A Rant...That Has Nothing To Do With Fanfiction!

Yes, I am so blown away (no pun intended) by the sheer dumbass factor that I'm cross-posting an entry from my LiveJournal.

Yes, some things just get my goat, and little boys playing scientist and soliciting donations for an endeavor they obviously don't have a clue about is one of them.

Brace yourselves for a major rant, friends!

What has got our level-headed, sweet-and-innocent little lawyer-in-training so riled up?

TornadoFighters.com.

They wanna go out there and destroy tornados. With bombs, cloud-seeding, and lasers.

As I told my LJ readers--the stupidity! IT BURNS!

So why won't a bomb stop a tornado?

• Because, geniuses, maybe it hasn't occurred to you that tornados, in all their destructive force, trigger explosions all the time.
  
• Recall Twister, where the fuel truck gets tossed and blows up? That was one of the few semi-realistic moments in that exceedingly-unrealistic-but-hysterically-funny show--tornados have blown fuel lines, fuel tanks, gas mains all the time. And those things blow HARD. An explosion doesn't phase a tornado.
  
• It'd take an explosion of far more destructive power THAN the tornado itself to create enough force to disrupt the air currents that form the tornado--and that would defeat the purpose. You'd level everything for five miles. "Oh, but we stopped the tornado! Yeah, we flattened your house with our big warhead, but we stopped the tornado! Thank us!"
  

Okay, so why won't cloud-seeding stop a tornado?

• TORNADOS AREN'T CLOUDS, YOU MORONS! Yes, I know they look like clouds, but they ain't.
  
• Tornados are air. Air moving really, REALLY fast, in a really tight, narrow pattern, triggered by the overall structure of a much-larger weather system. Not all thunderstorms produce tornados, because not all produce the exact overall conditions that can cause the tornado to form.
  
• HOWEVER...just because they're hard to produce in nature doesn't mean they're easy to destroy. The whole, awesome power of a tornado comes from the fact that once the conditions are right, the air pattern that forms the classic funnel cloud we all recognize is spectacularly strong.
  
• Tornados do not dissipate because of some "disruption," but rather because the energy levels in the storm and the surrounding air decrease to the point where it can't be sustained anymore.
  
• Cloud-seeding technology can barely trigger an early rain storm, if even that. It's been tried. They tried it on hurricanes, they tried in on supercells (thunderstorms) of varying sizes for decades. The problem is that adding more solid matter to the clouds in order to create more rain STILL does not deal with the core problem of air patterns that create most of the destruction in a storm.
  

What about a laser? Couldn't THAT stop a tornado?

• Uh, yeah. Since when do lasers affect air patterns?
  
• You cannot "chop off" a funnel cloud. It is not a cloud that can be swept away with a wave of the hand (or anything else, for that matter.)
  
• The power of the air current being driven down from the parent thunderstorm is almost beyond human comprehension, unless you have a Physics degree (damn, I wish I hadn't bombed that class in high school! It put an end to my dream of studying Meteorology right then!)
  

Bottom Line

• Until you can come up with a way to contain an explosion about the size and destructive force of the Mother Of All Bombs (MOAB) so that it doesn't flatten everything for several miles, you cannot blow away a tornado.
  
• Until your cloud-seeding can actually make the heat-cold, high pressure-low pressure imbalances that form a massive thunderstorm go away, you cannot cloud-seed a tornado.
  
• Until your laser can actually disrupt an air current as strong as nuclear fallout, you cannot laser-slice a tornado.
  
• There are truly no words to describe how stupid you people are. I am not normally driven to such language, but the sheer DUMBASS factor is just off the scale.
  

As you've undoubtedly gathered, it irks me to see little boys playing scientist and making assumptions about the physics and mathematics that goes into questions that NOAA and the NSSL have been trying for decades to deal with. These dweebs haven't the faintest idea what they're talking about, but rather than actually doing their homework, they're soliciting donations.

If it was merely a case that they were discussing the IDEA of modifying or destroying tornados, that wouldn't bother me nearly as much as this attitude, clearly demonstrated on their website, that they "have the solution."

You don't, kids. You don't have a solution, or a clue. And I sure as hell hope you don't have any money. Try getting a Meteorology degree before you start talking about trucking around Tornado Alley farmlands with explosives.

(Fume, fume, fume!)