Bill Gates Wants To Stop Hurricanes
July 11th, 2009 by ComputerBob
For a price, of course.
Mr. Burns — oops, I mean Mr. Gates — is reportedly one of the inventors listed on a patent application for a hurricane-prevention system that would use huge numbers of floating tubs to cool the surface of hurricane-generating oceans by mixing their relatively hot surface water with their relatively cool deep-sea water — thus reducing the amount of warm surface water that fuels hurricanes.
As a resident of The Beautiful Sunshine (and hurricane-prone) State, I like the idea of reducing or eliminating hurricanes.
And I’m not a scientist, so tell me if I’m completely wrong here, but I studied the patent application’s drawings of the proposed solution, and I think it’s a really bad idea, for the following reasons:
- The idea counts on wave action to fill the floating tubs with water to a height that is above the surrounding ocean level, thus forcing some of it down a long tube into the cooler deep-sea water. But it seems to me that instead of forcing the relatively light, warm water downward into the relatively heavy and dense deep-sea water, a high water level inside the floating tub would simply cause the floating tub to temporarily sink to a level that allows the water inside of it to equalize with the level of the surrounding sea — unless you somehow used massive amounts of energy to continuously monitor the level of the floating tub and manually raise its level whenever it was filled with millions of extra gallons of water.
- Even if the idea worked, and it was able to force some warm surface water down into the deep sea, I don’t see that making much of a difference in the temperature at the surface, because the deep-sea water is too “heavy” and dense to rise up to the warm surface. It seems to me that it would make a lot bigger difference to figure out a way to bring the cold deep-sea water up to the warm surface — but to do that would probably require prohibitively massive amounts of energy.
- Even if the idea worked, it would probably have a catastrophic effect on all sea life for mankind to suddenly and artificially lower the surface level of large expanses of the oceans, as well as to suddenly and artificially raise the deep-sea temperature of large expanses of the oceans. For example, many people don’t realize it, but algae growing on the warm surface waters of the world’s oceans provides around 20% of the world’s atmospheric oxygen.
- The whole idea comes from the same guy who brought the world Microsoft Windows, with its swiss-cheese security and its notorious Blue Screen Of Death, which has reportedly repeatedly plagued important computer systems around the world, including government computers, utility company computers, and even the computers that run nuclear submarines. Does anyone have any idea how to reboot an ocean after a Blue Sea Of Death?
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