“If meteorologists could stop hurricanes, we would.” This is why humans still cannot control the weather

Hurricanes remind humanity of the uncontrollable, chaotic power of Earth’s weather.

Milton’s powerful push into Florida, just days after Helene devastated much of the Southeast, is likely to have some in the region wondering whether they are being targeted. In some corners of the internet, Helene has already spread conspiracy theories and disinformation suggesting that the government has somehow aimed the hurricane at Republican voters.

REGARD: Helene’s recovery is complicated by lies, false reports and conspiracy theories

In addition to ignoring common sense, such theories also ignore weather history, which shows that hurricanes hit many of the same areas as they have for centuries. They also assume that humans are capable of rapidly reshaping the weather, well beyond relatively small efforts such as cloud formation.

“If meteorologists could stop hurricanes, we would stop hurricanes,” said Kristen Corbosiero, a professor of atmospheric and environmental sciences at the University at Albany. “If we could control the weather, we wouldn’t want the kind of death and destruction that happened.”

Here’s a look at what people can and can’t do about the weather:

The power of hurricanes, amplified by climate change

A fully developed hurricane releases thermal energy equivalent to a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes – more than all the energy used by humanity at any given time, according to Chris Landsea, head of tropical analysis at the National Hurricane Center.

And scientists are now figuring out many ways climate change is making hurricanes worse, with warmer oceans adding energy and more water falling into the warming atmosphere as rain, said Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment.

READ MORE: Is climate change causing hurricanes to stop?

“The amount of energy a hurricane produces is crazy,” said hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State University. It is the height of human arrogance to believe that people have the power to change them, he said.

But that hasn’t stopped people from trying it, or at least thinking about trying it.

Historic efforts to contain hurricanes have failed

Colby College’s Jim Fleming has studied historical efforts to control the weather and believes people don’t have nearly the practical technology to get there. He described an experiment in 1947 in which General Electric, working with the U.S. military, dropped dry ice from Air Force jets into the path of a hurricane to weaken it. It didn’t work.

“Typical science is understanding, predicting and then possibly controlling,” Fleming said, noting that the atmosphere is far more powerful and complex than most proposals to control it. “It goes back to Greek mythology that people believe you can control the forces of heaven, but that too is a failed idea.”

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the federal government briefly tried Project STORMFURY. The idea was to seed a hurricane so that its eyewall would be replaced by a larger one, which would make the storm larger but weaker in intensity. The tests produced inconclusive results and the researchers realized that if they made the storm bigger, people who had not been injured by the storm would now be at risk, posing an ethical and liability problem, the project leader once said.

READ MORE: Why some hurricanes become massive storms – and why they are difficult to predict

For decades, the National Hurricane Center and its parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have been questioned about dropping a nuclear bomb on a hurricane. But the bombs aren’t powerful enough and it would add to the problem of radioactive fallout, Corbosiero said.

Introducing cooling icebergs or planting or adding water-absorbing substances are also ideas that simply don’t work, NOAA scientists said.

Climate change brings about technology – and many questions

The failed historical attempts to control hurricanes are somewhat different from the futuristic ideas of some scientists to combat climate change and extreme weather. Instead of targeting individual weather events, modern geoengineers would act on a larger scale and think about how to reverse the widespread damage that humans have already inflicted on the global climate through greenhouse gas emissions.

Scientists in the field say one of the most promising ideas they see based on computer models is solar geoengineering. This method would eject aerosol particles into the upper atmosphere to reflect a small portion of sunlight back into space, slightly cooling the planet.

Supporters acknowledge the risks and challenges. But it could also have “very big benefits, particularly for the world’s poorest,” said David Keith, a professor at the University of Chicago and founding faculty director of the Climate Systems Engineering Initiative.

Two years ago, the largest society of scientists working on climate issues, the American Geophysical Union, announced that it would create an ethics framework for “climate interventions.”

Some scientists warn that manipulating Earth’s atmosphere to address climate change will likely lead to a cascade of new problems. Climate scientist Michael Mann of the University of Pennsylvania raised concerns about the ethics framework, saying that just talking about policies would increase the likelihood that the manipulations would take place in the real world, which could have harmful side effects.

Stanford’s Field agreed that modeling strongly suggests geoengineering could be effective, including in mitigating the worst threats from hurricanes, even if they are decades away. However, he stressed that this is only part of the best solution, which is to stop climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“Whatever else we do, this has to be at the core of what we do,” he said.

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