The mayor of Colleyville, Texas, Bobby Lindamood, made a perfectly reasonable suggestion that we should nuke Milton, after removing the radiation from the bomb, of course.
In a since-deleted Facebook post, Bobby Lindamood, the mayor of Colleyville (a Fort Worth suburb) wrote:
For the amount of destruction this next hurricane is brining, it’s time to throw a simi nu/ke bo//mb (minus the radiation) at this dude and see if we can stop the rotation. It may save more than it can hurt.He added,
Just casting thoughts and ideas. This is gonna be bad.
Spoilsport NOAA has thrown a wet blanket on that idea.
During each hurricane season, someone always asks “why don’t we destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them” or “can we use nuclear weapons to destroy a hurricane?” There always appear suggestions that one should simply nuke hurricanes to destroy the storms. Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.
I ask you, who do you want to listen to, some nerd in a lab coat or a proud MAGAt in a cowboy hat?
The big hat must cover a big brain.
I blame the endless succession of Hollywood action blockbusters which rely on the premise that there is no problem so big or complex that you can’t just nuke it.
@ ^ Dunc : I blame Trump, far as I’m aware he was the first fool to make that suggestion..
Source : https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-did-donald-trump-suggest-nuking-hurricanes-1535171
A nuclear bomb “minus the radiation”. LOL!
I guess if they believe in the god of the Pentateuch minus being a jerk and a bully …
A fuel air explosive would be the equivalent of a nuke without radiation. But ignoring the fact it wouldn’t work to stop a hurricane an FAE probably wouldn’t work in a hurricane. FAEs involve creating a large cloud of an explosive substance,. such as propane, then detonating it with another explosive. I doubt you could keep the cloud coherent enough in hurricane force wind long enough to properly detonate it.
billseymoure @ #3 — Which “god of the Pentateuch”? There are several…actually quite a few.
The idea of using explosives to disrupt a hurricane’s organization goes back a ways IIRC. But these fools don’t appreciate the amount of energy in even a small hurricane, much less a Cat 5 monster like Milton. Even several large explosions attempting to disrupt the storm’s organization would be a mere drop in the bucket.
@2 StevoR: Trump wasn’t the first. When I was a kid the science book in school explained that even ignoring the fall out, a nuke isn’t enough energy to matter to a hurricane. This sort of thing has been suggested from the start, when nukes were invented a bunch of idea for using them were suggested before the long term damage of radiation was understood.
The line about a 10 gallon hat on a 1 gallon head comes to mind.
Idiots like this are infesting the Republican Party, at all levels and in almost all states — and yet they’re still treated as a serious party. If even ONE high-profile Democrat had said anything this stupid, our “news” media would be all over it and the entire party would be mocked into oblivion for at least another generation. Hell, Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry, Gore and Hillary Clinton got sunk for saying things far less asinine than today’s Republican blitherings.
The hat covers the gaping hole.
The Pillars of Modern Conservatism; moral and intellectual bankruptcy. Just ask our own (Canadian) Peewee Poilievre.
Applying more energy to a highly energetic, heat-driven system sounds totally reasonable /s
“simi nu/ke bo//mb (minus the radiation)”
1. Lindamood is simi-literate.
2. What’s the deal with the slashes?
3. Minus the radiation is a dynamite idea.
C’mon, NOAA. He said remove the radiation first.
It’s just nuclear physics. How hard can it be?
I remember seeing a physics blog once that tackled an issue of Superman from the Silver Age when he blew out a hurricane. It’s been a long time but I believe they calculated that the necessary energy release in order to actually do that would be enough to blow a significant chunk of Earth’s atmosphere out into space.
I blame the uniformed, uneducated, ignorant American populus for allowing people like Mr. 10 Gallon to be put in any public office. This certainly can’t be the first senseless statement from this lowbrow politician.
hurricanes have a lot of power in them. a quick google responded with 6.0 x 10^14 Watts.
for a nuke, one megaton is equivalent to 4.18 × 10^15 joules. lets average out that energy over a second. then you get power output 4.18×10^15 watts.
thats like 10 times the power of the hurricane! seems like a nuke could do something to the hurricane.
however, the nuke is very local. hurricanes can have a radius of 100+ miles. plus the hurricane lasts for days, not a second.
a nuke is not gonna have a significant effect on a hurricane.
also, just where does does that asshat lindamood suggest the nuke be detonated? tampa? that might be a sub-optimal outcome for tampa…
This says that the average hurricane has the equivalent energy of about 10000 nuclear bombs. So a single nuke would not do much especially since Milton is not an average hurricane.
@12 larper: The slashes are probably some combination of trying to avoid any moderation algorithms that might latch on to a word like “bomb” and the general paranoia of rightwingers about the government listening in and coming for them if they use certain words. It goes right along with the rest of this guy’s intellect, which might best be described as 10 grams of brains in a 10 gallon hat.
xkcd posted a reference to that in What If: Short Answer Section II back on December 4, 2012, where he commented how not only does he get asked it a lot, so does the NOAA, and then he points to the NOAA response above, quoting the “Needless to say, this is not a good idea.”
I don’t know when the idea got started, but it has been decades that it has been floating around the public consciousness now. And PZ of all people should know that how hard it is to take deeply stupid ideas that may sound neat on the surface and actually root them out of ‘everybody knows’ territory.
Let’s throw a nuke at Colleyville.
It may save more than it can hurt.
Yes, please nuke the hurricane. Preferably when it’s right over Mar-a-lego so the nuke can soak in Trump’s divine juices to get the job done.
JM @6
Even when I was a child, I learned the energy powering the weather made all the nuclear weapons look flaccid.
Just take away the storm’s source of energy by dropping a crystal of ice-nine in its immediate path.
imback — Yeah, create an Ice Age.
BTW Marjorie Taylor Greene, that paragon of human intelligence, said a few days after Hurricane Helene tore through the South that ‘they’ can control the weather. I’m sure “they” can, tho she didn’t elaborate on who she thinks “they” are. I thought “they” could control the weather with prayers…hmm, maybe not.
@23 The cloud seeding program “Stormfury” ran for 21 years but was eventually abandoned as ineffective. The idea was that if you could encourage the formation of rainstorms outside of the eyewall you could steal warm wet air that was being entrained into the cyclone core and weaken the hurricane. The research driven by the Stormfury program fleshed out the understanding of eyewall cycles where a ring of rain/thunderstorms formed naturally outside the eyewall that eventually forms an entire new outer eyewall and then rapidly kills off the inner eyewall. The storm diameter expands and because r has increased the same angular momentum means lower windspeeds although a bigger storm. It was found though that these weakenings were always fairly short-lived as the storm diameter typically decreased some again as the inner pressure decreased.
This guy should have just magnanimously taken credit for praying the hurricane away from his town, and shut up afterword. I mean, it did move a bit toward Texas before doing a 180 and charging onto Florida, right?
“Trump’s divine juices” are three words I never ever wanted to see put together in a sentence.
FYI, I can, with certainty, state that Trump does not have any “divine juices.” Any juice he does have is more like unholy.
@27 & 28. The actual term is “Precious bodily fluids”
Maybe we should take the good mayor up on his idea on the condition he’s strapped to the nuke like his idol Maj TJ “King” Kong from Dr. Strangelove.
He already looks the part.
JM @6
Makes sense. Trump has no creatvity or originality and so he even has to steal stupid ideas. In fact, those are the ones that appeal to him the most. I read he stole his disinfectant injection idea from someone as well.
“I blame the uniformed, uneducated, ignorant American populus”
Heh.
I read a book in HS called The Weathermakers, I think Ben Bova wrote it. It was about using spaced based lasers and intense cloud seeding (and a fanciful theory where they could predict chaotic systems like weather super accurately). This would be in 1980 or 1981 when I read it so the thinking about weather control goes back a ways.
This only leads to another question…why don’t these people know the difference between books or movies and reality?
rutis1: I’d be very surprised if any of those idiots and con-artists have ever even heard of Ben Bova, let alone read anything he wrote.
Hardly new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_Active_Auroral_Research_Program#Conspiracy_theories
rrutis1 asks:
blockquote>why don’t these people know the difference between books or movies and reality?
Because they don’t do science. I don’t mean they aren’t scientists but that they don’t get science. They don’t know what is now scientifically accepted, they don’t know what science is being done now, and they don’t know what the open scientific questions are. They really don’t even care about any science, and that only makes them suspicious of it.
Robbo@16–
The NOAA puts the average hurricane energy at 1.3E17 J/day of wind energy alone, and 5.2E19 J/day of total energy including cloud and rain formation. The most powerful nuclear weapon ever, the Tsar Bomba, released 2E17 J and could have doubled its yield if a different uranium mix had been used. So a very very big nuke can match the daily wind energy of an average hurricane. As you point out, though, a nuke is limited in its area of effect (compared to a hurricane, that is) and also, in its duration of effect (fractions of a second), and finally only about half of a nuke’s energy goes into the pressure blast and the rest goes up in heat and particle emission.
But it’s not really about the energy itself. It’s about the angular momentum. A nuke will do nothing to change that.
I suspect what these doofuses are thinking is that they can blow out a hurricane the way explosives are used to put out oil well fires, even though the two situations are completely different. Explosions for well fires work by creating a rapid pressure wave that puts out the flame, like blowing out a candle. A hurricane is not a fire. It is not burning chemical energy. It is a huge mass of rotating air driven by atmospheric pressure differentials and Coriolis forces.
The only way a nuke could ‘blow out’ a hurricane is if it had enough energy to blast the entire hurricane radially outward so that all that angular momentum is absorbed by a larger region of the atmosphere. A explosion of that kind of power would, I suspect, be in Chicxulub territory.
Walter Solomon@31–
Hannah Arendt had a great deal to say about how totalitaran regimes end up destroying anyone, even loyalists, who show signs of competence. The more stupid a Great Leader’s ideas are, the better they serve as tests of fealty.
@6. JM :
Ah. Okay, thanks.
@33. rrutis1
Aussie scientist and author Tim Flannery has (also?) written a book called The Weather Makers which I’d recommend although its now a bit out of date. Its about Climate Change :
https://www.booktopia.com.au/the-weather-makers-tim-flannery/book/9780802142924.html
Unfortunately that linked site also notes :
However, Ben Bova’s bibliography on wikipedia notes :
(Bold original – sub-heading.)
Under his fiction novels and :
Source : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bova_bibliography
Under his non-fiction works.
Which on searching finds this :
https://archive.org/details/manchangesweathe0000bova
So wondering if that’s the one you read?
I grew up reading and love SF. At times, I have to wonder if X is something that’s real or fictional and whether i read about it in non-fictional or fictional contexts or idneed dreamt it or invented it in my head. In which case, if I’m unsure, I generally – if I care enough – try to search and find out. Now, I’m also not neurotypical and I dunno how many people have the same issue but I do know the human mind is not always a reliable thing and memories especially are vulnerable to change and confabulation and misinterpretation and general confusion. Eg. as shown by experiments on how reliable or not eyewitness testiminy can be. The gorilla being missed whilst counting sportsball passes experiment,, etc..
Imback @23
Yes, but as the water crystallises, it must rid itself of heat during the phase transition. You will destroy the world, but you will not destroy the hurricane.
The problem with Project 2025 is worse than you can imagine. It’s totally anti-science, anti-intellectualism from top to bottom. It is a Christian Nationalist manifesto to revert society to feudal times consisting of kings (guess who) and peasants (guess who). Also, it has nothing to do with the religion of Christianity, rather a distorted dystopian Pangalactic Gargleblaster (a rock in a velvet bag used to beat you senseless).
(not actual quotes below, just paraphrasing)
In an interview, Kevin Roberts, head of the Project, said that “Americans are tired of experts. We need to listen to ordinary Americans and use common sense.” Right, common sense. Medieval times are here again!
In an interview, JD Vance said that “democracy had run its course and was no longer effective. What we need is a benevolent dictator, a prince king.” Well, who do you think he picks as the king and who are the serfs?
These people are very, very dangerous and if we give in to their greed, avarice and ignorant it will be bad for everybody. We have to deny them power.
@ 41
Could give a citation for that J.D. Vance quote? I goggled around and can’t seem to find it.
@ 33
Conspiracy nuts believe in something called “predictive programming” where THEY expose their diabolical plans to the world through fiction as a means to desensitize us and get us to approve their nefarious schemes.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Predictive_programming
@42
I was paraphrasing from a video interview, maybe a podcast, that JD made a couple of years ago. Pre-beard. I only saw a few clips, but that was the gist of what he was talking about. It’s madness, total madness.
Re: Akira @42:
Maddow clip: On a Nazi podcast, Vance cited Curtis Yarvin, a guy advocating for replacing the whole government (and associated organizations and universities and businesses) with a dictator.
From that interview (2021, with beard):
/Maddow clipped from 20:43. And added footage of Yarvin.
^ Remember the anti-Irish quote with a pro-rape podcaster? Same show, at 6:52.