Are Hurricanes Good Things or Bad Things?

[HurryKane]

They're natural....I hesitate to say "good" so I'll go with necessary evil.

It's funny...my father is a very smart physicist. And I fully expected him to laugh it off when I told him about the Dyn-o-Crap.

But since I was in real danger of being hit by Ivan, he had a completely new and different view of hurricanes and began to say that anything we could do to stop them was ok in his book. He'd just heard that we were in a cycle of higher activity and couldn't stop saying, "We've got to do something about them!"

Heh. I guess that's what fatherly love will do to you. He's calmed down since, and I've explained to him that being in a cane's path was a choice I made when I moved here.

I was very lucky to only have a large limb down (about the worst damage in my neighborhood it seems). My prayers are with those east of here.

[Patrick99]

I heard that Florida Bay depends on a good hurricane every few years to wash away silt and muck and generally cleanse it. DEPENDS! I also remember that Florida Bay was in somewhat bad shape prior to Andrew....algae blooms, etc. Andrew's passing gave it a shot in the arm.

If you "stopped" hurricanes, somehow I bet nature would find some way to correct the heat imbalance, and it wouldn't be pretty.

[Patrick99]

Also, in my opinion, saying the weather is "good" or "bad" is totally ridiculous. The weather is what it is, and is the way it is for a reason.

[bartman]

hurricanes don't cool the planet... they don't funnel
warm air out to outer space... they simply re distribute
the warm low latitude air to the upper latitudes...
very important...

This is logical. Hurricanes transfer heat from the tropical ocean and disperse this heat into the atmosphere. The upper river of airflow generated by hurricanes eventually sinks (subsidence) around the storm into the atmosphere and may possibly stack up at the polar region before forcing a mass of cooler (cold, really) air to slide southward. The circle is closed.