It Doesn’t Scale
Time magazine has picked up on Bill Gates’s solution for hurricanes: cooling the sea surface.
The problems with this solution, as are patiently explained by Dr. Jeff Masters, an individual who actually knows something about tropical weather, are manifold, but can be condensed to the same major problem with everything Gates has ever done: it doesn’t scale.
What may look like a good idea in the lab, can be totally worthless in the real world. What Gates thinks is a great new idea already occurs naturally. Powerful hurricanes are immensely effective pumps, and they naturally create upwelling, bringing cooler water to the surface. If two hurricanes follow the same path within a week of each other, the second will be much weaker because of the cooler sea surface temperatures. Hurricanes have the energy of nuclear weapons, which is why they can do this. The puny fleet Gates envisions won’t impress the Gulf of Mexico, much less the Atlantic, and where are you going to find the people to man a ship that will be intentionally steaming into hurricanes? Sailors tend to be more reality based than the corporate managers who buy Microsoft products.
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LMAO PMSL
It doesn’t take much to convince the media that you are “a genius”. And if you do one thing successfully, they assume that you know how to do everything [Linus Pauling and vitamin C sound familiar].
The role that luck plays in success never enters into their heads.
It just amuses me that even after retirement, Bill Gates continues to come up with lousy technology that doesn’t work. Talk about perfect consistency!
– Badtux the Amused Penguin
It’s hard to believe that he applied for a patent on a bunch of ships pumping seawater.
Jeff Masters made another important point: if Gates tries it and a hurricane that was headed for Houston hits Mobile after making a sudden course change, the good ol’ boys will be heating the peanut oil and mixing the batter for the first deep fried retired executive.