Can Bill Gates Prevent the Next Katrina?

theodp writes "He once controlled the world's PCs. Now Bill Gates has set his sights on controlling the world's weather. And patenting it. On Thursday, the USPTO revealed that Gates and ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold have filed five patent applications that propose using large fleets of vessels to suppress hurricanes through various methods of mixing warm water from the surface of the ocean with colder water at greater depths. The idea is to decrease the surface temperature, reducing or eliminating the heat-driven condensation that fuels the giant storms. Hey, a guy can only play so much golf in retirement."

Re:How will they know..

[Sockatume]

For the curious [noaa.gov]. I'm not going to sit down and read out the data and figure out the standard deviation, but you're not kidding. You'd have to do this for decades to know how effective it was, and if it turns out to be useless, the environmental cost would have been wasted. I'd hate to be the guy who gets to do the risk-benefit analysis on that one.

Having worked in the weather community...

[joedoc]

...for a number of years (though I'm an IT guy, not a meteorologist), I learned enough to know that not only is this doomed to failure, they should already know that it's not scientifically possible.

How in the name of God are they going to generate the energy needed to cool the water at "greater" ocean depths? The would have to launch a fleet of ships far greater then they can possibly imagine.

Not only does this appear to be scientifically and logistically improbable, but have they ever considered the issues with screwing with global weather patterns? Stopping hurricanes (or, in reality, stopping their potential capability for damage to humans and land structures) is a noble dream, but every weather even had both positive and negative affects on other weather patterns, events that we actually may want to occur.

He would be better off taking all the money he'd invest in this silliness and hand it over to people in hurricane-damaged areas so they can rebuild. Or move.

Re:Truly Gates now thinks he is God

[Aladrin]

Didn't bother to RTFA, eh? He isn't trying to make warm water cold. He's moving cold water into the warm water via pumps. That's a hell of a lot easier.

Re:Gulf Stream

[mlush]

Offer lower rates if the building has been properly built [wikipedia.org]

Re:Oh, I don't know, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds exactly like the ideas used behind global warming and Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth. Very good [scienceand...policy.org] dissection and dismantling of the global warming alarmists beliefs/'evidence'

Yes it was very good. I have a few questions about the modelling, which peer reviewed publication should I direct my questions to? Oh wait, it was self published by the author who as detailed on the website, " has considerable policy experience in climate change science, mercury science, energy and mining, forests and resources, clean air and the environment." and to boot, unnamed undergraduate and advanced degrees from the mecca of science, wait, its coming....Brigham Young University! I wouldn't wipe my dogs ass with this tripe.

Re:Oh, I don't know, but

[nizo]

So people are just imagining the ice that is melting?

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=7738 [nasa.gov]

Now I'm not saying humans are 100% responsible, but you can't deny that ice all over the world that has existed for thousands of years is melting (well I guess you can, if you ignore the sheets of ice turning into water).

How about the animals arriving in the north that have never been seen there before?

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-and-unfamiliar-species-leave-inuit-lost-for-words-534866.html [independent.co.uk]

Yeah you can deny it all you want, and we can argue all day about the causes (until it is too late for us to do anything about them), but it is indeed happening. Wouldn't it be a real bummer if this was part of a "normal" warming cycle and because of our stupidity we tipped things too far and made the earth uninhabitable?

Re:Gulf Stream

[je ne sais quoi]

I also worry about the amount of rainfall that would be lost if Bill Gates plan actually works. Believe it or not there are some useful aspects to a hurricane and more importantly tropical storms.

Here [army.mil] is the chart of the water levels of Lake Lanier, which is Atlanta's only major water supply. The record low elevations line that you see was set last year, which was the second year of a drought (you might recall our governor's response to the drought, which was to pray for rain [wdef.com], aside from suing all of the neighboring states to try to take their water). The big bump that you see in the minimum recorded lake elevations just before September was hurricane Gustav, which essentially saved us from a situation where the lake would have been within 10 feet of a standing pool, and Atlanta gets its water on the outlet of the power generators. In fact, most of Atlanta's problems were because the El Niño shut down the hurricanes into the gulf for a couple of years after katrina. Now that they're back, and the wet weather in general, our water supply is fine for the moment.

Re:Gulf Stream

[osvenskan]

I also worry about the amount of rainfall that would be lost if Bill Gates plan actually works. Believe it or not there are some useful aspects to a hurricane and more importantly tropical storms.

Hugely useful. Here in central North Carolina (NC), the ends of our summers (August - October) are hot and often very dry. We get thunderstorms now and again but for a nice steady, soaking rain we rely on a tropical storm or hurricane running up the coast or moving north through the Gulf of Mexico, breaking up over land and then sweeping east over us as the remnants get caught up in normal weather patterns.

Have a look at the paths of the storms in 2007 [wikipedia.org]. Notice how few approach NC? That was also the year of the worst drought in over 100 years. We didn't get those late summer storms to mitigate an abnormally dry year.

Compare that to the 2006 map [wikipedia.org] and the 2008 map [wikipedia.org]. Lots more rainfall for us.

whatcouldpossiblygowrong indeed. Read John McPhee's Control of Nature [johnmcphee.com] for some examples. The story of the defense of the harbor on Iceland's Heimaey is inspiring. The story of redirecting mudslides near LA is a cautionary tale. Similarly, the story of how the US Army Corps of Engineers tool control ("permanent" control from humanity's point of view, "temporary" control from Nature's) of the flow between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya. Before that, the river rose and fell and people accepted it because they had no choice. Afterwards, people complained that the water was too high, or too low, and probably too wet as well.

Control a hurricane? Even if I had a magic wand with which to do it, I'd say no thanks. I would not want to catch that tiger by the tail.

Re:So...

[NeverVotedBush]

I thought the same thing. Mixing up the ocean's thermal layers will help to slow the conveyor currents that warm the higher latitudes and cool the lower latitudes. Lose the currents and areas near the equator bake while countries like England and others that depend on the currents to moderate their climate freeze.

Besides, pumping massive amounts of water will be a huge energy pig causing even more warming.

Hurricanes are like pressure relief valves. All of that excess energy gets sucked out of the ocean during a hurricane and helps to cool them. Mixing up the oceans allows higher average temperatures and it is hard to say what will happen to deep marine life as the heating gets propagated to the lower depths.

I like the idea by Steve Chu - painting roofs white. It's easy, distributed, and can be done on a huge scale. Plus, the roof paints help to seal as well and will protect the roof materials that are now exposed to the sun.

Re:Oh, I don't know, but

[sumdumass]

Yes, dismissing claims you don't support for reasons other then the claims seems to be the logical path to take "when you can't invalidate the claims".

I have to offer kudos, you did assassinate this guys legitimacy pretty well. I mean an AC on a public internet forum with no reference to qualifications shooting the messenger instead of the message and then commenting on how much you respect the paper he wrote by saying it was to good to wipe your dog's ass. And you do all this with less legitimacy then a guy who actually put his name on a paper while using the same tactics that you just decried.

Yes, if we can assassinate the credibility of all deniers like this, we won't have to fix the science or follow/address the questions presented by the denier and we can have our global warming the way we want it regardless of any truths. Perhaps we can even start a religion out of it. Many people already act as if it is one and refuse to answer critiques that point out potential flaws in the theories. We could be more blind then the catholic church when it demanded the sun revolved around the earth. Hell, yea, this new science is awesome because it still resembles science but we don't have to be accurate. All hail the convinced at all costs.

Re:Oh, I don't know, but

[2obvious4u]

I counter your ice melting with this Antarctic ice increasing:
Sea Ice May Be On Increase In The Antarctic [sciencedaily.com]
Late 20th Century increase in South Pole snow accumulation [agu.org]
South Pole: Ice Core and Snow Accumulation Studies [osu.edu]

I'm not worried about global warming. I do however enjoy having clean air to breath. Those of you who have been to China in the last decade know what I'm talking about.

Re:So...

[Golddess]

I (and others too it would seem) am fairly certain you're making a joke since the sky is already blue, but in the past "blue sky" could also refer to the notion that, were there to be a major radioactive contamination event from, say, atomic bomb testing, those without the means to detect the radiation would not realize they were in danger until it was too late, since you'd still have the gorgeous blue sky.

IIRC, it's how they came up with the name for the movie Blue Sky [wikipedia.org], and I believe it was also mentioned in the movie itself, but I do not recall.