Bill Gates' Hurricane-Fighting Invention (UPDATED) (VIDEO)

Microsoft's Bill Gates has already accomplished plenty in his life -- but now he's involved in an ambitious new venture -- a plan to tame hurricanes. He and several other scientists and engineers have a patent-pending project that plans to release barge-like contraptions into brewing offshore hurricanes, which would pump cold water up from the bottom of the ocean, thus calming the rough weather that's caused by warm ocean temperatures.

The Today Show did a segment on Friday that shows more details.

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Comments

[spleencat]

01:40 PM on 07/21/2009

What has happened to reporting? This is a shoddy example. Bill Gates has no intention to try this. Rather, he is part of an organization called Intellectual Ventures started by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold. Their business is patent licensing. Some people call them patent trolls. They buy and apply for patents on myriad ideas and sue (or threaten) companies that bring ideas to fruition. One way they develop patents is to have a room full of bright people like Gates sit around for hours expounding on ideas. Those ideas that have some glimmer of merit get written up as patent applications and filed. For the few percent of the ideas that turn into business, IV holds a fundamental patent, and can demand that a company using their idea pay millions in license fees. That's it. If nobody ever builds hurricane busting platforms in the Gulf, IV makes no money on this and is only out the $50k it cost to get and maintain the patent. For reference see the patent fight over Blackberry. A little company called NTP, whose business is owing a few dozen patents, got ~$600mm from RIM. This is what Gates and Myhrvold are doing, but in a much bigger way.

[Tyrione]

05:30 AM on 07/20/2009

This is asinine. The Gulf shelves need to be rebuilt. The below Sea Level Pump System devised in the 19th Century by a very astute fellow Engineer allowed for New Orleans to ruin it's natural protective shelf that extended > 20 miles out from the entry into the Mississippi. In fact, certain areas extended out over 100 miles. This shelf does exactly what this moronic approach of engineering purports to do--weakens and knee caps the power of a Hurricane.

Rebuild the Shelves, the Coral Reefs and the rest of the sublevel zones off the world's continental shelves which, by ecological evolution always existed before Man exploited the crap out of them and thus destroyed them.

[poster1122]

02:03 PM on 07/20/2009

That might mitigate storms in some areas, but what about places like the Carribean that are regularly battered by hurricanes often at great loss of life? If this technology can be made to work (a big if), the biggest beneficiaries aren't going to the states along the Gulf, but places like Haiti. Myanmar, for example, lost 40K people in that major monsoon last year.

The US has days of warning and always has the option of evacuation. Countries and islands that are tiny strips of land don't have that luxury. And building shelves isn't an option in most places. Cuba is about 50 miles wide. What are you going to do, triple its land area somehow?

[toxicbrainpoison]

02:25 AM on 07/19/2009

Has anyone ever heard of an orgone cloudbuster? That might be all Bill Gates would need.

[hauty007]

05:23 PM on 07/18/2009

Profound & believable?
Theory is just that, an opinion based on a platform on information.
If theory is based on quintessential platforms, which one can we assume this theory is derived from.

[user168]

04:54 PM on 07/18/2009

Heaven and Earth belongs to All. No one should mess up nature.

[BannedNBoston]

03:27 PM on 07/18/2009

MarsAmbassador,
We dont know what our real weather is.
Our hurricanes are created and steered by nuclear powered scalar wave satellites.
(Dr William Deagle)
We have massive chemtrail emissions clouding our skies.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOJ4z8yqa54

www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8Pmb2Rt47g

[wxman]

02:49 PM on 07/18/2009

Other ramifications are that all those tropical palm would be dying or dead not to mention having a desert peninsula. it would kill rainfall mechanism as well oh and those 80 degree balmy temp's probably a good 10 degree drop with a marine layer much like Baja California --- mostly surounding ocean and that might even affect all southern US - good way to induce drought - could not think of a better way actually.

[BannedNBoston]

02:31 PM on 07/18/2009

Scalar energy
... use their interference grids over the USA to control the weather moving hot or ... Facility of the Utah State Prison were subjected to scalar wave mind control. ...
members.iimetro.com.au/~hubbca/scalar.htm

[alwqb]

01:16 PM on 07/18/2009

These guys are scientists first and foremost. People are asking about the simplest possible problems with the system, like they hadn't thought about the fish. Come on. Also, God wouldn't have given us the intelligence and the tools needed to correct the planet since we are killing it with global warming if you want to go there. The hurricanes are just going to get worse and we need to use our intelligence to maintain our very existence.

[MarsAmbassador]

03:41 PM on 07/18/2009

You lost me at 'God'.

[Wide Stance]

06:56 PM on 07/18/2009

You missed the best part: "God [has] given us the intelligence and the tools." Alwqb is one of the latter, apparently. He's always thinking, that God.

[MarsAmbassador]

12:33 PM on 07/18/2009

Great. And how much marine wildlife is going to get sucked up into that contraption? Watch this destroy the gulf stream and throw Europe into an ice age. Hurricanes are nature's way of releasing the tension of built-up forces, much as lightning does on land. Energy builds, nature releases. Don't mess with nature.

"But make no mistake: the weeds will win; nature bats last."
- Robert Michael Pyle

[donnajr]

08:48 AM on 07/18/2009

this techno has been around since 1940's. used in Vietnam to create a foot of rain per hour.

[mioffe]

08:24 AM on 07/18/2009

Dear Mr Gates, I will remind to you that in water we have gases and their amount is bigger under pressure and low temperature.
What it means?
As you will start pumping water from deep oceans, pressure will reduce for every cubic inch of water inside tube and gases will start bubble as in open bottle of any drink. Density of water inside tube will decrease and it will create fountain of water from tube, which will be difficult to stop.
This fountain will bring also GHG from deep oceans, which will create additional problems.

[RTIII]

12:11 PM on 07/18/2009

You don't have to go very deep to get a significant temperature gradient.

Any released gasses expansion in the tubes will put pressure in both directions - up and down the tube - and no unstopable fountain will be created, and most probably no fountain at all...

Further, while I don't specialize in ocean chemistry, my colleagues do, and my understanding from them is that the chemistry of ocean is quite complex and the molecules that may originally be trapped from the atmosphere are bound up in new molecules through complex interactions at the surface and that there's little true gas (per unit volume) is so dissolved as you suggest.
.

[mioffe]

01:03 PM on 07/18/2009

Dear RTIII, "Any released gasses expansion" will decrease density of the water in tube and will create huge forces from outside water. It is law of Physics without any doubt.
I Google for you:
"The oceans are mixed much more slowly than the atmosphere, so there are large horizontal and vertical changes in CO2 concentration. In general, tropical waters release CO2 to the atmosphere, whereas high-latitude oceans take up CO2 from the atmosphere. CO2 is also about 10 percent higher in the deep ocean than at the surface. The two basic mechanisms that control the distribution of carbon in the oceans are referred to as the solubility pump and the biological pump."
CO2 IS ALSO ABOUT 10 PERCENT HIGHER IN THE DEEP OCEAN THAN AT A SURFACE.
Please pay attention about biological pump, where your colleagues are right and SOLUBILITY PUMP.

[clearwaterclearmind]

03:54 AM on 07/18/2009

i actually like vista and have had no problems with it.

and bill gates became a hero to me when he unleashed potentially malaria ridden mosquitoes on the Technology, Entertainment and Design crowd.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29022220/

i love his heart, but see little that can be done about natural weather patterns.

keep up the good work bill, but focus on the practicalities.

[RomeoMD25]

03:09 AM on 07/18/2009

NASA has corrected its US temperature records, the hottest year on record is no longer 1998, but 1934.
Five of the ten hottest years since 1880 were between 1920 and 1940 " and the 15 hottest years since 1880 are spread across seven decades.
This suggests natural variation, not a warming trend. Plant and insect remains found at the base of Greenland"s ice sheet indicate that,
just 400,000 years ago, the island was blanketed in forests and basking in temperatures perhaps 27 degrees F warmer than today.

CO2 is vital to all life on earth. It is exhaled by all living
things and even comes from nocturnal emissions by plants. It forms the bubbles in your soda, wine and beer. Standard air has 370 parts
per million (PPM) of carbon dioxide of which 93% comes from "natural sources" which are all beyond human control.

[moreDumber]

03:51 PM on 07/18/2009

I thought global warming deniers were extinct.

[Carol06095]

12:13 PM on 07/20/2009

So explain why his comments are wrong: And here it is, July 20, 2009 and no hurricanes yet.

[mudshark12]

12:27 AM on 07/18/2009

Yes, he can do it, however at first it will crash and then it will take many patches and software updates before it becomes operational performing marginally at best.