Control the path and strength of hurricanes like Helene? Forget about it, say scientists

Hurricanes remind humanity of the uncontrollable, chaotic power of Earth’s weather. Milton’s massive attack on Florida just days after Helene devastated large parts of the Southeast likely has some in the region wondering whether they are being targeted. In some corners of the internet, Helene has already sparked conspiracy theories and disinformation suggesting that the government was somehow targeting GOP voters with the hurricane. In addition to disregarding common sense, such theories ignore weather history, which shows that hurricanes hit many of the same areas as they do in the past. They also assume that humans can change the weather rapidly, far beyond relatively small efforts such as cloud seeding. Related video above: Hurricane Milton triggers evacuations along Florida’s Gulf Coast “If meteorologists could stop hurricanes, we would stop them,” Kristen Corbosiero, professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at the University at Albany. “If we could control the weather, we wouldn’t want the death and destruction that’s happening.” Here’s what humans can and can’t do when it comes to weather: The power of hurricanes, amplified by climate change Fully According to the National Hurricane Center’s chief of tropical analysis, Chris Landsea, a developing hurricane releases thermal energy equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes — more than all the energy consumed by humanity at any given time. how climate change is making hurricanes more intense, and warmer oceans are adding energy and more water to the warming atmosphere to fall as rain, said Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Environmental Institute. “The amount of energy produced by a hurricane is crazy,” said Phil Klotzbach, a hurricane researcher at Colorado State University. “It is the height of human arrogance to think that people have the power to change them,” he said. But that doesn’t stop people from trying or at least thinking about trying. Historic Efforts to Control Hurricanes Have Failed Jim Fleming of Colby College has studied historical efforts to control weather and believes that humans do not have anywhere near the practical technology to achieve it. He described an attempt in 1947 in which General Electric partnered with the U.S. Army to drop dry ice from Air Force planes into the path of a hurricane in an attempt to weaken it. It didn’t work. “Typical science is understanding, predicting, and then possibly controlling,” Fleming said, noting that the atmosphere is much more powerful and complex than most proposals to control it. “The idea that you can control the powers of the heavens goes back to Greek mythology, but it is also a misguided idea.” In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the federal government briefly attempted Project STORMFURY. The idea was to create a hurricane and replace its eyewall with a larger one, which would make the storm larger but weaker. The tests were inconclusive, and researchers realized that if the storm had been larger, people who would not have been injured by the storm would now be in danger, posing an ethical and liability issue, the project director once said. Video below: Flooding is one of hurricane season’s biggest threats For decades, the National Hurricane Center and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have been questioned about nuclear hurricane bombings. But the bombs are not powerful enough, and that would add to the problem of radioactive fallout, Corbosiero said. Bringing in cooling icebergs, seeding or adding water-absorbing substances are also ideas that simply don’t work, NOAA scientists say. Climate change is engineering — and lots of questions Failed historic attempts to control hurricanes are somewhat different from some scientists’ futuristic ideas for combating climate change and extreme weather. That’s because instead of focusing on individual weather events, modern geoengineers would be working on a larger scale, figuring out how to reverse the wide-ranging damage that humans have already done to the global climate through greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists in the field believe that one of the most promising ideas they see from computer models is solar geoengineering. This method would involve lifting aerosol particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect a small amount of sunlight back into space, which would slightly cool the planet. Advocates recognize the risks and challenges. But “it could also have some pretty big benefits, especially for the world’s poorest,” said David Keith, a professor at the University of Chicago and founding faculty director of the Climate Systems Engineering initiative. Two years ago, the largest association of scientists working on climate issues, the American Geophysical Union, announced that it was creating an ethical framework for “climate intervention.” Some scientists warn that tinkering with Earth’s atmosphere to fix climate change will likely create a cascade of new problems. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University, said he worries about the ethics framework that simply talking about guidelines will increase the likelihood of real-world tinkering, which could have harmful side effects. Stanford’s Field agreed that modeling strongly encourages geoengineering to be effective, including: mitigating the worst of the hurricane threat, even if it happens decades from now. He emphasized, however, that this is only one element of the best solution, which is to stop climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. “Whatever else we do, that has to be the point. set of actions,” he said.

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