Hurricane season draws near and so do the kooks:

From the Miami Herald:

Hurricanes can be frozen, nuked or blown away with really, really big fans. If we build a tall wall, they'll hit it and bounce right back over the ocean. Wait, barges that pump up cool ocean water -- that will kill 'em.

Actually, no. They won't. Not even close. None of it.

Hurricane myths are flourishing, experts said Thursday, another consequence of the recent swarm of catastrophic storms that struck Florida and other areas -- often after days of sky-high stress and suspense.

''You can see them coming sometimes a week in advance,'' said scientist Chris Landsea, who helped conduct a hurricane-myth workshop at the Governor's Hurricane Conference in Fort Lauderdale. 'So the natural question is, `What can we do to get rid of them?' ''

Here, as a public service, is the answer:

Nothing.

Not even a nuclear bomb?

''A nuclear bomb is just a hiccup to a hurricane,'' said Landsea, the National Hurricane Center's science and operations officer. ``And then you have a radioactive hurricane. Not good.''

And yet the ideas keep flooding in.

''It can get pretty exasperating, getting these same questions all the time,'' said Steve Letro, the National Weather Service's chief forecaster in Jacksonville.

On Tuesday, during a visit to Sun City, south of Tampa, President Bush was told by a man in the crowd about a way to destroy hurricanes using ``the coldest thing in the universe.''

Bush: ``To control hurricanes?''

Man: ``Right.''

Bush: ``Where were you last year?''

A day earlier, faxes arrived at the hurricane center, in Miami Beach city offices and at The Miami Herald promoting a plan to employ 25 barges -- ``with two pumps and four pipeing [sic] systems each vessel.''

The proponent said this would bring up from the depths enough cool water to kill a hurricane deader than dead.

Nah, not really, Landsea said.

It's all a matter of scale. Hurricanes are fantastically enormous, immensely powerful phenomena. One measure of that: Every second, a hurricane generates as much energy as every power plant on Earth combined.

Pumping up cool water? ''You would need 3,000 pipes,'' Landsea said. And in the right place at the right time in advance. ``Just not feasible.''

Towing icebergs and placing them in the hurricane's path? ``You would need all the ships in the world.''

Seeding hurricane clouds with silver iodide so the storm rains itself out over the ocean? That was actually tried in the 1960s. Didn't work. ``The pellets just went splash in the ocean.''

Building giant walls or mile-high fans along the coast? ``Let's not even talk about that.''

Read the whole thing:

1.) Isn't Landsea a great name for a hurricane expert?

2.) Every year there are calls to "do something" about hurricanes. I imagine that this year it will be even worse than usual because of Katrina and Rita. And politicians love to appear to be "doing something", hence all the calls to implement the Kyoto protocols and other such foolishness to combat "global warming". Whether anything can or even should be done is not usually a concern.

Here's a satellite shot of Hurricane Frances, Sept. 5, 2004, as it crosses the Florida Peninsula:

Notice the sheer size of this storm. At this point it was probably a category 3, though it had been a 4 as it traveled through the Caribbean. Now, what exactly do people think can or should be done about this? Well, some of that was in the article above and none of it would make much of a difference (except the "nuke the hurricane" suggestion, which would make things worse). This is the Earth system doing what it does, in this case moving heat and moisture around the hydrosphere/atmosphere in the most efficient way. When the lithosphere redistributes heat, we get earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis. It's just the way the planet works, and we members of the biosphere have to adjust as best we can. In fact, those of us who brag about having large brains should be able to realize the need for this and adjust our behaviour accordingly. But we like living on the beaches and barrier islands. We think that just because we build a city on a coastal swamp or a major faultline that manages to stay relatively untouched for a couple hundred years that it is somehow entitled to remain there forever. We really don't learn from experience, do we?