Can Bill Gates Prevent the Next Katrina? 380
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."
Next up! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Next up! (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Next up! (Score:5, Insightful)
And he will laugh maniacally, when the change in nature's cycles creates huge storms that wipe out entire Europe and half of Africa.
Seriously, why do people still not understand, that everything in nature is a system of sensitive balanced cycles, and when you change things, you have to make a new working cycle or at least balance it all out again, to not create a catastrophe in the long term?
Maybe because they still can. And because when it happens, they are long dead, or it does not affect them.
Well I bet his method will be just as elegant and as well-integrating as Windows. :P
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The irony of your username is hilarious.
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The Mad Scientist Stuff is the Point! (Score:3, Interesting)
And he will laugh maniacally, when the change in nature's cycles creates huge storms that wipe out entire Europe and half of Africa.
If you've been paying attention to history, weather and climate have huge geopolitical and strategic consequences. North Atlantic storms stopped both the Spanish Armada and Nazi Germany from invading England. Weather almost stopped the D-Day invasions. Japan is still a nation because of such a storm: the Kamikaze.
Climactic shifts sparked the movements of barbarian tribes and may have contributed to the fall of the Roman Empire, prevented the early Nordic colonization of North America, and paved the way f
How will they know.. (Score:4, Insightful)
How will they ever know that they reduced the number of storms?
The number of storms on a yearly basis is anything but consistent.
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Re:How will they know.. (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't. That was one of the (many) problems with Project Stormfury, the government attempt to disrupt hurricanes with cloud seeding back in the 1960's. You don't get enough data to run any kind of reliable control. So not only do you not know for sure whether you're making a difference or not, you don't even know whether you're making things worse or not.
Unless they can somehow manage to drive their fleet into every forming hurricane and make every single one suddenly fall apart, any success they claim is going to be very open to interpretation.
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But then the question becomes interpretation or exploitation?
Scientists are not the only people interpreting the results and often not the most vocal people most people get to hear. For example sales people in corporations have agendas they wish to push behind any PR opportunity that comes al
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Lets say they implement this sort of thing.. How will they ever know that they reduced the number of storms? The number of storms on a yearly basis is anything but consistent.
This is true--you wouldn't know instantly that you stopped a storm for sure. But as the length of time goes up without a hurricane, your confidence level rises until you surpass some threshold which is the longest distance of time between hurricanes. I'm sure meteorologists would like to speculate that the conditions are right but a new factor is stopping these storms. You'll just never really know.
Now, there's a lot of things you don't know whether or not you're changing. Such as the natural cycle
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One possibility: If the mixing warms the water at the bottom it may be enough to release methane from methane hydrates deposited in the ocean bed. On the down side this will make global warming worse, on the upside the mass of bubbles will sink Bill's fleet of ships.
Re:How will they know.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:How will they know.. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what I was thinking as soon as I read the article. Even if it works (and the theory seems valid if they could do it on a massive enough scale, but it would have to be MASSSIVE) what else are you screwing up by doing this? What place do hurricanes occupy in the ecosystem of the east coast of the US? How is all of this cold water going to affect marine life? I mean, you'd need HUGE amount of colder water to affect storm development. We're talking about one of nature's most powerful forces here, you're not going to break it up by dumping a couple of buckets of ice. You're making a huge expanse of the upper ocean several degrees cooler, and simultaneously making a huge expanse of the lower ocean several degrees warmer, what's that going to do?
And before some anti-environmentalist starts saying "Well, yeah, but who cares if we screw up the ecosystem a bit if we're saving lives and property?", do you think the people on the Gulf Coast will thank you if you eliminate hurricanes but cause an overgrowth of algae that ruins the fishing and shrimping industries? Those industries are critical to southern Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and a good chunk of Florida. Or if the weather pattern change causes a heat up in the region and traditional crops to fail? Or for that matter a cool down with the same affect? We have no idea what this kind of thing could do, even assuming we got it to work.
This would need tons of modeling and study before it could be safely deployed, and even then, as parent said, if should be used sparingly.
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As someone who lives in the quite arid southwest, I would be pretty pissed if we stopped getting less rain here, and we do indeed get showers that are a direct consequence of hurricanes. So yeah, messing with the hurricanes is going to cause horrible consequences we can't even imagine right now. But at least all those million dollar beach homes won't need to be rebuilt next year.
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Re:How will they know.. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a very significant problem.
Very true, so now we need to figure out the best course of action. Screwing with weather patterns probably isn't the best (or even cheapest) solution.
Re:How will they know.. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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You can use 10, 15, 20, etc. year averages, you can look at trends.
You can also look at weather patterns in an area, and determine how likely, historically, those weather patterns lead to storms, and then compare that to how likely they lead to storms "after treatment".
Determining success/failure won't be trivial, but it won't be anything resembling impossible either.
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You will easily figure if the device is working when you see very interesting weather on this page:
http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=Cupertino [wunderground.com]
Remember Simcity Tornado? ;)
Oh, I don't know, but (Score:3, Interesting)
I figure it will probably be the same pseudo science employed by Gore.
In other words, claims of consensus, its for the children, we're smarter than you, and such should suffice.
Any reduction in storms proves their process works, any increase proves it wasn't executed properly and would work with more money and adherence to their process.
Re:Oh, I don't know, but (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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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:Oh, I don't know, but (Score:4, Insightful)
So if the rate that the ice is melting is rapidly increasing, including the melting of ice that has been frozen for thousands of years, you aren't concerned at all?
Re:Oh, I don't know, but (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Whatcouldpossiblygowrong! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Whatcouldpossiblygowrong! (Score:5, Funny)
Blue sky of death?
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Because knowing is half the battle (Score:2)
Oblig. Dennis Miller quote (Score:5, Funny)
"Face it - Bill Gates is a about a white Persian cat and a monocle away from being a Bond villain."
Great Idea!! (Score:2)
And there can't possibly be any consequences of doing something like that...
Gulf Stream (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody likes hurricanes. They cause massive destruction and they kill people. But they are part of nature.
I think a better solution would be to act a little smarter about where we build our population centers, and do not offer insurance to people who choose to build in a location where hurricanes are known to strike on a somewhat regular basis.
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NOT A TROLL (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent is making a valid point that every location comes with the risk of a natural disaster in response to the absurd assertion that we should never put population centers in a place that can have a storm. People in Kansas have tornadoes, people in California have earth quakes. The solution is not to smugly deny that people live in areas that are victim to the phenomenon du jour, it is to find ways to mitigate those risks.
The danger that hurricanes pose is easily mitigated, just as tornado or earthquake dangers are easily mitigated. Most of those who lost their homes in New Orleans wouldn't have if the government had been doing its job and maintaining the dikes. People in Kansas are safe when the government puts tornado-warning infrastructure in place. People in California are safe when the highways and bridges are built to withstand shock. This is what we have government for.
If we only put population centers in places with no risk of natural disaster, the habitable surface of the earth would be small indeed.
Re:Gulf Stream (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree. 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 I sort of agree. We should be smarter about where we build our population centers, but more importantly HOW we build our population centers near the gulf.
I totally disagree. Most of the hurricane's damage is from storm surge not wind. So we should limit the amount of construction on shores and surrounding low elevation areas. However your insurance idea, which by the way is already being implemented, penalizes people who live in the same area (county) but built smartly and rarely have catastrophic damage done on their property.
I did not file any insurance claims for hurricane Katrina. Most of the damage from Katrina was FLOOD damage which isn't covered by regular home insurance anyway. But I pay 4 times the state average for insurance, and have a storm deductible based on a percentage of my home's market value. So not only do I pay more, I am less likely to be able to even file a claim. Basically the existence of hurricanes has given insurance companies political cover to rip me off.
There are folks in northern Alabama who have hail damage on their roofs almost every year from the spring storm season, and yet I hear no calls to raise their insurance nor limit the coverage from wind or hail damage. They have a history of tornadoes touching down and wiping out neighborhoods and commercial property, yet their insurance remains unaffected. There are areas in this country where people are susceptible to lose their homes from fires, mudslides, or tornadoes on a yearly basis and yet I hear no calls to relocate them.
Pardon me but you can take that "offer no insurance" idea and shove it up your arse...
Re:Gulf Stream (Score:5, Informative)
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.
The port problem (Score:2)
I think a better solution would be to act a little smarter about where we build our population centers, and do not offer insurance to people who choose to build in a location where hurricanes are known to strike on a somewhat regular basis
The problem is that some of the best places to put population centers are also where hurricanes tend to be. Population centers are often near ports. I would bet that, just about every one of the world's great cities began on a river or a sea port, and its certainly true
Re:Gulf Stream (Score:5, Insightful)
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Vaporware... (Score:5, Funny)
Great - more vaporware from Bill Gates... ;-)
whatcouldpossiblygowrong (Score:4, Funny)
I don't think there has ever been a more appropriate reason to use it....
The first thing I thought ... (Score:5, Funny)
Us: ZOMG! Blue skyz of deathz!
Proof of concept (Score:3, Funny)
The catch is that as Bill would have to visit Magrathea to get the planet built, it would be cheaper just to engage them to fix the global warming on this one. (and add a few more fjords while at it.)
Global warming is going to be a pretty big fix. (Score:2)
The catch is that as Bill would have to visit Magrathea to get the planet built, it would be cheaper just to engage them to fix the global warming on this one
My stupid Javascript global warming calculator estimates that Americans will spend probably somewhere around 8 trillion dollars to reduce emissions down to 20% of what they are today, and that's going to be with a pretty sharp standard of living decrees. I'm working on a more detailed economic modelling engine in C++ that I'll FOSS which I think will
Where is the Borg icon? (Score:2)
/. guys, this is the exact time to use Borg icon and it is missing.
Gates-way to eco-disaster (Score:5, Interesting)
Ok, as much as hurricanes hurt and destroy peoples homes, lives, and regions economies, I can tell you right now that to suppress them is A BAD IDEA.
Hurricane season and storm activity represent a huge portion of the rainfall/water collection/water renewal in the Caribbean, and is still a significant water contributor in the southern U.S.A., a region that is still experiencing drought conditions, even if its not as severe as last year. What, is this a plot to dry up an important freshwater source for a large region, then sell expensive desalination plants?! Desertification of a whole region to put up solar plants or harvest silicon?
Plus the hurricanes help to suck up all the warm water that's killing the the coral reefs - you know, one of the bastions against the waves pounding coastlines?
Oh wait, the Caribbean is full of small islands and a few unnecessary Central American countries that act as the hurricane buffer for the U.S.A., and absorb the majority of the insurance hikes when Florida/Louisiana/Texas gets hit. Shafting us and destroying our ecology is business as usual.
It's apropos that Gates should be the one doing it (Score:3, Interesting)
Cause the most prominent argument regularly put forth as to why weather control is bad is:
Do *you* want to be the one who causes lots of insurance companies to have to pay out because someone can make a reasonable case that where the hurricane landed was no longer an Act Of God?
Gates is used to playing God.
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Cripes, all we need is for insurance companies to add 'lack of action by God' to their list of things they don't cover.
Easy (Score:3, Funny)
1000 level (Score:3, Interesting)
Lousy idea, for 2 reasons ... (Score:2)
Error in logic (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Why would you pump cold water up? It is a heat sink. You pump the heat down.
2. Well THAT is the point. Do you put ice in your drink so it would just drop to the bottom or perhaps to cool the drink by absorbing the heat?
Anyway... Give Gates a LITTLE credit. The guy is NOT a moron after all.
RTFA - his idea is quite simple and rather carbon neutral (once you build a huge fleet of ships).
Basically, the idea is to use pressure and temperature differences to "pump" the warm surface water to the bottom.
Now...
Wh
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> (once you build a huge fleet of ships).
Sounds like time to invest in stocks of ship yards if he actually continues with this plan..
After the disaster that was Vista... (Score:3, Funny)
kulakovich
Hurricane BSOD (Score:3, Funny)
Uhhh oooh (Score:5, Funny)
GPF in Rainfall.exe. Abort, retry or ignore?
Gates should heavily arm his fleet . . . (Score:2)
. . . he is destined to encounter, and do battle with piracy.
This time the real thing.
Having worked in the weather community... (Score:4, Informative)
...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.
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Hmm, considering the areas that the hurricanes move over, I agree that it is an event that we actually may want to occur. ^^
When I see satellite films of a moving hurricane, I always sit there, trying to shove the hurricane on my screen in the right direction.
Like "*Just* a *liiittle* bit more to the left. Come on! Please!"
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You work on the helpdesk for the weather channel? Obviously you know more about this than the people who spent large amounts of time and money investigating the project.
Now if only I can find someone who runs cables at a hospital to tell me if I should continue to fund this cancer research project...
Finally! Some use for the tactical nuclear bombs! (Score:2)
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Obvious? (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been thinking about this for some time. A network of floating pumps across the belt where hurricanes form, solar powered, to pump cool water from a few tens of meters down up to the surface. When a depression is spotted, just turn on the pumps in its path to reduce the amount of surface heat to feed it. My oceanographer friend tells me I'm talking nonsense.
Anyone who thinks they can change the weather.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyone who thinks they can change the weather is either absorbed in hubris or insane.
A Hurricane can't be stopped or prevented. Or influenced in any way by anything human beings could do to it. You could detonate the largest nuclear bomb ever made in the middle of a hurricane and it wouldn't even dent it. A hurricane has so much energy that it releases more energy than all explosives ever detonated by humans every MINUTE...
Why doesn't he just buy New Orleans? (Score:2)
Why doesn't he just buy New Orleans?
No need... (Score:2)
I don't know where you live, but (Score:2)
Where I live, the annual rainfall is entirely dependent upon having a couple of hurricane remnants pass by us. If the hurricane season doesn't turn up anything, we've got a drought.
As we are heading into an ice age (Score:2)
Give "me" billions and I will chemtrail the world back to good climate health
See the temperature is dropping
MS saved us all.....
If MS can get the mix right, can they solve overpopulation too?... permanently?
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jun/14/wetzstein-billionaires-take-aim-population/ [washingtontimes.com]
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Worse idea than rampant CO2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
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IIRC, it's how they came up with the name for the movie Blue Sky [wikipedia.org], and I believe it was also mentione
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"What else can I fuck up today?"
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
I'd at least wait for the first service pack before I install it on my planet.
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes but what other "features" would be in that service pack?
(1) Clouds reformatted into Microsoft friendly format to show advertising for new products.
(2) Rains on Google offices 24/7
(3) Strong winds blows everyone toward huge advertising signs they cannot ignore.
(4) DRM infested sunshine we have to buy from Microsoft.
(5) Thunder storms raining chairs on Linux offices.
(6) Snow flakes spy on us all and then tell Microsoft what we like.
(7) Apple offices found 6 weeks later under mountain of huge hail stones.
(8) Profit.
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Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Where? Why, that's simple... (Score:2)
Just think of all those tiny windows flags. Fluttering in the wind.
ALWAYS fluttering in the wind.
Re:So... (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft seems to have taken "cloud computing" a bit too literal.
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What do I win?
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Ludicrous, ridiculous, etc. NOTHING man can do on this planet can even begin to compare to the scale of energies involved in natural phenomena.
Strongly disagree. The only place the water temperature makes a difference is at the surface and a small change in temperature can have potentially devastating effects. On the flip side, nothing you can do by heating the ocean will likely help, because the ocean has already been heated; the energy is coming out and we are perceiving it.
On the other hand, we know relatively little about these weather patterns' formation - precisely how it happens is still something of a mystery. So odds are that if anything,
Re:Truly Gates now thinks he is God (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Yes, all you have to do is move the water 10 meters down to the top
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Nah. He's more like John Klieg, the patent troll from John Barnes' Mother of Storms [amazon.com].
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Well, maybe we can't break up a storm, but diverting it away from a population center still sounds like a plus to me.
I do tend to agree that the number involved don't look particularly workable though.
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- The process patented would not need energy. In fact it uses the temperature difference between surface and deeper water to extract energy and mix the temperature, presumably while using the energy to move the boat it is attached to.
- Humans have already manage to cause large-enough changes to their ecosystem to create (unintentionally) big-scale events [wikipedia.org]. Alternatively, they have already made engin [wikipedia.org]
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There exists something called the British Thermal Unit
No it doesn't. On the other hand there's something called Joules, which is the official unit of energy. And it measures energy out of Britain too C;-)
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Now exactly how many TRILLIONS of gallons of water does Mr. Gates wish to cool by one degree? Assuming all you want to cool is the first 1 meter of depth of a 1 km x 1km patch of water contains 1 billion litres of water (around 264 million gallons). This would require at least 2.1 * 10^12 Joules of energy. And remember you have to deliver it in a limited time, in the path of the storm (which can change at any time - in fact is MORE LIKELY to change if you start cooling water ahead of it)? And let's not forget during the daytime you have to also account for sunlight, which will make your cooling process less efficient.
That's just an implementation detail. Right now we're talking about high-level design.
Nothing is beyond mankind. (Score:2)
NOTHING man can do on this planet can even begin to compare to the scale of energies involved in natural phenomena
Thermonuclear weapons do not naturally occur on earth. The only E=MC^2 that occurs in nature is in a start. Man can do it anywhere he chooses. And, even in chemical reactions, we have figured out all the good ones.
This would require at least 2.1 * 10^12 Joules of energy.
Well, first off, you have to assume that he would not be extracting the energy from the ocean and in some clever way use the
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It would make it even worse, the updraft caused by the explosion would suck in more air even faster and just add to the problem.
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The president doesn't write the budget. Congress does. Unless he told Congress he would veto any budget that doesn't cut SELA funding by 75%, you're blaming the wrong person.