Cyclones will get fiercer as the air above them gets warmer and wetter

This process is self-reinforcing (Figs090, 100). It can start with the flap of a butterfly wing that creates a minuscule vortex [G19], and grows to become a hurricane that wrecks cities and produces more power than all humanity's heat engines together. Once this has been understood, it becomes possible to devise engines that are mainly powered with ambient heat as Branca had intended.

Normal cyclones are self-inhibiting. The diameters of fully formed cyclones can be hundreds of km. Cyclones' ground-to-top-of-cyclone cloud heights are rarely greater than 4km. Air swirls in from their rims to their cores in flat hair-spring like spirals and then rises rapidly at their cores. These are emptied out centrifugally so that cold, dry, heavy air from above the cloud cover falls into them from above.

This cold air plugs the cyclone's core so that air swirling up between the plug and the inflowing cyclone air is compressed, warmed (Foehn effect) and becomes the clear eye through which one can sometimes look up to blue sky. The cold air plug also widens the core like a wedge so that centrifugal forces are reduced there and toothpaste-tube thermodynamic effects are partly inhibited.