| (Click on a 'Start Time' to view the video) |
| 00:00 | uh so i'm yeah so i'm i'm um uh originally founder and chairman of ameg which is the arctic methane emergency group uh i i'm a computer engineer designer system designer and i realized there's something wrong with the ipcc treatment of positive feedback and the arctic was in a was full of feedback particularly the albedo so i teamed up with peter waddens who's the top expert on arctic sea ice and stephen salter who's here and we had a we we had a brainstorming session all that and uh we had a an agreement that |
| 01:02 | something had to be done and we tried writing to heads of state without uh much response but um you never so i've been working on this kind of the arctic is key to climate change uh ever since we now started a new group called the planetary restoration action group prague for short it started as polar restoration and it's broadened out a bit so our our aim is to find means to restore the planet to [Music] as close as possible to late holocene norms by norms of pre-industrial or thereabouts so that's what i'm about um anton was |
| 02:01 | you yeah i'm anton alphanus i started a company called aqua vedic labs about four years ago um we do uh some engineering consultancy work and we've got a number of internal initiatives around cdr and particularly around the ocean stuff and i've been trying to help clive out with a few things and so he invited me to this meeting this is my second meeting with you all and i think i think by my if my memory serves me i like john i'm a bass player a double bass player yeah i'm a double bass player cellist |
| 02:48 | and double bass player there you go oh well that's amazing coincidence i'm glad you've just mentioned musical instruments uh because my excuses i was playing the piano i forgot the time so sorry folks but i see that you're all talking to each other which is very good and you don't need me do you of course we do uh i hope you don't because if i don't go under a bus tomorrow that means that's the end of the world isn't it so that's uh what about daniel i know what about that started on |
| 03:24 | introductions yes you keep going with that john you're doing very well and i'm looking for bits and pieces to display so you can keep going i i haven't met daniel before i don't think and we haven't met lyft before i think yes i think daniel is working with cambridge isn't that right daniel and you spoke to us a few weeks ago about ice the ice shields yeah i've been working on ice shields with the center for climate repair and i'm a second year engineer at cambridge as well excellent |
| 04:00 | well we wanted we wanted younger we want younger people to join this as well as us old east well we call ourselves oldest east day someone's older and older than others but we're starting to feel our age and we know that there needs to be young young lots of more young people such as yourself daniel so if you can encourage your friends and colleagues or whatever you call them associates to join then uh you know and i you might have seen i sent out another tranche any another uh set up to another set of |
| 04:29 | invitees um suggested by stephen so uh yeah anything to add about the work on so i tell you what before you do that so let's start we've also got beth oh do we see beth yes hello beth hi yeah um so yeah just a quick intro so i'm one of uh the center for client repair cambridge's interns um this summer so i've been working on marine cloud brightening um just doing a literature review and so recognizing a lot of names from papers i've read um so it's nice to finally put faces to names and i'm |
| 05:11 | saying here as engineering as um daniel so excellent thank you very much beth and welcome um well um so i'm usually quite good at some of these things but um so let's start so let's start with the way we usually start which is to get uh to have some agenda so we know what we're going to be talking about would we have a an update from the ccrc folk on what's happening there very good idea update from ccrc i'd actually like to give an update on ice shield stuff as well because i finished my project this friday |
| 05:59 | okay so ice shields at least would there be anything for you to so you've talked about uh a literature review beth is there anything to mention about that at all um i'm sure it's all stuff you've heard before um so i'm happy to give a quick overview of what i've been doing currently but it depends okay so just let's have an overview from beth that's i mean some of us are not that's not so familiar with it so um a reminder wouldn't go miss i don't think okay i'd like to talk about um |
| 06:35 | the way carbon dioxide is absorbed into the ocean uh because everybody says phytoplankton absorbs co2 from the atmosphere which i don't think it does it absorbs bicarbonate from the ocean which introduces a reduced partial pressure at the surface of the ocean and that's why co2 gets absorbed into the ocean and so anyway so let's just say some things about that um i want to talk about bicarbonate transistors are you there france okay okay because i talked this is a thing that goes back and forth between |
| 07:07 | me and um friends so and with respect to upwelling so i had got a bit of a question about that uh brian's got your hand raised brian greetings yeah i wanted to mention a couple of things but go ahead with your question first well no this is uh i'm filling in the agenda here so we'll get i'd like to get to that so that's from clive what i'd like to add is um that we've got a bit of funding and need to do some experimental design on this uh sinking of seaweed carbon in the abyssal ocean |
| 07:43 | and then you know um is there any data that we could get that would really help to validate the fate of remineralized carbon in the abyssal ocean could we use tracers um i'm thinking of ways that we would perhaps collect some data that would support the uh long sequestration time of abyssal ocean carbon and the long time immediate to medium outcropping long median time to outcropping of those waters back to um the atmosphere but um victor schmittercheck have you talked to him talk to him about it um well i would like i have not discussed |
| 08:33 | in detail and i'd like to um i think there's some we have to make the case for abyssal time scales and a lot of it can be done from physical oceanography but um you know we're applying for some research grants and i'd like to try to identify what are the highest risk highest technical risk um questions about the abyssal sinking the sinking of seaweed and either in bales or not in bales to the seafloor and then the time scale for that remineralized carbon to return to the surface so if you're interested in brainstorming |
| 09:14 | that yeah uh friends will you have things to say about that about uh the um [Music] you know the the uh possible sulfurization of that friends yes i i think uh if it is possible to do the thinking of seaweed or or what else is done without remineralization uh by oxidizing only in part by surface and producing sulfurized organics which are rather oxidation stable and produce separable so yes you we don't need uh |
| 10:20 | then in that case uh a remineralization and also we could uh produce uh necessity instead of uh acidity yeah okay right thank you friends thank you so we can um maybe let's come back to them that i'm making that so thanks if you've answered my question i i thought that would be the answer or the comment at least time scale for abyssal so we talked about remineralization um uh perhaps i put remineralization there as well um but uh so we know what we're talking about and uh so do you have to leave early today |
| 11:05 | brian um i i don't think so i'm checking my calendar now great okay so uh that should be interesting this is what this is our in the last few months and it's not um we'd like to think that we came up with the idea but actually it's from other scientists uh hulse uh scientific paper um uh talking about and others uh raven is another one yeah about this uh sulfurization it's where oil comes from today except that it happened millions of years ago over a very long period of time it turns into oil but it starts off as black sap |
| 11:44 | repel sediment um and and that's the reason why it's still available millions millions of years later for us to dig up and refine for ourselves is because it doesn't oxidize and also produce today yeah it's not it's a natural process so this is all that stuff we've been seeing about oh dear we can't do nature based well we're thinking well i hope you can because nature does a very good job of in this case using a hugely abundant sulfate in the ocean so the question is how do you do that so |
| 12:17 | let's wait wait until we get to that so okay um so update for ccrc this will hold this thing about the the ocean again um anything else um i did circulate a paper about hurricanes which yes yes you did um yeah so that's what i was thinking of showing so let's uh hurricanes yeah um okay paper distributed around the group uh yeah and um i had a brief look at it and i thought um yep so let's show that with them so sorry folks i forgot the time very bad very bad person um but um so i'll i'll find that and bring |
| 13:08 | it up we'll have a look at it and we can send it out to everybody yep it's actually written also online before harvey but i i haven't named any names but the the algebra is still the same i hope anyone say what the mistakes are i've invited people to say uh you made this it should be cubed there or um i i don't think you can accept this number but no one's give come back to me to to challenge them right uh this is it here isn't it did anyone see that there's some nice pictures uh intensity versus i thought this was a |
| 13:44 | rather uh dramatic picture showing hurricanes just looking at your agenda that's why oh you're not looking at the right thing picture yeah how about that that that's the way they track yeah interesting they don't get nearer than seven degrees to the equator so there's a great band of no hurricanes yes south america doesn't have any of them is that because of the cold currents do you think i guess so you've got the um that uh one going up past namibia could you could you just show them |
| 14:25 | quickly whitney and hogwarts um is that this paper no other way i think oh absolutely to the top yeah this one here that's right there yeah that that's plotting the intensity of a hurricane which you measure by wind speed and pressure drop and then the dots are the sea surface temperatures and the the theory is that we can drop it by two two degrees so that you turn a five into a two or right so it comes down kind of comes down like this yeah to two degrees and uh so you're missing out this whole you can't stop |
| 15:06 | one tomorrow if you want to do that you're too late you should have started last november and we keep track of the temperatures and have more or less treatment we can't promise no hurricanes but we can say we'll try and get this pattern of sea surface temperatures and you pass according to how well we how close we get to them but we never say no more hurricanes so what did you say you pay us according to how close the idea is that the government's own hurricane affected area would agree between them the pattern of |
| 15:40 | sea surface temperature that they think would be acceptable they want some because they get a lot of water rain water from those from tropical storms basically if you can get it down to 24.5 we'll pay you so many uh so much so we need to first of all tell them that there's a deal available and then get them to look at it right now we would move the fleets around according to how close we were to the trajectory that we were trying to aim for yeah okay so there's technical ways of dealing with it you move your fleet |
| 16:18 | but no no no one could risk being sued because there was a hurricane they promised wouldn't be one yeah that's a just completely unacceptable risk especially when there's americans around yeah okay so it has to be and you can't see it they love suing people yeah i think they're not the only ones um i i hear about other people that have to do that too um but fair enough stephen okay yeah so so okay so so beth have you seen this yeah i think i've been sent it i i haven't read through it in great detail |
| 16:52 | but i did look over the and the the missing the missing hurricanes over south america was interesting yeah so great good and i'm just mindful that uh you know you've had to start with that i mean this is hopefully a fairly small thing um you know the the host was late because of playing the musical instrument so this let this be a message to you youngsters that us oldies you know before it gets really nasty we'll be dead you know so you need to you know study this so you're in the right place um and we're here to help |
| 17:28 | so please do you know i'm i'm trying to make a joke of it actually i'm laying it on thick um anyway so let's move on let's move on this is uh nobody's laughing at that joke hi anything else for our agenda could we just uh discuss the different methods of droplet production for marine cloud brightening as well methods of droplet droplet production yes okay so i think we've got kind of two parts of our meeting company so methods that's production yep okay so there's been a lot of discussion |
| 18:14 | about that um we haven't so i've got a sort of tentative uh sean fitzgerald i think he's busy and everything um i'm hope hoping that that shawn and do beth and uh daniel do you know anything about about uh hugh hunt and sean fitzgerald if we're likely to see them again in the near future um i know that he's currently in normandy um and sean has been off the pat on holiday for the past week so i don't know whether because it's technically bank holiday here they might still be off today but you might see them in a |
| 18:48 | couple of weeks fair enough okay but i think both myself and daniel work fairly closely especially with you so um can see them around excellent stuff oh great i mean they they were regular well hughes was a regular attendee and then uh we changed the day so that sure sean could make it um but i do understand it's bank holiday it's in its holiday time anyway um okay thank you something else for the agenda anyone yes yes please um i i would like to uh very interested in the way phytoplankton produced dns |
| 19:26 | and wonder whether that could be a way of helping to cool the planet we think it is um we're not sure we don't up to now friends i'm not avail i'm not aware that we're we have any way to get them to produce dms other than to have them be that get them to be there in the first place to my my uh flakes doesn't does that yeah i've got a little bit more interested in buoyant flakes um so let's mention boy and flakes so i'd like to mention that so let's put that here um sorry brian i'm not meaning to put |
| 20:07 | yours off right off the end we definitely do do want to talk about that uh buoyant flex i want to mention our um c mount release as well uh c mounts c mount release idea because uh that doesn't disturb the bicarbonate gradient in in the water and neither do buoyant flakes so that's where i'm coming from so but we'll get to that anything else for anyone all right so that was all right so i think that's plenty then that's john this is all brian okay so um let's have the update from ccrc please can we start with daniel |
| 20:59 | sure yeah um so yeah i just really wanted to sum up a few things that i found during my project i'll try not to ramble on a bit too much okay but yeah so i have a i have a model for the freezing rate along an ice volcano as a function of time and distance along the slope and i had a bit of trouble getting getting a numerical solution for it so unfortunately i can't really say quite as much as i was hoping i could but one one of the things that i found quite interesting is that there is a theoretical maximum point of ice production which |
| 21:35 | happens before i think we'd have a loss of ice erosion with a lot of mass flow so essentially if we pour a very small amount of water then we don't get very much ice and as we increase that we reach this kind of plateau and then after the plateau then we start washing away a lot of ice and and other things limit our growth but it is more of a more of a strong flow than a than a trickle which is what i imagined at the beginning you were using intermittent flows daniel yes i'm working with with interesting flows |
| 22:11 | i'd love to see the results of that yes um i i am putting all of this in a report for the ccrc so hopefully once that's all done then then i can circulate that maybe was my guesstimation or estimation of roughly half a meter a day widely out or is that possibly doable i think half a meter will be tough well so half a meter would be possible on an instantaneous amount but because we have to let the ice cool we're dependent on on the the air taking away the heat and so that that would be almost the same limit as what we have in open water |
| 22:53 | which is about 10 centimeters a day if you have a lower flow rate then you kind of go go lower than that but as you increase the flow rate so long as you don't wash away the ice you get close to that 10 means yes um what is the assumed wind velocity um for for the 10 centimeters i think i assumed six meters per second but we might well have quite a bit more on a windy or a gusty day am i right in thinking that last of all it's night and secondly there's very high winds uh during the winter in the arctic and so i think |
| 23:34 | using actual what i'd call climatology data uh for those conditions may be helpful just to understand not only at some nominal level but at least in antarctica the winds are very strong and i would expect the same in the arctic right yeah it would be good if they were actually that would give us even more production that way yeah that's why i mentioned it so i think i'm just wondering if you've had the opportunity to incorporate any meteorology for medium winds uh anywhere in the arctic latitudes in |
| 24:09 | the winter i haven't done um on any of this actually um unfortunately all the meteorology is really new to me so i i haven't been able to find any data or use it there but i'd imagine it wouldn't be too hard to integrate into this model of course as i said that the numerical solver is a bit of a problem and and i was a bit disappointed at that point because i couldn't quite get as much as i was hoping but hopefully solving the numerical solver and then incorporating a lot of other data we might be able to get something |
| 24:42 | interesting sounds promising thank you does anyone have any tips for meteorological data for daniel i think we should use our application if you go to windy.com that tells you what the rate is today at any point in the arctic had at any altitude is there a historical record underground for point barrow alaska 100 underground yes will provide multiple years of history and i would suggest we look it up for point barrow alaska point barrow alaska there's probably some russian sites too but it's a worldwide system but you know |
| 25:33 | we have to find some reliable data i have some data that my father measured in 1946 in the antarctic i will dig it up and see if it's got the sort of thing you want it it would be suggestive but i imagine it's a bit a bit different yeah there's the challenges you get these huge winds coming off in the winter time off the 10 000 foot plateau and then dropping down cadiabatic wind so it's uh that the topography clearly is different in antarctica but um just to get a baseline it would be interesting |
| 26:07 | because who knows maybe at some point we have to do something in the antarctic as well you you are putting water that would feel really scaldingly hot if you were doing it at ambient temperatures can you tell me what's going to happen to all the extra heat that you're pumping into the air i believe in the conservation of energy so you were you're you're dillaging this thing with hot water um [Music] you you you must think of it as being hot even just just think of the things of being a minus 40 where you're pouring all this |
| 26:44 | water in so it's it's 40 degrees hotter than you you're used to so stephen we think it'll form um strong thermals taking the heat up to the tropopause yes um so our analysis to date stephen is that the wet adiabatic lapse rate is vastly lower than the dry adiabat and thus the propensity for uh convective instability in the troposphere is very high and so we expect that heat to result in cumulus clouds that will take um much of the latent heat up to the top of the tropopause where if we've managed |
| 27:24 | to confirm or identify that in fact the stratospheres stratospheric clouds are slim to none then there's a radiative increase in fact the amount of long wave radiation into space could increase dramatically which would actually convey much of this heat into space and would actually provide an excellent cold sink for this entire process okay but remember it might be blowing along at 60 miles an hour horizontally it's not going to be going 60 miles an hour vertically so is it going to be warming up next door |
| 27:59 | forming up next door yes well it's quite likely that we'll have a lateral transfer but of course in the atmosphere once you get off the boundary layer then the shear decreases and the cumulus clouds are able to form and the suggestion is simply that the buoyancy requirements of this uh heat transfer ensure the formation of cumulus clouds and we would expect the top of those clouds to be excellent radiators into the blackness of space in the winter i was under the impression that cumulus clouds had a net heat trapping effect is |
| 28:33 | that not the case in the arctic well i think it's all about um convective instability and um stratospheric clouds yes would have a blanketing effect but you have to understand that it's generally pretty darn cloudy in the arctic uh in the wintertime anyway so we're probably replacing some low clouds with some higher clouds and those higher clouds would likely have a higher uh surface temperature if you will at the top than they would otherwise and thus we anticipate using the black body radiative law of t to the fourth a |
| 29:07 | rather impressive increase in long wave radiation into space which is exactly what we might desire in a warming world that's what you really want to do yeah exactly did daniel i think daniel didn't say uh stratospheric clouds did you say stratospheric clouds just now daniel um i said cumulus clouds yeah exactly i thought you said cumulus clouds was i saw something from professor susan solomon about this i don't think i circulated around but maybe not everybody here saying because i thought that based on something that |
| 29:43 | lynn russell said uh a month or so ago about polar stratospheric clouds uh as you're saying stratospheric clouds providing a net heat trapping effect that uh and we saw a paper that uh the a sort of feedback so positive self-reinforcing feedback for climate change with extra water vapor going into the stratosphere and we know that it's the dobson brewer circulation takes um air and whatever's in it up to the poles and i was a bit worried that uh that because lynn seemed to be saying there's no way of detecting polystratoric clouds |
| 30:22 | uh in the winter uh because it's all dark um that there might be more and that might be because does anybody so this is a side question perhaps um i'm not aware that anybody knows why uh the well maybe they do by now the arctic is but the arctic seems to be warming much faster than had been predicted um and i thought that might be a reason but then susan solomon said actually the main heat trapping is from cumulus clouds so that's chimes with what daniel just said and then um so i did circulate something and steven |
| 30:57 | solder came back and said well you can use uh aiken mode to clear the clouds you don't want to brighten the clouds you want to clear these cumulus clouds in the arctic i didn't say we could i said it would be interesting to see if we might oh my sorry okay sorry sorry yes thank you for correcting me on that between uh between uh active cumulus clouds that are actually convecting heat and uh inactive clouds that are merely blocking infrared radiation so we're not asking the clouds to actually um you know uh |
| 31:31 | radiate we're asking we're asking them to do what they normally do and that is when they're active to actually go up now probably the biggest question of my mind is given the strong winds we're gonna experience there's you know just as a hurricane gets broken up by windshear uh there's probably a certain amount of breaking up of cumulus clouds by uh by wind shear vertically uh in any case and we have to understand okay what is the fate of cumulus clouds uh in a strong wind and strong wind |
| 31:59 | shear environment that's something that's known based on meteorological studies probably in the u.s particularly in the spring and autumn and we could probably learn from that you know to really model what is the increase in heat transfer that we might expect okay so you're saying that there'd be increased wind shear with the increased heat being given off from these ice shields now the increased wind shears associated with wind velocity and you know if you had no wind you'd form this lovely cumulus cloud would go all |
| 32:32 | the way to the top um the clouds will probably be a bit shorter and cut off a little bit but they'd still probably do their job so barring stratus clouds um we believe that active cumulus clouds would do a pretty good job of convecting heat to the um to the top the visible top of the atmosphere and that would then provide a nice black body into space or some black body into space yeah great okay so actus the key word that you seem to be using brian is active cumulus clouds because of the wind wind shear because |
| 33:08 | of the high velocity so yeah excellent active phase in active phase and then they'll dissipate and so we'd have to look at each of those but you know it's so cloudy up there in the winter usually that um except in downwind regions uh that you would have a lot of cloud cover in any case so i think it's worth looking at this perturbation study to see and modeling perhaps that would be interesting atmospheric modeling we would very much like the the clouds to discharge snow over greenland to address the |
| 33:44 | nice mass loss that's that's a that's called an annual cycle yeah that's quite likely for a number of reasons in other words um you're increasing the moisture content you're also increasing the heat and the convective instability and the original processes so if you were to do this upwind of greenland you would uh you could increase the snowfall markedly that would be a very significant effect and might be worth considering as a way to keep greenland white that's the best news i've had for |
| 34:27 | months thank you bro let's explore that further the whitening of greenland that would be the the the paper that would be fantastic yeah yes it was good that's that's a nice side benefit yeah until it gets stopped by some environmentalists yeah yeah yeah so great um clive as i said no good deed goes unpunished no good teachers i'm punished yet very good yeah um okay well this is good and this is fun uh all right so i'm i've got nothing else to say about that anything else to say about uh so this was from daniel wasn't it yeah |
| 35:18 | yeah yes i i i would like to offer daniel some uh some of the uh research and investigation that i've done with with a former incarnation of prague we produced a a review of techniques uh for ice thickening and uh several several other things other than wind power have been suggested and ways of doing it so i'll i'll get in touch with you i uh your emails on the list isn't that uh daniel yeah yeah so i'll i'll take that as an action on there not to disturb the meeting which is certainly just on other things |
| 36:11 | okay that presumably that'll that's of interest is it daniel yes it doesn't have to be but um thank you okay thank you very much john well i think this you know ccl need needs to know uh know what the alternatives are yeah in terms of uh providing the power for for this um pumping of water and the method of doing it so you can spray uh spray rather than uh sloshing the water out and relying on the slope right so this isn't or you can distribute with vehicles the autonomous vehicles which spray uniformly |
| 36:53 | uh get that power through uh electric points and pumping points for the water that's that kind of thing but i'll i'll deal with that off offline okay thank you thank you john so this is uh a rival mechanism to uh sev's uh ice shield uh so i think we want to try or you know all options oh i mean i don't really think of these things as right now i think it's done you know i'm just putting my big wooden spoon into into the pots and john that's all i did no no i you know really we've |
| 37:29 | got to try and work together complimentary oh definitely and sev knows that as well yeah so a perfectly decent chap yeah um now let me just say one one thing that uh so i was a bit surprised um andy who's an engineer and he said he sort of didn't want to think he had anything to add to these things these meetings but he said to me the other day we met up um and he he said the amount of steel that's produced in oil platforms from the oil business is it's just gargantuan the number of you know these things coming out of |
| 38:05 | korea or china wherever it is they come from so he said because i've been saying well this idea of refreezing the arctic isn't it a bit a bit pie in the sky and he said well actually no because it is a huge engineering project but if the government's decided that if we have to do that the capacity is there or something close to it you know around the world in terms of you know making the steel infrastructure anyway so uh so there we go oh we make it we make a billion cars or something like that a year |
| 38:38 | but yeah then they had to divert a fraction small fraction of that to the arctic and solve the problem yeah yes i'm just curious are still limited i mean is still a limiting quantity or something else i would doubt it steal from certainly especially for what yeah well andrew andy said and what um uh john's just saying it seems to be it's mostly money isn't it it's money and time and and and uh yeah and political will and sort of stuff okay political will is the thing you really need isn't it yeah which means |
| 39:15 | getting uh to the public um but um and so i think you know we have our methane action people are close to greenpeace and friends of the earth and bill mckibben which is you know 350. very very you know environmentally you know the sort of people that um are on the getting a bit on the fence now i i don't i don't really want to put them all in one pot because when you meet them they're all different anyway they all think themselves um so uh anyway so that's that's i'm just sort of painting a little bit |
| 39:50 | of hope there that uh we i suppose we now they're focused on methane and every time we talk to them about other things they just sort of say go away we've got enough on our plates with methane um but maybe i should try and meet up with daphne weishan and say um there's there are other things in the pipeline which would be extremely useful if it wasn't just sort of flush down the toilet immediately because this is very good work um that scientists are doing basically that there's a taboo on srm of any kind and |
| 40:22 | ice thickening is a kind of uh srm method you know it's it's surface production that's not necessarily i mean the correct conclusion i can imagine that if we place this into an ecological context that uh restoring habitat for polar bears and walruses could be right near the top of the list you just have to frame it in ecological terms yeah not in uh other terms yeah yeah so it's a reframing the republicans reframed abortion in the 1960s we should reframe our our work to be something that fundamentally appeals |
| 40:59 | to the marine ecological community and the public charismatic megafauna as we like to say for polar bears i think so in the arctic um will actually both increase the ice cover and uh put franz's isis into the air to reduce the methane brightening your sea atomizers you're saying uh yeah yeah do it would do it all i think though the question of um getting the funding to refreeze the arctic um requires a commercial basis for it and my my view is that the the best way to fund it may be to build the uh the trans-arctic canal uh |
| 41:53 | which would have the shipping time from um china to the atlantic and uh so it's it's quite likely then that that china would uh would fund the the refreezing and it's something that it should be discussed through the g20 yes did you just hear that china is putting a billion dollars into an otec plant ocean thermal energy conversion wow no that's a that's about 100 times more than the united states put into otec in the west coast of hawaii in the 1970s and 80s wow that's uh what's that ocean was it |
| 42:32 | thermal energy conversion conversion right low latitudes that's the size of projects they're undertaking and our estimate is we can deploy a thousand uh turbines for the billion dollars and uh the potential revenues are two to four billion dollars per year based upon the panama canal right okay so i mean what springs to mind is people might say well wouldn't it be cheaper just to um have an icebreaker going through the middle of the the the north pole and make a channel that well no you missed the key point the key point is ice |
| 43:10 | formation yeah that's the way you enforce the way you enforce it is by creating an ice i know but i'm putting my cynical hat on brian i'm putting my cynical hat on saying if i just wanted to uh sail boats across the arctic then why would i care about ice on either side it's actually going to be both and that is you know you if you're going to make a canal you want it to be year round for it to be your round canal that's where you get the most revenues you build an ice wall and you your assets are the ice wall and the ice |
| 43:40 | wall requires at least let's say a thousand kilometers worth of um you know uh a thousand square kilometers worth of ice and each one is populated with one or more wind turbines well and some associated pumps brian if you can use that logic and win the argument and get these the whatever how many billion dollars is needed then uh well i'll take my cynical hat off to you well we're going to rely on uh folks like i don't know that coalition builders like sir david king to um help us uh with the arctic countries and of course |
| 44:13 | we have to pay all of them including russia for um the consensus to do this so it'll be an interesting you know coalition but shoot they built the panama canal why can't we build this um you have to remember that it's moving the arctic is is moving uh so it's not gonna stay where you first put it unless you have a really big mooring system yeah or if you make enough ice you'll ground uh some of the shallower ones so you have to look for the geography but there's plenty of shallow continental |
| 44:45 | cells and in fact i seem to recall uh you know there was there was some way the humans made it across to um north america so perhaps um you know that's the the spot somewhere in the bering sea to to place the bridge and ground it ground it on the sediments okay well there you go solve that one uh sounds like maybe okay thank you everybody uh forgive my terrible cynicism so um okay let's have the overview from was there anything else to say daniel i think we've had a good old stab at that haven't we i don't think so yeah that |
| 45:22 | was most of the stuff yeah okay thank you very much so let's have the overview from beth please so yeah um i've been with the ccrc for about five weeks now um so it's been a bit of a crash course in meteorology and marine club brightening and all this sort of stuff um as i'm sure daniel sympathizes with um so i'm basically conducting a lit review to try and write something where if you know enough you know something about the area but you don't particularly know about marine club writing it's kind of you're like a go-to |
| 45:59 | place so that you get a basic overview and then you have a long list of references that are good papers to read um so i read through a lot of things that have been sent to the ccrc by steven soldier for um over the years um and a lot of other papers by john latham rob wood jim hayward all the modeling papers as well um and i think my current the current decision that's been made that i can't seem to find reasoning for and i wonder whether any of you have reasoning for it is the desired droplet size so i don't |
| 46:33 | know how much background knowledge i don't know how much people know about marine cloud brightening um we know lots about it okay um so the current droplet size has been put at um a 0.8 droplet that then gives you an 0.8 micron droplet that gives you a 0.2 micron salt particle that becomes your cloud condensation nuclei and i know they fit within accumulation mode and in kind of in the gap but i haven't found a comprehensive paper that has truly tested different droplet sizes either through modeling or i don't know |
| 47:09 | if there are any physical experiments that can be done maybe in a cloud chamber or something to see whether there is a better droplet size and i was just i don't know whether anyone has any ideas of stephen is there anything yeah yes the the i the the point eight micron liquid drying to 10 to the minus 14 grams was based on the problems of filtration and the problems of etching wafers and we were not at all confident about it but that was pressure in that direction and then we found out about the green field gap yeah |
| 47:51 | and uh that just fitted exactly very nicely with the filter and the micro fabrication now the weird thing is that none of the climate physicists in the whole game have ever heard of greenfield he did his work when we were very worried about nuclear fallout and they didn't seem to learn about that so uh i i seem to be the only person who's ever heard about greenfield and they don't really believe um believe in in this enormous difference in the scavenging efficiency however as well as the size you need to think about the width of the |
| 48:27 | dispersion and all the work that's been done has used a very wide dispersion of the accumulation motor or the eight king mode but mostly they're talking about the accumulation mode and i think that it's very important to have a very narrow width and i don't think anyone's ever done any modeling with this at all the reason for this is if you have uh a a turbulent airstream and you've got different masses of bit of particles in it they're going to be bumping into each other much more than if they were all exactly the same |
| 49:07 | weight and uh it's a bit what i'm my model of this is very much an engineering one of infantry real trained infantry who can do intricate movements with dangerous weapons without banishing each other because they all do it exactly the same way exactly the same time and if some of them were incredibly fat and some of them are very thin and you are making them do agile stuff that'd be more bumping okay um i i i i don't know if i've it's quite an amusing story but there is one case a friend of mine was |
| 49:44 | in the cold stream guards in his have i told you guys this story before no all right well he he he was um in the cold stream guards in the days when we did national service and he was changing the guard at windsor and there's one stage in the guard changing thing where you say new guard stand fast hell guard slope arms and he got these the wrong way around and half the soldiers in each group obeyed the order as given and the other half did it gave the order they should have been given so he had four different kinds of soldier |
| 50:23 | in each in each vlog and that moment uh a a dark red daimler came around the corner with no number plates on it and a little wee flag flying and it was then his duty to bring them to the present arms and getting from the present from being sloped or not sloped or not not shouldered it doesn't work you know and so he he nobody was actually benefited but it's very close to it and uh her majesty was having dinner with his come on his ceo that evening and my friend didn't know whether he was supposed to be shot at dawn or whether he's meant to |
| 51:06 | shoot himself and the colonel um apologized to her majesty and she said it was so not interesting to see it done differently and no no no disburning actions and nobody was shot and anyway so we're digressing so i want to avoid this different behavior of different drops and i want to give them an electrostatic charge i don't know that point eight micron liquid is right i'd love someone who did know more about it to say what they would like to have but it just seems to be a nice one uh and uh it it's equal misery from the |
| 51:50 | filtration and the the the micro fabrication so balancing them but balancing the difficulties is is a good way perhaps yeah because from my understanding of well basic understanding of the cloud physics as well if you have different size droplets they're more likely to coagulate and then it's going to rain instead of giving us nice clouds that will actually reflect any sunlight and it's the big ones falling through and gobbling up bigger we're going on the smaller ones that makes it rain yeah and you have to you have to get up |
| 52:25 | to 28 microns for them to start raining and we would like to stop that at sea maybe that would be good for people on land yeah there's another significance to the 0.8 microns that may be related and that is that's quite related to the optical wavelength of light and um so that's uh probably a strong coupling threshold for reflectivity yes but we're going to have things growing on them quite quickly so we're going to be growing too much longer than wavelengths of light i think yeah sorry would you make a call |
| 53:02 | quickly what do you mean we're gonna have things growing on them do you mean um the particles uh attract water vapors that's right okay uh and they they grow quite fast and the the small ones grow quicker than the one the big ones and so they you get a fairly uniform spread in the sizes of the drops of cloud if you if you put a new nucleus near an existing cloud drop it will and if it gets big enough to nucleate properly it will be taking water from the big one so typically what happens is that you have one 25 micron drop and you put |
| 53:43 | another nucleus near it and you end up with two 19 micron drops okay the same liquid water but two drops so the big one evaporates a bit yes that's right there's water coming in and out of the drops at the speed of rifle bullets they come out at the incredible speed and they bounce back in again because they hit another another air molecule so uh there's a convergence in the size of drops in the cloud um and the process can be 10 or 20 minutes it's not not not slow it's just just a question of getting |
| 54:26 | more um of these condensation into the cloud we're trying to get a greater number of them yeah yeah of the of the right size yeah yeah okay so um that's an engineer's solution to uh yes the the um uh well i think i think i've said enough um i i've got to go soon i'd be grateful if we could just quickly couple this marine cloud brightening with what phytoplankton do with dms uh it's exactly the same we don't need to go the the platform and doing a brilliant job uh you you if you read |
| 55:11 | charleston and lovelock they even really identify this and we would be useful for us to know where the phytoplankton were which we can tell from the chlorophyll and not bother going there because they're already doing it jolly well we want to go somewhere where the there aren't any phytoplankton or we make some more phytoplankton yeah well that's that's where the iron idea would come in yeah i think an aerosol is the best way to do that uh well one good way to do at least there are other other things |
| 55:43 | about bhaskar um the h a s k a r yeah they don't his his uh he was here once on his nickname yes his surname or and middle name are pretty long so i can't remember them just knowing if we know him as pascal yeah has written a passionate thing about uh diatons oh yes so do we know whether do diatoms produce dms yes they do because they seem to be advantages in using diatoms as opposed to other kinds of phytoplankton and you can get diatoms that live under the ice and that kind of thing so he's written |
| 56:28 | written a paper recently and victor smitacheck has pointed out a number of mistakes in it um which i i i think victor really does know everything about this this business and he there are some models in in the the in the paper which will need to be corrected that's right so i i think this is an urgent need of resolution uh david king thought that bhaskar was completely on the ball and didn't perhaps realize that victor had some valid criticisms there's an email this morning which was to do with david king and and victor |
| 57:14 | uh and there is a uh victor pointed out gave a link to a very good chapter that he wrote quite a long time ago about this which i thought was was very very good i must admit the english of it is brilliant for someone who is uh lived in india and is german extraction but it's really wonderfully written i haven't written all of it i've read all of it yet but it's it's certainly on my list you should read that yeah um okay possible well anything for you to add about um dms from phytoplankton friends i mean |
| 57:56 | fans can talk about all kinds of chemistry what the acids are acid aerosols but um anything to add friends yeah if you have a nice picture uh from the satellite uh clouds are there where the green yeah ocean is and where the blue ocean is there are no clothes right i think many people have seen it but maybe not everybody so it's and it's it's rather good to see it actually so um yeah not not a bad idea friends um for you to see it as well john it's just nasa uh i've got two actually can you see this here um so this is |
| 58:40 | we've got clouds and chlorophyll and we've got uh chlorophyll and sea surface temperature and you see a pretty close correlation in both yeah we do know that correlation isn't causation but uh what what else could be doing so there's this is a snapshot but uh from a movie you can you can just go to the nasa um i could i could i can um post the um link if anybody wants it um it's got about last six years or something uh so you but you can see so where there's chlorophyll there's clouds |
| 59:14 | on the whole where there isn't any chlorophyll um we don't get so many clouds there are some other images like this which have got incredibly fine detail in showing streaks and eddies and vortices and all sorts of stuff so it can change very sharply yeah so this is i think this is an average over a month so if you actually if you look at the ocean look at the individual still it is it's never got as much detail yeah know i can show you that as we could see what the clouds are right now over the pacific i've got the thing you find |
| 59:51 | there isn't that much actually so it adds them all up here um and then the other one is so sea surface temperature it's pretty close there as well with chlorophyll so uh what's the point on this one uh you know because there's high and low temperature chlorophyll and high and low temperature in the sea so um what what would you what conclusions would you draw from this would i draw yes there seems to be a strong correlation um so i haven't seen the opposite ends so i suppose i'm seeing this streak |
| 1:00:32 | going along there and that's low lower temperature this streak going along there that's a lower temperature oh okay you're talking about the fine scale because that's kind of looking at the base right yes yeah that is true that their temperature and nutrients correlate and so to the extent that the chlorophyll is uh macronutrient limited um nitrate and phosphate we do identify a very strong correlation between that and so upwelling and you know deep the deep ocean mixing fraction and the nutrient |
| 1:01:07 | levels correlate very strongly with temperature and so we can actually produce the lower map could actually be phosphate or nitrate uh for those limitations and we could uh correlate that quite nicely okay which is why we're doing a polling which is why you're doing upwelling okay yeah so we're doing you know upwelling for macro but um it will definitely yeah it's a limiting factor nitrate for the production of macarogy right um yeah i just want to see if i can if if anybody wants to see they weren't |
| 1:01:37 | interested to see the um uh the um come on i'll restore all time the movie got the movie here you've done something wrong uh oh no oh there we go so yeah so we can you can see that that's the slider you can use yeah this is not this has gone stupid yeah sorry yeah the slider you can move up and down that little orange circle yeah this one here that's right yeah yeah let's do it like that so you just generally see so we have a lot let's maybe get a so it might not be um exactly the same so you see a |
| 1:02:32 | lot of chlorophyll appearing here and it changes this temperature yeah and so the i think that a useful conclusion here is that because temperature is a proxy for nutrient levels um that's a good thing to compare and uh i think that the connection between nutrient levels and uh chlorophyll is very strong okay so yeah i'll see and class yes yeah yeah okay so i see what you're saying brian saying when when the sea surface temperature is lower there's more chance of just natural upwelling even far away from an upwelling zone by |
| 1:03:08 | the coast because you've got less stratification going on um less ocean surface stratification so you can get more nutrients so you will get more phytoplankton so it's and but and this is the uh positive feedback you mentioned a few of the cut about a month ago i think you said that you get less certification less nutrients less chlorophyll warmer water less you know more stratification so and so forth yeah i shut down the the cooling system but effectively i think the temperature is actually a proxy for the amount of |
| 1:03:40 | upwelling that may have taken place previously for example off the west coast of south america you've got a current going from south to north and you have then a lot of cooler water and nutrients advecting to the west just below the equator or somewhere else yeah yeah this this is and this is this here isn't it so this is the the benguela current going out uh not the boundary it's the humboldt rather yeah the humboldt current going up like that and going across there yeah the the african miners um yeah so that's that's the upwelling |
| 1:04:14 | from the surf the ocean currents bumping up against the continent and then having to come up because there's nowhere to go other than up and so it comes up and so you get all this phytoplankton and the best fishing grounds in the world here and certain amount of sapropel being made as well um up here on these west coasts um but i'm also taking what you were saying what you're saying about a nutrients being a proxy for sea surface temperature well away from um any land um because of the stratification effect |
| 1:04:48 | that's that's less when the temperature is less yeah and keep in mind there are meso scale eddies out there and their ability to pump water is usually determined or limited by the energy barrier the thermal energy barrier that occurs in the mixed layer yeah mixed layer being the what yeah it's also called the surface layer but i think it's it's called the mix layer by oceanographers yes and yeah we'll call it the surface layer i've got something to say about stratification which is the thing |
| 1:05:17 | i hadn't realized before green card writing has a logarithmic characteristic which means that we we really would like to have well spread out a low dose over a big area and it is a bad feature of it that the just near the vessel you've got a very high concentration which is uh not doing much for you however if you run a group of these things which are producing cooling over a long line but no cooling over the gap between them there's going to be a whole series of sort of furrows temperature furrows of that's going to |
| 1:06:01 | make the water sink where a vessel has just traveled which means that there's going to be a turning over of the water that was hadn't been covered which was still warm so we've got an interesting de-stratifying effect which we can turn to good advantage by choosing the gaps between the spray vessels uh i hope that will be useful what about thinking about currents ocean currents to sort of spread it all out we can choose how we go if we know where the currents are we can decide how we want to move relative to them i feel that we |
| 1:06:37 | might want to go square to them but i'd need to think about that a bit more but the currents are usually well are often driven by the winds so um maybe the currents are really a long-term average of what the winds are trying to do and we would like to to to sail square to the wind we have the wind keep in mind if you're dealing with abyss with deep ocean currents pelagic currents um it turns out that the variation in currents with mesoscale eddies and other features has more power in it than the median currents so |
| 1:07:14 | um it turns out the eddies there's more energy in the eddies than there is in the in the gulf stream that's very interesting and those eddies have a high reynolds number which means that they perpetuate for months and i'll tell you the complexity of mesoscale edit dynamics makes atmospheric weather look like a child's play but there are predictions there are numerical predictions on them it sounds as if you might be able to make turbines that were smart enough to have variable pitch that would lock onto the local eddy |
| 1:07:50 | well i think their dynamics in fact victor's put his experiments on iron into eddies because they make rather good containers at their local downwelling systems and so those convergent eddies are very good places to conduct experiments i i agree but a container is a good way to keep stuff out as well as keep stuff in and i think if you may get in the model about which side of the wall you're in you might be getting the very disappointing results i think all the experiments were done were really measuring the skill of navigation |
| 1:08:22 | of the experimenters to keep track of where they just been treated and victor was the best one this is why i want to do it over a a much longer period of the lower dose uh we're only doing it for a few days and i want won't yeah yeah well that's where we need the um the uh remote vehicles and the um they can have a much longer station time for coming back in a year in recovery did i send you the paper about that i'm not sure um how much sure i have sent it to you thank you right yeah so i'm just mindful uh that uh |
| 1:09:05 | those of you at cambridge um beth and daniel and it was very late notice so uh i'm not surprised i'm i'm even surprised you're there beth so if do you think that um you and your i don't know if you call your friends or or associates people doing the same thing as you you know people who've taken interest in the ccrc would think about putting something together something that public public facing perhaps or volunteering to to have some message that supports sir david king but what do you think |
| 1:09:42 | you know other than just something you know another another paper you know a reading list but something that sort of because we're all i'm sure you're busy busy busy as well but everybody's busy do you have capacity things like that i think there was possibly so the ccrc project manager katie you you might have heard of i don't know um i think was yeah katie parker she has i think asked a lot a few of the interns at least to do little summaries to put on the website and i guess that's sort of a way |
| 1:10:16 | of showing that ccrc is interacting and engaging our sort of generation um but i'm sure i mean it would be good to get something where it's extra work not workload extra time on us done in a some sort of holiday because during especially during a cambridge term there's not loads of spare time i'm sure there would be people who were interested in doing that um i don't know how easy it would be to organize um just in times purely of logistics i don't know what daniel thinks yeah i i agree with all of that um we |
| 1:10:54 | actually have two interns at the cclc now working on eri things um yeah emma and um i believe yeah so that they would be good to have in this conversation actually um did you have anything in particular can i just interrupt to say goodbye i've got to go okay john yeah yeah thanks for being with us hope to see you next time thank you everybody cheers bye-bye yeah keep going daniel oh yeah i was just asking if if you had anything in particular in mind do i have anything in particular mine um well something that's |
| 1:11:34 | that um non-experts if they come across it or something that might go viral you know or at least something that's ideally something would go viral but but something that gets to people something that that's understandable something that might be a surprise you know something that you know people would say hey you should look at this because so so my my thing is we keep being told you've got to reduce the mission robert tulip has been people have been saying for a very long time robert in particular you know we |
| 1:12:06 | keep being told you've just got to reduce emissions and that isn't going to do it um so we you know so there's then there's sucking greenhouse gas or removing greek greenhouse gases from the atmosphere so that's that's that's to me that's the next input important thing but then then there's it but if if you've got you know other countries pumping this stuff up faster and faster it's never no matter how much you bring down well it does it's going to be hard to keep up with all this extra stuff so if |
| 1:12:35 | there are ways of actually providing cooling now you know or not not like now but next year you know very soon by having extra clouds um or or whatever it is your actual actual cooling just direct calling then we have this horrible well we have a danger um franz keeps mentioning this to me and it's in our paper um additional what we call it warming induced emissions um so huge amounts of carbon about you know that will come out of the soil when it gets warm warms up and of course methane from you know not just from the |
| 1:13:16 | methane class rates but from the permafrost melting permafrost you know you've got um microbes producing methane so it's this this warming induced emissions that's that's a it's a worry and who knows you know the amazon you know that that it's important to get the temperature down um and so that's so so something that says that would be really helpful something that's there's these three sort of i don't know if you call it um mathematical what the mathematical relationship between maybe there isn't |
| 1:13:52 | one just to say there's there are and i think and dave so david's been saying he's been saying what is he saying reduce it's got um it's reduce remove repair i think reduce remove repair so his repair is um for me that's lower the temperature find a way or to at least to stabilize the temperature or ideally lower the temperature so that because they've been saying oh yes you've got you've got a budget you know and once you've if you can just stop when you've reached your budget then the temperature |
| 1:14:22 | won't go up anymore um but we beg to differ because you've got these uh warming induced emissions that are going to keep coming out so you know if and it's obviously it's a pipe dream that's going to stop by goodness knows 2030 anyway so yeah what do you think about that that's really interesting and i haven't thought about it that way i i think probably it would be best to talk to david and um and casey for organizing something there i think it could be possible yeah yeah i know they've had so the ccrc has |
| 1:14:59 | been involved in organizing because emma one of the other interns has been um helping on it um the act now film which is 18 to 30 year olds basically attempting to like persuade cop 26 leaders um that we need to actually do something and we need to do it now um so there are some there is a youth message coming from those sorts of projects i think sometimes the i'm not sure whether there are many people who know enough about geoengineering to form an opinion there will be people within our sort of age group who will fall on the um |
| 1:15:40 | side of we can't meddle with the climate and we should be we should just reduce emissions that's true that's all we need to do and it should we should focus on that and if we start geoengineering then it's going to take away attention from that sort of thing um so i think it's it's good to get a conversation going i'm not sure how unanimous the support would be from the entire generation but there would definitely be a large proportion of people like myself and daniel and other people that have worked with ccrc |
| 1:16:09 | um but i think it might have to be carefully framed um just to make sure no one ends up misinformed as well because it's quite a hard topic to inform people well on in a short amount of time that's going to hold an attention span and go around quickly because i think that's the issue is it's such a in-depth topic but you can't go into that much depth in the time you have um and i think that's part of the issue is getting it down into quick and easy words without skipping over details that mean people |
| 1:16:43 | misinterpret science um but i think it'd definitely be interesting to see if we can get something together great um so um you're kind of at the beginning you you've just i don't disagree with anything you've just said beth um that's what we're all up we've found we've found ourselves up against same thing um i would say that people find it hard to know who to trust yeah um and the so cambridge universities is a very strong brand if you like you know brands are something that people trust that's |
| 1:17:22 | why they spend their money buying marmite or whatever you know or a brand thing and so um well obviously you wouldn't want to sully that uh um it needs to be done properly so yeah absolutely right absolutely what you've said i think is the right approach to talk to dave talk to um sorry was emma the the lady so emma is the intern and then katie parker manager yeah katie agree at all with them i mean i'm sure you want to do that anyway and brian you've just heard brian uh give us advice on that as well uh a lot of |
| 1:18:00 | i find forgive me i hope this is not offensive i find that americans uh very they take good care of the so-called frame they call it framing you know it's very important for something and look look at you know that they've got the never mind you know they've got some of the best marketing in the world um and so they they think very you know and very it has to be treated very sensitively um but i think so all i'm trying to say is i think don't underestimate your your position and your power um |
| 1:18:34 | those of you you know you and daniel and your colleagues because you you have that brand behind you and and also it's backed up by i think you're working very hard on something as well on this there's another very interesting factor which is that the center of opposition to geoengineering is at oxford okay the center of opposition did you engineer that's right very interesting um i have a collection of eminent oxford professors who are all writing papers attacking geo engineering mm-hmm well that's right well yeah brian |
| 1:19:16 | brian let's let brian speak he's had his hand up for a while yeah i was wondering if i might be able to share my screen for a moment because there's of course an image that's been uh done with um i believe douglas grant and uh john nissin and um i just have to uh try to find out how let's see wonder oh it's probably google jack yes uh it's gonna take me a moment to pull it up but um this is strange um anyway uh i'm on my phone so it makes it particularly difficult but um why don't i anyway this image shows a a |
| 1:19:57 | it's a chart uh showing the curve i'm not sure if you're seeing a screen of mine no no no no let me just work on that some more but um anyway i had this curve up that's showing um that if we because uh the the sulfate emissions are going to increase the the temperature if we if we reduce the sulfate emissions you're going to increase the temperature quite a bit if we we could actually do a complete global decarbonization by 2050 but if you eliminate carbon uh emissions and also sulfur emissions you end up having almost a |
| 1:20:32 | warmer climate than business as usual and so um it does not particularly a decarbonization scenario that also decarbonate sulfate actually results in a very perilous warming trend that exceeds four degrees celsius under um nominal rcp protocols uh um predictions so it i think this curve is compelling i'll um look forward to forwarding it um to you and um try to put it in the chat perhaps and and then it i think the key message to get young people is that without some re-freezing of the arctic for example um |
| 1:21:08 | we don't actually get to a reasonable temperature we get to rather perilous exponential increases in temperature so i'll see if i can share it with you in the moments ahead okay thank you very much brian uh oh gosh there was something else i've had now i've forgotten there's a new rule about sulfur in ship fuel yeah they put a lot in it because all the software they took out of fuel for road vehicles they just put in the suffer ships and uh there's now from january of last year i think that you're not |
| 1:21:40 | allowed to have more than a tiny fraction and that is going to warm the planet yeah right really okay yes all right i've just realized the time the time has been flying and i've got to say there's 600 i saw this carbon tracker so there's 600 new coal-fired power stations planned in five asian countries um china japan indonesia the philippines and vietnam i think it is so while we're saying you know we don't want to allow the you know to get out of jail free card they just and these people are |
| 1:22:15 | they're in a different stage of development they're they're developing countries these are people who would quite like to be to afford to be able to send their children to school you know but not to have to worry about the next meal to be able to have to be mobile have a motorbike you know to be able to get somewhere well you know even a car would be fantastic so these people want to be able to switch on the lights at home you know that that's why and that's the current technology um you know we |
| 1:22:43 | haven't produced something that's in anyway so so so really uh for the people people to be saying so really what they're saying is okay so let's sacrifice you know how how this is what brian said uh about a million so there's about a million species whose habitats are going to be ruined so they're they're they're they're on the on the block um because if you we don't we want to discourage so so it'll be our fault basically it'll be it'll be their fault so you see what i'm |
| 1:23:14 | saying it'll be their fault for uh wanting to raise their standard of living with the wrong technologies that all these species had to go extinct it's just wrong yeah it doesn't have to be a lose-lose like that i mean the international energy agency has already said that and indicated that solar pv is the cheapest energy in history so it's actually cheaper than coal and if we were to for example subsidize a bit of energy storage then this would become a non-issue because you'd simply collect with pv uh store it |
| 1:23:49 | uh as needed and we'd never build the plants i think there's 300 gigawatts under construction and 200 gigawatts planned and those 200 gigawatts very least need to be never started and we just need to shift over to solar entirely and where necessary add a bit of storage so that they can actually run uh and make that intermittent power uh you know around the clock so to speak well it makes me wonder why then that they're planning coal-fired power stations rather than the cheapest energy ever known uh because they that's what they've |
| 1:24:21 | always done you know 200 years of call so it's it we just need to get the word out that in fact it's economically uh not only sub-optimal but it's imprudent to uh consider building any more cold power stations the the solar input is 9 000 times higher than all human energy consumption from the sun yes but that that's very difficult this is incredible in the world coming into here there's nine thousand times well actually yeah we're working on uh we actually have an example of taking an old hulking |
| 1:24:57 | fossil power plant a thermal energy plant and turning it into a thermal energy storage facility and we can actually reuse the steam turbines we can reuse the gen sets and we can reuse the transmission and so this simple thing is being tested at 10 megawatt hour level right now in alabama and we're also looking for a first project in australia and ultimately we should be able to take this thermal energy storage should be the phoenix that rises from the ashes of the coal power plants we just need to make sure that no more get built and i |
| 1:25:25 | think it's these kind of data that are key and probably our activism should be directed towards subsidizing enough grid scale thermal energy storage to enable the uh solar pv approach to be a no-brainer but to me this is what should be being discussed at the cop the details rather than just getting politicians to say yeah i promise crossed my heart and hope to die and i have no idea how we're going to do it let's get people talking about real details that can be discussed against electrical engineers and people |
| 1:26:00 | um right so i'm just mindful of the time um what else um i'm not sure it's really time to talk about that um so well other than to say okay s so you wanted to ask about sinking of seaweed in the fate of did you is there anything i mean we kind of said a little bit about it brian um is there anything more you want to ask about that is any discussion about that the fatal well there are a couple of i mean there are a couple of key risks in my mind uh we we think that uh with the bale of seaweed we'll be able to |
| 1:26:38 | track it through 300 or a thousand meters down we're expecting um and i love i love the the snap repel uh that works in at least three ocean basins but i mean they are it's but maybe 90 of the abyssal seafloor is well oxygenated and that is probably where we need to go um there the three basins you know include um uh the black sea the cariaca basin of venezuela and santa barbara channel so those are interesting places to make sap repel but i'm sitting here in the southwest pacific and here we are looking at a |
| 1:27:12 | well-oxygenated ocean basin and so assuming re-mineralization and tracking of the oxygen levels we need to really think about how do we support the physical oceanographic argument of many centuries to median time to outcropping and i i you know those are some of the key things we need to build support for and for me probably the the biggest uncertainty is how we could constrain the median time to outcropping for these waters after we deposit uh in a distributed way uh some carbon in the form of these seaweed sediments |
| 1:27:52 | i can remember seeing seaweed which had little um buoyancy balloons built into it now if they need that to float properly at the surface all you need to do is to run it through some rollers and puncture them and then it'll sink is that is that it what you would do they are remarkably resilient one of the most effective ways that we've found of dealing with them is ultrasonication because we do have a plan for an apse by our refinery that will take the raw seaweed extract the one percent protein that is |
| 1:28:24 | a very particularly high value and then sink over 90 of the carbon to the sea that process of cell lysis which is typically done ultrasonically enables uh you know destruction of the bubbles the pneumaticists as well and the net result is uh rather trivial sinking of the seaweed because their actual density of the seaweed is greater than water and we have several species that sink on their own uh so yes the sink rates are marvelous uh it's just a few days to the seafloor uh probably less than a week and then um you know |
| 1:28:55 | some months to uh being degraded and even uh uh the fellow from uh uh from saudi arabia um has admitted that maybe 11 to 30 ends up in sediments uh one-third gets chewed up by uh the microbiota and one-third by the macrophana and uh they get respired it gets converted back to abyssal co2 and then that abyssal co2 is dissolved and tracks the abyssal water flow uh which apparently uh based on radiocarbon dates is approximately 800 years from the southwest pacific to the northeast pacific so if we're dumping seaweed off |
| 1:29:33 | australia it should show up somewhere off the coast of british columbia 800 years later that's our present estimate 800 years yeah yeah um so well um so what what we're talking about in our paper is when there's enough there um that when there's any even so you even get sap repel being made beneath biofilms because everything gets covered by biofilms and the biofilm part of their reason is to keep oxygen away so they can have their other microbes the sulfate-reducing microbes um operating in internally you know underneath |
| 1:30:11 | um and anything to add about that france so if they have huge great big bales of seaweed just arriving on the sea floor getting down on the sediment again and again and building up a big pile with that um i yeah i i believe uh if if you have enough organic carbon which is falling fast enough down uh even if there at the place is it it will uh take all oxygen from the sea then automatically you get sulfate oxidation and sulfurization and you will you will produce separate from the seaweed excellent could we um consider doing |
| 1:31:03 | proposing two experiments one in the santa barbara channel and the second in the black sea experimental uh work to sink uh seaweed and actually uh see if we can produce some sap repel i'm not sure the time scale i would also look at the ocean west of uh south america uh adjacent to the uh to the existing uh black sediments because you have the same microbiota which are adapted to to these conditions yeah the difficulty there and also in oregon is that we're dealing with hypoxic conditions as opposed to anoxic |
| 1:31:59 | conditions and in hypoxic conditions you've got a perilously slow edge where you know a little bit of perturbation results in driving it anoxic and then it's our fault that when anoxic and there's a bunch of fish kills so we get fish kills regularly off of oregon due to the anoxia or hypoxia i should say and if we contributed to the hypoxia with just a little bit more carbon then plausibly it's our fault if it happens and that's one reason to use a truly anoxic basin because uh presuming that |
| 1:32:29 | it still works there it's already anoxic and it's naturally anoxic and if we uh make it even more adding more carbon it's a great place to store carbon for thousands of years and uh you you don't need so much ocean area if you if you work surface really reducing agreed yeah in fact we estimate that the black sea area could uh fix approximately one gig a ton of carbon dioxide per year and we could sink most of it if not all of it into the deeper portions of the black sea which are truly anoxic in fact you could probably |
| 1:33:09 | take another gigaton uh from the eastern mediterranean and uh tow it by barge into the black sea and sneak two gigatons per year uh because you know it's not that difficult to use very large barges to transport this at low energy through bathrooms and you have an another advantage you don't need some you leave a lot of oxygen in the ocean which otherwise yeah because otherwise you're you're re-mineralizing yeah with your ox so you're that's right it oxidizes yeah which makes it remineralized so |
| 1:33:49 | would rather do it in a very very concentrated high you know capacity high volume right make a giant compost heap in one place or just as you're saying by the way we could fix another gig a ton of seaweed in the caribbean and sink it in the cariaca basin if we got the cooperation of the venezuelan government so that's another opportunity and of course the us would probably be keen to sink some of it in the santa barbara channel there'll be some opposition there as well but um i think uh you know |
| 1:34:17 | this these things are going to be compelling sinks that will not decrease the abyssal floor of oxygen that said uh we're estimating the flux of oxygen to support approximately 10 gigatons of seaweed fixation carbon dioxide production in the bissell c4 based on the flux from the antarctic bottom water at approximately five gigatons per year and the flux of oxygen in the labrador current of the north atlantic supporting perhaps an additional five gigatons of carbon oxidation per year you with the north atlantic deep water |
| 1:34:56 | so we think we're estimating a dozen at the moment being that the speed limits in the oceans uh two inoxically and enough and ten with the two deep deep water formation what do you say when you say five gigatons of did you mean carbon dioxide or five gigatons of carbon which i think you said five gigatons of carbon i wasn't sure what it feels like the oxygen flux will support the oxidation of approximately five gigatons of carbohydrate which is already ch2o uh and so that additional oxidation that has to |
| 1:35:29 | take place can be done with the oxygen flux that comes in each ear from the antarctic body now i'm with you now so you're saying the oxygen comes down and and uh so okay so you're not really depleting you should but that oxygen would have gone along the sea floor that would have been in the antarctic bottom water but yeah well there's enough oxygen right now uh to you know fix some 4000 gigatons of of carbon carbohydrate um today in the in the oxygen in the in the oceans so there's an enormous buffer but |
| 1:36:03 | these um these fluxes represent a speed limit as to what we could actually do that would be supported by the existing flexes today so it's something we need to balance but it's a speed limit if you will okay so you're saying you wouldn't be okay you just use what's coming down right keep in mind the flux today is um significantly lower in the subtropics and tropics the carbon flux due to phytoplankton and algae could be down perhaps 30 or 40 percent based on this increased stratification in the |
| 1:36:35 | subtropical oceans that you've depicted so well in some of your diagrams in the blue regions right yeah thank you brian yeah so so what you're saying uh i missed that uh i just want to make make sure i got the 4 000 gigatons of carbon of carbohydrate of c okay basically sugars you could say carbohydrate yeah most most life is represented by ch2o carbohydrate yeah yeah yeah yeah and so as you sink it um then you have to take it to co2 you have to add an oxygen atom yeah and um and that extra oxidation can be supported by the existing fluxes |
| 1:37:13 | of high oxygen waters from the polar regions yeah i understand what you think it's just that figure 4 000 that we've got a figure in our paper i haven't seen four thousand four thousand is already in the ocean and that represents our um you know our storage oxygen storage if you will in the ocean so you're saying but there's four thousand gigatons of oxygen already in the ocean i'd say the oxygen in the ocean would support uh yeah four thousand giga tons of carbohydrate oxygenation that's what |
| 1:37:39 | it's called anoxic so it represents another speed limit another total compound state limit okay thank you thank you very much all right well it's it's um we've had more than our 90 minutes folks is there any burning thing john you haven't had a chart john mcdonald i don't think you've hardly had a chance to say that that's all right we can roll over that over until next time the it's the holy grail that we've been searching for with yeah we've been we've been talking about droplet sizes and |
| 1:38:04 | that that's uh but also i mean to discuss the equipment again see where there's all the methods oh yes you wanted to discuss the equipment again but uh but we can we can talk about next time that's that's fine yeah okay okay and thanks for joining us eduardo eduardo is from venezuela he's a he's a professor in in venezuela he tries to join us from christ that's wonderful eduardo we should talk about the carioca basin sometimes it's a it's a key national resource and it would transform our |
| 1:38:36 | ability to stink oxygen in the caribbean just to sink carbon in the caribbean okay maybe he's not not there right now or we can't hear him and thanks robert for joining us as well [Music] uh did anyone understand that might have been in spanish hi clove uh can i just make one one final comment you were mentioning uh my uh uh work on on the strategic dimension around climate change and the uh the justification for for geo engineering and uh i've really found it surprising how the uh the popular mythology of climate |
| 1:39:25 | change has has assumed that mission reduction is sufficient when uh you were mentioning the uh uh warming induced emissions i think that that's a really important point but the other big point is committed warming from past missions and just understanding that we're only worsening the problem by about two percent uh each year and so so if we only address uh a small fraction of that two percent rather than the the 98 which is the elephant in the room of committed warming then uh where uh we're going to uh have an unlivable planet and |
| 1:40:07 | and the other i think that the other key point is that uh even carbon dioxide removal and emission reduction are relatively slow in terms of weather impacts uh we're going to like we're seeing this uh hurricane ida today in uh in the caribbean um it would be possible through marine cloud brightening as stephen was describing to um reduce the impacts of hurricanes we absolutely have to do that as a security issue it's it's a planetary security-ish issue that that we need uh to brighten the planet and |
| 1:40:44 | and radiate heat away uh away to space so opening that sort of a conversation i think it's it that the arithmetic's reasonably simple but there's there's been a set of powerful assumptions that have blocked people from from just uh studying some of that you know basic science yeah so how about framing it as a debate beth and daniel if you're going to produce something say there needs to be an informed but it needs to be a debate about this a public debate because the public are only told you know reduce |
| 1:41:19 | emissions you know fly less eat less or something or breathe i don't know what it is yeah and that's not enough this that it that they there are these other options and when it's when people talk about um solar radiation management they're always talking about the these um putting something in the stratosphere but there are other options it's not just that there are all kinds of things all kinds of things that can provide immediate calling they never ever get mentioned because it's always getting |
| 1:41:45 | suppressed and there needs to be an open debate about this so how about that yeah i think i found especially with geoengineering you never get both sides of the argument in the same place at the same time so i've tried to do a roughly like i did look into what the other side was saying to see what sort of facts or opinions they were basing their arguments off and i haven't personally seen say for example the etc group or things like that speak with scientists and actually have a debate about this issue and i think |
| 1:42:17 | it'd be good to have an opportunity where like people like you guys and other people can like actually put a logical argument down against their reasoning because i know like i've read a very compelling uh thing by stephen um addressing the ethical issues that people claim with marine corps writing um but i think having a public debate about that where you let them have their time and say what they think but you don't let it go unargued would be really beneficial excellent idea yes that would be superb beth |
| 1:42:58 | along those lines i do notice several essays on the etc group site that are first of all are factually an error but secondly you know they didn't even bother to check their sources you know they just put out these um factually incorrect essays and a rebuttal to those i think should be uh something that they would be entertaining because you know assuming that they actually care about the technical facts and not just their political position on it i think that's rather essential because they're actually getting the facts wrong |
| 1:43:28 | so um i just wonder how we can i mean i know one or two people at etc um we need to try to make the case for actually um you know correcting erroneous information that's being put out by some of these groups yeah they get a lot of money for doing it as well heinrich burl pays them way way more than is going into geo engineering right maybe three hundred thousand a year yeah wow well we do you know unlike our our last uh american administration we do actually have to care about the facts yeah yeah yeah yeah um does anyone you |
| 1:44:13 | know does anyone ever watch um pod holder um there's some great uh youtube's pothole pothole uh some number i can't remember it is now he's a british he's a british um journalist um scientific journalist who who's done loads of great rebuttals against the you know the original sort of climate deniers um and very well informed so no if no one knows then i'll try and see if i can get in touch with him again um how about suggesting to katie or sir david can we have a public debate on the |
| 1:44:53 | tv about this yeah definitely i think yeah it's going to be something that perhaps an eight-week summer intern like myself can't quite organize but i think i think i'm sure katie and david would be on board yeah at least i i i sometimes i get a reply from sir david and he i think he's very very busy basically yes and i actually do have a meeting with him on wednesday um so i maybe i'll bring it up in that um to see if he has an opinion on it will you bring it up if yes i can bring up yeah fantastic right beth |
| 1:45:31 | you could you could decline you could say no i want to study first thank you very much great i think well let's let's end there anything any burning issue for anyone else uh okay thanks everyone for this and so the next one is in two weeks time which is the 13th monday the 13th and just for reference pothole is peter hadfield and he's on wikipedia peter definitely check that out yeah thank you for that reference sure okay that's it that means the bill thank you very much brian hope to see you on a couple of weeks |
| 1:46:05 | take care a good two weeks thank you very much everyone sure yeah bye you're welcome bye everybody friends do you want to talk about it we will see you tomorrow morning yes yes tomorrow morning yeah yeah okay yeah i was gonna say um i saw your answer from um let's hit the stop record from |