From the “would you, could you, with a boat department”. Bill goes macro. The Simpsons are cited by patent watcher.
Patent watcher “theodp,” who tipped us off to the filings, says he was reminded of “The Simpsons” as he read through them. “The richest man in the world hatches a plan to alter weather and ecology in return for insurance premiums and fees from governments and individuals,” he writes. “It’s got kind of a Mr. Burns feel to it, no?”
I guess Bill has been talking to the G-8 people and their temperature control ideas. Note to Bill: nature will squish you and your ideas like a bug. In the meantime with ACE values being low according to COAPS Ryan Maue and Steve McIntyre showing cooler temperatures on the SST map for Gulf Coast hurricane development areas, it looks like they may have to wait a year or two to try out their ideas. The idea? Basically, ship mounted pumps to circulate cooler water from below the thermocline to the surface by forcing surface water downward first. Good luck with that. – Anthony
One force of nature vs. another: Bill Gates tries to stop hurricanes
Recent patent filings have shown Bill Gates and his friends exploring subjects as diverse as electromagnetic engines and beer kegs. Now they’re thinking even bigger — trying to stop hurricanes.
Microsoft’s chairman is among the inventors listed on a new batch of 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.
The filings were made by Searete LLC, an entity tied to Intellectual Ventures, the Bellevue-based patent and invention house run by Nathan Myhrvold, the former Microsoft chief technology officer. Myhrvold and several others are listed along with Gates as inventors.
The diagram at right is from one of five related patent applications made public this morning. So how exactly do they plan to stop hurricanes? Here’s an excerpt from the filing that explains the diagram.
Vessel 100 is a tub-like structure having one or more walls 110 and a bottom 115. Vessel 100 may be held buoyant in the water by one or more buoyancy tanks 120 which may be used to maintain the buoyancy of vessel 100 and further may be used to control the height of walls 110 above the water level. Vessel 100 also includes a conduit 125 whose horizontal cross section is substantially smaller than the horizontal cross section of the tub portion 130 of the vessel defined by walls 110. In an exemplary embodiment, conduit 125 extends well below the ocean surface including depths below the ocean’s thermocline.
In most circumstances, most of the sunlight impinging on the ocean surface is absorbed in the surface layer. The surface layer therefore heats up. Wind and waves move water in this surface layer which distributes heat within it. The temperature may therefore be reasonably uniform to depths extending a few hundred feet down from the ocean surface. Below this mixed layer, however, the temperature decreases rapidly with depth, for example, as much as 20 degrees Celsius with an additional 150 m (500 ft) of depth. This area of rapid transition is called the thermocline. Below it, the temperature continues to decrease with depth, but far more gradually. In the Earth’s oceans, approximately 90% of the mass of water is below the thermocline. This deep ocean consists of layers of substantially equal density, being poorly mixed, and may be as cold as -2 to 3.degree. C.
Therefore, the lower depths of the ocean may be used as a huge heat/energy sink which may be exploited by vessel 100. When vessel 100 is deployed at sea, waves 135 may lap over the top of walls 110 to input warm (relative to deeper waters) surface ocean water into tub 130. Tub 130 will fill to a level 140 which is above the average ocean level depicted as level 145. Because of the difference between levels 140 and 145, a pressure head is created thereby pushing warm surface ocean water in a downward direction 150 down through conduit 125 to exit into the cold ocean depths (relative to near surface waters) through one or more openings 155. In an exemplary embodiment, the depth of opening 155 may be located below the ocean’s thermocline, the approximate bottom of which is depicted as line 160. This cycle will be continuous in bringing warm surface ocean water to great depth as ocean waves continue to input water into tub 130. If many of vessel 100 are distributed throughout a region of water, the temperature of the surface of the water may be altered.
“Many” is the important concept there at the end.
Gates, Myhrvold and associates aren’t the first to propose reducing the ocean’s surface temperature as a means of suppressing hurricanes, said David Nolan, an associate professor of meteorology and physical oceanography at the University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science.
“Every couple of years there’s a news story that gets picked up for some hurricane-suppression idea,” Nolan said via phone this morning. “They’re all kooky in their own way. Some of them are more plausible than others, but they all face an enormous problem of scale. … You would have to cover an incredible area with this effect to reduce the temperature of the ocean by a significant amount.”
Of course, a big difference in this case is that one of the people making the suggestion is one of the world’s richest men. But don’t look for Gates to fund the deployment of thousands of these vessels. One of the patent filings proposes paying for the equipment through the sale of insurance policies in hurricane-prone areas, in addition to funding from state, federal and local government agencies.
Patent watcher “theodp,” who tipped us off to the filings, says he was reminded of “The Simpsons” as he read through them. “The richest man in the world hatches a plan to alter weather and ecology in return for insurance premiums and fees from governments and individuals,” he writes. “It’s got kind of a Mr. Burns feel to it, no?”
The hurricane-suppression patent applications date to early 2008, but they were first made public this morning.
These and previous Searete LLC patent filings are believed to result from brainstorming sessions regularly held by Intellectual Ventures, in which Gates has been known to take part. It’s not clear how or when Intellectual Ventures might go forward with any of these ideas.
Meanwhile…. Still no sunspots….
You might call this kind of patent ‘Idea Squatting’. They have no intention of building the ships. They want to charge royalties should anyone build similar ships in the future.
Most people don’t realize how easy and cheap it is to file a US patent.
I have one, but unfortunately don’t have Bill Gates money to hire the lawyers to try and extract royalties from the companies infringing on my patent.
They should call a gentle eccentric, Patrick Cyclonebuster. He has a more fun idea.
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2009/experiment-for-patrick-cyclonebuster/
Neither will actually work.
Giant siphons, anchored tubes, etc, etc. are all junk.
That Gates is falling for it does not speak well for his due diligence advisors.
I read about this idea a few years ago. Sounds like they will have to put thousands if not more in the water for it to possibly work. When I read about it they said it would only cool the surface by a degree maybe two and that it would not stop hurricanes only make them less severe. Go figure.. bill Gates would jump on the band wagon.
OT. I was at medical on base waiting to have my blood drawn, they had BBC on the waiting area TV BBC announced that Peru is freezing people to death. Ont the TV they also (you guessed it) attributed it to “Global Warming”.? HUH, how does that work Warming = Cooling. I started laughing out loud and said they were crazy. Only 1 person out of 13 in the waiting room was upset at my skeptic reaction. This was so bogus that that we were able to get the channel changed to a hunting show. That one person was even more upset with that. I was about to engage the person about why she thinks global warming is really a threat, but realised she was 2 ranks below me. In the military we can not discuss such matters unless we are the same ranks and understand that we are not trying to debate each other rather just voice our opinions. Also at the same time my was called to see the Doc. Bummer.
OHH, this is the article I found on the Web about it.
Peru cold snap kills 250 kids
Posted 1 hour 10 minutes ago
Updated 1 hour 11 minutes ago
An extreme spell of cold weather in Peru has killed almost 250 children under the age of five in the past four months.
Serious respiratory infections and pneumonia are not uncommon in the winter months, but this year’s cold season began in March rather than June.
The extreme cold has brought snow, hail, freezing temperatures and strong winds, and has killed more children than recorded annually for the past four years.
Two hundred and forty-six children under the age of five have died so far, only halfway through the winter months.
One third of the deaths were registered in the southern region of Puno, much of which is covered by a high plateau known as the Altiplano, which extends into neighbouring Bolivia.
Experts blame climate change for the early arrival of intense cold, which began in March, even though winter in the region does not usually begin until June.
-BBC
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/07/13/2624141.htm?section=world
I am a “liberal” not a “conservative”. Conservatives want those who are “productive” to enjoy the fruits of their creativity, inventiveness, and smarts. In other words they should never have an upper limit on their incomes such that they must pay their workers living wages and such that they must pay their taxes for the largesse that always comes their way from government (lobbyists, et al). (Just take a look at the first corporations in the U.S., the railroads, and you can see the inevitability.) Bill (and Warren) should never be so rich that they can imagine global government or halting hurricanes. Guess who gave us BHO? These same wealthy guys who imagine global government — with all taxes going to their enterprises. Stupid. Stupid. Let’s change it.
And BTW, US patents never get rejected because the ideas behind them are harebrained and unworkable (as this one appears to be). The European patent system is a bit more rigorous.
The current US patent system is little more than a make-work scheme for lawyers. Which probably explains why no one is interested in fixing it.
But I go OT for this blog.
Jeez. The world has gone mad. This is one of the stupidest ideas I’ve ever heard. If the idea itself isn’t stupid enough, see the quote: “‘Such an approach may fail, perhaps on engineering or economic grounds’, they say, adding that the effects on the acidity of the ocean also have to be factored in.”
/sarcon Oh, yeah, sure, it may fail on engineering or economic grounds, yeah. But other than that, it’s SUCH a jolly good, really super, nifty-neato, simply wizard, whiz-bang idea. And that’s what counts, right? /sarcoff
Yes, Ted D. (19:03:56), the added water taken in will cause the container to sink instead of pushing water down the standpipe. The idea is brainless, ignorant Gaia-worshipping, green Cargo Cult drivel.
Bill Gates is going down the same road as T Boone Pickens: getting into something he doesn’t understand. It’s hubris.
The operable phrase here is “Stick with what you know.” Pickens is still making money on Mesa Petroleum, and Gates is still making money on Microsoft. “Shoemaker, stick to thine last.”
T-Bone Pickens will lose into the hundreds of $millions because of his ill-advised foray into wind power. Now he’s on the hook to GE for over a $billion.
Gates will have the same problems spending a fortune to stop hurricanes from happening that Pickens had with wind power. Doesn’t Bill Gates understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics? Hurricanes have to happen. Assuming for a moment that they can really be stopped, there will be side effects that cause other cascade effects — and they will involve an equal amount of energy. We can not predict what those effects will be.
Isn’t the best answer to look for areas where you can make a big difference? To look for a substantial return on your investment?
Bill Gates had a great idea in providing vaccinations to millions of kids in Africa. By doing that he’s saved countless lives. Bill should look for opportunities like that, where there is a real return, rather than rolling the dice on his Superman proposal to stop hurricanes.
It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature. Following through with this idea, if it worked, would be extremely foolish resulting in severe environmental damage. It would be truely the definition of man made climate change. If people don’t like the property damage caused by hurricane they should build better structures or get out of the way.
“Experts blame climate change for the early arrival of intense cold”
Interesting. They didn’t blame HUMAN CAUSED climate change … just “climate change”. Climate always changes.
Rainmakers and snakeoil salesmen — who’s more delusional — those making the pitch or those buying into it? This has unintended consequences written all over it. What happens if it causes a hurricane to veer in its path? Or it weakens the storm to the point that it stalls after making landfall, resulting in massive flooding? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to upgrade building codes and limit beachfront development? Once again, presumptive arrogance rears its ugly head.
Stop hurricanes? What about all the beneficial rain that these weather systems bring to farming throughout the South Eastern states? Oh, and what kind of superstorm will brew after a few years of Gates’ hurricane suppression (assuming it works)?
Bill forgot to ask the most important question before cooking up this idea:
Should we be doing this?
The answer is NO.
All the hype of man-made climate change and here he goes wanting to do exactly that….interfere with the climate.
Apparently, some folks didn’t learn a thing from the Hurricane Seeding project.
Didn’t look, didn’t think, didn’t ask.
Leon Brozyna (20:52:46)
There is precedent for exactly the ‘uninended consequences’ you are thinking of. Bill was too busy making $$$ to notice Hurricane Seeding.
The environmental resources that will be required to draft and defend the environmental impact statement for this project will probably be sufficient to put us over any nearby tipping points. There may be a new need for an environmental impact statement for the environmental impact statement…
Ted D. (19:03:56) : Obviously the container has to be buoyant, or attached to a ship or barge, so the device stays at sea level rather than sinking.
I’m sure that this device can convert wave motion into water being forced down. But I don’t know how much heat would be released near the surface rather than into deep water (will there be much shallow cooling?), I haven’t done the math to compare the amount of water in waves to the near-surface flow (thus how many pumps are needed), and we don’t know the other effects of stirring things up.
There also is a limit to how many of these passive pumps can be placed in an area, as upwind wave catchers will starve the downwind catchers.
Thirty or so years ago, a scientist who studies the impact of hurricanes on structures said it was madness to build on barrier islands and low-lying shorelines. John Stossel had a beach house on the Atlantic coast damaged by a storm. He was eligible for some of your tax money to repair his house so the next storm could damage or destroy it. Just another well thought-out gov. program in action.
My issue with this is manifold. What are the longer term effects of altering ocean surface temps? Does he have to file an EIS each time he intends on deploying such a system? If not, why not? What’s his pump system energized by, and does it have a carbon footprint? (mustn’t make the overall problem worse, right?)
Next, that energy is going to have to show up somewhere – what are the effects?
There is so much that we don’t know, and when people monkey with systems that they only superficially understand, the law of unintended consequences comes along and really bites us all in the ….butt.
Finally, why the heck would I pay for Gates to perfrom this kind of public service?
I’m a liberal, am fairly certain that humans are having a significant (and dangerous) effect on global climate, and look on the near future of humanity and Earth with a distinctly worried eye. In other words, I’ve not exactly much in common with most of the posters here, and I’m sure a lot of you are convinced that I and others with my views are crazy and/or evil.
But on this subject, at least, I pretty much agree with most of what’s been said, barring the talk of “if the water sloshes up above sea level, the whole fixture will sink” (C’mon, give the propounders of this idea a little credit! No one’s stupid enough to overlook that. No doubt the pumps would be held up above the water level in some way, either by leg reaching down to the sea floor or perhaps floats at their sides). But even supposing the idea were to work (and again, I’m sure these people aren’t brain-dead. I’d expect that they could come up with a roughly accurate estimate of how many pumps would be needed to actually make a difference to surface temperatures), there would be a lot of nasty side effects that might overwhelm the very great benefit of avoiding future Katrinas, Andrews, and Galvestons (old Galveston strike, not the recent one).
There’d probably be ecological issues aplenty, as many posters have mentioned; while I could be wrong, seems like any shift in surface temperatures great enough to hobble a hurricane would have a bevy of effects on sea life, as well, and also on land ecosystems that have evolved to deal with (and thrive on) hurricane strikes.
I’m more worried, though (and if you must, you can just label me a crackpot or some more extreme epithet now and stop reading–do as you please), about the climatic effects of this. Currently, when hurricanes roar through the gulf they suck heat out of the ocean and pump it into the atmosphere, where eventually some of that heat can dissipate into space; they’re gigantic, natural heat pumps, and were there no hurricanes global warming would probably be accelerating faster than it is now.
But with this idea, though…Well, not only would that result in less heat leaving the oceans and, eventually, the planet itself, but it would also have the nasty effect of pumping heat into the colder depths of the gulf that otherwise would have been warmed much more slowly. And, of course, quite apart from the more rapid transfer of heat from the atmosphere to the ocean, there’s the issue of what all that heat might DO down there…I’m sure some of you are familiar with methane clathrate deposits, and the clathrate gun hypothesis. While I certainly wouldn’t anticipate anything like enough heat transfer to cause some sort of dramatic, catastrophic release of methane from the floor of the Gulf…better safe than sorry. We do NOT want to be heating those things.
Well… I actually get worried when I read stories like this… People get freaked out when adding a little CO2 to the air but I start getting worried when people start actually changing the why eco-systems and normal current flows of heat. The scary thing may be that it would work. Scary because then it may actually cause a very different issue then the one we have currently… Sooner or latter their (heat sink? ) the deeper water would warm up… I suppose it may work so long as the heat was still allowed to leave some way, but it feels like this would actually purposefully cause global warming… I mean water vapor holds onto heat a little but if I am not mistake water as a liquid holds heat really well… Just saying I don’t think this is a great idea… But I may well be jumping at shadows here.
I wish Gates would throw some of that money at me rather than the hair brain scheme he’s cooked up to mitigate hurricanes. He’s throwing money down a huge rat hole. Do the physic’s, Bill, it’ll never work.
I’m REALLY surprised that this idea of Gates’ wasn’t recognized in this thread (so far) as simply a version of the OTEC, now being worked on by Lockheed Martin
http://www.lockheedmartin.com/how/
(video)
where the heat differential between the cold and warm waters fuels a power plant. The guy in the video linked above claims Lockheed will have a 10mw plant in a couple of years ( I think the US govt has/had a test plant in Hawaii) with 100mw plants to follow.
The idea of using the heat differential of the ocean has been around since the 1880s. If we had four or five dozen of the 100mw plants in the Gulf of Mexico (yes, they wouldn’t be as efficient as ones with cooler source water in deeper trench areas) I could see an actual (eventual) change in surface temperature. (Like wind farms on calm days, Gulf of Mexico OTEC plants would have a hard slog working in the winter)
I’d much rather be setting up plants to manufacture electricity/hydrogen than investing in a plant that doesn’t really DO anything.
Just one thing indeed “Unintended consequences”. Stopping huricanes wich are natures great heat exchangers might be a silly idea but i like to think a step ahead, what if they go ahead and construct those vessel 100’s.
Building capacity? Resources? CO2 emissions wich are going to be massive on this project? The damage from onshore and offshore activities? To name a few, this will not go well with “Gang Green”.
And then, will it work or are the intended consequences worse than the solution it should bring?
Ronan (21:28:57) :
Scale Ronan, scale. Do you really think we could create or stop this.
http://garybrandastrology.com/images/Hurricane%20Katrina%20Image.gif