What technology would be necessary to eliminate hurricanes and tornadoes? If we focused on that goal, like the space race in the '60s, how long would it take to develop?
(I realize any answer would have to be a guesstimate.)
It’s pure science fiction. The amount of energy in a hurricane is equal to millions of A-bombs. And, even if hurricanes could be stopped, it would be an even bigger disaster - they are a crucial source of heat transfer to the upper and lower latitudes.
I’ve seen a hypotheses that hurricanes could be limited to milder storms by selective seeding of clouds to produce rain during the early stages of formation. I don’t have any real details, but it seems like the idea was that tropical storms could be caused to diffuse over a large area instead of forming the fast moving vortex of a hurricane. It sounds like it doesn’t actually stop anything, just spreads the effect over a larger area. But it certainly doesn’t require countering a hurricane with an equal amount of energy.
Also, how crucial are hurricanes to the transfer of heat? Most hurricanes aren’t that large on a global scale, and short lived. The vast majority of heat transfer must come from other sources.
Okay, we’ve taken care of hurricanes. Several carefully positioned self powered heat transfer tubes. Kind of like giant gopher holes with those fan bonnets they used to install over industrial cooktop vents. Running from the equator to about half way between the Tropic and Polar lattitude lines. We can do that. (By ‘we’, I mean ‘someone else’.)
Earthquakes can be eased by pumping water along the fault lines.
Tornadoes are going to be trickier.
Fairy dust. Or the technomagical alien weather control equipment that is the cause of the Taos Hum.
Seriously, it is beyond any foreseeable technology to either precisely model or control large scale climactic effects from any particular initial condition. It isn’t so much the amount of energy involved–although it is an enormous quantity that dwarfs the destructive power of human arsenals–as the fact that climate is a highly nonlinear dynamical system. In layman’s terms, the system can advance in radically different ways from very small tweaks (perturbations) to initial conditions, and it can change so rapidly that making updating predictions based upon measurements cannot be done fast enough to evaluate the effect of said changes. You may alter an initial condition intending to reduce the probability of a storm only to find out that you’ve amplified it. Unlike building an atomic weapon or going to the Moon, which were technical challenges with relatively straightforward paths to success, controlling the weather is a problem that even defies clear characterization of how to approach it, even given the hypothetical ability to delivery large flows of energy.
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