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By Root 329 0

National Hurricane Research Center understood more about hurricanes and how very powerful they really were. And how very big—masses of air and zones of high and low pressure reaching to 40,000 feet and stretching over thousands of miles. Still, Congress allocated $30 million to further the research, so further it they did, creating Project Stormfury to see if they could, once again, use technology to fatally disrupt a major storm. Two hurricanes were seeded with silver iodide, and indeed, maximum sustained winds dropped, if only for a brief period, by some 20 miles an hour, a not-insignificant result. It was tried again in 1969 with Hurricane Debbie. When the results were tabulated, seeding was seen to have some short-term, very short-lived, effects, but had exerted no real pressure and caused no real damage to the storm.

The extensive press coverage of the time persuaded both Cuba and Mexico that the United States was using weather-modification techniques as a form of ecological state terrorism; both countries demanded that the experiments cease forthwith. Soon afterward they did cease, though less because Mr. Castro demanded it than because the results didn't seem justified by the effort expended. But in the end the experiments were worthwhile. Much data was collected. Forecasters knew more. Hurricanes were better understood.31

Science still hasn't quite given up the idea of controlling the weather. An MIT scientist has bruited the equivalent of setting small controlled fires to stop major forest fires—in this case starting small tropical cyclones to head off larger ones by cooling the ocean and thus robbing hurricanes of their energy source. His unlikely scheme, presented to a weather-modification symposium early in 2005, involves a chain of offshore barges loaded with a series of upward facing jet engines. Each barge would create an updraft, causing water to evaporate from the ocean's surface and thus lowering its temperature. The resulting ministorms should dissipate harmlessly. The scientist Moshe Alamaro blithely put the cost at a billion or so a year. Also among the optimists is Ross Hoffman, a scientist at a company called Atmospheric and Environmental Research in Lexington, Massachusetts, who has been given a $575,000 grant from NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts to look into the possibilities. Along with a number of other environmental scientists, Hoffman has been using Lorenz's discovery, but the other way around—not to see how far a storm would veer with minute changes in input data, but to see what input data would be needed to push a storm off course. Hoffman asserts that he has twice successfully "steered" storms, at least on his computer.32

Hurricanes are chaotic systems. But chaos doesn't necessarily mean what its commonsense definition implies—chaos has rules of its own. Chaos theory contains arcana such as strange attractors, which are only strange in that they cannot be analytically computed, though they are physically real, and can be readily observed. They are called attractors because "chaotic systems never wander aimlessly through the universe; they always hover around one of a finite number of dynamic forms."33 If—a big if—we can track the loci of these strange attractors, we might be able to find the right sort of trigger for a hurricane, and if we then deploy it at the right moment, we might be able to turn storms away from where we don't want them to where they would do the least harm. Or, if we are not careful and the right moment turns out to be the wrong moment, to where they would do more harm than ever. Now there's an insurance company's nightmare.

Another idea bruited about was to coat the ocean beneath an embryo storm with biodegradable oil, to separate the disturbance from its fuel, the warm water of tropical oceans. The idea seems fine, but the problems are enormous—somewhat akin to the big bad wolf huffing and puffing at a fortress instead of a hut. Where to find enough oil, especially biodegradable oil, to spread over so vast an area? How to get enough vessels to the right