Hurricane season is upon us. You’d think if we can launch a man to the moon, and wire up the world with the Internet and combine Cool Ranch Doritos with Taco Bell, you’d think we could tame little old hurricanes.
Well, let me disabuse you of that notion.
Wait SciGuy, you say, only crazy people think humans can control the weather. Not true, consider this Bill Gates.
Yes, a few years ago, the world’s second richest man backed a patent application to cool the water underneath tropical cyclones, depriving them of some of their energy source. He wanted to, if you will, give hurricanes the old blue screen of death.
The problem with Bill’s idea is that, um, it’s crazy. Sure, warm waters help make hurricanes stronger. But it’s not the most important factor — rising air, low wind shear are just two of many variables that are more critical for a hurricane than water that’s a few degrees warmer.
Then there’s the physics of the whole thing. It’s a problem of scale. You’d have to cover an incredible area of ocean with this method, and then try to reduce its temperature. But water has an incredibly high specific heat. And then you’d just have warmer water from below come to the surface.
Let me illustrate this problem of scale. From the lightning it produces to the latent heat of rainfall, a hurricane releases about the same amount of energy as the United States will consume during the next 10 years. Put another way, over its lifetime a large hurricane throws off more energy than all of the nuclear weapons ever made. Good luck controlling that, Mr. Windows.
The real question, in my mind, is whether the hurricane machine or Windows 8 was a worse idea.
