Dismantling Hurricanes

I've been pondering the weather lately and wondering why the world hasn't done anything to stop it. Yeah, I said it.

Every fall, we're spoon-fed a non-stop stream of scary media regarding storms. It seems as if every week we're told to worry about Tropical Storm Such and Such. Katrina is barely a year behind us, and though I feel for all that has been lost and left unredeemed in Nola, we really need to be looking ahead, not dwelling on what's already passed; because let's face it: storms happen every year. And though I don't intend on analyzing the political validity of the existence of Global Warming, we should be looking at ways to prevent a disastrous storm from striking a heavily populated area again. Because yes, it will happen again if we do nothing about it, guaranteed. Maybe not in New Orleans this time. Maybe it swings out of the gulf and smacks Houston, or Mobile, or Key West. Because Storms happen. They happen every year.

The fact: sometimes these storms will threaten urban centers containing millions of lives.

We should have already developed a system for eliminating, or weakening, those rare, high-intensity storms. This could be a weapon of last resort that we could implement only when major cities were directly threatened by Category 5 hurricanes. In this way, we could ensure the lives of millions of people in urban areas. In fact, concentrating people in nearby urban areas while storms were knocked out would be more intelligent than letting people race across the countryside as they try to flee approaching hurricanes.

I have no doubt we could develop the technology today.

• Might not a large, super-hot, high-intensity laser shot into the eye of a storm cause it to do something? Apparently, we'll never know.
  

• Could we not "seed" a hurricane in such a way that caused it to drop most of its moisture and dissipate?

• Or how about the opposite, by bombing a storm cloud with an intense hygroscopic, like Calcium Chloride powder, to rob the storm of precipitation.

Now I know I'll get a wad of hatecomments about how messing with mother nature is bad and how we can't trust science to do it right, or how my meteorilogical knowledge is off. I'm not saying any of those techniques would work. They might have already been investigated, in fact. My point is that we still have no solution to the problem.

It's unfortunate we can't afford to study further so we can come up with that solution. The $85+ billion dollars that went "missing" in Iraq could have easily funded our solution.

Too bad for the people in Nola. Too bad for us. And too bad for the world.