Late last week USA Today‘s Dan Vergano filed a story with a distinct element of surprise – not surprise so much at the what but at the who of this news. Microsoft megabillionaire Bill Gates and climate scientist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution of Washington want to patent a physically plausible method of hobbling hurricanes by ambushing them with pools of cold surface water. As Vergano reports, hurricanes get their energy from the latent heat carried aloft by warm, evaporating ocean water. They don’t grow in oceans cooler than around 80 deg. Fahrenheit (about 27 C). The idea would be to install some sort of turbines or other machinery near valuable coastlines prone to hurricanes. If one looms, the injection of cold, deep water at the surface could dramatically weaken any cyclone that moves through.
Scientists who Vergano queried agree the plan would work perfectly, if executed. The only hitch is to design a system able to get the requisite amounts of water to the surface and fast. That, and the possibility that man made overturning of the ocean, even on a local scale, may generate problems of similar magnitude as is posed by a natural storm.
USA Today was not the first to spot the patents. One is the patent office monitoring IPWatchdog. Its Gene Quinn had the essential news July 13. The story has links to the individual patent applications – all specificially for the devices purportedly able to move that much water in a jiffy. They include a long list of inventors. Some of the names will interest those who follow high technology and its disparate pursuers. The listed inventors include such as Lowell L. Wood, Jr., the now-retired, longtime Livermore National Lab physicist and far-out idea specialist, and Microsoft’s former technology maven Nathan Myhrvold.
-CP
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