StarTalk Live! Storms of Our Century (Part 1)

It's a perfect storm of science and comedy when Neil deGrasse Tyson and StarTalk Live surge into the Bell House the night before Winter Storm Nemo to discuss hurricanes and superstorms.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Welcome, everybody, to another amazing installment of StarTalk Live.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  It is my great and humble pleasure to bring out America's voice of science, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Eugene, tonight, we're going to devote the whole evening to talking about storm systems and climate.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  So let's bring out our guests.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, your guest first.

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. Ladies and gentlemen, the amazing Michael Showalter.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got two more seats. I have some expertise in weather and storms, but nowhere near what is necessary to pull this evening off. So I found Dr. Adam Sobel, who is a climate scientist from Columbia University. Adam, come on up. Adam.

• 1:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we like to have someone who we all know, and he just came 20 minutes ago from 30 Rock. Join me in welcoming Questlove.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Questlove, who I think has the largest Afro left in the universe. There's others that are larger.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  There's a rabbi I know.

• 2:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we've titled this show "Storms of Our Century." And, you know, we've had a few storms lately. So, Adam, it seems to me it's looking kinda bad, these intense storms. I don't know that we've had more storms. The ones we've had seem to be sort of record-breaking intensity and scale and size and damage. And, so, first, let me just ask you, where the hell do these storms come from? Are you making them in your lab? You a mad scientist in your Columbia lab?

• 2:32Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Al Qaeda. Prove me wrong, science man.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  No, we don't make them.

• 2:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, alright. Let the record show.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Scientific name for hurricane is a tropical cyclone, so they come from the tropics.

• 2:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so even if it goes across Manhattan, it's called a tropical cyclone?

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Well...

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Are you blaming immigrants for storms?

• 3:03Speaker 02

  You could view this storm itself as an immigrant to our shores, yeah.

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, a Venezuelan weapon, that's how I see it.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  A tropical cyclone forms in the tropics, but it has some other characteristics. And, if it keeps those characteristics as it comes further poleward, then we still call it a tropical cyclone. That would be north.

• 3:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm translating.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  In this hemisphere.

• 3:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, in this, okay, oh, sorry. So, he gave the general answer, because in the southern hemisphere, it could go to the south pole!

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 3:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Poleward, very nice, okay. He's not limited to a hemisphere of activity. Yes, he studies it all.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  You learn that when you talk to the Australians about cyclones.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Australians, yeah. So, how do you make these storms? What goes on?

• 3:47Speaker 02

  A tropical cyclone has a few characteristics, one of which is that it comes from the tropics. Another of which is that it tends to be, when they get strong, they're very circularly symmetric. So, when you look down from space, as you see those satellite images, you see the swirling pinwheeling thing with the eye.

• 4:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's more and more beautiful with a nice eye, yeah.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Right, the other thing about it is that it's warm in the middle compared to the air outside. Whereas, an extratropical cyclone, which is the kind that we're gonna have tomorrow, is cold in the middle.

• 4:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, right after people go home tonight, there's gonna be a storm. This is bad coincidence. We're gonna get blamed for this, you know? We'll blame you. So tomorrow will be cold in the middle. So if you can have a storm where it's cold in the middle and a storm where it's hot in the middle.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then you're not telling me that you understand what makes storms. If it could be.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, if there's two of a thing, how could that be?

• 4:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, if it's two, no.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  That sounds insane to me.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If the two things are opposite, I need some explain. Yes.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Right. So they get their energy from different places. So the tropical cyclone gets its energy from the warm ocean.

• 4:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Caribbean.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Could be the Caribbean.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Could be other warm oceans of the world, the Pacific, Indian.

• 4:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wherever it's warm underneath.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Wherever it's warm enough. And it's really warm compared to the atmosphere. So it's giving off heat because the atmosphere is in some way colder than the ocean.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Above the ocean.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  It's venting. Hurricane is a very organized and powerful way that the atmosphere sucks heat out of the ocean.

• 5:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I hadn't thought about it that way.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The atmosphere sucks. Okay. Go on.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  And the winter storm, the extratropical storm is different. So it doesn't care that much about the ocean underneath it, but it gets its energy from the fact that the low latitudes are warm and the high latitudes are cold. And that's because of how the sun shines, you know, at different angles on the different parts of the planet. And so when you have part of the planet being warm and part of the planet being cold, the climate doesn't like that. I mean, if you were to heat up half of the room and cool the other half, you'd have a contrast that would want to even itself out and you'd make a wind to.

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There'd be turbulence midway.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  There'd be turbulence. But because the earth is spinning, they can't flatten out. The warm air can't get to the pole easily and the cold air can't get to the equator easily because as they try to go, the Coriolis force.

• 6:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coriolis. Nice.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coriolis force.

• 6:08Speaker 01

  It's one of my favorite four forces.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  It's not a real force, actually.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  But it's one of the Corey's.

• 6:18Speaker 03

  I got that. Corey Haim. I got it. Corey Feldman. And Coriolis.

• 6:27Speaker 03

  He was in, uh, the Lost Boys.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Corey Olus.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  I heard he's selling his teeth on eBay.

• 6:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so I got a blob of warm air north of the equator. I got a blob of cold air up north.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're trying to equalize.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they can't do it. So instead, what happens, the Coriolis force turns them and you get the jet stream. The jet stream is what you have instead. So the jet stream is like the boundary between the warm and the cold. And it's can stay there because the rotation of the earth keeps it there in balance between the warm and the cold. It blows around the planet, but it's unstable. So the warm and the cold still kind of want to mix because that would be a...

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Fun.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  If the climate...

• 7:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  If the atmosphere could get to the...

• 7:10Speaker 01

  That's how babies happen.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Get a room, warm and cold.

• 7:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, I know. You cannot keep the warm and cold apart, is your point?

• 7:21Speaker 02

  You, well, you can keep them apart for a while, but the jet stream starts to wiggle. It develops undulations in it, and those are extratropical cyclones. Those are winter storms.

• 7:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Interesting.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  Too easy. Yeah. Too easy. He's literally describing sex. And it makes me uncomfortable. Now I get why there's climate change deniers. There's no way the wind is doing it.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  So then the storm dances up on you and...

• 7:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Undulates.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  I haven't thought about it that way.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, because you describe it that way, I can't believe you haven't thought about it that way.

• 8:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so you got the hot air trying to go north, cold air trying to come south, a jet stream that keeps them at bay temporarily. The jet stream gives in, begins to undulate, and that undulation is itself the birth of a storm.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  The jet stream is the chaperone of weather.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  At the junior high dance of climate science.

• 8:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Alright, so now, we've got the hot air trying to go north and it overtakes the part where it's headed towards, right?

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  With permission.

• 8:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  The overtaking gives you fronts. As the jet stream develops, wiggles in it, the cold and warm, they wrap up and you get fronts. That's where you have cold air and warm air right next to each other.

• 9:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but now you get this sort of circulation.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the thing to remember is that because an extratropical cyclone develops from a temperature contrast, that's an asymmetry. And so, the extratropical storm, the winter storm, inherits that asymmetry.

• 9:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, they're not beautiful spirals?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  No, the clouds tend to have a comma shape.

• 9:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've seen that.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This like, the nor'easters have that, don't they? A huge comma.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  We call it a comma cloud, that's the technical term.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Comma cloud, okay. They do that in San Diego every year, right? The comma cloud.

• 9:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everyone dresses up like a robot, and yeah. Alright, I got here, the Saffir-Simpson scale.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 9:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is, and invoked, any time you hear about them talking about hurricanes, they're using this scale. And it's the hurricane intensity scale, from one to five.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I once looked up the description of the damage at each one of these intensity scales, and it was like, the descent into hell, in a Dante storyline. Like, so, category one, they said, oh, heavy winds, right? So the wind is, you got this memorized, the winds? Category one?

• 10:16Speaker 02

  65 knots, which is about 75 miles an hour.

• 10:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're not knot people here, we are...

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Sorry, you want a meter per second? I can go to meter per second.

• 10:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh yeah, meter, that's better, meters per second. I bet they're slopping these boundaries, but it's like, 75 up to like 100 miles an hour, basically. So they said, at these speeds, you lose some roofs, some branches fall, local flooding. That's it. Category two, 96 to 110 miles an hour. 20% of roofs will blow off, some windows will blow out, trees begin to topple.

• 10:52Speaker 01

  People start defriending each other on Facebook.

• 10:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Category three.

• 11:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  111 miles an hour, 129 miles an hour. Like, all roofs that are not hurricane-proof blow down. 50% of trees have broken branches, 20% fall over entirely. Severe flooding in most places.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  People start following Justin Bieber.

• 11:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then, category four, where we're up to 130 to 156 miles an hour. It talks about leaves on trees being ripped clean from the tree itself. And then it says category five, no trees are left standing. Nearly all roofs are blown off, most structures are leveled, everything is flooded. This is Earth trying to kill us. Do people say, "Earth is a haven for life, Earth is beautiful."

• 11:49Speaker 01

  Earth wants us to stop hooking up so casually.

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you guys came up with the scale, and it's pretty devastating. Obviously, the category fives are rare, but in another segment of the show, we'll go over the list of the badass hurricanes that have come through town. I'm just curious, uh, this is an energy scale, basically, right?

• 12:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The destructive energy.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  It's the maximum sustained wind.

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How you get a category five hurricane? What are the ingredients?

• 12:18Speaker 02

  You have to have very warm ocean, usually not just at the surface of the ocean, but a deeper layer, because as the hurricane spins, it'll mix up water from below, and the water will be colder, and so it'll, if the water below is colder, it'll cool off. So you want a deep layer of warm water.

• 12:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're saying a hurricane can shut itself off?

• 12:34Speaker 02

  If it sits in one place for long enough. So if it moves fast, it doesn't happen because...

• 12:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It keeps taking heat for every next place it just...

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know that.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, but if it sits in one place for long enough, and the water below the surface is cold, then the turbulence brings up cold water, and it can shut itself off.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Is that common? Do hurricanes commonly just stay in one place and then disappear?

• 12:52Speaker 02

  No, they move, but if they move slow, you know, that can happen to some extent.

• 12:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so it's warm, deep. So as it sucks, the heat, there's more heat available to it. So it doesn't shut itself off.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  So, warm water, you want to start with a humid atmosphere, very high humidity in the atmosphere. And another thing they don't like is what's called wind shear, which is when the...

• 13:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, who's "they"?

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Hurricanes.

• 13:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They don't like it means that makes them less bad.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Can I ask a really stupid question?

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Hurricane is bad, so anything that, you know...

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have a question.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  I have a stupid question. Could you stop a hurricane? Could you go, "There's a really big hurricane happening."

• 13:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  Let's go get the hurricane stopper.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's physically possible. It's been thought about quite a lot. And it's just difficult and expensive.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  You're saying so no one has approached Samuel Jackson?

• 13:43Speaker 03

  Is it as expensive as the damage that a hurricane?

• 13:48Speaker 02

  That's a good question. So, there's been a few, you know, ideas that have been... That's a smart question.

• 13:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, if it costs $50 billion and you could use it, I don't know, twice,

• 14:04Speaker 01

  would that be worth it?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  So, there's a lot of ideas, and the ones that those of us in environmental science don't like are the ones involving nuclear bombs.

• 14:11Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  But the ones that make...

• 14:12Speaker 03

  Oh, forget it.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  The ones that make a little more sense would...

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait. How does a nuclear bomb?

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was saying, how are you gonna let this just...

• 14:20Speaker 01

  You're like, "Obviously, you could just drop a nuclear bomb on a hurricane." But, you know, that sounds bad because it's so windy there.

• 14:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, because, and...

• 14:29Speaker 01

  So naturally...

• 14:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You just told me that hurricanes like heat, okay?

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is a bomb because it makes heat.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They are thermo-nuclear explosions. How do you stop a hurricane with a nuclear bomb?

• 14:44Speaker 01

  You have 10 minutes, MacGyver.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  I'd rather not defend the nuclear bomb idea if I could...

• 14:51Speaker 01

  But we are curious.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  There have been ideas put out there with nuclear bombs. I don't think they're, uh...

• 14:56Speaker 03

  It just does so much stuff.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  You know, if you could change the circulation of the atmosphere enough, you could disrupt it.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Right, it blows up the hurricane and whatsoever underneath it. Is sort of what you're saying.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  It's a bad idea. There's better ideas.

• 15:08Speaker 03

  Let's hear the good idea.

• 15:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 15:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Better idea.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Because the hurricane lives from getting its energy out of the warm ocean, if you could cool the ocean, you could weaken the hurricane. So, one idea that is feasible, but just very expensive...

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Ice cubes.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Ice cubes? Well, it would take a lot of ice cubes, but one idea that's been...

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You drag a glacier down and stick it right there in the... That's like a big ice cube.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  Or they just, they float down. They just float down there anyway.

• 15:30Speaker 01

  It's the plot of Brewster's Millions.

• 15:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. I remember that, yes, from Brewster's Millions.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Another idea is just pumps to bring up colder water from below. So, if you had a lot of pumps in the ocean, bring up the colder water. You could cool the ocean and weaken the hurricane.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  That's a great idea.

• 15:42Speaker 02

  You'd need a lot of pumps. You'd have to get them there ahead of time. You'd have to do it fast enough. And so, you know, the...

• 15:47Speaker 03

  I see.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Do you think you'd be like 40 pumps, 90 pumps?

• 15:50Speaker 02

  The amount of... Hurricane is very large.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  The pumps need to be mobile.

• 15:54Speaker 02

  They certainly need to be mobile. Because you can't just line the whole ocean with pumps. Correct. Correct. You can't just preemptively put pumps everywhere. No, you'd have to deploy them in the right place at the right time. So it's very expensive. You know, the other interesting thing about it is...

• 16:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And plus, don't you mess with fishes?

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 16:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If a fish likes cold water at the bottom, because that's why they're hanging out there, and you circulate them back up to the top...

• 16:18Speaker 02

  You don't have to go all the way to the bottom. You'd have to go down a few hundred meters.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no fish in the middle.

• 16:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what it sounds like.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  From what I know, from just...

• 16:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, "I'm worried about the fish." "Oh, no, you don't have to go that." No, there's fish everywhere in the ocean.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  I don't know what I would do to the fish. Fish are his thing. I don't know.

• 16:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fish might not like it.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  But that would work. That would be one solution.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  It would at least weaken a hurricane that way. You could, yeah, you could do a lot of things. I think, um, one thing that somebody brought up once in a discussion I was in about this is that there's other ideas that would change the track of the hurricane.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, send it to Iran.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  So if...

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Probably not that far. But, but a lot of these things...

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Towards Iran.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  When we try to intervene in the atmosphere in these, in these ways, we usually don't do it quite right and things don't go exactly as you planned because the atmosphere is very unpredictable. So if you were to try to do something to a hurricane, uh, no matter what you did and no matter whether you did it or not, if the hurricane hit anyone, they would sue you because you... They could say you made it happen. Right, right.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  So in a legalistic society, it's probably not a good idea to try any of that.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  So my actual example of Iran was actually pretty good. To be the one place that people would be like, "I don't care that you're suing me."

• 17:22Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 17:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, no, but this is, this is an interesting socio-cultural point.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 17:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because if you don't redirect the hurricane, as insurance forms duly indicate, it's an act of God. If you do redirect the hurricane, it's an act of Andy.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  Joe Biden.

• 17:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Adam, I call you Andy, excuse me.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  But even if, but even if you tried to redirect it and even if you didn't do anything to it, but you tried to do something, it would look like you did it, right? Because nobody knows where the hurricane would have gone if you hadn't done it.

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they'd rather blame God than a human being?

• 17:53Speaker 02

  They can't sue God.

• 17:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  They could probably file.

• 17:59Speaker 01

  But, but you could then redirect a hurricane, you just would never bring it up.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  I don't know if we could do it, but we, you know, you...

• 18:05Speaker 01

  But if you tried to, don't tell anyone you did that.

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. Yes, that's what they...

• 18:09Speaker 01

  Just to avoid the legal headache of sending a hurricane to another place.

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We create a drink of the night to serve the theme of the evening and I collaborated with the bartender. So we created something called The Stormy Weather. It is rye, a common drink from the north, mixed with ginger beer, a common drink from the tropics.

• 18:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stormy weather up the whole coast. So, tell me what happened with Sandy. I lived in Lower Manhattan, we were out of electricity for five days, ran out of water after two days, so you can't flush the toilet. So, like, we had to leave. And what intrigues me about Sandy is that the hurricane didn't take out Lower Manhattan. It was the tides. That's all it was. And that was enough to take us out.

• 19:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  You live at the edge of an island. And wasn't it also the levees in New Orleans?

• 19:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the levees in New Orleans. So here we are, ready to blame hurricanes, and I'm thinking, no, there's an engineering problem here that has not been met.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  No, I'll say that I live right where, uh, okay, I'm a brand-new New Yorker. Okay, not West Side Highway, but the...

• 19:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  FDR.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  The East Side Highway.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, thanks. In September, three weeks before Sandy, I noticed that the water level was unusually higher than normal.

• 19:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you didn't tell anyone?

• 20:00Speaker 04

  Okay, I'll be honest, the person next to me was like, they were making a big deal of it, like, something's gonna happen, 'cause the water level was different. You know, I just dismissed it, like, ah, whatever, crazy.

• 20:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  And then, three weeks later, that person was first on the phone, like, "I told you, I told you, I told you it was gonna happen." You know, I was like, well, what are you, out there every night, like, measuring the water levels and...

• 20:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, what, are you a water scientist? That's a thing.

• 20:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I was just intrigued because there, yeah, there were some trees down and some awesome trees fell, you know, all the basements were flooded and the underground parking garages, cars were bobbing up out from the openings and it was like apocalypse, downtown apocalypse. And it was not even any of the properties of the hurricane that are normally sighted because it didn't rain very hard.

• 20:49Speaker 01

  It was mostly windy and then the full moon.

• 20:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Windy and then the tide surge.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Storm surge, yeah.

• 20:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The storm surge. And so what I find interesting is most people think that the full moon has like extra gravity to make the tide. The moon, when it's full, does not make any higher tides than it's at any other phase. The only difference is it lines up with the sun at the same time so that their tides add together, giving you the highest tides of the month. Because the tide is only a function of how far the moon is from Earth.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  So a full moon.

• 21:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that has nothing to do with the phase at all.

• 21:24Speaker 01

  Wait, so the full moon is just an indication that the tides will be higher because it's lined up with the sun, but not the result of it?

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not the result of it being full, other than it's a, it's when it's lined up with the sun, you're seeing a full side of the moon lit up. But the fact that the moon is full alone is not, if there were no sun, you'd have the same high tide every day of the month.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  So it'd be fine if we just had no sun? That is a very good point, Neil. Thank you for clarifying that the real culprit is that we have a sun!

• 21:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, so was it just bad luck that Sandy hit Manhattan at high tide of the day and high tide of the month? Because there's several high tides in a day and then it's the highest tide during full moon and new moon.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was bad luck. The difference between high and low tide at that time was about five feet. And yeah, the peak of the storm surge, which doesn't last that long, a couple hours maybe, came very close to the high tide so that we got the maximum of both of them at the same time. So the tide was about at the battery.

• 22:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The battery, the tip of Manhattan.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  Lower Manhattan, right. There's a tide gauge there and it measured, so five feet of tide, nine feet of storm surge, about 14 feet above the low tide.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  I have a question. Is it easier, instead of getting rid of a hurricane, to delay it then? To just be like, "Come like tomorrow."

• 22:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, not tomorrow. Come in a few hours.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Come in a few hours.

• 22:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. If it came three hours later, or earlier, we would have been fine.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  If it had come three hours later, it would have been a lot better for Manhattan, and maybe Staten Island, Brooklyn too. It would have been a lot worse in Long Island Sound. Because their tides are three hours.

• 22:58Speaker 05

  Ah, who cares?

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, right, right. Way more people live in Manhattan than on Long Island Sound.

• 23:06Speaker 05

  Billy Joel's best albums are behind the mountain.

• 23:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, your mom lives, okay.

• 23:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Sandy was unusual for New York, simply because we had bad luck, is what you're saying?

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Well, it was unusual in a lot of ways. The synchronization of the storm surge and the tide was one of them. It was also just a big storm surge, because it was marginal category one, forty or something miles per hour. So winds that strong were out to about 500 miles from the center. So something like 1,000 end to end.

• 23:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  So a very, very large area of high winds.

• 23:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  And they were blowing right towards the shore, over a very long area.

• 23:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that builds up the tidal surge.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  It builds it up. The length over which the wind blows the same way is called the fetch. And the fetch was very large, it blowing the water continuously.

• 23:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Persistent winds is what gives you the...

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Persistent and blowing right into shore.

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the point is, the surge can get us. Heavy rains can get us. Heavy winds can get us. There's three ways hurricanes mess with us.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, and surge is the one we'll always have to worry about the most in New York. Because we're a lot of low-lying areas. We're not going to get a category four or five storm here. The water's too cold. Miami or something's a difference.

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was just imagining, that was category one that was Sandy, and if Sandy were category three, we'd still be without power.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, it depends. I mean, a smaller storm would have been very destructive, but over a much smaller area. And the surge depends on the angle it comes in at, the speed it comes in at, the size of the storm. So it was a bad scenario for New York City as well.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  Yes, no, that we know.

• 24:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You think we figured that out? Okay.

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we have some bad hurricanes. In 1900, the great Galveston Hurricane. Now, I read this, and someone's applauding. Give it up for Hurricane? Give it up for Hurricane Galveston! So, I look at this, wait. Peak winds, 150 miles an hour. The island, Galveston, this is off southern Texas. The island is eight feet above sea level, and the storm surge was 15 feet. So, the entire island got wiped clean.

• 25:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I heard a Jesus over here, yes? Yeah.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  It's the first time that person has heard about anything sad.

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, in Galveston, 6,000 people died. This is before we had satellite images. And half the people said, "I don't need a space program." Oh, wait, what is the hurricane coming? So, back then, they couldn't predict. So, tapping my greatest hits list here. 1926, there was a hurricane that hit Miami. That was 1926, 128 mile an hour winds. If you had that hurricane hit today on that trajectory, it would be the most devastating hurricane in history, because the population centers are different today and are much more dense than they were back then.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Because people keep having sex.

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, precisely. And so, hurricanes can grow in their damage factor simply because of our living patterns. I got 1936, Labor Day Hurricane. So, this is the most powerful hurricane on record hitting the United States. Did you know this? I did not. Yeah, so that one tore through the Far Keys, full up, category 5, 180 mile an hour winds. Whoa. Atmospheric pressure, 26.35 inches of mercury. Yeah, that was low. I got 1991 Hurricane Grace. You know what put that on the map?

• 26:44Speaker 01

  The perfect storm.

• 26:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The perfect storm, that's right. That was a...

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Matt Damon.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  He's not in it, but he might as well.

• 26:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You find a way to mention Matt Damon for every one of these Star calls.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  I just want him to be my friend!

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Please find me Matt Damon. I am also from Boston.

• 27:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that one apparently is only category two. But it combined with a mid-Atlantic cyclone, so everything came perfect for the hurricane, and it made a movie.

• 27:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  It was similar to Sandy in a lot of ways, except that Sandy hit us.

• 27:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sandy, I got a place out on Long Island, so I care about this Long Island sound. I joked earlier, I care. And a 3,000-pound tree fell two feet to the side of my car. The car still got dinged up, but it wasn't smashed up. I told my son to go out and count the tree rings, which he did. He got something like 70 rings. And this is one of the biggest trees in the property. And I said, "Wait a minute, if this is one of the biggest trees, and it has presumably the most rings, that means none of these trees were here earlier than 70 years ago." So one ring equals one year? Yes, yes, because the ring represents the growth pattern, because over the winter the tree doesn't grow.

• 28:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It needs energy from the sun, which it gets through photosynthesis in the leaves, so it needs the leaves.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Oh, and there's no sun in the winter, I get it, go on.

• 28:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, there's no leaves in the winter. So, then I looked it up, and I found out there was a devastating hurricane that crossed Long Island, like in 1938. So there's no, like, significant vegetation that survived that transition. So, a high-powered hurricane, you pivot civilization on things like that.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, 38 was a very destructive storm, the strongest one, I think, to come make landfall in this area.

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that the one that was in Rhode Island?

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it made landfall first in Long Island, and then went through New England.

• 28:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so I got a couple more here. So Hurricane Andrew. Yep. Now, because it's named Andrew, and Andrew begins with A, that means what about it?

• 28:53Speaker 02

  First one of the season.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Hurricane Andrew is on the books at $40 billion in damage. And it was huge, it was a huge hurricane, carried a lot of energy in it, right?

• 29:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, just, thank you. He missed that class, he obviously missed the Hurricane Andrew class. 2005, of course, Katrina. In fact, that was category five in the Gulf. Landfall was only category three, and so Norlin should have surely survived that, and it's really just faulty engineering there. Does anybody else get severe weather like the United States does? We get hurricanes and tornadoes and drought and flood and fires and locusts and frogs. And we call our country, you know, God bless America. And it looks like God is not blessing America when you add all this up.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  There's definitely places that get it a lot worse in terms of hurricanes. In tornadoes, we're number one.

• 29:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We win.

• 29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, we take for granted that in The Wizard of Oz, they just showed a tornado. But if we are the capital of tornado and Kansas is tornado alley, then what is routine for us becomes the center point of a film for the rest of the world. That's an extraordinary weather phenomenon.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  So is the land of Oz.

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So is the land. Yeah, Oz would have been a little more surreal than the tornado itself. I would have to agree with that.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you know, hurricanes before this past century, right? The storm of 1609, that decade was extraordinary in science and literature. Kepler was alive at the time, a famous astronomer. So was Galileo. 1609, Galileo made his first observations of the night sky with his newly-built telescope and published a book a year later called Sidereus Nuncius, where he drew the fact that Jupiter had these stars that hung around with it, that would turn out to be Jupiter's moons. He mapped spots on the sun. And Queen Elizabeth was Queen of England and at work was also Shakespeare. And the storm of 1609, various fleets were in the mid-Atlantic moving between England and the colonies.

• 31:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That became the basis of William Shakespeare's play, The Tempest.

• 31:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When did you guys start naming hurricanes? And who names them? And who names them? Thank you.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  And why isn't it me?

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Hurricane Mr. Jelly! Can't be mad at him!

• 31:46Speaker 02

  I don't know the exact year. They started getting named shortly after World War II.

• 31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That late?

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. And I remember-

• 31:51Speaker 02

  For example, the 38 is called the 38 Hurricane. It's not called-

• 31:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not called Fred or something? Okay, now, I understood. Correct me if I'm wrong. Initially, all hurricanes were only named after women. Because-

• 32:03Speaker 01

  They're terrible.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Because they use their wiles to control us!

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Because, at the time, no one was able to predict which way the hurricane was going. And all of the meteorologists were men. Like a woman. And so they analogized the unpredictability of hurricanes to the unpredictability of their spouses. You're lying.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  I can't believe I was less sexist! Then they were!

• 32:33Speaker 03

  But there's the line, uh, the Shakespeare line, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

• 32:39Speaker 02

  I can neither confirm nor deny that story.

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Wait, I have a question.

• 32:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it was only during the rise of the modern women's liberation movement of the 1970s, where they started interlacing them with male names.

• 32:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, wait, I have a question. When could they start predicting that hurricanes might come? Like, 'cause in 1800s, they probably were like, "Oh my god, it's so windy!" But-

• 33:00Speaker 03

  But no, 38 Hurricane, they didn't know until two seconds before it, right?

• 33:04Speaker 02

  I think it was a little bit better than that.

• 33:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Better than two seconds in a-

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there were forecasts from way back, but they weren't any good.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  That's not a forecast, that's witchcraft!

• 33:15Speaker 02

  A forecast is just if you say what's gonna happen. Being right is another thing. Right?

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa!

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  But that's a super interesting thing.

• 33:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why they pay me.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  When did they start forecasting with like a monicum of possible accuracy?

• 33:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The first attempts to use the laws of physics to predict the weather were, you know, in the early 20th century. It got more serious after World War II when we had computers to actually solve the equations. Doesn't Doppler have something to do with it? Doppler has something to do with it. That came later. Doppler radar used that to see how fast the raindrops are moving. Yeah.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, wait, what is Doppler then? How fast raindrops fall? That sounds very romantic.

• 33:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Doppler is the Doppler- Was that a guy?

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Johnny Dopp-

• 33:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a gentleman named Christian Doppler. Yes. And he's a German physicist, and he did experiments with train whistles. And he noted that as a train approached, it was a high pitch. No, well, yes, it got louder. It got louder. Isn't that what it was? The discovery wasn't that noises get louder as they approach you. So the train whistle comes, and what he noticed was that the pitch of the sound was higher as it approached him than what it was when it receded. So for us modern folk, if you stand on the edge of a highway, the car will go.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  That's very good.

• 34:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very good. So you can calculate the shift change, the shift in the pitch, and know exactly the speed of the train. So the sound waves get emitted. So I emit a wave, but I'm in motion. So I come a little closer, and then I make my next wave. So I've compressed the waves in front of me. So the wavelength increased. When you have an increased wavelength, the pitch is lower. Right. Okay? The frequency in physics terms is lower. So, once you measure that shift, you know exactly how fast the thing is moving. And it's because of that fact of physics, we know we live in an expanding universe.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  But, back to raindrops.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Right, so on a more cosmic scale.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  It also tells us how fast the raindrops are moving towards us or away from us. Doppler radar can tell you not just that it's raining or how hard it's raining, but which direction the winds are blowing in the place where it's raining.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  And so when did forecasting go from like, "I think it's gonna be windy in a week", to like-

• 35:38Speaker 02

  I know it's gonna be windy in a week.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's so windy.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  This is an important story of Hurricane Sandy, actually. The modern science of weather forecasting started to be what it is shortly after World War II with the first computer weather models. And then over time, those computer models have gotten better and better. Of course, computers have gotten much more powerful. What your phone can do is much more powerful than the first computers that ran weather models.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  I know. I wish I could go back in time and tease those people.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Right. And then the observations, the measurements with the balloons and the radars, now the satellites, that we need to tell the models how to start the forecast, because they need to know what's happening now to get to the future, has all gotten much better. Hurricane Sandy was forecast pretty accurately by some of the models about a week ahead of time. Some of them were doing something different a week ahead of time, so we weren't sure if that forecast was right. By about four days before, we were pretty sure. That's an amazing achievement that couldn't have been done a decade or two ago.

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And four days' warning is enough to prepare a city. So, in New York City, the mayor, we preclosed the subway and we preclosed the public transportation. There's a lot of prep work that was done in anticipation of this, and there's a day where you wouldn't have known it in enough time to do anything about it.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta end this segment. We are live from the bellhouse in Brooklyn, New York.