They called me mad...

[learnedax]

Today's (well yesterday's, but then I got sidetracked) crazy way to save the world: place enormous arrays of windmills and wave power machines across the relatively small regions that tend to develop our major tropical storms. If the power farms are large enough, and the storm development sites can be found with enough precision, we can bleed enough energy off of developing storms to keep them from being catastrophic, while generating a lot of power off the high-activity region.

It would certainly cost a huge amount of capital, but we'd be saving money on disaster relief, and the work could be done incrementally. I think the critical question is whether we can sap off enough energy to have a significant effect. All the hurricane-fighting approaches that I've looked into so far attempt to stop an already fully-developed storm, which is so much a juggernaut that we don't seem to be able to fight it. A relatively small effect, though, early enough on in the production cycle, could probably have a significant effect. And all the maps I've seen so far suggest that the channels in which the storms form are comparatively small, and very well known.

Naturally, weather is a chaotic system, so it's very difficult to predict the impact of changes. Nonetheless, of all the changes that you could make, directly bleeding kinetic energy out of the system seems like the least risky.

Comments

[patrissimo.livejournal.com]

I think the comment about waves not helping is right. But absorbing wind energy should help. Also, aren't storms partly driven by warm surface water / cool atmosphere temperature differences? OTEC plants would cool the warm surface waters, and reduce the energy available to storms.

The point about the amounts of energy involved being massive is a good one too. But if we end up in a future w/ wind/solar/wave power, there will be far more wave power deployed in ten years than there is now.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

I think the massive energy concerns are largely moot, because we'd be aiming to calm the formation areas for tropical storms, killing them in their infancy. How precisely we can pinpoint formation regions, and conversely how large an area we might have to cover seem like bigger questions to me (even if we only need to draw a line across rather than blanket the region).

I think that cooling a sufficiently large area of tropical surface water to prevent hurricanes has a much higher risk of side-effects that we can't adequately predict. Nonetheless, I think it could be a viable possibility.