| (Click on a 'Start Time' to view the video) |
| 00:00 | um but you can use boron among several other proxies you can measure you can get um estimations of things like pco2 uh ph and other things i'm not saying precisely boron in that context but i'd have to check exactly which ones but there's a number of different proxies some of them using very very different um techniques so you know if you get good agreement from diverse sources yeah apparently so it gives you confidence yeah yeah fair enough yes thank you for that yeah yep okay well and uh we have brew yeah |
| 00:35 | greetings everyone hello there good to see you and john from australia hi clive hi everyone hi bro yeah hi hey steve hey hey and it's an hour later for you now john yes it's quite civilized [Laughter] it's got some natural light in the background right and it's going to get a little bit more civilized for us um in a couple of weeks as well uh because our daylight saving changes yeah yes yeah it's it's rather awkward actually the daylight saving changes at different times in different parts of the globe so |
| 01:16 | australia's just changed then the u.s will change a week or at least one week before hours and so if you get a meeting in any of those periods it's very easy to get your timing wrong yeah it is that's right chris queensland never changes here [Laughter] they take the same mac everyone up uh-huh um i could share there's something i use actually if i just quickly show those of you if you're interested uh i think i use called world time clock i think i got rid of it now but it's here um where is it here yeah there's also a |
| 01:49 | thing called timeanddate.com okay that's the one yeah right that's kind of like that's it right yeah so you put in melbourne or something or canberra yeah and and uh show timetable as it right that'll do yeah yeah and then you can look at this here and you can see what the times are yeah yeah it's excellent pretty useful yeah some of them don't seem to keep right up to date the the hoover application hasn't figured out that australia or eastern australia most of it is on daylight saving time yet |
| 02:26 | so i'm having to send little messages back to the organizers say hey get the uber people to get their act together uber the uber it's it's like a zoom all right okay oh and we have some new people here i think i can see are they still there yes elizabeth elizabeth right uh let's put it on yes so um are you from i get such a big long list now i don't even know where are you from cambridge yeah um uh me and will are both supervised by you like we're starting phds now fantastic in climate repair |
| 03:09 | my i couldn't connect on my laptop when they yeah are you doing an actual phd in climate repair yeah we both are at the engineering department so that's good wow and are you friends of beth as well you know beth taylor you know beth taylor you're friends of bets as well um yeah very good good it's great to see the word getting around and we have katie also from cambridge yeah i'm doing a fourth year project with you um also about climate repair what on um ice thickening oh great one of my favorites |
| 03:59 | so i'm just very good sean and ryan right yeah yeah yeah i'm just emailing friends without like i think you might have forgotten um yeah um are you joining us yeah um well um so uh yeah good to see you brian and sean yep uh we what we what i ask people to do well it's it's an us thing is a we don't all introduce introduce ourselves every time we ask uh newcomers to introduce themselves so would you uh elizabeth and william please just say a few words about it so you've already said that um you're |
| 04:45 | doing a um you're both doing phds in climate repair um so maybe a little bit more about that would you know um would be great to hear one by one individually please yeah so i did my undergraduate degree here in cambridge i did that in physics um and now um like i said i'm at the engineering department and i'll be looking at ocean iron fertilization and like i insult aerosols like currently the scope is still very like open and broad so i don't know what i'm gonna end up focusing on but that's the |
| 05:19 | general topic area fantastic very interesting okay thank you very much and william please um yeah so i i did my i did an undergraduate degree in natural sciences at nottingham and then i did a master's at exeter in mathematical modeling and climate science and so in that i did my dissertation on um stratospheric aerosol injection i worked with jim heywood if any of you know him yeah we do i do yeah yeah so he was my supervisor him and andy jones and we looked at kind of stratospheric aerosol injection and the |
| 05:54 | effect on the north atlantic constellation and um so now i'm here like hugh's my supervisor and we're doing i'm doing a marine car brightening geo engineering as my project okay fantastic and do you have anything to say about the difference between um those threads very aerosol injection and marine cloud brightness do you see one is safer than the other or anything like that um i think sai is a lot easier to model and so that it's a bit harder to kind of work out how safe or dangerous marine corps brightening is because you can't |
| 06:28 | really understand like i'm not so i've only just started so haven't you fair enough okay um and we usually have stephen salter is stephen with us today perhaps not yet a minute um and uh katie another new face welcome uh would you say a few words about yourself please um yeah so i'm in my fourth year so final year of a master's degree and i'm doing my project on arctic ci thickening with hugh and sean um i'm cur i'm just starting it now so i'm just looking at ice volcanoes and |
| 07:04 | how they might be useful yeah okay okay so you might have some questions for for sev uh first serve who's here with us this evening yeah yeah have you seen his documents oh i haven't actually know okay okay they're on the in you're on they're on your internet oh okay i have a look so you should better see there's quite a lot of them great okay i also have a picture of a um nice geyser that i photographed off greenland starting i think it was in um 2005 or so it's on a um a blog spot uh site |
| 07:43 | that i'll put on the chat okay it's a natural recurring one where you've got a high pressure water going through the greenland ice and then it it outcrops and it's just a hundred meters over the year and uh so it's a natural a natural analogy for a nice volcano okay that sounds very interesting okay thank you very much uh brian great okay so uh what we normally do um is what we'll do now is is make a agenda so uh if i go into word so that so and this is for anyone to anyone who wants to suggest agenda items |
| 08:23 | what we will talk about hi this is sean i was gonna suggest we kick off with katie if that's all right the reason being uh katie um has another activity uh that she needs to get to okay she's a keen sports person and um ice hockey ice hockey beckons i think the rink is under so although it's what 9 p.m am i right katie 10 30 p. |
| 08:49 | m is when your ice hockey ice hockey starts yeah which is just insane anyway so uh and i'm sure katie will have some grueling questions for sev um and i was also going to suggest that elizabeth also talks about just explains um what the first three months exercise might be that we're looking at uh to explain did you say explain the first three months exercise what's what she's studying for the first three months yep first three months okay i'll just put study right and that was katie uh so quick questions uh on ice on the ice volcano yeah |
| 09:41 | okay um right i'd like us to discuss um the various uh three or four methods of of iso distribution which i i i got mentioned in in my uh in my my paper right three or four yeah right well the fourth one is a combination of one and three okay so there are all ways of getting iron salts up in the atmosphere to get rid of methane and and marginally to uh fertilize phytoplankton yeah okay okay so you want to tell us about those or ask about them um or both a bit of both yeah okay all right discuss okay um and yep is there anything from will at all |
| 10:43 | um not that i can think of okay that's fine yep it doesn't have to be um i'm i've just got a very quick question sean that i missed i was away on holiday the um your um wonderful uh uh present you had a whole day didn't you about me thing and you had prof matt johnson is there going to be a recording of that oh gosh uh now you've got me on the spot it was supposed to be i understood because i watch that but i believe there was but it hasn't appeared yet that's terrible chris uh i apologize because i |
| 11:19 | i was i said you put me on the spot because i thought that the recording was made and if for some reason it has been made uh publicly available that's a bit of a clanger uh so let me i'm going to go mute myself and email the person that was helping us with that and asked i didn't mean to put you on the spot by the way peter excellent presentation i was going to ask sean that anyway clive don't worry okay all right i'll just add that peter wadoms had an excellent discussion of isotopic changes |
| 11:50 | for methane and how there's a more natural source in the northern hemisphere and it's increasing exponentially or super linearly at least it was interesting also there was the big change in 2007 well all of a sudden the um biogenic burning sources suddenly seem to take over or become much more prominent okay i mean it was really interesting and pardon me if i've got this incorrect brian but my memory serves me right it was interesting the day because there were two different schools of thought regarding the |
| 12:23 | uh prominence or lack thereof regarding methane release in the arctic as a result of uh the isotopic uh variations therefore it wasn't clear to me i thought there were two different viewpoints being expressed over the course of the day yeah there was some sort of uh i guess at least peter had articulated that the uh the change in isotopes post 2007 was implying a natural source that wasn't matt johnson also i thought somebody else had was proffering a different view that was all but i think they're from different |
| 12:59 | locations i think some of the biogenic burning is from the tropics not the arctic ah yeah and getting to the bottom of the isotope change i think is going to be a really key opportunity for us okay do we want to discuss that put that on the agenda no i think what we need to do is to get those recordings available peter um i noticed i missed he had something on the 7th of october which i missed accidentally is that anything to do with that was that part of climate cambridge climate repair as well no that was a four day raw society |
| 13:34 | meeting which was run by you and nisbet um oh yeah it was four days on methane a whole wide variety of topics i i was going to look at it but i just didn't have time but there were very different topics not all of which would be perhaps very relevant to us but it was there was a lot i think it will be available in a recording eventually okay okay all right great thank you so anything else we've got slightly usually have a bit more people usually pile in with more things anything else to go on here some people might have |
| 14:06 | seen some of the climate engineering conference last week in berlin which had a whole variety of subjects and interestingly for the first time natural scientists were in the minority compared to the uh social and humanities folks okay but so do you want there was one point about that i'll bring out in when katie talks about because it's relevant to to ice which was very interesting and um somewhat controversial right so this so just let me make a little note here is it climate conference 21 cec 21 yeah all right so and there was a an issue |
| 14:50 | about ice a completely contrary suggestion to how to um deal with the arctic okay okay all right so well that's part of that and so anything else from anyone well perhaps we'll finish early today then might be a bit of a first okay so let's kick off uh and feel free to you know uh if you think of something um we can put on the agenda so casey far away um one thing i haven't actually done much research into ice volcanoes yet so i'm not sure do they currently exist or are they purely a theoretical |
| 15:32 | uh construction at this point uh various groups have been making uh been thickening ice since since the 1960s for making roads or drilling platforms or or aircraft runways stephen desch uh put out a paper um a few years ago on ice thickening and he he read my stuff but hadn't appreciated the full scope of it and various others have been talking about using ice to slow up glaciers and things like that no one has done much recently with thickening ice using the ice volcano mechanism which allows um the ice to thicken |
| 16:31 | much more rapidly because you're not trying to freeze the last 20 of the brine you're letting that fall off off the uh the edge of the volcano um but uh daniel in from from cambridge has done some a little bit of work on on the ice thickening stuff and um we're hoping that some of you may do the um there's a a long box uh with with a sea water in it on an angle which i was proposing as a as an experiment which you might be able to do which should be able to determine fairly economically and quickly |
| 17:13 | the rate at which you can get ice to thicken under various atmospheric conditions and more importantly the composition of the brine how much co2 how much oxygen how much salt are concentrated and taking their contents very quickly to the seabed yeah i was discussing with you and sean earlier potentially doing some sort of experiment with a um a wide pipe um we were talking about this earlier and then katie did you you just want to explain the different options about a sim well an experiment and maybe an analog as well |
| 18:02 | um yeah so we were thinking of where so in order to replicate the arctic i guess we'd need to ideally blow air about like minus 10 minus 20 degrees um so we're thinking maybe we could use one of the college freezes if they've got a big walk-in freezer um or perhaps doing some sort of dimensional analysis conversion using a different fluid um if there was one that we could find that would set at more like room temperature instead of -20 and that might be more feasible to do in a normal lab but we're not sure what fluids would be |
| 18:34 | suitable right i'm suggesting just getting a a a junk freezer unit from a truck you know that and and and simply putting that blowing that cold air in in at the one end which should give you the you i think the requisite temperatures and you can do it all outside you don't all you need to have is a there's a power source and a few other bits okay yeah that would be good does that sound feasible sean well um uh it's all about you know i like the idea of procuring a one of these refrigerated trucks and |
| 19:17 | saying right we're gonna go and you know um wouldn't have the same problems as dealing with a college kitchen in terms of um you don't need to track himself so you just need to freeze the unit yeah you don't need the truck itself just the freezer unit yeah um i don't know how much power these things draw sever i don't know but anyway but i like the idea of the freezing unit but what we were thinking is um uh is a um a channel not a not a not a drain pipe but a well a drain pipe if you want but |
| 19:52 | make sure it's a of a of a rectangular section or a square section um and then having the brine flowing down it but with the air possibly being blown up it um and then trying to reach a steady state um so sorry sev that's that's pretty much what i've got in that slide four of the of the uh of the picture and it's pretty easy you just glue together the sheets of polystyrene with a bit of yo i reckon i could i reckon i could do it for a um oh a thousand or so pounds yeah so i mean having it insulated and |
| 20:37 | everything like that would be uh kind of neat and the one thing that we hadn't clocked katie was and i don't know whether this would be relevant for the uh scale of experiments set but is actually measuring the carbon dioxide uh difference uh within between the inlet fluid and what you then get out of the brine that's critical yes well you say it's critical i think it's really interesting even even without that i think there's knowledge to be gained in terms of comparing the uh the model |
| 21:10 | mathematical model and the experimental results um no one seems to have done the experiment to determine the solubility of carbon dioxide in salty water below freezing lots of ones above freezing nothing below freezing well it might not be zero but it might be nicer to do that uh as a separate experiment if you just want to understand what the solubility is um rather than worrying about it in this particular manifestation because i'm pretty sure uh that i couldn't guarantee or we couldn't guarantee that |
| 21:50 | that we would have got fully saturated carbon dioxide by the time it but in terms of the fluid that we will be measuring but as an end member uh to know what the solubility is therefore to know what the ultimate uh carbon dioxide saturation level would be would be kind of countries what cold are you wanting to get down to because deep ocean water of course gets down to minus four centigrade anyway because of the pressure and the saltiness in any cases so there will be data on carbon dioxide solubility and down to that temperature |
| 22:22 | i i think the low twenties all right okay one at 20 is what i'm looking at yeah because because anything below that you you don't get uh the the water just freezes out but chris i think where katie was heading was not just looking at sea water but concentrated brine absolutely right yeah okay and i and i don't know i don't know whether that data exists no idea um that was what your idea was they said wasn't it to actually then be left ideally to be left with frankly bright um yes brian i would start by going to the so-called |
| 23:05 | rubber book if any of you have heard of the rubber book no you're not ah dear me it's the chemical rubber company the book's about that thick it's got about 2 000 pages in it it's got data on everything under the sun and students we used to as postgrad students who used to we had the opportunity to buy them as a group in a department and it's got masses of data in it uh i'll i'd have a i'll have a look at i've got one now of course if you if you ask any chemists or maybe |
| 23:36 | some physicists they would probably know what you're talking about if you talk about the rubber book is that like perrys is that like periods in america this the crc book is an american book it's not a uk thing it's an american company the chemical rubber company is an american outfit yeah now i think i used it when i was a phd student as well so yeah and that's that's berries no i don't know perry's no that's just chemical engineering the rubber bug oh it's got anything it's got data about the ocean |
| 24:05 | the earth physics chemistry the whole kitten caboodle it's absolutely mind-bogglingly detailed in yeah how anyone would ever look through it i don't know what's chemical so where we were going the on the analog side was if we find that it's just too difficult to get reliable experiments served by operating it minus 10 degrees c um or whatever it is whereas is there a fluid that we can uh use that uh solidifies at room temperature or even outdoor temperature in the uk right now which is going to get a bit chilly but ain't |
| 24:44 | gonna get to and then because it's really trying to look at the mathematical model regarding freezing from above um and a fluid mechanic on an incline fluid on an inclined plane and hence katie thinking about um a two-phase mixture um we thought about candle wax haven't we katie but um i thought about that too it's a good physical model but uh allows the uh uh dissolution model uh we tell me more in lousy dissolution depending on what your what you what you might mix it with you mean well i i can't see anything being a good analog |
| 25:29 | for how um salt dissolves in in water and salt and gases dissolve in water okay you're saying that just having two miscible fluids is actually going to be pretty rubbish for you well it might be interesting for itself but i don't think it'll be useful for the for us right isn't water pretty unique stuff and and so i mean we're talking about it freezing and leaving behind brine as i understand it and which then flows off and goes into the sea very cold and and uh isn't it isn't doesn't the |
| 26:10 | way water behave rather different from everything else well brian look i'm not a chemist but brine is nacl it's just concentrated nacl in water right so it's another it's like another fluid so i don't know why um let's say having candle wax and a certain proportion of um other paraffin yeah i was like i was thinking of it yes of a different uh carbon chain chris but uh with a shorter length um so they would be you know you know would they be miscible but it's not quite the same process because when |
| 26:53 | you've frozen um but you know is there an animal i'm just thinking about easy you know experiments to get going with you end up therefore just ending up with let's say the paraffin chris or um one thing i mentioned to katie was that dealing with chemicals that can go bang is is you know in other words are there are there yet further uh things that you could use that aren't quite as hazardous water is the only thing which expands as it freezes the only thing i believe yeah and that's a huge difference |
| 27:31 | right that's the unusual part the crystallization process it's very common to um to fractionate the chemical compositions as you crystallize that occurs with magmas as well as ice yes um are you okay are you saying that the value let's say the value of doing a candlewax experiment with kerosene or paraffin is going to be a very limited value well i'm just saying that it's very common for the crystal as a crystal fraction of fractionalization to occur just as with a molten magma you'll get um |
| 28:15 | you know fractional crystallization of the more um [Music] of the of the more refractory components and a eutectic melt will change its composition what's more interesting is the expansion of ice that occurs on the freezing that's of course the property that gives us the sea ice that we wouldn't get otherwise that's that's the unusual part is the is the density difference and the pure solubility of water water water will dissolve more than almost any other uh chemical um i imagine this would be more |
| 28:52 | complicated than making it cold but i guess you could do a different pressure so the freezing temperature is different you need a lot of pressure i think you could do but um yeah you would but tell me more about this expansion thing brian about the therefore the validity of any model because if you've got water being the saline water being introduced to the top of this incline plane and you've got h2o um ice being formed where do we expect the brine to go in the in a water system in the arctic but imagine it's now at scale on an inc |
| 29:43 | is it going to run down the is it going to run on the upper surface of this yeah it'll find a mulan and it'll drop through because the brine is so much denser and it'll melt a bit of ice so it'll form a little moonlight it'll go drop straight through and drop down through the sea right but therefore it won't get to the edge of the ice volcano well it might go through the it might find a mulara might go to the edge depending on the slope yeah i think if your ice if your ice surface is very very cold like at -20 |
| 30:16 | then i don't think it will uh melt through there'll be frazzle eyes formed in in the in the flow and those crystals will catch on on the on the polar bottom surface leaving the more salty water to flow further that's a good point right so as long as you have enough slope uh it should find an edge and drop down that's it but the reality is brian that you can't dial up the slope you can only dial up the slope if you start with a good slope or i mean the way we've envisioned it is we've had a fairly tall |
| 31:01 | wind turbine that would you know give you some meters of uh elevation so i think you can almost imagine a uh a progressive system where you have a rather tall pumping tower and as the ice forms and it goes lower and lower the water rises to the next hole and drops out the next hole so i'm actually envisioning a formation of thick ice that gets thicker in the middle as you go and as long as you keep the water pressure up it'll get a certain number of meters above sea level and if you have a tall enough pole you could have several holes |
| 31:43 | in it on the way up that'll keep the ice keep the water flowing if you start with a level surface of seawater and you pump in your cold air you'll get the equivalent of sea ice forming a thin layer and then if you slowly pump a little of the seawater on top of that sea ice from one end it'll gradually thicken more near near the where the pumping is and less as as the brine flows over the slopes so you'll get a a natural wedge shape forming uh as as you would in in the in the in the sea with the ice volcano i you'll get a you |
| 32:28 | you'll actually produce a nice volcano have you all dribbled sand wet sand on a beach to make castles as you get the viscosity of of the wet sand and it builds up would it be interesting to learn about the viscosity of brine at different concentrations of different temperatures which you could probably do quite easily with a deep freeze where you could adjust the temperature because i'm envisaging this it's running down the side of your volcano and it's building up and creating a little dam in front of it and then it |
| 33:04 | will grow behind it on which point it will keep flowing over the edge and where your temperature um sensitivity will be that makes sense maybe not it does it's a little bit like the frazzle ice crystals plating out on the bottom the sand sand grains played out on on the bottom of your sand volcano and the the water then flows further which is the analog of the brine yeah i mean is it behaving like the wax of the candle it runs down and cools and gradually loses viscosity and hardens and then builds out not really because the the candle grease |
| 33:46 | doesn't separate out into two different uh phases okay so my mind's racing at the moment from what brian said so doing think doing an experiment on an inclined plane yes i'm not sure is that the right one is that the right experiment to do or is an experiment on let's say um with a horizontal channel all right and yet where you've pumped up the um the fluid and allowed it to fall down the outside of your tube so that it then builds up your inclined um um ice pack yeah the ladder is better and actually |
| 34:42 | the modified one is where you have a tall straw that has multiple perforations in it i understand i understand but but to start with just having where it runs down yeah but having it grow naturally rather than imposing the um yeah i think it's better to be natural and you know ideally it would be floating but that doesn't that's not so critical um and what is probably critical is to get the right temperature and the right level of sodium potassium chloride um [Music] primarily calcium chloride well kcl i have to look to see if |
| 35:26 | there's more sodium or potassium um but they're both in abundance and then um and then to to look for um the separation of the brine and uh you know and how it'll evolve katie i think that's really interesting rather than doing it on the incline plane just should we worry about actually the but looking at the natural formation yeah i'm really sorry i have to go i know which is why i stole you for the first half an hour katie go and enjoy some ice now thank you see you another time katie very much |
| 36:10 | everyone sure yeah um just before we move on uh has does is there any plan to contact i mean if the oil industry has been making these ice roads by doing the same thing for you know decades is there any plan to contact some of those engineers and say hey can you can you give us a few hints and tips they actually didn't use the uh the ice volcano idea they froze the whole lot of the sea water which is very energy efficient because you've got to freeze that last 20 percent of the brine as well and then cool it down before you do any |
| 36:50 | more flood uh irrigation to get the next layer therefore they can only make about [Music] 10 centimeters per day of thickening rather than the half meter per day which i believe is possible okay as a thought if you had a large chest freezer freezer the salt you dive into from the top sort of thing you put a body in or they keep ice cream and you fill that with salt water halfway and you put a little pump inside it the salt you put into a garden pond could you recreate the sort of conditions that you want to make and |
| 37:35 | create a little ice volcano but you might end up busting your freezer when the ice freezes thick enough to expand sideways and push it open keep rising up but i'm not suggesting you do it for so long but uh you know but just yeah you're grieving a model size one yeah but but the the the the stuff using the uh the you if you've got a concept of an esky a a a a foam-filled thing to keep being cool in summer when you take out yeah just make a very long one of those yeah you will even protect the freezer by |
| 38:18 | putting foam around the sides you would do a swimming pool or something but yeah yeah i don't see why you shouldn't make a little nice ice volcano in the middle of the freezer yeah it worked worked for a little while yeah it was a lab size experiment anyway okay um any any other things about that but i think we probably should move on okay then so let's move on to the next thing um elizabeth uh first three months of study the only other thing clive i was just going to mention yeah what i heard last week there was a proposal at the climate |
| 38:56 | engineering conference by someone called julian hunt who has published a paper um which i can give you the link to in the chat um who says i'll just look at the paper to make sure i get this right basically he wants to de-freeze the arctic because he reckons that if you um could keep the i tic ice free it'll lose more heat overall um that way by letting it radiate out into the into space eventually than you would by trying to cool the thing that's his basic idea so you lose you you it says the long wave radiation |
| 39:35 | heat loss into space will be larger and the increase in heat absorption due to the albedo effect and therefore this is one benefit i'm not sure many people bought that who heard it but it is a and unfortunately there was no real time to discuss that because there were some other people of course who were actually as you're suggesting we ought to be freezing the lights up rather than getting rid of it but it was a bit about being on about that group a revolutionary idea anyway i'll just i'll just post the link in the in the in the |
| 40:03 | chat yeah but mike mccracken's been on about that but you want to de-freeze it during the winter uh and you have clear skies as well you don't want to during the sun it's nice and reflective in the summer um yeah if you build an ice volcano you get the same benefit but you retain the benefit of ice reflectance and albedo in the summertime so the ice volcanoes if you have many of them then you're getting the benefit of liquid seawater on the surface and they heat into space and um you know and then in the summer you |
| 40:47 | still get the radiative benefit so those those authors were ignoring the summertime insulation which can exceed that of the equator on june 21st sounds like they're also not considering that the heat lost to space from ice uh from the from the water freezing from brian or did i miss something i think that's part of it and probably the thing that's missed the most is in the winter time there's an awful lot of clouds up up north and uh so with water evaporating you're going to get a convective instability that'll go up to the top the |
| 41:29 | other big thing of course you'll devastate the arctic wildlife such as what's left anyway but most importantly the radio surface is not necessarily the sea it's the top of the clouds at the troposphere and if you're providing if you have additional moisture to get the heat up to the top of the clouds then uh you'll have a radiative transfer from the top of the clouds into space which is what you want yeah but this is where the isn't it am i um tell me if i'm wrong but this is where william's work |
| 42:03 | um in terms of marine cloud brightening is that although you might want to do marine cloud brightening in the summer you might want to use the same technique but different droplet sizes to get the clouds to actually coalesce and fall in other words in the arctic winter so if there's a way of getting precipitation to clear the dam things in the winter might be a a nice thing to have done by playing games with although it's not a game of course on different sizes of bicycles um being raised to what the one the one thousand |
| 42:43 | meter kind of level right yeah there are a couple of strategies either you want clear i mean dark ocean radiating straight into space or more likely with the ice volcanoes you're going to have a lot of moisture and train in the atmosphere a wet adiabatic lapse rate that will carry heat right up to the top of the cloud layer and that low cloud layer will then radiate in space and that'll be actually a pretty good um pretty good radiator i said william sorry i know we're going to get to you just a moment if you could just clock |
| 43:15 | what brian said um i was um probably naively thinking about radiation directly from the uh let's say the ocean's surface but you know from from ground level to space in the arctic winter and what brian's suggesting is um effectively a two-stage process if it's a two-stage process brighton anyway yes i think it is and the important thing is that most of the heat is carried by convection through to the top of the cloud layer and while clouds don't radiate that efficiently their large area will probably make up |
| 43:50 | for other sins and their high temperature will make up for other sins and have a clear shot in the space from there so i see the latter cases the more likely in the winter time of the pulse are you saying that the idea about trying to create precipitation and therefore going for radiation directly from the uh from the ground level in the arctic winter is a non-starter well you see there are two different strategies here if we're going to create a lot of ice volcanoes we're going to introduce a lot of moisture |
| 44:25 | i believe let's see we're going to be freezing i think we're going to get more moisture into the atmosphere because of all this water available at the surface and so um i'm expecting because you're going to have the heat of freezing minus 20 degrees c air temperature yeah the vapor content of that water would be pretty low wouldn't it well it's pretty windy and you're getting a lot of mixing and so this is really about you know you have a latent heat of freezing taking place and that heat is |
| 45:05 | going into the atmosphere and a lot of it's going to go into the atmosphere as the latent heat of vaporization i know but my question is in what form is it is it being convected or is it being radiated oh it's all convection down low i mean you go you have winds a lot of winds in the winter time that's primarily wind power there's going to be a lot of turbulence in the boundary layer and you're going to be mixing a lot of moisture into the atmosphere there and that's going to result in a convective |
| 45:35 | instability and a wet adiabatic lapse rate so you've got to look at what stratospheric warming event you're going to get over the arctic and what that's going to do to the weather system good question i mean stratospheric clouds are a concern i think we do need to do what sean suggested in the stratosphere and that is ensure that we eliminate you know those stratospheric clouds if they if they were forming yeah that's brian you're ahead of me i wasn't thinking of stratospheric level clouds i |
| 46:06 | was thinking of lower level clouds yes no but but you suggested getting rid of clouds and it's the stratospheric ones you have to get rid of yeah so so can i just try and summarize so the the this moisture coming off from these ice volcanoes goes into this very cold air um but it's still it's still you don't uh uh the air doesn't get super saturated it doesn't sort of immediately come out as snow or anything is is that where you're at no there will be some of that but that's just going to kind of help the |
| 46:44 | convection um the the important thing is that you've got very cold surrounding air and you have relatively warmer and moister air being formed on the surface partly from this light and heat of crystallization so that latent heat is going to be increased moisture and then a little bit of convective instability is going to shoot up and you're going to have much warmer and moisture air going right up to the top of the clouds so that's going to be our primary heat transfer mechanism and i think you said in a okay |
| 47:15 | i understand and yeah i think you said in one of these previous meetings that with a lot of heat coming off the top of these tropospheric clouds that could even have a effect of melting the uh and clearing the stratospheric clouds might too that is a good question um i don't know enough about the stratospheric clouds except there's something called noctilucent clouds that i believe they have found in the arctic winters um yeah i saw the beginning to see those right now there is a strategy in the southern hemisphere i should mention and |
| 47:46 | that is closer to what sean was discussing and that is that uh if you have open ocean and leads and whatnot and you do reduce or eliminate clouds then you've got ocean going straight into the dark night of space um in in the ocean the southern ocean and that could do quite a bit of cooling that might be very effective so so you see the southern ocean brian why can't we do this in the winter and this is not the ice volcano idea this i've asked casey to look at this for the arctic which is effectively icebreakers or |
| 48:28 | booms to scoop up what was sea ice to expose frankly just more virgin arctic sea water yeah there is a bit of a zamboni approach here and that is um you know if you if you recreate the effect of um the pelinius we've actually been looking at uh various approaches using water circulation and and if you get a divergent water circulation you'll uh the water itself uh will will pull the the sea ice over to the edges if you will and you'll keep the center part clear so there is a an approach mainly using water |
| 49:08 | circulation to affect this without a lot of mechanical contraptions at -20 celsius tell me more about this sorry i i i it's it's well known in harbors that if you bubble um you will keep a an area devoid of ice and so um anyway if that's something we're considering for the arctic at present and that is uh simply use water convection to achieve the objectives desired one of the good things about the the ice volcanoes is that you are actually making those a series of those pelinas between the ice volcanoes where where |
| 49:48 | they meet in in hexagonal close packing and therefore you're getting all the warmish water what there is in the sea concentrated in those pelinas so that you're not only getting the the radiation from the warm sea but you're also getting the the radiation from the ice and you may well in the arctic where you're getting bubbling up methane you may well get brian's effect of those bubbles forming and running to where the pliniers are and the bubbling effect keeping them open during winter if there's enough that would be a a |
| 50:34 | rather dystopian future yes but unfortunately gonna yeah if i was gonna create anything in a mechanical there it would be a bubbler because the bubbler would actually uh do a fine job of you know surviving the ice and keeping the center very clear in fact if you really want to save your your boat from freezing you put a bubbler underneath it and that keeps the ice away a good point about the fellaini stuff i agree okay anything else on this topic before we move on it's high time we moved on um okay um by the way i just found this so |
| 51:19 | about pulling us here so i didn't know what a pelinium was myself okay so um and was there anything else to add from you chris i think you might it sounds like you may have made your point if you're speaking chris we can't hear you no nothing else yeah okay thank you um elizabeth please what are you studying with uh isa and ocean iron fertilization please um yeah so i think a kind of idea we had as like an initial starting point is to look at whales because they um are sort of a natural they kind of naturally |
| 52:03 | carry out oceanine fertilization when they there's kind of like the way so i'm not explaining this well but there's like the whale cycle where when they come to the surface their excrements are iron rich so they naturally fertilize um whale poop gets mentioned almost every time we have this meeting yep and then also i think they sequester about 33 tons of co2 when they die and go to the bottom of the ocean so i think um we were kind of thinking about looking at how restoring the whale population could be |
| 52:37 | a um solution well one sort of avenue in um looking at carbon dioxide removal like a more natural um solution um i don't know if i'm missing anything else i thought you said that you were going to be studying iron salt aerosol well it's all very kind of open like we haven't i've only just started and we're kind of still doing a lot of like the background reading so i don't really know exactly what direction it's going to go in i don't say the relevance cliven is that the end game |
| 53:16 | of not the methane oxidation but the the ocean iron fertilization the end game is to stop doing ocean fertilization the end game is to have actually a natural system that then does the job for you so elizabeth elizabeth's going to start with the end in sight in fact this is going to start with the end which is what is the what does an ocean look like in terms of with a whale population of 300 500 times greater than it is right now and its potential role um in terms of therefore supporting an ecosystem uh where you've got um enough iron being |
| 53:55 | distributed or pla or rather more iron being distributed at the surface through the biogeochemical pump which is what the natural ecosystem should provide with whales what's a the carbon content of the ocean or the oceans and what is the flux therein as a result of the sequestration and the basically the deposition into low into low level so it flux from the atmosphere to the ocean is that what you mean uh yeah but then in steady state it will be then from the ocean to low level and maybe deposits whatever it is |
| 54:27 | but the question is you know these numbers have been banded around i have absolutely no idea what that flux number is or what the ocean the content would be so to go and get a handle on this so that before we then start doing it looking at actually iron cell aerosols or or other form of providing those nutrients you may as well sort of get a handle on what the end game is okay it might be 120 years from now that end game yes yeah using the buoyant flakes you should actually uh increase the wire population because what you're doing is you're turning |
| 55:07 | the large part of the ocean which is currently infertile into fertile ocean and therefore you're making more phytoplankton more krill with more krill you get more whales so eventually once you kick start the the oceans enough yes the the whale poo would begin to help keep that iron in circulation but i believe you're going to have to keep on adding iron to the the ocean simply because there is a flux uh down to the seabed away from it which isn't going to be fixed up entirely by whales or or anything you you're simply going to need to like |
| 55:56 | like with the terrestrial fields you're going to need to have to keep on adding a bit of phosphate and and other fertilizers to it if you want to keep your productivity up just a point i don't think you're going to get krill everywhere you might want to by putting boyflex because remember krill are essentially a southern ocean species and they only live in fairly cold waters so if you go and fertilize the sargasso sea you're not going to get krill beneath there i understand there are cruel which do in |
| 56:27 | different species yeah i just don't think you should imagine that you could reproduce the sort of southern ocean everywhere by just fertilizing the ocean because i really don't think that's the case that's very right but that's very helpful chris thank you but i think you need to look look at the um there is some literature about wales and so on uh victor smek in particular has been uh banging the drum about that for a while and there's been a few other papers about wales that perhaps |
| 56:57 | elizabeth has already come across um well actually chris if you've got some suggestions uh you've got my email address yeah sure particular papers chris elizabeth i could have a quick look and see yeah you're really grateful i haven't i haven't particularly pursued that one but i have come across a number of papers about whales that would be really helpful chris thank you and but if your point about the fact that you'll lose iron um to the ocean bottom for example is well is well taken i'm sorry about that |
| 57:28 | you're right it might be a case of one needs to maintain some level of uh even if it perhaps isn't at the same level that you might do it an earlier period of time but that no that's a good point a couple of key insights here um the key insight is to retain iron you keep it biogenically in the whales in the plankton and in the krill and actually that system could be fairly efficient so when it's chelated in biologic form it can remain ferrous and soluble and the solubility is to keep it in inside |
| 58:03 | an organism so i think that's one of the key insights and the second sean is that i had made a mistake when i spoke with you last week and that is the doubling time for wales is not 20 years but i think a typical female can have an offspring every two or three years with a lifespan of half a century uh that inc it's encouraging because it implies a higher um multiplication rate for the population and perhaps my 140 year estimate to increase whales by two orders of magnitude might have been pessimistic |
| 58:38 | and they're rather on the species remember though some are much slower reproducing than others anyway but uh yeah in the blue whale yeah even the blood i'm thinking of things like some of the right whales and the bow head whales for example i think are a bit slower yeah but the humpbacks and the orcas and the blue whales can reproduce every two or three years the other thing is elizabeth all of these numbers are really quite helpful these the other thing brian said about keeping it in the biogenic species and so on is |
| 59:07 | perfectly reasonable thing and but of course if you're going to do that you're going to keep nearly all of it in the surface waters you're not going to be sequestering very much if you keep it all in the surface you may have a wonderful whale population but if there's going to be one well population is just turning everything over uh in the surface area where by surface i don't mean just the very very surface i mean probably down to i don't know 500 to 1000 meters perhaps um you may not sequester a lot into the |
| 59:34 | onto the seabed of course if you're making time are important um because right the crew will eat the phytoplankton in the surface waters and poop them out at a thousand meters deep during the daytime when they they're down there and therefore i believe that that that poop will in fact largely go to the seabed there won't be a huge amount of bacterial re-mineralization okay in which case you're not keeping most of the iron in in the air no no no no no no no no you have to understand that the krill do an incredible job of iron |
| 1:00:13 | scavenging and so you could express expect biological um specialization and fractionation where um the rear elements like iron could actually be selectively scavenged relative to the silica that's available in diatoms for example so the poop may be enriched in silica and decreased in in iron there would be some losses but uh we should expect the biological system to uh concentrate the rare minerals such as iron but i'm sorry brian are you saying that the poop would that gets to the ocean bottom will be |
| 1:00:46 | let's say the one the one i'm caring about is rich in carbon but not rich in iron i would say rich in silicon rich and carbon poorer in iron but you need to measure those ratios and that would normalize it all to phosphorus pretty much okay just like red fields this is perfect so i mean it's the carbon that we can't we want to get down and iron we want to keep up so hence the idea said there may be a degree of maintenance required but perhaps it's not as onerous as uh so this vision that i |
| 1:01:18 | shared with brian earlier which is a marine base uh marine biomass regeneration the idea of doing nutrient provision uh in the form of boiling flakes or whatever they are to start with is is basically a long long term but not infinite time catalyst to get the ocean to be um to restocked and then to have the biogeochemical pump sorting out the iron and other nutrients modulo the small point or the point that you made service that well yeah you might need you might be able to diminish it but you might not be able to get rid of it all |
| 1:01:53 | together brian's point is that actually uh the given what happens naturally anyway uh you might get this scavenging so the carver can get to the bottom with the silica but the the pressure the um the the iron and and phosphorus um minerals that we really care about might a large proportion that might be able to stay where we would like it yes first we have to get the iron concentration back up to what is the most productive and that will take a couple of decades to do even with the buoyant flakes yeah that's probably true and i think by |
| 1:02:35 | um you know if you want to uh track the carbon measure the phosphorus and the best thing would you measure the carbon to phosphorous ratio maybe the iron to phosphorus ratio and some other things um that would be highly relevant and um i think that would work very well and by the way um under this new for the more whales um i would say that they could triple their population in one decade under these new estimates and under that assumption you'd be looking at four decades to get up a factor of 81 or close to 100 |
| 1:03:11 | and so that's much more tractable from a time scale perspective yeah goodness me brian interesting information you can get by going back and looking at the old whaling logs i know the side's not necessarily good but there's it's very clear there were vast numbers of whales out there and if you correlate that to some of the fishing logs where people were capturing cod and other things you'll see that there was a vastly more active amount of biomass right across the ocean i've got a couple of slides somewhere which with |
| 1:03:40 | figures from around the turn of the century um but it's worth looking for that anecdotal information because you give you a very good guide as to where we might get back to the brew if you've got any references that you could throw elizabeth that'd be really helpful and i i have to say that you know i'm you know i was probably a bit naive but some of these sorts of things are so long ago that one may even think of them as i i personally was wondering well was that was it fantasy was it fiction so |
| 1:04:09 | long ago and of course it wasn't it's not read read captain cuts log which is all available online things people have seen it was not fiction exactly it was teaming with life out there this is what we need this is the language i think we need to be introducing because this is actually what we're trying to recreate i think there is one caveat to need to be aware of you can't just assume necessarily that you can restore things back exactly to where they were because there's plenty of other examples in the |
| 1:04:41 | ocean where there's been overfishing and so on and by reducing the fishing and getting eliminating it even in some cases you have not restored the previous environment because it's changed and is now dominated by different species so yeah they've passed a tipping point in some senses ecologically therefore assume you can just simply re-establish past environments i'm not saying it's not impossible in some cases at all but just be aware it's not a done deal no and chris i would even further i |
| 1:05:08 | would even further assert that uh and it's not even clear that even if you can't do that was that even where you wanted to get to anyway so this is the bold assumption that what was 200 300 years ago was in fact where we want to get to in fact was that even though i mentioned this to brian was that in itself a transient all right so actually were they well the numbers actually going up at that point so even so i would even just because that happened a long time ago uh may that may not even be the full |
| 1:05:37 | potential of where we should be getting to anyway there you go that's that that's the living carbon account which is the key matrix that's missed out everywhere all right this should be 11 000 giga tons of living carbon and we're down to 550 and if you can put that back you solve the problem pretty much that's elizabeth's first three months of the phd yeah i've got another caveat caveat to throw in if friends was here he'd say what about the oxygen we have another thing that's different now is we |
| 1:06:09 | have this uh stratification uh from the rapid warming which is uh also inhibiting oxygen going into and the weakening uh overturning circulation as well so uh be careful how much fertilization you want to do because if you have too much mineral remineralization going on down below it's going to use up all the oxygen now there's a there's an oxygen minimum zone that's uh a few hundred to a thousand meters deep and that oxygen minimum zone is the one that's been enlarging it turns out the deep ocean the abyssal ocean at 4000 |
| 1:06:44 | meters deep uh has plenty of oxygen in fact if anything the southern ocean turbo pump is increasing a bit in strength given the stronger winds that are there at the moment so from that perspective the critical thing is to retain enough natural upwelling to keep the biological pump running and the oxygenation of the mixture of the ocean which i think could help and it's a balance i think this this um an intervention in the southern ocean could help that as long as it's broadly distributed and not concentrated in one |
| 1:07:18 | place or you could actually lose a lot of oxygen from marine snow if it was concentrated in one location but distributed as was done pre-industrially getting back to the pre-industrial levels of those production um would be really helpful i think it could could help quite a bit the ice shield system will actually oxygenate the deep water because not only co2 but oxygen will be concentrated in the brine and taking it down the deep the deep waters generally though as brian said are well oxygenated and the reason why is because whether |
| 1:07:53 | it's coming from the north of the arctic or from the southern ocean there you're sinking very cold water that takes a lot of oxygen in it down anyway naturally so that's where the oxygen in the deep water is coming from it's already there yeah i think i'll have to mention that tomorrow at this webinar that will burns is putting on at northwestern university it's in approximately 24 hours but i'm in charge of discussing upwelling and downwelling they're saying artificial and i'm just going to say |
| 1:08:22 | restore natural upwelling and restore natural downwelling uh at our peril if we don't because we'll lose our civilization on the way if we if we come to a stratified ocean and yeah the first first thing your boy flakes does sir is to start restoring oxygen and that's the phytoplankton will deliver oxygen as long as you keep them alive and you keep the the nutrients but do they doesn't the oxygen bubble out no no the the what happens is the the the phytoplankton make oxygen in the euphonic zone and if you're removing |
| 1:09:00 | their dead bodies as feces down to the ocean deeps you won't actually be deoxygenating it because of bacterial mineralization so you end up with with a a benefit a a more oxygen and less oxygen being consumed by bacteria well great if the oxygen stays dissolved um observe well there is a limit how much oxygen you can put in water because obviously once it's 100 saturated then anything else will come out but generally speaking the ocean isn't and sometimes i think you can get some slight over saturation as |
| 1:09:35 | well naturally if i remember rightly not by a lot perhaps but you can get some oversaturation but not by sort of tens or hundreds of percent quite a plankton oxygen ends up in the atmosphere of great majority of it yeah well well that's the saying isn't it that the f the phantom phytoplankton in the ocean are the 50 percent of the soils or more than 50 to the global oxygen yeah yes that is correct and so you're getting a lot of oxygen in the mix layer there is a certain biological oxygen demand that occurs in the oxygen |
| 1:10:06 | minimum zone as the marine snow snake sinks and even towards the sea floor but at present the polar downwelling provides a lot more oxygen that is basically able to i would say oxidize over five gigatons of co2 in the southern ocean and over five gigatons of co2 per year in the labrador current and the north atlantic d-bar so between the two there's a surplus of perhaps 10 gigatons per year uh of oxygen flux going into the abyssal waters very very interesting okay so i'm interested in also what uh chris might have to say about um so if not |
| 1:10:49 | deoxygenation then of course ocean acidification if there's a huge amount of co2 uh going into the ocean and um you're getting remineralized and going round and round and round do you do which which for you is chris is is more of the concern loss of oxygen or or acidification or maybe neither i i don't think there's any one thing i think it's a combination of there's multiple pressures on the ocean and where you are in a particular case you may have one more important than another because of the particular local |
| 1:11:20 | or regional circumstances but they're all important in their own way they're all exerting some pressures on the ecosystem okay thank you so to me elizabeth coming back to a little bit to me these are the things these are the big questions that would be very useful if somebody does some research and comes out with some some good answers um uh you know uh because that this is the danger area you know and and hopefully somebody else will be along in 50 or 100 years time to work out you know you know the eventual situation with |
| 1:11:54 | with wales and so forth yeah just just just one comment clive about stratification um you didn't say it but i got a sort of hint that you felt that stratification was bad per se um and of course stratification is natural even in the ocean before humans had much influence it is a natural feature but the problem has been it has become um more um strong a stronger certification which is inhibiting mixing so it's not the stratification shouldn't be there but it's just become enhanced through partly global warming but i guess is one |
| 1:12:28 | of the main driver but perhaps not the only one yeah now fair enough chris i'm yes and i i was aware of that and it's the rapid warning rapid warming isn't it as we see it that's causing the stratification and additional stratification where it didn't used to be i don't think it's the speed that's causing stratification it's just the warming per se because the reason you get stratification from warming is because you're changing the density difference between the surface |
| 1:12:55 | layer and the layers underneath it's the density difference that provides that barrier to mixing so it's the density difference so it's not the rate of warming it's just the actual warmth of the surface temperature to that underneath right but so when you have a warmer period so we go back to you know our favorite time the cretaceous where i think it was 10 degrees warmer there were the oceans and the poles tended to be that much warmer anyway um you should have had less stratification was wouldn't there |
| 1:13:23 | have been less stratification uh i don't know but i think if i'm right there there was no ice at all in the cretaceous or most of it right so rightly so yeah there was no ice caps at all there was because there was a there was um forests in the arctic and or in those latitudes anyway yeah totally different ocean circulation yeah and anyway the continents weren't where they are now yeah sure any any comments from elizabeth before we move on you've heard everybody any feedback at all oh no that's just |
| 1:14:03 | really helpful and yeah if um any of you could direct me towards useful literature exactly exactly elizabeth if you could look at in your internet it's got all my ocean iron fertilization uh papers in there and there's a lot of them there it'll it's probably about a two or three days reading thing and that will give you a good idea about how i perceive things going but chris and brew on the whale stuff would be really cool and anything that brian's got as well would be really really wonderful um |
| 1:14:39 | if you haven't got elizabeth's email address feel free to throw them at me and i will then gladly forward them on to elizabeth okay so uh um and will whistle was was going to be uh so yes so we want sev to to just discuss three or four different methods of isa and we'll have we have we haven't heard from will yeah but will first i didn't write will here but um so yeah we'll please sorry very close it's okay yeah so i'm kind of making a start on my likes a lot like elizabeth i've only |
| 1:15:16 | just started so um and yeah like i my background was in stratosphere carousel injection so i'm new to the whole marine carb brightening thing um but like what i know so far is just from sort of just general geoengineering research um but yeah so um i don't know what what what did you want me to discuss right now it's okay i mean it's just to see what what you what and we don't have steven uh salter here this evening but um he's provided a lot of documents um yeah you should be able to read yeah i've |
| 1:15:52 | been given access to them on a one drive because i i know a lot of the work that beth did like i'm going to read her literature review yeah a lot of that was on some of stephen's work then i was also interested in so i know that like um like gm it did one of their i think it was g4 sea salt that was about and and ring car brightening and so i was gonna look more yeah so i'd say have a look around at stuff and come back another time are you aware of the um australian experiments over on the great barrier reef there's been two |
| 1:16:26 | field experiments now to test out initially at least there's a marine crowd brightening [Music] we may have a dodgy connection there looks a bit like a dodgy connection oh there he might be back now dr david harrison has been conducting those experiments yeah exactly southern across the university yeah sorry the connection went really bad then yeah there was there's i was just saying there was two field experiments carried out one this year one last year by um david harrison from southern cross university on the great barrier reef |
| 1:17:08 | daniel harrison yeah great i knew about vape and the um and the other people doing it you're probably aware of the university of washington uh in the us and there was also something which wasn't strictly a cloud lightning experiment but it was some people saw it as a bit of a precursor so-called e-peace experiments off the west coast of the us when they were burned using um i think they used fault generators that the sort of us army would use to generate smog on the battlefield sort of thing and you basically put up a sort of clouds of i |
| 1:17:41 | think a paraffin vapor or something like that yes um which has similar ish sort of effects that was published all quite a few years ago now probably about 2014 2015 or something it was published in the journal ambio i know that but uh i could look it up right now probably and there's also the palo alto research center that's doing some stuff on droplet generation vis-a-vis marine corps brightening as well it's going to be looking at the you going to be looking at the equipment for uh droplet production as |
| 1:18:15 | uh sean said i mean hugh hugh was mentioning a number of experiments a few months ago and uh getting the getting the right droplet size is obviously critical and just what method that is whether it's fluidic oscillation or cavitation or nozzles or all the different nozzles yeah so john the way that yeah it's being carpeted carved up in cambridge at the moment we've got two two fourth year project students are looking at droplet generation and will pardon me to correct me if i'm wrong but you're looking more at the |
| 1:18:46 | modeling yeah that was sort of right i was thinking but the droplet generation stuff we've got two other students who haven't joined us this evening and you will be you will be introduced to them but they're looking at um that that challenge in two different guises one using standard components and one looking at uh new uh methods uh which have been proposed by stephen great okay it's just the idea to to try and replicate this as well i mean that was what he was saying originally trying to get about three or four experiments around |
| 1:19:23 | the world to try and replicate the process i've been talking some other some other people here in deakin university here in melbourne that might be able to give it a go as well well that would be great john if you could ensure that hue is kept abreast of who those people are and what experiments they're doing um but you know the two fourth year project students one is looking at um trying to procure some nozzles that are off the shelf and then cortex vortex nozzles are there unclear as to exactly what the |
| 1:19:57 | mechanical nozzles are and then another one looking at fabrication using silicon wafers and piece of electric um vibration and stimulation thereof to try and create the droplets that way that's really important work that's great john just before we move on sean you're going to be uh visit your you know at cop26 as i understand it i will be there for at least some of it clive so are you going to get a chance to because i mean i feel just so depressed with you know what they'll be talking about you know |
| 1:20:33 | i mean stephen points this out every other time that they make absolutely no difference whatsoever they just give people false hopes and it's just a waste of time but are you going to have any chance to to say look you know cambridge repair center is you know uh uh working on the these cooling ideas is there going to be any sort of communication with dave king uh you know there as well through to the the sort of political class well that's a good question i need to i i am meeting dave tomorrow about what |
| 1:21:08 | the um [Music] various events and what we're going to say as a minimum we are going to be talking about going beyond emissions reduction to look at greenhouse gas removal just because that's a very natural follow-on to say all these all these lovely countries that are making net zero uh claims and they've they really even thought about what net means i mean and then there's a dual entrance under there of course net zero being it involves negative emissions technologies um so um so it's quite nice and but look |
| 1:21:43 | that's that's the first step and then the second thing is well really read ipcc al6 and i'm afraid even the most aggressive um or ambitious emissions reduction or net emissions reductions scenarios aren't enough to keep us safe all right so there is a two-stage um uh discussion really clive and i would hope that we get to um able to engage and talk about the what we really need to get real with um but um we haven't even managed to get a side event on greenhouse gas removal we are independently hosting some networking |
| 1:22:24 | events um on uh where greenhouse gas removal will be the main thrust of it but it's been i've been underwhelmed by the uh the lack of appetite really um but yeah for that for greenhouse gas removal on anything other than you know emissions reduction which where we know the targets whatever they set will be completely insufficient and won't happen anyway well exactly that's being within it you're right you're right yeah no matter what they say we know it's not going to be enough yeah yeah so that so |
| 1:23:01 | that's the thing i mean it seems to me that somebody has to stick their neck out um sean and say look uh even green has grass removal isn't going to provide the cooling that's needed but there are these methods of cooling that have been around for a long time and um there's pushback because people say you know it gives these evil fossil fuel companies a a get out of jail free card to you know to carry on doing their evil thing but it's not that that's a misrepresentation of how it is anyway |
| 1:23:30 | because well i've got a we've got a piece on this at the moment which i'm trying to get published somewhere in the next couple of weeks in more mainstream media so i haven't managed it yet but if we can't we're going to put it on our own website right but um because someone like me you know most people i'm i'm going to be giving a presentation to uh engineers from the ima ke on on the 19th and telling them this you know that cooling is needed um but um you've got a wonderful brand |
| 1:24:00 | um uh sean um that people listen to cambridge university did um any of you see the article that came out i think in about april where bob watson and a couple other scientists basically said zero is a trap and basically said it's a con it is but uh it was said by three quite uh prominent scientists in this field um but i it doesn't seem to have got a lot of traction that i noticed probably for obvious reasons he was on television this evening and he didn't say it but chris i'm not even sure you need to |
| 1:24:36 | get overly exercised about the word it's a con because we can completely diffuse that um argument in my opinion by just referring to ipcc ar6 oh sure yeah and it and it just says the most ambitious scenarios he's just going through one and a half degrees c bang all right admittedly they then say well the most aggressive one named siege you're coming dipping below by the end of the century but given the whole thrust of 2015 was we must try we was move heaven on earth to try and keep well to keep below one and a half |
| 1:25:10 | degrees all right and now six years on you know it's a you know this body is saying you can't do it with just emissions reduction and all the machinery behind that so anyway i'm going to use this as my armory chris you are the the okay the ar6 yeah yeah remind them there's at least a 10-year lag and by the way we're at 1. |
| 1:25:36 | 2 something now and look what's happening i know if in the one and a half degrees c chris oh bro exactly if you think one and a half degrees c is pretty do you think today is pretty yeah well exactly bear in mind you know where were we 10 years ago because that's the impact we've got now you know i mean and and they don't know politicians don't know they need to be advised and they they do you know they do the best you know hopefully the best they can given the information they you know they're given and there's all these |
| 1:26:06 | different voices all over the place um for example michael mann saying no no you can't you can't do any cooling you can't do all these things you know you've just got to reduce emissions but they can't you know clive i've got unfortunately i've got a son on the phone so i need to run and go really fantastic thank you so much indeed everybody for being introduced to our students tonight and there'll be more more and on um and uh we will certainly look back before cop 26 hits us and i'll by that time i |
| 1:26:35 | would have finalized my plans and dave's um as to exactly uh when we're going and what the events are it's still very much in flux though okay to go as well thank you okay thank you brian thank you sean [Laughter] we'll do a little bit more then with that without you two okay see you again in two weeks time yeah we'll do super job thanks guys sure thank you sean yeah yeah and and uh friends you're with us now yes yes yes i i missed the beginning yeah i forgot to uh reset i was realized to send out |
| 1:27:19 | the reminder so we just have a few minutes and sev wants to hear about um isa methods of isa dispersal um so do you want to fire away uh sev we'll just yes frank team and and i and others have been looking at basically two methods of getting iron salt aerosols into the air to to reduce atmospheric methane and maybe to help a bit with the phytoplankton the two methods are basically um to sublimate ferric chloride into nano sized particles which then capitally photo photo oxidize methane and the second is to spray |
| 1:28:04 | um some form of iron oxide maybe mixed with the ferric chloride into the air as as droplets which will then evaporate down and do the same thing now i've been working a bit on which is going to be the most efficient from an engineering point of view and the four methods i've come about across is first to to get that red mud waste from aluminium refining and if you separate out the smaller from the larger particles in that they mainly iron oxide you can spray the smaller ones as droplets into the air while with the larger parts you can put |
| 1:28:53 | it to my buoyant flakes and and you might want to spray with with a peric chloride solution as well to get get the the mixed particles which franz has shown do best which is basically an iron oxide particle with a thin film of ferric chloride solution coating it that seems to be best the second way i was thinking of doing it is to use pure iron oxide from from iron iron or mining but that's using a fairly high grade resource and i like to try and use low grade or waste resources the third way is to to simply on my setomizers |
| 1:29:49 | to use the the energy from produced by the wind turbine to heat up pellets of ferric chloride to make your nanoparticles of of ferric chloride to do the job and the fourth way is to use a mix of the of the red mud phones and the ferric chlorides both being produced by the setomizers to do the job pretty much globally wherever we have uh ocean uh to to to to to use or always or else upwind of um areas which are producing methane such as cracking fields rice rice paddies uh uh cattle kettle pins yeah yeah okay places where there's a high concentration of |
| 1:30:52 | methane yeah and i'm coming down to the idea that the fourth method which is using mixing perichloride sublimate with the the the the red mud is probably going to be best overall and i wonder whether any of you had any preferences for what was the best way to get iron up into the uh atmosphere yeah i i i'm sure it is uh the the the uh gaseous phase of iron three chloride and mixing it uh fast with the with um uh with the with with air to get the particles uh as small as possible yeah does that give you your iron oxide |
| 1:31:54 | though or not just a ferric chloride i i think it's best to use ferrochloride alone without iron oxide but your your big diagram shows an iron oxide particle yes yes nature does does it with iron oxide particles covered by iron fluoride coat but we don't need to do this i think surely you have also natural hcl in the in the atmosphere and in principle you can do it with iron oxide with pure iron oxide which will cover uh with a little with a small uh scl code |
| 1:32:57 | uh and iron three chloride coat but uh it's it's only 300 ppt hcl in the in the atmosphere over the ocean and it will last some time until you get this code and i think it's last time we should activate it from the beginning and so it's better to to use uh arthritis from the beginning right so what we need to get is the engineers to do some calculations on costs and particle size and distribution to see which is the most economic way to get the ices into the air to get rid of the methane and that i don't have the ability to do that and |
| 1:33:53 | i'm hoping that some some of the engineers and logistics people could do that yes and also the engineers will will have to prove that in in nature how how it will work there yes yeah yeah so we need we need some small small-scale experiments both in the lab and and in the atmosphere yes that's right good okay that that's that's pretty much what i wanted to get across thanks clive we have lost life oh god gosh clive yep god he's gone perhaps he's uh had had to pay a visit but maybe is there anything else which anyone |
| 1:34:52 | wants to uh to talk about we we're over time anyway so we could probably uh wind up yeah probably so it's um just just one thing on yeah excuse me so just one thing on the on the back of our discussion about clouds and destroying clouds in the arctic and so forth because it's a lot of it depends on the um on the on the sort of the cooling effect of different clouds the the optical thickness of of cirrus clouds can vary quite a bit and you know if they if they're very thick they probably have an albedo effect but if they're very thin |
| 1:35:34 | they can have a have a warming effect so it depends on the on the type of of high levels uh serous clouds as well so it's there's a whole study in in that area that's that and stephen's been all over this uh as well but um yeah it just depends on on on the on the sort of particle concentration and mass of those clouds and how effective they are in terms of cooling and heating because i think it can vary quite a bit i understand that overall have a warming effect whether they're thin or thick |
| 1:36:09 | but if we want to keep if we want to make more radiation off planet we want to try and minimize them so one way of doing that is to increase their size so that they have less effect the increase the particle size so they have less effect right yeah i've been talking to a fellow um ismail gussippi up in toronto an interesting fellow does a lot of work in ice fogs which is another area of study and whether they have any albedo benefits as well and uh yeah he's he's sort of writing papers and studying this and |
| 1:36:52 | he's it actually might be good to get him onto one of these calls if uh if we can just to throw another perspective into into this sort of detail yeah if you send send me his email uh john okay yeah that's it okay see what we can do sure yeah i had to disappear from a minute folks so i i missed a little bit of that uh but it said right you're going to say something else france was about to say wanted to come back to the uh stratification of the ocean and there was the uh question uh if rapid increase of warming |
| 1:37:38 | uh i'm i'm sure the the the more rapid the the the warming uh increases the faster the the the more the ocean becomes uh stratified because your the the temperature of the deep ocean keeps the same and the the the uppermost ocean layer it becomes much warmer and i think it's a rather simple thing that this will stratify more than slowly warming so it prevents oxygen oxygen absorption france yeah but surely it's the actual temperature differences at the time that matter the fact the ocean's been warming |
| 1:38:40 | twice as fast say in one area compared to another that will provide a different level of stratification other things being equal but the same would happen in the first area if you had twice as long so the rate of change doesn't affect stratification per se it's the temperature difference because stratification you get this layer at the bottom of the mixed layer of the ocean where you get a very rapid change both in salinity and temperature and consequently density and it's the density difference that |
| 1:39:14 | actually drives the stratification because that prevents this mixing so it's the actual temperature difference primarily that drives that that effect and the fact the ocean may have been warning quicker to get to a point i don't think actually is important it's the the actual temperature it's important in the sense that if you have a rapid temperature change you'll get stratification happening more strongly as time goes by but it doesn't affect the stratification at any one particular time how quickly it's |
| 1:39:46 | been warming they're two different things rapid warbing will mean getting more stratification as time goes by more quickly but at this an individual place it's the temperature difference at the time that matters because that's what drives stratification things which are breaking that stratification up so shoals are very large fish that are moving up and down [Music] well the there is some there's been a few of people speculating about things like krill and other stuff um causing a certain amount of mixing which |
| 1:40:30 | i'm sure they do and probably big shoulders of these things probably have an effect but they don't seem to as it were overwhelm the natural physical stratification that i'm aware of anyway [Music] i'm sorry i just didn't understand that that uh chris i don't know if i'm the only one that doesn't get it but because we're such think what we're trying to say is that when when something uh when you get a rapid warming atmosphere then it rapidly warms the surface of the ocean |
| 1:41:03 | so you do so that gives you your temperature difference and that's what then leads to the stratification well the temperature if the temperature atmosphere changes no matter how quickly let's say it's going up yeah then the stratification will depend on what temperature is achieved in the surface ocean yeah so um now if you if they oh the atmospheric temperature is warming more quickly it'll increase how strong the stratification is with time yeah but any one time if you measure the stratification |
| 1:41:38 | the actual rate of change of warming of the the atmosphere is neither here nor there to stratification it's the actual temperature difference at the bottom of the surface layer that is the point that drives stratification and so it's the it's that that is that today if i go out and measure the stratification somewhere to the west of the uk if there is well there probably isn't any of them in it actually it's winter time it's all mixed up um but if it was summer i could go out there and measure the stratification |
| 1:42:06 | yeah now if if the if the if the let's look backwards if the temperature today had been achieved to get to where we are twice as fast in one case or half as fast in another case the stratification will be the same okay yes but i think what we're saying is that when you have the atmosphere warming rapidly the lower layers of the ocean don't get a chance to catch up their temperature oh well they'll never do that anyway because the rate you're talking of mixing into the lower layers now that the the mixing rate there is so much |
| 1:42:46 | orders of magnitude many orders of magnitude slower that that the the um the rate of change of the atmosphere is it'll take a thousand years and more for that to um be affected so you'll see very little change in the beyond in the deep ocean yeah the surface layer changes right so that that's what we're saying i think that's what we're saying isn't it friends that but that that mixing is so slow that um that right now we have a rapid warming climate um whereas you know millions of years familiar you know |
| 1:43:17 | for most of the earth's history temperature atmospheric temperature changed very slowly because climate change very slowly but because of you know humans suddenly emitting all this uh greenhouse gases we have a rapid air temperature rise which is um which the rest of the ocean can't keep up with so that's why we have this stratification because of um the human induced warming as as am i disagreeing with you um chris all i'm saying is missing something if you have faster global atmospheric warming you will have fast you'll get |
| 1:43:52 | stronger stratification more quickly of that the other way around but i'm saying it oh you're saying that faster warming brought up franz zane was fast warming per se of itself at any one time means there's going to be more stronger stratification now than it was than it would be otherwise and i'm saying you can get to a point by fast or slow warming you could still have the same stratification depending on the time scale you're working over in the actual temperature of the atmosphere so faster warming means you get stronger |
| 1:44:25 | stratification after let's say 10 years or 100 years whatever period you like to look at okay if that's what we're saying yes but it's not the rate of change of warming that causes stratification of per se it's the rate of change of warming causes the rate of change of stratification not stratification the rate of change so one causes the other right okay so down to loss of ocean circulation and as you change the salinity i mean as the group is slowing yes but that you've got less tidal effect you've got less circulation up |
| 1:45:03 | and down you've got less of the big tidal up wellings that you have in some places also you have more inside birds well a lot of the things you've mentioned are not necessarily oceanic things a lot of those uh continental shell for other regions which is i don't think quite what we were talking about we're talking of global ocean so we're not talking of things like tidal effects being greatly significant i think in terms of short-term uh changes such as i was really referring to rapid change beyond the speed at |
| 1:45:31 | which the natural system can adapt to oh yeah yeah that happened to know well yeah quite happy with that yeah so i think you're you're saying that stratification exists already uh quite naturally uh chris which i fully accept you know the the tropical ocean is warm at the top and it's cold at the bottom and it always will no matter how much global warming we have even over millennia the top of the ocean is always going to be warmer than the bottom by quite a bit right inevitably yeah um and so you're saying it's it's |
| 1:46:02 | stratification it's not being caused by rapid warming it's just that um the rapid rate caused by warming warming causes stratification yeah yeah okay that's fine that's that makes more warming more stratification yeah yeah yeah yeah yes okay yeah that's i think we got something there friends did we okay okay yeah okay yeah so okay thank you thank you for that chris uh sev did you get your over time with 15 minutes over time did you get what you wanted from that i say i i'm finished enough uh i i explained the |
| 1:46:42 | four methods franz has said that the sublimation is best and and i think i'll go with sublimation plus maybe a little bit of the the the heavier i iron oxide uh to get the best of both worlds you get from ic devices yeah with it with the iron oxide you're not going to get much methane depletion i think that's the point no the idea is the iron oxide is coated with ferric chloride oh you're gonna coat it with it okay okay got it yeah okay any last point from any anyone else at all anyone at all |
| 1:47:17 | um okay well thank you everybody and uh i'll do the usual i'll send it out send out their recording and hope to see you again in a couple of weeks all right good night everyone |