Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It?
livescience.com
livescience.com
The correct answer is: about 8 inches.
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Finally, whether the bomb would have a minor positive effect, a negative effect, or none at all on the storm's convection cycle, one thing is for sure: It would create a radioactive hurricane, which would be even worse than a normal one.
Who (other than Michael Bay) is talking about nuking hurricane?
edit: tried some google news searches, I can't find any discussion about bombing a hurricane other than this article.
Also, the guy's name was Landsea. It's always fun when someone's name seems relevant to what they do.
> During each hurricane season, there always appear suggestions that one should simply use nuclear weapons to try and destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.
Here the question is asked in 2004: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=255086
Here's an authoritative discussion from the NOAA: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html
Some wacky ideas here, including using submarines to pump cold water from the ocean depths to the surface to disrupt convection currents: http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/meteorology/news-subver...
As to the origin of the idea, all I could find was that it was first proposed in the 1950s (but no source.) That makes sense given that it's an obvious thing to try with a new H-bomb toy. I couldn't find any evidence that the Ploughshares program* in the '60s ever considered it, so I expect the idea was shot down after the first back-of-the-envelope calculation.
*Ploughshares was an exploration of peaceful uses of nuclear explosives. Turns out they're only really good at digging really gigantic holes that you can't use for 50,000 years.
(Edit: ChuckMcM, commenting below, has actually been to a Ploughshares crater and since he didn't die I'll admit that "50,000 years" is poetic hyperbole, not scientific fact.)
Seems like it might be handy for moving asteroids around, too.
Two references for you:
Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan, contains a thorough exploration of the technology required to divert earth-bound asteroids, and the consequences of possessing that technology.
Project Orion, by George Dyson, is the definitive history of the 1950's & '60s project to construct a nuclear bomb-powered spacecraft capable of crossing the solar system in months.
"Certainly, my liege."
For example, the energy to fly a plane into the sky is small compared to what's released in a rainfull, but that doesn't prevent cloud seeding from being (somewhat) effective. The energy from a lit piece of magnesium is much smaller than what results from touching it to a thermite block.
It is of course the responsibility of the pro-nuke-on-hurricane folks (do they even exist?) to offer the mechanism that a nuke uses to shift the hurricane system to a lower energy state in a controlled manner.
The first approximation energy considerations quoted in the article and elsewhere in the comments here are not the same as a model of what happens in a physical system when you set off a bomb in a hurricane.
What a hydrogen bomb tends to do is to expel a cylinder of atmosphere straight upwards. Why didn't they ever build bombs greater than a 100 megatons? Not because it would have been too hard. It is easy to do. Instead, past 100 megatons, the extra energy just expels that cylinder of air into outer space even faster. So there is no reason to build a larger bomb.
What happens to a hurricane when a chunk at its center is launched into outer space? Or several chunks? Teller thought it was worth finding out. And there are very few physicists fit to lace up that man's boots. So it might be worth investigating.
As I recall, environmentalists went all doom-and-gloom after hurricane Katrina, and that was followed by many years of below average hurricane activity. How many hurricanes per year could we prevent by spending, say, 10% of our GDP on carbon reduction? How many more hurricanes occur today than 100 years ago?
Rhetorical question. It's not about the amount of hurricanes, but their strength and their path. Apparently Sandy was blocked by an anti-cyclone south of Greenland and instead of turning right it turned sharply left and made landfall. These highs are linked by latest research to the loss of ice in the Arctic. And connecting higher ocean temperature with more powerful hurricanes is trivial.
So, it is not about preventing hurricanes it is about preventing damage and victims and keeping the infrastructure functional. In this context you can easily justify closing fossil power plants.
If that isn't an awesome opening scene of a superhero film I don't know what is.
We created dams, removed marshes, harnassed hydraulic power, etc - feats unbelievable hundreds of years before. And before us, Romans did also uncredible feats - such as the aqueducts. We keep on improving. Nature more or less remains the same. The end result seems quite clear to me.
The human race has something nature lacks : a mind, which comes with a will and the capacity to understand.
If we haven't bothered to fix something yet, maybe it's because the problem is not so important. But I'm sure that if it tilts in the other way, we can find solutions - or wait until we have the technology to achieve it.
> If we haven't bothered to fix something yet, maybe it's because the problem is not so important.
This is rather callous. The catastrophic tsunami in Japan was a problem of some importance, yet with all our art we could barely predict its arrival, much less affect it.
Your first sentence makes a good point - the 'three rights.' So, can you name an example where the directed application of energy has affected - in a predictable fashion - some natural process of the scale of a hurricane? Earthquakes, climate change, tsunami, storms... Not much of a track record as far as I can see. (Cloud seeding, perhaps? Hardly predictable.)
I think your faith in humanity's power is premature at best, more likely misplaced.
> Nature more or less remains the same. The end result seems quite clear to me.
> ...or wait until we have the technology to achieve it.
Nature might well remain the same, but it's still hardly within our comprehension. The end result you're talking about, that mastery of nature, would appear to be many thousands of years in the future if we ever achieve it.
But as our construction techniques improve, maintainance cost are reduced (or alternatively reconstruction costs are reduced - it's all a tradeoff)
Also, look at what happened as a consequence of the tsunamis - we are getting better at monitoring them.
We will also certainly get a better understanding on how they behave, and maybe how to mitigate them (IIRC wavefronts of opposing frequency cancel out- maybe someday we'll be able to do something like that)
It all takes time- if only to develop understanding on what to do, what to avoid, and technology on how to actually do something.
I'm not denying the fact that we are not able to fix the weather - yet. But in the long run, we will.
It certainly is premature to put much faith in that, yet look at the ideas for geoengineering- it's very inspiring.
I don't want to be overtly optimistic - humans are great - but we also have flaws, mostly social. There are indeed very concerning in the short run - especially in the west and in Europe, where something is going wrong (less interest in science, less willpower, lesser will to live?). But the world is a big place, and if the current powerhouses stop innovating, someone else will take the lead. It doesn't really matters who does.
So in the long run, I'm sure the human race will win against nature (as in total win - incluing whole brain emulation), if we just manage to not destroy ourselves due to existential risks in the process.
These are IMHO the only real obstacles to acheiving that.
One might argue that there's defeat inherent in the idea of conflict with nature. We are a part of it, after all. Perhaps cooperation and understanding are the real path? We don't bomb the tsunami into oblivion, but learn to watch for it and get out of the way when it comes. There are many examples of this philosophy of 'going with the grain': buildings which use ground-source heat pumps, unforced convection and solar panels for HVAC & hot water; kite-driven cargo ships, and so on. The tree that yields survives the storm.
I'm sorry to say that I don't find geoengineering inspiring at all. I find it terrifying. We do not understand the mechanisms at work in global climate at all, yet we're presuming to try and pull the levers to create an outcome years hence. Have these people never heard about chaos, about sensitivity to initial starting conditions? It's exceptionally dangerous.
Most of us look down on 'cargo cult' programmers, people who copy and paste stuff from the web into an editor with no idea how it works, bashing away until it compiles. That's what geoengineering is. To extend the metaphor, we don't have the first clue about the world's API, even what language it's written in, whether it's functional, object oriented or what have you[1]. We're trying to change the value of a few public ivars in the hope that something will happen.
The consequences though! It's not just a compile error: we have some greedy, pig-headed salesman dumping kilotonnes of heavy metal into a rich ocean ecosystem so he can sell some phantom bits of paper to industrial polluters.
I'm coming across like some Sierra Club hardliner here. It's not right, because I'm not, I'm a proper capitalist and I love a supercharged V8 more than I like cigars and steak. I really do hate arrogance though, and I'm a big fan of the precautionary principle.
[1](Everyone knows it's actually in Lisp.)
I do not have an answer, just a gut feeling that both can be done at the same time.
Or about the tens of thousands of nukes, that can strip the poles of ice caps if properly deployed and again completely change the climate.
Or the probably achievable proposed projects of building solar mirrors or seeding the south oceans with iron.
One can look at the amount of energy humankind was commanding 300 years ago and now, and than extrapolate that to the next 300 years. That power would be enough to move stars around, not talking about a single planet surface fluctuations in gas pressure.
I can also anecdotally verify that New York City is not built from paper, but I doubt a more scientific study is required to back up my experience.
(The tone of your post is also not in the spirit of Hacker News and its Guidelines.)
Funny - I was thinking about my service in Okinawa, years ago. You know how in Karate Kid 2 they had paper houses because 'Japan'? Not so much.
Homes in Okinawa are built of cinderblocks and concrete with flat roofs because they get typhoons on a regular basis. So regular that 'typhoons' are how they replenish their water supply.
I suspect that one reason more homes in the US are not built like hurricane bunkers is that for any given locale in 'hurricane' range the odds of having an actual hurricane blow over are not 'will happen' but 'may happen'.
Think of it this way: every single home in the US within X miles of the coast from Maine to Texas would have to be 'hurricane' proof. That's a lot of construction.
I'm to understand that very few tropical cyclones reach inland Europe; if you're European, I doubt that you understand what it's like. Why don't you spend a few years living in coastal Florida, and see how your snark holds up after surviving a few of these storms?
In fact, there aren't a lot of paper homes in the United States (There are none.) Most Americans prefer brick homes but they're relatively expensive and don't really protect you from the worst of hurricanes. They also don't protect your power supply so that fridge full of food better not be perishable.
Of course Europe receives very few hurricanes because they typically move from east to west from the intertropical convergence zones and Europe has no east coast exposed to an ITCZ. Some parts of Europe (such as Britain) receive many tornado strikes but ones with the intensity of those in America are rare. The USA is the only country that receives several F5 strikes per year, and the British tornado scale starts classification of cyclones at much lower wind speed, were we'd just describe it as an 'F0' or not even classify it as a tornado.
An F2 on our scale (T4 on theirs) struck Birmingham in 2006 and caused forty million pounds of damage to many brick buildings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Tornado_%28UK%29
Brick is actually a poor material to use against high wind loads because has little tensile strength. When high loads are applied to a brick wall, the two ends of it are supported by the adjoining walls, which cause bending stress on the wall, and tension on the interior of the wall between supports. The wall then buckles inward.
The only truly suitable building materials are ones with high tensile strength: steel, reinforced concrete, and core-reinforced cinderblock. Practically speaking, the odds of any one building in the midwest getting hit by a tornado are very small and so people understandably don't want to live in a concrete bunker on the very slim chance that they get hit. Florida, however, does seem to have a great deal of concrete and masonry construction, even in homes. Although it's worth keeping in mind that the majority of the damage from a hurricane comes from flooding rather than wind.
Freakonomics discussed it on marketplace, (I think it's in one of the books too): http://www.freakonomics.com/2011/09/06/the-hurricane-vaccine...
It seems imprudent to try and stop them without considering this. Who knows what kinds of disasters we'd be trading for hurricanes - regardless of the technology we use to stop them.
Harvest them.