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Nature-based Ocean and Atmospheric Cooling

Transcript for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vw85K7MjwYk

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00:00If we had access to all the plastics, the glass,   and the aluminum that's currently  going to landfills, we'd have enough   resource for this project, for canceling  further warming on planet Earth. [Music] My name's Professor Jim Bendell and I'm delighted  to be with you today to chair and speak at a   panel on what we're calling ‘climate honesty’,  ending what we also call ‘climate brightsiding’,   and I'm very pleased to be here with Dr.  Ye Tao who's going to be presenting about  
00:49the MEER framework and also to be here  in collaboration with FacingFuture.TV.   There's an article in the Guardian today  about the big word on all scientists lips,   ‘scary’, and it's difficult to be scared all  the time, but emissions are up, atmospheric   concentrations are up, temperatures, sea levels,  hunger… they're all rising.
01:12We know all of that,   but there's also something we know which is far  more incriminating of all of us here, which is the   talks and agreements at the UNFCCC over the past  decades have not managed to change any of that.   Instead they consistently move the goal posts.  Back in May 92, when the UNFCCC was formed,   member states agreed to cut emissions to stabilize  atmospheric carbon at 354 parts per million.  
01:39By 2000, 22 years ago,   the annual emissions climbed 65% since then  and were at an all-time high last year.   Back in 2009, the world's climatologists, the top  ones of the world, got together and issued with   something called ‘The Copenhagen Consensus’.
02:03It  said, if global emissions had not peaked by 2020   we would face inevitable catastrophic changes. But  annual emissions as I've said continue to rise.   So they might continue to move the goal posts,  but we can't play games with Nature. Nature   will always win because Nature actually  owns us and not the other way around.   Faced with the bad news some experts are  asking myself and my colleagues to calm down.  
02:30They finally admit that, okay, it's  already worse than we thought it would be,   but don't worry, it's not going to be as bad  as we thought it would be. They say we just   need all societies on the planet to throw  their emissions into high-speed reverse,   have negative emissions technologies, prove all  independent analysis right and actually be useful   and also be blessed with some climate luck  from the ecosystems that we've already   disturbed being friendly to us rather  than amplifying what we've done wrong.  
03:04Opinion surveys now regularly show that vast  numbers of people don't believe that that's going   to happen, especially the young, and increasingly  numbers of people across the global South.   In response we see the professional talk  shoppers criticize folks for being too negative,   but people losing their livelihoods or  being displaced from their homes are not   going to benefit from such stubborn optimism  from the professional classes.
03:35Rather this   kind of climate brightsiding where we're made to  doubt what we can now see with our own eyes, is   actually limiting our conversation on our scope of  action and our urgency. It means we don't support   disaster risk reduction as much as we might.
03:54We  don't support adaptation and reparations as much   as we might. It means we don't support rapidly  deployable technologies that could help people   who will suffer the most and the soonest, which  is something we're going to hear about today.   It also means though we don't question the power  structures that are sending our children into   this hellscape, and it means we don't abandon  all the old ideas about ourselves and our work.  
04:17Well, therefore we don't allow ourselves to  become much more radical in how we respond   to the climate crisis. So, as I said,  it's difficult to be scared all the time.   Complete climate honesty is painful  and it's going to get more painful,   but it's necessary to tie to reduce the harm.
04:42  Today we're going to hear from Dr Ye Tao about   some of the awkward science on climate change,  currently ignored, about a net zero paradox   and a new initiative that seeks to  reduce growing suffering that he founded.   When working at the Roland Institute of Harvard  University Dr Tao realized just how bad the   climate crisis was becoming. So, in 2020 he left  what he was doing and founded the MEER framework.  
05:09It's his response to his understanding of  the accelerating and ultimate consequences   of the climate crisis on our delicate Web of  Life. He comes at this with a very relevant   education as a biochemist, physicist, material  scientist, and he brings the benefits of that   multi-disciplinary background in engineering and  in science to his new work in the climate crisis,   so I'm very pleased he's going to  present to us for a few minutes now.
05:38Yeah, so indeed we really need to be telling  the truth, the full truth of climate catastrophe   and the state of the world before we can  come up with the very effective solutions,   engineering solutions, to combat the crisis.  So, today, I'll be telling you about a technique   that's based on mirrors that can simultaneously  provide food system security, better shelters   when there's a heat wave, and also much better  access and the preservation of water resources.  
06:09But before the first point, I want to hit is that  we have another degree of warming in store for   us and that's… the IPCC has been downplaying this  ‘Inconvenient Truth’ so when we burn fossil fuel,   we not only emit the long-lived greenhouse gases  but also short-lived aerosols that interact with   clouds and promote brighter clouds to cool the  climate and the result is that we don't experience   the full impact of greenhouse gases, but rather  the difference between the greenhouse gases and  
06:43these cooling aerosols. So, in the future, when we  do indeed achieve 100 percent carbon neutrality,   what would happen is that at least in the short  term there will be a much larger amount of   positive radio forcing, heating the planet, so  COVID-19 provided an opportunity to interrogate   what happens when you have a sudden increase in  the amount of heating power driving warming on   planet Earth.
07:15So, we had about seven percent  over the year of reduction, but it happened,   you know, at different times on different  continents, so we know the dates of lockdowns, so   it's sort of a random controlled experiment that  we can interpret. When visible light reaches the   ground it becomes absorbed as heat, and indeed,  in much of Europe, for example, we observed   record levels of shortwave radiation reaching  the ground and in Asia, for example, in China,   the increased radiation also led to increase  in ground, then surface temperature, which then   drove stronger circulation patterns leading to a  record precipitation in recorded recent history  
07:56and these record-breaking events scientists were  able to attribute about 30 percent of the anomaly   to the disappearance or temporary disappearance  of aerosols from the burning of fossil fuels. And   very recently in the United States, forest fires  have also been partially linked to a reduction of   emissions during COVID lockdowns and curiously  the temperature anomalies, the precipitation   anomalies, and also the humidity anomalies about  30 percent were linked to the aerosols. We don't  
08:28know where the remaining two-thirds are coming  from, but in summary, in 2020, it was really   a record-setting event. Many parts of the world  experienced extreme hurricanes, temperatures and   floods. It appears that the aerosol component and  perturbation to the aerosol is so important. It's   quite important to understand how much there  actually is, so our best understanding up to   2021 was that there's about one watt per meter  squared of warming matched by these aerosols   and if we consider the translation from the  heating power to temperature at the equilibrium  
09:05state we know that roughly that translates to one  degree Celsius of warming that's still in store.   The field of studying this phenomena goes back to  the 1920s and we continue to make new progress.   For example, last month we discovered that even  though sometimes when ships… they go over oceans,   they create clouds sometimes, but sometimes they  don't, but even when they do not create visible   clouds, those tracks still contribute to cooling  the planet and we could be underestimating the  
09:37cooling power by another watt per meter squared  which is very scary indeed, and the history of   the IPCC has been consistently underestimating how  much cooling this pollution is providing. So in   the assessment report five [AR5] the central value  was 0.
09:599 watt per meter squared, that's hidden,   but by AR6 it was up to 1.3 watt per meter squared  that's hidden, in the curious Special Report, 1.5   degrees. In order for the resulting temperature  curves to not cross 1.5 degrees very quickly,  The modelers arbitrarily chose 0.
10:207 watt per meter  squared even though that's contrary to evidence   and everything we know. Not only did they have to  arbitrarily use a smaller input parameter which we   know is false, they also had to shift the baseline  down by about 0.15 degrees, just so that we do   not have immediate crossing of 1.5 degrees when  the simulation stopped to fossil fuel emissions.  
10:42So basically 1.5 degree target is  dead, and 2 degree target is also dead,   but yet we still say that mitigating greenhouse  gases is the only tool that's allowed and that's   problematic and we know that as we continue to  decarbonize which is necessary we will expose   the vulnerable populations in the world  in India, in China, and in Southeast Asia,   and in Africa to the worst impacts, because  there's more pollution there.
11:09So, as we clean-up,   they will be exposed to more warming. So what  do we do? For example, let's put some mirrors   on the roof. So, we did this experiment in  California and we discovered that just by   putting these simple passive reflectors, we can  decrease roof temperature by up to 30 degrees.   We can also decrease interior temperature when  there's no insulated roof by about 5 to 15 degrees   and that can mean the difference between life and  death in the global itself, where temperatures are   already increasing beyond 50 degrees Celsius. And  even in well-insulated global North buildings we  
11:44can still measure the internal temperature  decrease of one to two degrees Celsius.   There's also opportunity to apply mirrors to save  water. So, currently we're losing about 300 cubic   kilometers of water just from our reservoirs and  terrestrial water storage deficits in agricultural   areas is about 120 cubic kilometers, so if we  could just prevent less than half of the fresh   water from this evaporating away, we could go do  a long way to solve the issue of water scarcity,   so we performed the experiment floating mirrors  on the water, above the water and below the water,  
12:21and in all cases we observed dramatic decrease  to the rate of water losing, so in the raw   data shown in gray, you may be wondering what  those spikes are. So, it's actually squirrels   in the neighborhood, coming to have a drink of  water, and they seem to also prefer the bin with   mirrors floating on top, compared to mirrors that  submerged.
12:44So, they don't seem to be bothered by   the mirrors at all and in addition to saving water  from the operating, the mirrors also cool the   water substantially by up to 10 degrees Celsius.  So, you can imagine if we apply this technology to   coral reefs, we could potentially save them from  bleaching, because 10 degrees Celsius is quite   a lot.
13:09So, in summary, let's say, we covered 85  percent of the global hydroelectric reservoirs,   we could save 30 cubic kilometers of fresh water  that's 25 percent of the global deficit. We could   also, by virtue of reflecting away the light that  would be otherwise absorbed by the reservoirs,   we can reflect the weight, 29 terawatts of  global warming power, that's two percent of the   problem and if we cover it, 85 percent of all the  freshwater reservoirs, we could more than solve   the freshwater shortage problem and also address  about 10 percent of the global warming problem.  
13:41So, what about the remaining 90 percent of power  that's driving the warming? We have to use land   obviously, so in this field you are seeing on the  right experiments that taking place in an airport   in Plymouth, New Hampshire. So, mirrors have been  assessed to be not dangerous for pilots or planes.  
14:00So, where do we get all the materials  to make all the mirrors? Well, I was   just biking in the city here and generally,  when you go to different places on Earth,   there's a plethora of plastic, glass and aluminum  cans that just scattered around, but to us that's   a very important or material resource to  build out this infrastructure.
14:21So, at MEER,   we recently prototyped a system based on glass,  bamboo, aluminum, and the recycled plastics. So,   a system weighs a total of 80 kilograms, but it  has a surface area near the surface area of 70   meters squared and that can offset the warming  impact of seven tons of CO2. And in terms of the   emissions during the manufacturing, we have  about 70 kilograms of CO2 emitted during the   manufacturing and also including transportation,  the amount of carbon that's embodied in   infrastructure, both in the bamboo and also in the  recycled PET and the high density polyethylene,  
15:00is roughly double that of embodied carbon  emissions in the manufacturing process.   We'll go into a metric which is called a  ‘cooling return on investment’ and this   system achieved a cooling return on investment of  about 3,000, meaning: for every Joule of energy   you spent to build a system you can remove  from planet Earth 3,000 joules of energy   and the cost of the system to offset seven tons  of CO2 is 100 US dollars at small scale, using   off-the-shelf component and a personal 3D printer.  So, globally, if we want to basically take care of  
15:37further warming issues by offsetting 50 gigaton,  equivalent CO2 emission per year, if we had access   to all the PET, the plastics, the glass, and the  aluminum that's currently going to landfills,   we have enough resource for this project for  canceling further warming on planet Earth,   and the energy that's necessary to build out this  infrastructure can be found just by controlling   leakage from improperly managed decaying food and  also from the force of infrastructure.
16:12So, I will   end with one important metric that can be used to  assess all climate change mitigation strategies.   So, the central problem of global warming is  that we have a continuous power of roughly   between 500 to 1500 terawatts of power driving  the warming. So, the upper bound 1500 includes   the portion that's currently masked by aerosols.
16:41  The problem is that Humanity only has access to   18 terawatts and that's everything that we do.  So, obviously, we're trying to perform a level   of warming that's much larger than the technical  fossil fuel power we have access to, so no matter   how you slice the problem what you have to do is  for every joule that you can put in the system,   remove 100 joules from planet Earth.
17:04Obviously, we  have to also, you know, continue to live our life,   so in the very optimistic case where we can use  only 10 percent of the energy to perform process,   we need a cooling return on investment at least  one thousand, so an air conditioner is about   cooling return on investment of three and the very  famous direct air capture achieves about 100. So,   it's basically 10 times too inefficient to be  climate relevant, so in summary most of the   things that you have heard, direct air capture,  green roofs, or carbon storage, is way below the   threshold of 1000 for feasibility and the only  things that can work are direct cooling methods,  
17:44for example, potentially including MEER and  with that I like to show that birds and mammals   interact with experimental mirror fields,  and they don't seem to be bothered by them. Ye, thank you for getting through a lot of  important content there in a very short space   of time.
18:12I think what's really important is that  complete climate honesty throws up these issues   such as the impact of cleaning up our air and what  it's going to mean for people who live in cities   in the Global South and who don't have access to  cooling systems. And so we do really need to think   creatively about what to do about that.
18:34I want to  say something about how we are beginning to see   some more climate honesty, complete climate  honesty, for some more top scientists just   in the last few months and how that actually is  a real challenge to the IPCC and to the UNFCCC. Top scientists are now admitting the  plausibility of bad towards case scenarios,   papers like climate endgame, exploring  catastrophic climate change scenarios,   climate change, and the threat to civilization  and other paper recently out and also the world   scientist warning of a climate emergency  2022. I'll just quote from the top one:  
19:14'There is ample evidence that climate change  could become catastrophic. We could enter such   end games at even modest levels of warming.  Facing a future of accelerating climate change   while blind to worst-case scenarios is naïve, risk  management at best and fatally foolish at worst.   So, I do recommend that you have a look into  that. What we're seeing actually.
19:38Then is in   the peer-reviewed top scientific literature in  2022 what some scientists have been saying and   other scholars for quite some years. For example,  two years ago, over 500 scholars signed a public   Scholars Warning on societal disruption and  collapse, which asks not just for the study   of these bad to worst scenarios, but also  to actually consider how we can begin to   prepare for societal breakdown, disruption or even  possibly collapse.
20:08If you're interested in this,   I recommend searching online for either  climate honesty or climate brightsiding.   To end, I want to talk to you about something  we're calling the ‘Scholar's Oath to the Future’.   The climate science consensus over the  last years failed to predict the levels   of volatility and damage that we're seeing.
20:34  The most concerning science was sidelined,   yet it's proving to be closer to  reality than the past consensus.   Now the reasons why this 'establishment  climatology' we could call it failed to   prioritize communicating bad-to-worse scenarios  must be learned from as we're entering this new   troublesome and 'scary', to quote the Guardian,  time and that learning must include scholars   like myself and climate scientists, climate  communicators, and journalists reflecting on   the past choices we've made about being cautious  and reticent and pushing away the information that  
21:12we don't want to consider, because it's too  troubling to us and the choices we've made…   There is a risk that massive new funding is  going to distort this sense-making process.   We definitely need more radical approaches,  so I want to tell you about something that   165 scholars assigned to launch here today.
21:35  They come from 34 countries, and it's called   a ‘Scholars Oath to the Future’, so I'm going  to read it publicly for the first time today.   "This is an apology and an oath, a renewed  commitment. It's an apology from me and my   fellow scholars to you, the younger generations,  whom we are meant to serve. It is also an oath   to learn from our past mistakes, as we  seek to better contribute in future.  
21:56That future is bleak. You, amongst the younger  generations, are clearer on that than many older   people. You know that the total pollution  and devastation has exceeded the planet's   capacity to cope. You know that today's dominant  economies compel that destruction to continue.   You have a clearer sight of the situation than  most people older than you because you are less   compromised in how you assess this bad news.
22:24  You are less likely to assume the future will be   like the past. You're less likely to keep quiet  about uncomfortable ideas for fear of hurting   your income, reputation, or influence. You are  less likely to try to believe something because   it might numb your own pain. That is because  you must live in the future that will exist,   not one that many older people prefer to imagine  when they dismiss your negative thinking.  
22:45Scholars from around the world and many  disciplines have known for years that the trends   are in the wrong direction for Humanity and life  on Earth. Whatever corner of the world we live in,   we have seen how our efforts to reverse worrying  trends have not been working. We ignored all of   that to allow credible lies to be put to policy  makers, senior leaders in the general public.  
23:05We justified our complacency to ourselves with  a variety of explanations that put our needs,   pleasures, and fears first, and we blamed powerful  others rather than our own part in this charade.   Today, the rich countries, large corporations,  elite institutions, and mainstream media all   support the credible lies, subdue us so that we  do not rebel against the global economic system.  
23:29These lies form the modern face of processes, of  domination, and exploitation that have existed for   centuries, but today we promise not to compromise  anymore. When there is unsettling analysis,   we will share it. When there is injustice,  we will name it. When there is distortion   by national or corporate interests, we  will challenge it.
23:49If we fear a backlash,   then we will both name that fear and overcome  it. Then, if you within the younger generations,   are critical of our efforts, we will respond  with curiosity and seek to make amends, because   we recognize that our role is to contribute to  your future. So, myself and my fellow scholars,   are sorry for our own part in not helping enough  in the past.
24:12We promise to learn with you about   how to reduce harm, uphold universal values,  and enable futures that may still be possible.   Therefore I will tell others of this apology and  oath and promote mutual support. Then, every year,   I will publicly reconfirm this commitment to  you.” That's the end of the “Scholars’ Oath to our   Future”, which also Dr.
24:38Ye Tao has signed, along  with 165 of us from 34 countries and we're going   to be looking forward to engaging young people  in how we make real on that renewed commitment.   And Ye is already doing a lot of that, I know  with young people being a key… playing a key   role in getting you to this far and with  the experiments and research you're doing.   So, thank you on behalf of the  FacingFuture team! Thank you, Ye! Cheers! [Music]   foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]