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- [00:01]
Emily Gracie
Last week, Hurricane Milton battered Florida with storm surge, category 3 wind speeds, widespread flooding and tornadoes. This came just on the heels of Hurricane Helene, which caused widespread destruction and death across the Southeast. As our world faces extreme weather events that no one has seen in their lifetime, a small but vocal online community of conspiracy theorists have perpetuated dangerous false information about cloud seeding and weather modification. Some have even speculated that these hurricanes have been caused by the government. This week we're going off the radar to address those conspiracy theories. I'll be chatting with scientists who have built their life's work around studying and attempting to modify hurricanes not to cause harm, as some might think, but to prevent destruction and save lives. We'll dive into the history of weather modification.
- [01:00]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
In the 50s, they tried seeding the hurricane actually with dry ice and why.
- [01:06]
Emily Gracie
They say messing with Mother Nature is an incredibly complex issue.
- [01:11]
Moshe Alomaro
The power of hurricane is equivalent to the power of all the power plants of the world combined. Nothing can work to modify hurricane I'm.
- [01:23]
Emily Gracie
Meteorologist Emily Gracey and you're listening to off the Radar, a production of the National Weather Desk. On the show, we dig deep into topics about weather, climate, the oceans, space, and much more. Our goal is to help you better understand the weather and to love it as much as we do. Hey prime members, have you heard? You can listen to your favorite podcasts ad free. Good news. With Amazon Music, you have access to the largest catalog of ad free top podcasts included with your prime membership. To start listening, download the Amazon Music app for free or go to Amazon.com adfreepodcast that's Amazon.com adfreepodcast to catch up on the latest episodes without the ads.
- [02:06]
Moshe Alomaro
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- [02:46]
Emily Gracie
Welcome to off the Radar. I'm Emily Gracey. If you've been following the show for a while, you may have heard our episode where we previously discussed cloud seeding, a type of weather modification that uses substances like silver iodide to essentially make it rain. We did a whole episode about how this method was used during the Vietnam War in an attempt to wash out the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And take a listen. It's called Weaponizing Weather. Today. In light of this trending topic of hurricane engineering, we're continuing the discussion on the show today. We have Dr. Hugh Willoughby. Dr. Willoughby was the chief scientist on Project Stormfury, NOAA's only attempt at hurricane modification. He spent 25 years working with NOAA's Hurricane Research Division, including seven years as the director of that division. Dr. Willoughby has studied hurricane dynamics and flown on over 4, 400 reconnaissance flights into hurricanes and typhoons on missions like those that we recently covered in our Hurricane Hunters episode last week. I'll also be talking to Moshe Alomaro, a retired MIT atmospheric scientist who spent much of his career trying to learn whether we could control the natural forces of hurricanes so that they're not as destructive, only to realize that the technical, political, and ethical issues of hurricane modification made the work nearly impossible to put into practice. But first up, I'm going to check in with my friend and TV meteorologist Ed Piotrowski to discuss some of the wild comments he's gotten from viewers asking about weather modification in the wake of these recent hurricanes. So, Ed, let's talk about this week and what's been going on here because Helene happened not too long ago. Disaster in North Carolina. This has been a mess. This is awful. And now as we're recording this right now, Milton is making landfall tonight. So let's talk about some weather conspiracy theories that have been going on when it comes to this. I'm curious because you posted something on Facebook about this. Can you tell me first of all what you wrote? And then I want to hear about what viewers were saying in response to that.
- [04:56]
Ed Piotrowski
Sure. I simply posted because of so many rumors that were circulating that hurricanes could not be controlled by man. In other words, we can't control their strength. We cannot control their motion. And I thought that was a pretty safe post to make just to quell the rumors. But unfortunately, the conspiracy theorists came out of the woodworks talking about how the government is controlling the weather and they're aiming for a certain group of people that the hurricanes are going to go to, which is all nonsense, as we all know. There have been times where Noah has tried to do some work on reducing the impacts from hurricanes, but they've blatantly said and openly said that none of it has ever worked. So it's just about prepping for those.
- [05:40]
Emily Gracie
What are some of the things that people have said in response to this and where are they getting their information?
- [05:47]
Ed Piotrowski
You know, there's a lot of bad actors on the Internet and as we both know, there's money to be made on the Internet, especially on social media. So I think a lot of these people literally just make stuff up so that the fear mongering causes the information to spread. And when that happens, they're getting a lot of interaction. But there's also a lot of conspiracy theories out there where people are just quite frankly misinformed. As you have heard quite a bit. People will throw patents in your face that a patent is proof that this is actually happening. When in reality what a patent is is basically to protect you from anybody else using your invention or trying to duplicate your invention. There is absolutely nothing in a patent that says that it actually works. There's no proof of that at all. But people want to hear what they want to hear. No matter how many facts you throw in their face, they just don't want to believe that they could be wrong.
- [06:43]
Emily Gracie
Right. And to be clear, you know, like, I don't think anybody's denying that weather modification has existed in the past. In the past, rather. But you know that this is not something that there's so many things wrong with these theories. Like, you know, why would you test out any sort of hurricane modification on a major landfalling or hurricane? Like why test something and then why make something worse? But you know, I get it a little bit too in the way that something awful happened, people want answers. And in an absence of, you know, being able to figure out the why, they look to whatever's available as far as information, whatever is readily available. And there's a lot readily available available on the Internet.
- [07:27]
Ed Piotrowski
I mean, how many times did we hear, we've never seen anything like Helene or we've never seen anything like Milton, when there's clearly history that shows those kind of events. You know, a hurricane turning back to the northwest or hurricane crossing the Gulf of Mexico does happen and it has happened in the past. It's just a rare event. People have short term memories or quite frankly weren't alive when some of these things actually happened.
- [07:50]
Emily Gracie
Yeah. So, you know, I, I was going to do an episode on Asheville and everything that's gone on in Asheville and I'm going to, I'm putting that off, but I wanted to kind of bump that back a week and give it a little time to breathe and address this weather modification situation that's been in the buzz right now. So on today's show, I'm going to talk to two very interesting people. I'm sure you've heard of Project Stormfury back in the 60s and 70s, it was kind of the government's attempt to modify hurricanes. And as you know, and as I know, it was not successful and still is not successful. But I am talking today to the chief scientist from that project, from Project Stormfury. His name is Dr. Hugh Willoughby. Very interesting guy. And then I'm also going to talk to a professor named Moshe Alamaro, and he's an MIT researcher, retired now, but spent most of his career trying to modify hurricanes. Lots of different really wild things that are going to, you know, make people say, like, oh my gosh, that could work, that could work. You know, it did not. I mean, obviously we're still dealing with landfall and hurricanes, so there has not been success with this. But, you know, it's definitely something we need to talk about because the less we talk about it, the more people think that there's something to hide. So I think it's important to bring it to the forefront. But is there anything else you want to share about landfalling hurricanes and kind of the lessons learned here from this year so far and moving forward?
- [09:20]
Ed Piotrowski
You know, it's just, I think the most important thing that people need to remember is to have really credible sources. Make sure that the person you're getting information from is a meteorologist or a scientist that studies the atmosphere. To me, that's the most important thing because a lot of these things that are, are circulating are from random people on the Internet. There's a big TikTok video going around right now that the Gulf Stream is going to pull Milton due north and wreck the east coast of the United States. And people just don't have enough scientific knowledge to realize that that's just not going to happen. So it casts doubt on our forecast. And then of course, as we all know, when there's uncertainty or confusion about what the forecast is, a lot of bad decisions can be made. And unfortunately, people die when they make bad decisions on bad information. So I think just make sure you have credible sources when it comes to that and don't buy into all the conspiracy theories. Make sure you listen to scientists who actually study this for a living.
- [10:21]
Emily Gracie
Right. You know, it's funny because in times like these and we often talk about the role of local TV meteorologists and, you know, people watching TV less and less, but I always point people to a TV meteorologist to follow on Facebook or Instagram or wherever you get your weather information, because that is your credible source. Your local meteorologist is going to know what's best for your area. So times like this, people like you are an incredibly important source. So thank you for all you do, Ed.
- [10:50]
Ed Piotrowski
Well, thank you for what you do. I think one of the funniest things is the contradiction. Sometimes with these conspiracies, there are people that absolutely don't believe that man has anything to do with climate change, yet fully believe that man is impacting hurricanes and where they go. So you just kind of think sometimes about what. What's being said and doesn't even make sense, you know?
- [11:13]
Emily Gracie
Right. And we're going to learn about kind of hurricane dynamics today, too, and exactly what it would take to steer a hurricane or dissipate a hurricane or make a hurricane worse. You know, I can't wait to hear it.
- [11:27]
Ed Piotrowski
When you talk to Hugh Willoughby, tell him I said hello. I interviewed him in the Bahamas in the mid-90s. He's one of the most brilliant people I've ever met in my life.
- [11:35]
Emily Gracie
So he's one of the original hurricane hunters. I mean, he used to fly into typhoons.
- [11:40]
Ed Piotrowski
He knows what he's talking about.
- [11:42]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
Yeah.
- [11:42]
Emily Gracie
Awesome, Ed. Thank you so much. And happy anniversary to you and Cindy. You've got to be nuts. I can't believe that she agreed to marry you during hurricane season, knowing I'll.
- [11:54]
Ed Piotrowski
Tell you the story behind that. We got married the day after Matthew and I didn't even think I was going to make my wedding. But amazing story.
- [12:00]
Emily Gracie
At least she knew what she was getting into from day one.
- [12:03]
Ed Piotrowski
That's true intervention that I was able to make it for sure.
- [12:07]
Emily Gracie
And thanks so much. Next up, I'm talking with Hugh Willoughby, a research professor at Florida Atlantic University. He has spent more than 50 years studying the dynamics of hurricane motion, structural evolution and intensity change. Dr. Willoughby is no stranger to discussions about weather modification.
- [12:29]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
Okay, it's kind of my punishment for Kevin Kilt, Project Storm Fury. I get charming interviews like yours, but I also get a lot of a ignorant and be well, why can't we make hurricanes go away?
- [12:45]
Emily Gracie
So one thing I hear kind of some misinformation about is what actually qualifies as weather modifications. So can you give me kind of the basics on what weather modification actually is?
- [12:58]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
It started with rain making in the 40s, the dusted clouds with silver iodine. And there's. It's sort of complicated, but they believed in the 40s that all rain began as Ice crystals in clouds that extended above the freezing level and then melted when it fell down towards the ground. And by encouraging that to happen at a lower altitude in the clouds, it could make your brain. Irving Langmuir at the Nobel Prize winning physical chemist was a big advocate of this process. He kind of went off the deep end. He was a real serious guy, but this was kind of his blind spot. In the 50s, they tried seeding the hurricane with actually with dry ice. And they thought it was going to head out to sea. It was off the Florida and Georgia coast. It turned around and hit Florida and Georgia, mostly Georgia. And the people there were very unhappy about that. In the 60s, Project Storm theory started and the idea was you'd seed around the eye, stimulate the clouds to grow and form a new eye wall, encircling the old one, and that would then contract and strangle the old eyewall. And while it was strangling the old eyewall, the winds would be reduced. And they tried that in four different hurricanes. I was at the Naval Postgraduate School getting my training as a naval meteorologist when Hurricane Camille hit the Gulf Coast. But at the same time, they were seeding Hurricane Debbie. And so they were looking for volunteers and simple soul that I am, yeah, yeah, yeah, sign me up, you know, they were looking for people with more education than experience or judgment maybe, and I fit the bill. So I flew Typhoon and economists in the Pacific, taught for three years at the Naval Academy and got out and came to the University of Miami with the idea of working for the Hurricane Research Division, which had its. One of its missions, Project Storm Fury. This hurricane modification effort. Before I got there, they seeded three different Hurricanes, the most recent one in Debbie in 1969. They thought they'd weakened the hurricane artificially. There were people who were really nervous about cloud seeding. So we studied unmodified hurricanes. And what we found was there was a lot of natural ice down to. Down to just about to the freezing level. So cloud seeding wouldn't have much room to work. They also, unmodified hurricanes form an outer eye wall and it contracts around the inner one, and the inner one falls apart. And no, no intervention by humans.
- [16:24]
Emily Gracie
So what people would hear now is an eye wall replacement cycle is what was happening there.
- [16:30]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
Right, right. And I wrote the papers that introduced that concept. People had seen concentric eye walls, but they didn't put the. Put the pieces together. And I wrote the Project Storm Ferry paper that caused the project to its demise.
- [16:50]
Emily Gracie
So I have a question. If you were. You were in The Navy during Vietnam. Wasn't there a weather modification project that was happening during Vietnam? Yes, it's the ho Chi Minh Trail 1. Yeah.
- [17:03]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
That was seating over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And it had some sort of a.
- [17:11]
Emily Gracie
Code name, Operation Popeye.
- [17:14]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
Yes, I think we were doing that. I was there after they pulled the plug on Project Popeye. But the idea was to make it rain on the Ho Chi Minh Trail so that the North Vietnamese couldn't infiltrate to South Vietnam. It rained an awful lot anyway and the North Vietnamese were used to it. They made, they might have made a rain 10% more, but 10% more doesn't mean much when you're walking along, you know, carrying two artillery shells, wearing black pajamas.
- [17:44]
Emily Gracie
I mean, there have been some successes in using cloud seeding. Right. Like I have seen even now in Texas, drought stricken portions of Texas where they're cloud seeding crops to basically make it rain, to deal with drought. So is there a place for it or is it always going to be controversial?
- [18:04]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
The real fallacy is you can't create water by cloud seeding. If there's not enough water, the atmospheric conditions don't favor rain, you're not going to make it rain. I've considered writing a science fiction novel. You could actually use hurricanes that did, really did eye wall replacements just at the crucial time. You could claim that there were, you know, these heroic hurricane flyers going out and keeping the hurricanes from happening and destroying coastal cities. And you could use the actual hurricanes that made concentric eyewalls. You could just interpret it, interpret the results differently.
- [18:51]
Emily Gracie
I feel like you would make a lot of money if you did that. But then also people would not see that as science fiction. They would see that as science fact and they would run with it.
- [19:02]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
Let me give you an example of a weather modification thing that has a hope of working. Okay.
- [19:08]
Emily Gracie
Okay.
- [19:10]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
You know, the Gulf Stream goes through the Straits of Florida between Florida and Cuba and then flows northward between Florida and the Bahamas. You could create structures in the Gulf Stream. And you know this isn't a serious proposal. Right. This is just kind of playing around with it. You would, you would make square dots 140 meters long and they'd be kind of trapezoidal shaped with the slope on, so that when you normal, with the normal operation, when there wasn't a hurricane that you wanted, wanted to weaken, they would be down 100 meters in the ocean. There would be basically a hundred of them in a row across the Gulf Stream. Okay, you have the picture?
- [20:02]
Emily Gracie
Yeah.
- [20:02]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
And there'd be three or Four rows.
- [20:04]
Emily Gracie
Okay.
- [20:05]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
When you wanted to weaken a hurricane as they were approaching Miami or Fort Lauderdale or you would tip them up to a 45 degree angle, cool water would go in the bottom and out the top and you would use that to cool off the Gulf Stream, which would cut off the supply of energy to the hurricane. Okay, how is this going to be a technology gone wrong? Well, they get this thing all set, right? So they turn it up, turn it on, and suddenly it's. They do this in June and suddenly the climate of Florida, which is steamy and miserable, becomes sort of like the climate of California. Not 100%, but you know, in June, July and August, it's like April. Oh, that's good for the tourist industry. So let's just leave these things turned up. It will rain less. That's too bad. But you know, the tourist industry is more important than agriculture. And then it messes up the ocean circulation and triggers an ice age.
- [21:22]
Emily Gracie
So it's a butterfly effect. Even if you modify something for the better, something bad could happen too. And also, not to mention the fact that all, you know, the hurricanes that are coming from the Gulf of Mexico right now too. So you've got a Florida filled with tourists and, you know, hurricanes coming from the other direction.
- [21:36]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
There was a serious project. Some marine engineers from a nameless European country talked about putting wave powered pumps to bring cold water up from below and cool off the ocean and make hurricanes less severe. Where do you think the rain that irrigates soybeans and corn and wheat in the heartland of the US where does that evaporate from? Right where they were planning to make it cool. And you make it cool. There's not a much, you know, you could start a new dust bowl. There are real problems with unintended consequences.
- [22:17]
Emily Gracie
You know, there's a lot of like, ethical dilemmas that have been brought up because of this. Do you think that the science community should have more ethical training?
- [22:27]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
Medical research? There's some pretty careful ethical controls. Actually. The statistical schemes we use to evaluate the cloud seeding experiment, we actually hired a medical statistician to actually do the statistics. So I had a chance to talk to him some. If your experimental treatment really has a profound effect, you stop the double blind experiment and give everybody the treatment. The medical people have thought pretty carefully about it and most of them are motivated by desire to help people.
- [23:13]
Emily Gracie
Talk to me about the government because right now people think that there's secret government operations going on when it comes to weather modification. And they often bring up Project Stormfury as it's been going ON since the 60s, the government's been trying to control the weather. Can you speak to what is going on now when it comes to weather modification and in particular Hurricane Helene and the impact that it had in especially areas inland?
- [23:42]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
In a word, nothing. No, there's, there's no enthusiasm whatsoever, at least at noaa, for cloud seeding. We all wanted it to succeed, we worked at it. And as we got more into the science, it looked less and less favorable. And people are not going to devote their scientific careers to something that isn't going to, isn't going to have any results. You know, if you cause something like what Helene did in the, in the western North Carolina, it wouldn't be good for your career, but you wouldn't want to hurt all those people. Simply from ethical point of view, do.
- [24:25]
Emily Gracie
You think too much emphasis is being put on trying to modify weather as opposed to kind of hitting things at their source? When we're talking about the warm Gulf waters and climate change and, you know, carbon emissions, nobody seems to be really looking at this from the source of the Gulf waters being so warm. Instead it seems to be, let's put a band aid on what's already happening.
- [24:51]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
You sort of bring this up at the appropriate time. About an hour before the email, I and my two co authors are publishing a paper in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology that was just accepted. I got the accepted notice literally at noon today.
- [25:17]
Emily Gracie
Congratulations.
- [25:19]
Dr. Hugh Willoughby
Let me give you what's happening scientifically. We know that a warmer ocean produces more evaporation. And since the 1950s, Benner Miller, who was what we would now call the science and operations officer at the National Hurricane center, showed that a warmer ocean produces a lower, lower pressure effect of a warmer ocean is well established, but there have been a series of papers that say. Say what you will about this theoretical stuff, the damage is increasing. Well, this paper that's just been accepted says, well, yes, it does increase. And we make three different kinds of statistical arguments which I think are very persuasive. So we really do need to start managing emissions. Now. What I think is true, the whole electric cars, renewable sources of electricity, solar, wind, et cetera, it takes about 80 years for a technology to evolve. And we're really in a race between these renewable sources and improved battery technology and global warming. And if we are right on the verge of it being more attractive to power utilities to use renewable sources than fossil fuels, but they tend to make economic decisions rather than environmental decisions. But as the Economic decisions become so compelling, it's so much cheaper to switch to renewable sources. Then we've got a chance.
- [27:19]
Emily Gracie
Moshe Alomaro is a retired research scientist from MIT where he received his Master's of Atmospheric Science. Moshe spent years initiating programs with the hope of modifying hurricanes.
- [27:32]
Moshe Alomaro
So I wrote a test, this at MIT on the physics of hurricane. I built a lab where we build, manage and operate a lab where we simulated hurricane. And we tried different, I mean thought experiment, different approaches to address the hurricane and perhaps to reduce its intensity or to divert it from its truck.
- [28:05]
Emily Gracie
His first idea stemmed from the work that was being done by the government with Project Stormfury.
- [28:10]
Moshe Alomaro
The idea was in Storm Fury is to seed in the water drop in the hurricane with a material which enhanced nucleation enhance the freezing of the drop. Now when a material is coming in contact with water drop and that nucleation material, it enhances the freezing of the drop. But then the drop itself has a property to crystallize and to seed other drop. And then there is an avalanche drop and drop and drop. And then once you start with that, it's going and going and going. So the material that they used was, what is it? Liquid CO2. The best material, as I said, it's ice itself. So what we wanted is to take airplane with container and to fly very high when it's very cold and the water in the container would freeze. And then we will use it to nucleate the drop in the cloud. Robert Simpson, I communicate with him and he said that already the hurricane contain ice. So if we had ice, nothing happened.
- [29:45]
Emily Gracie
So that project was not going to work with hurricanes. But he found another use for the technology.
- [29:51]
Moshe Alomaro
But then I developed this for another project where I use snow making equipment to create artificial snow, to create mountain of artificial snow and to use the snow for water storage from. I mean the water would be pumped from nearby storage where it's full in the winter will create huge pile nearby. And then in the summer the water would melt slowly and will go back to the reservoir. And in addition, those pile of snow can be used for year round ski facilities.
- [30:37]
Emily Gracie
His next idea involved gathering old jet engines to create an artificial updraft.
- [30:43]
Moshe Alomaro
And then there was a Soviet literature in the 60s where they took jet engine mountain vertical and they were successful in creating updraft of air that is going upward. And they used it to try to do weather modification with this.
- [31:07]
Emily Gracie
Okay, so if you're like me, your first thought is what does this look like?
- [31:12]
Moshe Alomaro
It's a retired jet engine. And there are Thousands of them around. And they are very inexpensive and they're not expensive because they're not flight worthy. So the idea is to direct them up world to put them vertical. And then the jet, it's called free jet. The jet has a property that when it go up, air is entrained in the air that going up. So the amount of air that is going up increasing. But air is entrained in the air which is entrained, you know, and then eventually you have huge amount of air that going up. And that is a condition for rainfall. When water vapor go up, the water vapor reach air layer which is very cold. And then the water vapor freeze and then you have rain. Now it sounds really stupid. The idea was to take jet engine mountain on large ship and then to create artificial small hurricane which will take energy from the. From the, from the ocean, depriving the energy for the real hurricane that would come later.
- [32:42]
Emily Gracie
And once again Moshe thought, okay, this didn't work for hurricanes, but maybe it has another use. Well, one way a bunch of rising air would be useful is in a situation where sinking air is causing reduced visibility and poor air quality.
- [32:57]
Moshe Alomaro
So it didn't work for hurricane. And then we tried to use it to enhance rain, which was not enough air going up. And then I tried to develop, I develop a complete concept to address smog condition. And I proposed this to India and China. But then it died out because of the COVID So we couldn't continue with this.
- [33:25]
Emily Gracie
It didn't stop with jet engines. Listen to this one.
- [33:28]
Moshe Alomaro
And the idea was to spread black carbon on the top of hurricane. And the black carbon absorbs sun radiation and in that way would affect the hurricane physics somehow.
- [33:46]
Emily Gracie
But after years of research, Moshe came to a conclusion.
- [33:51]
Moshe Alomaro
Nothing can work to modify hurricane. Because the public perception and the technical challenge. The power of hurricane is equivalent to the power of all the power plant of the world combined. Can you imagine the problem is the control experiment are difficult or impossible. Control experiment. Say you want to experiment some drug on some patients. So you take, I don't know, a thousand patients and then you give to some placebo and some reel of the drug. And this is a control experiment. But we cannot do it on hurricane in the weather modification. Because every cloud system is different than another cloud system because of the natural variability of the weather. Okay? You modify the weather and you don't know if it happened because of natural variability or because of your attempt to modify the weather, you know.
- [34:58]
Emily Gracie
And I'm going to play the devil's advocate here for a Second, I want to go back to you were talking about no control. And how do you know that what is being done is being impacted by this and not by the natural variability of what's going on in the atmosphere?
- [35:13]
Moshe Alomaro
What is the cause and effect? Nobody can know what is the cause and effect.
- [35:18]
Emily Gracie
So when you said that my mind went to climate change, because I often hear people say that about climate change. How do we know if we don't have a control that this is what's happening because of what we're doing and not because of what's naturally going to happen anyway?
- [35:35]
Moshe Alomaro
Okay, so when I say control, experiment, it could be controlled observation, not necessarily experiment. So if we see that, I don't know, half a million years ago there was a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere and we can find this. And at that time there was global warming. And then another time, 50,000 years ago, the same and another time 10,000 years ago, then based on the observation, we can conclude that there is a cause and effect in increasing carbon dioxide in the air and that cause global warming. So it's not necessarily just control. Experiment can be based on observation.
- [36:28]
Emily Gracie
So you spent a long time doing this and you're no longer doing this. Tell me like mentally where you're at now with all of those years that you spent trying to modify hurricanes.
- [36:38]
Moshe Alomaro
I'm saying that it's hopeless. It's hopeless. The only solution is to build better standard and not to build, not to allow insurance for building near the shore. That is the only solution. And of course good evacuation plan. But there is nothing could be done about hurricane. You must understand that hurricane start as tropical storm. Only 1 in 10 tropical storms become hurricane. And tropical storms are beneficial. They bring rain to the southeast and actually some to the southwest. So they are beneficial. So we cannot address tropical storms start in East Africa. We cannot address it from there. So there were a proposal to cool the ocean like the Norwegian plan that is described in the Washington Post and in Japan. I can go on and on, but you cannot cool the entire ocean. Let's assume that you cool a strip of part of the ocean. First of all, you don't know if the Oricon next Oricon would go over that patch of cold water. Secondly, even if it go over that patch would be, I don't know, a few mile ten of mile wide. But the Orican advance at the velocity of about 10 miles per hour. So it will go over this cold water patch in an hour or two and that's it. And the hurricane would continue to intensify. After that, sometimes the ore can go overland like in Florida and then come from the other side of Florida and then intensify again. Okay. Over hot water. So it absurd. What the Norwegian tried to do, the Japanese is even more absurd. They try to harvest energy from the hurricane. Yes, the power of hurricane is high, extremely high. As I said, like the power of the entire power plant of the world. But it's not energy power. Energy is power multiplied by time. So what are you going to create power plant which would work only for two or three hours a year on a single hurricane? It's absurd. And then what are you going to drag the power plant with a hurricane? Again, it's absurd.
- [39:40]
Emily Gracie
Can we modify the intensity of hurricanes by reducing carbon emissions?
- [39:47]
Moshe Alomaro
No.
- [39:48]
Emily Gracie
So nothing we do to reduce emissions is going to help with the intense the change in the intensity.
- [39:56]
Moshe Alomaro
Okay, there are some, I don't know if I say speculation or theories that global warming cause in intensification intensification of hurricane. But if you are going to do something about global warming and about carbon dioxide, about carbon dioxide, it will be for global warming and then byproduct it will or will not affect the hurricane. But you're not going to do this just for the hurricane. Because the problem of global warming is much, much bigger than the problem of hurricane.
- [40:39]
Emily Gracie
Gotcha. But it could be a byproduct.
- [40:41]
Moshe Alomaro
Yeah, but it's a small. It's a small byproduct in comparison to the huge problem of global warming.
- [40:53]
Emily Gracie
Off the Radar is a production of the National Weather Desk. Make sure you're following the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. New episodes publish every Tuesday. Also, follow the National Weather Desk on all social media platforms to make sure you are getting credible weather information. Know your source and trust the experts. If you liked today's show, please share it with a friend. And make sure you check out our other episode about weather modification. Thank you to Dr. Hugh Willoughby and Moshe Alomaro for sharing their expertise today. Also to Ed Piotrski from WPDE and Myrtle Beach, South Carolina for joining me at the beginning of the episode. Ed is a great source of trustworthy weather information online and on air. As always, a special thanks to my associate producer Brian Petrus for the National Weather Desk. Got meteorologist Emily Gracie. Make it a great day.