food additives
Little known about non-natural chemicals increasingly being found in environment
Pesticides, ingredients from sunscreen, an artificial sweetener and the plasticizer bisphenol-A,were among the chemicals found.
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www.irishexaminer.com
The drugs we eat - Chemicals on farms end up on your plate
If we are what we eat then we should have a far better understanding of how a turkey becomes, in less than five months, such a splendid bird or how a farmed salmon glows Barbie doll pink.
How California's firestorm spread so mind-bogglingly fast: From 'Diablo' winds to climate trends.
The firestorm that engulfed large parts of Napa and Sonoma Counties in California on Monday will go down in history as one of the worst such events ever recorded in the Golden State.
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How California's firestorm spread so mind-bogglingly fast: From 'Diablo' winds to climate trends
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BY ANDREW FREEDMAN
14 HOURS AGO
The firestorm that engulfed large parts of Napa and Sonoma Counties in California on Monday will go down in history as one of the worst such events ever recorded in the Golden State.
By the end of the day on Monday, at least 15 people had been killed, 1,500 or more structures destroyed, and hundreds injured by flames that moved so quickly one hospital had to evacuate patients using nurses' own cars, rather than wait for ambulances to arrive.
The fires show yet again how cruel nature is when the right combination of ingredients come together. Five months of unusually hot and dry weather following the state's record wet winter ensured a ready supply of combustible vegetation.
SEE ALSO: July ties record for warmest month on Earth, but I'm sure we have nothing to worry about
On top of these background conditions, there was a unique combination of weather conditions in place on Sunday night and Monday that ensured that virtually any fire that started would spread rapidly and unpredictably.
COFFEY PARK, SANTA ROSA CALIFORNIA BEFORE THE FIRECOFFEY PARK, SANTA ROSA CALIFORNIA OCTOBER 9TH, 2017
IMAGE: GOOGLE MAPS
IMAGE: CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY PATROL/HANDOUT/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
In addition, operating just behind the scenes, like a puppeteer hiding in the shadows, is climate change, which is tilting the odds in favor of extreme heat events and larger fires, even as other factors — such as the buildup of sprawling suburbs close to forested areas — make us more vulnerable to damaging fires.
The fires took thousands by surprise, giving many only enough time to grab their keys, pick up a beloved pet, jump in the car, and flee toward safety. The unlucky ones never made it out in time, and the number of fatalities is expected to rise.
'Diablo winds'
The weather conditions in place across California on Sunday night and Monday were well-known to forecasters as being associated with some of California's worst wildfires.
Hot, dry, and powerful winds were blowing down hillsides, from inland areas to the coast. Such air currents are known as "Diablo" winds in Northern California, and Santa Ana winds in southern parts of the state.
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On Sunday night, the Diablo winds reached as high as 79 miles per hour, which meant that any fires that started quickly raced ahead with the gusts.
"Fire literally exploded and raced along the landscape," the National Weather Service's San Francisco office wrote in a forecast discussion on Monday.
As the air, forced by the circulation around an inland area of high pressure, rushed down hillsides and accelerated through canyons, air temperatures increased, and humidity dropped. One weather station reported a temperature of 91 degrees Fahrenheit at 4:30 a.m. ET on Monday, though the NWS suspects that reading may have been due to a nearby fire.
A burnt out car sits in front of a home destroyed by a wildfire in Santa Rosa, California, on Oct. 9, 2017.
A burnt out car sits in front of a home destroyed by a wildfire in Santa Rosa, California, on Oct. 9, 2017.
IMAGE: JOHN G. MABANGLO/EPA-EFE/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
"Clearly, the biggest single factor in creating yesterday's firestorm were the powerful and incredibly dry east-to-west offshore winds..." said Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at UCLA. "These kinds of winds have a long history of fueling many of California's most devastating and fast-moving wildfires over the years.
"This includes the 1991 Oakland Hills event, which (until now) had been the benchmark urban-interface wildfire in the Bay Area," he said.
The fires were so intense that descriptions of them are apocalyptic. According to a New York Times dispatch from a neighborhood in Santa Rosa, California, the fire burned virtually everything it touched:
Evidence of the fire’s intensity was everywhere in Coffey Park, which residents described as an apocalyptic scene. The aluminum wheels on cars melted and dripped down driveways like tiny rivers of mercury before hardening. A pile of bottles melded together into a tangle so contorted it looked like a Picasso. Plastic garbage bins were reduced to mere stains on the pavement.
Such extreme fire behavior isn't random, or the result of a single factor. Instead, many ingredients must combine to create such monstrous conflagrations.
"These winds were a necessary condition for the fires' rapid spread, but the broader climate context certainly set the stage for the event to be as bad as it was," Swain said.
Wettest winter, hottest summer
The fires capped off an epic case of weather, or in this case, climate whiplash.
The firestorm is occurring on the heels of the warmest summer in California's history, which featured numerous record-shattering heatwaves, including one that set a new all-time heat record for downtown San Francisco, at 106 degrees Fahrenheit. The hot, largely dry summer helped to dry out the vegetation that bloomed in the wake of Northern California's wettest winter.
Summer temperature departures from average for California, showing that 2017 had the hottest summer on record.
Summer temperature departures from average for California, showing that 2017 had the hottest summer on record.
IMAGE: NCEI
The wet winter, in turn, followed the state's worst drought in modern history, which lasted for 5 years.
Such weather whiplash, from cool, wet conditions, to hot and dry weather, is becoming a telltale sign of the new normal, as global warming reshapes the long-term climate and raises the odds of both extreme precipitation events and heat waves.
Heat waves are one of the clearest, best understood indicators of human-caused global warming. Such extreme events are becoming more severe, frequent, and longer lasting as the overall climate warms, and this past summer, it was the West's turn to roast.
In July, normally hot Death Valley, California managed to reach a dubious milestone for the planet. With an average monthly temperature of 107.4 degrees Fahrenheit, Death Valley saw the warmest month ever recorded for any location in the world, according to the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang blog.
The heat, particularly the relentless heat waves in September, played a crucial role in setting the stage for the devastating fires.
"[The] record heat in early September capped an already extremely warm and dry summer to date, which acted to dry out vegetation even more than would typically be the case this time of year," Swain said. He added that the heat, following the wet winter, causes seasonal grasses and brush to grow, which is known to firefighters as "fine fuels."
"Finally, the longer-term context of record multi-year drought just a year or so ago meant that some of the region's forests remain residually stressed. The net effect: 'fuel moistures' (the amount of water in vegetation) were at or near record-low values when these wind-driven fires ignited, which almost certainly contributed to the extreme rate of spread and the likelihood of spot fire ignition during this firestorm," Swain said.
A horse runs from the flames from a massive wildfire, in Napa, Calif. on Oct. 9, 2017.
A horse runs from the flames from a massive wildfire, in Napa, Calif. on Oct. 9, 2017.
IMAGE: AP/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
According to Noah Diffenbaugh, a climate scientist at Stanford University, global warming has increased fire risk across the West, and raised the odds that hot and dry conditions will coincide.
"I am careful not to make any attribution statements without having run formal analysis," Diffenbaugh said in an email. "That being said, we know that hot, dry conditions increase fire risk. Even though we had a wet winter this year, we know that the protracted drought drastically stressed vegetation in California (including killing tens of millions of trees), and that the summer and early fall have been extremely hot in California and the Bay Area."
"We also know from previously published work that [human-caused] global warming has increased fire risk in the western United States, and my published work has shown that global warming has increased the odds of the co-occurring warm and dry conditions that caused the California drought and the odds of extremely warm conditions in California," he added.
"So, although we don’t yet have formal analyses of this particular event, we do have a lot of evidence that global warming has influenced the conditions in which the event is occurring."
Given the property damage involved, these fires could rank as another billion dollar event in a year that’s turning into an extremely costly one — both in dollars and lives — for the United States. Given climate change projections for a hotter, drier future in the West, perhaps we'd better get used to it.
WATCH: Los Angeles is painting their roads white to cool the city down and improve air quality
TOPICS: CALIFORNIA, CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES, CLIMATE, CLIMATE-ENVIRONMENT, FIRE, FIRESTORM, HEAT WAVE, NAPA VALLEY, SCIENCE, SONOMA-VALLEY, WILDFIRES
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Fracking in Scotland could be banned indefinitely.
Energy Minister Paul Wheelhouse said that an existing moratorium on fracking from 2015 that put planning approvals in the country on hold for unconventional oil and gas extraction, including fracking, would continue “indefinitely”.
The Scottish government announced an “effective ban” on fracking on Tuesday, Oct. 3.
Energy Minister Paul Wheelhouse said that an existing moratorium on fracking from 2015 that put planning approvals in the country on hold for unconventional oil and gas extraction, including fracking, would continue “indefinitely”.
“Fracking cannot and will not take place in Scotland,” he said.
Fracking—or hydraulic fracturing—involves drilling deep into the Earth to reach shale formations. A mixture of water, chemicals, and other ingredients, such as sand, are then pumped into the rock at high pressure, causing the rock to fracture. This releases the gas and oil trapped in the rock, which is then extracted.
The technique is controversial because critics say that the fracking fluid can contaminate drinking water. There are also concerns that fractures in the rock could cause earth tremors.
Fracking advocates say that there are only risks to water if safety protocols are not followed, and that it is an economical source of energy that creates jobs.
The decision to ban fracking in Scotland came after the government held a public consultation that showed there was “overwhelming” support for the ban, the Scottish government said.
“Having taken account of the interests of the environment, our economy, public health and the overwhelming majority of public opinion, the decision I am announcing today means fracking cannot and will not take place in Scotland,” Wheelhouse told members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs).
#BREAKING: Scotland's energy minister @PaulWheelhouse tells Holyrood they will ban fracking following public consultation #OOTT pic.twitter.com/jMTg8j0DBq
— David Sheppard (@OilSheppard) October 3, 2017
A vote in the Scottish Parliament that is expected to happen later this year would finalise the ban. But with only the Tories, which make up 24 per cent of Parliament, opposed to it, it is very likely the ban will continue.
The public consultation received over 60,000 responses, of which around 99 per cent were opposed to fracking and less than 1 per cent was in favour, the government said.
Scottish Greens MSP Mark Ruskell welcomed the ban, but felt that it needed to be stronger.
“We are still a long way from turning a planning moratorium into a watertight ban that can resist legal challenge from powerful companies like Ineos [an oil and gas firm that owns a petrochemical plant],” he said.
Mary Church, head of campaigns at Friends of the Earth Scotland, was similarly concerned that the extension of the planning moratorium did not go far enough. She said in a statement that the Scottish government should “go further than relying on planning powers to give effect to this ban, and instead commit to passing a law to ban the fracking industry for good.”
The Scottish Conservatives called the decision to ban fracking “short-sighted and economically damaging.”
“According to the Scottish government’s own scientists, the extraction of shale from Scotland, with the right safety checks, could be done safely,” said Scottish Conservative shadow finance secretary Murdo Fraser. “It could also support thousands of jobs and deliver economic benefits to communities.”
When speaking of the government’s own scientists, Fraser was referring to a review of underground coal gasification published in 2016, a spokesperson for the Scottish Conservatives said. The review was lead by Professor Campbell Gemmell from the University of Glasgow, who was appointed by the Scottish government.
The review suggests that underground coal gasification, a technique similar to fracking but that uses fire to extract gas from coal instead of a water mixture that fracking uses to extract gas from shale, could be viable, but only if the industry can satisfy certain requirements.
In the executive summary of the report, Gemmell concludes: “At this point, it does not appear, that the tests could be met. In which case, it would appear logical, the current moratorium being justified, to maintain it, or, as in Queensland, [Australia] to progress towards a ban for the foreseeable future. As circumstances suggest, either arrangement could be revisited in due course.”
Fraser points out that the Scottish government is “happy to receive shale from the U.S. to refine at Grangemouth–a major industry in itself–yet doesn’t want to have that technology here.”
“It could also support thousands of jobs and deliver economic benefits to communities,” he said.
Ineos said the ban would be a blow to Scotland by negatively affecting jobs, energy security, and growth.
A 2013 report commissioned by the Scottish government identifies areas that need more research and public consultation. Like the 2016 report, it suggests that the industry might be able to develop safely subject to “robust regulation being in place.”
Tom Pickering, operations director at Ineos Shale said: “It is a sad day for those of us who believe in evidence-led decision making. The Scottish Government has turned its back on a potential manufacturing and jobs renaissance and lessened Scottish academia’s place in the world by ignoring its findings.”
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We’ve played chicken with food safety … and we’ve lost.
The meat industry is bad for us and bad for the planet. It’s time to end unsustainable 'food Fordism.'
We’ve played chicken with food safety … and we’ve lost
Felicity Lawrence
The meat industry is bad for us and bad for the planet. It’s time to end unsustainable ‘food Fordism’
Chicken being processed and labelled for sale to supermarkets in the UK.
Chicken being processed and labelled for sale to supermarkets in the UK. Photograph: For Guardian investigation with ITN
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The dirty business of chicken processing is in the spotlight, with a Guardian undercover abattoir investigation revealing dodgy practices. As supermarkets suspend sales from the factory involved and Labour promises a parliamentary inquiry, some members of the food industry are sighing at the media’s obsession with the subject of poultry hygiene. But the subject will keep coming up, however much business wishes it away, because industrial chicken is one of the defining commodities of our era. Its cheapness comes at a high price.
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Meat production has quintupled in my lifetime, in large part thanks to the ubiquitous skinless factory chicken breast, and chicken accounts for around half of the meat we eat. At any one time there are more than twice as many chickens on Earth as humans – around 19 billion of them, bred to put on weight at turbocharged rates and mature in record time as uniform units of production that fit abattoir machinery. We have invented food Fordism – meat for the masses from the conveyor belt, no longer a luxury but an everyday ingredient. But, for all its apparent democratising possibilities, it is a commodity fraught with inescapable dilemmas.
Intensive livestock production is one of the most significant drivers of climate breakdown. It contributes nearly one fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, rivalling the whole global transport sector. True, feedlot cattle leave a greater environmental footprint than poultry, but if you care about mitigating global warming, plant-based proteins are far better than intensively reared birds. Most of us in developed countries eat far more protein than we actually need for health, and most people could do more for the climate by cutting meat than giving up their car and plane journeys.
Politicians dare not say it for fear of sounding like Marie Antoinette, but the price of cheap is too high
As the world’s population grows, the question of how we produce enough to feed everyone becomes ever more urgent. Intensively reared livestock is an inefficient way of meeting needs. Farm an acre of decent land and you can produce 20kg (45lb) of animal protein from it; give the same acre over to producing wheat and you’ll get 63kg of protein. If the grain that is currently used to feed animals were fed directly to people, there might be just enough food to go round when population peaks. If instead we continue to spread our industrial meat habit to poorer countries, we’ll need three planets to feed the world. The ethical argument is overwhelming: we need to get back to thinking of meat as a luxury, to be enjoyed occasionally, if not entirely forsworn.
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The reason the sector is beset by repeated scandals is that it is economically unsustainable. Even leaving aside the big planetary questions, meat can only be this cheap if the price is paid elsewhere. The livestock revolution took off in the 1950s because of three factors: cheap energy, which allowed farmers to house animals indoors; cheap synthetic fertiliser, which produced surplus grain for concentrated feed; and the mass production of cheap drugs, particularly antibiotics – you can only keep large numbers of birds in close confinement if you have the means to control the disease that inevitably accompanies the practice.
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For centuries before that, farmers had been constrained in their production by how much their land could support. Chickens were fed waste and acted as scavengers of food and insects, allowed to range free so that they could eat food that would otherwise go unused, with the added advantage that they spread their manure as they went.
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The next leap forward for industrial chicken production came with the development of processing machinery in the 1960s – an engineering feat that automated the mass slaughter, plucking, eviscerating and cutting of birds in one continuous conveyor belt. Large numbers of workers are still needed to process chickens, but they are in low-skilled production-line jobs. All this slashed costs and allowed the populations of developed countries to consume meat in a completely new way.
But now the consequences are coming home to roost. Energy is no longer cheap; nor is the grain needed for concentrated feed, despite agricultural subsidies. Some of the raw materials for fertiliser are running out globally. Frontline antibiotics needed for humans are losing their efficacy in large part because of overuse in farming. Supermarkets with their oligopolies of buying power have used cheap chicken as a weapon in their price wars and kept prices low, so that processors have to work on high volumes with low margins, despite the pressure of rising costs.
The sector is highly concentrated, with just a few corporate players. Just five companies account for 90% of the birds slaughtered in Britain each week. The pressure to cut corners in factories and sweat capital-intensive machinery, leaving little time for cleaning, is intense. Food-borne illness caused by chicken is a stubborn problem. Meanwhile, if a supermarket wanted to go elsewhere to punish an errant supplier, it has little choice left.
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There’s plenty you could do to make it a more sustainable industry. You could slow the growing time and give birds more room on farms, using less engineered breeds that take 12 weeks, rather than just over a month to reach slaughter weight. That would help curb some of the cruellest aspects of the business, which see densely packed, overbred birds, prone to disease and bacterial infection, collapsing under their own weight. But that would cost more. In the factory you could slow the speed of the lines, so that cross-contamination of carcasses was less likely, and workers’ jobs less relentlessly tough and unpleasant, thus easing the pressure to break hygiene rules and making the sector more attractive to local staff. But that, too, would cost more.
We know roughly how much more, since the top end of organic production already does these things, and a posh chicken from that sort of outlet is three to four times as expensive as a conventional supermarket one. But there are hardly votes in arguing we should pay that much for our chicken. Politicians dare not say it for fear of sounding Marie Antoinette-ish. But the price of cheap is too high, and we should probably be eating something else.
• Felicity Lawrence is special correspondent for the Guardian
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2 gonzo ideas for slowing down a hurricane that might actually work.
Scientists are looking into ways to weaken hurricanes early on.
Hurricane Maria rampaged through Puerto Rico last week, leaving behind an ongoing humanitarian crisis for the island’s 3.4 million residents who are struggling without electricity and clean water.
With so much devastation, one may wonder whether anything can be done to stop these storms in their tracks.
It’s quite a daunting challenge, given that the average hurricane’s wind energy equals about half of the world’s electricity production in a year. The energy it releases as it forms clouds is 200 times the world’s annual electricity use.
The heat energy of a fully formed hurricane is “equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes,” as NOAA meteorologist Chris Landsea has explained.
And these are typical hurricanes, not extraordinarily intense ones like Hurricane Harvey, Hurricane Irma, and Hurricane Maria.
There’s really not much anyone can do once hurricanes like these spool up. Scientists have tried and failed to stop full-on hurricanes in their tracks.
But rising sea levels and increasing average temperatures due to climate change are further expanding the destructive reach of these storms. And with an eye to the potential to save lives and avoid billions of dollars in damage, some engineers and entrepreneurs, including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, are studying ways to dial back destruction from a hurricane.
Much of the research is focused on manipulating temperature, moisture, and wind to steer when and where these storms will occur. It involves geoengineering with giant tubes and aerosols. And it’s pretty intriguing — if still quite preliminary.
Scientists have tried to stop hurricanes — and failed miserably
Weather modification has a long, sordid history and hurricanes have inspired some of the more far-fetched proposals, from bombarding cyclones with sonic booms from aircraft to beaming down microwaves from space into nascent storms.
In one of the most infamous attempts to slay a hurricane, Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir led a US military experiment in 1947 to seed Hurricane King with ice in hopes of sapping its vigor. The storm at the time was sliding away from the United States and losing strength.
In an excerpt in the Atlantic from his book Caesar’s Last Breath, author Sam Kean explained Langmuir’s idea: Growing ice in the eye of the hurricane would make the eye grow wider and collapse the storm. But Hurricane King didn’t respond as expected. “To everyone’s horror, it then pivoted—taking an impossible 135-degree turn—and began racing into Savannah, Georgia, causing $3 million in damage ($32 million today) and killing one person,” Kean writes.
Other meteorologists at the time were skeptical that Langmuir’s experiment made the storm change course.
US scientists continued to study seeding clouds inside hurricanes as late as 1983 under Project STORMFURY. But they concluded, according to NOAA, that “cloud seeding had little prospect of success because hurricanes contained too much natural ice and too little supercooled water.”
The remaining tactics for fighting hurricanes require weakening them before they start by deliberately cooling seas and brightening clouds when storms are brewing, robbing them of the fuel for their destruction.
Stephen Salter, an emeritus professor of engineering design at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, has studied how to harness wave energy since the 1970s, and in 2003 began looking into using this energy to cool the seas.
A less-crazy but still far-out idea: cooling the seas with a giant tube
For ocean temperatures, the magic number for hurricane formation is 26.5 degrees Celsius (or 79.7 degrees Fahrenheit). So what if you could nudge that number down early on and reduce the risks and intensities of ensuing storms?
That was what Salter set out to do.
To cool the surface of the ocean, Salter invented a wave-powered pump that would move warm surface water down to depths as far as about 650 feet.
Made from a ring of tires lashed together around a tube extending below the surface, waves would overtop the ring, pushing the column of water down, while a check valve in the tube would keep it from flowing back.
Salter’s namesake device, the Salter Sink, was invented in 2009 at Intellectual Ventures, a technology firm led by former Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Nathan Myhrvold.
(Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates also filed for a patent in 2009 to cool the ocean’s surface with barges to fight hurricanes.)
The idea is that hundreds of thousands of these devices in hurricane-prone regions of the world would cool waters enough to make a measurable reduction in the strength of storms.
Another promising scheme: making clouds a tiny bit brighter
Salter’s other tactic for fighting hurricanes is making clouds a tiny bit brighter using aerosols, harnessing a phenomenon called the Twomey effect.
This is the observation that for clouds containing the same amount of moisture, the clouds with smaller suspended water droplets reflect more sunlight.
The increased sunlight reflectance in the sky would keep the waters below from warming up to the hurricane threshold while also curbing evaporation, thereby reducing the atmospheric moisture needed to make a storm.
“If you really want to stop hurricanes, I believe that cloud brightening is the better way to do it,” Salter said. Cloud brightening yields a much greater impact on the weather for a much smaller perturbation than directly cooling the ocean, he explained.
Salter envisions unmanned boats spraying sub-micron-sized water droplets into the sky, seeding shinier clouds in areas forecasted to spawn storms.
This would be much cheaper than spraying aerosols from aircraft, the boats could target specific regions, the effects would dissipate quickly and the change in cloud brightness would be imperceptible to the human eye.
He estimated that it would cost $40 million to construct a prototype cloud seeding system but has not been able to find any public or private takers.
“At the moment, the governments are saying its premature, we don't need it yet,” he added. “Irma might change their minds.”
However, Salter acknowledged the prospect of cloud brightening is just an idea at this point. “Most of the work is done in computers,” he said.
One reason diffusing a hurricane is so hard: conditions have to be perfect and they’re often not
For those that have tried out weakening the ingredients of hurricanes in the real world, the results have been disappointing.
Atmocean, a company developing ways to harness energy from ocean waves, looked into making devices to cool the surface of the ocean after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
Unlike Salter’s device, Atmocean’s approach used a contraption to instead bring cooler water from the depths up to the surface.
The test devices proved successful, but only under ideal wave, temperature, and geographic conditions.
“The physics of it work if the conditions are right,” said Atmocean CEO Philip Kithil. “You can in fact reduce the upper ocean [temperature] by a degree Celsius, maybe 2, which would have a measurable effect on the intensity of the hurricane, but the practical concerns were hard to overcome.”
The wave pumps have to be right in the path of a developing hurricane, and they require cool water to be at an accessible depth, which isn’t always the case. It definitely wasn’t the case in late August when Hurricane Harvey barreled through the Gulf of Mexico toward Texas.
“Harvey passed through an area where there was warm water all the way down to the bottom of the ocean,” Kithil said. “If there is no cold water, you can’t change anything.”
According to a study the company conducted looking back at Katrina, they found that they would need to deploy 100,000 pumps over just two days at a cost of $1,000 each, leading to a price tag topping $1 billion to mitigate the effects of the storm.
At those prices, planners have to consider whether that money would be better spent elsewhere, such as evacuations or shoreline hardening, and neither insurance companies nor governments were willing to investigate further.
Reinsurance firm Swiss Re estimated that Katrina led to $80 billion in insured losses.
Kithil noted that the company also had a hard time finding buyers for their devices. “The insurance industry was not willing to invest, since it was too early stage, too hypothetical,” he said. “And governments are not that proactive.”
Atmocean bowed out of the weather modification business in 2007 and has since pivoted toward using wave energy to drive desalination and onshore aquaculture.
Some hurricane researchers are skeptical these schemes will ever work
At the same time, hurricane researchers have grown weary of responding to proposals to slow storms and most remain skeptical that any tactic could be deployed in large enough numbers to have an effect on giant cyclones.
“As a general comment they show a lack of appreciation for the physical scale of hurricanes and simple ignorance of how they work,” wrote Hugh Willoughby, a hurricane researcher at Florida International University, in an email.
Mark Bourassa, associate director of the Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction Studies at Florida State University, echoed the skepticism about scale.
“For sea surface temperature change, you would have to do it over a very large area and you would have to do it quickly,” he said.
These ideas might be useful thought experiments to better understand the makings of hurricanes, but Bourassa noted that there always concerns about unintended consequences, especially about deploying these tactics at scale.
Scientists already have a hard-enough time recognizing hurricane progenitors and figuring out where the storms will go once they’re spinning, so adding artificially brighter clouds and cooler waters to the mix could prove dangerous.
“I’d be really nervous about trying them,” he said.
For now, computer models are the only place to deploy hurricane mitigation tactics, but that hasn’t deterred Salter, who despite his retirement and lack of a patron says he’s “still working seven days a week on it.”
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