Page 102 - James Rodger Fleming - Fixing the sky

Such minute disturbances “may be the determining factor” in what Franklin
called “atmospheric collapse,” triggering the time and place of severe “domino
storms” downstream. Note that triggering unstable equilibrium processes is not
15
the same as the butterfly effect, or more properly the Lorenz attractor, of Edward
Lorenz’s chaos theory. The set of nonlinear, three-dimensional, and deterministic
solutions to the Lorenz oscillator, when graphed, resembles a butterfly. I once
asked Ed if a butterfly could actually affect the Earth’s general circulation, espe-
cially given viscosity. He smiled and said, “Perhaps if the butterfly was as big as
the Rocky Mountains.” I call this the “Mothra effect.”
Franklin thought that the ultimate goal of meteorology was to devise a
means for controlling storm movements by the suitable expenditure of energy
at the critical time and place. Whether or not it could ever actually be realized,
Franklin concluded, this was a “legitimate conception to say the least,” well
worth the attention of meteorologists. He praised the smoke-ring cannon of
Burgomaster Stiger as a possible means for controlling all kinds of storm move-
ments and thought it might hold the key to weather control. After laying out the
mathematics of the forecast problem and the need for some future computer to
solve thousands of equations simultaneously, Franklin proposed a more prosaic
method of protecting Florida, by “touching off ” the local energy of the atmo-
sphere when a hurricane approached. Imagine a line of overgrown hail cannon
along the coast consisting of twenty or thirty very large open steel cones, 15 to
20 feet in diameter at the base, 40 to 50 feet in diameter at the top, and each
100 feet high, with a ton or more of gunpowder per cone to be exploded. This
would drive the air in the cone (60,000 cubic feet of it) upward as a kind of
giant “smoke ring” that would start a rising column of air, thus stealing this
energy from the approaching hurricane. Although such a project could cost sev-
eral million dollars, according to Franklin, the people of southern Florida would
benefit if they funded it. 16
Abbe thought that Franklin’s suggestions were “not the best that science
has to offer.” He pointed out that neither the concussions of cannonading nor
Stiger’s special vortex ring cannon had ever been proved to be effective. Abbe
concluded, “The importance of unstable equilibrium in the atmosphere is a
matter that has been so thoroughly investigated since the days of Espy that Pro-
fessor Franklin has only to study the modern literature of meteorology and the
17
mechanics of whirlwinds in order to realize the folly of his argumentation.”
Abbe wanted experimental trial, not peasant-like faith. More than seventy years
later, Ross Hoffman would again propose hurricane control using a distorted
understanding of chaos theory as his guide (chapter 7).

rain fakerS | 85