Hurricanes are a nuisance.

Before you scream, please read on a bit.

I have never endured the horror of a hurricane. But I have had the privilege of visiting a Caribbean island just after one went through. I had the honour of seeing the courage, optimism and good humour of the people as they cleared up after it. One particular detail sticks in my mind. A beachfront hotel, proudly featuring its golden sands, awoke the next morning to find the entire beach had just been washed away. The patio and pool deck now fronted on to a ten-foot drop into deep water. And the tourist season only a couple of weeks away. Not to mention the smashed windows and wrecked equipment. Excavators, bulldozers and trucks simply put the beach back where it should be while waitresses, busboys and anybody else rebuilt the rest and the hotel was ready for business. Until the next time.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could stop this extravagant waste of time and effort? Stop these destructive events?

No, it would not.

Hurricanes, Atlantic cyclonic storms, are an essential part of the Climate Engine. We stupid apes have no idea how that works, but we should have the wit to understand that it is a vital component. Even the destruction and the havoc has a part to play in the ecology, the development and maintenance of the ecosystems that are affected. I cannot understand or even begin to imagine how that works, but I am sure it is necessary.

But, we might be able to regulate hurricanes. That could be useful.

Now, from here on – keep it simple. The subject will be beset by Arbuters –“Ah, but…..”. I realise that the subject is vast and deep, a veritable Marianas Trench of data, models, information, theories and experimental observations. Even a very preliminary look risks being sucked into an inexorable vortex of brainstorms.

So I will take my little inflatable duck and paddle around on the surface.

I am also going to confine myself to the North Atlantic basin.

It seems that Atlantic cyclones, including named tropical storms and hurricanes, originate close to the Cape Verde Islands off the West Coast of Africa, about 16^oN 23^oW. From there they proceed West across the Atlantic before curving towards North.

They feed off the warm moist air and the warm surface layers of the ocean.

As they grow, they suck in more nourishment from the air, sucking in more and more. And this air is, in turn, picking up more nourishing moisture and heat from the ocean surface.

Heat is the food.

Heat is converted into air speed. Increasing air speed in a vortex leads to lowered pressure, which sucks in more air ….. We have a cyclone.

How big it gets depends on the supply of warm, moist air. And that depends on how hard it can suck.

Now, here’s the thing.

After a cyclone has passed, it takes a little while for the system to reset and build up supplies of heat and moisture for the next greedy heat gobbler.

It is unlikely that a succession of Category 5 hurricanes will march across the ocean in close formation. There is not enough time for the reservoir of heat energy to be replenished. The larder is empty.

IF it were possible to generate a self-sustaining vortex in the wake of a cyclone, it might be possible to gobble up the growing heat larder before it reach a size that could nourish a major cyclone.

If a sequence of vortices were generated at suitable intervals in the “air drift” it might be possible to maintain the heat larder at a sufficiently low level to prevent a Category 5 gobbler from arising.

What a good idea!

NO.       But we’ll get to that later.

If a ship were stationed off the Cape Verdes, an array of jet engines on her deck, firing at the correct alignment for a specified time, could create and release a vortex, and it could be self-sustaining – enough to start feeding off the atmosphere.

The alignment, firing angles, strength, duration….. I am sure these could all be modelled so that a pretty good scheme could be formulated. In theory. It is important to note “in theory”. The climate engine is so vast and so sophisticated that we have no hope of understanding all the variables.

So, the whole process is about as safe and reliable as sticking your finger up a sleeping tigress’s bum and saying, “What could possibly go wrong? She’s asleep” the answer, sonny, is “when she wakes up, she might not like it.”

But, if it could be made to work, it would allow us to de-escalate the hurricane nursery. Wouldn’t that be nice?

NO!!

As I have said, hurricanes, in all their horror, are an essential part in the climate engine. We cannot do without them.

But, by timing the vortices in sequences, it might be possible to regulate the “spectrum” of cyclones so that they are generated in a predictable series of strengths.

We could not avoid Category 5 hurricanes, but we might be able to give a warning, maybe even a year ahead, of when we would need to generate one to keep the climate engine running.

We would have to start behaving like grown-ups and work together, globally, to organise the support, rescue, re-building facilities and finances to allow those in its path to prepare and to endure with the knowledge that help with the aftermath will be there and be there fast. What am I saying? “Behaving like grown-ups” is how we got into this mess.

We know that, after they cease to be hurricane strength, cyclones move North before making a major contribution to the North Atlantic and the European weather patterns. We are all in this together, although that will sound stupid, arrogant and condescending to anyone who has just watched their house and home disappear into a pile of shit.

Going back to the sleeping tigress, it might be possible to identify an area of the globe where we could try this out in a less energy-rich zone, where the unexpected outcomes might not be so disastrous.

Although this is global climate engineering on a vast scale, the actual initiator mechanism, the vortex generator, is relatively cheap and simple. But, the gearing on this process is unbelievable. We need to be very careful about how we approach it. It isn’t something simple like sitting a bunch of people on top of a big firework and pointing it at the Moon. We need to think about it first.