Sandy victims: Life in a FEMA Camp feels like prison

Ashley Sabol, 21, of Seaside Heights, New Jersey looks over her accommodations at Tent City in Monmouth Park in Oceanport, New Jersey November 9. 2012. REUTERS/Michelle Conlin

“They treat us like we’re prisoners,” says Ashley Sabol, 21, of Seaside Heights, New Jersey. “It’s bad to say, but we honestly feel like we’re in a concentration camp.”

Reuters | Nov 10, 2012

By Michelle Conlin

OCEANPORT, New Jersey (Reuters) – It is hard to sleep at night inside the tent city at Oceanport, New Jersey. A few hundred Superstorm Sandy refugees have been living here since Wednesday – a muddy camp that is a sprawling anomaly amidst Mercedes Benz dealerships and country clubs in this town near the state’s devastated coastal region.

Inside the giant billowy white tents, the massive klieg lights glare down from the ceiling all night long. The air is loud with the buzz of generators pumping out power. The post-storm housing — a refugee camp on the grounds of the Monmouth Park racetrack – is in lockdown, with security guards at every door, including the showers.

No one is allowed to go anywhere without showing their I.D. Even to use the bathroom, “you have to show your badge,” said Amber Decamp, a 22-year-old whose rental was washed away in Seaside Heights, New Jersey.

The mini city has no cigarettes, no books, no magazines, no board games, no TVs, and no newspapers or radios. On Friday night, in front of the mess hall, which was serving fried chicken and out-of-the-box, just-add-water potatoes, a child was dancing and dancing — to nothing. “We’re starting to lose it,” said Decamp. “But we have nowhere else to go.”

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The tent city is emblematic of the crisis left by Sandy: the tens of thousands of people who have no place to live. Some are without power and heat – even if the utilities have their power back, their electrics and heating systems in their homes may have been destroyed by the floods. They are the short-termers. Others have a longer-term problem – their houses were made completely uninhabitable by flooding, ripped apart, or burned to the ground. And they pose a far more daunting challenge.

For now, all are without homes in one of the harshest housing markets in the world, with low vacancy rates and high rents. “There’s inventory in other parts of the country, but not here,” said University of Pennsylvania Wharton School Professor Susan Wachter.

To be sure, no one has been forced to stay in the tent city. But many say they have no other immediate option.

“This is an incredibly tough situation trying to find housing for these people,” said Federal Emergency Management Agency Public Affairs Manager Scott Sanders. “With winter coming, they obviously can’t stay there.”

FEMA has plans to bring trailers into New Jersey to increase the amount of temporary housing.

While FEMA is helping at the tent city, it is being run by the state of New Jersey. The state’s Department of Human Services did not immediately return calls seeking comment on Saturday morning.

Brad Gair, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s new emergency housing czar, has also talked about the complexities of post-disaster housing. The authorities in the region simply don’t have access to enough alternative housing or hotel rooms for all those who have been displaced. And all the problems this creates are on display here, where life has been even worse than during the storm, evacuees say.

BLANKETS AND PARKAS

One reason: the information blackout. Outside of the tightly guarded community on Friday, word was spreading that the Department of Human Services would aim to move residents to the racetrack clubhouse on Saturday. The news came after photos of people bundled in blankets and parkas inside the tents circulated in the media.

But inside the tent city, which has room for thousands but was only sheltering a couple of hundred on Friday, no one had heard anything about a move – or about anything else. “They treat us like we’re prisoners,” says Ashley Sabol, 21, of Seaside Heights, New Jersey. “It’s bad to say, but we honestly feel like we’re in a concentration camp.”

Sabol, who is unemployed and whose rental home was washed away in the hurricane, remembers being woken up on Wednesday at the shelter she was staying in at Toms River High School. Conditions there were “actually fine,” said Sabol.

Sabol was told that she had half an hour to pack: everyone was getting shipped to hotels in Wildwood, New Jersey, where they would be able to re-acquaint themselves with showers, beds and a door.

Sabol and about 50 other people boarded a New Jersey Transit bus, which drove around, seemingly aimlessly, for hours. Worse, this week’s Nor’easter snow storm was gathering force, lashing the bus with wind and rain.

After four hours, the bus driver pulled into a dirt parking lot. The passengers were expecting a hotel with heat and maybe even a restaurant. Instead they saw a mini city of portable toilets and voluminous white tents with their flaps snapping in the wind. Inside, they got sheets, a rubbery pillow, a cot and one blanket.

There was no heat that night, and as temperatures dropped to freezing, people could start to see their breath. The gusts of wind blew snow and slush onto Sabol’s face as her cot was near the open tent flaps. She shivered. Her hands turned purple.

It has taken three days for the tents to get warm.

Power workers from out of state who are helping utilities restore electricity to the area were starting to bed down in the tent city, too. Some empty vodka bottles appeared on the muddy street. There were now far more men than women or children, and the women said it was impossible not to notice the leering of some men.

Brian Skorupski, a manager with Tolland, Connecticut-based Asplundh Line Construction, had just rolled in with 50 workers, who were there to help restore power. Skorupski is used to his house in the suburbs. He missed his king-sized bed with his Hotel Collection sheets. “The only thing worse than this is sleeping in your truck,” he said.

Obama Ordered DHS to Control Hurricanes

Infowars.com | Oct 30, 2012

by Melissa Melton

While the debate rages regarding whether or not the U.S. government uses weather manipulation technology to steer storms like Hurricane Sandy, further evidence shows the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been engaged in research to do just that for years.

In 2008, an article in New Scientist discussed a new DHS project that funded research into guiding and directing the intensity of hurricanes.

Obama’s October Surprise – Creating and Steering Hurricane Sandy ?

Citing Hurricane Katrina as the basis for the project, the Hurricane Aerosol and Microphysics Program (HAMP) worked with Project Stormfury veteran Joe Golden and a panel of other experts “to test the effects of aerosols on the structure and intensity of hurricanes.” HAMP was funded under contract HSHQDC-09-C-00064 at a taxpayer price tag of $64.1 million.

In 2009, Richard Spinrad, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) assistant administrator for the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), sent then DHS Program Manager for Advanced Research Projects Agency (HSARPA) William Laska an official memorandum regarding OAR’s review of a “Statement for Work” for HAMP.

Full Story

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“Thunderquake” actually a “Super Bolt”

krmg.com | vMar 20, 2012

By Dan Potter

It woke up sleepy Tulsans, set-off car alarms and freaked out the family pet. Many people thought it was an earthquake that hit Tulsa at 3:33 this morning.

Instead, says National Weather Service Meteorologist Steve Amburn, is was a “Super Bolt.” Amburn says a super bolt is a positively-charged cloud-to-ground stroke of lightning.

Computer records indicate a single “super bolt” struck in the heart of South Tulsa just after 3:30.

No damage from the super bolt is reported.

HAARP, Haiti, Brzezinski and the NWO

Online Journal | Jan 22, 2010

By Jerry Mazza

On October 25, 2005, I wrote an article for Online Journal, headlined Is it the weather or government terror, detailing government manipulation of weather, including earthquakes, for terror and destruction, mentioning that “your local weatherman was surely not up to pointing this out,” and adding “let me help with the forecast, past, present and long-range. Well, déjà vu all over again seems to have struck in Haiti on January 12.

When I wrote that article, I was disturbed over the effects of Katrina, on August 25, 2005, not to mention the Indonesian tsunami preceding it on December 26, 2004. It seemed to me it would take a helluva lot more than the weatherman to explain such cosmic events within a year, four months and a day. Today, I ask you to read my first article to familiarize yourself with HAARP, the acronym for the government’s High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, which is about more than weather, but rather US Weapons of Meteorological Mass Destruction.

As I write that, I can hear the sirens of “conspiracy theory” going off on the airwaves as if a thief had broken into the dark hole of the Pentagon and was filling his pockets with all the secrets of these darker ops. Well, perhaps.

HAARP, as you will read in more detail, can shock the upper atmosphere with both a focused and navigable electromagnetic bolt. The ionosphere is the electrically charged sphere that surrounds the earth’s upper atmosphere, about 40 to 60 miles above the earth’s surface. Take a look also at the excellent Haiti Earthquake Raises HAARP Controversy at the phoenixaquua.blogspot, so you don’t think it’s just me thinking this. In fact, you can see filmed examples of how HAARP works, and how it has worked on Haiti.

You will particularly enjoy this article’s film clip of Pat Robertson’s analysis of the Haitian earthquake. Pat believes it’s due to the victory of the Haitians in their rebellion over Napoleon and the French in 1801. Their victory, he claims, was due to a pact the Haitians made with the Devil. And this pact, Pat iterates, haunts them to this day. This is a man who ran for president of the US, is the owner of a chain of TV and radio stations, and a leader of the Machiavellian Dominionists sect of Conservative Christianity. But I digress and I’m dizzy from this one.

HAARP has always been referred to by the US government as a tool for researching weather, but in fact has been developed and used by the military for Department of Defense purposes. This dark side of HAARP has been played down for obvious reasons, but Dr. Nick Begich and Jeane Manning have done an excellent expose of this “Military Pandora’s Box” in their book, Angel’s Don’t Play This Harp. There as an excellent summary of the book at this site. It debunks the notion that HAARP is no different than other ionospheric heaters operating safely through the world in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Tromso, Norway, and the former Soviet Union.

Yet a 1990 government document claims that the radio frequency (RF) power bolt can drive the ionosphere to “unnatural” activities. Quoting the authors . . .”at the highest HF powers available in the West, the instabilities commonly studied are approaching their maximum RF energy dissipative capability, beyond which the plasma process will ‘runaway’ until the next limiting factor is reached.” The program operates out the University of Alaska Fairbanks (in Sarah Palin-land), providing a ground-based “Star Wars” technology, offering a relatively inexpensive defense shield.

But the University also boasts about the most mind-boggling geophysical manipulations since nuclear bombs of which HAARP is capable. It’s based on the work of electrical genius Nicholas Tesla and the work and patents of Texas’ physicist Bernard Eastlund. The military has deliberately underestimated the deadly possibilities of this uber technology, most pointedly in this case to create earthquakes with the generation of bolts of electrical power aimed at specific targets.

In fact, HAARP’s potential for havoc drew the attention of none other than Zbigniew Brzezinski, former NSA adviser to Jimmy Carter, science advisor to President Johnson, and political advisor to President Obama.

More than 25 years ago, when Brzezinski was a professor at Columbia University, he wrote, “Political strategists are tempted to exploit research on the brain and human behavior [another strange purpose HAARP can be put to]. Geophysicist Gordon J.F. MacDonald, a specialist in problems of warfare, says accurately-timed, artificially-excited electronic strokes could lead to a pattern of oscillations that produce relatively high power levels over certain legions of the earth . . . in this way one could develop a system that would seriously impair the brain performance of very large populations in selected regions over an extended period.”

He capped this statement with “no matter how deeply disturbing the thought of using the environment to manipulate behavior for national advantages, to some, the technology permitting such use will very probably develop within the next few decades.” Let me tell you, dear readers, it’s here.

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Artificial Snow in Beijing Delays Hundreds of Flights

Epoch Times | Nov 3, 2009

By Aifang He & Gu Qing’er

Chinese scientists tinkering with the weather caused millions of tons of snow to fall on Beijing over the weekend, delaying 523 flights from the capital and infuriating passengers.

The Beijing Weather Modification Office (BWMO) induced the first snow of the season, a month earlier than usual, after firing 186 silver iodide capsules into the clouds, according to Weather China.

They fired the capsules at 8:00 p.m. on Oct. 31, and by 11:25 a.m. the following morning Beijing was covered in snow.

Chinese meteorologists say the earliest snowfall normally occurs around Nov. 29, according to statistics developed over 50 years as reported by state-run media.

“We won’t miss any opportunity to use artificial precipitation since Beijing is suffering from an ongoing drought,” the Weather Modification Bureau chief Zhang Qiang said to Student News Daily.

The snowfall inconvenienced more than 10,000 airline passengers and delayed 523 flights at the Beijing Capital International Airport.

Former Google Vice-President Li Kaifu waited 17 hours in the boarding area for a Taipei flight, according to the Guangzhou-based Southern Metropolitan Daily. He blogged about the experience on Sina.com: “I thought bringing two notebook batteries to fly from Beijing to Taipei would be enough; I didn’t think I’d be waiting 11 hours. Now I can only use twitter on my cell phone. People on the plane were full of complaints; some people were so hungry they were going to faint, I just took it as a chance to lose weight. I’d not eaten for nine hours or drunk water for three, and there was nothing for it. The air conditioning was terrible. The grumbling staff didn’t have any strength left to get angry.”

Other passengers were loaded onto planes that wouldn’t take off for hours.

Because the oxygen supply on the planes was short, some passengers fainted and had to be carried out. Later, many began demanding they be let off, some trying to force their way out of the cabins in an attempt to return to the terminal. Jin, who flew from Beijing to Shanghai, said passengers on his plane were extremely agitated, quarrelling angrily with airline staff.

Others complained about the inefficient coordination between the airlines and the Beijing Weather Modification Office.

China weather “magic” conjures blue sky for parade

Reuters | Oct 1, 2009

BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s air force deployed a “magic-like” range of chemicals and technology to clear Beijing’s smoggy air for a grand parade marking the 60th anniversary of Communist China, state media said on Thursday.

Chemists and officials worked for weeks on the country’s most ambitious ever attempt at weather modification, with air force technicians fanning out across the region to help teams operate complex equipment, the official Xinhua agency said.

The evening before the parade chemicals were fired into the hazy skies, and a light rain washed the city clean.

Surrounding provinces had already been loading clouds with silver iodide and dry ice, to try and force rain to fall before it reached Beijing, the report added.

“Only a handful of countries in the world could organise such large-scale, magic-like weather modification,” said Cui Lianqing, a senior air force meteorologist who said the parade operation was the largest in China’s history.

Contingency plans allowed for the teams to use one kind of chemicals to bring down rain in the parade area, and another to hold it off, he told Xinhua.

China has been researching cloud seeding and other weather manipulation techniques since the 1950s, but in the past has met with mixed success.

The opening to last year’s flagship Olympic Games fell on a day when skies looked hazy despite a raft of anti-pollution and weather manipulation measures.

And a deluge in 2005 forced a hasty last-minute venue change for an outdoor ceremony featuring top Chinese leaders, even after organisers had been promised China could guarantee dry weather.

Cui said this year’s plans dwarfed those for the Olympics, but despite their success he said there was still room for further improvements.

“The technology we have mastered so far could only allow us to modify the weather to a limited extent,” he told Xinhua.

“There are many uncertainties up in the sky.”

Royal Society warns climate engineering could result in mass starvation

Artificial trees that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere are one of the plans that need further research, according to the Royal Society. (Institution of Mechanical Engineers)

London Times | Sep 2, 2009

Royal Society warns climate engineering ‘could cause disaster’

by Ben Webster

Giant engineering schemes to reflect sunlight or suck carbon dioxide from the air could be the only way to save the Earth from runaway global warming, according to a group of leading scientists. But they say that these schemes could have their own catastrophic consequences, such as disrupting rainfall patterns, and should be deployed only as a last resort if attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions fail.

The Royal Society, a fellowship of 1,400 of the world’s most eminent scientists, published a report yesterday on the feasibility and possible dangers of technologies for cooling down the Earth, known as geoengineering. The ideas include artificial trees that draw CO2 from the air and mimicking volcanoes by spraying sulphate particles a few miles above the Earth to deflect the Sun’s rays. The most far-fetched would would be to launch trillions of small mirrors into space to act as a sunshield.

A far cheaper solution would be a fleet of 1,500 ships that would suck up seawater and spray it out of tall funnels to create sun-reflecting clouds. However, the report said that these clouds could disrupt rainfall patterns and result in mass starvation in countries dependent on the monsoon.

The panel of 12 scientists who produced the report concluded that all these approaches were theoretically possible and, despite the potential side-effects, should be explored with a view to holding trials.

They called for a £100 million annual global research fund to study geoengineering technologies and said that Britain should contribute £10 million a year, ten times the amount being spent now on such research.

Professor John Shepherd, who chaired the panel, said: “It is an unpalatable truth that unless we can succeed in greatly reducing carbon dioxide emissions we are heading for a very uncomfortable and challenging climate future, and geoengineering will be the only option left to limit further temperature increases.

“Our research found that some geoengineering techniques could have serious unintended and detrimental effects on many people and eco-systems — yet we are still failing to take the only action that will prevent us from having to rely on them. Geo- engineering and its consequences are the price we have to pay for failure to act on climate change.”

Professor Shepherd, Fellow in Earth System Science at the University of Southampton, admitted that there was a risk that the report would be exploited by fossil fuel companies, which might use it to argue that there was an alternative to cutting CO2 emissions.

But he said that it was better to start a thorough research programme now rather than wait until the start of rapid climate change, when the world would have no time to test solutions before deploying them.

Professor Shepherd added that he had no firm opinion on how likely it was that the world would need some form of geoengineering. “My opinion ranges from maybe to possibly to probably, depending on what I had for breakfast.”

Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution in the United States and a member of the panel, said: “We should spend 99 per cent of our effort on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and 1 per cent on this insurance policy \. We need to understand what our options are.”

The report said that an international body, possibly the United Nations, would need to oversee geoengineering projects because they would have impacts far beyond national boundaries. An international compensation scheme would also be needed to help those adversely affected by any project.

Professor John Beddington, the Government’s chief scientific adviser, endorsed the report’s call for more research into geoengineering. He said: “These are part of the armoury of dealing with what is an enormously difficult global problem.” But he added that it was “too early to say” whether trials should be approved.

Can Bill Gates stop hurricanes? Scientists doubt it

Hurricane experts doubt feasibility of Bill Gates-backed weather-control idea

CNN | Aug 28, 2009

By Ayesha Tejpar

(CNN) — Hurricane experts are throwing cold water on an idea backed by billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates aimed at controlling the weather.

Gates and a dozen other scientists have raised eyebrows by submitting patent applications for a technology to reduce the danger of approaching hurricanes by cooling ocean temperatures.

It’s a noble idea, given the horrible memories from Hurricane Katrina, which slammed into the Gulf Coast four years ago this week.

The storm, which rated a frightening Category 3 when it made landfall in Louisiana, was blamed for $81 billion in damaged and destroyed property and the deaths of more than 1,800 men, women and children.

Skeptics applaud the motive of the concept but question its feasibility.

“The enormity of it, in order to do something effective, we’d have to do something at a scale that humans have never really done before,” said Gabriel Vecchi, a research scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Hurricanes are fueled by warm water, and cooling the waters surrounding a storm would slow a storm’s momentum.

According to the patents, many tub-like barges would be placed directly in the path of an oncoming storm. Each barge would have two conduits, each 500 feet long.

One conduit would push the warm water from the ocean’s surface down. The other would bring up cold water where it lies deep undersea.

World reknowned hurricane expert William Gray, who’s been studying and predicting the storms for a half-century, also doubts whether the proposal would work.

“The problem is the storms come up so rapidly,” said Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University. “You only get two to three days warning. It’s very difficult to bring up enough cold water in two to three days to have much effect.”

The idea itself isn’t groundbreaking, according to Gray, who said it could only be feasible if the barges were put into place at the beginning of hurricane season with the idea that storms will come.

“But you might do all that, and perhaps no storms would come. That’s an economic problem,” Gray said.

Even if the technology does work, Gray said it won’t completely halt a hurricane.

“There is no way to stop it. The storm might weaken in the center, but the outer areas wouldn’t be affected much.”

And flooding and storm surges are determined by these outer winds, Gray said.

When word of Gates’ five patent applications first made headlines in July, alarmed bloggers lit up the Internet, expressing fears that playing with ocean temperatures could lead to catastrophe, possibly forcing a storm in a different direction.

That’s not likely, said Kerry Emanuel, a professor in atmospheric sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“You’re doing something to the ocean that the hurricane would have done anyway,” Emanuel said.

Cold water that churns up during a storm slows down a hurricane naturally. But the coldest water is usually at the rear of the storm, so sometimes it’s too late to weaken [the storm], Emanuel said.

“The key is doing it a little sooner than the storm itself does it and make [the hurricane] weaker than it would have been,” he said. “There are enough experiments to find out whether hurricanes’ natural cooling could steer the storm in a different location, and the answer is no, or it’s a very small chance.”

While Emanuel believes the physics are conceivable, he says the cost of implementing the system shouldn’t outweigh the benefit.

“This would only be practical if the amount [of money] you spend doing this would be less than the damage caused by the hurricane,” Emanuel said.

Gates and scientist Ken Caldeira, both listed as inventors on the patents, did not respond to CNN’s requests to comment about their venture.

The patents, which were only made public last month by the U.S. Patent and Trade Office, were filed in January by Searete LLC. The company is a subsidiary of Intellectual Ventures, an invention firm run by Microsoft’s former chief technology officer Nathan Myhrvold.

A spokeswoman for Intellectual Ventures, which holds about 27,000 technology patents, didn’t elaborate on the cost associated with the patent.

“At this point, there are no plans for deployment, so there is no talk of funding,” she said, adding that it could take up to 18 months for the patent application to be approved.

Regardless, inventors say that this technology is not something they’ll be rushing to use anytime soon.

“This type of technology is not something humankind would use as a ‘Plan A’ or ‘Plan B,'” Paul “Pablos” Holman, an inventor in the Intellectual Ventures laboratory, wrote on the company blog.

“These inventions are a ‘Plan C,’ where humans decide that we’ve exhausted all 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.”

Hurricane expert Gray agrees.

“I don’t think this is anything that’s going to be done in the next few decades in a practical sense, but maybe further down the line,” Gray said. “I would love to see Bill Gates, with all his money, use some of it to experiment.”

Beijing Ministry of Weather Modification vows no rain on Communist party parade

Beijing vows rain will not fall on its parade

Beijing has declared its weather-fighting forces will ensure no rain falls on October’s National Day parade, which will mark the 60th year of Communist Party rule.

Telegraph | Aug 25, 2009

By Malcolm Moore

Zhang Qiang, the deputy head of the city’s “Weather Modification” office, told state media that anti-rain rockets would be ready for the celebration. President Hu Jintao will oversee an enormous military parade on Tiananmen Square.

“From weather records for the National Day in Beijing in the past three decades, we see a 30 per cent chance of rainfall, mostly drizzle,” said Guo Hu, head of the Beijing meteorological bureau.

Before the Olympic Games last year, Beijing fired 1,104 anti-rain rockets from 21 sites around the capital to ward off an approaching rain belt. The rockets “seed” clouds with chemicals such as silver iodide in order to disperse them.

Whether or not the rockets work is still a matter of debate. Mr Zhang said the rockets could disperse some clouds but not prevent a large storm.

Ye Qian, the assistant president of the Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences said there was no effective way to change the weather. “Artificial rain reduction is like boiling water. If you want to stop the boiling, you must turn off the fire before it reaches the boiling point. But we just cannot find the point,” he said.

The Communist Party is focusing all its efforts on the 60th anniversary celebrations, and hotel rooms across Beijing have already been booked out for the thousands of visiting officials from across the country.

Bill Gates turns his attention to controlling the weather

Good news, folks. Microsoft founder Bill Gates has turned his attention to controlling the weather.

USA TODAY | Jul 16, 2009

Hurricane-calming technology? Bill Gates has a plan

By Dan Vergano

Five U.S. Patent and Trade Office patent applications, made public on July 9, propose slowing hurricanes by pumping cold, deep-ocean water in their paths from barges. If issued, the patents offer 18 years of legal rights to the idea for Gates and co-inventors, including climate scientist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Hurricanes, most famously demonstrated by the deadly intensification of Hurricane Katrina before its landfall in 2005, draw strength from warm waters on the ocean’s surface. The patents describe a system for strategically placing turbine-equipped barges in the path of storms to chill sea surfaces with cold water pumped from the depths.

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First requested by Gates and colleagues last year, the patents describe methods “not limited to atmospheric management, weather management, hurricane suppression, hurricane prevention, hurricane intensity modulation, hurricane deflection” to manage storms.

Given the scope of the applications, “I suspect these will have a lengthy stay in the examiner’s office. They are talking about some interesting issues here,” says patent expert Gene Quinn of IPWatchdog.com.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Caldeira declined to comment on the patents.

“The bottom line here is that if enough pumps are deployed, it is reasonable to expect some diminution of hurricane power,” says hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is not part of the patent effort. Cutting sea surface temperature by 4.5 degrees under the eye of a hurricane would actually kill a storm, he adds. “This would have to be done on a massive scale, but is still probably within the realm of feasibility.”

Says climate scientist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University in State College: “Needless to say, there is a whole lot of skepticism about this among tropical meteorologists. But it’s not so ridiculous that I would actually dismiss it out of hand. There is certainly an important role of upper ocean mixing on tropical cyclone behavior.”

Ocean water quickly grows colder with depth, reaching temperatures of 28 to 37 degrees (salty ocean water doesn’t freeze at 32 degrees) about 500 feet down. The patents envision sail-maneuvered barges, with conduits 500 feet long, pumping warm water down to the depths and bringing cold water up. The average depth of the Gulf of Mexico is 5,300 feet.

“By cooling a region in the path of a hurricane (over 60 square miles), models suggest we could knock a half-a-category in wind speed out,” says Philip Kithil of Atmocean in Santa Fe, an ocean-pumping firm mentioned in Gates’ applications. “All the models indicate the path of the storm would be unaffected.”

In the average year, six hurricanes develop in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean or Gulf of Mexico in a season that officially extends from June 1 to Nov. 30. Over the past century, the annual cost of hurricanes to the USA has averaged about $10 billion, according to a 2008 Natural Hazards Review study. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina killed at least 1,800 people and caused at least $81 billion in damage.

“From a scientific and political standpoint, (the Gates plan) looks fanciful,” Quinn says. “But the physics is real and like a lot of things, the question is whether the damage you prevent is worth the money you would spend to develop something so massive.”

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Further Reading

‘Flying syringe’ mosquitos get Bill Gates funding
Bill Gates Unleashes Swarm of Mosquitoes on Crowd
The victims of Gates Foundation generosity
Antiviral tomatoes, sick mosquitoes and laser vaccinations: bizarre projects receive Gates Foundation grants
Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population