Tag: skepticism

Nuking a Hurricane Is a Stupid Idea

Why have a hurricane when you could have a radioactive hurricane!

Hurricane Florence as seen from the International Space Station in September 2018 [NASA (edit by Ian O’Neill)]

Now, I don’t like to use the “s” word too often; it’s often misplaced and used to belittle someone’s lack of knowledge. A lack of knowledge doesn’t necessarily mean someone doesn’t want to learn, so to say an idea is stupid suggests someone is willfully ignorant. But this is one occasion where I’ll use “stupid” with a high degree of confidence that this idea is, well, very stupid:

President Trump has suggested multiple times to senior Homeland Security and national security officials that they explore using nuclear bombs to stop hurricanes from hitting the United States, according to sources who have heard the president’s private remarks and been briefed on a National Security Council memorandum that recorded those comments.

Axios

We’re now into year three of this administration’s willful ignorance of climate science, so it may not come as a surprise that the president doesn’t like to surround himself with many scientifically-savvy minds, lest their ideas get in the way of his administration’s damaging policies. So, while his statements may sound a little, shall we say, “extreme,” he’s coming from a place of ignorance and a horrible worldview that obsesses over detonating nuclear weapons to solve problems.

It’s easy for the science community to mock Trump’s comments as he often delivers these half-baked ideas with such bombastic enthusiasm that every day feels like an episode of The Twilight Zone, but it might come as a surprise to hear that he’s not the first to float the idea of nuking hurricanes. In fact, the idea of interrupting the convection currents of hurricanes over the Atlantic Ocean with nuclear blasts dates back to the Eisenhower era. And since then, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which is a government body, I might add) regularly receives queries about going all Dr. Strangelove on the Atlantic.

During each hurricane season, there always appear suggestions that one should simply use nuclear weapons to try and destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.

NOAA

Fears of spreading radioactive fallout far and wide notwithstanding, if a nuke was actually effective at snuffing out a hurricane before it can even form, or at least redirect a powerful one from hitting Florida, say, wouldn’t the ends justify the means? In other words, if a deadly storm (capable of killing thousands) is averted, is a little bit of radiation really that bad? Well, yes, it is really bad, but nuking the ocean would be terribly ineffective hurricane mitigation effort.

As discussed by the NOAA, the amount of energy carried by a fully developed hurricane is huge and to interrupt or redirect a formed hurricane would require a lot of nuclear warheads detonating all the time.

The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required. A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20×1013 watts and converts less than 10% of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes. According to the 1993 World Almanac, the entire human race used energy at a rate of 1013 watts in 1990, a rate less than 20% of the power of a hurricane.

NOAA

That’s not all: to concentrate the compression effects of the nuclear blasts on the central region of the cyclone to effectively dampen its sheer power, in a nutshell, simply isn’t possible.

OK then, why not drop a bomb on the weak tropical depressions (i.e. the seeds of hurricanes) to prevent them from growing in the first place? Well, that would be a crap-shoot. According to the NOAA, “[a]bout 80 of these disturbances form every year in the Atlantic basin, but only about 5 become hurricanes in a typical year.” There’s no obvious way of knowing which ones will ripen into that “killer” storm and, besides, we’d still need to dump a lot of nuclear energy into those depressions to stand a chance of stopping them.

Of course, these arguments sound reasonable; there are very few informed people who, after a little research, would doubt that firing nukes at weather systems is a stupid idea. But here we are, talking about the leader of the richest and most powerful nation on the planet wanting to wage a nuclear war on Mother Nature herself, while ignoring the very real science behind global warming (which, by the way, supercharges the ferocity of hurricanes) that is currently causing irreparable damage to our ecosystem.

What a time to be alive.

UPDATE (Aug. 26): Trump denies everything. In a baffling mix of third and first person, which leads me to believe it’s all true:

Tonight’s “Black Moon” Isn’t Actually a Thing

The media strikes again.

Ahhh the glorious Black Moon. Seriously, it’s there. [via NASA-SVS]

Who doesn’t love the moon? You just have to look up when the skies are clear and there it is, our lunar friend, doing its thing, changing phases, yanking at our oceans, inspiring the world to look “up.”

It’s little wonder, then, that humanity has created many different names for our planet’s tidal partner in crime. There are useful astronomical names that describe its different phases (new/full, first/third quarter, waxing/waning crescent/gibbous), but there’s also other names that have popped up throughout human history that relate to other subtleties in the lunar dance around our world. A quasi-rare second full moon of the month? Blue moon! When the full moon coincides with perigee (lunar close approach with Earth)? Supermoon! When you get a bonus lunar combo that includes a full moon, a supermoon… and the Earth is blocking the sun so we have a lunar eclipse… and it all happens to occur in January?? That’s a SUPER BLOOD WOLF MOON ECLIPSE! Because of course it is.

As you may or may not have realized, humans—particularly humans in marketing departments, the media, and astrologers with too much time on their hands—like to label things. Some of these labels can be useful, others not so much. Many are, frankly, just plain silly. Which brings me to today’s lunar branding non-event: The Black Moon. Ohh sounds… eerie.

Over to Joe Rao at SPACE.com:

As one who has been involved in the broadcasting field for nearly 40 years, I’d like to point out that we live in a time when the news media is seemingly obsessed with “branding.” This marketing strategy involves creating a differentiated name and image — often using a tagline — in order to establish a presence in people’s mind. In recent years in the field of astronomy, for example, we’ve seen annular eclipses — those cases when the moon is too small to completely cover the disk of the sun — become branded as “Ring of Fire” eclipses. A total eclipse of the moon — when the moon’s plunge through the Earth’s shadow causes the satellite to turn a coppery red color — is now referred to as a “Blood Moon.” 

When a full moon is also passing through that part of its orbit that brings it closest to Earth — perigee — we now brand that circumstance as a supermoon. That term was actually conjured up by an astrologer back in 1979 but quite suddenly became a very popular media brand after an exceptionally close approach of a full moon to Earth in March 2011. It surprises me that even NASA now endorses the term, although it seems to me the astronomical community in general shies away from designating any perigee full moon as “super.”

Then there is Blue Moon. This moniker came about because a writer for Sky & Telescope Magazine misinterpreted an arcane definition given by a now-defunct New England Almanac for when a full moon is branded “blue,” and instead incorrectly reasoned that in a month with two full moons, the second is called a Blue Moon. That was a brand that quietly went unnoticed for some 40 years, until a syndicated radio show promoted the term in the 1980s and it then went viral. So now, even though the second full moon in a month is not the original definition for a Blue Moon, in popular culture we now automatically associate the second full moon in a calendar month with a Blue Moon.

So are you ready for yet another lunar brand? The newest one is Black Moon.

Joe Rao, “Black Moon 2019: What It Is (and Why You Can’t See It)“, SPACE.com

That’s a very polite way of saying, “it’s all bullshit, really.”

So, what IS a Black Moon? Well, it’s the opposite of a Blue Moon, as in it’s the second New Moon in the month of July and a New Moon is when the sun, moon and Earth are in almost exact alignment; the entire Earth-facing side of the moon is in complete shadow. The upshot is you can’t see it. It’s a naked-eye astronomical non-event.

Having said that, should the moon exactly line up with the sun, you get a solar eclipse—arguably the most mind-blowing astronomical event we can see on Earth. A plain ol’ Black Moon? Not so much.

UPDATE: As this post turned into the seed for a fun little online discussion, I added some thoughts in the following Twitter thread. Feel free to @ me: