a reply to:
Azureblue
Look...
There is something you need to understand about storms like these. Tornados and Hurricanes, like fire, can be fed by certain circumstances. Unlike
fire, the circumstances which play into how a Hurricane or a Tornado forms and moves, are related to what humidity and temperature is at play, both in
the path ahead of the weather system, and indeed to what circumstances birthed the thing in the first place, windspeeds, temperature of the air being
blown into the storm and driving it forward, temperature and humidity it will encounter in its path, windspeeds in regions ahead of it, wind direction
in areas ahead of it, and so on.
What is crucial to understand with the particular case of Texas, is that Texas has been, in general, very warm of late, with decent levels of
humidity. Storms generally tend, assuming wind direction allows it, to suckle on such circumstances like an infant upon the teat, only lending fury to
them, driving them, keeping them going. Running into colder, drier circumstances tends to have the opposite effect, which is why hurricanes and
tornadoes tend to occur most frequently during the hotter months in a given location.
A storm will flourish the closer to humid and hot circumstances it gets, because, from a thermodynamic point of view, there is simply more energy
imparted to it by those circumstances. Simply put, heat = energy, cold = a lack of it. The particles in a hot area of air, are more excited and
agitated, more energetic, than particles in colder areas. This means, necessarily, that as more heat and humidity are added to a storm, it will have
more energy in total than if it had run up against an extremely cold area of air, and sucked that up instead.
So when a storm whirls faster as it approaches a given area, when its groundspeed picks up, this is usually a result of its coming into contact with
air which is hotter and more energetic.
What I am getting at is this:
While it may look for all the world as if this storm "deliberately" sped up, the better to slam into Texas, and have its merry way with the place,
all that actually happened, is that normal thermodynamic effects produced a terrible, but utterly predictable result. No manipulation of the weather
was required in the least, because, as far as these things go, the process occurred in a totally natural manner, following only the same physical laws
which operate everywhere else.
Further to that, I just want to add that in order to manipulate weather in a controlled and predictable manner, one would have to be able to track
variables and control them, in such number and to such a fine degree, at such remoteness from them, as to render the process physically impossible. I
do not care how powerful the equipment one assumes is being used might be, nor do I care much what degree of processing power and monitoring
functionality one might be able to accumulate and deploy, even with a budget black as night and broad as the ocean. The simple fact of the matter that
these weather patterns are not well enough understood for a scientist, mad or otherwise, to pin point a place in the sky to aim a beam or a heat ray
or a microwave or any other thing, to produce a predictable weather effect at the end of it.