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| 00:02 | yeah yeah they it's uh i i suggested a name change form a while back called extortion assets incorporated they didn't think that was funny they've got all the yeah to they kept again they got all the rights to the the the big wave sink yeah but um right anton which company are referring to uh intellectual ventures yeah i've encountered that yeah they're they're doing it because they were bored they weren't they wanted something to be make life more interesting vultures is the word i've heard |
| 00:45 | associated with them yep yep all right are you waiting for me to say something well yes to start the meeting and say good evening everybody and um so yes and i've hit the recording finally and i remember to hit the recording button on time um and uh so um so so right there we go welcome everybody then so you have to manage this whole thing don't you um and um hopefully more people will tell i suppose we're in the middle of august so there's some people on holiday now what's a holiday what's a holiday don't |
| 01:28 | you have holidays stephen and there's friends good evening friends can you hear okay didn't like the sound of that i think he's still okay he's still connecting to audio hi hi john hi chloe hi and sev so they join us at they have to get up at six o'clock in the morning yep just just so in case anyone forgets and i think brian's uh you're in australia as well so uh same for you yes yeah welcome brian that's getting up at five to be ready at six yeah okay okay very good um well uh so uh where are we i've been doing other |
| 02:16 | things so i need to get kind of connected back in again and this is for for everybody to discuss um so um let's do what we usually do um i'll do what i usually do which is uh share my screen and we do the agenda so i've got a suggestion here because um most but those of you that have been along every time will know that i've got this thing about you know what what's the best policy here so i've got a um i did a presentation to institutional engineers let me let me share properly actually and |
| 02:51 | share my whole screen so i can show you whatever it is uh where are we going share this whole screen um yeah um to institutional engineers so i'm thinking about putting this first this slide first so let me just just digress just for a minute uh residents were told to stay in so this is an example of what i call this an illus to illustrate the tragic outcome of a dangerously unworkable policy i see um nothing but you know we need you know why isn't the british government telling us to to all install heat pumps |
| 03:25 | uh to insulate our houses better and to put a price on fuel these are uh interventions that will that should uh reduce the amount of co2 being emitted from from britain um and uh so ignoring the increased emissions from asia and completely ignoring the interventions which will have an immediate effect so so not distinguishing between interventions that will have an immediate effect and an intervention that would take decades um so you know this whole thing about clouds or you know so we was well established last time |
| 04:11 | uh increasing the albedo to reflect heat away and then increasing the heat transfer which was very useful that people told me that last time i made that clear heat transfer mechanisms these would have an almost immediate effect on whether or not the oceans are being warmed up continue to be warmed up or cooled down so to me this is vitally important that the the policies seem misplaced that and so okay so that's what i'm putting that on on the agenda there baked baked in warming we got a i included uh susan |
| 04:45 | solomon in a uh email chain and she went back and said who included i've got time floors but she included some papers um which i've just been reading one that's saying that yes if so if emissions were to stop all of a sudden then actually the temperature wouldn't keep going up because of sort of negative feedback so i'd quite like to talk about that i'm so not an expert but just trying to sort of stand right back from the whole thing and just see is is there something that we're all |
| 05:16 | missing or something the politicians are are missing something that's not there in the policy so that's right so that's me done a lot of talking who else who else has got something else for the agenda i'd like to add in evaluating different iso methods iso methods no evaluating different iso methods when you said it's isa methods you're talking about are you yes okay so as in what ships um chimneys no those different ways to produce the photocatalytic particle okay uh okay particle synthesis we say |
| 05:58 | okay right along those lines i'd like to bring up something that stephen salter mentioned in an email a week or two ago and that is if you spray droplets of seawater into the air you don't you've got the chlorine uh why don't we get catalytic uh oxidation of methane just from the water drop sure friends will answer that very well assuming you're there still um yep okay um why not uh photo catalyst basically because there's no eye there basically that's the main reason but there's a water droplet |
| 06:37 | yeah um it remains aerosolized at that small particle size yeah okay because it's because it's iron that changes its oxidization state easily from iron three to one two i think that's that's that's the very short answer but um if that's not sorry sorry bro it'll be interesting because um you know is that redox state critical to the chlorine action that's the question yeah i think i think so um because uh it goes from iron three to ion two and then so you've got a a chlorine so |
| 07:16 | the chlorine uh atom what was a bound atom um has trying to get this right um it comes here yeah well it goes from cl minus to just cl it comes in at that point as they check last night the ue photon does a fine job of splitting chlorine but let's confirm it yeah okay so i think there's there's probably some but not and so let's let friends answer that so one kind of drop it's good and i'm adding to uh services point there i think it would be good to discuss deployment methods as well as a particle sensors part of the census |
| 08:02 | i make that a separate line though separate line yes separate deployment methods okay right i had a paper earlier today uh about what's happening in the antarctic where apparently the enormous weights of ice there are melting and so they're changing the pressure on the underlying rock and this is likely to lead to enormous volcanic eruptions when you take the moment the rock is being held down by the weight of the ice and as it goes then you get uh the fracture of the of the and great lots of of you know ash or carbon or whatever has |
| 08:52 | come coming up and this sounded very scary you know measuring how the uh the ice is moving uh i haven't really thought any more about it just came in a little bit before this meeting yeah i wonder if this thing is happening in iceland because we do have volcanoes and the magma isn't far below the surface and we do have unweighting of the alpine glaciers in iceland yeah you also of course on the atlantic ridge where it's all pulling apart anyway so that would have been volcanic whether there was the ice mass or not |
| 09:29 | it might make it a lot worse of course i think the point i'm making is that you might see the effect much sooner in iceland if we look at the history of volcanism there it may be i mean they have a thousand years of history now we should run some statistics on the eruption rate because you may find a near-term effect with the alpine glaciers and a long-term effect in antarctica and greenland yeah keep in mind alaska's got three volcanoes that are just going off right now so that might might be also in alaska |
| 10:04 | yeah that's a good point we should run some statistical analysis on these eruptions at high latitudes and write a paper on the increase in volcanism associated with the isostatic rebound uh associated with decreasing ice mass yeah iso static rebound nasty positive feedbacks there yes yeah a lot of runaway feedback because otherwise lay people are confused what positive feedback means yeah run away or self reinforcing yeah because it's it'll melt the ice that much quicker yeah yep okay um anything else we don't we've i set aside 90 minutes |
| 10:52 | for us to speak we don't have to drag it out to 90 minutes some last time we were nearly two hours because we couldn't stop talking um it does tend to get passionate and exciting and very interesting anything else for now clive we probably should just keep mcb on the list with with isa the two i i see the two of them going going hand in hand i could do to help it i would like to do that i did work out a way to put more chlorine in the water we were spraying i was already going to do it just to stop internal |
| 11:27 | of biomass in in inside my my ships but i could crank that up to 12 parts per million at the moment there's two parts per million put into drinking water in the uk and i was going to put it up to four uh for a bit of extra chlorine in the ships but i i worked out what to do to put it up to 12. but i've now convinced myself that uh you guys are right and i can't produce the iron on the present ship arrangement we need a different arrangement for putting iron in and i can put iron into the sea water with a |
| 12:08 | accelerated uh enotic so accelerated it's using cathodic protection the other way around i think i've sent this to some of you um is that the same as electrical or nation which is used in intakes of large pipes for power plants yeah that's the biggest use of chlorine in the uk is for but it's not injected chlorine it just you just do injected you just do electro chlorination and it forms the species just out of sea water yeah that's right right so that's talking about chlorine in in your mcb droppers but your iron |
| 12:45 | from your ship stephen i have to say we are rather taken by our iron salt aerosol because it depletes you know methane and other um oxidable uh you know tropospheric ozone and things from the atmosphere before then being very widespread over the over the ocean so where you could do this is to have an iron ship and an uh an aerosol spray ship in closed tandem so the water that we are going to use as spray from marine club running would actually have already been enhanced in iron um [Music] no you could just have an iron solution |
| 13:26 | in the holes of your of your boats which you were concentrating on which you yeah yeah remember my boats are flying so i really don't want to have any unnecessary weight the the the iron injection boats are they're they're born and they're floating normally uh like a trimaran um yeah but they could work we work it could be working together i could i could spray iron enriched water if that would help if you'd like that well let's for me there's a the we have to prioritize um so um let's we could have a discussion about |
| 14:09 | that so this is the what do you want to call it the iron ship yeah okay iron ship um yeah so presumably your your boats need to be flying because they need to move fast so they can cover a wide area with this brightening yes yeah right uh but for yanching they're not they're not we're just watching hundreds of tons of iron on board so yeah yes uh brian why why is a wide area needed because the wind velocities are so much higher than even the ship velocity typically um that wouldn't the wind uh spreading |
| 14:46 | we'd do a fine job of moving it would do a good job yes but you still want to move to the other hemisphere in the summertime and you want to move away and when the autumn comes and you know there'll be a need for extra cooling of the coral world as a hurricane developing water so i want to use the mobility and the high speed mobility of spray vessels sort of worst case scenario so if you can engineer to that and then you don't need as much you know you're in a much safer boundary cage i think i missed some of that anton |
| 15:30 | what did you begin by saying that well it'd be a lot harder to have uh to get a larger spatial area so if you design for that engineer for that and then it turns out over sea trials and many number of years that you need less spatial area well then that's easier right so in a sense you want to kind of i think correct me if i'm wrong but designed for a worst case condition so i would agree with the larger spatial area right yeah yeah we at the moment there's a sort of constant cost for whatever size of vessel you're |
| 16:04 | having and uh then there's a one that depends on the flow the power and the flow rate and you've got to try and get a balance of those and at the moment the there will be two higher concentration in too small an area near the vessel and we're hoping that we can spread the stuff around to get a lower dose over a wide area it's because the effect of green cloud brightening is logarithmic that you want to low dose over a big area and in fact you could argue that you should be spraying in under clear blue |
| 16:38 | skies it should give time for it to spread before that ims gets to the right of a road of humidity this is where the america's cup technology could work very well because um you know the beam reach is probably the fastest point of sale oh yes and uh that's also the direction that will result in the maximal area coverage yeah so it's yeah i can i can concur that a high-speed sailing vessel would do a fine job yeah the only only difference there is that the america's cup race is about 25 minutes and if you had a design which fell into |
| 17:18 | a pile of completely useless rubbish after 28 minutes they'd they'd win okay and they would try and get as close to that as possible we want to last for 25 years so so we aren't allowed to use the same factors of safety as the america's cup people i tried to get in touch with them but they were all too busy yeah it's kind of a technology demonstrator but um i think with scale a scale-up uh could be made quite reliable with a computer the the the one the one day the french round the world war day race is actually |
| 17:52 | much more relevant because they've really got to go right around the world with only one person on board and that that's lasting months uh and uh i i found that a big encouraging and about half of them are now on foils it's very much defined by the person that won it last time and they can be very very strict about rules that will suit them um the reason i sort of question this um people that have been meeting us in other meetings engineering types have been saying uh well what's wrong with sort of um clapped out old ships of 10th |
| 18:35 | the cost um almost like barges you just keep them around that they can be towed somewhere also they might just about get somewhere else under their own steam but they're very cheap and so you can have ten times as many and they've got the iron in them already there's lots of iron coming off them already yeah well just so instead of just a spraying platform yeah then if they're drifting freely and they crash into another ship they're not drifting freely they're they're either anchored or they or they've got some |
| 19:04 | sort of engine they can keep it in the right place specific you want them in mid-pacific yeah so you can't anchor in mid-pacific no but if you've got an engine then you can sort of keep roughly keeping the same place can't you uh yes and you have to bring the fuel out to it and you've got to have people there they've got to be fed and yeah um so i don't know i don't mind doing initial experiments there but it's very expensive to do anything in mid-ocean for a long time ships at the moment go |
| 19:32 | through the from one port to another port uh as quickly as they can uh that's the economical fuel consumption and they don't want to go gathering around in other places and and you know life insurance and all that stuff is is a big big cost what do you think about i mean i saw um let me just see i went to i found uh looked at um there it is right there in the middle of the atlantic um there's a i think would you call that a guio g-u-y-o-t because it looks really flat on the top looks as though it's not far from the |
| 20:11 | surface a thing like that you might be able to have some some sort of barge over that you could more to it yeah i wouldn't mind doing an experiment there yeah and these you find these in the pacific as well so anyways that's it that's the agenda um um i don't know i said let's put a question mark um okay all right that's so that's on that basis um i don't know really what i suppose i'm still in the middle of i mean what do people think about do you agree with me that uh there's too |
| 20:47 | much emphasis on um reducing on cooling that will happen one day by reducing co2 emissions and not enough political focus on the opportunities of you know for example marine cloud brightening i i hardly agree but when you point this out people get very annoyed i i wrote a thing for cop 26 about this and it's i've got all the the marine corps brighton so i've got all the co2 increases that are still accelerating upwards there's no sign of any reduction even though we're claiming that we're |
| 21:25 | emitting less but the atmosphere doesn't know that it's still increasing it yeah actually it's still accelerating yeah yeah and franz i don't know what happened to friends i guess he couldn't quite connect but um saw that uh um got that brian um saw that um uh there's this thing called this people are calling it a compost bomb so it's basically it's a tipping point with the soils the soils have uh something like not is it 17 or 19 times as much uh human emissions in a year to to come out |
| 22:01 | um in the next several decades um with a few degrees of warming yeah brian um yeah at two points i guess the compost bombs interesting because there are things we can do to encourage soil microbial communities that would prevent a lot of that carbon from escaping but on the earlier point i think there's this an interesting and maybe somewhat strong analogy with the pandemic that i'd like to offer and that is billions of dollars went into the vaccine which actually doesn't prevent infection or transmission |
| 22:36 | and almost nothing went into or very little went into treatment we had a particular hyperbaric oxygen treatment that actually solved some non-linear problems with vasoconstriction of pulmonary arteries and veins and improved oxygenation so it's amazing there were some very substantial results with hyperbaric oxygen they were systematically shut down by the american medical association in particular but uh in general as well people wouldn't touch it because it wasn't approved by the medical authorities in other words it even the |
| 23:09 | the funding for the research was not supported so uh it's i'm not saying that's really a solution but it is an analogy and i would offer as a potential solution that i'm reminded of two things and one is building grassroots support and the second is i wonder if there's any lessons to be had from kun's book on the structure of scientific revolutions whose book hume um um i i was very interested when the kobe business started through logic through ignorance and i thought about the fact that the |
| 23:58 | food can be protected by having strong salt solutions or vinegar and it's it works by osmosis it you dry you draw the water out of a bacteria by putting something salty or sweet or whatever near it and i thought can we use the technology i want for making clouds white so for killing black viruses and they told me that there isn't any water in the virus so that osmosis doesn't work but i worked out that if you had decided that you want to put aerosol into somewhere like the albert hall or the london underground |
| 24:42 | and you could use the same size of salt aerosol that we want to use for spraying that's 10 to the minus 14 grams as a salt particle and the covered virus is only a tenth of that it's 10 to the minus 15 of a gram so the question is what happens if you get this bloody great big ten times salt thing hitting a cobia virus that's breathing out and i worked out that to do the entire london underground with 10 to the minus 14 grams of salt would only need 20 grams and i would be giving it a thousand salt |
| 25:18 | particles per cubic centimeter of air and now i don't know how many of those would be lucky enough to hit a a virus aerosol but it won't be none and you could easily do hospitals and schools and the albert hall and only need um uh one gram for the albert hall and wembley stadium you could have two grams of salt so it's not you know it's like three packets of crisps and i tried to get all the um uh the the covered people interested in this idea uh and one or two of them in edinburgh said yes they were but they wouldn't do any |
| 25:56 | experiments for me and they didn't want to fancy doing petri dishes with live viruses at home um but it would be a bit like making everybody in a big city think that they were walking on the beach in rough weather we give them that amount of salt dose and uh we don't we just don't know what whether it will be good for them or not victorian doctors of course always knew that it was very good to go and brief sincere and um but you're quite right the medical profession doesn't like to have any idea that's not been through |
| 26:36 | really rigorous trials and they have every hospital now has an ethics committee to [Music] vet all all ideas for any changes in treatment and they are very conservative yes i think that's a the fundamental problem is that the earth doesn't have time for such conservatism and it's a bit like the virus you know uh people go on and on about having soft lockdowns and hard lockdowns in sydney and elsewhere but the virus doesn't care if you have any any bit of a leak somewhere you know it grows exponentially and we've seen this in |
| 27:13 | sydney and so you know it's really there's nothing about you know intention it's all about action and you know i think the results in sydney are kind of a microscope of what we're looking at globally and that is people may have the greatest of intentions but unless they're acting to actually develop a healthy climate the earth is just going to proceed as the earth system and it's going to you know as we're seeing change exponentially yeah absolutely yeah stephen i did not long ago know someone who had worked on the |
| 27:45 | roads or knew someone that had worked on the roads um like laying you know tom with tarp working with tarmac and said um that when he was working on the road he never caught a cold yeah so maybe all that smell of that bitumen stuff was was having effects one at a time stephen please uh i haven't had a curl since i started taking vitamin d okay right and you said uh vitamin d is in delta yeah okay good to know that's helpful uh i think i was just saying uh seconding stephen's suggestion to uh recreate salt |
| 28:32 | air in the uh stadiums if you will and the buildings because uh i think that is quite intriguing but uh you know i think in that case you know we're seeing a lack of support for research and i think the open question is can we um you know can we get the kind of uh well i'm reminded to the 1950s uh in oceanography where you could write almost any reasonable research grant and and get a you know 60 or 70 chance of funding um it was a bit of a renaissance and i think that's what might be needed to really foster um |
| 29:10 | transformative approaches in healthy climate a lot of that was due to sputnik the americas got a really bad fry when the russians put out the first sputnik and they they was a lot of money going into anything that was going to give the americans at the edge over the russians well we've had enough of a fright from climate change with all these fires and floods and everything you would have thought so but no sign yet there was another effect as well that is post-world war ii they finally realized after losing thousands of troops at |
| 29:46 | guadalcanal and elsewhere that uh oceanography actually matters in other words hey you know they they decide to do a marine invasion at low tide and they found it on the coral reefs because they didn't have the tides properly and so um you know it i think the navy actually sponsored a huge amount of oceanography between 1945 and 1960 and then of course sputnik took over from there so it's you know fear of various sorts whether it's a hot war uh you know realizing that how catch-up was needed or uh cold war and the sputnik um you |
| 30:24 | know that seems to be a major driver yeah um yes the all the leading oceanographers that i've met which i met quite a lot of them had started off for the d-day invasion exactly people like michael logan higgins and nobody really cared about it before there's no need well i think i'll keep going with my pictures of burning towers and things like that to scare people and talk about compost bombs um uh the advantage of that too clive is uh once you get an inferno like that it's very difficult to put it out that's |
| 31:03 | where the analogy is quite good i think with the grenfell tower oh you like that it's um john yeah yeah yeah i thought you're gonna say don't don't become too alarmist no no no no no well no i think it's just a reality you can't put it out yeah that's it thank you yeah that's right yeah that's that's how i see it too and um and telling people to stay there when they well they now they know now they didn't really know at the time um but um and they didn't have much time to to |
| 31:34 | think about it but we've got a bit longer to think about it and we don't have it we can't escape anywhere else that's the only problem we've only got one one place at the moment right but what we can do is is concentrate on on cooling is it actually start to distinguish between things that are going to might do some calling one day except they won't because tipping points will will kick in and and things that we can deliberately provide calling you know if you want to call yourself it's crisis intervention i mean i like |
| 32:02 | the analogy that robert came up with the turnokay of the the patient bleeding to death on the operating table i mean you've got to you've got to stop the bleeding and then then the long game is that is the is the cdr and the carbonization and we've got to keep it on keep everyone on board we need to need to always add that in i think yeah yeah i've forgotten about his stop the bleeding analogy yeah yeah so was that what you meant um brian this one here thomas the man thomas kuhn he wrote a book called the |
| 32:34 | structure of scientific revolutions right and what we're talking about is an implementing a scientific revolution where people realize that cooling will be absolutely necessary and i think that curve we showed a few weeks ago is probably one of the best convincing aspects of that the the the uh you say the curve what the keeling curve is that no no there were um there was a graph shown a few weeks ago that showed five different interventions you know here's your life business as usual here's your life with all the renewable |
| 33:08 | energy you can imagine here's your life with uh zero carbon emissions i don't think it was done on this one of these uh things don't uh brian it was must have been something something else that was in the media or something was it done well it may have been you know prague or somewhere else but anyway we'll have to get that curve up for this group for those who are interested because until you actually got to active cooling and or methane oxidation you really didn't uh especially when you start reducing sulfate aerosols uh |
| 33:41 | because you cleaned up the uh diesel pollution um you know the heating effect of uh you know reducing the sulfur emissions is going to be really profound so you know you look at those curves like none of those are going to make a difference unless you actually get into some active cooling and i think those kind of comparative curves will go a long way towards enabling you know if we if we take thomas kuhn to heart and say we really do have to create a scientific revolution uh and he probably has a recipe in his book i haven't i need to go back and |
| 34:15 | look at it but finding those recipes here are the seven steps you have to go through to actually make this happen and here's what you have to do in sequence um that's probably what we need to analyze for that social perspective right i love it maybe we don't have to do it maybe we just need to cause it to be done maybe peter will do it for us feikowski well by the way we we do have in this country um uh sir david king you know he's very interested in iron soul aerosol and he's he's waiting waiting waiting to get our |
| 34:46 | ocean paper finished and franz tells me it's coming a lot still coming along um should have section six finish soon but i mean if that that graph sounds very interesting brian i don't know how i've managed to miss that graph um yeah i will just go through my archives because i'm sure it's sitting somewhere and uh i'll do some searching and and i'll post it here as soon as i can find it again okay great thank you very much thank you that'd be really good um okay so what else we got then um |
| 35:20 | right let's talk about this then evaluating uh and seb didn't you want to uh get feedback on your because you've got an updated c atomizer that's what the particle synthesis is about okay right okay so particle synthesis and deployment methods uh [Music] so i'm amazed that we don't have to have francie he must be having problems with this computer uh oh doug hi doug nice to see you thanks for joining us hello i was a little late sorry yeah uh okay yeah so i'm just wondering where there's a phone |
| 35:57 | friends um but i think he uh oh hi oswald hi oswald hi do you know anything about friends his problems we saw friends early and then he went away well i don't know i don't know we just chimed in right now i don't know okay all right let's see if i can see how well i can do with this then um me and john john knows a little bit about this as well um so particle synthesis and uh okay well in the uh most of you should have received the uh the update on the sedomizer paper where it's got a slide on it saying |
| 36:41 | options for airborne methane destruction i confess it only came this morning i haven't really seen it properly can you bring it up if you got it handy um seth oh not easily can you bring it you should be able to get it from from your okay uh all right if you keep talking then yep okay well i i've worked out that there are three options for oxidizing airborne methane the cheapest of which is to use the red mud waste from alumina refining and you can separate out the finer particles and add ferric chloride and spray them |
| 37:24 | out as the the particles which uh franz has worked out works best the the second way to do it is to get a purer source of iron and grind that up and do the same thing with it and the third way is to simply sublimate air ferric chloride uh uh yeah to a vapor using a pneumatic way to get them up to the crucible and what i've asked the people at cambridge to do is whether they'd be interested in evaluating which of those methods is going to work best for large-scale usage on spraying by whatever spray method which we're going which |
| 38:23 | we're going to use right we've been through this ourselves haven't we else world that's got the different methods okay well we at this stage think that the third method is probably the best um that is sublimation is that the third method yes yes but um we are not fully decided we say we as amr but france pushes us that way and he probably knows best i i'm not yeah yeah it's it's more the the engineering and cost evaluations i think plus the effectiveness of the method one method may be slightly less |
| 39:24 | effective but if it's at half the cost then you might want to still go with it so if there's one there's one parameter that is size size of particle that is about in well in my opinion about 100 times more important than all other all other parameters together so if you get if you can get to the smallest possible size of particle then that's the method i think everything else is yeah what size do you think have in mind well the smallest possible elevator 50 nanometers would be good 40 nanometers better would be 30 and i |
| 40:07 | think 20 is even better so it's always better to get smaller yeah so we have so uh we think that um so a couple of weeks a month ago we were thinking about using something like silane you know sort of silicon type methane thing or or numerous ways that you can burn either oil that's got some sort of iron compound in it um that produces um this is known to produce particles of 10 20 nanometers in diameter and then use those as condensation nuclei in a stream of iron iii chloride vapor so and that vapor could either be |
| 40:51 | produced by sublimating you know iron three chloride crystals or actually just by burning iron in chlorine burning um iron pellets in in chlorine uh that'd be very cheap to do to do that on a large scale so um but then peter farkowski seemed to get some good results simply by sublimating iron figure you just heated it up without some sort of hair dryer or something or some not exactly a hairdryer something that produced i don't know 150 degrees centigrade and uh it seemed to me to make an aerosol um and so friends was started |
| 41:26 | thinking well maybe it's just using existing uh aerosol i don't know water droplets or something in the atmosphere to to make its to make its aerosol uh because it didn't come up with great pieces of big splodges um so but whether they be small enough we don't know so there still might be we still suspect we'll need to what would be the for the form of iron that just been corroding in water uh when i imagine iron corroding now i'm getting a fe plus thing ions which are looking around for a chlorine |
| 42:02 | or something else to mate up with what about what what's that like close to where they've just corroded you probably get hydrated uh ferric oxide and a bit of ferric hydroxides but what size would it be close to the weather corrosion um you said you wanted it small i'm trying to get the size of it well the trouble is because it grows on the existing iron surface it wouldn't be a separate particle it'd be attached right so that would just look like a bit rusty bit of arm then yeah you'd have to probably need to use some |
| 42:42 | sort of mechanical means some things scrape it off there was water flowing past some some would would go into the water stream but i suspect most would stay attached to its solid solid substrate second question does anyone have any uh experience of what plutonium dioxide in the atmosphere is fine particles affected has i understand that it it can oxidize um you know vault you know volatile organic compounds pfas and a lot of smog nasties so the first method which i showed there would have a clean air effect as well as the |
| 43:35 | the icer effect which might be might be beneficial yeah france um i've just seen he sent an email to say he's had problems um needs his grandson to fix his computer um but he did some work with titanium dioxide uh sev so um i think he found that it he had problems with the apparatus or so it was either him or zech in the university but it covered the lamps ended up uh doubling in size you know because they've heated up the glass heated up um so he's tried that but i think he's fixed up on iron three chloride very chlorinated the |
| 44:20 | first method is mainly iron but there's there's a four percent titanium dioxide which might have some useful other effects well i think titanium dioxide is as a condom as a condensation nucleus nuclei formulation is good it's so that's one of the one of the ones he's considering or has considered should we say yeah i've had my hand up for a while i'm sorry back to the sublimation i i was the first to suggest to peter piekowski to use sublimation and i suggested not only sublimating it but precipitating it on |
| 44:57 | diesel part particles coming out yeah and friends like that idea yeah that's the original uh source of it i'm glad peter's been able to validate the experimental sublimation process and i think the open question is the sublimation onto diesel particles you know would go a long way towards addressing some of the small particle size requirements and uh you know it'd be quite compatible at the very top of an exhaust stack perhaps and there might be an argument for reducing pollution at the same time |
| 45:35 | yeah yeah um it would produce pollution um because it would tend to oxidize the particular you know the unoxidized diesel whatever that is particular matter um so franz likes it actually um probably more than you'd like him to like it as well i don't i don't mind at all actually um i just realized that it is a separate question from the question which one of these methods is the best because you can combine either of these methods with quantization nuclei or without so it's really two questions do we use |
| 46:17 | condensation nuclei is one very important question and which method do we use is one important question but we don't really have to sort of answer them with one answer i think it's two questions really yeah absolutely yeah we could do it in different ways yeah i think we i got a little bit stuck for a while on the thing the fact that there's sulfates naturally in bunker oil so in their fumes and they have to have at least when they're um close to land they have to switch their scrubbers on don't they |
| 46:49 | um uh sulfates sulfur dioxide scrubbers so if they have a scrubber um that if they have to to keep it on so this is the question would they keep it on in the open ocean if they're gonna have a scrubber um removing software so they're probably gonna be removing the particulates as well i don't know i don't know maybe you'd know about that brian well for us wouldn't be a relevant question because we we don't use covers we regenerate the whole earth stream and everything yeah it wouldn't it wouldn't relate to us |
| 47:28 | because that's only for the ship's solution where you added to an exhaust that's right yeah a scrubber type mechanism is interesting because it's a good way of distributing um a sublimated gas for example but i'm not sure it's necessary necessary for what uh even coverage of diesel particulates with sublimated ferric chloride not necessary no but so where i'm coming from is the imo you know the international maritime organization have a directive that ships must uh install sulfur dark side scrubbers to remove the |
| 48:12 | sulfur dioxide emission from their uh outlet and that from their yep uh certainly well i think that that's definitely near shore but whether it's far away or not i don't know i don't know i think the answer is not yet but it will be soon far away and by the way when they do scrub all that sulfur dioxide they're going to cause an enormous amount of global heating yeah that's right we've discussed this degree or one degree i can't remember i don't know but whatever it is it's |
| 48:56 | it's just crazy it's just beggar's belief really doesn't um so so but i don't know if this could affect peter's plan if they if they have to have scrubbers and they have to switch them all the time then um you're gonna he's going to is it is he maybe he's not going to have any particulates he's and he's going to have to introduce his uh the freckloid after the scrubbing process but anyway if if he was here he'd be asking us all about that so let's let's let him worry about that unless you want |
| 49:29 | to say something anton because i think you've got well if the maritime industry doesn't want to go to full-time scrubbing right maybe there's a way to um you know isa on ships could showcase the benefit of using you know and training that emissions with something more beneficial if there'd be a lot of calculations that would need to be done to verify that that's a net positive but you know maybe that's a way to get support from the maritime industry they're always up for saving money mm-hmm |
| 50:04 | yeah yeah and do some trials but um i think we're we're not too sure how well it will work with this dual use you know that the fact that you're going to have to have trained people and separate equipment on every single ship this is your point isn't it oswald well i i'm not very concerned about it because i think it will never work it will just ever work okay can't you use you can't do you use that's i'm completely convinced you can't do that okay all right i'm getting a meth uh |
| 50:39 | um you've got to go within the hour brian so thanks for that uh heads up anything else so what else um so we talked about deployment methods is that anything else for you seven no that's all for me am i showing it properly i don't think i'm showing the screen there you go yeah um okay so um brian i think this was your question why not the photo catalytic effect from water droplets it's it's a shame that we don't have franz here um i don't think i've got much more to add from what i said before |
| 51:17 | uh that it's the it's the transition from of iron iii to ion2 so here's an interesting idea steven takes uh seawater adds a bit of electric chlorination sprays it out and if you recall the electrochlorination could be in several ionic forms in the droplet one would be hclo3 minus but another might be cl minus that's a good question and then i wonder because there will be a strong interaction with uv photons what's required in order to get that cl minus from the droplet past the surface tension barrier |
| 51:57 | to the atmosphere and i think that's an open question um and you know what is the process by which it works on a spherical ferrous uh conversion you'll get a cl minus and that cl minus has to go somewhere presumably out of the droplet but how does it get past that boundary it almost seems like an analogous situation and i wonder if uh electrochlorination might be a viable approach if you go into a swimming pool you can smell chlorine so it can come out of the water i agree um and i i've been told that molecules come out |
| 52:42 | of water and the speed of rifle bullets and then go back in again because they hit another one but the stuff can come out of water and you know if we can smell chlorine and soak in the atmosphere yeah yes i think all you need is an excited state of chlorine and i wonder if a combination of electric chlorination and uv action on the small seawater droplet uh either one of those might produce uh chlorine in the atmosphere it's it's important to distinguish between a chlor chlorine atom um so a chlorine atom |
| 53:16 | uh is very energetic well it does molecule is less so as a chlorine is not a c or minus it's just a cl so um qcl doesn't it yeah but how long how's that going not long because it's very it's very reactive in the air it's a cl one yeah a single cl atom with without the extra electron um it is that's why it's so reactive because it's desperate for for that extra electron to fill its shell up so it's zero that's not a cl minus is a distinct yes right it's distinct so this little |
| 53:55 | this little circle uh in front of the cl um atom there uh is denotes that it's a radical a chlorine radical which means it's a just an atom with only seven electrons you know it's just a pure chlorine atom not a cl minus so cl minus is what you get when you react chlorine with you know sodium because the the sodium loses its electron because it's a chlorine that's an ionic reaction well why wouldn't cl minus be active uh i guess it would i don't just don't think you get it doesn't that's not what |
| 54:27 | happens uh if you can get a cl minus um great but i think it's not as it's not as reactive with methane this a c chlorine atom is known to be one of the few things that will actually uh oxidize a methane molecule in the air the cl atom is at a very high energy state and that's why it's it's so reactive the cl minus is at a fairly low energy state that's why it's not very reactive i agree also i would ask the question uh i wouldn't be surprised if a uv photon did a fine job of splitting a chlorine molecule |
| 55:05 | into two atoms yeah energetics so i mean if you have chlorine gas nearby as uh stephen has remarked in a swimming pool then it takes one of course it is harder for a photon to interact with a molecule of chlorine but certainly in a droplet you can get a pretty good absorption cross-section and uh that's where the cl yeah imagining that's where you might get a splitting taking place so anyway i'll look at some of the energetics there and let you know what i find sure yeah i think franz looked at he knows about all that and you get some um |
| 55:46 | renault talks about you do get some um but i think it's we expect to get a very high volume of chlorine atoms from an isotope do we know if we make an excited state of a seawater molecule with some electrochlorination that we wouldn't get this reaction sorry uh what are you saying a very good suggestion and that is skip the iron just go into this in the ocean electrochlorinate and spray tiny droplets and get the same effect here can we prove that doesn't work i don't know so you're saying so |
| 56:19 | electric you say when you say electrochlorination you're getting a little bit more chlorine in a sea water droplet and spray it in mcb and the chlorine goes into an excited state and that it remains for some minutes in the excited state in seawater what when you say the excite an excited state what do you mean by that the chlorine atoms in the seawater have an excited state for some minutes after electric chlorination okay what is that excited state then well it's a variety of species we can go through the detailed electrochemistry |
| 56:55 | but suffice it it's enough to kill most if not all of the microbes in seawater okay is this something you know about yep sorry there's no expendables here you can have a ship out there for years running on solar and it can do this and you never need to recharge it with anything not even iron and it's going to be politically more acceptable because you're not going to be uh facing two battles you know trying to fight a war on two fronts the anti-iron people and the anti you know marine cloud brightening people this way you |
| 57:28 | can get social acceptance much sooner because you don't raise the specter of iron yep okay um it's a shame franz isn't here to be able to answer that but uh so you're saying elect electrochlorinate yes uh sea water uh so you get chlorine an excited we state compare that to the uv excitation and see what's going to be more effective and that's something that uh photochemists should be able to tell us yeah i'm actually going to have uv is another sterilizing thing for the seawater so so i'm gonna have two kilowatts of |
| 58:10 | ultraviolet immediately by the uh the electrolysis yeah i've got four ways of sterilizing the water one is stripping the oxygen and the co2 out of it and then i'm putting it through a cavitation thing a bit like an ultrasonic cleaner and then i've got the uv and then i got the chlorine so the water that's going to be going into my filters is going to be fairly sterile i hope we don't need all four but i'm going to i've designed all four and we can put them in we'll have microbes that'll be dead they're going to |
| 58:49 | accumulate on the filter do you somehow oh the build is back flushed the filters can be backlashed every few minutes if you want very good and the water can be recirculated and i'm also putting a film of stuff called paroline on all the walls of the pipework before we could put any water in and they will seal in all the dust that's there so i'm gonna have uh trying to minimize the clogging of the filters you can clog a nozzle with something that's a tenth of the size of a nozzle you can build an arch across it |
| 59:30 | sounds right so um are you with us from minute brian are you disappearing then i should leave momentarily but let me know if you have any no okay so i mean i would quite like to go okay uh and we could call it a day there um unless anyone else wants to keep uh has things to talk about i'm really thinking what you said brian uh this thing about a scientific revolution it's it seems to me that that the media have not grasped the idea that there's there's a possibilities of cooling which wouldn't be very far away if the |
| 1:00:10 | research money was there and they just haven't realized that um the methane bomb will put the compost bomb to shame and if we get and still enough here in people then we can start talking about the actual cooling approaches and get some scientific support behind it and i think that's what we'll have to do so i think i'm going to write a short email to david king um and see if he's uh what he can accommodate with that we have we've lost uh sean and hugh for the time being no doubt they're on holiday and they said |
| 1:00:42 | it's going to all take off again um in september so um i think this is hopefully our our our low point here in august um so should we call it a day there gentlemen anyone else i mean just because stephen and bruh and brian need to go i'm i'm okay for the time being but uh maybe we've lost our uh our main people good good night stephen c in a couple of weeks sure brian i welcome cersei again soon should we should we call it a day then gentlemen okay it's fine okay yes oh yes thank you so much i'm sorry it's interrupt can i |
| 1:01:23 | just us this is tom gordon because i was in another meeting that dragged on and on and so i i really apologize but i mean i came in when you were talking about the the chlorine free radicals and uh when brian mentioned that uh you know you could do alcohol so of course altruistic water does produce all kinds of active forms of chlorine i'm not sure that it produces free radicals though i i don't know for sure brian are you aware of that because i mean the thing is i think a lot of the free radicals are produced by gas phase |
| 1:01:57 | chemistry i i could be wrong in the atmosphere i'm not sure those mechanisms so there's a for example um hclo3 minus sure b1 radical that's produced in solution and that's commonly uh done in the swing pool i suppose that's a free radical with an unpaired electrons in it it's in solution and i think it's uh it is ionized if that answers your question i just don't know much about it i'm just not sure if there's something special about gas phase chemistry that makes it more effective than water but that |
| 1:02:31 | that's those you know the question i i want to throw out i just don't know yeah i think one of the key distinctions about seawater is you've got a lot of ions running around so you have a lot of ionic exchange happening regularly whereas in the gas the lifetime of a radical will be perhaps longer because you have fewer ionized reactions per second in the atmosphere normally well um if i just talk about this briefly this how franz describes this is the chlorine radical has a very low henry's law uh |
| 1:03:08 | constant i think it's that way around we've got which means it's uh has a very strong affinity for the gas phase as as does methane and then when it uh reacts with hydrogen chloride to become hydrogen chloride that's a very strong affinity for the uh aqueous phase so it gets absorbed into this into the the sort of wet droplets so you have a solid particle it's very hygroscopic so it's always going to be a bit moist on the outside and you have these chemical reactions happening here so really franz's point is that all the |
| 1:03:40 | right things happen in the right places you know it goes back the hcl gets back in this uh in the droplet where it then reacts um re chlorinates you could say the iron compound in in the uh in the in this aqueous layer um and then oxygen also gets absorbed to oxidize re-oxidize the iron so it goes back from being a ferrous to ferric iron and so the whole thing keeps keeps um circulating so he's really saying it's the affinities that matter here that they're all they're all the right way around for |
| 1:04:16 | the thing to operate as a cyclic um in a catalytic process right so we still do we still have brian i think brian's disappeared he had to go um thanks for joining tom i'm interested just before we go good good that you could join us thomas you've done a lot of work in bio rock did you pick up a lot of professor hilbert's work in the early days you picked up on professor hilbert's uh work in the uh oh yes we were you know yes so we worked together for more than 20 years yes yes fantastic yeah how's that going is it is this any |
| 1:04:58 | is it very much buy a rock going on these days oh oh okay well yes yes that's maybe what i'm active in doing but but but um yes no no no we we are very much so i mean mainly what i've been doing is using it for ecosystem marine ecosystem restoration we are able to regenerate not just coral reefs oysters sea grasses uh salt marshes mangroves speed up the growth of all marine organs was pretty amazing so we've been focusing on the the ecological um aspects of that then we've also been focusing on adaptation to sea level rise |
| 1:05:31 | we grow back severely eroded beaches at record rates by simply growing reefs in front of them that break the wave energy before they hit the shore so that way you know they deposit sand instead of eroding it and that way we're able to turn severely eroding beaches into growing ones literally in months so that that physical benefits we've done a fair bit on but it's very difficult to get approval because what people know is throwing concrete and rocks in the water it's never worked uh ever in history it |
| 1:06:00 | almost fails but you know everyone guarantees the next one will so he's been locked into that that shell game um the other thing we're working on though and actually the meeting i was just in is we're actually also working on on on producing you know carbon removal moving materials the thing with the biorock is that you know precipitating limestone and seawater is a source of co2 to the atmosphere although it's a sink of bicarbonate from the ocean and that's something a lot of people have gotten mistaken but what the |
| 1:06:32 | biorock process does is you know of course there's an anodic and a cathodic reaction that that are opposing in in many ways so so one of them is generating acidity or this generating alkalinity and so one of them in effect is a source of co2 but the other is an effective sink of co2 once that that acidity gets neutralized it gets produced with the other electrode so you know you can't just look at the limestone deposition alone i mean fundamentally it's it's co2 neutral when you look at the reactions in both of the |
| 1:07:03 | electrodes so in a sense we're able to produce limestone material that's harder than concrete that that um you know it is an effect co2 neutral as we did we see it in fact slightly co2 negative because because of the reactions that take place with chlorine at the the chloride ion because some of the electrons wind up reacting with chloride and making chlorine and some hypochloric acid and stuff like that too but hypochlorous acid but but um and those those don't result in in the production of of hydrogen ions |
| 1:07:38 | those reactions so so in a sense those those wind up um making the the net reaction net alkalinizing but but small but in in addition we're also exploring producing other minerals that can absorb co2 directly from seawater throughout trousers so we are busy with that there's been no funding but we are working hard on it have you had any success in building materials from the sea i mean i'm interested as an architect i mean the concept of putting a low voltage charge with solar through through steel and and growing building |
| 1:08:14 | materials is pretty interesting yes well yes sorry no that's that's yeah with the you know what we produce depends on the conditions that we grow it under and so you know we've got one end members to grow it very slowly and very hard and that way we produce material that's typically two to three times harder than concrete in terms of bearings i mean it's like you know limestone that the pyramids are made from it has got a lot of experience working with that and you know different forms of it |
| 1:08:48 | of course um but then then um well you know so we're producing the limestone but we can also grow it very quickly then we wind up producing magnesium minerals soft those have other properties so you know they're not structurally strong but they have other other very useful properties so we're working on those as well um there's some interesting sort of visionary concepts of building cities in the ocean that professor hilbert's came up with originally well yes i mean there's some element of science fiction |
| 1:09:20 | there wolf's idea was actually not so much to build cities in the sea because that that's what you know people took got got off on but really his idea was to produce building materials for making buildings on land to produce blocks and walls and arches and all of that but the difficulty with that is to get the material that's very hard we have to go at no no more than one to two centimeters a year and you know most most people don't want to wait a couple years for a wall that thick you know so |
| 1:09:48 | so um you know that was a problem but but in fact um you know we produce about a kilogram of material per kilowatt hour of electricity and so basically the cost of the material depends on the local cost of electricity in most tropical countries you know we pay through the nose for electricity because it's ridiculous when people pay on islands i mean you know you can't believe it so so you know in that case it might even be effective to import cement from the other side of the world if you have high electricity but if you have cheap |
| 1:10:17 | electricity locally you can produce material that i think is a lot cheaper than portland cement and harder in a lot of places i put together a a competition proposal for a for a centre for biomimicry a few years ago and the roof was going to be made up of tiles which were growing from the sea from sheets of of steel that were you know growing the bio rock on them and then became the tiles on the roof so yeah i don't know where that would have been they would probably have been covered in barnacles as well but |
| 1:10:48 | it was it was one of those ideas that was out there well yeah it depends on that of work you go on under yes well i don't want to i i know if the meeting has said i don't want to drag it on but but yes there's a lot of interesting stuff to do um i mean the biology you know the thing is we're producing minerals by electrolysis but we're also producing even more about biology and so there's a bit of a competition there but you know if you if you do it in the dark then you you get rid of the biology |
| 1:11:15 | [Laughter] interesting stuff well some of it yeah yeah of course you should talk further offline but it's interesting it does have some overlapped climb with what we're talking about here that's that's right they're definitely co2 sync applications and we are working on them as you know we need to push all of them we need to push all of them and uh you know i certainly hope um you know you can get something going with the iron salt i'm i'm not i want to see experimental results obviously you know |
| 1:11:48 | yeah so do we we want to see experimental results as well so that's that's so crucial to have that you know otherwise it's it's a feasibility argument you know exactly yeah yeah so thank you i'm very uh thank you thomas great grateful for you joining us obviously we see your emails a great deal and i think you see you know i send some occasionally and you know after three years there comes a point where you know let's actually talk a little bit because yeah otherwise it's just uh you |
| 1:12:17 | know i think i'm a bit uh what's the word antagonistic or i think i have been and i don't think that's a good long term you know we we want to sort of recognize each other as all of us um as we all really want the same thing at the end of it um a sustainable planet or something like that that's how i put it everyone has a different way of describing it um and we want to er our efforts to to add you know to multiply uh ideally and and not um subtract you look at the the grand total it seems to me the grand |
| 1:12:54 | total intelligence of all the clever people all around the world in terms of climate action is about zero no the effect is zero yes yes sorry for that yep sorry i interrupted you again now it's a disaster what's happening there's no question about it i mean we just just hope something happens in glasgow that uh that you know governments get serious at last but up to now they've just been you know uh promoting business as usual i think the politicians they what they understand is political success political failure and political |
| 1:13:32 | success and so they want to come out of the you know the risk for them is is a political failure at these uh meetings at the cop meeting and so you know if there isn't any sort of agreement then that's a failure but if there's a good agreement you know and everybody's slapping each other on the back and saying hey you know we're gonna we're gonna solve this this is all gonna all gonna turn out well then that's a political success but they don't really understand i don't think |
| 1:13:55 | they just grasp the physical world yeah it seems like the ex what what you know an exponential growth is like you know they just don't grasp that um yes they're vitally important part of the process but the other thing is they so i've been saying this earlier in the meeting and so there's there's long-term cooling by uh reducing emissions and and greenhouse gas drawdown except it would probably wouldn't be long term because we have tipping points kicking in um you know warming induced emissions |
| 1:14:27 | forest fires and all sorts of things and then there is actual cooling that can happen well tomorrow if it's there you know if we could make if we could brighten some marine clouds um or you know and so forth um there's actual physical cooling where the ocean goes down in temperature next year and and then the year after and then the year after and politicians haven't been made aware of this it's just and because part of the reason is because as soon as anybody um for example uh hugh hunt from cambridge wanted two bath loads of water |
| 1:15:04 | he wanted to spray them up in the air um to see what the aerosol would happen and it all got stopped and his funding was withdrawn because he had the you know temerity to intend to cool the planet without drawing down you know without reducing emissions so we're saying we need both of course you need to reduce emissions and we're going to need some cdr as well but what about that cooling you know and and what brian van hersen says is you know what about the million species at risk that don't get to vote you know |
| 1:15:40 | and it's my observation that you have these people saying don't you dare do something that's going to cool the planet because that gives a get out of jail free card to the evil fossil fuel companies that just want to carry on pumping co2 in here but when you look at the growth in emissions it's people lifting themselves out of poverty in east asia a lot of them in china and and other asian countries that's where the growth in emissions and and they're they're planning 600 cold front new coal-fired power |
| 1:16:07 | stations so you know we can have a few plants that are pulling co2 out of the atmosphere for a hundred dollars a ton but what's the point you know um so this is where where i come from so the the politicians need to be that they need to be better informed they need to have because they can only operate with the choices they're not most of them are not engineers they're not or scientists and they rely on the scientific community to to know what the options are and if they're told by ipcc or whoever it is that you know these are |
| 1:16:39 | these are the only options yeah and i've not been i've i've been ill informed i've read this from susan solomon she sent it in the last week saying that because there's this thing about baked in warming you know if you have a certain amount of co2 in the atmosphere it's just going to keep warming the planet until it gets down to until we can get suck it down back down to 350 or something and she's saying no no no no as soon as you stop emitting co2 the warming stops because of these other |
| 1:17:09 | processes because the ocean of naturally absorbing co2 so i'm i'm finding even today you know my understanding keeps changing about what's what can and can't be done but yeah you know i i don't think that can be right because there's still the thermal inertia of all that excess heat that's already in the ocean you know that she's she's saying solomon is saying we're just the thermal inertia just keeps it the same you know it just stays the same it doesn't it doesn't doesn't |
| 1:17:34 | keep rising so i had thought that if you if you stop emitting co2 and and it stays at whatever it is 412 parts per million that the oceans would carry on warming because the energy imbalance remains but what she's saying is no they wouldn't keep warming they just stay the same temperature i'm i'm very confused by that argument i mean she certainly is i mean i have a paper that she's an author on sitting here that says you know that that sea level rises and ice melting of antarctica is going to keep going for a thousand years |
| 1:18:04 | you know um yeah but yeah so how she can reconcile that with there being no thermal inertia in the ocean that doesn't make sense she's a very good physicist she's she's not saying there's no thermal inertia she's not saying there's no thermal inertia tom she's not saying there's no thermal in the nurse she's just saying that the the temperature would become would stop rising the the the the thermometer would just keep it the same but it would stop rising that's what is |
| 1:18:31 | what well that's what i understand has to be saying with this paper now which paper is that that you're referring to this is uh matthews i'm send it i can um send it send you okay i mean i think that's something you know the one i have here is one that was in nature recently uh this is the paris climate agreement future sea level rise in antarctica well she's she's not on oh this this is actually you know this paper here um in nature in may this this year basically says you know it's just going to keep on melting |
| 1:19:07 | right well okay i think she's not saying that the ice wouldn't stop melting she's just saying the temperature wouldn't increase so it's just yes oh well yes yeah but i think people are taking that to say that they're not going to be any long-term consequences you know that well yes that's right and uh i mean certainly that's not going to be true for sea level rise i i can't see how that's possible for temperature either frankly i i you know but i mean she's she's a she's a very |
| 1:19:34 | clever physicist there's no questions i actually wouldn't yeah you're not going to make an elementary mistake no well if i it's a very fundamental question isn't it it is yeah i mean surely we can get this one right i would have hoped so yeah yeah i don't know personally although i mean her office was 10 minutes walk from my house but i had never actually met her i'm curious what she thinks about that you know well no i might just close you know right now you know because of colby oh |
| 1:20:06 | of course yeah but yeah i mean i actually yes i'm sending that paper because i i'm i'm baffled by that claim i've been having a long argument with andrew lockley about exactly this issue you know uh about whether warming will suddenly stop when when net zero is achieved i i you know i i take the same view that um alcohol rolling takes if this is you know you can't ignore the thermal inertia of the ocean thermal inertia just means it's it takes a lot of energy to change the temperature doesn't it yes yes that's |
| 1:20:41 | right but it also means that that you see there's all this excess heat that's disappeared into the ocean is going to come back in 1500 years as it goes down you mean it goes down and it comes up down and eventually it's going to come back up you know right now we have about a 1500 year time constant frozen circulation there's no getting around that that's that's why why global temperature lags behind global co2 by a couple thousand years systematically because of because that ocean mixing |
| 1:21:09 | effect and this is fundamental physics you can't get around i i don't see how it can be argued away yeah you know she's not arguing for that she's just saying it wouldn't change it wouldn't keep increasing she's just saying it would just stay the same there wouldn't be uh there wouldn't be that energy imbalance anymore if co2 stays the same well i find that i'm just like you i find it hard to understand hard to believe i understand yeah i mean send me the link sometimes or do you |
| 1:21:37 | know the paper said on vr didn't you on the cdr side i don't know i've been away and she she okay on the cdr side because that that is that is very very relevant okay i'll do i'll do that i'll put it on there i mean alcoholic has the same point of view that i do here's a book coming out in oxford university press that's going to be out in about a month or two on on a lot of this is it's pretty good i mean he's done a very thorough job in that book i i got to review it for for |
| 1:22:08 | oxford university press so um but you know he seems to have thought about pretty much every he doesn't he doesn't get into iron aerosol so he backs off on that one what are your general thoughts on iron salt aerosol and tom well i i i've you know read some of your materials and uh um i'm very intrigued but i'd like to see experimental evidence that it behaves the way that you say do you mean in the ocean or the atmosphere or both well both yeah yeah i mean it seemed to me that you need need |
| 1:22:39 | some proof that uh you know some experimental evidence yes behavior that i have i'm not i have to look back at what you said but uh i mean i'd love to see that there that that would i think make the case one way or another yeah i mean the conclusion we've come to is uh the main one is that there's a much bigger danger of deoxygenation in the ocean than of acidification we don't think acidification will do that much harm but the deoxygenation with iron salt aerosol if we do if we do too much of it iron |
| 1:23:10 | salt uh fertilizing the ocean um then it goes you know as you know as i'm sure you'd say it sinks down and it oxidizes the thing to remember though though i mean is that that a lot of that's dependent on changes in ocean circulation they have changed dramatically in the past so that that affects oxygenation a great deal i mean there's no no you know first of all we're no risk of running out of oxygen in the air that's not i mean i don't mean the air i mean i mean the ocean but in the ocean some places but |
| 1:23:42 | that's because of changes of restricted circulation if circulation changes by only a small amount you could have very dramatic effects on on on surface atmosphere ocean surface atmosphere fluxes of heat heat as well as co2 that could you know with a change in in ocean circulation regimes yeah the non-linear change happens a lot of those bets could be off and that's very worrying and friends is particularly worried about that yeah wally broker was constantly going on about that you know i mean he got you |
| 1:24:16 | know i i heard him talk about the stuff going back since the 70s you know and he would all it always used the same phrase i got a little tired but because you'd always use exactly the same phrase but say you know the climate is an angry beast and were poking at it with sticks you know he wouldn't go further than that but he was trying to imply that there could be potentially violent and unanticipated non-linear responses you know yeah i i think uh people need this uh these analogies because they just haven't |
| 1:24:47 | it's it's difficult to explain but i mean it's stratification as well isn't it from the from the warming that in the ocean that the oxygen doesn't get in and then if we have too much uh product productivity at the surface and going down and oxidizing then it uses up the oxygen as it just as it goes down it simply just rots away it oxidizes what that's what organic carbon does it oxidizes in there can happen the main changes we're doing we're doing about that by basically killing coastal ecosystems with |
| 1:25:16 | nutrients so that that's still most of the the uh you know deoxygenation we're getting is in shallow coastal waters on the bt but you know as i say there are times in the password ocean circulation has dramatically changed and where the whole ocean went anoxic pretty much you know except for the very surface layer that was when mixed with oxygen and uh yeah that that could happen again and then then of course your co2 goes away but it takes a couple hundred thousand years you know yeah yeah yeah yeah so |
| 1:25:45 | the other thing that franz is talking about now is making sap repel so as a way of um drawing down huge amounts of co2 yes i missed this discussion on that i mean the fact is that any any form of carbon you make that is very resistant and put in a place where it takes a long time to decompose is going to be a big benefit the problem is that there are all these people peddling you know fertilizing surface waters with nitrogen and phosphorus and making phytoplankton blooms and then claiming that carbon's gone forever |
| 1:26:14 | that's that really is but getting it down to the bottom in a form that's uh let's say you know like biochar or forms but you know the best place to do it is to bury it in anoxic muck and that that's where it preserves but the fact is you know about half of all the organic carbon barrel in the ocean happens in coastal shallow coastal sediments that happens in right next to the shore it doesn't happen in the deep ocean yeah and yeah we know this yeah we can affect we were having the wrong effect on it |
| 1:26:48 | now because we're destroying those ecosystems but if we were to grow them back seriously we we could switch that balance back in the right direction that's that's an interesting thought yes you see sequestering the seaweed of course the seaweed to the deep ocean and it's there for thousands of years that i mean that's what brian's work is pretty much well yes you can but you see my alternative suggestion to that is to grow mangroves to grow mangrove peat and you can sequester carbon at much greater density |
| 1:27:19 | more quickly and probably at lower cost you know but you know that that is that's that's another alternative i mean the dynamics of working the coastal zones a lot faster than working at the bottom of the deep sea for sure you that's something we're working on i mean we're working on really trying to accelerate the growth of marine plants in order to store carbon in shallow marine sciences you're looking at seagrasses as well yes yes yes i mean i i use electricity to stimulate seagrass growth like i can |
| 1:27:55 | grow seagrass from a rock which no one else can yeah because we get we get such prolific root growth it actually attaches and you know you create a whole little mini ecosystem and the electricity is the key you're speeding up the growth and uh so that that that way i mean we think there's a lot that can be done with regenerating these ecosystems we've destroyed about half of them worldwide you know they've been having have you have you engaged with uh peter mccready at deegan university he's an expert in |
| 1:28:26 | seagrasses there's a lot of work in seagrasses yes no no i haven't no i know the name i know the name no i i've just you know i've just the work that i've done is in indonesia jamaica bahamas panama mexico places like that and these are just small experiments that we do but we haven't worked with other seagrass people at all as a matter of fact yeah um so they're not aware of what we do but but the thing is this is there are lots of people trying to plant these ecosystems the name of blue carbon the |
| 1:28:58 | problem is it's very easy to get little plants and stick them in the mud and you walk away and you say i planted a thousand of them and you walk away and then what happens is the waves wash away before the roots can grow so almost all those projects are actually failures you know people make huge claims of success but you come back a year later and there's usually nothing to see for it so so that that's that's where there's a lot of you know inaccurate claims being made by those people now we think we can |
| 1:29:26 | get around that because we're speeding up the underground growth a great deal the the the root growth of these plants as well as the above ground you've secured carbon credits security got we haven't got into that i mean the carbon credits thing is a bit of a mess because as i say people are are peddling credits regardless of how long they lost you know i mean that that use it but but i mean definitely the longer the carbon stays out of circulation the better the better it is for the climate you know so |
| 1:30:00 | you might be able to claim carbon credits tom um you know you can prove because that people have been getting carbon credits for for trees yes they're all going up in smoke now yeah well we've never gotten into that i mean i i think there isn't an accepted carbon credit mechanism for accounting for carbon you know i i think the problem is people aren't taking the lifetime of the carbon into accounts like confusing short-lived stuff with long-lived carbon right well somebody needs to say something about and once again the |
| 1:30:27 | politicians you know if they could have a political win you know by putting money towards this your sort of project um where it's sustained you know where the carbon it doesn't it can't go up and smoke it's in in the coastal water yeah well you know andrew locklear has been after me to finish up this paper that i wrote wrote a couple months ago and it got bounced several places they refused to review it but basically just pointing out that without taking the lifetime of carbon sources and sinks |
| 1:30:54 | into account uh you know into consideration accounting properly but basically every every journal we sent it to refuse to review it well so just another thought there's a bbc uh lady that i've been put in touch with every time i speak to her she says well have you got something we can take that we can film and uh my answer is well no not really come to my office and it's nothing to see so if you've got something that a crew could could actually take some footage of tom you know this is what kids are looking for isn't it yeah well |
| 1:31:34 | we we can but we don't have any carbon numbers because you know the thing is here's our problems we work without funding so we have no laboratory or equipment you know so we we can't effectively make measurements except with what we can see with our eyes and photograph well if you had a bit of money couldn't you oh well that's not the world i live in unfortunately a world with plenty of money flowing in your direction yes no well i mean the thing the thing is i you know i i'm optimistic let me just say this on a |
| 1:32:06 | slightly different note i mean i've been working to help set up the new un blue climate fund which is going to be announced hopefully in glasgow and help with the u.n in a couple months there's never been any mechanism for funding these kinds of projects anywhere in the world you know that the u. |
| 1:32:26 | n set up the green climate fund a number of years ago that's that's specifically for helping developing countries with things like tree planting but there's never been a blue equivalent well that that's now about to be addressed and so the u.n green climate fund is setting up the u.n blue climate fund and that's going to be supposedly announced at the u. |
| 1:32:45 | n and in the next month of the month after and that they're getting in a network of private investors who want to be energy investors but they obviously want to return on their money so that's what they want to see see proof but but um these are net networks in geneva paris and new york and the these are very big players so they're they're this is going to be announced the next few months so we hope that by next year there will be serious funding available for blue climate projects you know and hopefully that will be defined in the |
| 1:33:18 | broadest possible way that will include some of the things we're talking about i i mean i'd certainly hope you get money to test siren salt aerosols uh steven salter gets gets to you know spray salt in the air and uh particularly over the arctic and all that and uh you know i i'm i'm glad to see peter wadhams is in support of of uh of that idea and uh you know um we need to push very heavily for that in glasgow very heavily for all of the things that were underplayed in ipcc ipcc did ignore an awful lot of stuff i |
| 1:33:54 | mean i i think you know i haven't heard peter watson's comment on i'm about to post something i was meant to do it today but you know because they left coral reefs out as usual you know they ignored the fact that they've killed most of them already so they're lumped together with those possible future impacts not already dead you know so for me that that's an unforgivable sin but they left out a lot of other things that they simply didn't want to consider and you know peter wadhams has a very strong point of view |
| 1:34:20 | that they've ignored the polarized feedbacks and um you know he he he doesn't take uh biochar and rock powder and all these other things as seriously as i do uh his view is that really albedo modifications sort of the only last hope for that um you know that that's peter what i'm saying i've got a lot of respect for him you know i hope he speaks up on that yeah i hope so i hope so too yeah yeah doug anything to add not good to see you yeah doug's your campaigner and your uh bernie sanders isn't it or people close |
| 1:35:02 | to him yeah i'm in burnley country but the problem there is that the person who was his uh energy and climate advisor left after five years and went to work for ro khanna who's a representative in california where i'm we're in the next county over so my contact with bernie is gone and the person who took her place is from climate exchange which is all about a carbon fee and reduction of emissions none of this other stuff that we're talking about so i have to start over um so i'm just i'm deliberating you know |
| 1:35:37 | what what is the right right approach and we're talking about that on this other this other group you know keep looking you will find never never never never give up never give up that's it yes yeah well gentlemen we've had on 95 minutes um it's been great to see you tom after all this going yeah great to enjoy the call tom yeah come down under some time and if you break the border controls we'd love to get you involved in some projects down here too are you not working yes and i'm working i'm working with |
| 1:36:11 | brian the climate foundation we've got some interesting yes yes good kelp and seaweed projects underway as well yes well you know i've known brian for many years but i i had not had a chance to talk with him about his latest stuff so for a couple years so we uh he's on the call elliot yes i know he is i know i i know he was and i've stayed at his house and he stayed at my house but but i've not run it for about two years so we're we have to catch up yes i know he's up to a lot of stuff |
| 1:36:41 | i mean definitely i think the upwelling modification definitely has a lot of potential it has to be handled very carefully because of the nutrients so you know location all that but uh you know i'd like to talk to him a bit more about that i did try to help him about 10 years ago setting up an artificial bowling project in panama and you know we we never got any place for the usual wrong reasons but yeah i think there's there is potential there and um you know obviously changing circulation rates of the ocean |
| 1:37:11 | is going to change the heat balance very dramatically if we can big trouble if the gulf stream suddenly slows right down we're in big trouble aren't we well that's right but you know the things one is that there's been a bit of stuff about that recently but it's it's important to recognize the gulf stream is driven by the rotation of the earth okay you know that's the key thing as long as the earth spins there's going to be a full screen you know these other factors will determine where it flows to |
| 1:37:45 | but in fact i mean the the prospect of the gulf stream slowing down and stopped flowing is not going to happen unless you restore spinning okay so it's not just a thermal thing then of course of you know bright thinking there's a real dynamic component to it too yes i didn't know that that's a relief yes yes that that is so so um you know that there's uh carl once who's one of the world's top physical oceanography he just thinks that the whole claim is total and he says oh these are |
| 1:38:18 | people they're just just inter misinterpreting short-term numbers you know carl wants uh you know once he's he's a professor at mit and he's he's he's you know i regard him as probably the world's top physical oceanographer in ocean education i was a former student of this i don't always agree with him i got to tell you that but but um he's he's a real purist about mathematical modeling and non-linearities but basically he thinks that a lot of stuff that people say about circulation is is just based on |
| 1:38:50 | misinterpretation of short-term data that doesn't can't be physically sound that's his interpretation so what he's saying that the gulf stream is is driven by the earth's uh spin partly well i think he i yes i i think i as i recall i've heard him say that but i mean that that argument comes from henry stommel who was his teacher henry stoneman was the great physical ocean of the woods who i also knew pretty well and also walter monk who i knew very well who just died a a few years ago so |
| 1:39:21 | these were the people who kind of established the uh you know the dynamic circulation of the ocean in terms of how the earth location affected it yeah i'll i'll have a look at that you know i'm learning to be a scientist tom which is to be skeptical about everything yes but you have to come down on one side at some point yeah you're saying let's hope the moon's not going anywhere soon too the moon will be sticking around for a while too won't it i'm sorry we need that for need that for |
| 1:39:52 | our tides it's not gonna fly off to venus or somewhere no that's right it's not not happening anytime soon john i'm sure no that's right all right gentlemen so in a couple of weeks same same again 30th of august if that's good for you good see you see you then and i'll send you that paper tom yeah thank you yes thank you so much yes bye everybody thanks thanks you're welcome john see you tomorrow morning cheers tom all the best bye yes good meeting you |