The Point Radio: Weather Channel Shows Us How To HACK THE PLANET

It’s not only super villains who want to control the weather – scientists do as well, and now they have the technology. It’s all explained in a cool new series on The Weather Channel called HACKING THE PLANET with John Keener and Cara Santa Maria (from TALK NERDY TO ME) and they give us all the details – plus have you seen that WONDER WOMAN fan film? Somebody finally got it right! Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.

Transcript

Hello, it's Mike Roff and welcome to The Point where all parts of pop culture come together. Well, everybody talks about the weather and now you really could do something about it. We talk about the technology that's shown in a new show called Hacking the Planet coming to the Weather Channel and we got the details. Plus finally, Wonder Woman done right and we'll show you how.

Let's get to the point right now. This is the point, the point radio, get the point radio. Everybody talks about the weather. Well, you know how the rest of that goes, but did you know there actually is something that can be done about it?

It's all explained in a new show on the Weather Channel called Hacking the Planet. John Renney, host of the show and the former editor-in-chief of the Scientific American, explains it all. This show for the Weather Channel called Hacking the Planet. In each episode, we take a look at one big natural catastrophe or threat.

So things like hurricanes, but also earthquakes, tornadoes, lightning, any number of different things. In each episode, we ask the question, given what we understand about the science of how these things work, what causes them, what could we do to use that knowledge to our advantage? So on the most ambitious end of things, it actually means could we use our technology

to potentially try to do something like weaken a hurricane or steer it someplace so it's going to hit a less vulnerable part of the coast? But even in some cases a more realistic timeframe, we can also look at the question of, could we do something to greatly improve our ability to predict exactly when and where these storms will hit?

Or could we do something to improve our preparation for these storms so that we could reduce the numbers of lives that might get lost or the amount of property that gets damaged along the way? So the technology exists to do something about these major storms. So why don't we do it? Well, so of course, as you talk about all of these different kinds of phenomena, it changes a lot.

But in the case of something, let's say starting with, say, hurricanes, because that's what our first episode is about on that. There are some very interesting concepts on the table right now where theoretically, the technology is there that if you could scale it up enough, you might actually be able to do something.

So today, it's true. You could not really do anything to actually weaken a hurricane, even if you wanted to. It's not out of the question that someday we might be able to scale up these technologies to be able to do something about that. But right now, that's not going to happen.

What we can do is improve the kind of protection and prevention and prediction that we would have. Some kinds of hacks, though, that we talk about are much more realistic. And they are things that we really can do right now. So for example, cloud seeding to be able to try to make it rain or to make it snow. The technology is very simple.

We've been doing that for a long time. The science, the question has been whether or not it really works. And that's one of the things that we take a look at in the show is people have been spending a lot of money on cloud seeding, but does it really work? Well, there are some experiments in progress right now that are trying to arrive at that answer.

John's co-host is Cara Santa Maria from the Huffington Post and the popular online blog, Talk Nerdy to Me. I talked to Cara about the also common belief that the changes in weather, well, were due to some changes in the planet as well. And if that really is the case.

The data is pretty conclusive. Not that we can peg any particular storm system to global climate change and to human intervention. But when you look at kind of the million, when you look at all of these different weather phenomena together, we are seeing an increase in the quantity and in the devastation involved with these.

There is a link that we are seeing between, you know, kind of catastrophic weather phenomena and global climate change. And I think this is an important point to make because a lot of people when they first hear the title, Hacking the Planet, they think, oh, no, we shouldn't be messing with mother nature. But the truth is we've been messing with mother nature in an unintended way for many,

many years now. And so one of the big questions of the show is should we be doing, should we be hacking these things in a more directed way to maybe kind of undo some of the damage that we've already done? So at the very least, is this going to make weather forecasting any easier?

You know, for a whole bit, it's very easy for a lot of us because if I was to make jokes about meteorologists and weather people and oh, they always seem to get things wrong. But actually meteorologists get things right way more often than people realize. And our abilities to predict some kinds of things farther out are getting better and better. So for example, and actually was one of the fun things with working on the show was at one point

I was at this NASA flight facility on the Virginia coast and I was watching as the scientists there, they had sent an unmanned drone, one of these aerial drones originally developed for a flight over Afghanistan, and they were flying it over a big storm system off the coast of the Canary Islands. And they were watching that to see if that was going to turn into a hurricane.

Right now we're actually benefiting from the fact that readings from those kinds of instruments are coming back and directly influencing the kinds of predictions that are being made about whether or not we're going to get hit by a hurricane. So we really are seeing some amazing improvements in our ability to predict these things. And that's one of the great things that in the course of hacking the planet that we get to

shine a spotlight on. So what can we look forward to on hacking the planet? We've got multiple episodes. So we're starting with hurricanes and immediately after that we'll see an episode about tornadoes. We also investigate lightning, we investigate earthquakes, we investigate volcanoes. So a lot of people see a kind of catastrophic weather phenomenon.

We really look at all angles of. And also just these issues of things like cloud seeding, whether or not you can make it rain or snow on demand and what the potential implications of that would be. Oh and also a big question is even if we can, should we? Should we?

Absolutely. But we get into that a lot. John and Kara and a lot of great scientific knowledge all come together on Hacking the Planet. Catch episodes every week on the Weather Channel and see more, including the past episodes at weatherchannel.com.

As always, a lot going on. Here's the latest in pop culture. TNT is making the first six episodes of this new season of Dallas available online and via the mobile app as well. And the second episode set to air on March the 7th will also be available online the day before that, all in preparation of the big JRU-ing funeral episode of the series. This of course gives viewers a chance to catch up completely on everything of the season before that

historic episode airs. In case you're all pumped up about DC's big WTF cover promotion in April, well you might as well forget it because DC has now made plans to remove the WTF logo from the covers. It's not clear about whether we'll get the actual art on those covers, the ones who were so spectacular that once we looked at them we were supposed to exclaim out loud WTF. You know how that goes. DC announced a change in plans at a recent media of comic book retailers. When it

comes to getting comic book properties on movies and television, the big question has been for a long time, what do you do about Wonder Woman? It certainly wasn't answered with the NBC David Kelly pilot a year or so ago and it looks like now the CW has slowed down the process of getting their Amazon project on with nothing said to appear until at least 2014. However, putting together some favors and a few thousand dollars, movie director and former stuntman Jesse V Johnson

seems to have the answer with a little fan-made film that he's putting out as his resume for why he should be involved in taking Wonder Woman to the next level. You gotta see this, we've put it up on our website to make it easy. Check it out now at GetThePointRadio.com. Firefly is a franchise and well just won't go away and I know we're all happy about that. Now there's a new game to add to the list done by Margaret Weiss Productions. It's a both digital and tabletop role-playing

game for Firefly. Weiss had also done a serenity-based game back a few years ago but this one is all brand new. Add that to the list of a couple of other games that are out there including one from Toy Vault and Guild Force 9 all available over the next coming months. Marvel has announced they're going back to the concept of What If, a title that was popular a couple of times in the history of the company telling altered inversions of different points in Marvel continuity. The company however

was not specific on how the What If concept will return whether it be a series of stories or an ongoing comic series like it was at least back in the 70s. That does it for the podcast. We're back in a few days and a visit to the set of Community. A new season is rolling lots of people are talking about it. We'll find out what's going on on set. In the meantime this podcast produced twice every week by now content media. Catch it on great websites like ComicMix.com, michaeldavisworld.com

and in the iTunes podcast directory as well. You can catch up on all the pop culture you want to hear 24-7 and get the point radio. Listen online or with a free app available right now in the iTunes app store. Search under pop culture and the point or if you have a droid or a blackberry then get the app. Tune in radio and listen to us anywhere. On social media you can follow us under the point radio on Facebook and Twitter and be sure to be back here in a few days. Get the point radio.com