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

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope it doesn't blue sky on us.

Oblig. Dennis Miller quote

[Chris Mattern]

"Face it - Bill Gates is a about a white Persian cat and a monocle away from being a Bond villain."

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.

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

[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: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 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, 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.

Vaporware...

[ghostis]

Great - more vaporware from Bill Gates... ;-)

Re:How will they know..

[Sockatume]

For the curious. 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.

Re:So...

[JustOK]

I'd at least wait for the first service pack before I install it on my planet.

Gates-way to eco-disaster

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Whatcouldpossiblygowrong!

[__aayejd672]

Blue sky of death?

Re:So...

[MindKata]

"wait for the first service pack"

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.

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

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:So...

[maxwell demon]

Microsoft seems to have taken "cloud computing" a bit too literal.