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."

Comments

How will they know..

[Rockoon]

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.

Re:How will they know..

[FroBugg]

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.

Re:How will they know..

[eldavojohn]

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 of hurricanes influencing unknown factors like wildlife or pressure systems in other areas or rainfall up the East Coast being reduced resulting in lower crop yields and dryer soil? What effect (if any) will pumping this warm water down and cool water up have on the wildlife or natural currents of the ocean? It's warm and cold bodies of air that create natural cycling of air, I assume the same is true for water. If water went still, it might be great for us but bad for wildlife. I think there's a lot of questions one could raise about this. I'm not arguing against it, I just hope this is taken into consideration.

I mean, this 'weather control' should be used sparingly and I hope they don't take this to the next level and use airships to diffuse hot/cold fronts so that we don't get thunderstorms so that my power isn't knocked out for a few hours while my roommate complains he can't watch the latest episode of True Blood right away. Preventing hurricanes is a neat idea and I hope this works, I just hope there's not hidden costs like the rest of Bill's products. :)

Re:How will they know..

[DrgnDancer]

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.

Re:How will they know..

[nizo]

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.

Gulf Stream

[olsmeister]

There has already been talk about the possible shutdown of the Gulf Stream plunging Europe into a mini-ice age. It seems like meddling with the mix of warm and cold ocean water in this fashion could make things even worse. And who knows what pumping billions of gallons of cold water from the depths up to the surface would do to the marine wildlife.

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.

Re:Gulf Stream

[selven]

No one is saying you don't have the right to build in hurricane territory, it's just that insurance rates will be 10x higher and the government won't help you. So if you want to live in a warm place on the coast, go ahead, just make sure you eat the negative consequences yourself instead of passing them along to the taxpayer.

Re:Gulf Stream

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Nobody likes hurricanes. They cause massive destruction and they kill people. But they are part of nature.

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.

I think a better solution would be to act a little smarter about where we build our population centers,

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.

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.

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:Next up!

[Hurricane78]

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

Worse idea than rampant CO2

[Skull_Leader]

As soon as someone thinks that can control or SHOULD control the weather we are doomed. Despite the losses seen in violent storms and other weather events, those events keep our world in balance and in check. There are more factors involved than we can comprehend or yet understand. Changes in humidity, movement of seeds/soils... so many things. The problem is, not to sound too greenie, is that we treat the earth like we own it, not like we are part of it. The more we influence it (actively or passively) the more likely it is to get messed up and for things to get worse for us. We need the Earth... it doesn't need us. I think Gates, the meglomaniac/idiot savant, should stick to giving his billions to those less fortunate and leave mother nature alone.

NOT A TROLL

[an.echte.trilingue]

I must call attention to this!

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:Oh, I don't know, but

[nizo]

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?