World 'helpless against nature'
2005-10-12 15:23
Washington - In a more hopeful time, the promise of science brought assurances that hurricanes could be tricked into dispersing, earthquakes disarmed by nuclear explosions and floodwaters held at bay by great mounds of dirt.
The planet's controlling forces romp over dreams like those. Usually the best that can be done is to see the danger coming long enough to run.
Rich and poor nations have taken the hit over a period so twisted in nature's assaults that one month, rich is helping poor and the next, poor is helping rich as best it can, and then the poor gets slammed again.
The United States, giver of tsunami aid in December, accepted hurricane aid from some of those same countries in September.
Now it is giving to South Asia a second time, in response to the weekend earthquakes.
India is sending tents, food, blankets and medicine to its foe, Pakistan, geology briefly shoving aside geopolitics.
More than 176 000 people died in the earthquake and tsunami of December; about 40 000 in the quake on Saturday; perhaps 1 000 or more in Guatemalan landslides last week; more than 1 200 in Katrina.
It wasn't supposed to be this way
After World War II, nothing seemed too far-fetched for science, not once the atom was split and, again, not once men stepped on the Moon.
In one of the most enduring efforts, still alive but hardly about to happen, man thought he could seed clouds, make rainfall reliable and put a stop to devastating drought.
The effort continues, especially in China; there rockets, anti-aircraft guns and aircraft regularly pelt the sky with chemicals. The results so far: China has lots of experience, but limited success, in making the rain come.
If humans are inexorably warming the globe, they've proved unable to fine-tune the mega forces to their benefit.
They can cause earthquakes, little ones, by injecting fluids into deep wells, filling huge reservoirs with water or setting off nuclear explosions, but they can't prevent any, says the US Geological Survey.
Any notion of "lubricating" tectonic plates to relieve destructive tension would only make things worse, if it made any difference.
Danger zones and long-term probabilities can be surmised, but "there currently is no accepted method to accomplish the goal of predicting the time, place and magnitude of an impending quake," the survey says.
One trick being tested: coat the ocean with a thin, biodegradable, oily film to deny a hurricane the evaporation that feeds its fury, in essence mimicking conditions after landfall.
One response to Hurricane Katrina was decidedly lower tech: Civil engineers proposed putting up old-fashioned air raid sirens so people would know to get away.
The belief persists that humans will someday be able to dial up a thunderstorm at will, tweak the jet stream to avoid floods and starve a tornado of its energy once it starts spinning.
- AP