weather report

Just as the heat wave in California has broken and given us some relief, the Southeast gets another hurricane. Hurricane Milton (the Monster) has, as I write, just made landfall near Tampa and the expected winds and floods are ensuing. I wish everybody and everything in its pathway the best of luck.

Still, the Florida peninsula sticks right out into the middle of hurricane alley. It's a target, and gets hit quite frequently. I wouldn't want to live there, for that and numerous other reasons, and nobody much did, except the Seminoles, until the invention of air conditioning. It's given the false impression that this land is generally habitable.

However, what is one to make of Marjorie Taylor Greene's declaration that an unspecified "they" control the weather? If I had control of the weather, I wouldn't have hurricanes at all. What a strange and unhelpful thing to invent. I don't quite understand them anyway, although I took a course in meteorology in college. Hurricanes seem to be created by the following algorithm:

1. Heated tropical water transfers excess energy to the atmosphere.
2. ????
3. Hurricane!

I'm sure there's more to it than that, but that's the impression one gets from the news.

Tropical cyclones do form in the east Pacific, but the shape of the land is such that the tracks usually take them out to the most isolated part of the ocean. Occasionally one hits Mexico, and brings heavy rains to southern California, but that's about all we get. It's the shape of the land which spares us where the Southeast gets slammed. Geography really is destiny.