This week, Bill Gates and several other scientists received criticism from submitted patents for hurricane suppression technologies by scientists around the world.
This plan is supposed to cool the ocean water immediately surrounding an approaching storm. For this to happen, Gates and his colleagues suggest having large tub like barges placed in front of storms to pump warm ocean water down to the depths while bringing cold water up at the same time. This would hopefully lessen the power of the storm by the time it makes landfall.
William Gray, a renowned scientist in the field of hurricanes, doubts that the project would work. Gray thinks that it is not possible to bring that much cold water up in such a short amount of time.
Gray thinks, however, that the program could only be feasible if the barges were set out before the hurricane season began, which might pose economic problems if no storms were to show up to the party in that year.
Cost is the biggest factor that keeps this from being successful. Many people thinks that the cost outweighs the potential benefit. However, a multibillion dollar project might prevent hundreds of billions of dollars in damage that come globally because of these storms each year.
Information found at CNN.com -
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/08/28/hurricanes.gates.gray/index.html
