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Comment by mrfusion | Hacker News Reader

I think pumping cold water to the surface from lower depths could be very effective. I wish we’d try it out.

Edit. Bill gates actually filed a patent on this.

There was quite of bit of discussion about this last year. The goal was to activate the cold water bubble/mist field around a 1000 miles from the shore. The theory is that before the storm hits warm shallow waters that increase the strength of the storm, the cold mist could collapse the thermal convection turning a major hurricane into a tropical storm at landfall.

I doubt that you’d be able to do this at a large enough scale to make it worthwhile. And any storm is a moving target, so you’d need to have pumps all over the ocean.

Storms actually move fairly slowly. I would suggest placing the pump boats in the eye as it’s forming before it gets to hurricane strength.

Remember you’d just be moving already cold water which takes orders of magnitude less energy than cooling the water.

If a nuclear bomb is a trivial amount of energy compared to a hurricane, I think we can say with confidence that the amount water you're going to have to pump around will be absurd, as will be the environmental impacts.

And you'd be pumping warm water lower, thereby making the next storm worse.

I’d need to see a source on that. I’m not sure how you can assume that.

I will not provide you with a source, I don't have the time. I consider what I said basic, first-principles stuff. We two layers deep discussing an idea that is not feasible, anyway. Here is a source that the pumps will not work: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/08/28/hurricanes.gates....

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