This post is going to go out of order of the events as they happened this week.

First in my order: Warren Bluhm (to whom I once contributed a story idea) on Godzilla:

The suspenseful new trailer for the new movie Godzilla seems to promise the first great movie since 1954 about the big green monster. Folks like me grew up loving Raymond Burr intoning “What has happened here was caused by a force that until a few days ago was beyond the scope of man’s imagination,” but then saw the original Japanese film and realized that the American version had stripped the story of most of its power. …

The 1954 Japanese film Gojira is a remarkable drama. Nine years after the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a creature emerges from the depths of the seas, shaken loose by the vibrations of nuclear bomb testing and mutated to unnatural proportions by the bombs’ radiation.

A scientist has created a weapon even more terrible than an atomic bomb, one so horrible that he refuses to share the process he used to discover the technology and resists efforts to use the weapon against the giant creature, even as Japan’s largest city comes under siege.

It’s a movie about war, peace, violence and nonviolence, technology and the simple ongoing question: Just because something can be done, is it right and just to do it? A very thoughtful and important movie with fantasy and science fiction elements.

Gojira was repackaged as Godzilla, King of the Monsters, for distribution in America, and each and every one of its more than 20 sequels has been mindless child’s play. One almost has to wonder: What was so dangerous about the ideas inGojira that it had to be so trivialized?

But then — scary monsters are often transformed into cuddly children’s toys. Look at the stark and poignant story of the man built from parts of other men by Dr. Frankenstein. The iconic image of Boris Karloff in his monster makeup eventually became Herman Munster.

Perhaps it’s simply a natural reaction to looking into the depths of the soul and finding darkness. We step away, we dress up the darkness with childlike innocence, and we look the other way. A person can only spend so much in the dark before needing a little sunshine.

This is what Bluhm means:

The first Godzilla movie I remember watching was where the atomic lizard had to share star status with our own King Kong:

This comes to mind indirectly because of this Facebook exchange, which started with two Mike Smith observations: First …

I looked at my correspondence after lunch yesterday and found numerous Facebook comments about this abstract (summary of a scientific paper) for next month’s American Physical Society session on climate. This abstract is the poster child for why you must have an understanding of atmospheric science to make a positive contribution to climate or weather science.

Here is the abstract, I am intentionally omitting the author’s name (this isn’t personal). Bold type is mine.
(Dept. of Physics, Temple Univ, Philadelphia, PA)

The recent devastating tornado attacks in Oklahoma, Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota raise an important question: can we do something to eliminate the major tornado threats in Tornado Alley? Violent tornado attacks in Tornado Alley are starting from intensive encounters between the northbound warm air flow and southbound cold air flow. As there is no mountain in Tornado Alley ranging from west to east to weaken or block such air flows, some encounters are violent, creating instability: The strong wind changes direction and increases in speed and height. As a result, it creates a supercell, violent vortex, an invisible horizontal spinning motion in the lower atmosphere. When the rising air tilts the spinning air from horizontal to vertical, tornadoes with radii of miles are formed and cause tremendous damage. Here we show that if we build three east-west great walls in the American Midwest, 300m high and 50m wide, one in North Dakota, one along the border between Kansas and Oklahoma to east, and the third one in the south Texas and Louisiana, we will diminish the tornado threats in the Tornado Alley forever. We may also build such great walls at some area with frequent devastating tornado attacks first, then gradually extend it. …

As to the rest of it, it is nonsense. In order,

1. The old cold air hitting warm air canard. That is misleading at best, especially since most of the violent Plains thunderstorms occur along a “dry line” where there is a relatively small temperature difference.
2. Instability has to do with vertical temperature changes, not horizontal.
3. Tornado rotation is around a vertical, not horizontal axis (although I concede I’m not sure what it is he is trying to say).
4. The “Great Wall of Tornadoes” — if supercell thunderstorms with F-5 tornadoes could laugh, they would have a hearty chuckle as they “attacked” the wall. If tornadoes can go up and down mountains (and they can!), they would go over/through the wall.

Wait! There’s more!

With wind energy the darling of the pro-global warming crowd, you knew this was coming.

After the proposal to build the Great Tornado Wall to be made at next month’s climate session in Denver, now there is a proposal to…wait for it…

…build wind turbines to stop hurricanes!

It is claimed the wind turbines can stand up to hurricanes. Yep, I’d like to see Hurricane Katrina or Camille at their peak intensities take on thousands of offshore wind turbines. I’m certain I know which “side” would “win.”

While I’m sure the engineering professor making this proposal is well-intended, it is yet another case of someone making a proposal about the atmosphere with no background in atmospheric science. In fact, he touts his “qualifications” as having been interviewed about global warming on Late Night With David Letterman!

The proposals are, of course, utterly stupid. However, if you don’t take them seriously, you have the next potential Syfy movie. Syfy, remember, brought the world …

So how about this Syfy movie idea: A ginormous hurricane is brewing in the ocean, threatening to wipe out entire states. A plucky group of scientists (at least two of which need to be attractive enough to attract audiences of the opposite gender) devise a way to fight the hurricane with a wall of tornadoes to keep out the hurricane. And, as is always the case (as another Facebook friend of mine pointed out), some character at least once must say the line: “You are fooling around with forces you cannot possibly understand.

There have been, of course, movies that have featured hurricanes …

… and movies (fiction, as opposed to this classic) with tornadoes …

… and of course hurricanes can produce tornadoes.

To this point, though, I believe my idea has never even been proposed anywhere else. even before the era of easy CGI effects: