Common Sense is Relative

Recently someone on an email list I’m on posed the following question:

"So, how come we don’t dump large quantities of ice in the water when we know hurricanes are over it gaining their strength from warm water?"

Good idea. Also, how come we don’t counteract the winds with big fans blowing in the opposite direction? With enough fans, we could stop a storm in its tracks. Oh, and how about preventing global warming by everybody turning up their air conditioning?

Now, contributors to this email list are almost exclusively well-educated, especially in scientific fields. And I knew from previous posts that the ice questioner was no dummy. So I assumed the question was a joke.

Fortunately, not everyone on the list took the inquiry as farce, because it turns out it wasn’t, and I was treated to some real working out of the numbers. Those who whipped out their calculators came to the consensus that cooling a patch of water 10 meters deep with a radius of 100 miles (presumably the water directly affected at any time under a smallish hurricane) just a single degree Celcius would require an ice cube 0.8 miles on edge. The finishing touch: "If we assume that each person could contribute 100 kg, that implies 96 billion (1E9) people [;-)". Of course, the scenario ignores the fact that we would have no way to predict exactly where to drop the ice, and that the difference of 1 degree in temperature would be negligible anyway.

So, was I right to react to the ice inquiry with a chuckle, or have I simply overlooked my own amazing abilities of instantaneous guestimation? If the latter, I need to recognize my skillz and check myself to avoid further charges of being a pretentious cad.

update:
Scientists agree with the absurdity of throwing ‘canes off course–according to one hydrometeorologist, "It would be like trying to move a car with a pea shooter"–but it took them decades of trial-and-error to reach that conclusion. ("Project Stormfury"? Was that endeavor  named, by any chance, on bring-your-stoned-teen-to-work day?)

The public has not quite given up on the idea. The Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory even includes among its Frequently Asked Questions: "Why don’t we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?" Great idea. We could call it Project TumorFrenzy.