What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Can Humans Control Hurricanes?
Earlier this week, US Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a series of tweets suggesting that Hurricane Helen was either man-made or that its path was not a fluke. Check this out:
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Many called her stupid, but Green did not back down. To support her argument, she offered a video of Obama’s CIA director John Brennan.
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So can we control the weather? Can we stop a hurricane or change its path? Why doesn’t John Brennan even talk about hurricanes or weather in the clip provided by Greene?
We can’t control the weather (except maybe sometimes)
Leaving aside the uncertain political consequences of a hurricane hitting Florida, even if Democrats could do it, Greene is wrong about the manageability of hurricanes.
As meteorologist Don Schwenneker notes , it all comes down to energy. The winds of one hurricane can generate 1.5 x 1012 W of energy . This is 50% of the energy generated by all humanity per year. We don’t have anything close to the ability to generate enough energy to counter or redirect such a force, and won’t for the foreseeable future.
Don’t get me wrong, anyone in power would like to use hurricanes to their advantage. Imagine the consequences for growing crops, winning wars, and somehow influencing elections, but so far man’s ability to change the weather is limited to cloud seeding, which is the release of silver iodide into the clouds to stimulate precipitation. It’s been around since the 1940s, and there’s still no consensus on whether it even works. Some say cloud seeding can increase precipitation by up to 35% per year in the right situation, but a report from the National Research Council concluded, “There has been no scientifically acceptable evidence of a significant seeding effect.” So maybe we can make it rain a little more; maybe we can’t. But we can’t control hurricanes, no matter how much we might like to.
Can we blow up hurricanes with nuclear bombs?
In 2019, Axios reported that then-President Trump repeatedly suggested that Homeland Security officials explore the possibility of using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting our country. This is not a new idea. Destroying hurricanes with nuclear weapons was one of the most audacious proposals put forward by Project Plowshare in the 1950s, a program designed to develop peaceful uses for the nuclear weapons we had.
While bombing a hurricane would be nice, it wouldn’t work. First, because it would violate any number of long-standing international treaties regarding the use of nuclear weapons, but, more importantly, a nuclear bomb wouldn’t work for the same reason nothing would work: too much energy. The thermal energy of a hurricane is equivalent to a 10 megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. A hurricane will laugh if you drop a nuclear bomb on it and then spread radioactive fallout everywhere.
How else could we stop or control a hurricane?
Preventing or controlling hurricanes would save countless lives and save billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars. The person who came up with this will become rich and will be in contention for the Nobel Prize, so people are constantly trying to figure out ways to make it happen. Here are just some of the suggested ideas:
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Towing icebergs to a hurricane to cool the water and weaken the storm
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Adding an oil slick to water to prevent wave formation and turbulence.
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Flying jets are directed clockwise into the eye of a hurricane to reverse its flow.
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Blowing storms offshore with giant fans
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Everybody shoot the hurricane until it dies
All of these ideas would fail for the same reason: people, our cars, our oil spills and our bombs are insignificant compared to the power of a hurricane – in 1992, when Hurricane Andrew passed over the Turkey Point nuclear power plant in the southern United States. In Florida, it released 5,000 times more thermal and electrical energy than the plant could produce.
We couldn’t get enough icebergs to where the storm was brewing because we didn’t have enough ships to tow the icebergs or enough gasoline to power them. We were unable to release enough oil to cover the area where the storms were building. We don’t have enough planes or jet fuel to reverse a hurricane. We won’t have enough power to run fans to blow hurricanes out of our cities, or an extension cord long enough. Nothing will help because hurricanes are stronger than us.
Even attacking a young tropical storm before it becomes a hurricane won’t work—only about 5% of tropical storms become hurricanes , and we can’t know which ones will end—and even if we knew and started attacking the storm, it 10% is as powerful as a hurricane, that’s still far more force than we could reasonably use to counter it.
The upside is that we are pretty good at predicting where hurricanes will hit, so we usually have time to move out of their path . We just need the humility to admit that it is impossible to win the battle against a giant storm.
What about John Brennan?
Greene is also wrong about John Brennan. Perhaps her idea was to prevent people from actually clicking on the link or watching the video, but Brennan doesn’t talk about hurricanes at all. He discusses the potential of stratospheric aerosol emissions (SAI) to counteract global warming. SAI essentially spreads sulfates into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight and counteract global warming. “It works when volcanoes erupt, so why don’t we do it on purpose?” – SAI supporters ask.
It turns out there are many reasons. SAI models showed that this process could lead to ozone depletion. We don’t know how this will affect ecosystems. We don’t know how this will affect the clouds. This can lead to acid rain. This can affect crop yields. This could have catastrophic consequences that we do not foresee . And so on and so forth. SAI is theoretical, so we just don’t know. It appears that there is already some basic work underway that could lead to future real-world testing, but that is still a long way off. Either way, it has nothing to do with hurricanes.
What Marjorie Taylor Greene is Right
Greene ends his tweet by saying, “By the way, people know this and hate anyone who tries to hide it.” And she’s probably right: a lot of people get angry when they’re told Democrats can’t control hurricanes. And these people also seem to hate people who try to tell them otherwise, and this can be as insurmountable a problem as dealing with a hurricane.