11 thoughts on “The Great Walls Of The Midwest”

  1. I lived in Colorado Springs for over 25 years. In all that time, we had many powerful thunderstorms but we never had a tornado. Odds are the Rocky Mountains were responsible for that. Those mountains were well over 1000 feet above the local terrain. However, once you go east about 40 miles or so, towns like Limon are hit by tornados including some very powerful ones. Building those walls might protect the people living close to them but storms can still form downwind of the walls. You might also have a serious impact on local weather patterns. Who would be responsible (or liable) for that? Predicting the weather in Colorado Springs was difficult because of the effects of the mountains (and weathermen are known to lie).

  2. Well… If the goal is just “add drag”…

    I’d rather do it with “kite turbines”.

    That is, not -ground- level windmills, but put the kites farther up (anchored to a turbine turned by the spinning “string”).

  3. The same weather patterns that bring tornadoes also bring the rain for agriculture. Changing those patterns will probably turn the Midwest into a desert and most of the towns will dry up with it, which will tornado proofing the area irrelevant.

  4. This paper is based on “calculations.” There wasn’t time to do a little wind-tunnel testing before rushing out a sensational press release?

  5. Hey, what’s not to love? First, you’ve got to get multiple states to go along with it, and get the EPA on board, as well as the FAA and the NOAA and the Department of Agriculture and probably fifteen other government departments, along with their state counterparts. We’re talking Full Bureaucratic Employment here, people! /sarc

    Jesus Christ. There are already two million miles of pipeline crisscrossing North America, and we can’t get a couple hundred miles approved for Keystone XL, which would be real employment in high-paying, taxpaying jobs for tens of thousands of Americans..

    Three one-thousand-foot-high walls crossing several states? So America can be more like China and have fewer tornadoes? How many people will die building these walls? How will such a project change weather patterns, snowfall and rainfall… how much will it cost to build it? And how in hell is the brokest nation in the history of money going to pay people to build that?

    1. And if we had unobtainium, it would be a fraction of the cost of the walls to build multiple space elevators.

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