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Diverting Hurricanes
Diverting Hurricanes Next in Wacky Scientific Plans
By Joshua Hill Sunday, May 4, 2008The history of science is no less filled with idiocy and insanity than any other field of endeavor, if not more so. From bizarre DARPA mind-control experiments to nuking the crap out of atolls, science has done it all. And, lucky for us the climate sciences aren’t immune from this either.
The 1960s saw a lot in the way of weird science, and one initiative of the United States Government was to attempt to seed tropical cyclones, or hurricanes, with silver iodide. Operation Stormfury saw aircraft would be flown in to a hurricane in an attempt to weaken or disrupt them using the chemical.
The theory went that the silver iodide would cause supercooled water in the storm to freeze, thus disrupting the inner structure of the hurricane. Though Stormfury found successes, it was later found that its hypothesis was incorrect, and what changes they had claimed were actually of natural origins.
However the United States Government has once again called on Stormfury, this time for Joe Golden, who is now at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Golden’s task was to gather together experts to evaluate prospects for taming hurricanes.
Last week, the panel reported their findings at an American Meteorological Society meeting in Westminster, Colorado. Their conclusions were that disrupting hurricanes should not be the goal, but guiding them and moving them away from densely populated areas.
The group said that “hurricanes serve a useful purpose in the Earth’s energy budget and… rainfall from tropical cyclones is a vital component of the regional water supply.”
