the top...
Israeli: We've got problems too; we can affect the path from the bottom, but have no way to do it from the top.
American: Say... if you can affect things from the bottom...
Israeli:
Fry: Stop it! You're just going around in circles. (*rubs temples, concentrates*) THINK, Fry, THINK! Everyone's depending on you!
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
A (thin) coating of oil on the surface of the water would reduce evaporation and smooth the water, making the hurricane turn away from the oil (since it goes faster over smooth water.) Who knows if it works at the scale desired, but it may be no worse than spreading "black particles from the manufacture of tires!" An experiment on this topic was done in 1891 by Rear Admiral Cavelier de Cuverville from a ship in a cyclone.
Everyone on the weather channels always talks about how the warm gulf water strengthens hurricanes well then isn't the opposite true?
Can't we shoot some big chunks of ice or supercooled air into the base of it and stop it dead in its tracks?
I'm sure fermilab would love to toss some gamma rays into the center of the next one just to see what happens.
It seems to me that these techniques in the post are all about using heat. Wouldn't that be counter-productive? Wouldn't that speed the hurricane up and make it more powerful? Sure you might change the direction, but katrina hitting fla. is just as bad as katrina hitting NOLA.
The BBC did a program on this months ago called Superstorm. It didn't work out too well, and ended up being militarized by the (US) govt.
First, some numbers:
Katrina caused 41 billion dollars in damages.
The Payload of a heavy bomber (B-52, B-1, B-2) is over 60,000lbs (30 tons).
The US has about 200 active duty heavy bombers, but once had over 600 of them.
The National Hurricane Center tries to predict major hurricanes at least 24 hours before landfall.
You're right, it would be futile to try and dissipate a hurricane. However, if your goal is only to deflect the hurricane, your job is going to be a lot easier.
A single hurricane can cause tens to hundreds of billions of dollars in damages; the deflection effort could be allocated a budget of billions of dollars every year and still be profitable for the country.
With that kind of budget, the military could attack each incoming hurricane with hundreds of heavy bombers, dropping tens of kilotons of soot.
I think further study is justified. This is going to be expensive, but if science has a way to stop disasters like Katrina, then it's worth tens of billions of dollars.
And here I was thinking that that song was about corrupt police and a boxer....
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.- Shelley
Being lived in Kansas, I always wondered, while tornadoes brought so much destroy to the cities, and were easily detectable on a meteo radars, why not fire high explosive rockets to them at least in attempt to destroy or diminish that tornado?
Actually, it's scary because FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) is an easy
trap to fall into.
Look at a hurricane: it uses sunlight on salt water (free and abundant resources) and
creates rainfall (fresh water) and lots of mechanical energy. Taming hurricanes
is as big a step as taming fire, it's a VERY good way for civilization to proceed
to a bright future. Don't let FUD steal your future, or blight your
descendants' prospects.
Taming fire worked out well, until greenhouse gas pollution became a problem.
Taming hurricanes can work out well, too--if we actually DO it instead of just
trying to talk about the FUD.
My money's on the Israeli team. Their technology must superior. I never hear of hurricanes hitting Israel.
J
Find and kill that damned butterfly that keeps flapping its wings at the wrong time.
How wise approaches like these actually are. Since all storms, (and all weather events for that matter) are about moving towards equilibrium. I guess if folks haven't learned yet what steering nature does over the long haul by now, then they just aren't able to learn.
Pfft. There's not a thing wrong with it. It's just a bugfix -- like finding out your database has a remote login vulnerability, and firewalling it. I mean, come on. Global warming causes all these freak storms, and you want to actually fix the global warming?
I'll not wait at home while these guys heat or freeze a Katrina like hurricane . . . just in case there is a software glith or a calculation error or something, you know.
What happened to the theory that a slick of an environmentally-safe oil strategically placed in the path of a hurricane would decouple the hurricane from its energy source (the warm ocean)? That sounds less like lawsuit-bait that trying to turn one.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Hurricanes, while destructive to the coastline where they make landfall are beneficial in the long run. Most hurricanes that come ashore in the Gulf of Mexico are beneficial to the Mid-Atlantic states. Because a few days after the hurricanes come ashore, the remnants of the storm move east and bring needed rain to the mountain regions of North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia. The rainfall here helps the rivers and tributaries which move eastward towards the Chesapeake Bay.
When will man learn to leave nature alone? Don't want destruction from hurricanes? Don't build on the coastline.
How small are those "small imbalance"? It may come out that natural occurring "small imbalances" are too big to beat with artificial ones. Are there any studies made on the topic, any experiments done? For one, single ship trail in the storm should leave a thermal tail behind in the water (engines are cooled by sea water) and storm should, theoretically, track the ship.
Exhibit B: Gulf stream has quite significant thermal footprint on sea surface. If this theory about where storms "wish" to go is exact, all Hurricanes should track Gulf stream and drift northeast, never leaving it, thus staying well off the US shore. Is that the observed behavior?
...if a hurricane hits Town B instead of Town A because of human intervention.
Just send a hundred bucks to Pat Robertson.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
The technical corollary to this is that Systems/Network admins should always carry a piece of fiber in their pocket. That way if they ever get lost, all they have to do is bury the fiber and wait until the backhoe operator arrives to cut it and ask for directions.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
... the article about the super-carrier battling a hurricane, and you have one of the Navy's new top-secret weapons programs. Within the next 10 years, everyone may start wondering why every Atlantic hurricane stomps all over Cuba before turning north-east away from the US. ;-)
This is a joke of course, but the really crazy thing about it is that Congress probably would approve spending for something stupid like this. They've approved things a lot farther fetched than this in the past. Actually, it would be cool if we could steer one over Atlanta to alleviate the drought condition (it's never full hurricane strength by the time it gets that far inland, but it still drops a lot of rain).
I think hurricane == typhoon == tropical cyclone
Just different names for the same storm, maybe over different waters.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Katrina was sent into New Orleans using this technology, which already exists (*)- genocide by weather.
(*) When you hear about something it means the gov't had it for at least 10 - 20 years
It was a joke that was assuming the readers already knew that...
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
The east coast of the US gets a significant portion of its annual rainfall in the form of tropical storm-related precipitation. If these storms were steered out to sea, what effect would that have on North American ecosystems? Agriculture? No one knows.
I can tell you that the Southeastern US would gladly take a hurricane right now, as long as it wasn't too severe.
The most promising approach seems to be building mobile home parks in strategic locations to act as magnets, steering hurricanes and tornados away from populated areas.
Have gnu, will travel.
Dr. Evil: "Ahhhh, my plan to get the governments of the world to pay for giant microwave-beaming satellites which I'll hijack is finally coming to fruition."
Number Two: "What argument will you use to get them to sell it to this to their own constituents?"
Dr. Evil: "Well...solar power generation beamed to earth, maybe double as a heating agent to attempt to steer hurricanes by 'refraction'." You know, I leave the details to you.
Scott: "Why not just launch your own satellite? You've built more expensive satellites and launched them yourself. Heck, you can pay the Russians to launch it for only $25 million."
Dr. Evil: "Zip it."
Scott: "I'm only saying you've got all the tech here you need already, and even if you didn't, it would be cheap to pay for it just with your Starbuck's profits alone, heck, I just saw how to build your own sputnik with storebought and crashed 747 parts. You've got a 747 painted to look like Austin Power's plane for that other plan...."
Dr. Evil: "Look at me...I'm Zippy Longstockings. When a problem comes along, you must zip it. Zip it...zip it good (whuh-crack)..."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You know, weather satellites don't actually control the weather, don't you?
Sheesh!
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
It's not as if the fate of human civilization depends on steering hurricanes - our hurricane-filled environment still supports us "as we currently are" acceptably well. Before we undertake a project like this, in which even the level of risk we propose to accept is unknown, we need to be sure that the cure isn't worse than the disease. For example (as I've pointed out elsewhere), the Eastern US gets some significant portion of its rainfall from tropical storm precipitation. Once we start steering these things out to sea, the clamor to avoid hurricane damage from ALL tropical weather systems is likely to be irresistible. We've got an idea what storm damages cost. But what are the costs when the average annual rainfall drops by 10 or 20" over a huge portion of North America?
We need to understand what we're doing before we leap into this kind of thing. If we had been scientifically advanced enough to ask these kinds of questions BEFORE we dumped enormous amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, our history of the use of fossil fuels (and the apparently inevitable evolution into a significantly changed planet) may have been different.
Steer it WHERE? Toward some other major population center you don't care quite so much about?
The first time someone attempts to steer a hurricane and as a result a residence or company is hit will start the law suits flying. IMHO, governments would do well to leave the storm alone and instead do a better job of responding to areas after they are hit by a storm.
We can't even predict the weather - we shouldn't be trying to control it.
This kind of stuff scares me, for the same reason genetically modified food scares me.
I suppose you're terrified of cows, chickens, pigs, and wheat, then? None of these life forms existed prior to selective breeding and domestication efforts by humans. We've been engaging in genetic modification for millenia. Look at aggressive dog breeds, like Pit Bulls. These animals are significantly more dangerous than your garden-variety dog (under certain circumstances -- I know that pit bulls can be loving creatures in the right environment) but they were brought into being through traditional breeding methods, not genetic modification.
I don't see why you should be any more apprehensive of GM that any other kind of human-directed selection of organisms.
Queue Alex Jones/Jack Blood/HAARP/what-have-you conspiracy theory whacknut gobbledegook in 3... 2... 1...
PS: How very funny and appropriate... the CAPTCHA word to verify this post is "masonry". The Illuminati are on to m... [NO CARRIER]
http://pics.livejournal.com/mkblack/pic/0002er3w
Oh, the possibilities for abuse are a lot greater than you imagine...
Insurance agent: Nice house, Mr. Public. Be a shame if anything were to, you know, "happen" to it.
... but you're talking out your ass. You have no idea whether the results of interfering with the natural course of the hurricane would be better or worse than leaving well enough alone. And since we're talking about the potential for billions of dollars worth of damage and an unknown number of lost lives, we really, really need to be sure of what we're doing before we just blindly start doing it.
There's nothing "vague and unspecified" about the potential problems - you are a) messing about with the transfer of enormous quantities of energy from the tropics to the temperate and polar regions, b) substantially changing rainfall patterns for a large chunk of the North American continent, and c) "playing God" by deliberately aiming a hurricane from one area to another (which presumably has its own population). We don't know the consequences of any of this, and in any case, this assumes nothing goes wrong. Here's a scenario for you: we divert a hurricane away from Miami, but hit unprepared Havana instead, killing 10,000 people. In retaliation, Venezuela announces an oil embargo against the US. War breaks out.
The argument that those who oppose weather control are Luddites is a red herring. There's a little more at stake here than acceptance of, say, labor-saving technology. Given that even the amount of risk we're taking on is unknown, we need to be extra careful to understand the consequences of our actions before proceeding.
Steer them to where?