Since he stepped away from the day-to-day at Microsoft, Bill Gates has been steering a hefty chunk of his $53 billion fortune into health, educational, and environmental issues.

You know, $800 million to global health here, $122 million to send D.C. students to college there. All in a day's work.

Interestingly, Gates' latest pet project is one that could come in awfully handy for Floridians: he's financing research into a project that would sap hurricanes of power before they hit land by using pumps to cool the ocean's warm surface water. 

Stanford University's Ken Caldeira, who came up with the idea of ocean cooling pumps, hasn't yet worked out all the kinks or explained what effects cooling the ocean would have on marine life.

That's where Gates and his research money come in handy. 

But the basics are easy enough to understand, if you first grasp that -- and this is the version for dummies -- warm water prompts hurricanes by evaporating into the atmosphere and eventually forming and feeding its spiral.

"If you can cool the ocean's surface," Caldeira says, "you take fuel away from the hurricane, and decrease its power and strength."

Caldeira's solution is simple in principle: a large open ring is placed on the ocean's surface. Underneath, a plastic funnel trails toward the cold ocean floor. As waves wash over the top of the ring and the water level inside it rises, the warmer surface water trapped inside is pushed down the funnel to the ocean depths, prompting displaced cooler water to rise to the surface.

With a network of rings in place -- Caldeira said it would take "many" -- the surface temperature of the ocean could actually be reduced by several degrees, a change he says would have been enough to save a thousand lives and "many tens of billions of dollars" when Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans. 

In other words, welcome to 2010, where we now have software visionaries working to hack Mother Nature. Oh sure, it sounds good, but let's get to the bottom of what's really happening here: not content to run a giant technological monopoly, Bill Gates is now trying to control the weather.

It's only a matter of time until he's just a brain in a jar hooked up to mechanical hands controlling the space-time continuum, but so long as it might reduce our homeowner's insurance and save us from those horrible lines to buy water and canned food, that sounds just fine.