“The wayward wind is a restless wind.”---Gogi Grant/S. Lebowsky
When we were kids, we didn’t know from hurricanes. Hurricanes were for other people, silly folks who lived in sweltering, pre-air-conditioned Miami, oddballs who congregated in zany Key West, grits-eaters who foolishly congregated on someplace called the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Too bad for them, but nobody made them move there. We had enough trouble of our own with rip-roaring Nor’easters and monumental blizzards which could block up your doors, cave in your roof, leave you snow-blind and close the schools for days. Okay, so those blizzards weren’t all bad.
Then, in 1954, Mr. Weatherman called to inform us that Hurricane Carol was on her way and would likely strike the eastern portion of New England. This failed to impress my crusty father who was completely fearless and didn’t believe in stuff he’d never seen, with the possible exception of God, and we’re not even sure about that. “It’s not going to come here,” he announced in stentorian tones, “those hurricanes always go somewhere else.” So much for that. Tom Killeen had made his decision and that was the end of it. No hurricanes for us.
Somehow, Hurricane Carol failed to get this news. She kept barreling along, heading straight for us, unimpressed by the legions of nonbelievers. On August 31, she slammed into Old Saybrook, Connecticut, tearing the place to shreds with 125-mph winds, blowing roofs off houses and dumping unheard of amounts of water all over the place. Providence, R.I. got 12 feet. Narragansett Bay, New Bedford Harbor and Buzzards Bay had storm surges of 14 feet. We stood upstairs in my grandmother’s house, looking out the windows in shock. Nobody had the temerity to ask, “What do you think NOW, Dad?”
All of us watched aghast as large trees began to fall in the streets and the winds picked up to deafening levels. A small leak appeared in the living-room ceiling of our fortress, a place we’d always regarded as impervious to harm. My combative grandmother was typically unflustered. “Don’t worry, kids,” she told a stunned Alice and Bill. “The hammers of Hell couldn’t wreck this house.” We felt a little better then. A hurricane might be scary, make a lot of noise, blow out a window here and there. But there wasn’t a force on God’s green Earth that wanted to screw around with my grandmother.
It Was A One-Eyed, One-Horned Flying Purple People-Eater
Hurricanes in Florida are an occupational hazard. Every year, in late July or early August, tropical depressions form in the Gulf of Mexico and wend their ways either north or west, often smashing into Mexico or the unlucky Texas- to-New Orleans corridor, sometimes heading north over Florida. The storms which head west have time to build up and create havoc, the ones that hit Florida are still in their developmental stages and generally create more angst than trouble. The true hurricane season for us is August-September, when the little critters start forming off the coast of Africa, dine on the warm late-Summer waters of the Atlantic, get fat and come gallivanting over to take a poke at Florida, Georgia or the Carolinas. There are threats every year but most tropical storms eventually take a hard right before they reach the mainland and fizzle out somewhere in the North Atlantic. It’s been a fortunate 13 years since the last monster struck here in 2004, that year a parlay of Charley, Jeanne and Ivan, a woeful threefer which left the peninsula groggy. Plenty of people moved out, nobody moved in and tourists went elsewhere. The Cosmic Arbiter decided enough was enough and gave us a welcome 13-year exemption slip. In 2017, alas, frustrated by over a decade on the leash, the perps had done their time and were finally released back into polite society, unburdened by parole officers. In no time, they were shooting up the Caribbean, smashing poor defenseless islands to atoms, drowning half of east Texas and vamping through most of Florida, leaving a trail of shattered buildings, flooded roads and ravaged coastlines. “Hey Marty---have you seen my yacht? It was here just a few minutes ago?” The questions are: is this an aberration, an unlikely combination of circumstances which won’t be soon repeated---or will this year become the norm, a horrendous result of climate change, of that infernal global warming Al Gore keeps telling us about? Some people think they know. The following is what they’re guessing:
Trouble In Margaritaville
Everyone knows that hurricanes get their fuel from the warm waters of the Atlantic; some speculate that global warming increases these water temperatures and hypes up the storms, resulting in monsters like Irma with historically unprecedented winds. What everyone doesn’t know is that temperatures in the Atlantic are affected by a natural phenomenon called the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation, which results partly from a change in ocean currents. From the 1970s to the early 1990s, Atlantic temperatures were relatively cool because of this oscillation. Since then, the ocean has been generally warmer, coinciding with scientific concern over rising greenhouse gases and elevated global temperatures. To analyze what’s going on, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research developed climate models based on temperatures recorded over the last century, also factoring in various environmental conditions, ranging from the sun’s energy output to the impacts of volcanic eruptions. These models illustrate that the Atlantic has warmed beyond the effect of natural oscillations, according to Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis section at the NCAR in Boulder, Colorado. Trenberth claims there is strong evidence that global warming contributed to the intensification of Hurricane Harvey, which ravaged Houston.
Harvey was spawned from a tropical wave that developed to the east of the Lesser Antilles. It reached tropical storm status on August 17, barely limped into the Gulf of Mexico, then rapidly intensified on August 24 as it took aim at Texas. During this period, surface temperatures in the Gulf were 2.7 to 7.2 degrees Farenheit above average, with record levels of heat deep into the water column and dense air moisture above. Trenberth said the conditions were ripe for the hurricane to intensify and later unleash record rainfall. Great news. Any arguments about climate change being the culprit? You’re kidding, right?
Au Contraire, Mon Ami
The Flying Pie, a firm believer in climate change (we’ve even moved our fruit tree orchards further north), is nonetheless a little dubious about Sudden Hurricane Expansion. After all, it’s been thirteen years with hardly a dollop. So why now?
Like Harvey, Hurricane Irma also formed in the general region where Atlantic waters were abnormally warm, about 2 degrees above average. But some meteorologists contend that other factors were at play as Irma quickly built into a Category 5 storm. Joe Cione, a hurricane researcher with the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, said his analysis shows that Irma intensified in a stretch of the Atlantic water that was relatively cool compared to the surrounding warmer waters. That occurred on September 4 and 5.
Cione and colleague Neal Dorst say other factors such as low vertical wind shear were crucial in supercharging the storm. “Irma’s explosive strengthening was as much a matter of the proper atmospheric elements coming together as the ocean warmth,” Dorst said. There is global consensus that uninterrupted climate change will eventually cause more extreme hurricanes and other undesirable weather events but scientific organizations differ on whether it is already occurring. In May, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change concluded “There is observational evidence for an increase in tropical cyclone activity in the North Atlantic since about 1970, correlated with increases in tropical sea-surface temperatures.” By contrast, the NOAA says “It is premature to conclude that human activities---and particularly greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming---have already had a detectable impact on Atlantic hurricane or global tropical cyclone activity. That said, human activities may have already caused changes that are not yet detectable due to the small magnitude of the changes or observational limitations.” What all that means in a nutshell is, If It Ain’t Here Yet, It’s Coming!" So now what? Do we Floridians all sell our houses and move to Colorado? Or will we just run into savage ice storms there? It’s enough to make a grown man cry, as Dagwood Bumstead used to say. Maybe he still does.
Mighty Mouse Is On The Way!
It is comforting to know that no matter the gravity of the problem, regardless of the impossibility of a solution, there are crazy people at work somewhere in the bowels of the Earth looking for a solution. Some of these prodigies will be heavily scorned when their plans are revealed and celebrated as geniuses when they work out. ‘Twas ever thus. Long live their fame and long live their glory and long may their stories be told.
Stephen Salter is an emeritus professor of engineering design at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and one smart cookie. Doctor Salter has been studying how to harness wave energy since the 1970s, which puts him right up there with Laird Hamilton. In 2003, Salter began looking into using this energy to cool the seas. For ocean temperatures, the magic number for hurricane formation is 79.7 degrees Fahrenheit. Dr. Salter wondered if it might be possible to nudge that number down a tad early on and reduce the risks and intensities of ensuing storms. Being a wild and crazy guy, he decided to take a shot. This is what he opted to do:
To cool the surface of the ocean, Salter invented a wave-powered pump that would move warm surface water down to depths of 650 feet. Made from a ring of tires lashed together around a tube extending below the surface, waves would overtop the ring, pushing the column of water down while a check valve in the tube would keep it from flowing back. Salter’s namesake device, the Salter Sink, was invented in 2009 at Intellectual Ventures, a technology firm headed by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold. (Later that year, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates also filed for a patent to cool the ocean’s surface with barges.) The idea is that thousands of Salter Sinks placed in hurricane-prone areas would cool waters enough to make a measureable reduction in the strength of storms. Hey, is anyone listening? SALTER SINKS! What have we got to lose?
Salter wasn’t done just yet. He devised another hurricane-fighting tactic, making clouds a tiny bit brighter using aerosols, harnessing a phenomenon called the Twomey Effect. This is the observation that for clouds containing the same amount of moisture, the clouds with smaller suspended water droplets reflect more sunlight. The increased sunlight reflectance in the sky would keep the waters below from warming up to the hurricane threshold while also curbing evaporation, thereby reducing the atmospheric moisture needed to create a storm.
“If you really want to stop hurricanes, I believe that cloud brightening is the better way to do it,” Salter advised. Cloud brightening yields a much greater impact on the weather for a much smaller perturbation than directly cooling the ocean, he explained. Salter envisions unmanned boats spraying sub-micron-sized water droplets into the sky, seeding shinier clouds in areas forecasted to spawn storms. This would be much cheaper than spraying aerosols from aircraft, the boats could target specific regions, the effects would dissipate quickly and the change in cloud brightness would be imperceptible to the human eye. Salter estimates that it would cost $40 million to construct a prototype seeding system but has not yet been able to convince any public or private takers. “At the moment, governments are saying it’s premature, we don’t need it yet,” Salter shrugs. “Irma might change their minds.” In retrospect, Hurricane Katrina led to $80 billion in insured losses alone.
The Ray-Ban Alternative
Research published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests another hurricane-quelling option. By pumping sulfate gases into our planet’s upper atmosphere, we could probably cool down our oceans enough to cut the number of super-hurricanes in half over the next 50 years. Such an effort would require about 10 billion tons of sulfates to get the job done, an amount much larger than the sulfate discharge from a typical volcano eruption. Sulfates are known to block out some wavelengths of light, therefore regularly pumping the chemicals into the atmosphere would essentially create a giant pair of sunglasses for the Earth, bringing the overall ocean temperatures down. There is already some evidence this works.
The journal explains, “The explosive volcanic eruptions of Katmai (Alaska, June 1912) and El Chicon (Mexico, April 1982) preferentially loaded the Northern Hemisphere with aerosol and they were followed by the least active hurricane season on record in 1914 and the least active hurricane season in the satellite observation period in 1983. The trick, the scientists say, is to get the balance correct, since a cooler Atlantic means more intense Pacific hurricanes and vice versa. But if both oceans were properly cooled, that would temper the frequency and intensity of storms in the Atlantic and the Pacific. Moreover, it would be affordable at a cost of about $10 billion a year.
One small problem. Pumping that much sulfate into the atmosphere would poke holes in the protective ozone layer surrounding the Earth. You know, the one that merely protects us from deadly radiation from the sun. Oops. Nonetheless, the model still works. Engineers are already working on a mix of gases that mimic the shading effects of sulfates. When they get that annoying little problem figured out, those artificial particles could be pumped into the atmosphere with no damage to the ozone layer.
Changes in latitudes, changes in attitudes, nothing remains quite the same. Impossible problems today are tomorrow’s happy conquests. Where is all this encouraging news in my morning newspaper? I, for one, would much rather read about Hope For The Future than read about Russian hookers peeing on Donald Trump. Hmm, bad analogy. Let’s try again. I, for one, would much rather read about Hope For The Future than hear any more about Kim Jong-un’s nuclear missiles heading for Chicago. Let’s brighten up those front pages, boys, there’s good news breaking out everywhere. For one merry thing, September 30th is the true end of another hurricane season. No matter what those silly meteorologists say.
That’s all, folks….
