Five patent applications for technology that aims to control the weather bear the signature of a man who knows how to think big: Microsoft founder Bill Gates. The applications made public by the U.S. Patent Office last week describe floating devices that could reduce the strength of hurricanes by drawing warm water from the ocean’s surface and channeling it down to the depths through a long tube. A second tube would reverse the process and bring deep, cold water up to the surface.
The applications were filed by an entity called Searete, which is part of the company Intellectual Ventures that was founded by former Microsoft executives as an “invention business;” Bill Gates is an investor in the company. Gates is listed as one of the inventors on each hurricane-quelling patent application, along with scientists like the geoengineering expert Ken Caldeira. One of the patent applications describes how part or all of the cost of building and maintaining the hurricane-killer ships could be raised by selling insurance to coastal residents whose risk would be reduced by using the new system [New Orleans Times-Picayune].
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The state of Louisiana is losing its coastal wetlands to the Gulf of Mexico, and a new study suggests that conservationists won’t be able to turn the tide. If engineers don’t divert sediment-rich waters from the Mississippi River to help replenish a sinking river delta, about 10 percent of [the] state will slip beneath the waves by the end of this century. However, even if the engineers do try to abate the subsidence, the Mississippi doesn’t carry enough sediment to offset more than a small fraction of that loss, a new analysis suggests [Science News].
Before American settlers subdued the Mississippi and its tributaries, the river periodically overflowed its banks and spilled muddy water, thick with sediment, into surrounding wetlands. But the new study found that the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers today carry only half the sediment they did a century ago — between 400 million and 500 million tons a year then, compared with just 205 million tons today. The rest is now captured by more than 40,000 dams and reservoirs that have been built on rivers and streams that flow into the main channels [The Times-Picayune].
So even if Louisiana officials embark on an all-out campaign to restore the marshes through controlled levee breaks and diversion projects that bring back river water, it wouldn’t be enough to save the land–especially since sea levels are rising due to global warming. “We conclude that significant drowning is inevitable” [The Guardian], the study’s authors wrote.
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Natural disasters took a deadly toll in 2008, killing more than 220,000 people and causing a total of $200 billion in damages–a 50 percent increase in costs over 2007. A new report sums up the damages wrought this year by weather and geology; the deadliest disaster was the cyclone that battered Myanmar in May, killing an estimated 130,000 people and causing losses of $4 billion, and the costliest was the earthquake that struck China’s Sichuan province, killing an estimated 70,000 and causing losses of $85 billion.
The new figures come from an annual assessment of global damages by the reinsurance giant Munich Re, which offers backup policies to companies writing primary insurance policies. Reinsurance helps spread risk so that the system can handle large losses from natural disasters [AP]. Munich Re has a financial interest in understanding global weather patterns, and board member Torsten Jeworrek says the uptick in losses from natural disasters is another indication that global warming is already having widespread effects. “Climate change has already started and is very probably contributing to increasingly frequent weather extremes and ensuing natural catastrophes,” he said [BBC News].
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In a new study, researchers looked at the role of cyclones in Earth’s carbon cycle. They found that cyclones (an umbrella term for hurricanes, typhoons, and tropical storms) can transfer terrestrial organic carbon, in the form of plants, soil, and fossils, to the bottom of the oceans and prevent it from entering the atmosphere. In just a few days a single typhoon can dump the same amount of carbon to the bottom of the ocean as an entire year of rain. The storms do this by ripping mud and decaying vegetation off the land, and flushing it down rivers in huge floods and out to sea [New Scientist].
The study, published in Nature Geoscience [subscription required], conducted on the LiWu river in Taiwan, focused on how cyclones sequester carbon rather than how much carbon they bury. Nevertheless, the researchers warn that the amount of carbon sequestered by cyclones is a pittance compared to the amount of carbon generated by human activity. “The current amount of carbon dioxide building up from manmade sources is about 100-1,000 times faster than this carbon (burial) from the interaction between the cyclones, erosion and forests,” said Robert Hilton of Cambridge University who was one of the authors. “In terms of the manmade carbon cycle this is not going to save us. But it illustrates that the earth has natural ways of dealing with carbon dioxide,” he said [Reuters].
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In the destructive heart of hurricane season, climate scientists have come out with some alarming news: the most powerful storms have gained wind strength over the past 25 years as a result of gradually warming ocean waters, and global warming is likely to continue that trend. It’s hardly welcome news, as Gulf Coast residents are still recovering from this week’s close call with Hurricane Gustav and Caribbean islanders are warily eyeing several new tropical storms gaining strength over the Atlantic.
The new study is likely to renew the debate over global warming’s effect on major storms: [T]here has been controversy about whether these hurricanes will get more intense and numerous, with many claiming the data are not good enough to discern a real trend upwards in recent years…. Today’s study, by Prof James Elsner of Florida State University, concludes that the strongest tropical cyclones – the general term for intense storms such as hurricanes and typhoons – are getting stronger, with the greatest increase recorded in the North Atlantic and northern Indian oceans [Telegraph].
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In a congressional hearing yesterday, a supplier of the “FEMA trailers” used after Hurricane Katrina admitted that the company has known for years that the trailers contained dangerous levels of formaldehyde. But the chairman of Gulf Stream Coach said his company failed to disclose to Hurricane Katrina evacuees or the government its internal findings that formaldehyde in some units exceeded a federal health standard by as much as 45 times in 2006 [Washington Post].
Gulf Stream received over $500 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for 50,000 trailers that housed displaced Gulf Coast residents after the devastating 2005 hurricanes. But Gulf Stream chairman Jim Shea deflected blame for the evacuees’ chemical exposure to FEMA, saying that the agency turned down the company’s offer to conduct thorough tests on the trailers.
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