Hurricane Ivan and related weather phenomena were the focus of this show which featured physicist James McCanney as the main guest, and Prof. William Gray of the Tropical Meteorology Project in the first hour. "It's going to do tremendous damage," Gray said of Ivan which was heading towards the Mobile/Pensacola area. Such hurricanes are the result of the Atlantic Ocean circulation pattern, driven by salinity levels he explained, adding that we have had similar, very active storm cycles in past decades.
Explaining his theory that electrical currents that flow throughout the solar system affect weather on Earth, McCanney said that our planet's passage through one such current in August accelerated storm conditions. Solar winds and the new moon phase can also act as weather triggers, he noted.
He also touched on weather modification and said that it would be possible to send satellite beamed energy into the eye of hurricane to increase its intensity. Conversely, he has proposed a method to deplete the energy of a hurricane. McCanney predicts we may be in for a period of smaller but more intense storms and extremes of weather, such that drought could be next to a place that's flooding. He also announced the publication of his new weather-themed book, Principia Meteorologia - The Physics of Sun-Earth Weather.