What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: Can People Control Hurricanes?

Earlier this week, U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene issued a series of tweets suggesting that Hurricane Helene was either manmade or that its path was not an accident. Check it out:

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Many people called her dumb, but Greene did not back down. She offered a video of Obama's CIA director John Brennan to backup her argument.

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So can we control the weather? Could we stop a hurricane or alter its path? Why is John Brennan not even talking about hurricanes or weather control in the clip Greene provided?

We cannot control the weather (except sometimes, maybe)

Leaving aside the uncertain political effect of a storm hitting Florida, even if Democrats could make it happen, Greene is wrong about the controllability of hurricanes.

As meteorologist Don Schwenneker points out, it comes down to energy. A single hurricane's winds can generate 1.5 x 1012 Watts of energy. That's 50% of the energy generated by the entire human race in a year. We don't have anything close to the capacity to generate enough power to counter or redirect that kind of force, and we won't in the foreseeable future.

Don't get me wrong: Anyone in power would love to harness hurricanes. Imagine the implications for crop growth, winning wars, and somehow affecting elections, but so far, a human's ability to alter the weather is limited to cloud-seeding—that is, releasing silver iodide into clouds to encourage precipitation. It's been around since the 1940s and there's still no consensus about whether it even works. Some say cloud-seeding can increase rainfall by up to 35% annually in the right situation, but a National Research Council report concluded, "Scientifically acceptable proof for significant seeding effects has not been achieved." So maybe we can make it rain a little more; maybe we can't. But we can't control hurricanes, as much as we'd like to.

Can we blow up hurricanes with nuclear bombs?

In 2019, Axios reported that then-president Trump repeatedly suggested to Homeland Security officials that they look into using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting our nation. This is not a new idea. Nuking hurricanes was one of the more batshit suggestions to come out of "Project Plowshare" in the 1950s, a program meant to develop peaceful uses for the nuclear weapons we had sitting around.

While bombing the shit out of a hurricane would be satisfying, it wouldn't work. First, because it would violate any number of long-standing international treaties concerning the use of nuclear weapons, but more importantly, nuking a storm wouldn't work for the same reason nothing else will work: There's too much energy. The heat energy of a hurricane is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. A hurricane would laugh if you dropped a nuke on it, and then spread the radioactive fallout far and wide.

How else might we stop or control a hurricane?

Preventing or controlling hurricanes would save countless lives and billions, maybe trillions, of dollars. The person who figured it out would become rich and would be a shoo-in for a Nobel Prize too, so people are constantly trying to come up with ways to make it happen. Here are only some of the ideas that been proposed:

• Towing icebergs to the hurricane to cool the water and weaken the storm

• Adding an oil slick to the water to prevent waves and turbulence from forming

• Flying jets clockwise in the hurricane's eye to reverse its flow

• Blowing the storm away from shore with giant fans

• Everyone shooting at the hurricane until it dies

All of these ideas would not work for the same reason: People, our machines, our oil slicks, and our bombs are puny compared to the power of a hurricane—in 1992, when Hurricane Andrew passed over the Turkey Point nuclear power plant in South Florida, it released 5,000 times the combined heat and electrical energy that the plant could produce.

We couldn't get enough icebergs to where a storm was brewing because we don't have enough iceberg-towing ships or enough gasoline to power them. We couldn't spread enough oil to cover the area where the hurricanes were building. We don't have enough jets and jet fuel to reverse a hurricane. We wouldn't have enough power to work the fans to blow the hurricanes away from our cities or a long enough extension cord. Nothing will help because hurricanes are stronger than us.

Even attacking a fledgling tropical storm before it becomes a hurricane wouldn't work—only about 5% of tropical storms become hurricanes and we can't know which ones will graduate—and even if we knew and started attacking a storm that is 10% as powerful as a hurricane, that's still way more power than we could reasonably bring to counter it.

On the positive side, we've gotten fairly good a predicting where hurricanes will land, so we generally have time to get out of their way. We just need the humility to accept that you can't win a fight with a giant storm.

What about John Brennan?

Green is wrong about John Brennan too. Maybe her idea was that people wouldn't actually click on the link and watch the video, but Brennan is not talking about hurricanes at all. He's discussing the potential of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) to counter global warming. SAI is basically spreading sulfates into the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight and counter global warming. "It works when volcanos erupt, so why can't we do it on purpose?" proponents of SAI ask.

Turns out there are a lot of reasons. SAI models have shown that the process could deplete the ozone layer. We don't know how it would affect ecosystems. We don't know how it would affect clouds. It might cause acid rain. It could affect crop yields. It could have disastrous consequences that we don't foresee. And on and on. SAI is theoretical, so we just don't know. There seems to be some foundational work being done that could lead to future real-world testing, but that's a long way away. Anyway, it has nothing to do with hurricanes.

What Marjorie Taylor Greene is right about

Greene ends her tweet with, "By the way, the people know it and hate all of you who try to cover it up." And she's probably right that a lot of people get mad when you tell them that Democrats can't control hurricanes. And those folks do seem to hate the people who try to tell them differently too, and this might be as unsolvable a problem as controlling a hurricane.

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