“The most interesting answer is not just that we can’t stop tornadoes but that we shouldn’t. This was the answer I got from Greg Carbin, one of the wind geniuses at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman. “Why can’t we stop tornadoes?” I asked. “Well, what is the purpose of a tornado?” he responded. It had never occurred to me that a storm had anything as grand as a purpose. Consider a hurricane, Carbin said. It acts as a kind of air conditioner for the planet, pushing excess heat from the equator off toward the poles. Similarly, he said, a tornado releases pent-up instability. “In the process of that turning,” Carbin told me, “there’s something that the atmosphere is releasing, or relaxing. So if you could eliminate tornadoes, what does that mean? How does the atmosphere react to the fact that you’ve now suppressed this natural phenomenon? It’s going to manifest itself in some other way.”