Skepticism

Can the Government Control Hurricanes?

Last week was pretty rough here in the Bay Area, with absolutely astonishingly high temperatures for eight straight days. From September 30 to October 6, the average temperature in San Francisco was 90.3F, or 32.4C. The usual temperature during that period is 70F, or 21C. And San Francisco is one of the coolest cities in the Bay – here in Oakland it was even hotter.

Now, I know some of you out there are extremely annoying and are heading to the comments to call the Bay Area a bunch of wussies who can’t handle a little heat, but there are a few things to keep in mind: first, historically we just don’t get heat like that, so only about half of residents have air conditioning. I am not among them.

Second, yes, we are wussies. Physically, not mentally. The human body is a very efficient machine, and part of that efficiency involves individuals adapting to the temperatures they’re usually exposed to. If you are regularly exposed to very high temperatures, your skin will flush more easily, which brings heat from the core of the body to the surface where it can be released more easily. You will sweat more and the salinity of your sweat will be lower than people in colder temperatures. Your body will, all on its own, work more efficiently than mine to keep you cool.

So yeah, by living most of my life at a perfect (for me) room temperature, it’s harder for my body to adapt to sudden temperature swings up or down.

In other words: last week SUCKED.

And so of course, I wanted someone to blame: the government, who secretly controls the weather. Why would the government want the Bay Area to cook for a solid week? Well, if we work backwards from our conclusion…aha, I’ve got it! Our local energy provider, PG&E, has consistently failed to maintain infrastructure and so now every time the heat spikes there’s a serious risk of their equipment causing wildfires. Maybe after one or two more wildfires caused by the bloated and mismanaged corporation, California will finally have the impetus to go full socialism and take over managing our energy needs in accordance with public health and safety instead of profit margins. Yep. Gavin Newsom made it an uncomfy week but it was all for the greater good. I feel so much better.

If you think THAT sounds stupid, wait til you hear that Marjorie Taylor Greene is back on her bullshit. MTG, the US congressperson most likely to ask you to join her Scentsy team, has previously expressed a belief in “Jewish space lasers”…hold on, what did she think Jewish space lasers did? Ah yes, she said they caused the 2018 wildfires in California. Cool.

Anyway, MTG is back pontificating about the TRUE cause of natural disasters, and this time she’s focusing on the hurricanes pounding the southeast US right now. “Yes they can control the weather,” she Xitted. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” She went on to Xit: “Climate change is the new Covid. 

“Ask your government if the weather is manipulated or controlled.

“Did you ever give permission to them to do it?

“Are you paying for it?

“Of course you are..”

So first of all, it’s worth noting that yes, it IS terrifying that hurricanes have now been politicized by Republicans. It’s a very good reminder that they will turn ANYTHING into a culture war issue–they cannot win on the facts, so they change the conversation to be about feelings.

It’s obvious that the federal government wouldn’t purposely send hurricanes to the southeast just so, what, the Republican residents could see their batshit representative hanging out with Donald Trump at a football game instead of helping them? Oh and there’s an even dumber conspiracy than that: the Democrats wanted to clear out western North Carolina so they can mine lithium. Because I guess it’s easier to create a hurricane than to just employ some eminent domain lawyers. Lawyers are pretty expensive.

So yeah, IF the government could control hurricanes, that’s not what they’d do with them. But you may be wondering: DOES the government have the ability to manipulate the weather?

No. Bye!

Okay, just kidding. Forget the conspiracy theories you’ve heard about the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP, where scientists study the Earth’s ionosphere but conspiracy theorists think they control earthquakes and the weather for some reason. Here’s where we actually are on weather manipulation.

Humans have been trying to control the weather since there were humans and weather. Once most humans realized that prayer wasn’t working, we turned to science. It took until the 1950s to develop a decent technique for “cloud seeding,” which is a method of adding a substance, usually some kind of salt, to clouds to produce more precipitation.

Here’s a fun thing I learned while researching this video: atmospheric scientists working for General Electric discovered the initial cloud seeding technique, including Nobel-prize winner Irving Langmuir. Langmuir’s colleague then discovered and patented the use of silver iodide to alter the crystalline structure of the clouds in order to produce rain and snow. THAT scientist was named Bernard Vonnegut, and he was the older brother of the guy working in GE’s PR department at the time, one of my all-time favorite authors, Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt would go on to borrow an idea from Langmuir and his brother’s research for his book Cat’s Cradle, which describes a doomsday substance called ice-nine, which is water that’s solid at room temperature.

One major theme of Cat’s Cradle is the danger in how scientists may make new discoveries just for the joy of the discovery itself without considering the application of those discoveries. Appropriately, during the Vietnam War the United States used cloud seeding to try to prolong the monsoon season in the hope of disrupting the North Korean army’s supply lines and causing landslides. Whether it worked or not, once the world realized the US was lying about not doing that, the United Nations officially banned its use in war.

While I’m on the subject, here’s an interesting tie-in to a video I made last month: just after Bernard Vonnegut died in 1997, he was posthumously awarded an Ig Nobel for his 1975 study “Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed,” which tested a 19th century study that found that a chicken shot out of a cannon at 341 miles per hour could be fully plucked (though not necessarily without mutilating the corpse), thus establishing the wind speed of a tornado that would leave a chicken in such a state. Vonnegut found that it was impossible to separate the effects of the wind from that of, you know, the cannon exploding, thus found that plucked chickens are NOT an accurate way to measure the speed of a tornado. 

I’m sorry, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, the government controlling the weather.

Cloud seeding does seem to work, at least a little, but even after six or seven decades, scientists are still trying to figure out if you can do more than squeeze a few extra drops out of an otherwise dry sponge. Despite the less-than-stellar results, Dubai keeps trying and occasionally maybe succeeding at using cloud-seeding technology and unmitigated evil to turn their desert into a slave-powered lush paradise for the obscenely wealthy, so that’s cool I guess.

It doesn’t really inspire confidence in the US’s ability to control entire hurricanes, though, when another wealthy country unmoored from any modern ethical concerns can barely get an extra centimeter of rainfall here and there.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the role of space lasers in weather engineering. That’s right, MTG may have been onto something (she was not, she is an idiot, she has no idea what any of this is about): the UAE has experimented with using lasers to seed clouds, zapping clouds to create the conditions necessary for rain. Other researchers are working on the use of lasers to create plasma in the air that can lead to lightning.

But that’s not going to create, or direct, a hurricane. There are theoretical ways to use lasers to prevent hurricanes by quickly cooling surface ocean temperatures (yes, scientists have figured out how to use lasers to cool things down). There are also theoretical ways to prevent hurricanes by adding oil to the surface of the ocean, cooling the water with icebergs, and, um, dropping a nuclear bomb on the hurricane. None of these ideas has worked out. Surprisingly.

So no, the government can’t control hurricanes and scientists aren’t even at the point where they can really start experimenting with super villain ideas like that, because they’re still at the stage of figuring out how to stop people from dying from them. Possibly more relevant than “how do we stop a hurricane that’s already formed” is “can we make small geoengineering changes that attempt to counter global warming,” and then also “SHOULD we,” with many climate scientists worrying about the unintended effects of trying to unfuck our environment with things like aerosols released into the atmosphere to reflect some sunlight. Why even bother, in fact, when we haven’t bothered to do the things we know are possible and have no downside at all, like reducing our use of fossil fuels and sequestering more carbon out of the atmosphere?

That brings me, at last, to why people love this conspiracy about the government causing the destruction of hurricanes. I talk about this all the time but I’ll say it again: it’s so much more comforting to believe that everything happens for a reason, and you know exactly why this happened, and the cause is something that could theoretically be fixed. But I’m not just talking about the conspiracy believers, here. I’m also talking about myself.

You see, it’s easy for me to say that I suffered all last week in the unbearable heat because of global warming. And yeah, in a way, I did: global warming has undoubtedly increased our temperatures over all and also made it more likely that we will experience more extreme weather events throughout our lifetimes. But this heat wave isn’t exactly unprecedented. In fact, I was surprised to learn that it’s only the second worst that San Francisco has seen in recorded history, with the worst one having occurred in 1939. 1939! You know those guys didn’t have A/C, and their heat wave lasted a few extra days.

Similarly, I saw a lot of people, and media outlets, claim that it was unprecedented, and unthinkable, that Hurricane Helene flooded Asheville, North Carolina because it’s so far inland and high above sea level. But in fact, more than 100 years ago, in 1916, two tropical storms converged over the town, causing flooding that killed 80 people, breached the dams, destroyed Asheville’s power plant, wiped out the train tracks, and cut the town off from outside help. They experienced damaging and deadly floods every 20 years or so after then, but with updated infrastructure, training for emergency personnel, a flood mitigation plan in place, and confidence in weather forecasting, Asheville’s website on the 100th anniversary of the flood proclaimed that “Those plans, coupled with an unprecedented ability to notify residents of imminent danger through mobile phone technology and computers, greatly lessens the risk of a catastrophic loss of life when major flooding comes to call. And based on both history and future meteorology modeling, it will.”

There’s no doubt that Asheville’s proactive plans made a horrific situation less bad than it could have been, though experts are pointing out that they’ve been asking the government to do better for years. There’s also no doubt that climate change is making heat waves like the one we experienced here, the flooding Asheville experienced last week, and the hurricanes like those continuing to hit the Southeast much worse AND much more frequent.

But at the same time, it’s important to remember that things don’t always happen for a reason. Even if we get our shit together, stop our fossil fuel usage, and get the carbon out of the atmosphere, there will still be disasters. We live on a big scary planet spinning through a big scary universe and ultimately there’s only so much we can control.
I know some of you will be in the comments complaining that I’m saying it’s just as valid to blame Jewish space lasers as it is to blame climate change so let me assure you that I am not saying that. One of those is an understandable simplification of a complex issue and the other is antisemitic pig barf. I’m just pointing out a tiny way that we all share this human desire to find order in an increasingly chaotic world. Here’s a thing we all can control, though: if you have a few bucks, consider supporting the work of World Central Kitchen who are now in North Carolina, or you can donate to the North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund. And as always, vote for politicians who care about their constituents with healthcare, human rights, and of course, action on climate change.

Rebecca Watson

Rebecca is a writer, speaker, YouTube personality, and unrepentant science nerd. In addition to founding and continuing to run Skepchick, she hosts Quiz-o-Tron, a monthly science-themed quiz show and podcast that pits comedians against nerds. There is an asteroid named in her honor. Twitter @rebeccawatson Mastodon mstdn.social/@rebeccawatson Instagram @actuallyrebeccawatson TikTok @actuallyrebeccawatson YouTube @rebeccawatson BlueSky @rebeccawatson.bsky.social

Related Articles

Back to top button

Discover more from Skepchick

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading