A System to Weaken Hurricanes
It might be possible to suppress hurricanes so they aren’t so devastating to people who live in their path. We’ve been inventing in this area along with climate change and alternative energy sources. Today a patent application related to this was published by the USPTO and TechFlash has written a nice piece about this. Some of the questions that came up in the comments there are about whether this type of inventing should be done in the first place. We absolutely believe that we should investigate our options should the environmental change cause severe disruption. This type of technology is not something humankind would try as a “Plan A” or “Plan B.” These inventions are a “Plan C” where humans decide that we have exhausted all of our behavior changing and alternative energy options and need to rely on mitigation technologies. If our planet is in this severe situation, then our belief is that we should not be starting from scratch at investigating mitigation options.
We’re looking forward to discussing these ideas and will post more about them here later this year.
Pablos, thanks for providing some extra explanation. I’ve posted a follow-up on TechFlash (http://bit.ly/zx5ZK) so that more people will have this additional context.
Also in that post are more comments from the University of Miami’s David Nolan, questioning whether the concept would work as outlined in the patent filings. Would be great to hear your thoughts on those questions, as well.
I am currently reading a book by Clive Cussler callled Polar Shift- a story about a group of scientists/business people that have a paradigm that would cause the magentic poles to shift and the ramifcations that would follow. Human’s trying to manipulate events without knowing the ripple effect or being able to control the effects? HMMMM