| (Click on a 'Start Time' to view the video) |
| 00:03 | ah he's coming now we're just giving her getting a run down from ghana green who's just come on friend of dunk ground ah uh oh doug grant okay let's have a look oh hello manager that's well i'm i'm uh i can't get on uh video right now i'll be on in about five minutes okay doug we'll see you in a minute then yep um and we have a herbert yeah did they tell you manager um i i asked everyone to all the new people uh to just give a quick intro so not now um um maybe in a few minutes when we'll |
| 00:59 | have more people here i'll be glad great yeah and then i'll try to get on um video we're trying to get on video okay yeah so that's what we spend the first few minutes doing solving rit problems i hope we have some of the cambridge people on today it's been a long time since we've had them in a while i thought i don't know the last time um we had um hugh was he threw we were he entertained us throwing his boomerang around his uh office whatever it was and i kept that in the video on monday |
| 01:41 | what's that brian you always doing that and does it all over the world oh does he so we weren't special with oh i know i didn't mean to say that at all that's right i don't i'm only joking anyway yeah i didn't realize that yeah i'm sorry we didn't really get back to you properly did was that okay if you in the end her but we we kind of did some calculations and realized it was that it was it was going to be a no-no i see i know i didn't know exactly why oh sorry about that well no that's quite |
| 02:11 | all right but i'm uh happy to work with you at any time thank you very much okay and i'll try and be a bit more uh straightforward and polite i didn't notice the lack of politeness well i was just i think i think i did get back and say and said um something about you know this we've done some calculations and it just seems um not possible this was about making holes in sea mounts to lift up nutrients and i worked out we need 80 million boreholes and that alone is is makes it um unfeasible when you've and then i |
| 02:54 | learned that it was about half a million dollars for each borehole so there's got to be a better way ah talking of cambridge people here's sean yeah but i i feel very strongly that every possible idea needs to be thought out and worked through and and some will not be so good but you don't know that till you work them out yeah absolutely right yeah yeah yeah so we that's right we didn't we didn't dismiss it for a long time um but um there we go maybe i should have done those calculations a bit soon well i |
| 03:29 | mean i i i guessed i did an estimate of you know the flow rate that we could expect um maybe it could be a lot more um but anyway we're working on something else now which we'll tell people about once we're ready with it bring me in on that i'll be happy to do so okay thank you very much much appreciated well it's uh it's past eight o'clock so so welcome everybody um i'm always amazed to see so many wonderful people turning up to this thing so i keep sending out the invitations and i keep posting the video |
| 04:08 | um we have uh a new person with us today it's uh how do i say your name is it manager or manager green are you there i was i'm here i was on mute and uh let me um is there someone else that needs to introduce themselves so i can just get to a place where i can we can we can give you we could you can take a bit longer if you like um is it manager do i say either one just uh if if you want to just go with with mana that's fine or manager either one could see you now okay so uh just to let you know um i i am um |
| 05:06 | my day job is that i work for hudson rivers loop clearwater i'm their environmental director in their 20 years and if you're not familiar that's the organization pete seeger founded and i also serve on the ulster county legislature where i chair sorry the energy and environment committee and the climate smart committee and i'm uh al gore strange climate reality leader and have done a lot of very constructive work on preventing emissions you know the sources and sinks but i'm very interested now in |
| 05:56 | the oceans and um and the polarized caps uh i we you know we've been talking about transitioning to a renewable energy economy for 20 or 30 years and it's starting to gear up but i have a lot of concern that that's not enough uh and so i'm here to learn to listen and learn and help where i can that's fantastic uh thank you very much manor that's great i think we those concerns are shared by well i don't like to speak to other people but i think well certainly me and i think most people here as well |
| 06:38 | um okay let's do what we usually do i'm going to share the screen uh let's just share this thing here and what do we want to talk about today well i'd like to hear of the the cambridge uh um news update from cop26 and what they're doing there should be a lot of action there yeah cop 26. um and what else yep okay assume that uh sean will be willing to be happy to do that i've been interested in the solubility of carbon dioxide in seawater and looking at the input and output flow rates apparently |
| 07:26 | it goes in in the cold water and comes back out again in the warm water and i'm interested in what happens if that the flow rates there either in or out change because of concentrations in the atmosphere and uh we might find that instead of going in it's coming out about a third of it goes in at the moment but there's nothing to keep it in there if the balance of vapor pressures changes okay so do you have something to say about that or you want to ask about that oh i've more acidic yeah right okay yeah |
| 08:03 | just think about it be nice to this but maybe discuss that a little bit see if people got i think i can think of one or two people here that might have something to say about that okay and anything else pumps for uh co2 removal did you seem to have had an interesting discussion recently clive with the new sunrise so upwelling uh yeah i participated in it um i think i'm downloading two yeah i should just sit down and download it maybe we can call it um upwelling pumps wearing pumps what's happening sorry i said just |
| 08:47 | willing welling pumps whirling pumps well i'll leave it like that um yeah keep pumps in there okay hopefully wellness pumps too wellness pumps yeah uh thank good could i could i add something uh yeah yeah i came up i only uh wrote about it about two two less than two hours ago yeah on the on the list um at the meeting uh with hca's regular weekly meeting on saturday um saturday evening uh uk time um there was some quote uh peter waddens who was given some questions here by the way yeah i'm peter and somebody called bob |
| 09:40 | frye uh made a suggestion that you could get significant cooling from the albedo of algae blooms okay um and it looked as if it was scalable to to really quite a lot of cooling yeah that that idea has been around a long time john it's nothing new yeah but i i've never discussed it on any of these forums yeah sure okay it sounds quite a possible technique yep okay so we're all here to learn so that's uh we can we can talk about that a little bit uh clive yeah uh i'm i'm curious uh uh uh manna with her her long experience in |
| 10:31 | the u.s environmental movement by the way man i'm i'm in chicago uh and i i i did spend some time in westchester and interacted with pete and all the the clear clear river uh people but uh i'm curious if she could uh you know as well as learning some things from us may perhaps help us understand how to move the broader environmental movement in the u. |
| 10:59 | s and elsewhere toward an understanding that's direct cooling is absolutely necessary at this point as some form of direct cooling that you know exactly what you express that you know you've long been working on mitigation and and uh you know the effort to get to the long-term sustainable economy but but right now we're seeing that things are too hot already and that we we just can't do nothing for 30 years and let things fall apart uh or you know not do nothing but yeah great you know yeah you get the point i got the point yeah okay thank |
| 11:36 | you ron uh how to move the environmental movement towards this these ideas that we're discussing yeah okay i mean that's um [Music] that may be enough uh as this is some other ideas there but um if not let's let's jump in um are you there sev i mean um sean rather i i am clyde can you hear me is that okay yep it's loud and clear good so look um i apologize we haven't been with you since cop 26. |
| 12:16 | so um my my take on cop26 but i wasn't the only one there so peter was there actually for the full two weeks peter waddens is on the call so actually i think peter should also comment if you don't mind me imposing on you peter but my my big message is that i think there are two areas of cop there's the official bit so whatever gets agreed and you know that takes two weeks and we saw some of that going on and uh there's the unofficial bit in other words actually what happens around in the the green zone actually much of the blue |
| 12:49 | zone right not just the negotiations piece so my takeaway is that the the official bit it was set up the way the whole thing is set up unf triple c 197 countries um i think to call it either a super tanker or even a glacier and the speed up they're able to move it's just you know i think that's an overstatement okay i think it's you know it's really really slow but unfortunately i haven't got any better ideas all right in terms of uh and i don't think anyone else has either in terms of if you want to get 197 |
| 13:25 | countries working together um but they're what the positive thing is that there were some improvements so they you know the rule book got agreed in paris so look but these are like in my in my mind ripples on the ocean or deck chairs on the titanic in other words there was some there was some stuff that was done um and we should there we shouldn't therefore ignore that politically we absolutely should not uh but we're a million miles from where we need to be that's my uh take away and actually you |
| 13:54 | know the big things for ipcc i just found it laughable when they said we're keeping the one and a half degrees c alive all right um that was the the language that was being used and i did one shouldn't really sort of find this humorous but if only they read just the most recent ipcc report al6 um you know working group one every scenario every scenario sees a sailing through one and a half degrees c all right admittedly the most ambitious aggressive emissions production scenario sees it then dipping below one and a half |
| 14:28 | degrees c by the end of the century but non-linear aspects of this i found even just the some of the commentary the official commentary about keeping one and a half degrees c alive disingenuous so that was a bit disappointing but on the other side um is that look there are lots of people there lots of people talking uh and the overall uh and enthusiasm out with the the core negotiations i think is really encouraging and we should therefore take heart you know there is a there is a groundswell and i think it's you know we |
| 14:58 | have to do something beyond the official cop uh process but we should there but we shouldn't ignore the official cop process clive that's my big thing because otherwise you alienate people you're seen as a rebel your scene is not actually work i think you need to do both it's both and so that's my quick summary i don't know whether anyone else wants to add peter you were there um yes i'd agree with you on the whole um that uh the the positive the most positive thing i think that came out of cop26 was the the |
| 15:29 | work of the of the ngos the uh of the the people like us that the the people who were talking together um analyzing what should and could be done about climate change and and most effective could most be most effect effectively put in motion um the the the normal human beings who could see had the experience in intelligence to see what needs to be done and knew how they should try to do it that was that was the positive thing the negative thing was that the dead hand of government and uh which came in right at the end |
| 16:13 | for instance the the indian government decided that they weren't going to do anything about climate change until 2017 and then and in the meantime they were going to dig up as much coal as they wanted and so why did they even take part in cop what was what you know they they they they could have said all that before coming and not come um so there's that there was a a governmental side of cop which was that governments were just simply not prepared to follow through on the promises made uh in the paris climate agreement and um |
| 16:54 | you were just completely despaired of of seeing the world saving itself when it needed to make a massive effort and it wasn't prepared to make that effort so that that was the contrast i think between the the uh the non-government people who knew what to do uh who but didn't have the resources to do it and the and the governments who had the resources but didn't have the courage to do it okay so before we go to brian um what i should say is that there was one extra thing which was that the there was in |
| 17:30 | terms of the um the feelings in the room we have a colleague um at the center for club repair called natalie jones and she was in the negotiations as a commentator and observer for two weeks there's really lack of distrust between the developed and developing nations and in particular the promises that were being made for the 100 billion a year you mean lack of trust um uh sean don't you sorry sorry lack of trust uh in terms of therefore meeting the commitments of for example the financial commitments and |
| 18:02 | therefore uh meeting everything is as well uh clive so uh that that that unfortunately came through anyway i was going to hand over to brian okay thank you okay brian good morning or evening um well you know for me keeping 1.5 degrees alive means not exceeding 1.5 degrees and this idea of getting back to 1. |
| 18:26 | 5 degrees after overshooting is such a poor cousin to the reality i mean the reality is we've got to stay below 1.5 and just you know it's just this abdication of leadership on the part of government to me is just spelling i mean i think the dead hand is is the is the right way of referring to it it's not i think paul hawking wrote regeneration we have one generation to get this right is correct because greatest generation will disassemble whatever systems are not working uh you know in that time frame thank you can we hear a bit about what the ccrc |
| 19:02 | has been doing on the research side look let's let uh herb speak um if uh herbert might want to make a comment about what about this i'm not sure that i have everything anything really much to add to from sean and um peter and in a sense uh bridges already brown has already said um i would just say i watched a number of uh the uh sessions that sean was involved in and he and others but he in particular made some extremely useful sensible sensitive scientific points and then when i read each uh boarding the newspaper reports |
| 19:41 | of what had gone on in cop it was totally different there were right angles to what was going on and that's really what has been said we must talk it seems to me not so much about what a good scientific idea is as important as that is but how do we convince governments and people of influence and countries like india and china to understand what is obvious to us but they don't seem to listen uh if if i could just comment on that from ron baiman here i'm the economist again this this if if somebody would give india you know |
| 20:20 | a trillion bucks or whatever it would take to uh to substitute for coal and the ability to produce the energy then i bet they would they would uh go for it you know it's it's uh the question here is you can't ask a poor developing country to to impose poverty mass poverty on its population for the sake of the global climate as much as you know we might like to do that so we need uh you know to move this forward we have to be realistic i keep mentioning the the case of ecuador where the anyway you've heard |
| 20:55 | well some of you haven't the president uh was a leftist he wanted to not drill oil in the forest he said yeah who will give me money and nobody did so they drilled in the rainforest so you know this is this is the problem it's it's it's not a matter of convincing it's a matter of practical way to get from here to there while promoting development yeah and this is this is this is a politician's quandary but but ron i think one of the problems is it may well be it's slightly costly now to do some of the things that we |
| 21:30 | want but if they're not done the cost to our grandchildren is going to make the cost now trivial and i'll say why the hell wasn't a few million pounds spent when it's costing us trillions leaving aside the cost of people's lives the forest fires of devastation of lands of uh uh doing enormous damage to animal populations yeah well so so i mean there are two easy quick answers to that one is that we had a scheme the kyoto method transferred hundreds of billions of dollars to developing countries |
| 22:11 | particularly china which they use for you know among other things for scaling up the solar voltaic production but you know the the voluntary green fund has not even succeeded in raising 100 billion so if you want to actually transfer funds you set up a scheme cap and trade you know that that will promote that that's one way the other point of course is that politicians they get reelected every few you know they they work on a short term not a long term and regardless i mean they many of you i'm sure that many of them understand |
| 22:46 | or you know i would hope that many of them understand the depth of the problem the serious the long term costs but that that doesn't get us from here to there you can't just impoverish your country you know you've got to find a way to do this without doing that yeah i've got a question um just for any anyone to to what extent does anyone think um that politicians really have both hands tied behind their backs by the by the you know the money people the sort of dark money people they i call them they call it the |
| 23:21 | tragedy of the incumbents you know that they don't want anything to change and they don't want to lose any money well clive i think it's true that there are vested interests who have a big influence on government without doubt after all if you see the subsidies that the oil and gas industry gets from governments globally it's absolutely huge um and governments are not going to upset them basically if they can avoid it anyway um and they're not the only vested interest you know there's plenty of |
| 23:50 | others for various reasons yeah well i might just quickly add to that clive i think you asked a good question and i've given australia an example being australian malcolm turnbull who i know somewhat who became prime minister after i'd talked to him understands climate change very well he really realizes what problem is going to be but then his right wing back benches really forced him to take their line and he very much wanted to be prime minister in quite an unaustralian style he said when he was about 12 or 13 he |
| 24:30 | was going to be prime minister so he would do anything and it's a pity and i might just say a smile uh he is hosting a book launched tomorrow with brian schmidt the uh nobel laureate uh in astronomy uh just on this matter now he's no longer prime minister he lost that i'll be interested to know what line he takes tomorrow okay thank you um who is next was it brian i think yes uh you know from a technical standpoint the solution in india is clear the international energy agency has already identified solar as the |
| 25:11 | cheapest power in history so with appropriate capital in place um the incentives can be put for india to to not build any new coal power plants to put in solar with a combination of pumped hydro in the himalayas and pump thermal transforming the ashes of a thermal power plant into a state-of-the-art renewable energy storage facility at grid scale it's possible to store that solar and use it 24 hours a day at pennies on the dollar compared to traditional batteries the combination of indian solar plus um bulk grid scale energy storage will save |
| 25:47 | the day i mean it should save the day and those those financings simply need to be linked to not building coal power plants for the coal power plants in india yeah there was a recent um program in fact today on uh himalayan uh climate change in the himalayas and the conclusion was that uh um over 40 percent of the the the warming caused by uh uh the black ice on falling on himalayan glaciers is due to cooking stones in india so you could with you could solve this problem relatively simply by providing enough um efficient cooking stoves that you |
| 26:35 | don't get um black ice you don't get enough dirt going onto glaciers to give you black ice so the these things can be solved at where the country involves is like india where everything is is of low cost you can you can find a solution um but of course the question is why isn't that solution being found and implemented it also kills a million people a year in india [Music] yeah um so i've got another question why do politicians i mean they we all know this they just keep on talking about you know |
| 27:20 | reducing emissions and and here we are talking about you know all kinds of different solutions like like that one um cooling from you know clouds and possibly you know stratospheric aerosol injection is is do anyone see why that doesn't ever seem to get on the agenda for with politicians or is it on the agenda maybe i've missed something well clive um to a small extent it's on the agenda in some places an example the british government has funded some ggr research and it's recently uh funded about 20 or more projects |
| 27:57 | for direct air capture um so it's it's still small beer i know but at least it's something and a start and there's um in the us also as a result of the biden presidency there are some things happening of a similar nature there but compared to the scale of the problem i would accept that they're nowhere near addressing the scale that needs to be addressed all the range of issues that need to be addressed either okay so i'll try and go quite after this is there something there missing do they see a |
| 28:28 | clear so we sit here and talk amongst ourselves twice you know once every two weeks um and then share the video amongst ourselves and and that's pretty much whoever all the people get to see it so we're not you know i'm not pushing much out for politicians to see is does anyone have any comment on whether they have the information in a reliable you know form and it is easy enough to read that they can respond um as we think they should that's that's aaron okay good good to meet you adam aaron i've seen so many uh |
| 29:09 | posts from you with pictures yeah i do show up a few times i've actually our government has been buying up any land around wellington that's anywhere near sea level for the last five years um you're you're in new zealand then yeah and um we might already be experiencing some sea level rise uh the tide is two hours away from high but it's already higher than it's been um for weeks you know it's right up at spring tide level last night you know you've got the whole um norwegian seas uh covered in blob |
| 29:57 | tsunamis and those images i've been sending you the whole of the labrador seas uh the there are low-lying areas of northern norway where it's obvious that it's been inundated for perhaps 50 kilometers inland um i can't find anything in the news on the web whatever uh but they did announce about five days ago that they could expect um abnormally high tides on the east northeast coast of america i i wonder if that um you know they're aware of these things but it's scary and um filling up with chinese billionaires and |
| 30:44 | stuff they're all buying uh you know not just chinese but any land that's at high altitude is instantly bought for twice its normal value um if it goes on the market and 99 of the of the ones in our quarantine facilities in rotorua are chinese billionaires and their brats i was wondering when that was going to start happening are people going to start buying land high up i wonder i wonder they don't they don't respond because they're not aware they're not responding to your request to reduce |
| 31:21 | carbon because they know that a final dry ice is initiating and right at the moment we probably need all the heating we can get the earth is lashing back with phenomenal force um and you know we've just seen the west coast of greenland the ice caps shatter and recede 100 kilometers in the space of a few days wow that's scary when i returned to all those tsunamis all over the ocean right let's let's peter respond um aaron let's let peter answer that trying to respond to what uh clive was saying |
| 32:04 | is there a link and why if not why isn't the link between all the research that's being done by the uh ngos and and university labs and scientists uh on uh what is causing global warming what are the what are the mechanisms going on what must be do and what should we do to to try to to uh to stop all this and and and take away co2 from the atmosphere get ourselves back into a livable world all of that is being done without any kind of support often by ngos and on the other side of the fence in in uh cop there's the governments who |
| 32:57 | who who simply are governed by and determined by political pressures and they will decide that something can be done and something else can't be done on the basis of uh of pure politics and that accounts for uh most countries that are really putting their all into to to the results of of of um cops like like india um and so i think claire's question was why isn't there a proper link between all the scientists and all the the research has been done on how we can we can deal with with climate change and |
| 33:42 | the the governmental bodies who are saying well this is we're only going to go this far because this is this is well what our go for i think you can relax peter everything you've asked for is happening uh there's massive amounts of sulfur dioxide coming out of antarctica and greenland there is plenty of um enormous storm activity putting salt aerosol sprays into the atmosphere there is oh what else oh yeah the ocean we're talking about the link here uh without doing any reconnaissance um on the current situation |
| 34:35 | yeah and you know it's great to we you provide a great service yeah you're telling us this stuff um you're and you're giving us evidence day by day with with pictures and a very concerned voice really encouraging you guys to familiarize yourselves with looking at these images and and monitor them you know you should have someone who actually has better facilities than me i've only got a smartphone i'm living on a boat you know i'm off grid solar powered yeah yeah so and so what we're trying to |
| 35:11 | get to here is how could we get to because there's so much great work could you all right at one end of it aaron supplying this these images what how do we get to the politicians so i i can't if i could venture most of them speak three years ago yeah so so i think the answer may well first of all there's a an economist graciela chitchillnisky who designed and promoted and got the kyoto accord promoted implemented and it's continued in europe but the captain trade system europe has actually resulted in emissions the only major |
| 35:58 | part of the world there's actually decreased emissions and part of that of course is because china has taken over all you know so much manufacturing but the the broader so she has the the the idea in her in her book which is it's not anyway it's it has some excellent ideas it's not it's not a great it's not written very well but it's got some very good ideas uh your latest book is to uh use a profit incentive to promote negative emissions technology so build on uh the kyoto uh uh mechanism that transferred all these |
| 36:37 | billions uh and exactly what peter was saying the the incentive for the original idea was that it's cheaper it's cheaper to yeah okay okay so let me let me just finish so yeah so the the with this kind of negative emissions like the one i mentioned you know the global thermostat idea and so forth if you if you created a market you could actually make this profitable and that that might drive some serious some serious change the other thing of course uh is that you know if we can we've talked about this if we could get to the the |
| 37:12 | casualty the insurance people and so forth and say look you know you could save a lot of money if we were able to do some real cooling immediately well so somehow you know that this is something that politicians both to transfer the billions of investment that are urgently needed in the developing countries i think you do need some kind of mandatory uh you know uh collective agreement to do that as the kyoto protocol did and frankly it was the left i mean my colleagues my comrades kind of tanked that uh you know |
| 37:49 | because of sort of anti-market ideology and contracts were were fuzzy which is all true but you can do it right you know you can you can uh hold countries to their missions whether or not the individual contracts are bulletproof or not so so i mean there are methods uh but we have to you know i think i think you know a lot of us are talking from the science point of view but from the from the social science and political point of view they have to be realistic they have to be something that you know that works politically yeah that's right |
| 38:21 | so a lot of this has been discussed so i i wonder if politicians uh i mean so sean the uh cambridge climate repair will come back to come to um what you're doing soon um if i was a politician i'd be looking to something like you know some uh institution that looks respectable where people have sort of i'll get it all out amongst himself because if you have a this is what i think john kerry says you know you go to you ask a room full of 100 scientists what should you do and you'll get 100 different answers |
| 38:56 | um but if you go to an institution like cambridge climate repair or one you know i'm not that's just wouldn't have to be that you know maybe harvard or yeah i don't know either do you think that um cambridge climate repairs is able to advise governments well i mean i'm asking sean let me ask sean yeah yeah go ahead i mean the answer is yes clive um and actually that's part of the work in particular dave who's got the experience of working with governments um around the world as well |
| 39:31 | so the answer is absolutely yes but the important thing is that it won't just be cambridge uh being represented uh you know the purpose is actually liaising with other experts around the table for example here this evening as well as other institutions as well that's being uh really trying to sort of bring the insights of different research uh to bring to bear so yes that is part of the objectives climate excellent okay well that's uh wonderful to hear that um a little bit comforting um is there i |
| 40:00 | think let's move on unless i think right uh doug has something we haven't done and chris what came true well just i want to get to that very soon but just while we're if there's anything else to say about this i'm i promise not to make any questions doug yep yeah in response to clive's original question i'll be very brief i've had conversations with bernie sanders staff and i've had conversation with my representative and i believe this holds true for john kerry as well i was told specifically by |
| 40:29 | my representative quote we appreciate your passion um please understand people are very difficult to convince and be patient and i've concluded and with regard to bernie sanders staff she told me specifically she didn't think that any sort of cdr or anything like that had any promise and then she left and went out now we have a new staffer who came from a group called climate exchange which is all about carbon fee and dividend so these people are influenced by whatever is driving them not to listen to us and i think it |
| 41:08 | has to do with their political future and not wanting to have their heads stick out above you know so that's that's my conclusion we have a real conundrum yeah okay thank you and uh chris did you have something yeah it's slightly similar but on a slightly different tack and that is i think uh there's a paper i've just put a link to in the chat about what journalists are reporting on in terms of climate solutions and i think that that links to an example of the uk the press generally apart from a few |
| 41:44 | odd examples are not very supportive of this sort of approach and some of them are still pretty skeptical about climate anyway and if if the papers and they influence the political parties and if you if your political parties themselves don't have the the sort of constituency within it who are trying to push this as well then the parties are just not going to move and and so i think you've got to have um a combination of getting the press who make a much more of this more widely not just individual papers as well and |
| 42:16 | to get constituencies within the political process without that you're not going to get action from the politicians because they respond to what's out there from the public and they and the press is very influential um does anyone know uh oliver morton who writes the science uh for the economist yeah i think i know who we are i'd like to join one of these meetings yeah i i'll try and do that i'd like to tell you something about a chat called robin cook who is a a politician in scotland who i knew fairly well |
| 42:48 | he was our foreign secretary and he resigned because of the policy of his government but he told me that politicians never lead they always try to follow they want to see what the public is going to be wanting to have and be the first one to say that that's what we should be doing that they they never lead i really admired him a great deal and he died tragically young brits other brits may remember him yeah robin cook yeah absolutely yes yeah okay thank you steven thank you everyone so um yep i'm going to move on so i want to |
| 43:30 | find out my comments and advice and a message okay all right thank you very much aaron appreciate it thank you for joining us and thank you for your pictures and thank you for your concern much appreciated uh uh um yeah so uh sean um would you care to care to update us well actually brian's got his hand up oh brian did i miss you sorry yeah um so ron responding to ron um solar in india is profitable today and uh the barrier is sovereignty uh the prospect of nationalization of projects is a concern some assurances on finance |
| 44:09 | there are a concern as well and we're actually actively working on some approaches to marine solar that can address all of those concerns so i think there is a technology opportunity there it is profound in india and when the right uh coordinated effort we can get those solutions there that can enable private finance to have a positive enough present value to really displacing coal in india and uh ensuring that solar plus grid storage can make um be prevalent in the day okay thank you brian okay then um so |
| 44:42 | sean please i don't want to chris has still got his hand up is that an old house oh sorry no no hold hand yeah great so look i popped something in the chat because i really don't have i've got to run very very shortly okay look into in terms of just where we are we i mean we have you know now got various people working on different projects um uh clive so in terms of just i i broke this into um you know marine cloud brightening um so that's being uh led by he uh we've got a phd student that started in |
| 45:14 | october we've got two undergraduate students uh working on that as well so this is doing droplet generation and drop measurement using different droplet um generation methods one is uh taking on board steven's ideas this is with a very high frequency salt wafer there's somebody else looking at actually um just standard bits and bobs that you can buy off the shelf to see actually how bad is that so we're seeing those in parallel um and then the uh the phd student is actually doing more modelling work like |
| 45:45 | that's uh he's an ex a student of jim hayward's in exeter but he needs to liaise with um uh the modeling team alan uh guardian in in lead so that's an action on him steve just so you're aware we had a meeting about a week ago at number two we've got uh marine biomass regeneration which is one of the ocean projects a postdoc who started from south korea fairly recently as well as a phd student you'd have read about the sort of the various things on whale excrement or rather the function |
| 46:17 | of whales in a biogeochemical pump and that's really interesting at the moment trying to identify areas that might be candidates just so uh there is in the marine regeneration work uh there's further work that peter uh wadhams is has been doing with a group um in in italy at the cheering polytechnic looking at specific types of uh phytoplankton and then thirdly we're liaising with the um a research institute in india and they're doing they're planning for some experiments in the spring in metacosm |
| 46:53 | bags in the arabian sea we're liaising with them or we've helped them find some funding to support that work number three on kelp uh macro algae this is very close to um brian's area uh and we've we're i mentioned to brian this morning we're in the process of appointing two post docs the first candidate we've we've done some interviews and it looks like we the way that it was structured we're going to be able to um uh appoint one of those you know agree getting that agreed very very soon |
| 47:24 | and then we just need to find out whether we need to re-advertise um just it's just university policy and things like that but we've got two candidates that we really liked from the modeling side um number four is on ice thickening so save your ice volcanoes idea we have an undergraduate we had a summer student uh as you were aware said over the um summer we've got an undergraduate now working on some some further work and in particular planning some experiments next week actually in a in one of the ice rooms in |
| 47:56 | cambridge really best trying to investigate what the heck happens if you put water on top of ice all right so and herbert also on the call is has provided some very helpful insights there regarding just where the brine might go what might happen and we're going to try and get some experiments going on that and then the last one in terms of the key bigger areas of research physical physical science research uh we've got some we're still looking for some funds to support our work on methane oxidation um |
| 48:28 | we have a sort of a consortium that's been pulled together we're just looking for funds for that so those are the physical science areas and then the last one what i wanted to add was social science so actually we've got a postdoc doing some part-time work right now uh which is looking at attitudes and views on terms like geo engineering we've struck up a relationship with twitter um so they're actually we they're helping us provide providing some access for research purposes but it's really interesting about sort of uh |
| 49:01 | different episodes over the last 10 years in different geographies so it's not it's the uk the us india and then the broad the gamut of this as well so i'm hoping that we'll be in the position to be able to start sharing some of certainly the social media work in the early early getting to a state where we might be able to fund it anyway that's some of the very quick summary of some of the stuff going on in cambridge that's great um thank you very much sean is it strikes me is dave king does he |
| 49:34 | get is there anything that we could be doing either individually or as a group um to support his efforts dave's all over this of course and he's actually also in terms of um out in terms of raising profile and funding for the group as well as well as engaging with politicians uh in the background um you know just trying to get an understanding of where they might be to go and progress things okay great stuff okay any compare the comments or anybody i'm just wondering is there any more anything any further work going on with the droplet |
| 50:16 | sizes with me very cloud brightness sorry that i did mention that john that was um one of the the two two students uh doing projects on droplet generation standard kit and um getting we've got a basically a salt wafer um which is that that kind of process being done in the nanoparticle labs in um in cambridge but on the droplet sizer actually we've also been looking at um just different methods so standard kit which is basically pressurized nozzles as well as just acoustically uh generated droplets and i i just think |
| 50:54 | they're going to be too large but we are but we are actually measuring those and you get evaporation and things like this so uh we're just interested in exploring the different tech the different approaches at the moment john and we've had uh you know you've had brought students they've come on these meetings uh sean um they tend to come sort of maybe a couple of times at most and then we don't see them anymore do they not enjoy these meetings we need to i need to remind them to come |
| 51:22 | and climb but they remember with the undergraduates they just they finished term uh on friday so they then have a monumental five-week break but uh but but the phd students you're right it would be uh kind of neat for elizabeth and or william to join us yeah they're always welcome here indeed thank you sure yep okay uh okay uh so let's go to our next item um which is um okay uh should we do this one next co2 flow rates uh is there anything else to say about that stephen um yes the uh there's a tremendous factor |
| 52:04 | of two difference in the solubility of salt in sea water just going from five degrees centigrade to uh 20 degrees centigrade so talking about one and a half grams per kilogram of water to three grams of salt per kilogram of water and the worry i have is that at the moment about a third of the co2 that we're putting up is being taken up by the sea but actually uh there's two um two flows it's going into the sea in the cold areas in the high latitudes but it's also coming out at the lower latitudes and if |
| 52:48 | we're going to get warming in future we might suddenly find that there's more co2 coming out of the oceans if there's more sea up at the uh [Music] somebody else can tell me a bit more about this but it's there is an anxiety that what was taking up a very useful amount of carbon dioxide might suddenly stop and might even reverse yeah if you get a warmer sea area all right let's see what brian has to say about that um stephen he's got his hand up yes i've just been reviewing some of the |
| 53:28 | low latitude sources and sinks of carbon dioxide and there are spots in the western pacific where in fact carbon dioxide is being sunk by a combination of diazotrophic nitrogen fixing and regular plankton and so there is other there are sources in sinks at low latitudes certainly some major sinks in the polar regions and that should continue for some time frame um it is true that of the thousand gigatons while the 1500 gigatons that man as humans have put into the atmosphere some 500 gigatons have managed to make it into |
| 53:59 | the oceans so going the other way when we do manage to lower the co2 levels we can expect to have to pull out 1500 gigatons on a time scale of decades to centuries rather than just the one thousand so we should plan for fifty percent more when it comes to carbon drawdown yeah and and not less it's do you mind uh just reminding me uh what's diazotrophic isotropic means nitrogen fixing plankton and that's key because there are many places in the ocean that are nitrogen limited but these diazotrophs if there's |
| 54:31 | phosphate present as there is in most of the pacific the excess phosphate can be utilized by dazzatrov to fix carbon uh frequently at favorable carbon phosphorus ratios okay glad you've got a bit of iron there too iron helps yep okay talking about iron uh i had a i've been in touch with russ george who wants to uh get involved with this again and he's got a marine engineer in aberdeen and we're making contacts there okay interesting yep um okay let's get back to this um because uh yeah we've got 35 minutes |
| 55:13 | left um how about so let's just go to next on the list upwelling and downwelling pumps john that was from you john mcdonald yeah whether this debate goes on uh of course probably brian you're probably the best experience that uh in the field with with the ocean pumps and the red food ratio would you like to comment on that yes happy to you know i think um upwelling is promising however there needs to be a clear case for net carbon sequestration uh the way we like to describe it is if you want to calculate the carbon the best is to |
| 55:47 | measure the phosphorus because while carbon and nitrogen will come and go from the atmosphere the phosphorus remains in the ocean and thus by tracking the phosphorus and measuring the carbon to phosphorus ratios you can actually determine if it's a zero-sum game or a net benefit the the traditional story in the marine ecology community is that it's a zero-sum game because for every phosphorus atom you bring up to the surface with upwelling you bring up 117 carbon atoms on average as well more or less in some places and so when |
| 56:20 | you do that then the traditional plankton conventional wisdom is that you're fixing 117 carbon atoms with every phosphorus atom as it goes into life and then sinks into the deep ocean again zero-sum game the exceptions to this could be disotrophic phytoplankton the nitrogen fixers oftentimes will accumulate carbohydrates which have c h and o but no p are less p in which case the c to p ratio will increase and um that looks promising it's controversial and it's taking some decades for the marine ecology community to decide how |
| 56:54 | well that works the other non-controversial way is to actually grow macroalgae from the upwelled p and the fraction of phosphorus that goes into the macroalgae are fixed at a carbon to phosphorus ratio of 220 to 1 up to 800 to 1 and the net result is that there's a net benefit for whatever fraction of phosphorus ends up going into the macro algae we can document that and quantify it and identify that as a net carbon export now the downwelling is a little less clear except it's very useful in the arctic and the polar regions i should |
| 57:26 | say because that downwelling will carry with it much co2 and will also establish bottom water that can be used to re regeneratively and renewably cool uh coastal areas and marine areas very effectively uh through the antarctic bottom water and the north atlantic deep water and you're saying down welling can be used to provide cooling i didn't understand that brian well antarctic bottom water formation is done near the polar regions north atlantic deep water also provides a great source of oxygen which is |
| 57:57 | essential for marine life and it also provides a renewable source of power of thermal power that's available a few hundred meters below the surface and so that um you know ocean thermal is one uh the the commercial version of this is sea water air conditioning that's been used in half a dozen places to lower the cost of power by a factor of 10 in some cases uh in by a factor of four in the worst case and we've done studies in oman and elsewhere that have demonstrated you know there are many major cities in the |
| 58:31 | middle east and elsewhere uh that have 70 percent of their electrical load is cooling requirement and so if you replace most of that with um seawater air conditioning you can in fact perhaps decimate uh that load and ultimately eliminate most of the power requirements of these tropical cities and so the prospect of deep water cooling where there's deep water nearby is uh is profound it can also downstream from that protect coral reefs and downstream from that actually regenerate a macro algae forest so that pipeline of benefits starts with |
| 59:07 | seawater air conditioning and then goes beyond from there the key point is that this renewable energy source is coming from the polar regions and we should utilize that resource because there's enough thermal energy in the oceans to actually cool off the the surface of the earth and bring warming to zero momentarily uh you know a thousand times over and i think the the key question is how can we best utilize that renewable source ensure that the thermal pump continues to work and then ensures that we can get |
| 59:37 | back to a healthy climate through a combination of restoring natural upwelling and ensuring that the macroalgae fixation can continue at scale we have 4 000 square kilometers of help for us to regenerate okay thank you very much john uh brian sorry yeah thanks um chris yep um i just wanted to mention that in terms of cooling the ocean something that's been around a while though he doesn't seem to get a lot of attention is a proposal from a guy called jim baird for thermodynamic geo engineering which is basically to have a big heat |
| 1:00:08 | pipe and to pump the heat down from the surface into the deep ocean and he claimed this would um certainly for a period of something like 3 000 years i think um make a big difference to cooling the earth the surface of the earth anyway anyway i i wouldn't say any more than that but the other thing in terms of ocean upwelling i did post on the google cdr group's uh post about the ocean carbon ocean based carbon solutions upwelling pumps proposal and in my view they've completely misinterpreted the basic data on which |
| 1:00:45 | they based their assumptions on so for example they seem to assume that 100 of all the carbon they generate in surface waters will be sequestered beneath the surface mixed layer that's never going to happen um and in normal circumstances you you would expect the vast majority to be re-mineralized within that surface layer and maybe 10 to 20 or so would sink below it and i won't go into the other details there on the uh on the posting if you want to have a look at it and just to mention seawater air conditioning this is something that we |
| 1:01:17 | touched on in the uh gazamp report um and while it's absolutely true what brian said there are some issues still in terms of what you bring up with it for cooling depending on where you put it back afterwards because you will bring up the extra co2 and you will bring up the extra nutrients it could be a benefit of course depending on what you do with it but you need to think about what you do with that water after it's done the cooling that's all i would say yes and i would agree with um chris on |
| 1:01:43 | both of those points uh the 100 you know is a bit optimistic and we do need to manage that and we propose in some cases to absorb those extra nutrients with macaroni offshore um so i think that is promising one important note on the down walling and upwelling is that if you down well water we're already dealing with a deeper layer of the mixed layer of warm water at the surface and higher temperatures and so you um it takes a long time with down welling to actually see the benefit uh you'd have to get |
| 1:02:13 | through work through the entire layer of you know of warm water in order to see some nice benefit of the surface whereas we're finding that with judicious upwelling and mixing through the basically irrigation of a kelp forest we're seeing mixed layer benefits accrue almost immediately because in fact by proper drip irrigation if you will of the kelp forest we're getting that mixed layer to the surface we're cooling surface water immediately and not waiting to plow through the entire thermocline and as a result um judicious |
| 1:02:48 | upwelling in some locations can have some cooling effects that we've measured uh quite tangibly uh in local regions and uh that can be done at far lower energy initially than the downwelling approach so something we'll need to validate at hector scale happy to say that we're scaling by a factor of 10 in the coming months and building a tenth of a hectare in the philippines and that to be followed by some contingent pledges to enable us to scale another factor of 10 in the year after next and that is to fill the full |
| 1:03:20 | hectare and continue scaling exponentially as we're hoping to do with these hectare scale demonstrations that can validate a lot of these claims um in in the western pacific okay fantastic about the cooling effect of global cooling effect of upwelling there are several papers modelling papers done after um or was it uh jim uh the gaia guy anyway jim lovelock made his paper back in about 2007 i think it was um which didn't indicate that the cooling effect wasn't as perhaps as straightforward as people might assume |
| 1:03:58 | uh one was by andrew sashley's and colleague and another one i can't remember the first author off the top of my head but um there was they're quite well known papers so they they do look at what happened there no doubt modelling today could do a better job i'm sure yes i i would just add to that that ashley's did make a couple of invalid assumptions that i think need to be revisited and so uh happy to work with you on that chris could i uh remind you that down down welling pumped by uh sea waves uh doesn't need any fossil |
| 1:04:33 | fuel to drive it uh bill gates and i have a patent on it and we argue that uh the upwelling stuff will sink very quickly and the downwind stuff will take a longer time to come up and we can control how far up it comes by how much mixing we do at the bottom of our pipes and i think you need to do both kinds in the right places at the right times the amounts of energy that you can get from waves with the thermal energy we're talking about 20 or 30 gigawatts of hot water being got rid of the original idea of this came after katrina where we were |
| 1:05:11 | just trying to stop hurricanes i think it's probably better to stop hurricanes or moderate hurricanes with green cloud brightening but this would have worked quite well provided that you could control where these uh these things went it's not easy to uh to tow them there's nothing strong enough to get a good grip on it and we were going to let them drift freely and just adjust the way the radius between our machine and the center of a jar so they'd be going round and round in a jar and we'd steer the exit flow to |
| 1:05:49 | to control that radius um like i have got quite a lot of work on how we'd make these things yeah we talked about this a few months ago didn't we uh stephen you should get that nice stuff i don't know if you've all heard of it but if you haven't got the paper i will send it to you there's a paper that i did before conference in sweden oops a lot i think it was yeah right yes well i think those are good points um steve and and beyond that um the key as we found it to the upwelling and making that work well |
| 1:06:21 | is the drip irrigation process that actually distributes that water and mixes it with at a dilute concentration with the mixed layer water and that process of drip irrigation to a kelp forest actually does a very good job of mixing as a result of which you don't have the same sinking behavior that you do if you just bring a plume up and it goes immediately back down to the top of the thermocline interesting yeah okay so drip just drips to mix it uh so that it just doesn't sink from being too cold yes it's all about good mixing and that |
| 1:06:54 | can be done using the same endogenous wave and solar energy sources yeah right great okay anything else on upwelling and down welling um uh it's possible that you could generate a whole lot of real estate if you look at the value of tropical islands um you know they they get sold and there's not that many of them but you could make something to live on on the surface of one of these these machines with protected water where you can swim in inside um and uh you there's also a design for collecting plastic |
| 1:07:32 | uh from the surface of the sea you can make a coral which makes the it's a plastic get in but not get out and then every few months you come along and remove a concentrated plastic sheet well we've had a proposal in for some time not funded yet uh from the german politic and the cyprus institute of of uh oceanography um based on the fact that in the eastern mediterranean there's a region where um upwelling occurs because of the temperature sanity structure of the ocean so if you stick a pipe if you |
| 1:08:14 | stick a vertical pipe in the ocean then water starts coming up it and keeps on coming up it and that depends on the on the particular characteristics of the ocean sanity temperature structure but it's certainly true of eastern mediterranean and so there you can you can you can do use the upwelling to to bring plankton up to the surface and uh do do the things you want to do without uh any needing any input of energy so long as you're in a zone that has the right um oceanographic characteristics uh sorry can i just uh so you're saying |
| 1:08:55 | you you you put a vertical pipe in the ocean and water goes up the pipe yes if that's the case why why does it need a pipe why doesn't it just come up anyway well because the pipe um is the is the temperature uh you're looking at heat transfer through the from the water in the in the sea to the water inside the pipe and uh that's that's what determines the fact that that that water will continue to be less dense than the water so the pipe gets sort of heated up by the warm water at the top then does it is that right the |
| 1:09:30 | pipe and then the water comes up the pipe so the pipe conducts its heat downwards and that heats up the water yes so there's no there's no reason why this shouldn't work and it's been shown to work in lots of lab scale experiments but um so far nobody's given anybody the money to go and stick some pipes in the ocean the the japanese have done experiments for fisheries enhancement basically using what they called stomal saltwater fountain which is similar i think to what you're describing and stomal |
| 1:10:03 | proposed this about in the 1960s i think it's a long time ago actually 32 even earlier yeah and certainly the um the japanese have carried out quite a few experiments to for fisheries and purposes in the pacific basically using a pipe without any active pumping in it to provide the upwelling that's right i'm actually working with uh dr ray schmidt for from the woodsol oceanographic institution is a world expert on um you know on this kind of salt uh dual exchange and one of the most promising approaches is |
| 1:10:40 | actually a pipe that split down the middle and you get an upwelling down welling that occurs and so you get hot water going down and heat exchanging with cold water coming up and that enables the salt fountain to work better are there particular regions peter that the mediterranean works i know it works in the subtropical atlantic but do you know which portions of the eastern mediterranean uh are the most promising in that regard um it's the it's south of the is the gnc and south of that um it's just |
| 1:11:13 | what diameter well bigger the better in general um although the heat exchange has some scaling challenges i know that ray has some designs that and facilitate the heat exchange and some thoughts on how to optimize that we do as well in terms of some architectures you know three meter pipes are commercially available and we've studied the techno-economics of deploying some of these keep in mind the power density of the salt fountain is two or three orders of magnitude below the power density of either a marine solar or a |
| 1:11:47 | wave energy system perhaps so i think it does need to be primed by wave and solar energy there is an effect that will work at night whereas uh you know solar will only work during the day uh and a combination of approaches could be effective and it's probably worth taking a look again at the mediterranean as peter suggested can you get a positive small positive pressure inside the pipe yes in the sense that um there the cooler fresh water that comes up gets warmed and it results in a net uh higher let's say um |
| 1:12:23 | stagnation height inside the pipe than outside right because because that's structurally very attractive to have a little positive pressure if it's suction then it'll collapse and you you if it's positive pressure you can use a very very thin material that's very cheap well at the bottom it's uh the pressure is below ambient and at the top it would be above ambient so i believe i mean at three meters they do have a variety of pipes that including corrugated ones that will avoid collapse |
| 1:12:53 | under proper conditions but does require careful engineering and we've worked with those um pipes and other structures over a period of the last three or four years now i i i'm more interested in hundreds of meters diameter oh yes no i think that i've seen the design uh at the larger diameter and yes uh and i think that the wave downwelling system works and it has some interesting ramifications we should look at all these techniques and identify what works best in the right place a prescription for you know uh |
| 1:13:25 | desired objectives [Music] stephen forgive me for being a bit naive but if you're sort of friends with bill gates and you've got you hold a patent with him i mean does he reply to your emails would he find some of these things he has in the past but they uh i think they're waiting for someone to come along and say how badly they need it and he hasn't given me any money uh and uh um okay try again and see okay he's given money to uh to other people uh to do things that i'd quite like to do okay i mean maybe it needs a sort of a |
| 1:14:02 | more of a you know lots of people sort of slick um you know the sort of classic slide deck sort of thing and uh sort of following behind it and so forth so that he can be confident that it's not just going to be you know just cancelled you know use a um cliche today's cliche um okay any anything else i'm being i'm the arbiter here of uh making sure we cover everything so um uh so this um maybe we kind of did talk about that a bit didn't we but um we could come back to it at the end um so john nissen um |
| 1:14:44 | calling from albedo from from algae blooms so um uh yes not everybody knows about that so if you're interested in that let's let's see what uh what what people have to say about it do you want to introduce it john uh yeah it just it came up this idea which apparently is quite an old one um but i haven't seen it anybody pursuing it seriously recently and so i didn't include it in the uh review of techniques for procuring the arctic but this one could be applicable for cooling the water either in the |
| 1:15:23 | arctic or flowing into the article both depending on the characteristics of the particular algae um if the if you look from space the the images show this there's a considerable uh of the albedo increase where you have an uh or the blue blue and this uh this man who who mentioned this at the meeting on saturday has done some calculations uh which uh which he sent me in an email which i've sent to everybody a couple of hours ago and um which suggests you you could have a if you did this if you restored uh or the |
| 1:16:19 | the algae level that there was in the past which might may be about double what we have now uh that would have a significant effect and to counter global warming completely you'd probably have to increase by 11 times that was his estimate now the down what's the downside um well i i couldn't see any obvious downside to this um the phytoplankton may well sequester co2 as well as providing some albedo which is good um they may also they may provide some dms to cause cloud brightening which is good but they would |
| 1:17:08 | feed fish and help to feed the world which is good so i'm not quite sure where the downside is except um chris vivian i'm sure says that you can't do it because it's against the montreal necessarily i didn't say that yeah i just want to mention waiting for it i i learned about this uh from bruce spruce with us this evening your um one your video on um um buoyant flakes brew when you said that um before the whales was decimated um the whole ocean was um turquoise i've actually kind of quoted that in |
| 1:17:43 | conversations i hope that you still think that uh you i think you might be honest we can't i can't hear you bro you've taken yourself off me but we're not i'm not hearing you yeah that's a shame that's really annoying can't i can't hear where it says it would have been nice that that ends the function of the boy in flakes but you will brighten the sea and therefore call the uh the ocean circulation program yeah that's better yeah jumped off the wrong one to the wrong microphone yeah |
| 1:18:17 | a major part of since buoyant flake proposition is that um you could cool cool very large areas of ocean surface with just a slight greening so yeah i always made the point that if we had the satellite picture being taken 500 a thousand years ago we would have called it the turquoise planet and not the blue planet yeah yeah thank you very much i just wanted to hear that again that's wonderful um um but let's hear from the experts sorry but uh people put their hand up so i should respect that um who was first was it sir |
| 1:18:58 | was it chris let's go with chris please okay i was just going to say i mean different algae will give different albedos and certainly some of the work earlier on was looking particularly at things like cochlear blooms because they i give a very white bloom and therefore a much more reflective than a normal sort of uh greeny colored uh bloom and um but um i think the issue i think is probably how can you actually generate the blooms you want in sufficient size and get them to be there more than just episodically |
| 1:19:32 | um on a long frame and remembering that if you generate blooms you're going to have some effects on the nutrients and so on as well um and so it it's it sounds very uh attractive but i think it does need very careful thought and detail about exactly how you do it and what the downsides may be what are the masses that you need the material to put in how big how big is how much quantity uh it well it depends whether you're talking of just putting iron in in terms of iron fertilization say to generate a |
| 1:20:05 | bloom or whether you need to put macronutrients in if you want to put macronutrients in then you're into large quantities of material as opposed to iron which is quite small that's the problem um i i wonder uh chris if we i mean we as you know we talk about iron salt aerosol which is just iron it's you know it's iron chlorides it's really essentially just iron um going over a very diffusely over a very wide area so um so my question is to what extent do you think there'd be a bit more phytoplankton at |
| 1:20:37 | least for a while over wide area so you should get more you know zooplankton more of everything and more of the biomass we should swim up and down and bring nutrients up they should you know bring them up sticking to their bodies to what extent do you think that would be self-sustaining well i'm not at all sure it's not really my feel but one thing i think you need needs to be thought about is that plankton blooms really bloom because the phytoplankton grow much faster than the zooplankton and they outcompete them |
| 1:21:05 | for a long time until the zooplankton can get going and gobble them up and so i have a feeling that if you put small amounts of iron in you will generate small amounts of bloom that will get gobbled up fairly quickly because the zooplankton will deal with it and therefore you won't actually generate much in the way of blooms from very low levels of iron in the ocean that's my sort of gut feeling i've got no evidence for that that's just sort of my gut feeling okay the the uh the case that was reported |
| 1:21:34 | yesterday uh john mentioned was um uh e huxley i that was a white yeah that's the cochlear i mentioned yeah and you have to it doesn't in a sense for this albedo effect it doesn't matter what what the thing does as long as it's color is good as long as it's white hacks the eye seems to be the best from that oh yeah yeah yeah then of course there's this working with with diatoms and um uh feeding those uh there's there's a lot of work being done here at uh chewing polytechnic by a group who is uh |
| 1:22:18 | choosing particular uh diatoms and and choosing the the the nutrient that will most like most be most effective in feeding them up and then knocking them down um and so there's about six diatoms being studied there uh so it's it's a long tedious business to find the best combination diatom and and nutrient that will uh will give you the the maximum co2 removal effect uh so in a sense the the white coccolithophore is a sort of cheating i mean it's it's a way it's a simple way of getting some some |
| 1:23:04 | some good result out without having to go to all the tedious business of understanding uh how you uh what what diatoms are most effective and how you feed them would you be able to allow would you be able to control that your community of uh phytoplankton in the ocean and would you be allowed to peter the person who's working on this in pennsylvania who's got some very very nice equipment and uh we're hoping to take it out in into the ocean uh this year we'll find out if they need any needs any |
| 1:23:47 | any you if he's doing it in uk waters he will need permission from the uk authorities irrespective of the international uh controls on that peter you need to this is this is in italy so it will be oh okay it's the italian authorities then probably what attracted me to this um thing was was that we could achieve extremely rapid cooling uh by this method extremely rapid i kind of start start doing something next year and and and and scale it up quickly so we could perhaps generate enough cooling uh to to start reducing the temperature |
| 1:24:34 | in the arctic within five years because i think we could do something within five years uh we could have a real impact on the jet stream uh behavior because we increase that temperature gradient between the the the arctic and the tropics which is uh the decrease of which has caused the jet stream to be under and causing the extreme weather events this is it's the extreme weather events although all the other climate crisis um i hope my wife isn't interrupting this uh my speech i can hear you okay yeah um so this is this is the real crisis |
| 1:25:19 | immediate crisis that needs to be solved we need to start cooling the arctic uh eventually uh we freeze it uh to stop greenland uh discharging uh between the ice uh and they uh slowed down the emissions of methane from permafrost but the key thing at the moment what's causing climate change which everybody's worried about with mega floods in china worse than five thousand year year record um it is to do with the uh the jet stream and and getting that temperature gradient there if we if we could do that uh we can solve the climate crisis at |
| 1:26:04 | least for the time being uh and and and do the drawdown and all the other things so that that that's the basis of my presentation uh to the agu which which is supposed to be in for tomorrow i think okay well look forward to i hope you're recording it then john yeah okay thank you i think brian you might have had your hand up for a while if so i apologize all right um so i've done some research on uh actually i since uh saturday i was incorrect about it being a diazotroph i was uh thinking of see watsone which is |
| 1:26:42 | a different one but uh it's very important that it has been documented in the peer-reviewed literature the decrease in e-huxley bloom since 1952 and so this decrease is really quite substantial and that could contribute to warming in and of itself and so there's a challenge and an opportunity and that is could we get back to a pre-industrial level of ex-huxley blooms which would do a good job of reflecting sunlight back into space um and that could be done potentially with judicious upwelling i we do note |
| 1:27:13 | that um e huxley is present from tropical and subtropical waters all the way to temperate higher latitudes and um so it does draw down nutrients it's something that needs to be managed and something that needs to be aligned and coordinated with the london protocol and similar challenges but uh it does have a relatively high gain and it could provide a significant amount of reflectance um you know in the future does it occur in the arctic brown uh it's cursed as far as north as the norwegian fjords some of the most |
| 1:27:49 | intense uh that may be more eutrophic and it and it seems to be associated with stratification of the waters uh which is interesting because i think a following of the thermocline contributes to the formation so the conditions are pretty well known i think there's an opportunity to restore pre-industrial levels of e-huxley blooms by restoring natural upwelling in judicious locations and it's the kind of thing that uh could potentially be researched further and would potentially have a significant of effect on um |
| 1:28:21 | albedo uh on on reasonable time scales the magic key that john is looking for or we're all looking for that's uh something about it do you want to add anything friends all has been said uh i came also with the uh with the cocholita for us uh uh cuts it is white and makes a good uh they make a good reflection yeah yes you were pointing out to me some time ago that the caribbean has a lot of uh cochlear force there and they have that sort of azure yeah light colored [Music] um bacteria oh it's bacteria |
| 1:29:13 | produce what uh how is it good okay i i did i remember that wrong then yeah okay uh john did you want to add something just if we could find a white colored macro algae that would be useful too i've looked around but i haven't found one yet but if anyone knows me um there are calcareous milk or augies um the calcareous ones do tend to go white particularly after they're done uh you know photosynthesizing so there are you know 14 000 species total um many of them are calculus macaroni and um those will have |
| 1:29:50 | a wider appearance but i think the jury's still out and we've probably only harnessed a couple dozen of these 14 000 species so far there's plenty of discovery to be made in that area would this be applicable to the great barrier reef great barrier reef cooling it's an interesting question i think it could improve albedo it could help to reduce the amount of sunlight in the summer that the reef is experiencing and so um on two counts it could be beneficial the first would be reflecting more sunlight the second |
| 1:30:27 | would be reducing the amount of sunlight that's hitting the corals in the summer and then that result would be a reduced amount of thermally induced photobleaching the there'd be a bit of competition over the calcium but i think we have perhaps an overabundance in the surface waters so it's probably worth exploring a bit further yep we could take that home from the meeting today yeah yep yeah i've got a picture here of kel ceres but uh yeah let's not let's not delay things lovely book here on seaweeds |
| 1:31:01 | uh one of many um which one is that by the way that's it's by david thomas it's been around a while it's quite quite old very good thank you some lovely photographs in it yeah um all right well we've we're just about done on time uh we didn't hear uh anything um so we're we're a bit um i don't know uh we i don't know what's the word impetuous here so um is it manor are you still there manners ah yes you are there man did you want to say anything more about um about or you might have your own thing |
| 1:31:38 | to say about how to move uh the environmental movement if i can just read this now the environmental movement towards you know towards these these topics of cooling which go beyond you know um drawing down greenhouse gases are you there mana yes i am and um first of all i want to say how interesting this is and i have to go back and look up some terms and um one thing that strikes me and you may have already have this is that it would be very valuable to have this information organized on a website uh kind of by topic |
| 1:32:21 | and ultimately um you know a video teaching tool uh that goes over um the different uh terms and concepts and what research is being done and what pilot projects are underway um well manor you'd be welcome to do that um if you've had time no way i love to hear and yeah guess what yeah and i'm sure all of you are but it it you know so what we do have let me sorry we have a um a um google sheet that um there's an indian scientist it's just too late for him it's about three two or three o'clock in |
| 1:33:12 | the morning for him um but he watches the video so this is being recorded um and it's um i put it on youtube unlisted um which means people won't find it if they search but all the people on the invite list list get a link and are able to watch this video um and so i don't really say anything more about it than that so if you want to share it with some friends or people you think would like to you know would get something from watching people speak you know i think this is kind of part of the part of the deal of turning up here |
| 1:33:43 | um um so and anyway so his spread so those links i need to update i think put the latest one we keep putting them in into that spreadsheet and the spreadsheet also has bios i haven't uh confessed i haven't looked at it recently i put my own bio in and and this is uh basker um put his bio in let me just do a little poll has anyone here updated that uh sheet with their bio [Music] oh dear so it's just got to yeah maybe we'll do that clive if i could just mana could you could you share maybe your own uh you |
| 1:34:21 | you sort of mentioned that you were long involved with clearwater and you know and recently you've become more concerned about direct cooling so i'm just curious you know what what propelled you to this kind of you know change of thinking i mean what what picture what what got you kind of uh more on the on on this this kind of way of looking at the problem want to answer that but i first want to say um that i don't think you should generalize um about politicians um there are general patterns to be sure |
| 1:35:00 | but i am an elected official and i work with elected officials there's a big difference between uh well i won't go into details i also want to be sure that you know that new york asked a very aggressive climate act but it is very focused on renewable energy and to answer your question um you know i i've been promoting the transition to a renewable energy economy with storage and efficiency for many years but when i look at what that will take it is enormous and we're not making the rapid progress we need to |
| 1:35:51 | so uh when doug mentioned the idea of you know polar cooling and rebuilding the polar ice caps and and finding ways to not just um prevent emissions or sequester uh greenhouse gases but to directly affect um jet stream it it it seems very hopeful because uh you know all i can focus on is new york you folks have a wonderful global focus um but i'm working with local municipalities here the other thing i want to say is that people i'm sorry if that glitch but anyway that that um people are still very comfortable |
| 1:36:55 | even those of us who have taken al gore's trainings and know about what's going on around the world what's going on in california and so forth as long as people are comfortable and have have been for generations depending on their age it is really hard to get them to implement the changes that need to to be implemented so um but the best way is to make the information very clear well organized and and understandable and that's where um you know if there are people and it may take some funding to pay people |
| 1:37:46 | to take this information and make it really accessible i do think that there are people that will respond the other thing is um [Music] and again i i'm focused on the us but it was a a big relief to those of us working when um paul hawkins created drawdown and now there's a hundred things we can do to address climate change um i do think that uh you know there's some superstars here that have to be convinced their mind has to be opened up and that has to be done with um you know the best evidence available |
| 1:38:33 | and and that of course is uh also al gore and we have access to him and bill mckibben um uh and one of the things i've been working really hard on is trying to uh assure people that um that nuclear is not a climate solution uh and the there is a nuclear resurgence that is occurring because people are hopeful for that and if you work with communities that are then burdened with the high level radioactive waste uh legacy um and also as as the economists tell us um it's too slow even if it were safe so those are a few things i to |
| 1:39:26 | contribute and i really um i i don't have time to read a lot of scientific papers i will always go back um to the source if i need to but to have this uh simplified and synthesized and organized uh would allow people like myself to then have those conversations with the locals and the state and the superstars so i hope that's helpful uh it i think it is actually uh manor because uh you've kind of answered the question um you know i was sort of asking searching questions in the first part of this and saying what how come they don't respond |
| 1:40:14 | is that they just don't know um and um and you've said well the reason i don't know is because you're all too busy to actually make the make the information available and if we could just make it available in a uh sort of layman's form i do actually then you know it could make the difference no so um so are you i mean maybe don't let me put you on the spot but um let me just just say it like this you're welcome to come next time or but could you let me have your email address so that if i get some |
| 1:40:44 | time you know i did make a website called climate game changes but i've been neglecting hasn't changed for a couple of years um um maybe i could update that one or i've got i've also got a noack website you know this is nature-based ocean atmospheric cooling and just stick to that because that might be less controversial perhaps but i wouldn't be but we i talked about sharing these videos and people not too keen to have the videos shared publicly on the website but i can extract the information at least anyway and if |
| 1:41:17 | people are willing you know i couldn't get permission for people to have their names on the website perhaps and some bios um and perhaps that could make some difference but i'd want to work you know liaise with the client the cambridge people i don't want to sort of duplicate what they're doing um but to have someone like you looking at it and saying well you need to tighten this up or make that more friendly or make it less technical whatever would could be very helpful actually i i would be more than uh glad to and as |
| 1:41:48 | often as i can i will listen in and in between things i don't understand i'll go look up um and uh my my email is just mana joe at clearwater.org and if you don't mind um it's very hard for me to put something in the chat right now so it's it's simply my name at clearwater.org.org okay we're over time thank you very much mana for that um any last thoughts from anyone all comments uh so where are we now we're on uh we're on the sixth so i've put down the 20th of december um i think the next one would be after |
| 1:42:46 | that would be monday the 3rd of january i'm not too sure if if how many people who would want to come on the third or practical or who's who's got who who will who will who is the 20th uh a good proposition yep okay so that'll be it then so see you in a couple of a couple of weeks on the 20th thank you very much everybody very good thank you thank you thank you everybody thanks everyone thank bye for a you of weeks |