Playing God: Can We Control the Weather? 8/05 discovery ch.

[Extremeweatherguy]

yeah the movie superstorm was pathetic. It was littered with problems. A few I found particularly annoying were...


-The hurricane being located just off the SC/NC coast and yet being only 6-8 hours away from a NYC landfall.

-The hurricane making landfall in NYC as a large shelf cloud filled with lightning and winds that looked to be in the Cat. 1 range at most (when this was supposed to be a Cat. 3 making a direct hit). It didn't look anything like a real hurricane landfall and was still sunny up until the eyewall hit.

-The storm surge that looked more like a mega tsunami. (yeah right.. )

-The damage in the city after the storm being very minimal. The flags in the background weren't even tattered! lol. And the skycrapers only lost scattered windows.

-The news reports that kept saying "A Cat. 3 hitting New York would be a like a Cat. 5 hitting anywhere else" and then the reporter going on to say, "New York can expect winds near 170mph" (when it was only a Cat. 3)! That made no sense to me at all.

-The cloud seeding consisting of just 1 airplane and 12 small robotic planes...as if that would be enough to effectively move the storms path.

-The fact that the first storm (Alpha) was still around at the same time the main storm (Grace) was. That would mean that 5 storms would have had to have formed after Alpha and before Grace...yet the two were only a small distance apart.

-The weather system forming on the west coast and then reaching the east coast in what seemed to be 12 hours or less..LOL! I don't know how that would be possible, but I am guessing it must have been traveling at hundreds of miles per hour to pull that off (totally impossible).

-The "scientists" saying that NYC would be safer with a direct hit than with a hit to New Jersey. I don't know where that idea came from, but a direct hit would certainly be worse than a hit along the southern New Jersey coast.


Well I think that is enough for now. I could probably list 100s more examples, but for now I think the above ones are enough to get my point across. lol.

[Hybridstorm_November2001]

I didn't even watch Superstorm. I was so disgusted with Playing God, that after it was over I turned the channel. Sounds as pathetic as I assumed it would be from the trailer though.

[HURAKAN]

I didn't even watch Superstorm. I was so disgusted with Playing God, that after it was over I turned the channel. Sounds as pathetic as I assumed it would be from the trailer though.

I did the same. "Superstorm," "Category 7," "10.5," are more fiction than science. It just plays with the common fear of common humans!!!

[chadtm80]

I watched Jan, and found it very un-profesional and irresponsible to give the GW stuff based on a 30 year window of the Tropics.. We all KNOW you cant draw any kind of conclusions on the tropics from just a 30 year span.

Do we know that? If we were talking about the Atlantic basin alone, I'd say yes. But all basins?

What in your opinion makes a diffence between us talking just Atlantic VS. all basins?

Also way I were to find say a 10 year span with strength of hurricanes dropped.. Would you just as easily be able to accept that bit as proof of global warming not occuring and or GW not having an effect on canes?

[Cyclenall]

I have only two words for the Superstorm movie after the first program: UTTER GARBAGE (Like the NBC TV weather movies they made about 2-3 years ago on Category 6 and 7 ). I didn't even watch 25% of that, and it was already more then I could take. Someone should pull that off the air before the public is fed more lies within the "movie".

The part where the guy thinks to put washing machine fluid in the waters was very dumb to begin with, and then he said "Maybe it will make the waters cleaner?". If that was real by chance ( ), I would have fired him on the spot for being so incredibly stupid.

To add to the gross nature of the TV movie, they used old, cut up footage of real life shots that didn't even fit in with the movie and film quality (maybe even frames per second the old film was running at!). I really hate it when they recycle real life footage horribly because it just further makes it trash. Was that part of the black and white footage on purpose or meant to fit in? If it was meant to fit in, then I'm speechless.

I'm growing real tired of weather programs and/or TV movies that just make up stuff, treating the public like total morons. When will a good one ever be made? I'm sure the only place you could find that is PBS or NOVA.

[x-y-no]

What in your opinion makes a diffence between us talking just Atlantic VS. all basins?

Because the slow period in the Atlantic basin does not, in general, imply that global cumulative intensity is low. That is, there is nothing in the proposed mechanisms for the AMO-driven variation in the Atlantic season which would affect the other basins.

Also way I were to find say a 10 year span with strength of hurricanes dropped.. Would you just as easily be able to accept that bit as proof of global warming not occuring and or GW not having an effect on canes?

Not if it's embedded in a longer increasing trend. Now if the overall trend were weak, then I'd say that that would be pretty good evidence for some countervailing effect (to enhancement by higher SSTs) of global warming.

A couple of points here ...

First, any trend, increasing or decreasing, in cumulative intensity of tropical systems is independent of the evidence for anthropogenic global warming. The only connection, really, is that SSTs increase as a result of global warming and higher SSTs play at least some role in the intensity of tropical systems. Indeed, the surprising thing would be if AGW had no effect on cumulative intensity. That would mean that some other effect(s) of AGW happen(s) to exactly balance the effect of warmer SSTs.

Second, I certainly don't disagree that it would be better to have a longer timeline than 30 years. But as Chris Landsea and others have correctly pointed out, there are significant problems with the reliability of the pre-satellite data. And 30 years isn't an absurdly short period.

[Wthrman13]

The main problem with most weather modification proposals, particularly those that endeavor to modify hurricanes or other large-scale weather systems, is just that, the scale is way too large. In principle, many of the proposals that have been put forward (such as dumping ice into the ocean ahead of a hurricane to cool the surface waters and thus weaken the storm) would probably work. Most, however, profoundly misunderstand the dynamics and thermodynamics of weather systems and would definitely NOT work, such as the idea of blasting explosive rockets into tornadoes to disrupt their circulation and destroy them (don't even get me started on that one; it doesn't take much imagination to see the numerous flaws of that proposal).

Using the example of dumping ice into the ocean in the path of a hurricane, the problem is that, in practice at least with current economic/technological resources, we could never come up with enough ice or a way to transport it to the proper location in time, because the problem is too large in scale. The same goes for the myriad of other proposals that have come out. They almost always invariably underestimate the scale of the problem. Even if we waited around long enough so that our resources/technology grew to the point that we *could* conceivably do something like this, it's likely we wouldn't even bother because of other technologies that would likely be in place to protect us from the effects of the hurricane (such as improved sea walls, sturdier construction materials, better drainage systems, etc.) which would almost certainly be far cheaper than going down the brute force modification route.

Regarding smaller weather modification ventures, such as cloud seeding, the results of many years of study continue to show much ambiguity in the effectiveness of such schemes, and my conclusion at least is that they are hardly worth the time and effort that could be better spent in such things as better agricultural practices and resource management (particularly of water).

[cpdaman]

HAARP and the Russian woodpecker system are examples or facilities able to modify areas of the ionisphere as well as a whole host of other things, which are National Security Secrets as to what the "full" capabilities are?

does that mean they are modifying the weather here and there? not necessarily

would i be suspicious? you bet

would you be privvy to the information if they were? most certainly not