Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. I'm
Speaker 1: Horee Cham and today we're answering the question can you
Speaker 1: stop a hurricane? Hurricanes are some of the most destructive
Speaker 1: phenomena in nature. A Category four or five hurricane can
Speaker 1: cause upwards of one hundred billion dollars in damage and
Speaker 1: kill thousands of people depending on where it hits when
Speaker 1: it reaches land. To find out if we can stop them,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk to several experts, including someone who
Speaker 1: flies into hurricanes for a living and a scientist who's
Speaker 1: been tracking how these storms have changed over the last
Speaker 1: one hundred years. So batten down the hatches and get
Speaker 1: ready to get blown away as we answer the question
Speaker 1: can you stop a hurricane? Hey? Everyone, So today's question
Speaker 1: is a pretty tall order. As we'll learn today, the
Speaker 1: answer to can you stop a hurricane is actually sort
Speaker 1: of yes. Red lease, it's not a no okay. To
Speaker 1: get started, we need to know what a hurricane is
Speaker 1: so that we know what we're up against, and I
Speaker 1: thought the best way to do that is to take
Speaker 1: you inside a hurricane. So I found someone who is
Speaker 1: a real life hurricane hunter, which means it's his job
Speaker 1: to go into hurricanes. Here's my conversation with doctor John Zowislack,
Speaker 1: a researcher at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration or Noah.
Speaker 1: Thank you, doctor Zoways Slagg for joining us.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's great to talk to you about hurricanes here.
Speaker 1: Well, describe for us what is your current job as
Speaker 1: a hurricane hunter.
Speaker 2: So, as a hurricane hunters, our job is take an
Speaker 2: airplane into a hurricane. I'm at the no Aircraft Operations
Speaker 2: Center as a flight director and meteorologist. So my job
Speaker 2: in the airplanes is essentially helped navigate the storm, help
Speaker 2: the pilots out and make sure the data is quality
Speaker 2: and make sure we're getting the data to the ground.
Speaker 1: How would you describe what a hurricane is?
Speaker 2: Complete chaos at times. Obviously they're very large in scale
Speaker 2: and when you go out fly one, you can really
Speaker 2: feel the scale of the motion, the scale of the energy.
Speaker 2: So for us, we see them as the danger they are.
Speaker 2: We see them for the hazards they are.
Speaker 1: So this sounds super dangerous.
Speaker 3: Why do it? So?
Speaker 2: We often gets the question why do it? Why fly
Speaker 2: an airplane into a hurricane? Right, We're taking a crew
Speaker 2: into a very turbulent environment, just a little bit more
Speaker 2: hazardous than an any pilot would do. But the reality
Speaker 2: is that satellite they see the big scale, right, they
Speaker 2: see the cloud field, they see where it's located. But
Speaker 2: to actually see inside those clouds, to see the rain
Speaker 2: field inside those clouds, and particular the winds. Winds are
Speaker 2: very very hard to measure from a satellite, So the
Speaker 2: airplane allows us to go into the storm and measure
Speaker 2: it at that high resolution scale, both in time and space,
Speaker 2: to really understand what's going on inside that cloud field.
Speaker 2: Because when they make landfall, we know the impacts and
Speaker 2: them that has on communities. Is what really motivates us
Speaker 2: to learn more and forecast better.
Speaker 1: Okay, I asked, doctor, is always like, how do you
Speaker 1: actually fly into a hurricane?
Speaker 2: How we sample a hurricane with an airplane? First of all, No,
Speaker 2: we have a four engine turboprop airplane called a P three.
Speaker 2: They are our storm petting trading aircraft, so they were
Speaker 2: built to fly low and slow and they could take
Speaker 2: a punishing too. What we do is we'll set up
Speaker 2: a direct path from outside the storm to the eye
Speaker 2: to the other side, and it's a straight line, right.
Speaker 2: The safest way to fly a storm is a straight line.
Speaker 2: It's just you get in and out quickest, right.
Speaker 1: Could you maybe describe the whole experience. You take off,
Speaker 1: you're flying, You're approaching the storm. What do you see.
Speaker 2: It's just basically you start getting cloudier, You're starting to
Speaker 2: get the rain. You might have a really strong outer band,
Speaker 2: which is a really intense thin line of thunderstorms, and
Speaker 2: we're gonna have to navigate through that. You just kind
Speaker 2: of have to find the weak spot and get through
Speaker 2: the outer band.
Speaker 1: Okay, here I thought would be good to explain where
Speaker 1: we are in the hurricane. You can think of a
Speaker 1: hurricane as a giant area of circulating air. The area
Speaker 1: is typically three hundred but sometimes up to six hundred
Speaker 1: miles wide. And if you've ever seen a satellite image
Speaker 1: of a hurricane, it basically looks like a giant white
Speaker 1: cloud that is flushing down the toilet. But actually a
Speaker 1: hurricane is sort of the opposite of a toilet. It's
Speaker 1: a lot of air coming together in a spiral and
Speaker 1: then shooting up from the center towards the sky and
Speaker 1: then spreading out into that giant white cloud you see now.
Speaker 1: For the first few hundred miles that you're going into
Speaker 1: a hurricane, things aren't too bad. This part is called
Speaker 1: the outer band, and you're basically cutting through layers of
Speaker 1: rain and thunderclouds that get progressively more intense.
Speaker 2: And then you start getting towards fifty sixty miles away
Speaker 2: from storm, and now things start happening, right. You're encountering
Speaker 2: more turbulence, the winds are coming up, and I always
Speaker 2: say the biggest thing that happens is it gets really loud.
Speaker 2: On the airplane. It's already loud enough because of the
Speaker 2: four turboprops running on you, but once you start getting
Speaker 2: the wind, you start really getting the heavy rain, so
Speaker 2: it gets really really loud, particularly in the stronger storms.
Speaker 2: Ending of course it's bumpy. It's kind of a roller coaster,
Speaker 2: but you don't know what the next drop is or
Speaker 2: what's coming up next. Wow.
Speaker 1: Okay. As you get closer to the center, the winds
Speaker 1: get faster and faster, up to about seventy to ninety
Speaker 1: miles per hour, and then when you get to about
Speaker 1: thirty miles from the center of the storm, you reach
Speaker 1: the final band of the hurricane. Here the winds can
Speaker 1: reach up to one hundred and sixteen miles per hour.
Speaker 1: This part, called the eye wall, is the one that
Speaker 1: causes the most destruction when it reaches land.
Speaker 2: The eyewall is essentially a giant rainfield that's rotating. Now
Speaker 2: I don't want to call it a tornado, but it
Speaker 2: has that really strong intensi so it's creating a lot
Speaker 2: of turbulent eddies, really really intense turbulent eddies.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, then if you make it through that chaotic, intense,
Speaker 1: spinning eye wall, you get to clear, calm air.
Speaker 2: So when you get in the eye, the rain comes down,
Speaker 2: the winds come down, You look out the window, you're
Speaker 2: gonna generally see a clear area. So if you ever
Speaker 2: see the really infamous pictures or hurricanes of that clear eye,
Speaker 2: that's what we call a stadium effect. You just emerge
Speaker 2: into the stadium and it's clear above. Everything calms down,
Speaker 2: and you just get this beautiful bowl of clouds. So
Speaker 2: it's a true magnificent site. I mean, it's breadthaking. You
Speaker 2: can hear audible gasps because you're going into sunlight beaming
Speaker 2: down on you, or at night you might see the moon.
Speaker 2: We kind of we call that sort of the Holy
Speaker 2: Girl hurricane flying when you're in the stadium effect and
Speaker 2: it's a full moon and you're looking at a full
Speaker 2: moon in the clear eye of this hurricane. But as
Speaker 2: magnificent and onspiring as that moment, there's the downside which
Speaker 2: you use. You know, for as beautiful as a storm
Speaker 2: can be, you also know the hazards the risks that
Speaker 2: it poses because it's you know, if we're flying it,
Speaker 2: it's all likelihood, means that it's forecast to potentially make landfall.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see. The more beautiful it is, the more
Speaker 1: dangerous it is to people outside the storm.
Speaker 2: Right. A lot of times that's happening because the storm
Speaker 2: is just so intense, right, So it's a magnificent, saddling image.
Speaker 2: It's magnificence flying that statement effect, But it's also a
Speaker 2: bit frightening to us because you know that storm is
Speaker 2: extremely intense.
Speaker 1: What got you're interested in this field in doing this?
Speaker 2: Yeah, ask my parents. I was growing up. There's two
Speaker 2: great gloves I had.
Speaker 1: Flying.
Speaker 2: Just loved when we took a vacation every summer and
Speaker 2: flew there. But I also loved weather. My first book
Speaker 2: I could ever read it was a meteorology book, a
Speaker 2: weather guide. Right now, my job is to fly in weather,
Speaker 2: so I get to work with aircraft, I get to
Speaker 2: study the weather, so I say I am living the dream.
Speaker 1: You might say you're right in the eye of the storm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're ring the eye of storm.
Speaker 1: All right. So having met someone who flies into hurricanes
Speaker 1: for a living, the big question now was whether he
Speaker 1: thinks we can stop a hurricane. A lot of people
Speaker 1: are wondering but on the internet, if you can stop
Speaker 1: a hurricane, how would you answer that question?
Speaker 2: Scientifically? If you have to think about the scale and
Speaker 2: the energy of a hurricane. Okay, this is a cloud
Speaker 2: field that is several hundred miles large. A hurricane itself
Speaker 2: will released an equivalent heat of about ten thousand nuclear bombs. Okay,
Speaker 2: that's a lot of energy.
Speaker 1: Okay. When we come back, we're really going to dig
Speaker 1: into this question. We're going to talk about all the
Speaker 1: different ways people have proposed to stop a hurricane, and
Speaker 1: we're going to talk to different experts about whether they
Speaker 1: think any of these ways would work. Stay with us,
Speaker 1: we'll be right back. Welcome back. Okay. We just heard
Speaker 1: a first hand account what it's like to go inside
Speaker 1: a hurricane, and now we're going to answer the question
Speaker 1: of whether you can stop a hurricane. To do this,
Speaker 1: I reached out to someone who's been studying hurricanes and
Speaker 1: storms for over thirty years. Here's my conversation with Professor
Speaker 1: Bob Hart. Well, thank you, doctor Heart for joining us.
Speaker 4: Hello.
Speaker 3: I'm a professor of meteorology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida,
Speaker 3: and my research is primarily hurricanes, how they form, and
Speaker 3: trying to help out the public with proving the warnings
Speaker 3: and watch us.
Speaker 1: I'll ask doctor Heart in a minute if we can
Speaker 1: stop a hurricane. But first I thought it was important
Speaker 1: to talk about how hurricanes form because that's going to
Speaker 1: help us a little later. Okay, back to the conversation.
Speaker 2: Amazing.
Speaker 1: I guess we'll start with can you give us a
Speaker 1: brief overview of how hurricanes form?
Speaker 3: That's an hour question right there.
Speaker 1: Sorry, we need a whirlwind answer from you.
Speaker 3: They don't just appear with an eye suddenly. Usually it
Speaker 3: takes several days for it to go from disorganized thunderstorms
Speaker 3: in the tropics to organized thunderstorms to having an eye
Speaker 3: could take several days to a week, sometimes even longer,
Speaker 3: and it has a life cycle of formation and growth.
Speaker 1: Can you maybe step us through that life cycle, like,
Speaker 1: how do hurricanes get started?
Speaker 3: Well, there's not one way, and it's a big area
Speaker 3: of debate right now.
Speaker 1: Really, we don't know exactly how hurricanes form.
Speaker 3: We know so some aspects of it.
Speaker 1: That's right, It seems we don't know exactly how hurricanes form.
Speaker 1: According to doctor Hart, we know what the basic ingredients
Speaker 1: are for making a hurricane, but we can't really predict
Speaker 1: exactly when those ingredients will turn into a hurricane. Here's
Speaker 1: how doctor Hart explains it.
Speaker 3: We know that you need to have some rotation in
Speaker 3: the atmosphere, whether that's due to the Earth turning corioliss
Speaker 3: or due to something else like a front. If you
Speaker 3: have that, and you have a moist atmosphere and you're
Speaker 3: over warm water, then those thunderstorms can become increasingly strong,
Speaker 3: increasingly more organized. But the million dollar question that we've
Speaker 3: been debating for quite a while now is what specifically
Speaker 3: causes those thunderstorms to get organized and what's enough.
Speaker 1: When you say organized, what do you mean.
Speaker 3: Well, if you look at a satellite image of the tropics,
Speaker 3: you'll find that on average, thunderstorms are pretty sporadic. There's
Speaker 3: popcorn type thunderstorms. You know, thunderstorm in one location and
Speaker 3: then an hour away there's another thunderstorm, but in between
Speaker 3: there's no rain or no clouds. That's not organized. Organized
Speaker 3: would be if they grow in size and the rotation
Speaker 3: that occurs causes them to continue to reform and reform
Speaker 3: and reform so that it isn't short lived, so that
Speaker 3: it lasts hours and hours and days and days.
Speaker 1: Okay, here's a quick breakdown of how a typical hurricane forms.
Speaker 1: You start with a patch of warm ocean. That's where
Speaker 1: most of the energy for a hurricane comes from. That's
Speaker 1: what powers the hurricane. This patch of warm water heats
Speaker 1: up the air above it, causing it to go up,
Speaker 1: and as it goes up, it kind of creates a vacuum,
Speaker 1: pulling in more air from the surrounding area. So it's
Speaker 1: a little like someone brought in a giant vacuum host
Speaker 1: and started sucking air near the surface of the water. Now,
Speaker 1: a sucker heart said, if the air has some initial rotation,
Speaker 1: like from the rotation of the Earth, but just randomly
Speaker 1: from the air current, that spinning will create a vortex
Speaker 1: as the air gets sucked up, and sometimes the conditions
Speaker 1: will be just right. The air will be moist enough,
Speaker 1: and the top of the atmosphere will be cold enough,
Speaker 1: and the wind shear will be low enough, and the
Speaker 1: thunderstorms that are there will come together in just the
Speaker 1: right way that it creates a complex spinning system that
Speaker 1: kind of acts like a runaway, self perpetuating machine that
Speaker 1: just gets stronger and stronger on its own, all powered
Speaker 1: by the heat from the warm ocean.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a feedback where the warming that occurs in
Speaker 3: the column above the storm ends up leading to lower
Speaker 3: pressure even more warming, and so it's a nonlinear feedback
Speaker 3: that strengthening of a hurricane makes even more strengthening possible.
Speaker 3: And the theory says that as long as you don't
Speaker 3: have something getting in the way of that, like land
Speaker 3: or cold water, the hurricane will continue to strengthen, but
Speaker 3: it doesn't reach infinity.
Speaker 1: According to doctor Hart, hurricanes would continue to grow and
Speaker 1: grow indefinitely if it wasn't for one thing friction.
Speaker 3: There's a reason why we have a category five as
Speaker 3: a maximum, and that's because as it gets stronger and
Speaker 3: stronger and stronger, and now we're talking about winds of
Speaker 3: approaching two hundred miles an hour. The friction goes up
Speaker 3: very very quickly with friction between what with the ocean,
Speaker 3: so friction between the air and the ocean's while we
Speaker 3: get large waves in hurricanes. So eventually that friction becomes
Speaker 3: so strong that this hurricane cannot intensify any further.
Speaker 1: Okay, those are the basics of how hurricanes form. Now
Speaker 1: let's get to the main question, which is can you
Speaker 1: stop a hurricane? All right? Now we get to the
Speaker 1: kind of controversial part of the topic here. What are
Speaker 1: some ways that people have said you can maybe stop
Speaker 1: a hurricane? All right? According to doctor Hart, there are
Speaker 1: three basic ways you can try to stop a hurricane.
Speaker 1: Number one, you can mess with the way a hurricane forms.
Speaker 1: Number two, you can try to cut off its energy supply,
Speaker 1: and number three you can try to blow it out
Speaker 1: of the water. We'll start with number one, messing with
Speaker 1: how a hurricane forms.
Speaker 3: There were some experiments, it's about seventy five years ago now,
Speaker 3: Project Storm Fury, where they did cloud seating of hurricanes.
Speaker 1: What does that mean.
Speaker 3: They put certain chemicals in the atmosphere in thunderstorms or
Speaker 3: near thunderstorms to dissipate those thunderstorms. So this was like
Speaker 3: one of the earliest tests of weather modification.
Speaker 1: What did these chemicals? What were they supposed to do?
Speaker 3: They would reduce the relative you met the air, so
Speaker 3: the cloud would go away, or you could turn the
Speaker 3: liquid more to ice, which changes the physics of the air.
Speaker 1: I see. It'd be like throwing salt up into the
Speaker 1: atmosphere to lower the freezing point. Maybe something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: One way to try to mess with how a hurricane
Speaker 1: forms is to spray the clouds in a hurricane with
Speaker 1: basically anti freeze, or actually the opposite of anti freeze.
Speaker 1: And this is something scientists actually tried. Project Storm Fury
Speaker 1: was a twenty year joint project between the US Navy
Speaker 1: and the Department of Commerce where they experimented with spring
Speaker 1: silver iodide to the clouds outside the eye of a hurricane.
Speaker 1: The idea was that the silver iodide would trigger the
Speaker 1: moisture in those clouds to turn to ice and eventually
Speaker 1: expand the eye wall, making it weaker. It's something that
Speaker 1: actually works in a single small thunderstorm, but showing that
Speaker 1: it works in a complex, huge hurricane is a different story.
Speaker 3: The results were nonconclusive, and the reason why they were
Speaker 3: abandoned and never done again. Was because they could not
Speaker 3: prove that there was a cause and effect there. Sometimes
Speaker 3: it didn't have any effect, sometimes there was an intensification,
Speaker 3: and sometimes they weaken anyway, So that experiment's never been redone.
Speaker 3: And you're of course modifying the environment. With all this
Speaker 3: junk that you're throwing into the atmosphere, you would be
Speaker 3: dramatically hurting the oceans and us. Even if you could
Speaker 3: get all this chemical Think about what it would be
Speaker 3: doing to the fish, Think about what it would be
Speaker 3: doing to the trees.
Speaker 1: I see. So it could be an environmental disaster.
Speaker 3: Yes, okay, without saving another environmental disaster.
Speaker 1: Right, right, okay? What are some other ideas that people
Speaker 1: have floated out there?
Speaker 3: Pumping up cold water from the deep ocean. Once you
Speaker 3: get deep enough, let's say, beyond maybe two hundred and
Speaker 3: three hundred feet, the ocean begins to cool and some
Speaker 3: of the ideas are to pump up that cold water
Speaker 3: to the surface to cool off the surface of the
Speaker 3: ocean such that all that physics we talked about and
Speaker 3: that feedback doesn't occur or shuts down.
Speaker 1: Another idea to stop the hurricane is to shut off
Speaker 1: the source of our hurricanes energy, which is the heat
Speaker 1: in the ocean, presumably would deploy something like an array
Speaker 1: of deep water pumps that go down two hundred to
Speaker 1: three hundred meters and bring up cold water through hoses
Speaker 1: or tubes. This could technically work, but.
Speaker 3: The problem is you need to cool over a large
Speaker 3: area for one storm, and in order to cool or
Speaker 3: for a large area, you need to drop all these
Speaker 3: devices that we haven't even created yet, and that means
Speaker 3: you have to fly them out there in the right location.
Speaker 3: And of course then you also realize that, well, we
Speaker 3: don't know the forecast of these things incredibly well, which
Speaker 3: means by the time you get there that forecasts may
Speaker 3: have changed, and now you've missed your opportunity.
Speaker 1: In other words, you could build this array of water
Speaker 1: pumps and deploy them, but you need to build a
Speaker 1: lot of them to cover a large area hundreds of
Speaker 1: miles wide, and then you might miss the hurricane could
Speaker 1: unexpectedly veer off and miss the area of the ocean
Speaker 1: you were cooling off, So then you need even more
Speaker 1: of these pumps. It all gets super expensive. Pumping cold
Speaker 1: water that's also just prohibitively expensive, and you don't know
Speaker 1: if it's going to work. Yeah, all right, what are
Speaker 1: other ones? I've heard? Nuclear bomb?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've gotten those questions from the public. Those go back,
Speaker 3: you know, twenty years when I started teaching at FSU,
Speaker 3: before social media became a real big thing. These sort
Speaker 3: of questions become very nice graduate school questions for candidacy
Speaker 3: exam for PhD students to pursue their PhD, because they
Speaker 3: have to go through the math of figuring out is
Speaker 3: this feasible sort of and what are the downsides to it? Well,
Speaker 3: all the physics that we've talked about at the beginning
Speaker 3: of this for how hurricane strengthens and forms. That's an
Speaker 3: incredible amount of energy, a really incredible amount of energy,
Speaker 3: and we can generally calculate it various types of energy,
Speaker 3: kinetic energy, latent energy, thermal energy. So we can come
Speaker 3: up with an estimate of the total amount of energy
Speaker 3: that is in a hurricane over its life. And then
Speaker 3: you can say, okay, well, let's say we wanted to
Speaker 3: destroy the hurricane by matching that amount of energy by
Speaker 3: the release of nuclear weapons outside the eye and the
Speaker 3: eye wall of the storm to disrupt it. Right, So
Speaker 3: you're basically causing this disruption in the normal structure of
Speaker 3: the system with the goal of dissipating it. Well, if
Speaker 3: you do the math out, total amount of energy is
Speaker 3: equivalent to basically the entire nuclear arsenal of the world.
Speaker 1: In other words, what doctor Hart is saying is you
Speaker 1: could stop a hurricane by blowing it up, but you
Speaker 1: need about ten thousand nuclear bombs, which is basically all
Speaker 1: the nuclear bombs on Earth. That's just to stop one hurricane.
Speaker 1: There would still be more hurricanes that season, and the
Speaker 1: next year and the year after that, not to mention
Speaker 1: the enormous mess exploding ten thousand nuclear bombs would make.
Speaker 3: And so even if you were to do that, we
Speaker 3: don't know where to put them these weapons, Like where
Speaker 3: exactly do you put them? Do you put them in
Speaker 3: a circle outside the eye? Well, well we don't know.
Speaker 3: In the outer part of the storm, we don't know.
Speaker 3: And even if you could do that with phenomenal resources,
Speaker 3: probably more resources than it would take to go to Mars,
Speaker 3: you now have caused a massive environmental disaster, both in
Speaker 3: the ocean and the air in this attempt.
Speaker 1: Meaning you've basically radiated the entire Atlantic Ocean kind of
Speaker 1: and the.
Speaker 3: Atmosphere there above it, and the food, the food supply
Speaker 3: because so much of the world's food comes from the ocean,
Speaker 3: and the greenhouse effect that exists. Of course, because you're
Speaker 3: modifying the structure of the ocean. It's a nightmare. The
Speaker 3: planet would be destitute financially, resource wise.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's not do that, all right. When we come back,
Speaker 1: we're going to explore this idea more, and we're going
Speaker 1: to learn about the time when humans they have inadvertently
Speaker 1: stopped several hurricanes. Stay with us, you're listening to science
Speaker 1: stuff and we're back. But the people have mentioned Saharan
Speaker 1: dust and wind turbines.
Speaker 3: Yes, there's wind over Africa. Those winds often carry dust
Speaker 3: into the atmosphere of the Atlantic, and that dust changes
Speaker 3: the physics of the atmosphere there, causes it to be drier,
Speaker 3: causes it to be warmer. So that changes the ability
Speaker 3: to form thunderstorms.
Speaker 1: So the idea to put more dust or less dust.
Speaker 3: Well, you would want more dust in theory that would
Speaker 3: prevent the thunder storms or decrease the likelihood of thunder
Speaker 3: storms going all the way up in the atmosphere. But
Speaker 3: yet again, this is a lot of dust you would
Speaker 3: need over a large area.
Speaker 1: You need to be pumping dust all year over a
Speaker 1: huge amount of space.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't think a lot of the people that
Speaker 3: live in Africa and otherwise would appreciate having enormous fans
Speaker 3: blowing at all this dust into the Atlantic air and
Speaker 3: also changing the surface there and probably hurting rainforests as well.
Speaker 1: So you could also stop a hurricane by throwing dust
Speaker 1: at it, but again, the skills such that you need
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of dust, how would you blow all
Speaker 1: that dust from Africa? Okay? The last idea here is
Speaker 1: to use a wind turbine basically a fan to try
Speaker 1: to blow a hurricane away or at least a mess
Speaker 1: with it. Okay, and then really quick wind turbines. I
Speaker 1: imagine it's the same idea somehow you put wind turbines.
Speaker 3: And yeah, that was one of the emails that somebody
Speaker 3: had tried to patent an enormous ship like device that
Speaker 3: would basically redirect air in a hurricane, preventing it from strengthening.
Speaker 3: And the same questions logistically come to mind is even
Speaker 3: if you could build this in enormously expensive device, how
Speaker 3: do you lift it? And if you're going to have
Speaker 3: it floating in the water. Things that are very heavy
Speaker 3: tend to move very slowly in the water, and by
Speaker 3: the time you got it to where you need it,
Speaker 3: the storm's gone formed and died somewhere else I see.
Speaker 3: Not to mention the energetics of it. We've seen enough
Speaker 3: examples of oil rigs and ships at sea that have
Speaker 3: been capsized during hurricanes due to the massive waves that
Speaker 3: would just probably destroy this or certainly heavily damage it.
Speaker 1: WHOA all right, So what does this all mean for
Speaker 1: a question today? Can you stop a hurricane? I feel
Speaker 1: like all of these potential solutions could work if we
Speaker 1: just crazy scale up the engineering, throw all our money
Speaker 1: into it, not worry about environmental disaster. I feel like
Speaker 1: maybe the answer can we stop a hurricane is yes,
Speaker 1: but maybe we don't want to. Yes.
Speaker 3: I think we could be able to stop hurricane century
Speaker 3: from now, let's say, when we're in a very different
Speaker 3: technological environment, ideally with a lot more resources and a
Speaker 3: lot better understanding.
Speaker 1: So we might be able to stop hurricanes. But here's
Speaker 1: the surprising part of the answer. According to doctor Hart,
Speaker 1: we may not want to because when you mess with nature,
Speaker 1: things can happen that you didn't expect.
Speaker 3: So there's also the political aspect of that that you know, Okay, well,
Speaker 3: what if it did work and you change the path
Speaker 3: storm if you did cloud seating, Let's say of a
Speaker 3: hurricane that was a day or two away from one
Speaker 3: country and you weakened it, you could change the track
Speaker 3: slightly enough that it ends up hitting another country nearby,
Speaker 3: or ends up going into a major city rather than
Speaker 3: a rural area. And then it becomes a mess, a nightmare,
Speaker 3: because you're going to have some stating that Okay, well
Speaker 3: we got a hurricane with high damage that we shouldn't
Speaker 3: have got because of the modification.
Speaker 1: Oh, it becomes kind of like a hot potato.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, I guess the best thing for me to
Speaker 3: close in on is hurricanes themselves are a part of
Speaker 3: the climate, just like winter storms are, just like tornadoes are.
Speaker 3: They occur, they play a role, and usually that role
Speaker 3: goes back to, well, it's hotter in the tropics, it's
Speaker 3: colder in the poles, and we're trying to redistribute the heat. Well,
Speaker 3: if we don't allow these hurricanes to occur, we may
Speaker 3: get something worse, something different that we're not prepared for. Anyway.
Speaker 1: Okay, we heard from a hurricane hunter about what it's
Speaker 1: like to go into hurricane. We talked about a lot
Speaker 1: of the ways humans have proposed to stop hurricanes, and
Speaker 1: so far none of them seem to work or be
Speaker 1: very practical. Now, does that mean we are helpless against
Speaker 1: the forces of nature? Not necessarily. It turns out there
Speaker 1: is an instance where hu may have inadvertently stopped not one,
Speaker 1: but several hurricanes. It's something I learned when I talk
Speaker 1: to Professor Gave Becky and I asked him how the
Speaker 1: number of hurricanes has changed over time. Here's what he does.
Speaker 4: My name is Abe Becky. I'm a professor of geosciences
Speaker 4: at Princeton University, and I do research on how climate
Speaker 4: affects weather events, including hurricanes.
Speaker 1: Amazing, I was wondering how has the frequency of hurricanes
Speaker 1: changed over time?
Speaker 4: So the part that we can answer very clearly and
Speaker 4: unambiguously is that over the last forty years, the frequency
Speaker 4: of hurricanes in the Atlantic has gone up a lot.
Speaker 4: We have satellites and those let us see hurricanes very
Speaker 4: well over the last forty years, and we are almost
Speaker 4: one hundred percent sure that they've increased in the Atlantic
Speaker 4: over the last forty years.
Speaker 1: How many hurricanes are we talking about here per year
Speaker 1: in the Atlantic.
Speaker 4: In the Atlantic, the average number of hurricanes, if you
Speaker 4: go and you look before nineteen ninety five, that average
Speaker 4: was much lower, as more than four, and recently that
Speaker 4: average is eight or so. It's a substantial increase in
Speaker 4: the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic over the last
Speaker 4: forty years.
Speaker 1: All right, what doctor Vicki's saying is that the number
Speaker 1: of hurricanes per year has been going up since the
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties. But here's the weird part. Before this happened,
Speaker 1: the number of hurricanes per year went down.
Speaker 4: So this increase over the last forty years was preceded
Speaker 4: by a decrease over the preceding forty years. So if
Speaker 4: you look at the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic
Speaker 4: from World War II, or they say the nineteen thirties
Speaker 4: to the nineteen eighties, they showed a very dramatic decrease
Speaker 4: comparable to the increase that we've seen over the last
Speaker 4: forty years.
Speaker 1: These changes in the number of hurricanes are significant, which
Speaker 1: makes the question what happened and here scientists are not sure,
Speaker 1: but there are a few hypotheses, the first being that
Speaker 1: it's a random fluctuation of the ocean currents.
Speaker 4: The climate system. It sort of fluctuates on its own.
Speaker 4: It can have time scales of decades. And in the
Speaker 4: Atlantic there's this current it's called the Atlantic Meridional overturning circulation.
Speaker 4: It's a mouthful. This current brings warm surface water to
Speaker 4: the north across the Atlantic, and that current seems to fluctuate.
Speaker 4: Some decades, it's stronger, some decades it's weaker. And so
Speaker 4: one hypothesis is that those chaotic fluctuations have led to
Speaker 4: an increase in hurricane activities. Not everything aligns with that hypothesis,
Speaker 4: but some evidence does. Another hypothesis is one to do
Speaker 4: with human practices. It has to do with sulfur dioxide.
Speaker 4: So one of the byproducts of burning coal was emission
Speaker 4: of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere which would undergo chemical
Speaker 4: changes in the atmosphere and become sulfate, which you can
Speaker 4: see it reflects sunlight and it can turn into sulfuric acid,
Speaker 4: and this is what gave us acid rain is a
Speaker 4: side effect of burning coal. And as there was industrial
Speaker 4: development after World War two in Europe and in North America,
Speaker 4: there was a lot of emission of sulfur dioxide. And
Speaker 4: so between World War Two into the nineteen eighties, you
Speaker 4: had this cloud of reflective particles building up over the Atlantic,
Speaker 4: and they reflected sunlight and they made the Atlantic colder
Speaker 4: than it otherwise would have been, and they sapped the
Speaker 4: energy that hurricanes would have liked to have had.
Speaker 1: Okay, what doctor Vicki's saying is that there are two
Speaker 1: possible reasons why the number of hurricanes went down in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties. One is that it's a natural cycle
Speaker 1: of the ocean currents in the Atlantic, and the other
Speaker 1: is that it's due to us. After World War II,
Speaker 1: we started burning coal like crazy, and that could have
Speaker 1: cooled the ocean and reduced the number of hurricanes. But
Speaker 1: then in the nineteen eighties, when we realized all this
Speaker 1: pollution was terrible for our health and it was causing
Speaker 1: acid rain, which was killing all the forests, we started
Speaker 1: putting filters in coal power plants to take out to
Speaker 1: reflective pollution, and this ironically could have led to the
Speaker 1: rewarming of the Atlantic and the increase in the number
Speaker 1: of hurricanes per year. Now, I brought this up not
Speaker 1: to make the point that we should go back to
Speaker 1: polluting our air and killing our forests, but to show
Speaker 1: that human activity does have the potential to basically stop
Speaker 1: something as large as a hurricane. And this is important
Speaker 1: because of climate change. Now, we don't actually know if
Speaker 1: the number of hurricanes is going to increase because of
Speaker 1: global warming. Scientists have a strong prediction that it's definitely
Speaker 1: going to make them deadlier.
Speaker 4: We don't know whether the number of hurricanes in a
Speaker 4: warming climate goes up or goes down. We know it's
Speaker 4: possible that it might change by a considerable amount. Now,
Speaker 4: this is where we get to the other metric, which
Speaker 4: is intensity, and there we have a lot more consistency
Speaker 4: and understanding that the peak intensity of hurricanes in a
Speaker 4: warmer world should increase. And that's because hurricanes draw energy
Speaker 4: from the warm ocean and the moisture, and so as
Speaker 4: you warm the planet, you have more energy in the
Speaker 4: ocean and the hurricanes will tap into that. So the
Speaker 4: hurricanes that exist in a warmer world are likely to
Speaker 4: have larger peak.
Speaker 1: Intensities and therefore be deadlier. Exactly, all right, so recap,
Speaker 1: can you stop the hurricane? The answer seems to be yes,
Speaker 1: we can stop a single hurricane, but it would be
Speaker 1: too expensive and unpredictable with current technology. And yes, our
Speaker 1: actions can affect how many hurricanes happen and how deadly
Speaker 1: they are. I think what's clear is that we need
Speaker 1: more science. With more science, we could answer a lot
Speaker 1: of these questions, and we could do a better job
Speaker 1: of neutralizing hurricanes by being able to predict when they're
Speaker 1: going to form and where they're going to hit where
Speaker 1: people live. If we can do that, we can evacuate
Speaker 1: people and prepare so that the hurricanes don't do as
Speaker 1: much damage. Unfortunately, right now, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric
Speaker 1: Administration is getting massive cuts to their budget. The Trump
Speaker 1: administration has proposed cutting the NOAH budget by forty percent,
Speaker 1: including killing its research division, the Office of Oceanic and
Speaker 1: Atmospheric Research. So, if you live in Florida or tax
Speaker 1: or Alabama, or North or South Carolina states that are
Speaker 1: in the crosshairs of future hurricanes, I highly recommend you
Speaker 1: call your elected official and let them know you oppose
Speaker 1: these cuts because stopping a hurricane may not be practical,
Speaker 1: but learning more about them so we can reduce the
Speaker 1: effect is just common sense. Thanks for joining us. See
Speaker 1: you next time you've been listening to Science Stuff. Production
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio written and produced by me or Ychm, edited
Speaker 1: by Rose Seguda, executive producer Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer
Speaker 1: and mixer Kasey Peckram. And you can follow me on
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