Headline AP: Scientists Dispute Hurricane Blaster Idea
DENVER - It sounds like a great idea: Let’s just blast hurricanes like Rita and Katrina out of the sky before they hurt more people. Or, at least weaken the storms and steer them away from cities.
Atmospheric scientists say it’s wishful thinking that we could destroy or even influence something as huge and powerful as a hurricane. They abandoned such a quest years ago after more than two decades of inconclusive government-sponsored research….
“It would be like trying to move a car with a pea shooter,” said hydrometeorologist Matthew Kelsch of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. “The amount of energy involved in a hurricane is far greater that anything we’re going to impart to it.”…
According to the center for atmospheric research, the heat energy released by a hurricane equals 50 to 200 trillion watts or about the same amount of energy released by exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes.
So, scientists say in this article that people can not even influence … a hurricane. Hurricanes dwarf what we could do even with nuclear weapons. But then the liberal politicians and most of the mainstream press like to say that hurricanes are on the increase because of human induced global warming. People must have the power to create but not destroy hurricanes.
Or maybe hurricanes just go in natural cycles, and human activity really doesn’t have any impact on them.
September 26th, 2005 at 2:00 pm
Your logic is faulty. I am not saying Global Warming is a man made phenomenon. The fact that man can not create enough energy to match a hurricane does not, de facto, mean man can not affect the source of a hurricanes energy that might end up increasing their frequency and power (i.e. create a hurricane). IF man has influnced the atmosphere such that even a tiny fraction more of the suns energy is trapped, that would amount to far more than the 50 to 200 trillion watts released by a hurricane. Saying you can not generate that much energy does not automatically equate to not being able to minutely influence a stream of far greater energy.
I happen to agree with you that natural cycles offer a better explanation for the increased hurricane activity. However, I hate bad logic.
September 27th, 2005 at 9:45 pm
Mea culpa. I should have taken the time to reference some other scientific statments about how the current increase in the number of hurricanes is not due to global warming but rather due to natural cycles and tie the the two ideas together more naturally. You are quite correct that I conflated the two ideas. Thank you for pointing this out.
Best regards,
Knilram.