permaculture

[dylanford <dylanford@optonline.net>]

Folks. Though this Guardian article will not be of use to anyone seeking an 
immediate application for discarded auto tires, I thought it might be of 
general interest to the permaculture community.  dylan
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/nov/04/stephen-salter-tyre-hurricane-sandy
The man who would stop hurricanes with car tyres
 Devastating tropical storms of the kind that battered the US last week could 
be weakened and rendered less deadly using a simple and cheap technology 
based on a surprising component – old car tyres.
One of Britain's leading marine engineers, Stephen Salter, emeritus professor 
of engineering design at Edinburgh university and a global pioneer of wave 
power research, has patented with Microsoft billionaires Bill Gates and 
Nathan Myhrvold the idea of using thousands of tyres lashed together to 
support giant plastic tubes which extend 100m deep into the ocean.

Wave action on the ocean surface would force warm surface water down into the 
deeper ocean. If non-return valves were used, he says, the result would be to 
mix the waters and cool the surface temperature of the ocean to under 26.5C, 
the critical temperature at which hurricanes form.

According to Salter, who has written to the government's chief scientific 
officer setting out his scheme, harnessing energy from the waves to cool the 
surface temperature of the ocean makes ecological sense. The naturally 
working pumps would be located in "hurricane alley", the warm corridor in the 
Atlantic through which the most damaging storms typically develop and pass.

Salter claims that the hydrological problems have been solved but that 
research funding is urgently needed. "If you can cool the sea surface, you 
would calm the hurricanes. I estimate you would need about 150-450 of these 
structures. They would drift around and send out radar signals so that no one 
would collide with them," he said.

The idea of what is now known as the "Salter Sink" was first presented to the 
US government in 2007 at a post-Katrina US Homeland Security meeting on 
hurricane suppression. It was picked up and developed by Intellectual 
Ventures, a Seattle-based new tech company run by Myhrvold and backed by 
Gates which buys and licenses patents and inventions.

"The Salter Sink concept is delightfully simple and singularly gargantuan," 
the company said in a statement posted on its website . "It has captured our 
imagination here in the lab. We have done some experiments and computational 
modelling work to validate this idea, but a lot more research needs to be 
done by experts in related fields such as climate science and oceanography, 
and we need partners to pursue the project further."

Research into hurricane suppression is considered urgent by the US government 
because seven of the 10 costliest hurricanes to hit the United States have 
struck since 2004. Hurricane Sandy has caused approximately $30bn of damage, 
taking the economic costs of hurricanes in the US and Caribbean since 2002 to 
more than $200bn.

Salter's research is unlikely to be funded by the British government, which 
is traditionally shy of paying for "blue sky" marine technologies, and 
Salter's own wave devices in particular.

In 1982 Salter invented the idea of a mechanical "duck" which bobbed on the 
ocean and generated electricity. But the government shut down the UK Wave 
Energy programme, arguing that his invention would be too expensive to 
develop further.

It emerged later that civil servants in the nuclear power division of the 
energy department had "miscalculated" by a factor of 10 the estimated cost of 
energy production, possibly setting back British wave energy research by 20 
years.

Salter, with John Lathan of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research, 
has also developed the idea of using hundreds of ships spraying very fine 
seawater droplets high into the sky to reflect sunlight and thus counter 
global warming and suppress hurricanes. The UK government was asked to assess 
the technology research, but declined to back it financially.

Hurricane suppression ideas go back more than 100 years but attempts have 
mostly proved tragicomic, said Jim Fleming, author of a new history of 
geo-engineering. Ideas have included setting up rows of cannon on the Florida 
coast to shoot them down; using laser beams from space; and "seeding" them 
with silver iodide.

The results have proved at best uncertain. One hurricane "manipulated" by the 
US government in the 1940s veered off course and struck Georgia, causing $20m 
of damage and killing two people. In 1962, just after the Cuban missile 
crisis, Fidel Castro complained that the US had "modified" a hurricane which, 
remarkably, lingered over the island for four days after exercising a U-turn.

Many countries, including the US and Russia, have tried to militarise weather 
research, trying to divert hurricanes and storms into the path of their 
enemies.

Salter was inspired to invent his device after seeing the damage wrought by 
Katrina.