As each new season comes, the hunters are wiser and better equipped. The battle with the hurricane is joined. It is something to worry about, like war and the H-bomb. At the end of the 1954 season, the executives of the big insurance companies were in conference with grave faces. Property damage from Carol, Edna and Hazel had mounted upward to around a billion dollars. Reports had been circulated to the effect that the slow warming of the earth in the present century is bringing more hurricanes with greater violence and paths shifting northward to devastate areas with greater populations. There was speculation about the effects of A-bombs and H-bombs on hurricanes. All this trouble comes from water vapor in the atmosphere. Without it, the earth would be a beautiful place but useless to man. Even over the tropical oceans it rarely exceeds five per cent of the bulk of the air. In other regions, it is much less. But it is this vapor, constantly moving from the oceans into the air and spreading around the world, that builds the stormy lower layer of our atmosphere—the troposphere—where clouds and storms, snow and ice and torrential rain, thunderstorms, hurricanes and tornadoes thrive in season. Such tremendous energy is needed to carry billions of tons of moisture from the oceans to the thirsty land that all of these rain and storm processes are maintained on the borderline of violence. Here at the bottom of the atmosphere the vapor absorbs the heat radiated from the sun. There is a swift drop in temperature as we go aloft. Moist air pushed upward becomes cooled and ice crystals, water droplets, snowflakes, are squeezed out. Clouds form, beautiful in the sunset, gloomy on a winter day, threatening as the summer thunderstorm shows on the horizon, fearsome as the winter blizzard takes command of the plains and valleys. Here is water vapor coming to the end of a long journey from the surfaces of distant seas. From here it goes to the land and begins another long journey, in the rivers and back to the oceans. But on the way to us, violence may be one of the principal ingredients. We can’t live without it and we have trouble living with it. When this lush flow of water vapor from the tropical ocean to the atmosphere becomes geared in some special manner to swiftly-moving air from other regions, the process seems to get out of nature’s hands. Upward motion begins on a grand scale. Converging streams of air are twisted by the spinning of the earth on its axis. And just as men begin to see the picture, nature draws a veil by the condensation of water vapor. Under this darkening canopy, violence grows with startling swiftness. The water vapor that drew the curtain now releases energy alongside of which the A-bomb shrinks to insignificance.