Bill Gates hurricane stopper: help for humanity or ecological disaster?

Microsoft founder and former CEO of Microsoft, Bill GatesBill Gates, is part of a team that has applied for five patents to manufacture hurricane preventing technology.

Hurricane Katrina caused billions of dollars in damage, inestimable losses in human lives and property destruction, and raised a serious question about the efficiency of FEMA.

But can we stop or control hurricanes? More importantly, should we?

Bill Gates, along with his former CTO at Microsoft, Nathan Myhrvold thinks we should. They filed for the patents last year at Bellevue, WA. based Searete LLC, an entity of Intellectual Ventures, currently managed by Myhrvold.

According to a Searete spokesperson, who declined to elaborate, Bill Gates is involved in the weather modification strategy, but the patents aren’t expected be granted for another year or more.

The basis for the modification plan is to use multiple specially-equipped ocean vessels to essentially lower the temperature of the Gulf Stream water surface, by pulling deeper, colder water up into the mix.

Pertinent passage from one of the modification patents:

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.

David Nolan, associate marine biologist from the University of Miami had this to say about controlling hurricanes:

"Every couple of years there's a news story that gets picked up for some hurricane-suppression idea," Nolan told TechFlash recently. "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."

Between the years of mid 1960 to the end of the 70’s, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) researched hurricane control in an experiment known as Stormfury, where the concept of “seeding” intense storms with silver iodide was explored. The theory was to increase precipitation outside the “eye” of the storm, causing it to cool and fall in on itself, thereby reducing the storm’s intensity. It never worked. After millions of dollars to fund the study, researchers discovered that hurricane systems already include ice crystals, which is what the silver iodide was supposed to duplicate.

Other weather modification ideas have included stratigically placed Earth-orbiting solar satillites, to heat specific sections of the ocean’s water, in an effort to draw or steer the hurricane away from populated coastlines. Another idea was to use gigantic land positioned windmills to literally “blow” the storm in another direction. Since water evaporation is drawn up into the storm as fuel, the idea of spreading a layer of “biodegradable oil” over miles of the ocean’s surface has also been a theory also considered by researchers.

All these ideas have major draw backs and ecological consequences that would be almost impossible to anticipate. Controlling Mother Nature is a dangerous game, when one system is modified without consideration of other systems, environmental impacts, and so on. The potential ecological domino affect could be disasterous.

What would happen if human controlled storm manipulation resulted in damage to other continents? How would the disturbance of the ocean’s temperature and Gulf Stream affect marine life? What happens when weather patterns are distrupted to save lives and avoid damage in one area, but causes drought and temperature disruption in another? How would using massive numbers of weather-control vessels spread out over miles of ocean, impact shipping lanes? What ramifications would aquatic related climate tampering have on global warming? What kind of fuel would the vessels use and how much? How about increased potential for ship collisions and oi/fuel spills?

According to NOAA, weather modification is a risky proposal that might not be worth all the money and effort to put into a hurricane stopping system.

However, a person who lost loved ones, friends, homes, precious belongings, pets, personal dignity, and everything else they owned in a Hurricane like Katrina--might have a different opinion.