I've mentioned tornadoes in these articles, but never focused on them. I thought I'd use a column for one of my articles that appeared in Atlantis Rising last year. By way of introduction, empirical science hasn't the foggiest idea what produces a tornado. As usual, to cover its ignorance, it simply starts to name things. Because tornadoes trail the back of huge thunderheads producing extreme weather, it names the thunderheads supercells and then says tornadoes are produced in the supercells. One thing empirical science does know is that the preponderance of these supercells are produced in the southwest United States and occur during the spring and summer months when the sky is clear and the sun is heating up the ground.
On the other hand, empirical science knows quite a bit about hurricanes. They know that they start as tropical depressions and are fed by heat, with heat increasing the strength of their winds. They start out southeast of the United States and head toward us, passing over islands and devastating entire communities, as evidenced by Katrina last year.
So with that as a backdrop, Hollywood decides to produce, for 150 million, a film designed to scare the heck out of the public about global warming. But this film has a peculiar slant to it. It was designed to turn global warming into a mechanism for freezing the world. I'll tell you why after I briefly describe the absurdity of the movie. Don't get me wrong. The special effects in the movie were quite good, the story just didn't reflect reality.
First was the ravaging of Los Angeles with oversized tornadoes that could bring down skyscrapers. Forget the fact that tornadoes simply don't occur west of the Rockies, there were no supercells. The tornadoes just came out of nowhere. Next, a giant hurricane develops whose tidal wave buries the Statue of Liberty and floods New York. Where did the hurricane form? Why over Canada, of course. It came out of the Arctic, which is pretty cold, and no hurricane has ever formed north of the United States. Well, two for two. But, as if ashamed that they forgot the supercells in Los Angeles, the director creates not one, but three giant supercells. Where? One over Ireland, one over Siberia, and one over, what the heck, I was laughing so hard at a supercell forming over Siberia that I missed it. Now supercells are heat driven and produce lightning and copious amounts of rain. What do you think these supercells did? They froze everything in sight. They were capable of reducing the temperature so far and so fast that buildings simply froze in their path. Nice shot of the American flag flapping in the wind simply freezing.
The reason the producers tried to turn global warming into a freezing situation is interesting. When global warming got its start in the eighties, it took the pro-growth people awhile to argue against what is basically a fantasy (see column 16-05). They first had to bury Sagan's nuclear winter scenario, which had become much more, if Newsweek's April 28, 1975 issue is to be believed, where Peter Gwynne stated "There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically," and going on to predict a new ice age. Around 1996, they came up with a pretty good argument, at least on its face, to make the global warming folks look ridiculous. This argument was, in the late 70s, the father of global warming, Carl Sagan, had claimed the world was on the verge of freezing. In all fairness to Sagan, he was referring to a "nuclear" winter, one in which a nuclear war closed off the sun and turned the planet into an ice cap, but the pro-growth people left that part out and the global warming folks found themselves on the defensive. The movie kind of answers the pro-growth argument.
As an aside, to demonstrate the quality of the people promoting global warming, PBS had a special called: Global Warming: The Signs and the Science. Instead of a credentialed scientist, pretty hard to find on this subject, the program was hosted by that atmospheric expert, Alanis Morissette, known for her whinny songs and her lucid statements on science, statements such as, "It is my belief that our political beliefs are our spiritual beliefs tangibly evidenced." I didn't watch it, but she might have sung it.
In any event, here is the article.
Researchers are beginning to discover that tornadoes start on the ground rather than in the swirling clouds of the atmosphere. Perhaps another scientific mystery is close to being solved. PBS recently broadcast an interesting NOVA program, Hunt for the Supertwister. This is the first program that I have seen that did not brush tornadoes off as the result of downdrafts produced by supercells, an explanation that is about as descriptive as saying grass grows because there are lawn mowers. By using Doppler radar as close to actual forming tornadoes as possible, the show's scientists, Howie Bluestein and Josh Wurman, detected what they referred to as miniature twisters which combined to start the larger twisters that had the potential of becoming the huge tornadoes that can last up to an hour, following the supercells that give them birth and chewing everything up in their way.
A primer on tornadoes finds they are spawned by storms that form during hot, sunny afternoons on the American plains. Huge storm heads produce hail and lightning as they generally move in a northeasterly direction. From an objective point of view, the clouds trailing these supercells have a tendency to rotate in a counterclockwise manner and sometimes, almost playfully, combine to create funnels that touch the ground. In some grand cases, huge circular funnels develop and lay waste to everything in their path. For some reason, those paths include trailer parks if there are any in the vicinity of the supercell and recently Houston, a large town with many skyscrapers, came under attack by a spawn of tornadoes that lasted several days.
The popular scientific explanation for a tornado is that a downdraft from the supercell starts a rotation of air, which turns into a funnel and then fuels the tornado. The NOVA scientists' field work found that tornadoes did not result from huge downdrafts, but were the result of three or four miniature funnels and that these did, if conditions were right, form together, each little funnel increasing the size of the overall funnel until the funnel had the power on its own to start the vortex that became the tornado.
The unique point about this observation, other than it is based on observation rather than some imagined downdraft fantasy, is that the funnels formed on the ground rather than in the air. It is only when they start to combine that they start to involve the overall supercell, with the increased force of the combination influencing the winds of the supercell to produce the twister. In Bluestein's words: We've been able to actually catch tornadoes in the act of forming, with very, very high resolution. And what you see is, well, it's not chaos, but you see a lot of small vortices. You don't see one vortex becoming a tornado, you see a number of small vortices.
"This adds a whole new layer of complexity in the tornado story," the narrator responds. "All the evidence is pointing to an amazingly intricate dance of wind and moisture interacting with the environment, including the terrain itself." Bluestein replies that he "think[s] that the solution [to the formation of tornadoes] may be in sight."
I first described how tornadoes worked in my 1996 book Light, Replacing Three Centuries of Misconceptions, not because I didn't think it was a weather phenomena that belonged in my book How The Weather Really Works! published 2 years earlier, but because I needed the understanding of the interrelationship between the Earth and the atmosphere that emerged from Light to understand what tornadoes were, with the light of a sunny afternoon being the key to the tornado's formation.
While I certainly don't want to get into the nature of light, we can start our discussion of tornadoes with the sun beating off the ground. We know that both the ground and the atmosphere carry a charge, with the ground considered to be positive with respect to the atmosphere. We also know that heat changes potentials so that for the Earth to remain with its relatively small atmospheric charge differential, its electrical potential pretty much follows the atmosphere as the afternoon sun heats up on those hot, and I can't resist using Kansas, afternoons on the American plains.
The current belief about sunlight and the Earth is that the Earth absorbs radiation during the day and gives it up during the night. Without getting into what radiation is or what it does, when the sun starts beating down on the hot Kansas plains, both the atmosphere and the ground remain in balance as far as charge is concerned so that one might think that, when the beautiful, formerly sunlit day on that portion of the plains shaded by the forming supercell all of a sudden turns dark and threatening, the Earth beneath would start radiating.
This cannot be true. While I am a theoretician, any storm provides the necessary fieldwork needed to verify the Earth remains positive with respect to it. Practically speaking, the supercell begins generating huge amounts of electricity, which is discharged into the more positive Earth in the form of lightning. While we might think the Earth would radiate, it doesn't and the dark supercell is also incapable of radiating because it is physically demonstrating a negative charge with respect to the ground. Remember that the sun around and above the supercell is just as bright and hot as ever, just like the ground not directly beneath it.
As the supercell solidifies itself and moves across the plains, it discharges electrons into the ground, leaving the ground with a higher negative charge than it had before the supercell formed and passed. Because the supercell is moving, it departs the area leaving the ground with an excess of electrons.
The electrons have to get back into the atmosphere so that when the storm passes, the sun and the Earth can once again reach an electrical balance. The question then becomes, what happens to these excess electrons? They surely don't return to the atmosphere as lightning!
The most logical place for the electrons to start their movement back into the atmosphere is through the clouds trailing the supercell. They, after all, have been robbed of their own electrons through the much higher charge of the supercell. And this was where I made a basic mistake, corrected by watching NOVA's Hunt for the Supertwister. In Light, I describe the electrons as flowing back into the atmosphere in streams, causing funnels to attempt to form around them.
How funnels would form around streams of electrons flowing from the ground to the atmosphere is scientific rather than theoretical. Funnels would form around electrons returning to the atmosphere because of the effect of inductance. A primary flow of electrons establishes a circular flow of electrons at right angles to the flow. To witness this effect, point the thumb of your right hand up. Your fingers will curl in the direction of electrical inductance and its effects, which is the direction tornadoes twist.
The other characteristic of electron flows is also scientific rather than theoretical and is their tendency to combine. Inductances combine flows of electrons into bigger flows. Thus, I thought, under the right conditions, returning flows of electrons, after the supercell passed, could cause air particles to get caught up in the combining inductances, creating the twisting effect of the tornado. As more flows combined, the funnel would increase in size and if conditions were right, which is to say, if there was a great enough potential difference - if the day was hot enough and the winds favorable, tornadoes would form to trail the supercells as they marched across the hot Kansas plain, and indeed, anywhere throughout tornado alley.
Under these circumstances, I couldn't see how a tornado could be prevented. Any attempt to block the returning electron flows would just result in them coming out somewhere else and it wouldn't take a supercell of lawyers to construct the liability issues involved in sending tornadoes the next town over. Our purpose in knowing about tornadoes is not only knowledge, it is practical, the ability to prevent them and their horrendous damage.
But the scientific findings of the researchers in the NOVA program show that the returning electrical flows attempt to form their own funnels first. This is only logical as well as measured by Doppler radar and provides hope that tornadoes may actually be prevented. It is these miniature funnels that then combine to form the tornado. That's why some storms produce tornadoes and others don't. For instance, wind conditions might keep the funnels from combining or the funnels might combine, only to collide with another set of funnels and break up. When wind conditions allow the miniature funnels caused by the returning flows of electrons to combine, or it is sufficiently hot, the funnels can start to form and, under the right conditions, grow.
In fact, once a tornado forms to trail a supercell, it can become part of the supercell system, returning the excess electrons the supercell shoots into the ground back into the sunlit sky behind the storm, allowing the tornado to live on as long as their are electrons to cycle.
Once we know that the birth of tornadoes is the combination of miniature funnels, scientifically verified by Bluestein and Wurman, caused by individual returning flows of electrons, theoretically justified not only by the nature of electrical inductances, but by tornadoes' fondness for the easy electrical access to the sky trailer parks provide, their prevention becomes a matter of disrupting the combinations of miniature flows.
Supercell chasing planes could follow tornado potentially producing storms and seed their trailing clouds with positive ions. This will keep the small funnels from lining up by disrupting the returning flows of electrons. The returning flows would still be free to move into the atmosphere, but they would have to thread a sort of maze to get there, and in doing so, the miniature funnels they produce will never be able to form into tornado funnels.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com