RUSH: Now, moving on to our business broadcast day: hurricane plugging toward the Louisiana-Texas border. Texas is now evacuating Lufkin, Texas. They expect Port Arthur to be flooded as well, which is where a lot of refining capacity is. Port Arthur, isn’t that where Janis Joplin is from? I think Port Arthur — and Jimmy Johnson, the former coach Of The Miami Dolphins — Miami Hurricanes and Dallas Cowboys. He did coach the coach the Dolphins as well. He’s now with Fox Sports. I think they’re both from Port Arthur, if I’m not mistaken. (interruption) Well, there is a jet fuel terminal there. It’s not going to screw it up. It’s going to cause supply problems for a while and distribution problems if it does get hit as bad as everybody is suggesting. Governor Bush is already warning Floridians not to panic, that there might be some shortages here, as there were last time, because the pipelines from that region — and, by the way, make no mistake about it: Texas is the petroleum capital of the country. If this hurricane… It’s down to a category three now, by the way, which is still powerful, but the problem is not that. The problem is that the forecast models all say it’s going to stall once it hits land. It’s going to not “stall” but really, really slow down. Some parts of Texas may get 25 inches of rain, they’re saying, and 16 hours of hurricane force winds.
It’s bad enough when these things roll through at 12 or 15 miles an hour but when they roll through and then stall over you… If you’ve never been in a hurricane, the best way to describe being in a category three or four, even a two, the best way to describe it, so that you understand just the noise, just the noise, is tremendous. Imagine that you are on the tarmac at any airport and a Boeing 747 with its brakes on revs all four engines to max power, and then stand there and endure that for as long as you think the hurricane lasts. That’s how loud it is. The noise of these things, for people that have never been through them, is one of the most shocking things and unexpected things that happens, as well as the destruction. Interesting story today. This is from the Associated Press, interestingly enough. “Scientists: You Cannot Modify Hurricanes.” Some wacko in Europe is now saying that this hurricane proves global warming. It’s becoming laughable. But this story has a fascinating fact in it. Let me read to you just a part of the story: “It sounds like a good idea. It sounds like a great idea: Let’s just blast hurricanes like Rita and Katrina out of the sky before they hurt more people. Or, at least weaken the storms and steer them away from cities. Atmospheric scientists say it’s wishful thinking that we could destroy or even influence something as huge and powerful as a hurricane. They abandoned such a quest years ago after more than two decades of inconclusive government-sponsored research.”
The vanity! The vanity of thinking that we could, anyway. What are we going to do, go out there and seed the clouds? What are we going to do? There was one experiment. They thought they’d put some pellets into a hurricane that would soak up all the moisture and basically kill it, and they tried that, and that didn’t work. Nothing worked. Can I tell you why? “Researchers say hurricanes would dwarf” any measure we take. “For example, Hurricane Rita measures about 400 miles across.” Now listen to this: “According to the center for atmospheric research, the heat energy” alone, the heat energy, “released by a hurricane equals 50 to 200 trillion watts,” of power, “or about the same amount of energy released by exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes.” The idea that we lowly mammals think that we would have anything to say about this hurricane, any hurricane — creating one, stopping one, steering one, weakening one — is absolutely laughable. You get used to seeing these thing on television now on a weather map, and in fact it looks like just a flat piece of cloud rolling across the ocean. We never see any pictures of the eye of it. Well, you see pictures of the eye. We never see any pictures out at sea of what that hurricane looks like. Can you imagine the power? Stop and think. This thing, when it is 500 miles away from coastline, it’s still causing eight-foot waves, 400, 500 miles away. Now, stop and think of what it must take. A body of water like the Gulf of Mexico, imagine what you would have to do to stir that up to cause that, and then, is there anything we could do short of a nuclear bomb to do it?
And according to this it would take a bunch of them to create the same kind of power this hurricane is putting out, consistently. If you really stop and think about all this, it just boggles the mind to think that we human beings would have any power whatsoever over these storms, and then when you extrapolate that kind of reality and realization to global warming, it gets even more ridiculous as you ponder it. I mean, I live on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean down here in Florida, and, folks, there’s not a hurricane out there. Well, there is, there’s a low-pressure area that’s Hurricane Philippe, and it is away out there, it is way, way out there. This Hurricane Rita that got nowhere near here, the surfers were out having a ball for a full week. The waves were huge! The power to stir up something as big as the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico is — again, it’s like a trillion dollars; it’s incomprehensible. Do you know how long, if you wanted to count from one to one trillion, how long it would take you if you counted once every second? It’d take you 31 years. People have no concept of size. Sometimes that’s not their fault. It’s just some of these things are impossible to even concede.
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