Windswept_ The Story of Wind and Weather - Marq de Villiers [93]
On Hoffman's computer, a change in wind speeds of a mere 5 miles an hour was enough to steer a storm past an island instead of over it; and something as apparently small as a one-degree change in temperature at the initial stage killed a simulated storm completely.34 But to change a thousand-square-mile piece of the atmosphere by one whole degree would take a massive amount of energy, almost as much as was latent in the storm itself. Where would this energy come from? Will satellites eventually beam down enough heat to change atmospheric temperatures? What unforeseen consequences will that have on weather and climate? Most ecolo-gists believe the whole notion of control is misguided, and that man's natural penchant for meddling with the environment can only make things worse.
And there is one more difficulty with translating computer models into reality. Scientists can do hundreds of runs in the simulation models to find the one small tweaking that would cause just the right result. It can't be done by trial and error in the real world, because there is no way of telling ahead of time what consequence any single small change will have. The chances of making things worse are equally as good as making them better.
Despite all this, one fairly simple-to-execute method does exist to kill budding hurricanes while still tropical storms. If a massive explosion were to take place beneath the ocean, driving cool water from the deep to the surface, it would deprive the storm of its fuel and would stop it in its tracks. But an explosion that large would pretty much have to be a nuclear fusion device, a hydrogen bomb, and it's hard to see such a thing being tolerated by any population keen on self-preservation—any such explosion would cause extensive radiation contamination, massive fish kills, and tsunamis, which collectively would do more damage than the hurricane itself. Much better to follow the ecologists' dictum, and do nothing. Put the money to living more prudently, construct stronger and more hurricane-proof buildings farther inland, and leave the shore to the wild winds and the sea birds.
CHAPTER SEVEN
An Ill Wind
Ivan's story: By the morning of September 10, Ivan had taken its expected turn from its westerly course to the northwest, and most of the models now had it headed straight for Jamaica. After that, probably western Cuba and then to skim up the west coast of Florida. All day, as Jamaica braced for the storm and battened down as well as it could, the storm's intensity fluctuated. It started the day as a Category 3, but by mid-morning the pressure had risen slightly to 929 millibars and the winds were down to 123 knots or less, dropping the storm back to a 4. The deep pattern on the north side was looking a little ragged, but no one thought the storm was actually weakening, only changing. There was little wind shear to disturb it, and the ocean water remained very warm. That life-saving ridge of high pressure was showing some weakness over the Gulf of Mexico, and Ivan would likely be steered around it to the west.
In the afternoon, as Ivan bore down on Jamaica, two things happened. It reattained Category 3 status with the winds increasing to 163 miles an hour, and the pressure dropped back to gio millibars. This made it the sixth most intense storm ever recorded in the Atlantic. But it also took an unexpected jog back to the west from northwest—the high-pressure ridge again—which meant that it struck only the western tip of Jamaica. The eye and the strongest winds remained south and west of the island, at sea.
Even so . . . The winds that did strike were the equivalent of Category 3 or slightly above, and the entire island lost its power and public water supply. Communities along the south coast were destroyed in the winds and