Am I the only person disturbed that this is an actual FAQ that crops up "every hurricane season"
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.