[ExI] Trump Says a Smart President Is All That’s Needed to Rein In A.I.

[Keith Henson]

"Hurricanes are heat engines of a sort.  They run on heat at the ocean
surface, spinning up and delivering the heat to the cool upper atmosphere.
When there is a strong El Nino, the upper atmosphere is warmer, so the
temperature differential is lower, so the hurricanes, even if they don't
get sheared apart, have less fuel and as a result they aren't as violent
and energetic."

Spike, look at the numbeds. This is as silly as trying to disrupt a
hurricane with a bomb.

"OK then.  What if... we build power plants out on the continental shelf
east of Florida?  The water isn't all that deep out there, so the towers
could be built in the sea bottom, which isn't that far down there, rather
than floating.  Or it could be floating, either way."

Again, silly. The cost to build anything offshore is crazy.

Keith

Best wishes,

Keith


On Fri, Sep 18, 2026 at 10:19 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

>
> ...> On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat
>
>
> >>... These three examples don't say how the data centers deal with
> > unpredictability and intermittency of wind power
>
> >...What, you've never heard of ocean thermal electric conversion?  Use
> the ocean as a thermal battery.
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>
> Yes I have, but that technology is irrelevant to the power storage needs
> of a data center.  The sea is highly relevant as a potential heat sink
> however.
>
> Regarding that notion, I had an idea.  We are experiencing an anomalously
> quiet Atlantic hurricane season.  This historic average has us up at 74 ACE
> units by now.  This year we have... 4.4 units.
>
> https://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Realtime/index.php?loc=northatlantic
>
> I feel cheated.  Well, not really, I am pleased, for I still own Florida
> real estate, and I have people I care about living there now.  Hurricanes
> are a bad thing in Florida: its elevation along the coast is too low.
>
> Hurricanes are heat engines of a sort.  They run on heat at the ocean
> surface, spinning up and delivering the heat to the cool upper atmosphere.
> When there is a strong El Nino, the upper atmosphere is warmer, so the
> temperature differential is lower, so the hurricanes, even if they don't
> get sheared apart, have less fuel and as a result they aren't as violent
> and energetic.
>
> OK then.  What if... we build power plants out on the continental shelf
> east of Florida?  The water isn't all that deep out there, so the towers
> could be built in the sea bottom, which isn't that far down there, rather
> than floating.  Or it could be floating, either way.
>
> Check out this cool image, Google in satellite view:
>
>
> https://www.google.com/maps/place/Florida/@26.883389,-83.7996933,1380415m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x88c1766591562abf:0xf72e13d35bc74ed0!8m2!3d27.6648274!4d-81.5157535!16zL20vMDJ4cnk?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDkxNS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D
>
> Note how far the continental shelf reaches 50 miles or more east of
> Jacksonville Florida.
>
> If we had power plants out there, the water vapor could be lofted into the
> atmosphere, warming stuff up high.  Then the hurricanes that form off the
> west coast of Africa would encounter both warmer water (as climate change
> warms the sea surface) but also a warmer upper atmosphere because of power
> plants belching heat up there.  Then, the hurricanes would have less
> potential to wreck expensive stuff in the north Atlantic, ja?
>
> spike
>
>
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