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.
Two words: “tax write-off.”
Wow. I have this great idea. DON’T DO THIS!!
Hurricanes release energy, and to my layman’s mind, this is the equivalent of sticking a potato in the Earth’s tailpipe, so to speak.
Also, I am currently downloading update after update, and I just have this funny vision of the Weather Channel tracking a hurricane that suddenly turns into the blue screen of death.
He needs to 1st improve his companies products before he goes & solves the world’s “problems”, IMHO
It will all be run using Window’s Vista, It will never happen.
Windows has encountered a problem with application mega pumps of mercy and needs to close.
Close program y/n
Y
Program is not responding
DOH!
We have officially entered into the twilight zone. It seems that anyone may now confidently believe in anything whatsoever, as long as there is money in it for them.
Science has become the servant of monied interests, whether government money or private. Tell us what you want the truth to be and we will do the appropriate studies. They’re all in it together. Too bad that we are the ones holding the bill…
In an interesting chapter entitled Engineers Dreams from his book” Infinite in all directions”, Freeman Dyson explains the reasons for the failings of Von Neumann and his team for the prediction and control of Hurricanes.
Von Neumann’s dream
“As soon as we have good enough computers we will be able to divide the phenomena of meteorology cleanly into two categories, the stable and the unstable”, The unstable phenomena are those that are which are upset by small disturbances, and the stable phenomena are those that are resilient to small disturbances. All disturbances that are stable we will predict, all processes that are unstable we will control”
Freeman Dyson page 183
What went wrong? Why was Von Neumann’s dream such a total failure. The dream was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of fluid motions. It is not true that we can divide cleanly fluid motions into those that are predictable and those that are controllable. Nature as usual is more imaginative then we are. There is a large class of classical dynamic systems, including non-linear electrical circuits as well as fluids, which easily fall into a mode of behavior that is described by the word “chaotic” A chaotic motion is generally neither predictable nor controllable. It is unpredictable because a small disturbance will produce exponentially growing perturbation of the motion .It is uncontrollable because small disturbances lead only to other chaotic motions, and not to any stable and predictive alternative”
Ronan (21:28:57) : “…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.”
A patent application must show all components and features necessary to make the invention work. The patent application in question has no way to prevent high internal water levels from causing the main tank to sink. Therefore, there are at least several people stupid enough to overlook such an important detail, just as there are people stupid enough to believe in AGW. (Even if the tank didn’t sink, the device still wouldn’t work. It is left to the student to determine the reason.)
Oh, just great … NOT.
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I wonder if they’ve given ~any~ thought —at all— as to how their plan will destroy an entire fishing industry in the Gulf area?
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Outside that, the natural chain of events will be seriously disrupted by such manipulations.
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Of course, you understand, what results of that egregious attempt at weather modification will be blamed on the rest of us.
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Maybe a giant squid will swallow the filthy gringos?
Ronan (21:28:57) :
Ronan – you are more than welcom here! We don’t get the chance to debate ‘climate’ here very often with rational beings such as yourself. Please hang around and join the debate – I’m sure that everyone here will benefit from your rational input.
I’m with you. How crazy is this idea? It’s up there with ‘let’s paint the Arctic ice black’.
The idiocy of this proposal is overwhelming. I have trouble believing that Bill Gates really believes in it.
There are a number of sources on the web that estimate the energy released by the phase change of water vapor as it condenses and (perhaps) freezes in a thunderstorm. One thunderstorm (yes, only one) average size thunderstorm carries the energy equivalent to a 20 kiloton nuclear bomb up, through the bulk of the green house gasses, to 40,000 feet where it will radiate into space.
On the other hand, one hurricane releases some 6 X 10-14 watts per day, roughly equivalent to the entire world’s production of power. And that power is also carried up to where it can also radiate into space.
Bill Gates is sooooo trivial when compared to nature’s forces.
But, then, on the other hand, there is “T” Boone Pickens. His plan called for some 1,200 SQUARE MILES of wind farm.
The local rumors around Texas have it that his plan had nothing at all to do with wind power and everything to do with water. There is a vagary in Texas law that came into being a few years ago as if by magic. The law allows that if there is a power line right of way, then a water pipe line can also be laid in that right of way. It seems (and it may be true!) that the plan was to put in some wind turbines and get the Texas tax payer to buy the right of way and build the transmission towers. Yes, there would be some green power, but it would be nothing compared to the value of the water.
I would have a lot more respect for “T” Boone if the rumors are true.
As for Silly Billy Gates? Maybe there is something afoot like “T” Boone’s plan, or perhaps he is just hustling the rubes that will believe that drivel. Just like Al Gore.
It would disappoint me if Silly Billy believed his own press.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack
“Mr. Burns” from the “The Simpsons” was mentioned in part of the article. But I imagine it is more like “Brewster’s Millions.” Some idiot walks up to a geek with a ton or two of cash and pitches this idea to “save” the Gulf Coast. Now this money infused geek thinks that he can change the world because when he speaks, people listen. So here is his chance to sign on to something that could really shake the world. Now being a technology geek, show him some nicely drawn plans and he gets all slobbery and has an instant craving for Hot Pockets. Furthermore he is not expected to plop down anymore than initially requested. Not bad he thinks. So he does it, and in return is ridiculed as the fool that he is. Before this I had no idea whether or not he believes in AGW, but now it is obvious. Anyone who would invest any type of money in a hair-brained scheme such as this, expecting to actually change weather patterns, is foolish enough to believe in AGW. Further proof that money does not infer intelligence.
(How to keep a billionaire busy):
Bill – try this idea: Do away with the Panama Canal locks and just deepen and widen the canal to allow the Pacific Ocean to directly flow into the gulf. (I believe it is a few feet higher than the gulf.) In time, that ought to change the world’s currents – but who knows how?!
Another idea: Determine the height on lever arms at each of the earth’s axial poles; the amount of thrust needed for giant, rotating turbines constantly opposing the earth’s axial tilt; and the amount of time & $$$ to straighten up the earth’s axial tilt from 23.44 degrees to 0 degrees. Of course that might actually cause global warming, so try tilting it more – to say, 30 degrees!
With Bill on board, the ship’s pump control systems will be fiendishly complicated, the pumps will run at half the expected speed, and a message will regularly appear on the bridge monitor informing the captain that:
“Your application has performed an unexpected violation and will be shut down.”
At this point, the ship will have to return to port, and everyone on board will have to disembark before the ship’s engines and systems can be restarted.
As I read the patent description the system’s sole function is to pump warm water from the surface down below the thermocline with no mechanism for returning cold water from depth to the surface.
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.
With wave action providing the only filling mechanism and no cold water brought to the surface it’s hard to envision this scheme having a meaningful affect on surface temps, let alone any passing hurricanes. Given the obvious potential disrupting the Gulf ecosystem, it’s hard to imagine the plan would survive the gauntlet of ecolawyers, even if enough politicians could be bought off to clear the regulatory hurdles.
Maybe I should dig out my plan to wrangle calving icebergs with ocean going tugs, beach them on the African coast, and use the melt water to irrigate the deserts into new greenspace. Sounds like the kind of thing that would be right up Bill’s alley. I even had a nice biotech aspect to my plan since the trees we’d be growing in the desert would be genetically engineered California Redwoods that would reach mature size in about 25% of normal time, the better to sequester all that CO2, don’t ya know. Of course, my plan doesn’t have any potential as an insurance shakedown, so Bill might not find it as lucrative as this beauty.
Sounds like a WIN-WIN situation to me.
He KNOWS the seas are cooling and cooler seas equals less huricanes.
He takes the kudus.
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As a patented inventor I can see this is an application to act as a bookmark for the idea and not a well thought out invention. For bill gates and co. this is a legal angle to sue for royalities from anyone that tries to manage hurricanes, go back and read the application, it’s about hurricane management and not the device that manages the job.
Remember Gates is a troll not a real inventor.
The suppression of Carlin’s report is the final nail in the AGW coffin. The Cnet News article “E-mails indicate EPA suppressed report skeptical of global warming” http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10274412-38.html notes the following:
“Carlin’s report listed a number of recent developments he said the EPA did not consider, including that global temperatures have declined for 11 years; that new research predicts Atlantic hurricanes will be unaffected; that there’s “little evidence” that Greenland is shedding ice at expected levels; and that solar radiation has the largest single effect on the earth’s temperature.”
Here’s a link to an updated graph of global temperatures: http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
One can see that temperatures have declined since 1998, with a particularly sharp decline since 2007. At the very least, it can be said that global warming has stopped for the last 11 years. If warmists insist that longer time scales must be referenced, then it becomes a natural rebound since the last Ice Age, so that argument has no merit. Beware of graphs that have the right side truncated to conceal the cooling trend.
Turning to the matter of hurricanes, Google Scholar yields studies questioning the mythical hurricane-global warming link, which was spawned by the media’s obsession with Katrina. In “An explanation for the lack of trend in the hurricane frequency”
http://66.102.1.104/scholar?q=cache:qg90fbLc9OsJ:scholar.google.com/+Atlantic+Hurricane+severity+frequency&hl=en ,
By Author Rasmus E. Benestad of the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, notes
“Goldenberg et al. posed the question whether the increased activity was due to long-term global warming or a result of natural variability, but concluded that the latter was the most likely explanation.” and “Furthermore, a systematic change in the total number of TC (tropical cyclones) has not yet been established and a lack of trend may seem contrary to expectations given a general warming trend.” Also, “Global climate models (GCMs) provide an important tool for making future climate scenarios, but these do not yet have a sufficient spatial resolution or a representation of the physical processes within the storm to give accurate results”, concluding that “These results furthermore suggest that there may be a non-linear relationship between the area of high SST (sea surface temperatures) and the number of TCs, which can explain why there has not yet been a clear upward trend in the number of Tcs.”
Likewise, in “HURRICANES AND GLOBAL WARMING”
http://66.102.1.104/scholar?q=cache:qivH58LCaB8J:scholar.google.com/+hurricanes+global+warming&hl=en
by BY R. A. PIELKE JR., C. LANDSEA., M. MAYFIELD, J. LAVER, AND R. PASCH, the conclusion is “To summarize, claims of link-ages between global warming and hurricane impacts are premature for three reasons. First, no connection has been established between greenhouse gas emissions and the observed behavior of hurricanes (Houghton et al. 2001; Walsh 2004. Second, the peer-reviewed literature reflects that a scientific consensus exists that any future changes in hurricane intensities will likely be small in the context of observed variability (Knutson and Tuleya 2004; Henderson-Sellers et al. 1998), while the scientific problem of tropical cyclogenesis is so far from being solved that little can be said about possible changes in frequency. And third, under the assumptions of the IPCC, expected future damages to society of its projected changes in the behavior of hurricanes are dwarfed by the influence of its own projections of growing wealth and population (Pielke et al. 2000).”
Concerning the alleged accelerated melting of Greenland, recent research brings to light the reality of the situation, at
http://www.theresilientearth.com/?q=content/greenlands-ice-armageddon-comes-end
“Now, from the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union, comes word that Greenland’s Ice Armageddon has been called off.
Researchers reported in 2007 that two of the area’s major outlet glaciers—Helheim and Kangerdlugssuaq—had slowed significantly by the summer of 2006. Then at the 2009 AGU meeting, glaciologist Tavi Murray and ten of her colleagues from Swansea University in the United Kingdom reported the results from their 2007 and 2008 surveys.
“It has come to an end,” Murray said during a session at the meeting. “There seems to have been a synchronous switch-off ” of the speed-up, she said. Based on the shape and appearance of the 14 largest outlet glaciers in southeast Greenland, outlet glacier flows have returned to the levels of 2000 nearly everywhere. “There’s a pattern of speeding up to maximum velocity and then slowing down since 2005,” Murray reported. “It’s amazing; they sped up and slowed down together. They’re not in runaway acceleration.”
Glacial modeler Faezeh Nick of Durham University in the UK and her colleagues found similar behavior when they modeled the flow of Helheim Glacier. In their model, as they report recently in Nature Geoscience, Helheim’s flow is extremely sensitive to disturbances at its margin but can quickly adjust. “Our results imply that the recent rates of mass loss in Greenland’s outlet glaciers are transient,” the group writes, “and should not be extrapolated into the future.””
The effects of solar radiation on Earth’s climate have been misunderstood, underestimated, and over simplified by proponents of anthropogenic global warming. As noted in the abstract of “Sun and planets from a climate point of view”
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=4866248
By J. Beer, J. A. Abreu and F. Steinhilber:
“The solar electromagnetic radiation received by a planet is very unevenly distributed on the dayside of the planet. The climate tries to equilibrate the system by transporting energy through the atmosphere and the oceans provided they exist. These quasi steady state conditions are continuously disturbed by a variety of processes and effects.” and “On a planet, many factors determine how much of the arriving energy enters the climate system and how it is distributed and ultimately reemitted back into space. On Earth, there is growing evidence that in the past solar variability played a significant role in climate change.”
From “On global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate. Are humans involved? “
http://www.springerlink.com/content/t341350850360302/
By L.F. Khilyuk and G.V. Chilingar, the abstract:
“The authors identify and describe the following global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate: (1) solar radiation as a dominant external energy supplier to the Earth, (2) outgassing as a major supplier of gases to the World Ocean and the atmosphere, and, possibly, (3) microbial activities generating and consuming atmospheric gases at the interface of lithosphere and atmosphere. The writers provide quantitative estimates of the scope and extent of their corresponding effects on the Earth’s climate. Quantitative comparison of the scope and extent of the forces of nature and anthropogenic influences on the Earth’s climate is especially important at the time of broad-scale public debates on current global warming. The writers show that the human-induced climatic changes are negligible.”
What the warmists don’t want you to know is that even if solar radiation were constant, the amount absorbed or reflected back to space is highly variable.
In “Global warming due to increasing absorbed solar radiation”
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL037527.shtml
Kevin E. Trenberth and John T. Fasullo, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, observe that any warming due to GHGs and water vapor is “offset to a large degree by a decreasing greenhouse effect from reducing cloud cover and increasing radiative emissions from higher temperatures. Instead the main warming from an energy budget standpoint comes from increases in absorbed solar radiation that stem directly from the decreasing cloud amounts. These findings underscore the need to ascertain the credibility of the model changes, especially insofar as changes in clouds are concerned.”
How about that Arctic ice? You’ve probably heard the warmists shrieking that the Northwest passage is open “for the first time in history”. It’s not true. The St. Roch, constructed of Douglas Fir, was the –
First vessel to sail the Northwest Passage from west to east (1940 – 1942)
First vessel to complete the Northwest Passage in one season (1944), also making it the first to use the more northerly, deeper route and to complete the Passage in both directions.
http://www.vancouvermaritimemuseum.com/page216.htm
Actually, several vessels have negotiated the Northwest Passage over the years, even tourists and two guys in a catamaran, listed at:
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2007/09/bad-reporting-about-northwest-passage.html
The Encyclopedia of Earth documents the fact that sea ice has been highly variable for the past 100 years:
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Sea_ice_in_the_Arctic
“However, sufficient data are available for portions of the North Atlantic region, based largely on historical ship reports and coastal observations, to permit sea iceal trend assessments over periods exceeding 100 years. Perhaps the best-known record is the Icelandic sea ice index, compiled by Thoroddsen[16] and Koch [17], with subsequent extensions (e.g., Ogilvie and Jonsson[18]). The index combines information on the annual duration of sea ice along the Icelandic coast and the length of coastline affected by sea ice. Figure 6.6 shows several periods of severe sea ice conditions, especially during the late 1800s and early 1900s, followed by a long interval (from about 1920 to the early 1960s) in which sea ice was virtually absent from Icelandic waters.”
The current Global Warming controversy is a perfect storm of many factors; a lack of historical perspective in natural climate variation combined with recent technological scrutiny, a lack of appreciation and ignorance of the many factors affecting climate, partisan politics, misguided ideology, unprofessional reporting by the media, the rise of urban heat effects, and sadly, deliberate manipulation of temperature data.
I used to work in the for a Swiss multinational building big centrifugal pumps. The inside of a pump which has been shifting seawater for a few years looks like the surface of the moon, greatly reduced efficiency. Unless you make them out of Bronze, Stainless Steel or Monel.
Those insurance policies ain’t going to be cheap.
When we used to test a big pump, the resulting power drop dimmed the lights across a large section of the urban area our factory was in as the motor spun up. It takes a lot of energy to shift water, it weighs a kilogram per liter.
Assuming Bill isn’t planning on laying power cables from a wind farm out into the ocean to run these pumps, what power source is he going to use for them? Not fossil fuels shirley?
Concerned environMentalists think they should be told.
Big pumps and their driving motors get hot. What are they going to be cooled with Mr Burns? The cool water brought up from below the thermocline?
Doh!
As others have said not a new idea,
“The idea is to tether millions of vertical pipes across the oceans to pump nutrient-rich deep water to the surface. These waters would fertilise the growth of algae, which in turn fix carbon dioxide. The pipes, reaching to depths of 200 metres, would have flap valves at the bottom operated by the energy of waves, which would push deep water up the pipe.”
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn12698-ocean-pumps-could-counter-global-warming.html
Summary so far:
1) Hurricanes are essential. They are MAJOR cooling engines, shutting them down or even reducing what naturallly forms would be detrimental to global climate.
2) Intentionally messing with climate when we truly do NOT understand everything about it is beyond evil, and should never be allowed, ever.
3) Bill Gates may be the world’s second wealthiest man, but he’s certainly not in the top 100 for intelligence.
I think the next time a Hurricane form in the Gulf we ought to all go down there and drink some beer, and pee in the ocean.
Same results, cheaper, and a lot more fun.
Then we run like hades to see if we can “get out of town” before we Drown.
I thought Bill Gates was on the right track investing in Sapphire Energy’s algae based biofuel, but controlling hurricanes?? Our climate could suffer the blue sky of death…
– This climate has encountered an unexpected error and needs to shut down. Ending climate now could result in loss of breathable atmosphere. End climate Y/N? –
Let me put a number to it. ‘Global warming is happening twice – that is exactly twice – as fast as ……..
I give you: The Twin Peaks of Kilimanjaro!…
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46btEgKmCTo&feature=fvst]
Marge: I’m worried about the kids, Homey. Lisa’s becoming very obsessive. This morning I caught her trying to dissect her own raincoat.
Homer: I know. And this perpetual-motion machine she made today is a joke. It just keeps going faster and faster.
Marge: And Bart isn’t doing very well either. He needs boundaries and structure. There’s something about flying a kite at night that’s so unwholesome.
[Looks out window]
Bart: [creepily] Hello, mother dear.
Marge: That’s it, we have to get them back to school.
Homer: I’m with you, Marge. Lisa. Get in here.
[Lisa walks in]
Homer: In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics.