Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[TamerVirus]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Meanwhile, someone's been blessing the rains down in Africa...

[scriver]

Posit: Do the weather pattern resulting in hurricane season in the modern Americas match the old time Africa-America trade triangle?

Thesis: Hurricanes are caused by the ghosts of angry slaves

[smjjames]

Given that sailing ships tend to follow wind patterns (they don't have to, but sometimes 'path of least resistance'), I'd say no.

[Folly]

Barry is now a Cat1 and expected to make landfall within hours. The nasty end of this storm seems to be on the south end however, so the more damaging winds and rains won't come until later this afternoon.

[Max™]

Welcome to the anthropocene, humans.

What is this supposed to mean? I know I've explained the folly of the (much scarier, granted) assumption that warmer=drier+stormier before, haven't I? If we're supposed to be responsible for warming the planet then wouldn't that mean the equator > pole energy gradient is shallower, and thus there is less available energy for storms to spread around? You shouldn't get to stomp around blowing the catastrophe horn without acknowledging that the same hypothesis leads to positive outcomes as well.

[Folly]

Trump trying to fight Hurricanes with Nukes.

[Telgin]

It's interesting to see the numbers laid out that show how ineffective nukes would be at stopping a hurricane.

I am, however, now curious if they would be effective at destroying tornadoes.  Still wildly impractical since tornadoes are generally fairly short lived and difficult to hit in time, and because a strong enough nuke would do way more damage than a tornado anyway, but I still wonder if it would work.

[Rolan7]

Unfortunately he's not the first with that idea.

Hell, it's not even the fist time he mused about that- he did so back in 2017.

This is a neat and concise explanation for why the obviously bad idea is bad, thank you!  It was fun like reading an XKCD What If.

[Folly]

Tropical Storm Dorian is expected to make landfall in Puerto Rico as a Cat 1 early Thursday morning Wednesday Evening.

After passing Puerto Rico, the storm will be over water until it reaches Florida, allowing it to pick up more water and possibly be a Cat 1 again when it makes landfall. Either way, most of Florida is going to get wet.

[smjjames]

It's interesting to see the numbers laid out that show how ineffective nukes would be at stopping a hurricane.

I am, however, now curious if they would be effective at destroying tornadoes.  Still wildly impractical since tornadoes are generally fairly short lived and difficult to hit in time, and because a strong enough nuke would do way more damage than a tornado anyway, but I still wonder if it would work.

You’d probably have a better chance of disrupting a tornado at the cloud base rather than near the ground, actually, you’d probably have to disrupt the entire system as a whole for that to work.

[wierd]

*is moderately intrigued at the potential for abusing laser wakes to create local corridors of negative air pressure, to puncture the pressure differences between storm cell components, and thus release the potential energy before it can reach hurricane or tornado levels...

(It would require absurdly prohibitively energetic lasers to create wake cavities large enough to do that though, so it's just a moderate curiosity, not any kind of suggestion. The lightning it would facilitate would be impressive though.)

[Folly]

Dorian, originally expected to pass through Puerto Rico and then trapse over to Florida as a tropical storm, has instead shifted north of the island chain to pick up more water and wind and is currently expected to make landfall in Florida as a Category 4 sometime Monday afternoon.

[smjjames]

As to quote that FAQ regarding other ideas, they have a page on that too.

Attacking weak tropical waves or depressions before they have a chance to grow into hurricanes isn't promising either. About 80 of these disturbances form every year in the Atlantic basin, but only about 5 become hurricanes in a typical year. There is no way to tell in advance which ones will develop. If the energy released in a tropical disturbance were only 10% of that released in a hurricane, it's still a lot of power, so that the hurricane police would need to dim the whole world's lights many times a year.

Of course though, a laser or whatever that powerful would likely be able to melt cities.

[wierd]

More, "write your name on the moon."

We are talking a laser powerful enough to create ionized plasma pockets large enough to enable the deflation of the pressure system, by allowing the high pressure below to easily get above the storm front. 

The most powerful lasers we have, (which are pretty goddamn strong) can do this with areas about the size of a fist to the size of a basketball, if they get shot through atmosphere. We are talking something powerful enough to make a cavity the size of a mini cooper, or larger.


I knew full well in advance that this was (ahem) "Implausible"-- It was more of a Randal Munroe "what if?" question.

[PTTG??]

Welcome to the anthropocene, humans.

What is this supposed to mean? I know I've explained the folly of the (much scarier, granted) assumption that warmer=drier+stormier before, haven't I? If we're supposed to be responsible for warming the planet then wouldn't that mean the equator > pole energy gradient is shallower, and thus there is less available energy for storms to spread around? You shouldn't get to stomp around blowing the catastrophe horn without acknowledging that the same hypothesis leads to positive outcomes as well.

That sounds a lot like asking people to be appreciative of how the light thrown off by a burning house lets you read in the backyard. Never mind that climatologists themselves are the ones saying that climate change is causing increased storm activity. The correlation between hurricane strength and global warming is not in doubt; the connection to frequency is harder to measure, but the data are suggestive.