Why don't we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?
aoml.noaa.gov
aoml.noaa.gov
(A "style case" is one where the facts or logical reasoning behind an argument are secondary to how funny and entertaining your arguments and persuasive efforts are.)
According to what we concluded in that round, we need to start destroying tropical cyclones, and any other of Mother Nature's "attacks" on us, in order to better condition her and bend her to our will. It's Psychology 101, folks.
Apparently the NOAA disagrees. If this were the McCarthy era, I'd call them communists and be done with it.
What such a philosophy fails to take into account is that these forces aren't just destructive. They represent a system that has a certain equilibrium which is maintained by periodically removing excess energy that has been introduced. Sometimes this surplus of energy is quite considerable, and so the transfer of that energy results in damage to things along the path.
It is possible that going the other direction might work for some things; force the energy transfer to occur more often but less severely. However, even this might have unintended consequences. Less powerful tropical cyclones may not survive to areas as far inland that may depend on their seasonal arrival for necessary rainfall.
I think the best thing we could do is educate people that certain things are not and will never be in our control, and that our reaction should not be panic and sensationalism but cautious respect and preparation.
People forget that Manhattan island was once under a glacier, a couple thousand years ago. When people talk about "preventing and reversing climate change", they're not talking about putting Manhattan back under a glacier.
For that matter, modern life already tolerates deep, profound respect for processes on this planet. Research being done right now into the formation of tornadoes in the plains every spring is being done with the goal of greater detection. Tornado prevention is not something I hear a whole lot about; the goal is to get people out of the way while something of immense energy plows through a region.
Building tornado shelters, much like building stilted houses along the coast, or buildings ables to withstand repeated ground waves along the West coast, are a result of people coming to understand these forces and how they behave. This to me rings of a pretty deep and profound respect; a recognition of something to be studied and understood, not just prevented, and maybe not even to be prevented once we understand the implications.
Maybe I am discounting too much the power of our ingenuity; maybe I am calling for too much humility. Perhaps, in time, we will discover a way to do what tropical cyclones do without unwanted side-effects. Depending, I might even want to help work on it. But I am not optimistic that we will.
But to turn that into a system of thought and to consider non-intervention to be the default - I don't see the logic in that.
> I think the best thing we could do is educate people that certain things are not and will never be in our control
Excuse me for wanting a cure for cancer. Yes, using a nuclear weapon is not the brightest idea in the book, but this doesn't mean the problem is unapproachable. A couple of directions that might be usable in the medium future:
- lowering the content of water in atmosphere in an area is something we can already do. Microparticles that facilitate rain are a pretty scalable method. This could be used to steer proto-hurricanes away from shore.
- large amounts of high-entropy energy are freely available in space.
But what I want to know is what good do you thing would do to "educate people that certain things are not and will never be in our control"?
Wrong interpretation. I am not saying we not intervene at all. I am saying that we understand our cure may, in some cases, be worse than the disease. And not out of respect for the planet, but out of a desire for our own continued survival. Curing cancer is one of those cases where I think the cure is better than the disease; there are issues of increasing population from people dying, but we've shown ingenuity there in the past (thanks, Normal Borlaug). Preventing tropical cyclones is one of those cases where I worry the cure is not better than the disease, at least until we find a cure for all the other implications of doing so.
From what I gather you try to stop people from even thinking about possible solutions, on the grounds that solutions may be worse then the disease. In some (most?) cases that's true, of course, but I still think it's better to have many ideas to chose from, even if most of them are useless and some are dangerous.
In the end I think it goes to how scientifically literate are the politicians. If they're smart enough not to implement stupid ideas then we're safe. If they're not... I think the problem is with the politicians, not with the ideas themselves.
It's hard for me to express how much I disagree with this statement.
I can understand how someone could reasonably believe that there are things that we intelligent beings could never control (the spinning of a galaxy or something), but it seems really odd on a tech-oriented site to find those who not only don't agree that we could control natural phenomena on this one little rock, but who don't believe that any argument worth listening to could exist, such that they're calling for the education of those who disagree, rather than the convincing of those people.
At least in the case of tropical cyclones, I am having a really hard time believing that we will be able to prevent their formation, and still be able to emulate accurately all of the various effects they have on the planet. We'd have to build systems to advect heat from the ocean to the mid-atmosphere and mid-latitudes, rain to places where the storms no longer go. We'd have to find a way to prune all the weak trees these storms naturally prune. The same argument is made for the infrequent windstorms Seattle experiences; it keeps the forests healthy by knocking down the weak and sick trees. We've have to do this identification and pruning by hand, not just in the tree farms, but in whole forests.
This is the kind of education I'm hoping for. Not telling people we can't control nature and that is the end of that, but explaining, with as much depth as they would like into the theory, that attempting to define a new equilibrium for a particular system on this planet runs the risk of other equilibria being redefined as well, and also needing to be controlled; these in turn may redefine even more equilibria, ad infinitum. Maybe "can't" is the wrong word here, maybe what I mean to say is "you don't want to".
When I was a kid I had a sort of Popular Science-y book from the early sixties that talked excitedly about the plans to dig the second Panama Canal by using underground nuclear blasts. Even as an eight-year-old I knew that this was a hilarious anachronism.
As I've understood, the hurricanes that form every year are actually part of a process of advecting heat energy from the surface tropical regions to the higher altitudes and higher latitudes. I remember seeing a ocean temperature analysis just before and after Hurricane Rita traveled across the Gulf of Mexico, and the drop in ocean temperature was quite noticeable. Similar drops, to a lesser degree, can be observed with all tropical storms.
This process is really important to keeping temperatures around the planet more balanced that they would be otherwise. It also keeps the temperature of tropical oceans somewhat in check, so they don't spawn even more energetic cyclones later on. If we start trying to control this, there is the risk that we will screw ourselves by making tropical storms less frequent but much more severe.
If we could package up the energy coming out of some hurricane-powered turbines, store it up for a year, and ship it around the country cheaply... yeah, our energy worries would be a lot fewer. Especially if the same technology could be applied to solar grids in Arizona.
The problem with a hurricane, of course, is that you get a lot of energy but you get it all at once. You can store a lot of energy in a tree, but you can't turn a tree's worth of energy into a tree in five minutes. You'd rather that the energy trickle in over time, so that you have time to capture it.
Now let's see. First, there is a question of what effect it would have. How powerful should a nuke be in order to actually destroy a medium sized hurricane, and how will it affect the atmosphere and biosphere and the earth surface near the epicenter? Second, what should we do with the nuclear fallout? I am sure there are more questions to ask.
The real problem, though, is that this represents an extreme upper limit on the effect that the nuclear weapon would have. Since most of a nuclear weapon's energy is in the initial impulse, most of it will pass through the hurricane with no effect whatsoever.
Another point to consider is we can try to use a nuclear explosion in order to prevent a hurricane from forming if we catch it early enough. Is that possible?
I do doubt that we can routinely nuke hurricanes (even ignoring the radiation effects), but looking at just the mechanical effects, I think it would be interesting to take another look at the picture. I am not sure that the effects of turbulence can be calculated, but how much can we get from the first principles?
BTW, Hiroshima was about 15 kt, if I am not mistaken, and the average modern nuke is on the order of 400 kt.
Angular momentum is conserved. If you create a detonation in the middle of a spinning storm, you'll get the usual explosion effect (fast) overlaid on the spinning storm (relatively slow). That's even more nasty than either effect on its own.