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."
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
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."
We get such bad hail in the summer here in Calgary, that they've been successfully seeding storm clouds for years. They spray something on the clouds before they hit the city, so that the hail stones form early.
It seems to be working; I haven't seen or heard about hail damage in a few years now.
There is a lot of energy in a thunderstorm... not hurricane energy, but I expect such a thing IS doable.
Jeremy
Not exactly the same as steering hurricanes, though. In your case, the thunderstorms still occur, they just don't produce hail, right? Hurricanes pack a lot of energy. Where will all of that energy go? What other types of damage would that cause? I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm saying that we might not like the repercussions.
My blog
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.
Well, they can make their way up along the coast a fair amount. I recall my old place getting hit once or twice really hard in the past, to the point that we didn't have power for 1-2 days. And I was a lot further up the coast than DC.
I'd imagine controlling a viciously-strong storm up the coast could have some devastating consequences. Sure, it wouldn't hit the intended target at full force but if an enemy controlled enough of them during a bad hurricane season they'd wear down the area a little.
Sooner or later, world scale experimentation is going to be necessary. I'm not talking about Global warming or anything like that, just that one day our environment will have naturally changed in some way that won't support us as we currently are. Yeah, its dangerous, but so is leaving things to chance and trying to predict our way around them. The whole "no one knows" argument is the same garbage that's holding back Genetic Modified foods; the same argument that's held people back for ages. Of course no one knows, that's why we're trying to find out! If exploring, exploiting, and manipulating your environment is not something you are particularly fond of, you might be in the wrong species...
Demented But Determined.
And I live in Florida. Central. Which brings up another point. Why is Florida the shape that it is? Because hurricanes tend to run on either side of it, but rarely up the middle (sometimes across it, but these tend to be weak ones). Is it any coincidence that the first few miles near the shore are nothing but palm trees and other hardy plants, while the center of Florida is dense forest? No, it's just nature, and hurricanes maintaining ecosystems. This is not something that needs to be controlled. The reason New Orleans had trouble is that the city is below sea level. By the ocean. In the Gulf. Blocked by man-made levees. Anyone else see the obvious problem?
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?
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?
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.
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?