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Some sage advice: Never, ever nuke a hurricane

By Mike Zielinski, Host of The Mike Zielinski Show

Sep 10, 2019
Mike Zielinski

Do not be deceived. Mother Nature is not our friend. Otherwise she would stop bearing all these monster storms that imperil the Earth.

We all are about six exits past being sick of hurricanes and the destruction they unleash.

Dorian is the latest culprit to destroy lives, property and serenity.

In this age of rising sea levels and increasing average temperatures, the destructive reach of hurricanes has extrapolated.

What to do?

Reversing climate change would help. But that has as much chance of happening as Miss Universe dating me.

Some people want to drop a nuclear weapon on a hurricane.

There have been brighter ideas.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration debunks that crazy idea on its frequently asked questions page.

Explains NOAA meteorologist Chris Landsea (yes, that’s his actual name), hurricanes are so powerful that even a nuclear weapon, or several, would barely nudge such a storm.

The average hurricane’s wind energy equals about half of the world’s electricity production a year. The energy it releases as it forms clouds is 200 times the world’s annual electricity use.

Man, that’s a lot of juice.

According to Landsea, the heat energy of a fully formed hurricane is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. Wrap your head around that for a moment.

So if you foolishly drop a nuclear bomb on a hurricane, you most likely will end up with a radioactive hurricane.

Oops.

Evidently there’s not much anyone can do once hurricanes spool up. You can’t derail full-on hurricanes in their tracks. All you can do is either evacuate or bunker down and pray the rosary until the beads crack.

Some engineers and entrepreneurs are studying ways to dial back a hurricane’s destruction in more plausible ways than nuking it.

Their research is focused on manipulating temperature, moisture and wind to steer when and where these storms occur.

It involves geoengineering with giant tubes and aerosols and is far beyond the comprehension of anybody who struggled with high school physics.

One proposal is called marine cloud brightening, which would infuse clouds with particles of sea salt around which water vapor would condense to form droplets. The more droplets in a cloud, the whiter it is and the more sunlight it reflects, cooling the sea below it.

Indeed, cooling strategic parts of the warming sea such as the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean’s hurricane alley between Africa and the Caribbean would put a kink in killer hurricanes.

Geoengineering technologies could someday replace dogs as man’s best friend.

It sounds pretty intriguing. Unfortunately, it also sounds pretty far out. It’s all quite preliminary and don’t hold your breath waiting for it to eliminate hurricanes.

In the interim, it seems prudent to avoid the coasts as if they were leper colonies and move as far inland as possible.

Granted, those folks routinely get whacked by tornadoes.

So pick your poison.

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