Logo
Close this window to return to the application
Contact Us   
Nature-based Ocean and Atmospheric Cooling

Transcript for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRJqQfrbgP0

Search Words:   Any:     All:            
(Click on a 'Start Time' to view the video)
00:00introduce you and then you can uh yeah uh and then you can you know share screen you can do it from your end yeah uh if that's okay with you I mean yeah yeah okay okay so welcome everyone to the uh to the Healthy Planet Action Coalition meeting our general meeting and we're very pleased to have Alan gadian who um is a senior scientist at the NA national Center for U atmospheric science and uh visiting uh professor of meteorology or dynamic dynamical meteorology uh I'm not at the University of leads uh and uh is working with uh uh
00:43many many uh folks here that many of you know like Stephen Stalter and Robert tulip and herb and I don't know if Rebecca's here Brian bun herdson uh uh they're working on you know uh moving forward the Marine Cloud brightening technology that uh uh we and many others believe is a very promising uh uh direct climate cooling method potentially a very promising direct climate cooling method uh that uh you know should be really investigated and researched and and uh you know piloted if if things turn out the way we we uh we think they
01:26they might uh as soon as possible so anyway I I'm I going to stop editorializing so uh Allan without further Ado if you want to just U uh uh what we're gonna we're gonna do a presentation uh uh Allan will go for about 45 minutes and then we'll have about 45 minutes of discussion uh and we want to end promptly at um uh this is it would be six o'clock uh Eastern Standard Time uh where I am right now uh because Allen does have some other it's it's quite late actually in the UK for one
02:02thing and uh you know it would be it would be not fair to to go much longer than that so um okay Alan take take it away please thank you right I shall try and share the screen uh just a minute uh I oh I'm sorry let me just add for those who are new to the Healthy Planet Action Group please uh put your email in the chat if you want to be on our mailing list we've had you know numerous uh I think very interesting talks that many uh you know a good many of them are up on the website we're trying to get
02:34the other ones up there right now and uh some some uh some papers and uh letters and other things that uh and we would really welcome you know uh your participation at our general meetings which are held uh uh once a month uh on on at usually at this time uh you know Thursdays uh well it's actually twice a month alternate Thursdays uh every month U okay so sorry about that Ellen go ahead yeah no it's no okay can you see that screen is there yes anything wrong everything's fine everything right so 12
03:13quick slides on introduction I decided to include them because it it it uh uh it mean it means that I can then move faster with the other slides so um right so basic problem so I've just given five quotes the bottom one from the EU that came out very recently said these ssts we've had are unprecedented and Beyond the extreme there's other papers I've list there the work of the UK Met Office obviously because I've been influenced by the Met Office which says that the UK climate's changing very rapidly the
03:56wmo uh also says record levels of gases is UK Parliament has also said something about this and satellite data suggests that the the the te Global surface temperature is increasing by up to 34 and maybe two to three times more in the Arctic so these are uh these are the background which I think you all know uh this these two slides actually convinced a man called Boris Johnson in 20th of January that he he it's something he should be worried about you've seen all this information before carbon dioxide increase top left top
04:43right The observed warming only over the space of 40 to 50 years at the top right the global mean temperature differences everyone's seen that and the sea level rises uh and that's um been there you've also probably seen that the the the the pictures on the left which says these hadex 3 are actually changes in temperature extremes and that's something I want to emphasize later the extremes are the ones we're looking at and if you look over large parts of South America and and Europe you're
05:27getting extreme temperatures well over well over 4° Celsius already on the left hand side the the alarming thing is a number of days where the temperatures exceed the maximum percentile but on the right hand side is something that I really want to emphasize as well uh Penn State University has come out with a new definition of comfort if you like or body breakdown and that said that 100% humidity 31 Celsius which is a low 90s fahit the body will shut down previously it was put at 35° C the figure is the old figure uh which uh which doesn't include
06:20these latest results but the other point is temperatures above 40° C can cause grave issues with working computers machinery and in my with my other hat as advising the nuclear regulator on their 100 billion doll projects with uh with nuclear power stations this is the modeling equivalent I think we are on RCP 8.
06:515 what does that mean that means the 8.5 means watts per square meter that we're going to have I think we're on the right I think we're destined for temperatures of 4 to 5° definitely not doesn't include extremes so this is the slide that I really want to a background I want to emphasize mostly so as long ago as 2007 ipcc gave the figures of carbon dioxide contribution water vapor contribution ethane contribution in 2010 Schmidt gave the figures that 50% of global warming came from water vapor and 67% if you take the clouds away on those
07:46regions not gone cloud and then you look at CO2 that's 19% and when you take the clouds away 24% but this below and red is the major issue that we we've got to address that this Claus claen is standard grade physics in the UK and the saturated vapor pressure increases by 7% for every degree so when you get up to four degrees Celsius which we're going to get to at the present rate relatively soon then you can see that we're going to get 30% of 50% so we're going to get a huge contribution so removing
08:40CO2 if you could do it tomorrow great but the problem with it is that you're not going to attack the problem of Planet overheating and on the right hand side I think I've given the data that in 22 202 two uh the 50 permits maybe 3 GW each Green Piece in 20202 said there were 9 gaws India is going to increase its uh coal production by almost 30% and the amount that's been removed globally is insignificant so whatever one thinks the planet is being cooked but it's not that simple simp Le and again I referred to the
09:32Atlantic that a paper has just come out saying that the Atlantic meridional circulation is on the verge of collapse best estimate 50 years the authors Say by 2025 but it's between 15 and 300 years and it would change the whole of the North Atlantic both sides of the North Atlantic and Reduce by 4 to 10° locally you probably don't know where the W where the fauland are but off South America we're going to get typical weather windy weather and trees well they'll be a problem because they w't we to stand
10:16ight the other point is the Greenland ice sheet is now going so when I say many oceanographers if you there's no organization called the British Antarctic Survey which has station there and over a pint of beer she will tell you the green and ey sheet is now past the point of no return without doing serious work it will not reform and the the Wikipedia gives you 1.
10:555 M uh oceanog give 7 m so whether you're living in Long Island or wherever uh Florida Keys and that's a reference of the paper it is uh it is we're in trouble right so that's a background that's an that's not controversial in my book um okay so now I want to now show you something that has happened this year and why and why it is encouraging and I put the word it's good news and it isn't good news of course but it scientifically it's good good news from my point of view so why are the sea surface temperatures if you
11:35look at the right hand plot you'll see somebody mute their yeah please mute not sorry yeah okay the if you look at the right hand uh plot you'll see this significant black line which was the June sea surface temperature Northeast Atlantic and that's really significant you you're talking about 1.
12:065° above Min -0.75 so you were really over two and the left hand one shows the SE surface temperature anomalies in June which is plus 1.36 this is all data so the on the right hand side we're going from the 1970s to the 2020s okay so why has this happened and people will talk about the El Nino which hasn't happened yet so that's going to make further problems Sahar and dust possibly anomalous high pressure over of the aor islands well yes that is true but the significant thing I think or one of the significant it's all of them is the
12:52reduction in Sulfur emissions from international shipping and you can see this is a graphic from carvon brief this and and we all know about this that uh that this has over the space of a year or two has actually caused this effect it's Global the effect is global and this is really the one of the most significant things if you look at the leftand plot there's Peaks usually in March and here 60 South to 60 North it's in August we're talking about hugely significant this is the mean here and that is two standard deviations so we're
13:38even we're well out of three standard deviations here 95% now I want to point out this area here this area here and these areas here and with temperatures up to 10° off New Foundland it was easy to predict that that a hurricane would land on those Shores uh and this is the reason it's encouraging is because it gives support to the idea that uh varying the aerosol or the reflective power in the lower atmosphere will affect the climate now bejond Stevens who runs Max plank when I first presented this to
14:28him he stated this is a lovely fairy tale and I told him there's a lot of Truth in fairy tales but this was 10 12 years ago and I presented what was happening and I think he would now support it but what I'm going to talk about with Marine Cloud brightening is this area here this now a lot of people use the average incoming solar radiation 342 Watts I prefer to think of it it's 1360 wats because that is the figure at midday and what happens is some of this radiation is getting reflected back and
15:11if you go off the coast of uh South America uh Chile you'll see that the actually the copper smelters which are 2,000 M have actually reduced some of the stratus clouds and I'm going to show you a picture so this is what we're talking about we're talking about this yellow bit uh so the only I'm not going to talk about stratospheric aerosols but I'm just going to talk about what I think is the optional system but before I do this these are the things that have being suggested slide from robwood space based methods
15:55stratospheric AOS cells uh that decreasing the amount of high level cus some people say that when 911 occurred there was less cus and it affected surface albo enhancement well I don't think that's viable and this Marine Cloud brightening here and this is is to me the safest and I think a lot of you agree with that so now we're going on to Marine Cloud brightening so what happened was to me in 1974 said that aerosols will lead to uh uh more aerosols or more smaller particles will affect the reflectant and if you take the to as you
16:47if you take two clouds as we see them here the same amount of water equivalent Water Mass and you make them smaller they have higher albo and this was started by this then went on to lay them in '92 and it followed Slingo who first applied it to clouds in 1990 uh Tony Slinger unfortunately died so this is a project I went on in about 2008 off the coast of uh South America Chile and Peru and this is there was if there's a little yellow ship there well a boy and we made measurements there and this is a quick cycle through robwood
17:38led the project and essentially strata cumas cover more than 30% of the oceans and I wanted when we did the work we focused just on some of those areas 10% of the ocean surface lot of smaller drops produce whiter cloud and we went out to PO and measured these clouds now it might seem amazing but this was the first real time there was a dcoms where they did it off North America but this was the first time we'd really done it uh in with with four five aircraft from France UK two from the US and one from Portugal and this is what
18:26we're talking about and over here I've stol and Steven suter's slide here and you'll see these are glass beads and these are the shape of old this is the scaling of the old beo and what you can see is the mass of glass is the same in both these jars but these have different sizes and we've we've we've actually ex Steven's exaggerated it but so you can actually grossly clearly see the principle of uh Tumi of of L them of the this now Salter this is what we're talking about it is
19:13it's easy to do within two weeks you can switch it off uh it's precise and you you have to do it in certain regions so if you went to an a North Atlantic or Pacific storm you could NE you're you're producing about 1% of the salt that's thrown into the atmosphere and but if you do it under one of these Strat accumulus clouds this 24hour Loop here then it changes nature of these clouds and that is what what we're talking about so I think you've all seen this as well thank you Stephen
19:53for this slide he's mod keeps modifying the design but these these the these boats aren't really very big but obviously you've got the flatner rotors in the middle to actually propel them and I've included quite a few slides here for actually um so you can look at it the references which is always very useful top right uh you've got Tumi then you've got um Slingo then you've got John leam and I think you can recognize a younger form of Steven Suter down there uh these are some papers obviously
20:33I well not obviously but I've used some of the most of the papers I've been involved with because then it gives a flavor of what I've been doing but Wood's been doing it gettleman's been doing it there's a group at um at um University of Washington who've been doing it as well so there's lots and lots of references but the the basic ones were the were that with the Salter and laen one there was another 2008 paper in there uh but um those are so now I'm going to move on to how we
21:10getting on with sign War I now I'm going to get on with the models I'm going to give some results and then do a summary so I'm going to focus on the work we did to look at the the how R the global model how we did the high resolution models how it resulted in Hurricane weakening coal bleaching and the the the the final paper on there is how this affects the meridional heat flux which cause a pole so this is the first paper this is what I really want this was a this was done with a stu a postto and we were
21:51basically looking at the reaction of seeding seeding clouds and seeing what the result was so we took the results from the vocals experiment and we set up the model to run using that data great so it replicated the data and then on the left hand side here we put low we put a small number of what we call low 42 uh 42 per cm cubed and you can see that the size of the particles are really quite big over 50 microns when we put in a lot of them which is 380 you can see it's green here so you're getting a lot of small
22:42particles a lot of small droplets I should say putting particles in and the important thing about these Strat accumulus is these circulations underneath and we're pushing it a bit here if we put two bigger droplets in it precipitates takes out and destroys the cloud if you put to so you really must be careful on the size you choose and that I think it's about 8 microns diameter uh but uh Stephen and I really think we can home in and do better and if you want to look at it with time this is low medium high you can see the alido
23:28with that the number goes up the Al and the albo goes up higher than the that than the medium and the low you can see the effect on the clouds now I don't want you to take any of that information in really but it's all in the paper and I thought you should include it so that was the first thing we' done the second thing and this is this paper I talked about 2012 with a lot of people on there including Phil rash and in it we took an atmospheric model and this these green bits here are the only areas that we
24:08seeded because we could guarantee you get high Strat cumulus decks we also did the experiment where we seeded all over the globe and that's what Danny Rosenfeld wants because he wants to seed and even if there's no clouds it will increase the radiation going back but we said look let's do this so a is three most populous regions and it's only 5% of the ocean surface and on the right it's over and I'm going to now show you some climate Model results so this you can see here are the three regions that
24:44we seed right and we did it so that by the time we got up to 2040 we somehow stopped the increase in CO2 which we estimated was by the time that the world might actually wake up so you can see the pictures there you can see how this reduces this is the change in Delta F watts per meter squared and we changed the the the uh the the forcing here now people say well that's somewhere that's a specific location but the atmosphere's role remember is to take heat from the equator to the pole and that is what it
25:30does I've given you details there I'm not going to talk about it because uh it's 2045 because that's details you can look at later if you want to so here we're going to now look at what we call the hurricane Development Area so ran it to 2045 then left it to go a bit longer what happened to the Sea surface temperatures we were very very uh very very confident that this this is an underestimation of what is actually going to happen and you can see temperature rises of plus one there when we put double CO2 and you can see these
26:15and and these double CO2 and these regions where we seeded what happened to this area it returned to the pre-industrial levels so really not preindustrial to the levels we started at in at the at the turn of the century so what we've got here is the although we only applied it in those areas it actually had a huge effect and remember the the the the hurricane Theory well you may not know is that you can't really get the argument is you can't really get a category five hurricane and a colleague of mine at enart did the
26:57research and he and he did some research on a hurricane with K Emanuel and they showed that all your you're not going to get more hurricanes but what you're going to do your category two hurricanes are going to become three four or five and that is what's going to happen so this even our limited work showed that it affect the Hurricanes now this is the same experiment just with the three areas of seeding double Co to double and you can see near the poles it's quite warm these are the areas for cor reef
27:34and what happens is just go back um there's Joan Joanie Kass she was she was the first person to talk about coral bleaching and remember it's the spikes it's the Delta functions and what happened is that when we did the three region seeding with double CO2 it compensated for it and these bleached areas which are now probably on the verge of Disappearing anyway and there's some numbers there that you can look at but I don't really want to talk about but I wanted them in there so you could you could look at
28:12them later so so we did a paper on what is actually happening when you do this three SE region seeding three reasons remember because we could guarantee a whole year and the way it does the meridianal heat flux is the atmosphere just takes heat from the equator to the pole that's what its role is in my terms I'm a dynamical meteorologist the atmosphere is there just to move heat around it does other things as well but it just does and if you look carefully the you look at double CO2 you see it's a green
28:55line and the the this one is if we see the whole area of the sea surface and the reason you it's really done like this is because you have to integrate from one end latitude to the other latitude so this is the Equator so what you see is that the blue and the green the blue and the red which is you've got double CO2 red blue is double the the the sorry the control is the blue one the double CO2 is the green one and the and the red one is the double CO2 with the Marine Cloud brightening just in those areas and this one well in
29:47this one we've got uh all the Seas and in fact the uh I think the ice the Ice Age comes back to visit Steven in Scotland so that is the effect of it and that's exactly what uh what um the Israeli Cloud physicist uh argued that it was it was that we should be doing it everywhere um but anyway so final stage now on this talk really is we haven't done this so this is a second part we divided the globe into uh the soci part Globe 89 areas we applied we switched it on and off I'm not going to talk about
30:34that if you want to know about it stepen will explain it more easily so what we wanted to do was to look where we switched on and off this uh seeding what effects one of the concerns was uh the Amazon basin so we looked at those areas and you can see that seeding in those areas affected the chain in in in precipitation and we looked at the northern uh area of there so you're going to have consequences and I've got a slide later on the effect of precipitation there's going to be consequences of seeding not as much
31:15consequences as double CO2 mind you but it would give you a helping hand to decide where you're going to put the seeding structures so really really what I'm saying is and this is discussion really Net Zero isn't necessary but China India it's it's going to be pointless because we're already there's another 40 to 100% increase in CO2 and I'm not worried about the CO2 more the water V but that has that's a side effect Marine Cloud brightening is cost effective it's you give a good uh messy salary for five
31:58years and we could do all the work and then uh well it doesn't take many billion dollars to actually build these ships it can be switched off it and that was in the third paragraph and the overall it's a plan B but now uh I I think uh we're on to plan B Because plan a removing the carbon is is not likely so in this talk and I've gone very quickly is what I've tried to do is give some idea of the data so I've given you the data the observations the frightening thing is what's happened to
32:44Sea surface temperatures this year now it could be a oneoff it could be a dynamical effect of the asor high but why was it all over the Northern Hemisphere uh it certainly the elino can't be there you can't uh the aor high and you can't talk about Sahar and dust affecting the whole globe second thing is I've given you a background to the physics what is it we're looking at we're looking at CO2 we're looking at methane but the the the the big effect is water vapor and uh if you if you argue we remove the CO2 then
33:26increases the then it's not we're still going to have the problem I presented some high resolution model simulations and other people have done it as well so uh there's a lot of discussion I've presented some high high resolutions Cloud simulations people like Vine gold uh and and wood have done some there's a lot of discussion about how it will work how it does work uh what does it do the microphysics argument but I think the theoretical arguments are still there I showed the effects on the meridional heat flux that is what is
34:07melting the poles people talk about arctic amplification uh I hate to tell you it's the fraction of a petawatt of the warm air every time you have this warm air out brast going up the east coast of the US SE board that I I look at the charts 500 m halfway up the atmosphere and I think oh my goodness they're going to it's going to be melting more of the Arctic Ice I predict that uh by 2035 there'll be in September there'll be no arctic ice at the in the North Pole by no I mean less than 15% and even
34:48people like Slingo Julius Slingo and Graham Stevens I think they would would agree it and I talked about hurricane weakening and coal bleaching I also talked about this coding manipulation which is needed as well it really if you're going to try and focus the efforts my original work was just to look at those three areas but there's a as Steph said this yesterday we need to optimize a Sal salt I think we've what we've decided would work it needs to be mono dispersed that's absolutely incredibly important but if we can get a
35:3010 20% more efficient by choosing the relative Optimum size of the C spray salt spray using the high resolution models that's good and we need to apply that uh so in reality um is the planet being cooked yes pessimist yes Trump supporters well global warming doesn't exist I think The Optimist can we do it quickly yes but we have to now reduce solar input by Marine Cloud brightening that's the best option for me I can show you the I've got a slide later on have a look at it if you like which shows the
36:14effect of uh um not C TOA um the other the other the recent hurricane and it's to once you put those aerosols up there in the stratosphere what worries me is it affects the ozone lay it affects the ozone hole and it also uh doesn't cool the poles down very much carbon dioxide is going to increase and if you're a pessimist it's the end of the an P but that is uh what I want to say really I hope uh hope I'm gone too fast or give too much technical information but it's about 40 minutes okay
36:57thank you thank you Alan uh uh that was excellent that was really excellent um uh do you want to maybe remove your slide so uh we can see each other here is that done it yeah yeah yeah thank you um so we will now uh have a question answer period and as I said uh uh Allan uh has hopefully we'll be able to stay until uh about 6 my time so we have a good you know 49 minutes or so uh and uh please please just uh you know put your hand up if you want to ask a question I'll try and keep track of the the order
37:43here uh and I see that Clive has his hand up it's the first question to Allan okay thank you very much for that Alan that's uh very good news to see all that that um I couldn't say understand understood most of it but it's very much in line with what we've been the conclusions we've been coming to ourselves many of us uh here now because we have all these other meetings I've got kind of two questions um Steven Suter already knows that me and another gentleman who's not here tonight are
38:21proposing if there's any problem with getting monodispersed um salt sea salt particles uh sea you know droplets it can be you can easily make Aeros salt particles using chemistry um people the military have been doing it for over 100 Years to you know obscure their operations you know they make stuff anyway so we don't want to do it quite the same way as them um but we have all kinds of ideas and it once the cloud Burns off it uh photochemical there it photocatalytically removes methane and black carbon aerosol makes
39:03black carbon aerosol more hydrophilic so it rains out better and can also remove um High concentration of tropospheric ozone as well so so do do you see a role do you see a use does that sound interesting to you Steven's sort of Steven's here and he's very helpfully actually offered um help with a spray tunnel to US for doing this what it how does it land for you Alan I I the reason I want it mono dispersed is because I've seen the effects of the coast of Chile of having larger particles and smaller
39:42particles and the smaller particles just make a haze remove it and the larger particles if you like nappy powder that was tried off Cal of Florida and worked tremendously well you you want to remove them so I've attacked it as a microf physicist a cloud microphysics to get rain is very dubious but I know if you fly above a a paper mill for example you will precipitate out the rain and my concern all the time is to maximize the change in alido so I I I I I could comment on what You' said but I'm really
40:36not an expert on some of these other facts stepen probably knows more but it worries me that if we don't get this right then you could have a sort of cloud dimming process which is what happened off off the coast of Chile when they turned the smelters on that you actually got r rid of the cloud by having far too many big it just became a haze so I'm not answering your question and I'm sorry about that but I know from the cloud microphysics point of view in the equations that if you do it too big or
41:13too small you reduce the efficiency of it but on the other hand uh you could see that even those small areas doing those small areas would combat double CO2 yeah okay I mean we we definitely don't want to do it if it's going to make it worse we we understand that you know albo the need for increased albo to reflect more sunshine away so if if we can't get the right size then we just close up shop basically um well well we wanted to do some experiments with aircraft and just to check that we I mean I want St to produce a few
41:52different sizes and so we can actually check and the other thing from a microphysics point of view it may not be the optimum size in all parts of the globe for for the different types of stratocumulus cloud so there is a question I CH those regions are subtropical stratocumulus and they they're quite similar so that's why I was choosing it really uh out of naivity or Simplicity because it's really quite complicated yeah mean we think that we use hot Vapors and we mix them up we can get get the right size can can I just ask my
42:32other question or should I come back later if you like maybe come back later Clive thank you yeah yeah we usually are we have you know you could have a a followup uh you know maybe one followup and then we we try and move it on and then you know just just get back in the cube uh thank you C uh and and Allan of course uh Robert tulip uh thanks Alan just magnificent um really appreciate it's very compelling story that you've presented about the urgency and the and the need for this work and and uh the
43:05Simplicity of it uh I just wanted to add for the benefit of of those attending that uh we're working together with uh Steven Suter to uh seek the uh the initial minimum viable project I suppose for uh how we can uh get this this work underway and we we suggest that an investment of about uh5 million us is needed to uh uh continue your work on uh modeling with Leeds University to um uh prove the engineering problem of this uh submicron mono disperse salt aerosol spray it's uh it's a non-trivial problem
43:49being able to generate a salt aerosol that's smaller than a micron and Stevens Workshop in Edinburgh is uh ready to to do the work just with a a a a a really small amount of funding in terms of the security impact of uh of global warming so uh we've got the proposal pretty well ready we're getting our re bright.
44:16org uh website which will be able to uh provide some of this information and so the the challenge is identifying people uh who are willing and able to to uh provide funding um to uh to get this work done and also to uh to help us uh get this message out it's such a challenge that uh there's such uh strong and really quite crazy political opposition to uh doing this uh basic research uh into how we can actually address the uh the global warming problem so I I really just wanted to uh thank you Alan for uh for sharing that
44:57basic science with us and uh if you have any uh any comment on this U practical uh process of of Taking It Forward I would welcome that I think I think you're exactly well you're you're right about the way to go forward I would like to see two or three different groups maybe doing some of the modeling we've done some of the modeling already preliminary modeling and now we've just want a home in it but I'd love someone else do those results when when we were talking about gr and fine Go's work he did it on ship tracks and
45:34and it did they were brighter but the ships were also pumping out a lot of large particles which actually dissolve some of them some of the things so yeah but I think coming back to your your comment is that yeah I think that's the way to go I that the technology if you had to say point8 now uh of this is this is my diameter whatever ra I would say go with it because I know it'll work but it might be better point seven or 0.
46:069 or something I think it's I think it's about 7 well sorry we're talking radius and diameters here and wet and dry so uh I don't want to confuse him but yeah I agree with you yeah and just to follow up on the modeling it's surprising that there are a lot of scientific papers that uh question the efficacy of marine Cloud brightening but generally they seem to apply quite U unrealistic parameters to uh to the deployment strategy could you comment on that Ellen it's I think that's I think that's coming in a lot of
46:43science actually there's always people I mean this theoretically there's if you look on the slides later on you'll see a slide by a man called and he had a very analytical computer model with gigatons and he's done better than most climate models he was a brilliant dynamical meteorologist from MIT and he's done as well and he's actually plotted the he's actually predicted what the warming would be for the emission of so much carbon so but he was lambasted and people argued against
47:22still argue against it but until it's actually repeated several times and tested and that's what we've got to do test it and there'll always be uh uh different people saying the the the uh the D not David Keith but the the people who promote um um stratospheric sulfur for example they will always try and find reasons and I don't understand it because in many ways we possibly might need both techniques but I don't know but the Marine Cloud brightening I'm convinced will work especially after
47:59this summer thank you uh Clive uh uh Clifford yeah I Clifford would you would you mind introducing yourself because I don't I don't believe I've uh yes please and and if you if you are interested please you know sign up for our uh uh to be in our uh in our Google group if you want to you know get more notices about these kinds of presentations but go ahead please yeah I I've been an author on a few of these paper I work on energy and sustainability engineering at the University of Illinois and um we're
48:34doing some integrated assessments modeling and so this caught my eye um that includes with and without SRM um and there was a paper by claudell that was submitted to Environmental Research Communications about Mono siiz very small dispersion siiz salt particles made with ethanol water mixes and it's it's just been submitted so I don't know if it's penetrated yet but I wonder if uh if you have a look at it or or you know about the idea anyway these are much smaller well this is dry weight so they're much smaller particles than you
49:05were talking about no I'm afraid I haven't seen it um or or heard about it the the the problem the problem is that I come back to this I'm A Cloud microp physicist and we have certain equations and these equations might un underestimate so certain people like Armon nimons he had made the inkjets and he was working on much smaller size uh I'm right there Steph I think much smaller size and he was using the inkjets for and I'm afraid he he's he's not very well and he's not he's not continuing now
49:47but I I just look at the equations look at what T what uh Slingo did and then put it in into a numerical model now I'm very cautious about numerical models so one of the things you could we could do is put smaller particles in the numerical model but when we did that I showed you the worker Andre Chu there on his Mo on the model there and when we put small uh aerosol in it it it it wasn't very effective at all however I have to say that this was two Dimensions so you're not getting a three-dimensionality and there's a big
50:33difference between two dimensional clouds and threedimensional clouds so so I can't say definitely but I I worry about small particles going in and and sorry I haven't seen your production with methanol or whatever not mine people no the one you were talking about so I'm I'm sort of blinkered in what I know will work and other things may work so that's the problem you've got with me okay yeah you're talking about salt water and they're talking about salt itself so maybe there's some confusion there well
51:09well yeah I mean it's yeah yeah dry and wet yeah yeah okay thank you thank you Clifford um before we move on Allen I I just had a kind of a a lay lay person's question uh um so stratocumulus is that the same thing as a marine Cloud because I mean there is the the serious cloud thinning they talk about cumulus cloud so those are those are higher up right yeah yep yep yep yeah sorry yeah Strat cumulus Stratus means a layer cumulus means the white fluffly clouds and they occur maybe depend on the part of globe you are they
51:48may occur anywhere between five and 600 meters and maybe 1500 meters because meteorologist don't use a they occur over land as well but over land the air is so dirty that you don't tend to get them and it's one of those properties like lightning lightning doesn't really occur over the sea although it does because of the drops the sizes but the St Marine Strat cumulus is what we should really be talking about over the sea layer clouds thin layer clouds that if you're flying over the top in an
52:24airplane as one does there just this layer of sort of roles the continuous layer that's the stuff I'm talking about and it's it's not not a a simple these naive questions are the hardest to answer y thank you thank you for that clarification uh Jonathan yes thanks uh that was a great presentation um so my question is the uh diesel smoke stacks of shipping are putting out an enormous variety of particle sizes and the uh recent scrubbing of the compounds that were deemed to be bad pollution uh has led to this dramatic
53:11increase in SE surface temperature maybe even as much as half a degree celsius so uh this simple action of scrubbing their either their fuel or their emissions has resulted in the removal of a whole lot of marine Cloud brightening um this seems like a a very crude careless thing that certainly doesn't focus on 08 Micron or below particles have you studied or can you say something about the type of particles that have been removed by this scrubbing and why they've been so effective in allowing the energy of the
53:50Sun to reach the water surface well I I really can't comment on that but um the the the if you put aerosols of any size into a dry boundary layer what the result is that you will reflect the incoming solar radiation so if you put if if you look I don't know volcanoes go off and they produce these horizontal glass plates at maybe two or 3 4 km when and they they stay there and they reflect a lot of radiation when you get the sulfates coming out of the ship sulfur and it converts to sulfates these are often sort of horizontal plate likee
54:41crystals so I really don't know what they've done or what they've taken out but if you look at at uh the papers about aerosol content they've been predicting this for years and uh it's obviously cleared up the quality of uh we can go to go to the average Port even the US anywhere and you'll see that the air quality is so much better obviously the salt falls out but the airos Sal will ref any airos salt will reflect radiation that is distinct from how it affects the clouds so near the land what whatever you pump
55:26out is not going to affect these stratocumulus clouds because there's so much coming out there's so much if you look at Australia you can see it hidden by this Haze of particles caused by all the mining for all the M M Metals and coal and things going to China that is reflecting solar radiation so really I cannot answer the specific question but yet there's people arguing we should be we we should be pumping out sea salt or something into to cool the planet down and yeah maybe we should but that would
56:03certainly cool it down but there are consequences right well my one followup then is um if it was a simple matter of scrubbing the emissions or the fuel of the ships in order to cause a 05 degre C temperature change um it would seem like uh doing the rever ver uh somehow adding sulfur or whatever compounds for the actions on the open ocean where they're not near a port and they're not creating a polluted Port would would seem like a way to create a 0.
56:425 degrees Celsius in the other direction and well this is this is Steven's argument I think that that you could you could do it by uh by basically just putting sea salt just spraying sea salt into the into the behind the ship uh and if it's if it's if it's in an area where there's a storm it'll make absolutely no difference it's only in these calm regimes where the air is still and that's quite often in subtropics where you could uh um where you could where you could do this and as I say this is what he's written many
57:22papers in in science about this with fine saying that we really need to increase the aerosol in in the lower atmosphere but I don't think from the radiative calculations it's as effective as Marine Cloud brightening but that is because you're going to have to spend a lot more effort doing it uh but maybe Steven's got a comment on that because I know he's thought Stephen did you want to uh we we have a a group actually Jonathan you might want to contact me we're trying to work up a proposal along the lines that
58:04you've discussed and Stephen has commented on that that there's a thread in uh I think it's in geoengineering and some of the other but just just contact me but you know the as a as a as just a an Emergency immediate measure one it appears that one could just relax the regulation for the you know in in the out in the ocean but uh much better would be of course to have some kind of benign aerosol and and Stephen has suggested see did you want to comment on that Stephen you suggested just spr salt
58:37salt water in the yeah you could well yes you could uh inject uh salt into the exhaust manifold of a marine diesel engine and there's lots of other gases going up and that would move the salt particles up to where they'll meet mix in the clouds and and we do the job and that would be a very very cheap thing to do the only disadvantage of it is that the ships go where the ship owners want them to go and you might decide it would be better to go go somewhere else and in fact the places that we probably want to
59:13go is where the shipping is very low the the places you looked in the Pacific was not not very a high shipping density uh but we certainly could do that it's a bit of a dist action from doing it being able to do it where we choose to do it and to stop when we don't want it so uh the the the other point is that the to see a ship track you need to get a contrast change of 40% well you you can't tell at all if it's less than 15% But A nice bright ship track is probably 50 or 60% contrast change so it's it's enormously much more
59:53than we want we want to do gentle increase of uh perhaps five 5% if you if you could do it in just 10% of the world's oceans the problem is actually only about half a percent if you could do it everywhere just a half a percent increase in reflectivity would solve the thermal problem um right so so thank you Stephen I think the data that you know the the the latest paper that I've looked at is estimates that U you know um over the the the shipping lanes the major shipping lanes about one watt uh uh per
1:00:32meter per meter effect but you know with a global impact of about 0.1 so it wouldn't be ideal it wouldn't be like Marine Cloud brightening but it would be a a quick way to implement this on a on a on a on a fairly so anyway that's you know it it because the question becomes implementation uh while we're building the Salter yacht or the Theo Yachts or whatever I'm sorry that's Hartford who has to leave but uh know and and it it it would serve the function of um raising the issue you know very clearly that you
1:01:13know the Aerosoles and Marine Cloud uh brightening and other techniques uh are significant and important and we should be thinking about them but I'll I'll move on to uh uh to Herb uh thanks Ron and thanks Alan that was really provocative and uh as much as I consider myself a sort of Doomer in many respects listening watching the first few slides uh added to that and of course you you then reversed it a little at least a little bit with the rest of your presentation uh uh some of you may know I recently wrote a book
1:01:47called A a climate vocabulary the future and I have a a write up on MCB and I coin the term designer salts to reflect the fact that we're talking about a designed salt not a natural salt um the I I'm I'm intrigued with with not just intrigued but I'd really love to know more about what what do you mean by temporary uh in other words flesh that out in terms of uh why MCB would only be looked at as temporary whether it's temporary in temporally or spatially or or otherwise and and I guess the just the last thought that
1:02:28came to mind was it sort of remind me if we're up at God forbid at three or four degrees uh and somehow we're still able to even manufacture and maintain the ships that um you know produce the uh and and disseminate the salts um it sort of reminds me of of of the analogy with being on a kind of heart lung machine if you're you know you're in the hospital and you're you're almost incapacitated and this sort of takes over the the breathing and the and the respiration and the metabolism for
1:03:03you that we would become so dependent uh on this um you know if and until we were able to pull the carbon dioxide of that of the atmosphere and and eliminate our emissions but that said um tell us more about about temporary and and what's how how far can you stretch temporary to um to be close to permanent well well by temporary in the terms terminology I've got I'm talking about 50 or 100 years because and I keep coming back to this uh you talking about three or four degrees warming I I I can't see with if
1:03:44you look at the amount of carbon dioxide carbon dioxide that China and India are planning to pump into the atmosphere that 40 is is is Pie in the Sky you're talking about six or S degrees that's right no seriously there there is no way that you that it will not now the point the way I say temporary is because eventually people will realize this is happening removing CO2 is not an easy operation so oh I don't think it's an easy operation no one has done it so temper it out going 100 years if if it's
1:04:28not solved within 100 years then um I sit on this regulator panel and I'm telling them they're going to have to cope with with temperatures that at least by the end of the century at least four degrees warmer and what's actually happening now in France they've got all these nuclear power stations in 2018 they switched six of them off because the control rooms overheated the that's why I mentioned the computers that it is so expensive to to cool the Control software the control Hardware that they had to switch the power off
1:05:12and it was a bit embarrassing because Britain was using coal to send to France to electricity so temporary is to me in terms of if you look at the younger dras and sorry it's it's an event that happened 12,000 years ago and the temperature suddenly shifted and it went down and then it went back up and it was to do with the Marine circulation as well and that was a a a temporary event that lasted about 100 150 years and I would say that we're talking about this could continue if you believe Danny
1:05:51Rosenfeld then then we're all right for for CO2 but when the temperature gets up and that's why I put that six slide in there when the temperature goes up I'm not worried about CO2 I'm worried about water vapor you're going to have to extract the water and that's because the water vapor will totally at 6° the water vapor will dominate anything we do with CO2 and remember you've got to get the water vapor out and you can't if the temperature's hot so what would um so that's a different conception of temp of
1:06:28temporary than I had in my mind which is much more reassuring uh but um so if you were uh if if we were uh meeting uh 20 years from now and the temperatures continued to rise as they had been but MCB started to be uh applied and deployed let's say a decade from now uh at the kind of Maximum feasible uh capacity and everything goes right What would life be like in 20 years Visa the climate with the temperatures increasing and MCB at Full Throttle I don't hear you uh Alan you're you're muted if you had MCB at Full
1:07:15Throttle I think you could bring the Ice Age back I really think it's that effective that's what the model at the appropriate throttle then okay I think you could maintain it uh but the you you could the problem is CO2 is going up so you've got this background CO2 Rising but the compounded effect of warm air uh warm temperatures means water vapor goes up and you've got the added complication because I'm afraid you new York's going to be London are going to be underwater there's no Holland is
1:07:59already anticipating that if we don't do it then the local regions and when I gave a talk in Washington about 10 years ago there were two guys from the Pentagon there and I said why are you here he said we're looking for uh areas that could cause instability and climate change is one of them and they said why are the British worried and I said well there's 200 million bangladeshis with British passports that that could come there's going to be Mass migration so I think you're going to see mass migrations
1:08:34because remember if you look at 50% of the world's food it comes from less than 10 meters above sea level but what if I if I could I'm still I'm a little confused if if MCB is working optimally and you're it could bring presumably temperatures back to what they are now or even what they were you know in mid 20th century or whatever the World shows so so wouldn't that minimize or slow down sea level rise and the increase in water vapor well you've got the problem of Greenland Greenland only exists as an
1:09:17ice cap because it's so high so you now have reduced the height of the ice at Greenland and you're going to have to do something very very severe to stop it melting further even even if it wasn't even if the planet wasn't warming up if you take the top few hundred meters off the Greenland ice cap you have a major problem because it will it it only exists because the ice only exists there because it's so high so there's some interesting oceanographic papers and Ice papers on the formation
1:09:56of ice of what is uh what is going to happen so if you look at the Arctic the Arctic melts well doesn't really matter it's like your gin and tonic the ice melts it doesn't go over the top but if you melt Greenland and you melt Antarctica that's on solid land then the sea level rises remember 50% of sea level rise is predicted to come from just thermal expansion so yes we can cool the planet down and yes we can do it but we've got to do something to address the melting of the ice caps you
1:10:35could reform Antarctica yep that's fine but Greenland is a problem and that's 7 MERS but that you're talking of there probably about 100 200 years but it will happen thank you thank you Alan um yeah if I could just there's the the issue of the the the modeling that shows the the heat will come back out of the ocean and the the temperature will stay put even as the as the greenhouse gases uh are are are are falling out uh so that you know the the cooling could it it kind of I think further makes your point that could could could
1:11:12it we we we may may need cooling for for many many years in the future even if we are successful in drawing down greenhouse gases based on that modeling uh but let me let me go to Kevin hi hi Ron I think you've almost answered the question or the point I was um going to make was when we're looking at cooling interventions we need to think clearly about the specification for it um and the large part of that is how long um that the cooling process must go on and when you look at the VTO ice core um and extrapolate from that it
1:11:52will take something like 200,000 years for CO2 to return back to stable conditions so it seems to me that that the cooling that we need to introduce needs to be indefinite you know 50 years 100 years 200 years they're not the sort of time scales that we need to be thinking of we need to be thinking of a cooling intervention that will that we that we can sustain for in the order of 100 thousand years you know basically forever and and that's just what what is you know as Alan says has no quick ways or there's no quick ways on the on the
1:12:27The Horizon at all for getting CO2 out the atmosphere quick enough and overcoming all the hysteresis problems that we've got in the in the climate system so we have to be looking at the at the Uber long term for for climate intervention and for climate Cooling and I think when you look at it in that perspective um of really thinking what the specification is that then starts driving the the the the engine engering solutions that that we have in in front of us and allies to that is that in the coming years you if we want to try and
1:13:04Tackle um climate change we have to cut CO2 therefore we have to massively reduce energy consumption uh which which is basically dve will drive you know some major economic collapse so as part of the specification we need cooling that can last for effectively for you for the the the rest of of civilization at a time when when there's there's there's minimal energy to to operate it and and it does seem to me that MCB is is one of the few candidates that that can can can tick those those boxes Kevin I'm sorry go ahead G can I
1:13:44comment on that I think fusion fusion reactions will occur very within the next 20 years uh I think that solar solar solar introduction of great solar Farms could provide masses of energy so I'm really quite confident on the energy front that in 20 30 Years it'll be all right but coming back to the previous comment when you looked at the bomb tests in the 50s what it showed was the the oceans have got a typical life cycle of 3 400 years so in terms of the warming that we're doing to the oceans now the deep
1:14:30currents we've got a little bit more time than many people would expect Liss at University of East Anglia and several Europeans did that so I'm not quite as pessimistic as you but if if if India increases if if China and India keep producing more CO2 then you're on a hiding to yeah I'm much less confident than you on that one Alan you know Fusion you know the standard joke is it's it's always 50 years away um and even if we got Fusion working and and and and and solar and everything else we still got this Legacy
1:15:11of a huge amount of CO2 in the atmosphere which is not going to disappear anytime soon at all even if we can double you know the the the CO2 uptake in the planet we'll reduce the time period from 200,000 years to 100,000 years and in whatever way we look at it um for all the things that you have talked about um we we need to be looking in time periods of of a minimum s you 10,000 years you know it's you know nothing on the horizon I can see is is is going to stop the the rapid sea level rise and again you know coming
1:15:45back to what you were saying before Allan that that we get the sea level rise we take out huge amount of agricultural land but what we'll also do is flood nuclear power stations oil refineries ports military installations I mean somewh like you know 50 60% of the whole Global e economy is within a couple of meters of sea level rise so it's it's an insurmountable problem that we've that we've got at the at the moment I might jump in and uh I I think that the problem is some accountable um
1:16:25and uh but what I'm what I'm in and that by increasing planetary albo we can um address the uh the temperature problem um quickly enough to uh prevent the uh the dangerous sea level rise so what what I what I would like to uh to ask is uh one of the problems with the uh solar geoengineering is is the U uh observation that it would uh disrupt weather patterns for example the monsoon and uh so I'm just wondering Alan if there was a combination of a a very low dose of uh stratospheric aerosol injection together with targeted Marine
1:17:15Cloud brightening that could address some of these uh problems like the monsoon like the El Nino the Indian Ocean diol uh like Atlantic hurricanes uh that's uh that that sort of uh combined U approach uh would would work to uh to prevent the uh the dangerous sea level rise and and temperature rise does that make sense to you yeah yeah it does I mean I I've always thought and John Leen thought that we're pushing Marine Cloud brightening but I think we're going to have to consider everything possible to
1:17:53be honest the if you looked at the uh if you look at the the slide a bit later on it shows the change in precipitation patterns with double CO2 and the Marine Cloud writing and there are some big precipitation patterns changes so yeah I think I I agree with you that that I'm not as pessimistic as you are Kevin I I mean I think there are things we can do well I hope I'm not as posimistic maybe I'm but but I agree I agree when it said in mountable at the end yeah I think you and Rob Robert you probably corrected me you
1:18:34know we absolutely have to do this um we have to cling on to this and and absolutely go at at full pace and and and think carefully about the specifications sorry back back to you Alan sorry if you look at Danny rosenfeld's comments again and you Green Cloud brightening over the whole ocean you would actually cool the planet down and if you cool the planet down enough then the double CO2 is not that severe at all compared with double CO2 and the warming because if you get the warming down then your your agriculture will be it's it's the
1:19:15extreme temperatures that kill off agriculture kill off production and things and therefore I think in the end getting the temperature down is critical but that probably doesn't answer your question Robert um I'm going to thank you uh Ellen I'm gonna we only have about you know 10 minutes left and I'd like to make sure that oh Harford anyway uh I'd like to make sure uh if I could just call on Stephen because he's our other Marine Cloud brightening expert here and then uh and then I you know if we have
1:19:50time maybe uh uh Robert Chris I know Clive if we and and the other folks here uh and and just leave just you know just so everyone understands the the the the official position of hpac is in fact you know let's let's try a lot of different things we don't want to put all our eggs in one basket and uh uh so anyway okay uh uh if you don't mind I'll just call on Stephen goad Stephen hi uh well first of all the the amount of engineering that you need to do to uh cool the planet with Marine cloud
1:20:26rening is really very small we might need several hundred or maybe a thousand vessels and they they they displace 90 tons each so it's a tiny fraction of the world's ship building industry and we could do that forever if we had to um the second thing is that there's a very interesting uh paper from the uh the Norwegian uh uh Stern I think you C it uh at the Cicero labs in Norway where they instead of blasting way between 30 North and 30 South which is what nearly all the modelers do they decided that they would
1:21:07only spray in areas where there were low clouds um this is not actually the most sophisticated tactic that you could have but it was a nice one and that showed that the were there were changes in precipitation there were increases in almost all the drought stricken regions uh and the there were reductions in precipitation but they were all over the sea and I've got those maps in in a leaf I've sent around so the there are effects on precipitation but they're all benign they're jolly good things to do
1:21:44we would like to have uh the increases that are predicted and I'm sure that the Norwegians could think of an even better strategy than just looking to see whether or not it's cloudy uh as as a choice of where where to do the spraying I think we will be able to have uh climate planners who will have very high speed satellite data coming down uh real time uh and they can plug uh different possible cooling patterns into fast operating model predictors uh which I think we need to make a lot of improvements in in in
1:22:26climate modeling uh and they would be able to tell us uh they'll be able to do a merit order of all ocean regions and they will tell us that The Fleets have to be move either north or south or wherever to get what the uh the planners think will be the best thing for uh agriculture or cricket matches or whatever uh you how you want to control we will be able to decide if we got enough clever enough polish so we'll be able to decide exactly what kind of climate we want where and when and uh I think it needs
1:23:05just a different way of looking at uh the the way we drive the climate rather than let it drive us you want to comment on that Al uh it's a great I'd rather hear some someone else to ask question or raise it or see there's still three hands up I can stay another 10 minutes easily okay great thank you uh okay so Stephen did you have a followup or yes one thing that's bit sad is that John Nissen isn't with us this evening because he he's been very negative about Marine Cloud brightening and I I hope
1:23:46that he'll watch a repeat of this yeah I should St say Steve that John asked me to do a very quick Rough and Ready Kevin yeah Kevin yeah let let's let's go in the queue here uh so uh the next one up I well who hasn't spoken yet would be uh Robert Chris yeah I it's it's late in the day I've got a question which is slightly kind of off the wall because it's not actually about Marine Cloud Marine Cloud brightening so what I will do if I may Alan is I will email it to you and perhaps cover off there good anyone
1:24:24email me anything to like yep okay I'll try and respond but do look at some of the other slides on that power PDF that's okay uh and now we're back to Clive uh okay thank you very much goe thank you Ron it's um hugely encouraging Alan that you say well we could have another iceid if we wanted um so but Mike so my question is uh with Greenland losing altitude and going past its point of no return um we might you know use Marine Cloud brightening to cool down the oceans but still find that Greenland
1:25:02eventually collapses um do you think uh so but the winds L of winds on Greenland they they're catabatic they come down in the middle and then they go out to the coast if there were enough aircraft so this is back to our our our aerosol that we can you know stand out of an airc do you think that whatever it is some some kind of benign aerosol um in the summer months because I know you can only cool the ice sheet the polariz sheets in the summer months because otherwise because the rest of the year the clouds trap
1:25:36more heat than they reflect as I understand it do you think there might be enough Cooling in the summer months to just maybe allow the to preserve the winter snowfall to maybe allow the the ice sheet to come back up again um I'm not oh just a minute I'm not sure that uh it will come back up but but I'd look at it a slightly different way and I think you could ask uh you could ask um um Jane Francis the same question I think it will reform over Antarctica the water will condense somewhere else and the ice will form
1:26:14somewhere else so maybe Greenland going isn't as disastrous as as as as all that because the the the SI the planetary system will and if you look at Mars the ice caps move from one end of the planet to the other every two years or every ye so solar year so yeah Greenland going will raise a sea levels