Can You Stop a Hurricane by Nuking It?

"dams burst (...) it'll only last as long as we expend energy to maintain it" - true

But as our construction techniques improve, maintainance cost are reduced (or alternatively reconstruction costs are reduced - it's all a tradeoff)

Also, look at what happened as a consequence of the tsunamis - we are getting better at monitoring them.

We will also certainly get a better understanding on how they behave, and maybe how to mitigate them (IIRC wavefronts of opposing frequency cancel out- maybe someday we'll be able to do something like that)

It all takes time- if only to develop understanding on what to do, what to avoid, and technology on how to actually do something.

I'm not denying the fact that we are not able to fix the weather - yet. But in the long run, we will.

It certainly is premature to put much faith in that, yet look at the ideas for geoengineering- it's very inspiring.

I don't want to be overtly optimistic - humans are great - but we also have flaws, mostly social. There are indeed very concerning in the short run - especially in the west and in Europe, where something is going wrong (less interest in science, less willpower, lesser will to live?). But the world is a big place, and if the current powerhouses stop innovating, someone else will take the lead. It doesn't really matters who does.

So in the long run, I'm sure the human race will win against nature (as in total win - incluing whole brain emulation), if we just manage to not destroy ourselves due to existential risks in the process.

These are IMHO the only real obstacles to acheiving that.

I've heard this sort of sentiment come from Europeans before. Apparently it's part of the "stupid americans" myth in Europe that American construction is "shoddy" and that's why weather is so destructive here.

Of course Europe receives very few hurricanes because they typically move from east to west from the intertropical convergence zones and Europe has no east coast exposed to an ITCZ. Some parts of Europe (such as Britain) receive many tornado strikes but ones with the intensity of those in America are rare. The USA is the only country that receives several F5 strikes per year, and the British tornado scale starts classification of cyclones at much lower wind speed, were we'd just describe it as an 'F0' or not even classify it as a tornado.

An F2 on our scale (T4 on theirs) struck Birmingham in 2006 and caused forty million pounds of damage to many brick buildings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birmingham_Tornado_%28UK%29

Brick is actually a poor material to use against high wind loads because has little tensile strength. When high loads are applied to a brick wall, the two ends of it are supported by the adjoining walls, which cause bending stress on the wall, and tension on the interior of the wall between supports. The wall then buckles inward.

The only truly suitable building materials are ones with high tensile strength: steel, reinforced concrete, and core-reinforced cinderblock. Practically speaking, the odds of any one building in the midwest getting hit by a tornado are very small and so people understandably don't want to live in a concrete bunker on the very slim chance that they get hit. Florida, however, does seem to have a great deal of concrete and masonry construction, even in homes. Although it's worth keeping in mind that the majority of the damage from a hurricane comes from flooding rather than wind.

You seem to be forgetting about the billion or so human-made combustion engines, that are easily capable of altering the global climate in a few years.

Or about the tens of thousands of nukes, that can strip the poles of ice caps if properly deployed and again completely change the climate.

Or the probably achievable proposed projects of building solar mirrors or seeding the south oceans with iron.

One can look at the amount of energy humankind was commanding 300 years ago and now, and than extrapolate that to the next 300 years. That power would be enough to move stars around, not talking about a single planet surface fluctuations in gas pressure.