Is the thermal effect sufficient to abort fledgling storms?
Even if the pump were to succeed, bringing surface water to the depths of the ocean would have little effect on sea-surface temperatures, says Bill Smyth, a physical oceanographer and member of the Ocean Mixing Group at Oregon State University’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. That’s because the first 20 to 100 meters of the ocean above the thermocline are already so well mixed. “If you take 20 gigawatts of heat away from surface, you think that has to cool it, but that is not necessarily true,” Smyth says. “What it’s actually going to do is raise the base of the mixed layer. If the base is at 50 meters, and you pump away the upper meter of the ocean, the mixed layer will then extend down to 49 meters. It’s not that the 20 gigawatts disappear into thin air. It’s just that it’s not doing anything useful in terms of changing sea-surface temperature.” Salter counters that many of the areas where his pumps would be deployed, such as the Caribbean, have thermoclines that start
