Some problems, meanwhile, seem beyond the reach of any solution, simple or otherwise. Think of the devastation Mother Nature regularly dishes out. By comparison, traffic fatalities seem eminently manageable.
Since 1900 more than 1.3 million people worldwide have been killed by hurricanes (or, as they are called in some places, typhoons or tropical cyclones). In the United States, the carnage has been lighter—roughly 20,000 deaths—but the financial losses have been steep, averaging more than $10 billion per year. In the space of just two recent years, 2004 and 2005, six hurricanes, including the killer Katrina, did a combined $153 billion in damages to the southeastern United States.
Why so much damage of late? More people have been moving to hurricane-prone areas (it’s nice to live near the ocean, after all), and a lot of them built expensive vacation properties (which drive up the property-damage totals). The irony is that many of these homeowners were lured to the ocean because of the scarcity of hurricanes in recent decades—and, perhaps, by the correspondingly low insurance rates.
From the mid-1960s until the mid-1990s, hurricane activity was depressed by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, a long-recurring climate cycle of sixty to eighty years during which the Atlantic Ocean gradually cools and then warms up again. The temperature change isn’t drastic, just a couple of degrees. But it’s enough to discourage hurricanes during the cool years and, as we’ve seen recently, empower them during the warm.
In some regards, hurricanes wouldn’t seem to be such a hard problem to solve. Unlike other problems—cancer, for instance—their cause is well established, their location is predictable, and even their timing is known. Atlantic hurricanes generally strike between August 15 and November 15. They travel westward through “Hurricane Alley,” a horizontal stretch of ocean running from the west coast of Africa through the Caribbean and into the southeastern United States. And they are essentially heat engines, massive storms created when the topmost layer of ocean water edges above a certain temperature (80 degrees Fahrenheit, or 26.7 degrees Celsius). That’s why they start forming only toward summer’s end, after the sun has had a few months to warm up the ocean.
And yet for all their predictability, hurricanes represent a battle that humans seem to have lost. By the time a hurricane forms, there’s really no way to fight it. All you can do is run away.
But outside of Seattle lives an intellectually venturesome fellow named Nathan who believes, along with some friends, that they’ve got a good hurricane solution. Nathan has a physics background, which is key, because that means he understands the thermal properties that define a hurricane. A hurricane isn’t just a dynamo; it’s a dynamo that comes without an “off” switch. Once it’s begun amassing energy it cannot be shut down, and it’s far too powerful to be blown back out to sea with a big fan.
That’s why Nathan and his friends—most of whom are, like him, science geeks of some sort—want to dissipate the thermal energy before it has a chance to accumulate. In other words: prevent the water in Hurricane Alley from getting warm enough to form a destructive hurricane in the first place. Armies sometimes engage in a “scorched earth” policy, destroying anything that might be of value to the enemy. Nathan and his friends want to practice a “chilled ocean” policy to keep the enemy from destroying anything of value.
But, one might be tempted to ask, doesn’t this constitute playing with Mother Nature?
“Of course it’s playing with Mother Nature!” Nathan cackles. “You say that like it’s a bad thing!”
Indeed, if we hadn’t played with Mother Nature by using ammonium nitrate to raise our crop yields, many readers of this book probably wouldn’t exist today. (Or they would at least be too busy to read, spending all day scrounging for roots and berries.) Stopping polio was also a form of playing with Mother Nature. As are the levees we use to control hurricane flooding—even if, as in Hurricane Katrina, they sometimes fail.
The anti-hurricane solution Nathan proposes is so simple that a Boy Scout might have dreamt it up (a very clever one, at least). It can be built with materials bought at a Home Depot, or maybe even filched from the dump.
“The trick is to modify the surface temperature of the water,” Nathan says. “Now the interesting thing is that the surface layer of warm water is very thin, often less than 100 feet. And right beneath it is a bulk of very cold water. If you’re skin-diving in many of these areas, you can feel the huge difference.”
The warm surface layer is lighter than the cold water beneath, and therefore stays on the surface. “So what we need to do is fix that,” he says.
It is a tantalizing puzzle—all that cold water, trillions upon trillions of gallons, lying just beneath the warm surface and yet impotent to defuse the potential disaster.
But Nathan has a solution. It is basically “an inner tube with a skirt,” he says with a laugh. That is, a large floating ring, anywhere from thirty to three hundred feet across, with a long flexible cylinder affixed to the inside. The ring might be made from old truck tires, filled with foamed concrete and lashed together with steel cable. The cylinder, extending perhaps six hundred feet deep into the ocean, could be fashioned from polyethylene, aka the plastic used in shopping bags.
“That’s it!” Nathan crows.
How does it work? Imagine one of these skirted inner tubes—a giant, funky, man-made jellyfish—floating in the ocean. As a warm wave splashes over the top, the water level inside the ring rises until it is higher than the surrounding ocean. “When you have water elevated above the surface in a tube like that,” Nathan explains, “it’s called ‘hydraulic head.’”
Hydraulic head is a force, created by the energy put into the waves by wind. This force would push the warm surface water down into the long plastic cylinder, ultimately flushing it out at the bottom, far beneath the surface. As long as the waves keep coming—and they always do—the hydraulic head’s force would keep pushing surface water into the cooler depths, which inevitably lowers the ocean’s surface temperature. The process is low-impact, non-polluting, and slow: a molecule of warm surface water would take about three hours to be flushed out the bottom of the plastic cylinder.
Now imagine deploying these floats en masse in the patches of ocean where hurricanes grow. Nathan envisions “a picket fence” of them between Cuba and the Yucatán and another skein off the southeastern seaboard of the United States. They’d also be valuable in the South China Sea and in the Coral Sea off the coast of Australia. How many would be needed? Depending on their size, a few thousand floats might be able to stop hurricanes in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.
A simple throwaway version of this contraption could be built for roughly $100 apiece, although the larger costs would come in towing and anchoring the floats. There’s also the possibility of more durable and sophisticated versions, remote-controlled units that could be relocated to where they are most needed. A “smart” version could even adjust the rate at which it cools the surface water by varying the volume of warm water it takes in.
The most expensive float Nathan envisions would cost $100,000. Even at that price, allocating 10,000 of them around the world would cost just $1 billion—or one-tenth the amount of hurricane property damage incurred in a single year in the United States alone. As Ignatz Semmelweis learned about hand-washing and as millions of heart patients learned about cheap pills like aspirin and statins, an ounce of prevention can be worth a few tons of cure.
Nathan isn’t yet sure the float will work. For months it has been undergoing intense computer modeling; soon it will be tried out in real water. But all indications are that he and his friends have invented a hurricane killer.
Even if it were capable of eliminating tropical storms entirely, that wouldn’t be wise, since storms are part of the natural climate cycle and deliver much-needed rainfall to land. The real value comes from cooling down a Category 5 storm into a less destructive one. “You might be able to manipulate the monsoon rain cycle in tropical areas,” Nathan enthuses, “and smooth out the boom-or-bust nature of rainfall in the Sahel in Africa, aiming to prevent starvation.”
The float might also improve the ocean’s ecology. As surface water heats up each summer, it becomes depleted of oxygen and nutrients, creating a dead zone. Flushing the warm water downward would bring rich, oxygenated cold water to the surface, which ought to substantially enhance sea life. (The same effect can be seen today around offshore oil platforms.) The float might also help sink some of the excess carbon dioxide that has been absorbed by the ocean’s surface in recent decades.
There remains, of course, the question of how, and by whom, these floats would be deployed. The Department of Homeland Security recently solicited hurricane-mitigation ideas from various scientists, including Nathan and his friends. Although such agencies rarely opt for cheap and simple solutions—it simply isn’t in their DNA—perhaps an exception will be made in this case, for the potential upside is large and the harm in trying seems minimal.
As dangerous as hurricanes are, there looms within the realm of nature a far larger problem, one that threatens to end civilization as we know it: global warming. If only Nathan and his friends, such smart and creative thinkers who aren’t afraid of simple solutions, could do something about that…