The weather has to be stopped. Nothing else in the world manages to demonstrate to the human race just how feeble and powerless we really are. We can invent things like IPad’s and International Space Stations, find planets rotating around distant stars, erect billion dollar structures that are visible from space but as soon as the wind kicks up or the ocean decides to create a bigger wave than normal, we all become ants on the driveway surrounded by kids with magnifying glasses.
I don’t believe that controlling the weather is impossible. I think it would be hard. I think we can do a lot of things to better protect ourselves in the meantime. I don’t think it would be a perfect science, but none are. I liken the people who laugh at people who endorse weather control as morons. Isn’t it at least worth a shot? Or are we just supposed to sit around and watch Japan fall over into the Pacific and people in the Midwest float away in funnel clouds and people in the South have their homes flooded over and over and over again, on CNN, for the rest of our lives? I would rather deal with something after I had exhausted every effort to eliminate it then just blindly deal with it.
At some point we need to decide if this planet is ours or not and make some tough decisions. Are the causes that we have our smartest people working on now really all that noble to begin with? You can’t tell me we can’t pull a few people out of designing the next great phone or figuring out a new kind of pill that gives old dudes bigger hadrons and task them with applying their genius toward something that could save lives. Currently we are not getting out in front of this problem; we are not doing ourselves any favors.
I also don’t want to hear a lot of noise about how car exhaust and aerosol cans of hair spray are to blame for the recent uptick in severe weather. Whether it was a contributing factor or not is no longer the point. The fact is, we needed all those things, we still do, they aren’t going away anytime soon, so we need to figure out how to survive on Earth with the shit we need. We made this bed, so we minus well make it comfortable.
We already know that we can ionize clouds in order to weaken their strength. We do it all the time with hurricanes that are scheduled to make landfall. Why can’t we do this in the Midwest with storms that have a shot of producing tornados? Now the meteorologists will likely say something like, they pop up too fast to possibly be able to react to them and ionize the clouds. But this is my point exactly; let’s all just give up then and go back to designing our social networking websites until we all get sucked up into the sky. I will bet if someone offered a 1 billion dollar reward to anyone who figured out an affordable system to ionize cumulous clouds that have the potential to produce tornados in a timely manner, someone would figure it out in 10 years or less.
This brings me to the issue of tidal waves. There are presently over 200 laboratories around the world that do nothing all day except simulate tidal waves. Yet whenever anyone asks them how it’s going over there, all we hear is “We still have a lot to learn about these waves”. Well what the fuck? How long is this going to take exactly? Is there anything else we can do from our end? You people have made the choice to study waves all day, every day so it’s time to figure it out. I’m no scientist but I am pretty sure a tidal wave is just the result of a metric shit ton of water all rushing ashore at the same time. I also don’t think we will ever be able to stop the root cause (earthquakes under the sea floor), but how do we protect the coasts? Is there anything we CAN do? Or should we all just keep floating around in our cars, screaming for help every time one of these things blows in? Every coastal city in the world, that has half a head full of sense, has some sort of 1920’s style break wall in place. So they had to have had an idea back then about how to stop oceanic flooding. Maybe we build them bigger? Maybe we build them 20 times bigger? Wouldn’t spending a couple billion on that pay itself off as soon as it worked once? Or should we just keep flooding and melting down Nuclear Power Plants and causing trillions in damages for halves of entire countries?
Hurricanes are an issue I think that we should have people working on stopping around the clock. We generally get the same answers as we do with tidal waves; “There is still so much we don’t understand”. Well that is just fine then, you just sit there and study then while we all drown. The damages that we endure from hurricanes could be made minimal by both of the aforementioned techniques. First you ionize the shit out of the storms in order to weaken them; next you have your new massive break walls in place to eliminate the storm surge. After all, the storm surge that hurricanes produce is the real killer. That is what causes the most deaths and property damage.
Finally, if you live somewhere that is at risk of real windy situations, such as hurricane force winds, tornadoes, down drafts, micro-bursts, dust storms etc… do yourself a favor and live in some sort of a structure that can withstand these things. Let’s maybe stop putting trailer parks in Tornado Alley. Let’s perhaps stop building New England style homes in New Orleans. Let’s get something in place where the roof doesn’t rip off in winds any higher than 80 miles per hour. Maybe put that thing on some stilts if you live in the French Quarter?
Let’s also build sections of our basements that don’t sit directly below our homes. Just one room, built into a wall in our basement that is not directly under the house that is likely going to collapse and crush us in a tornado. Maybe we look into mandating the same type of shatter proof glass that car windshields are made out of, for the houses that are at the highest risk of being hit by a twister?
Then of course there is the education factor. This is the favored approach by all sorts of people in law enforcement and meteorology. The more people know how to react to various weather situations, the better prepared they are to react properly when they occur. This is all well and good and I don’t want to sound like too much of a prick here but this idea puts entirely too much faith into current US population. Can we please just face the inconvenient facts here? Most of this country is thickly populated by a bunch of real dumb folks. Most of these people cannot be sat down and taught things. Even if those things could someday save their lives. You kind of have to devise operational solutions for these sorts of people that will save their lives without them ever having to even put down their moonshine ladles or manage to get their tongues of their bus windows. Basically you can’t expect most people to be able to do anything to help themselves. You have to do it behind the scenes, on their behalf. It is unfortunate, but it is what it is.
The education approach is also quite flawed. I remember in grade school where we had our “tornado drills” These drills consisted of all the students, walking out in the hallway and bending over with our hands on our heads. Thank god a tornado never really happened because we would have probably been better off just trying to run away from it. Then of course there was the ingenious nuclear bomb drill that consisted of us doing nothing but getting under our desks and closing our eyes. Thanks teacher, I am sure this quarter inch piece of Formica above my head is all I am going to need to survive the thermo-nuclear explosion outside of the school window.
Education is overrated. Education relies far too heavily on people ability to learn things and not having complete dipshits deciding what to teach them and how to teach it to them, too many variables. Technology is a much cleaner solution. We have a lot of smart people left, but they are going fast. My suggestion would be to get them on the important jobs before it is too late for us all.
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