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| 00:03 | problem is the um nature based which is quite often used uh as i said in my email just now comes from the conservation community and is very much focused on ecosystems and tends therefore to exclude purely abiotic approaches so um i would uh myself tend to avoid using nature based because i think that's uh potentially somewhat restrictive whereas natural i think it quite clearly includes chemistry and physics for example not just biology just coming to the tail end of that yeah i just said clive i've just sent an |
| 00:40 | email a few minutes ago just going back about the nature natural solutions issue okay is that does that reply to my email i sent last night yep okay thank you it's only fairly short so i just um as i was mentioned just now to john yeah yeah i don't want to be restrictive yeah uh natural mean non-technical could the word natural mean non-technical or non-engineering um well i don't think so because even nature-based solutions quite often have to use engineering to achieve their objects they have to get |
| 01:24 | bulldozers in and excavators and dredgers and all sorts of things so there's always engineering involved because you can't you can't move stuff around without engineering can you i i agree with you and i think engineering is very important but i'm alone sometimes i feel like though i'm just reading it natural [Music] well so if if chemical and physical is is natural then what isn't natural well you could argue like putting reflectors up in space you would argue is probably not natural well isn't that |
| 02:07 | physical it is physical but whether it's natural in terms of i mean naturally it's natural in terms of the existing natural processes i think we should have added that perhaps but um what the assumption is you're using processes that already exist whether they're chemical physical or biological isn't that what i'm saying here yeah but i think the the problem is you're using the word nature-based and nature-based to a lot of folks means ecosystems only i see and to exclude abiotic obviously |
| 02:37 | yeah okay all right okay thank you i yeah i didn't know about that so i do know do now okay let's close this down right uh good evening everyone is it eight o'clock yet or whatever at the hour yeah yeah yeah even john uh john mcdonald hi john and john ellis and friends and my friends and uh no doubt we'll have more joining uh dermot good evening nice to meet you nice to meet you yes you likewise um i can't remember who it was someone it was a busker in uh okay in india right yeah great well welcome to the group have you |
| 03:31 | had a chance to watch any of our recordings yes i have and found them very interesting i'm not a scientist or anything like that so it's great to see a skill set out there shining away and great great to discover that great stuff we usually ask uh a new face um if there isn't time for everybody to introduce themselves i knew someone knew so to introduce themselves do you mind just saying a few brief words uh dermot yes of course sure so um well i'm 65 years of age so i've been around the block a few |
| 04:04 | times i studied economics at liverpool and um started my own business then afterwards i started the economics and spent the next 30 years losing money but over the last 10 or so years i've been focused on nanotechnology and looking at where nanotechnology solutions can benefit practical commercial and business so advising companies like nestle and craft heinz and these type of companies um to show where practical benefits come in and i am welcome i'm connected to a lot of german scientists who are where there are a lot of |
| 04:40 | nanotechnology in the institutions there and really enjoying enjoying it so i'm my clients will be sort of big property companies looking for ways to look at green i'm involved with techies go green which is a novel new website helping it companies become more conscious of the environment and that's just been running for a year now and it's it's a small software company in dublin that's behind that but again it's just growing in the last year started to grow quite a bit so um i think it's a question of |
| 05:13 | connecting connecting stakeholders together to see what we can do yeah that's um very much the aim of this uh these meetings that people hear from different disciplines um uh do you see a role for nanotechnology in solving climate change um again uh maybe not that's okay if it isn't if it's that long when i look at nanotechnology i look at what nature's already doing and try and copy nature which works obviously at the nano level all the time and you know for example making water and bringing water back to becoming a more |
| 05:49 | natural solvent for example which is more or less it's it's state originally yeah um and that can then be used to reduce the amount of chemicals in in society that sort of thing okay okay all right well welcome to the group and thanks for joining us thank you yeah did you want to say something friends yes uh uh isa has much to do with nanotechnology because the droplets that well the particles would be like 100 nanometers across yeah yeah 0. |
| 06:21 | 1 0.1 uh microns yeah yes okay so we're we're nanotechnologists ourselves uh great and and hello peter waddams um and there's only that's okay and uh hugh hunt thanks for joining us um i think we know what we want to have on our uh agenda this evening um well there's at least two things um i can think of well hugh said last you said last time didn't you let's you give us an update on uh cambridge progress um and there's manner great good evening manor anna jo uh welcome okay so let's without further ado |
| 07:05 | get to uh get to this um uh all right let's okay make an agenda so we make an agenda and uh be thinking about what you'd like to have on the agenda um so uh let's make a do that and so this gives everyone a chat while i'm fiddling around you'll be thinking what what you might like to have so um so update so i put this like this hue um update from from the cambridge what is it the ccrc the cambridge climate repair center or is it the center for climate here at cambridge climate repair at cambridge it's a bit like |
| 07:55 | cambridge it's like that movie the life of brian the people's front of judea and the popular yeah yeah yeah okay we see if i can type one in right um cambridge um camera bride okay there we go yep and uh i was delighted to see uh a facing future video with um no one no less than uh stephen saltzer peter waddems and paul beckwith talking about marine cloud brightening uh have you had any response from that stephen no you're that you're the first person that's mentioned it oh gosh it was very good |
| 08:48 | good it was yeah it was right yeah exactly very good do you want to comment at all on it stephen or or not should we just let that go well if you've if you've seen it i can't add any more i can just advise you ronnie hasn't seen it yeah i think i mentioned umbrellas was this the one too much about um climbing a glacier without taking an umbrella with him no glass here in greenland with no umbrella was that the right you might have done but it was only it um it's only appeared in recent weeks or |
| 09:21 | maybe a week or something um just even i've got a link to it in the chat perhaps because i haven't come across it okay it's it's in my email actually as well is it all right okay i did set down all of that i just thought it was fantastic to actually see something so um i'll just put it there it might get dropped off if people have other ideas to talk about it's very good for ordinary folk to understand the the the concepts behind it and it says a non-threatening way yeah is this the one everybody |
| 09:56 | looks familiar yes i think so that looks about right last chance to save you yeah we could perhaps a little bit later okay anything else uh how's peter's swarms ribs peter how are your ribs you're muted you're you're muted peter wadden's microphone i just want to know how your ribs work my lips are better now yes fully uh well not fully healthy but uh i'm a mobile and uh what one of the lunar astronauts did the same thing i think fell over in the shower i think uh yes i remember you saying that peter that it |
| 10:49 | wasn't some spectacular accident falling over on the ice it was getting in the bath and then falling over or something afterwards i'd spent two weeks clam climbing over glaciers in greenland with no ill effects and then and then came had a bath at home except for getting wet in the rain yeah okay uh well apart from embarrassing injuries or whatever they are injuries um any is there anything else about the climate about the fact that we might only have five years to live uh just to talk about uh something about |
| 11:27 | his uh uh work in turin peter's work in turin yeah um oh well well really we're working so i'll put it on the agenda now this is this is filling up the agenda peter okay just pick it on the end but it's not a big deal it's relevant yeah uh i've just started something on the ice thickening by pumping water on from underneath on top i'm trying to design a model of this that could be there we could try to test the laboratory i've sent some calculations around and if there's anybody's interest |
| 12:05 | in this i'll start doing some drawings um i think yeah that would be very useful ccrc has funded a a student to do something yeah i'm going to be talking about that yeah yeah we're going to hear just a minute from hugh about that um i i would like to include on the agenda a brilliant uh piece by robert tulip on uh a rebuttal of that uh paper or letter by a whole lot of yeah scientists geo engineering crowd the anti-geo engineering thing yeah well i mean it's interesting the anti-geo engineering crowd includes |
| 12:53 | some names in there who i don't think they are anti-geo engineers anti-solar geo engineering i'm really astonished to see some of the the names on the um [Music] on that letter who have been involved in research projects on solid geoengineering and who are definitely um they're not they are saying in their letter that they are anti-geo anti-geoengineering research yeah empty solar geo engineering research that's i mean that's verging on irresponsible but your volume level's a little bit low hugh |
| 13:47 | oh i don't know if you can get a bit closer to the microphone or something no that's just i'm just keep trying it's emerging on irresponsible yeah it's better um because i really think that um if we are ever going to think about you know when it comes to that awful decision that hey look we're not going to save the arctic without stratospheric aerosols these people who have been talking you know for a long time about the the pros and cons of geoengineering would have us being being taken into this journey |
| 14:37 | on deploying stratospheric aerosols without research having been done is that really what they want yeah and that's what they signed up for the research is is essential to find out whether it can be done safely and whether it will be effective and whether it might be something in our toolbox for the if and when you know that's so i'm not sure that it's it's right to say that they're um in your agenda you talk about anti-geo engineering i think it's even it goes beyond that it's uh research |
| 15:21 | geoengineering research right do you think that they have been fraudulently added to that paper that they no they haven't been fraud at the edit but i think that the um [Music] uh so no it there's that's someone should contact them and say what are you playing it it's all it's all the way politics works that if you if you want to you know any publicity is good publicity i guess is what i'm saying yeah and and um so for the people who've signed up to this it it doesn't hurt for them to have signed up to this even |
| 16:11 | though they might not actually agree with everything in it yeah it's interesting that the the title is an international non-use agreement but then as as hugh has said it then goes on to talk about prohibiting funding agencies from supporting development and and earning research so the actual title is in a sense a bit uh deceptive as it only refers to use and not research but but doing to forbid research as anti-scientific in on any any subject at all we mustn't do research on this that that's something a scientist never |
| 16:48 | says you know it's it's ridiculous and when you look at some of the people who sign that there are people who are certifiable lunatics like this pierre humber who's a professor at oxford but when he speaks that then he gives every impression of being completely bonkers and so uh what do you do when we're in a lunatic world where where craziness is now the norm but this is just an aspect of of that which is which goes way beyond what any scientist could should tolerate right this one should be should be stomped on in some way but |
| 17:30 | the worrying thing was that he got the chair in oxford after going very public with that statement before that he was in chicago and he there's enough other people in oxford to get him uh the most prejudiced chair in in in the uk if not the world um for saying exactly that yeah so how can he possibly have an oxford chair i mean yeah once we insult oxford but unless there are lots of other people not who think exactly the same yes fortunately there's a few people in cambridge who would argue with it but there are people in oxford who would |
| 18:12 | argue with it as well to be fair because they've got a dual engineering program as well with people in there who've been researching it and so on who aren't playing the same sort of group as uh peer humber but i notice on the geoengineering google groups there's been quite a lot of comments about this mostly adverse comments about that uh letter uh i'm one of them actually if it's there or somewhere else i saw it was equating this with um the catholic church telling galileo he shouldn't say certain |
| 18:42 | things which is perhaps taking it a bit extreme but it does sort of uh approach that sort of level and and he they wouldn't look through the telescope right we are meant to be working on the agenda here i have just put in the chat for those who are interested um you may well have seen it this was um yeah uh june last year there was a an event um warning from scientists and indigenous peoples and climate activists about solar geoengineering it just does show raymond pierre humber at his um at his peak most mendacious |
| 19:31 | of his peak of uh lunas right okay absolutely it's definitely worth it's if you've got to spare a couple of hours it really is worth watching and listening to the kind of arguments um and interestingly when gregor turnburg at the end gets gets her turn to um to say something um she basically says um oh well when you're in a hole stop digging that's her message um which is not that scientific the other interesting thing about the signatories just very quickly is that the vast majority of them were actual governance social |
| 20:14 | scientists people not actual natural scientists i understand i haven't counted them myself but that's what the comments in the google group say is seven times more effective than any other device on the market someone needs to mute themselves yeah now i i'm gonna i'm just going to say that i am i'm worn out i've had a very very full-on day so i'm not going to stay for the whole meeting this evening so i'll give my um should we have you first then uh hugh and i'll stick around for as much as i |
| 20:49 | can but um so shall i probably launch now yes please so um the um the various things that have been going on have been really quite quite interesting so um that you're still a sorry here just a tiny bit quiet i don't know if there's anything you can do understand what let me just get them it's not it's no i'm just wondering whether i've got the wrong mic connected let me try is that better or worse no that's that's kind of not very good uh is that better that seemed to be better actually okay |
| 21:27 | i'll go for that then yeah um thank you fine um so um we've got um interesting experiments moving ahead with um with the marine cloud brightening stuff so we've been doing measurements of of droplet droplet sizes and of course as is well known to anybody as we've discovered anybody's ever tried to do it the any droplets you generate evaporate um before they reach the um the sensor that measures droplet size and so droplet distribution size distribution that you measure of liquid droplets is not particularly |
| 22:25 | accurate but what we've found is uh that if we're using salt water that we allowing the the droplets and the particles to settle onto a onto a surface and then putting it under the electron microscope and measuring the diameter of the salt particles is turning out to be quite effective so one of our students is doing some measurements on various different uh droplet generated generation techniques on the electron microscope just getting just getting um getting good at doing sizing but he's also using a droplet sizer and what he's trying to |
| 23:12 | do is to is to get a handle on what the error is when you measure droplet size as opposed to measuring the salt particle site and what i would propose is that maybe in four weeks time or six weeks time that we asked him to give you guys a little um presentation of what he's been doing because that's been quite interesting could you try and um increase the humidity so you don't get such evaporation yeah um snap yes of course and i can while we're at it we'll do it on mars where the pressure's lower |
| 24:02 | i mean it's quite a job to to do any experiments at all and i'm okay just trying to help you you said diameter uh i i thought they might a lot of them might be a little cube uh salt crystals it crystallizes out into a cube are they round or are they square let me show you the piggy [Music] um if i can find it um [Music] um no they're they are beautiful beautiful cubes good if you had to if you had to if you had to make nano dice [Music] you couldn't do better they are beautiful perfect cute um i think i haven't given you the ability |
| 25:06 | to share so have you tried clicking share you i've just done it now no i haven't i no no i can't i'm not even yeah they're very nice um what sort of size cubes so well um well they're way too big but we're just measuring stuff all right they're about one meter cube i mean look no they're not 80 nanometers they're not 20 nanometers stephen if that's what you're asking yeah they're they're way too big and i apologize for not making them this is the measuring |
| 25:55 | exercise and so you're proceeding with a measuring exercise i don't know what this is about okay so thank you that's that's all good hugh i'm happy with that um and i think and then we've got another guy who i mean the problem i've got with with telling you what what we're doing is nobody says hey that's great the first thing i guess oh have you tried this have you tried that well yeah we're trying our little best yeah don't don't take it that way here we're all |
| 26:24 | keen sometimes you can do you can do you can do everything and then you you just get picked up yeah so that's what they're only trying to help but i think you've had a long hard day as well and i'm certainly very um where's the button going here i suspect everyone's really the same as me as well here they're all so these are our um these are our this is our all our engineering students at trinity college and um that's um ev all the years first year second years third years fourth year phd students |
| 27:18 | just from trinity college just to give you a snapshot this was last thursday evening our sort of annual photo so the best part of this is it's the first time that this we've been allowed to be together for two years yeah no wonder everyone's smiling yeah absolutely um anyway i just thought i'd show you that just for good measure um right the other student fourth year undergraduate so that so that first student is he's a fourth year undergraduate so he's got 20 he's a 21 year old or whatever |
| 27:55 | the other one is um trying to make a um a silicon um a silicon wafer style droplet um generator um but he's starting with what he can do without um being too complicated so he's he's going for um relatively large and relatively large sort of couple of the exact diameter but not not 800 nanometer holes but something perhaps an order of magnitude bigger than that on silicon on a silicon substrate um the point being that it's what what he can get done in the time scale available to him because he's only got until the end of |
| 28:42 | april before he's got exams and so anyway he's doing that but he's also um uh just um looking at making using a cnc machine to um to drill point one millimeter holes um on a on a on a point five millimeter i can't remember what material aluminium sheath with a view to creating a support structure for the silicon wafer um so um and he's having fun doing that but but he'll um he'll no doubt come on and talk to you guys about that in in a in a couple weeks time but in i don't know when but so he's looking |
| 29:33 | more at the um rather than droplet measurement side looking at the uh how to to create droplets um and um and uh yeah so yeah so stephen he's trying to make uh using a silicon uh make sure make a um a droplet generator using silicon um and then we've got a um a phd student on marine cloud brightening looking at the modeling side of things and he's only just started he's just getting his his his feet under the table and but he's particularly interested in looking at the modeling um which was with respect to the |
| 30:28 | um the droplet that the um the size the cloud condensation nucleus size which we're looking at wanting it to be 20 200 nanometers he's looking at the modeling from a perspective so what if it isn't 200 nanometers what what's the impact of having a a a broad distribution so okay you got your drop your particle size ideally 200 nanometers but it's there is a spread so the impact then of having a spread and then what then are the trade-offs so if we have a a droplet generator which is not perfect um then does that |
| 31:20 | completely um bugger up the whole idea so not worth trying at all or do you have to have perfection in which case it will never happen i mean you can see what i mean we're going to try and work out the trade-offs yeah um so that's what he's doing he's gone then we've got i o to skyrim christensen has he has he read that carefully has your student got the paper by altersguy and christensen almost certainly we've got all of the stuff that you've been sending but it might have got lost make sure he has got |
| 31:54 | that um okay yeah all right sorry steve please pray continue you know out uh i i'm just asking you if the student you know he said steve now he's saying he's almost certainly got that stephen i think i know the one you mean it's the norwegians and then um and then we've got a fourth undergraduate student who's been doing some lovely work in the in a in a minus 18 degree walking freezer flowing water down a channel and watching it freeze and she's um she will do a presentation she's got one |
| 32:42 | ready to go she so she might do that in uh on monday week uh or this this event in two weeks time um and um but what's turned out to be really interesting is that the the freezing of the of the of the water doesn't seem to occur at the place where the where you'd expect it to what seems to be happening is that the freezing in the water occurs and you get ice crystals which then flow a significant distance down the hill before they actually um can i get inside settle out so it means that if you are trying to model this |
| 33:38 | a simple model would be that you look at your heat transfer and you look at your mass transfer and you look at it and the simple model would say ah right at this point in time if i've got some water that freezes it adds to the thickness of the ice at the point where that water is frozen but that isn't happening uh the place where you'd expect thickening to occur thickening isn't occurring at all it's happening quite a substantial distance down down the hill and um what we actually reckon is that |
| 34:19 | quite a lot of ice crystals are flowing off the end and not ever settling and it's a bit like having muddy water flowing down a slope quite a lot of the mud doesn't settle no it never settles it goes it goes off the end so that's turning out to be uh quite an interesting uh observation and uh peter you saw i think that's the explanation peter for that conundrum you saw the other day were you there you saw that video that presentation of um of uh katie's and um and there was the conundrum about well |
| 35:01 | why isn't it why is it thickening non-uniformly like that and that seems to be what's happening yeah well it's not there's not a lot of mystery there to what's going on it's it's just seems um how does that have any bearing on how to create an ice pyramid oh yeah okay well that's the next step i remember your comments in the video peter you think it's pretty impractical anyway well uh the concept of a nice pyramid i think is is refreezing the entire arctic though oh yeah we're freezing the arctic i think |
| 35:37 | is is something that um uh has to well it has to be tried somehow but i don't think this is the way to do it piling up it might not be the way to do it but it's certainly proving to be a very interesting project for this student and it's um it's uh it's getting good conversations going um it's definitely been worth doing but i think that i don't want to say any more about it because i think it'd be good for her to to to talk about it and then then we can um you know so that's that and then we've |
| 36:14 | got an another phd student looking at some uh marine biomass regeneration as she's calling it which is about uh essentially artificial whale poo um and doing some um quite interesting sums about um challenging that this the the conventional wisdom about how impactful this this will be is that uh julia yoon the the korean lady yeah so yeah june she came on one of these by the way a couple of times ago yeah so she's but the postdoc is elizabeth baltas i think she came on as well yeah and um so uh so that might be good to have her |
| 36:59 | to talk about what she's been up to sometime um in the future um and then um we've also um let's see what um oh yeah but anyway we're looking to appoint um uh some a couple of a postdoc and a phd student on the marine corps brightening stuff as we move forward anyway i mean nothing is um earth shattering is not what i would say um but um we are we're moving forwards in the hours that uh that the day gives us okay great well thank you very much thank you nice to get that update so are you open to sort of it's meant to |
| 37:52 | be constructive feedback then people are meant to be trying to help you i mean no i know i know but there's all sorts of things that that we could be doing but we're having um our hands full just trying to do what we yeah sounds like you're doing the best you can with what you've got and uh it's all going ahead and it's yeah one of the things that um [Music] certainly when it comes to the droplet stuff is like all of these things actually doing it is a lot harder than talking about it yeah i bet |
| 38:28 | and um so um um you know that's that's it's fantastic that you know but i would i would um i would challenge any of you to go out there and try and measure some of this stuff um uh you know doing the sums on a piece of paper is relatively straightforward but actually measuring things is is yeah it has its uh twists and turns just wondering if i'll accept that challenge and uh we are actually measuring that sequestration in the uh western pacific ocean this year and last year you're actually making |
| 39:17 | well one form of this biological sequestration as you call it is in fact the sinking of seaweed which we measured at one thousand to four thousand meters per day so in 24 hours we're down on the sea floor and that sea floor you know then we're looking at remineralization and a median time to outcropping of centuries at the deeper depths so we actually can measure this flux quite noticeably on a daily weekly and monthly basis because it is particulate organic carbon that's sinking at a high rate right so this is an example of actually |
| 39:52 | doing it you're saying brian and actually taking measurements and actually seeing some results yeah i agree it's hard to measure a lot of micro algae and all the rest but thank you i guess the particular thing i was referring to was measuring droplet sizes and um yeah i apologize i agree yeah but but you're absolutely right and measuring stuff out in the field is um well i mean it's great we and that by the way and brian we need to um if you've got if you've got some time we'd love to uh |
| 40:28 | to um have a chat with you at some stage about the measurements you're doing so let's let's let's talk about that offline that would be excellent and there are two contexts one is that we are seeking ccrc um uh affiliation validation of our uh you know our general approach and that's this week for a february first deadline for the x prize for carbon removal and then next week i'll have more time of course to talk about broader topics as well but if some of this might relate to that i think the biggest question is |
| 41:06 | median time to outcropping for abyssal waters that's kind of a very narrow topic if it's broader perhaps next week would work well yeah so um in terms of the x prize is this are you is your um i can't remember the the name of the australian um forester is it there there are several australian airports sticky [Music] a woman in in sydney who was talking about um artificial whale poo i can't remember is that oh yes i do recall some of that um you know some of it came out of uh there's several efforts but i do |
| 41:53 | recall a long-standing effort in sydney where they've been looking at a number of micro-algae approaches and quail poo was the latest uh chapter in that i believe so i'm familiar with that group but i agree it's much harder to measure the whale poo and the micro algae sinking rates uh although it has been done with sediment traps i'm happy to discuss that uh perhaps next week but if you have any thoughts on this median time scale to outcropping of abyssal waters we're working a bit with oh john taylor and uh andy woods on that |
| 42:32 | cambridge this week very good let's um okay hugh is there anything else you'd like to add or discuss get feedback or so i guess one of the things i i don't know whether um we talked about this a while ago about and i was just trying to remember what your what your idea was for doing the ice volcano experiment um and can you remind me what your what your proposed experiment was i've just yeah it was a uh basically a very long uh thin box of foam polystyrene tilted and you have salt water in the bottom |
| 43:16 | on a sort of a a a wedge shape and you um pump salt water slowly the the actual tube is is a is cooled with a a a a truck based uh uh freezer unit and maybe a bit of nitrogen gas and you pump the cooled by pumping air through it cold air yeah to replicate the the arctic environment and you you pump the the sea water slowly down what's once once an ice surface is formed you then pump sea water slowly down that slope and see how it um how it how it forms how how intermediate you need to make it yeah how fast um what the salt distribution is |
| 44:12 | and and how much uh co2 from that air gets absorbed into the the brine which uh runs out the other end of the long tube it i've it's on one of the the the power points i can send it to you okay now that that that that is more or less how i record it so that's that's helpful right okay and by the way i got your book out of the library today peter oh good okay this is the one on uh on uh on ice is that a farewell to ice no no no no only a one called ice in the ocean which is a textbook and uh i recommend it very strongly because i |
| 44:59 | get much more royalties from that than i do from a penguin book well i'm afraid um i'm afraid my taking out of the library hasn't added to your royalties insist that the library buys more copies yeah well the one that's in the library doesn't look like it's been taken out very often [Music] regarding uh i would imagine that a giant version of an ant farm a two-dimensional approximation to this process would be an interesting uh visualization of the freezing slopes and freezing rates yes so if you don't get any results just |
| 45:41 | take a picture of an ant farm and sort of airbrush it to look like a an ice volcano well ideally you could actually build a giant arm and measure the the critical slope go ahead i mean one of the things that that we found quite interesting is that um on a on a very um kind of a very simple experiment so we've got a slope and we've got a centimeter of ice already on the slope so this is ice at minus 18 degrees so we're minus 18 degrees and then we pour water in here through a tube at zero degrees actually it might be at minus 1.5 or minus 1.8 |
| 46:47 | celsius at the top one pressure salt no it's pure water it is pure oh oh it's not going to be salt water sorry i'm just talking about the experiment that we did in in the freezer thank you and and what you'd expect is and the water is flowing down at a reasonable rate so that water comes off the end so that there's there's water all the way down here and what you'd expect is that it ought to thicken uniformly because the water is at zero degrees it can't get colder than zero and but what we found was that it thickened |
| 47:39 | substantially thicker down here than up here and the amount of thickening here cannot be accounted for by the heat capacity of the ice at this point here the only way we can account for that the thickening here and not there is because of ice crystals flowing down the slope and and solidifying further down but more interestingly is if i plot a graph of thickness versus distance but it it doesn't kind of just go up like this but it's got this it's it's wobbly and um and uh so it appears that the oh by the |
| 48:35 | way i don't know whether you know and zoom if you want to be able to see these if you if you right click on the image and click pin it makes it go full screen if you right click and go pin you can get full screen that helps to be able to see this there you go i've pinned it there as well yeah so i have two conjectures on this um one is that the um there's there's probably a time scale associated with mixing of that turbulent layer and that time scale could be part of the reason you're seeing more deposition downstream in |
| 49:08 | addition to the let's say floating particles of ice and the second is because the non-linear nature of this accumulation i wonder if the sinusoidal oscillations are related to the non-linear nature of deposition given that well i'm sure it is and so what i think is is likely to be happening is where the flow slows down then the deposition will be greater and therefore that makes a higher peak which therefore slows the flow down which makes the deposition greater which makes a higher peak so yes it's the |
| 49:47 | it's an unstable um it's an unstable thing it's a bit like the way that that um ripples form on a on the sea floor where you've got to flow and with sand and things like that and i was actually thinking also of a dirt road accumulating absolutely that's incredible and i mean what's really interesting about the dirt road one is that i mean server's probably got a corrugated dirt road outside his uh front door um the um what's really interesting about the corrugated dirt roads is that you've got a dirt |
| 50:25 | road which is kind of dead flat and then a couple of weeks later it's got these um corrugations on them which are maybe um 10 centimeters or something wavelink and it seems to be it doesn't matter what the speed of the vehicles is you can have slow-moving vehicles or fast-moving vehicles you just get the same wavelength of corrugations on the on the so road you change yeah if you change the the springs constant on the suspension system well you get a different way it doesn't it doesn't change either and it it all comes down |
| 51:04 | to um as far as i understand it that the tyre picks up particles of dirt and they they fly through the air about a distance of about 10 centimeters that's where they land saltation so it's all to do with um it's all to do with the uh the sort of projectile motion of the little particles of dirt and that doesn't matter how um it doesn't matter about the suspension it doesn't matter how fast you drive it just that's just the anyway there we go it seems all i can say is that it's when |
| 51:39 | you start doing measurements of this sort of stuff and you start you you start looking at it it throws up more um more questions than it does answers it does and i'll offer one comment and that is that it may be that we out uh exceed the limitations of a two-dimensional model fairly soon and we may need to use a frozen pie slice uh for our ice volcano because the three-dimensional effects are likely going to be important in terms of deposition and non-linearities you're absolutely right so we're um we're |
| 52:11 | hoping to do that either as a um either katie the student who's currently on it we'll we'll do that or we might try and get a summer student to do that as well i've sent you the the uh an email of the file showing the experiment if you could put that up on the so people can see it uh okay uh i think it's um slide four i haven't heard you send it too sorry to me or here oh if it went oh here we go yep can you see this is a slide number four perhaps yeah i think it's slide number four is that it there |
| 52:53 | yeah that that's it there very nice what happens if you have it horizontal you don't get the right slope but what do you get what slope do you get uh i haven't thought i wanted to try and replicate the ice the ice wedge shape and uh it's harder to do when you've got it horizontal anyway look that's uh that's enough of a cambridge update for now and um okay i'll try and get some more of these uh things uh reported in future weeks right thank you you great yes thank you for the address |
| 53:49 | thank you thanks yeah yes thank you very much the only problem is that the arctic will be summarized free before we go too long but we can actually provided there's winter sea ice we can still work it true well you're right that's that's true and um yeah you know it's true trying to trying to regenerate the samurais right there was some talk about uh commercial nozzles for making spray um we've been we have been doing some measurements with some um commercial nozzles but um i'll have to |
| 54:32 | um i'll have to how about we try and do a a talk on that at this group in in the next you know two four six weeks time frame yeah great when you're when you're as soon as you're ready yeah that'd be good i'm just going to check up with uh with charlie who's been doing that work what how how far i've got with that okay excellent thank you very much hugh are you sticking around i mean you're welcome to stick around i'll stick i'll stick around i might i might go and um |
| 55:03 | catch myself beverage okay all right if you think you deserve it thank you very much and come back by the way this time of day it's not a cup of tea i've got my iced coffee it's like it stays cool we'll cope yeah i'm just running just so you know the view outside my window at the moment is dark that's my view outside the window it's dark here yes yeah okay thank you very much yeah i'm just wondering dermot uh working with nanotechnologies do you i mean people put their hands up you're |
| 55:45 | welcome to put your hand up if you want to speak or just as you can see people just pitch in anyway even without that uh you're muted currently um you might have i don't know if you have anything to say about uh making nano droplets yes it's it's very interesting what you're talking about here um over the last couple of years i've been involved in nano coatings and of course the uh the whole nano nano coatings coating doesn't look good no no cooking making very small burgers and um of course the whole exercise |
| 56:24 | is determined by the success of the coating and there's a lot of efficacy around that and um it fails our our success by the measuring of that coating and the durability of the coating and the adhesion so what you're talking about here is very very interesting um there is some guys in edinburgh have worked on creating a nano sprayer to more or less control the particle size um and there's yeah there's a fair amount of work done on this already um my work has been involved in sio2 and tio2 coatings um |
| 57:06 | [Music] and of course the carrier is ethanol or water or based industrial alcohols um so i shouldn't i don't see any big problem with with ice and and salt but of course the particle size is the issue you'd need to have very small quantities of salt and of course the more the smaller the salt particles are the more reactive they are so um yeah very interesting stuff i'm not really on the technical side but i could certainly if if we can narrow down any problems i can probably uh look at a portfolio of different |
| 57:48 | suppliers who could make it easier to find a sort of particle solution are you looking at for your coatings um around from 12 nanometers up to i guess two three hundred that's it it's all right the instruments are very are very special sometimes it's it's the question of getting getting hold of an instrument and getting time to use a lab where those instruments are available there's a very interesting thing i hope you'll be able to look at which is trevo electricity if you have water going past |
| 58:24 | different materials it can get charged up and there's a range of different trevo electrical coefficients ptfe is the one nearly at one end of the range and what we would like is to have the this going through the hole generating a negative charge so that you have the drops repelling each other which is going to reduce their coalescence and i want to know whether we can get the coefficients for a material called paralleline which is a powder that you can heat up and it turns into a vapor at quite a low temperature |
| 59:06 | and because it's a vapor if you have it in a vacuum it'll get in every single nook and cranny of of a structure and you can have it going inside tiny tiny nozzles so we're looking for vaporized condensing in a vacuum and being tripo electric so that's that's a lovely little neat requirement right yeah um but i mean your nozzles dermot do they spray do they do you have coagulation i can bring in um one of these talks i could probably ask the um the inventor of this technology to to join you for an evening |
| 59:50 | um and just please and he will he'll be able to throw some light on some of these areas and of course the plasma chambers and all those deposition chambers that you refer to stephen there's i've got a lot of contacts in that space um and the technology has moved on quite a bit i guess um and again if i can help i i'm plea please uh news me and abuse me here right we we also want to have uh the the the paralleling material deposited on the inside of pipe work of a thing that's really quite big imagine |
| 1:00:26 | all the pipes in a ship the reason for this is that it's incredibly difficult to get clean air and if you buy a pipe it's full of dirty air and what we'd like to do is to seal all the dirt in the air that's in the pipe seals in as if we were varnishing it over so it's it's doing paralleling coating which is normally done in a quite a small vacuum chamber in a whole pipe system so that's that's also very interesting it's an area close to where i'm where i'm focused at the moment |
| 1:01:00 | and that is to be able to look at infrastructure in buildings um and to stop um oxidation yeah in those buildings so again that's a that would involve having a clean substrate and um then putting a coating on that that would last maybe 10 15 20 years yeah so there's some synergy there looks if we're really kindred spirits on this i also want to know how fast we can have a a a fluid going through a hole without eroding the surface um if you have ordinary water or maybe a slightly dirty water going through |
| 1:01:39 | stainless steel it starts ripping off the surface of the stainless steel at about five meters a second okay and we want to have stuff coming out about 40 meters a second and the question is are we going to have erosion problems if you've got ultra filtered water i i'm hoping that it's because we've got granules in the water the ripping stainless steel which are sort of bigger than the boundary layer and if they were a lot smaller than the boundary layer they wouldn't be rubbing the stainless steel because they'd be |
| 1:02:13 | too small but i that's my hope i'd like to have someone confirm this is actually reality do you know what we're talking about with the boundary layer dammit yes i think so there's a guy called um jeremy robinson you may you may have heard of him i haven't uh and he's um but he's based in the uk but i think he's also at basel university um but he did a lot of measuring for me for for abrasion for nano coatings yeah and he built little robots to measure that abrasion so he would certainly |
| 1:02:51 | be all favored with the requirements of doing this um and he's i think he's a sort of gentleman that's open for opening up to experiment and and to look at ideas um and um you know very very nice guy actually yeah so a couple of thoughts on this one is that uh there may be a variety of surface coatings that can substantially moderate the erosion rates at higher velocities and the second is that it sounds a little bit analogous to the problem of electron migration which has been studied in great detail in |
| 1:03:25 | semiconductors and noted with interest that lower z materials in that case um like aluminium were more prone to electromigration than uh higher z elements like tungsten um but the the surface films would be an interesting area to explore particularly a nano graphene or nano diamond film i imagine might have a significant reduction in the erosion rate does that help dermot maybe it's just interesting brian is very accurate there yeah um and if i can help if if we can structure the question in such a way that um i i can then maybe focus in on where |
| 1:04:14 | i can get a very quick answer and then there's a lot of people i can contact around the world who are working in this area um funny enough not really in the uk um enough in germany but um again i um i guess it's just a question of um what what is the question okay yeah do you have a a question so steven's talked about some pumps that pump uh through nozzles for a while filters that filter out you know uh particulate um matter so they they pump and then they get blocked up and then they reverse it's a reverse sort of pumping thing |
| 1:04:56 | isn't it sort of click clear out these filters uh and then and then whilst you have some other filters working um but does that is that or am i just behind us behind the times now with that stephen do you have questions for dermot uh i've got i want to talk to him about lots of things that we've raised if if he sends me his email i'll send him the all the designs that we've got for the filtration and the nozzle and uh one of the interesting things is he is you can't use a spool valve most |
| 1:05:26 | hydraulics doing clever tricks with high pressure oil uses spool valves and you can design very clever spools that do all sorts of calculations but the trouble is they do produce a little bit of wear debris and we are only really allowing us to use poppet valves but we also want to use a a valve system which doesn't have any rubbing at all and it's called a blister valve and it's if you imagine a sheet of rubber which has got the fluid that you're trying to switch on or off on one side and oil pressure that's pushing the |
| 1:06:06 | rubber sheet against a matrix of holes so if the pressure of the oil pressing the rubber brain is slightly bigger than the pressure the water you're trying to control it will seal off this array of holes and uh i was terribly proud of this and i found that perkin elmo invented it about 20 years previously and even called it a blister valve in the patent yes we need them all over the place for this great great minds thinker like stephen so the emails should be at the the last email i sent out should both be in them |
| 1:06:39 | but but feel free to sort of send a chat or something if i've got that if it's on your in your uh your invitation i'll i'll send uh them at everything yeah but if you don't if you can't find it then come to try and come back to me stephen just one postscript on this and that is a lesson from the semiconductor industry and that is silicon nitride is very good at vacuum uh chemical vapor deposition and uh it forms a very robust films and those films have been measured at 8.5 on the mohs hardness |
| 1:07:16 | scale and that might be an interesting refractory material that could provide some of the wear resilience that's being sought yes it's also not very notch sensitive ordinary monocrystalline silicon is very very notch sensitive and if you're holding it at all roughly it can suddenly break and you've got a whole handful of very very sharp exactly rectangular razor blades that are incredibly sharp and can easily cut you so i would love something that can seal up all those notches that stops the crack beginning |
| 1:07:53 | yes and it could be silicon nitride has been fairly conformal in semiconductor applications in the past okay so there's an idea silicon nitride may have some drawbacks but it's an idea there's also silicon carbide which does a similar kind of thing wonderful okay okay well uh any any more to say about so this is about marine cloud brightening of course and um we want to um so it's nice very nice that cambridge are doing some experiments um i was very um you know delighted to see that video from you uh |
| 1:08:32 | stephen and peter wadhams and paul beckwith it's rather disappointing that there's nothing's come back so obviously it needs more of an effort it has you know people have to actually sort of go out and kind of be like sales people except that you're saying well i see i say go get give me money and i'll save the planet for you or something you know we want to do this can you put the link to that video in the chat i think it went in the chat i think it might have been one of the first things |
| 1:08:57 | i think doug put that in there there it is yeah there we go yeah um so uh the other one that could benefit uh from these discussions is daniel harrison um i've been in touch with him recently and perhaps uh that's the student talk that he's organizing the good one to invite him along to i think it's really important that he's part of the loop in terms of his development as well with his uh wrinkle breaking on the gbr yeah i have invited him in the past um john and uh unfortunately we haven't |
| 1:09:32 | seen him uh but perhaps if you could watch him a bit if you know he's like yeah the spray that he's producing has a very large fraction in the atkin mode where altascar and christensen say it works the wrong direction so he might be spraying a horrible blend which gets exactly no effect at all this is why i think it's very important to have a narrow spread of sizes i don't know what the size should be my my preference is 0. |
| 1:10:03 | 8 of a micron but that's really based on the manufacturing and the filtration issue i don't know for sure what the the best one is i think that uh cola would agree that point eight is quite close to being the right one but uh rob woods in in america says he wants to have a much smaller one and there's a conflict between his size and the ultrascar size um and it really matters a great deal that we can sort this out yeah so uh forgive me for pressing perhaps a little bit uh dermot i don't know if you're uh what your |
| 1:10:41 | situation is you sounds as though you run a company i don't know if it's a big company or a small company no it's uh it's a nano company no no no no i said very small right okay yeah that online global was uh it's been in business for about 10 years but it's never really been commercialized it's been uh basically a network in 32 countries i'm just wondering so these suppliers you're saying some of them are german companies um are any of them big companies i'm wondering if if it might be possible to |
| 1:11:10 | persuade a sort of some sort of consortium of companies to put in just enough perhaps their you know expertise rather than money you know put in some time from some of their people um to actually build some sort of rig that then that's able to do an experiment you know to actually bit like they're doing in australia see if we can brighten some marine clouds you know yeah i i think that's um it's really an interesting idea there's to be part of a group that that um business has to morally step up |
| 1:11:44 | um and there is a lot of opportunity there in a lot of boardrooms um it's becoming in the last two years it really the penny has dropped that they need to do something rather than just green washing um i've seen a huge change in the last five years and companies have been more interested in doing something right and so it's it is a good time so i i guess we we need to have a diet we could have a dialogue on the strategy to do this yeah you only get one step at doing this to these type of organizations so you |
| 1:12:19 | really need to go in with the right strategy but i think it's it's one really worth trying and if you have the strategy right then you can approach maybe 20 30 40 big companies um is schlick the german company one of those nozzle companies you're talking about uh no but that they are i know of them but yes yeah they i've suggested those to hugh and uh and an american crowd so listen i'll dig back to the records to find this company because um so what i'm a vendor neutral sort of guy so when i advise a company basically i i |
| 1:12:59 | don't push a technology on them um my role is just to actually advise um and but where what i've noticed is that some companies will use their own vendor and they'll use their own sprayer and their own apparatus and they'll come back and they'll say this works really well and or this doesn't work so then i can use that information for for further research and stuff so um great yeah as one of your colleagues said earlier the more you go into this the more complex it becomes um but uh yes there's |
| 1:13:35 | a lot of potential here well that's great um uh i think you've got the right you know idea there about i think i'm very impressed actually with what you just said about having a strategy and getting that strategy right before i'm going in and making presentations to companies because you just get one chance so if there's anything i can do if you'd like to talk to me then i'm open to that not this week unfortunately because because i'm i'm distracted this week by having to earn money it's really boring |
| 1:14:07 | i know but um but i'm freelance so i i get tired i'll be free from tuesday next week and i've have irons in other fires don't worry the other people so there are other people here are thinking clive don't desert us so um yes um if if if sometime next week that would be that'd be good and uh look forward to that and and uh and stephen we can uh and i don't know if you but maybe if i don't know you and me i'm from the commercial world um and uh so i don't know that's my suggestion actually that we |
| 1:14:42 | have a quick chat and and then um perhaps then involve is that do you want to be involved stephen right at the beginning uh yes i'll tell you what i've been doing at the moment yeah the the design of the spray vessel is uh a a row of sockets into which you can plug in bits of equipment that do energy generation or filtration or drop generation or this all that the other then there's lots of different kinds and what i've done is i've got i'm writing a specification of what each module has to do |
| 1:15:17 | without saying uh how uh it might be done and then separately from that i've got another documentary saying uh repeat repeating the the specifications for each compartment but my ideas for it and what i want to do is to send these documents out to people who might be making things that are similar for example there's a company that makes pancake motors that could be uh very good at making the motors that i want for driving last so this is giving them a clean slate that they can make improvements or maybe point out my |
| 1:15:53 | mistakes but we can also send this to more than one company so that we may have two sources of supplier and we can't be held to ransom by one of them they know that there's somebody else around who can also do it uh then um they might behave a bit better but you could if you wanted to have lots of different parts of this thing made made all over different countries and then put together very quickly so if we need to have spray vessels in a hurry we can do this we might need hundreds of them in a in a big hurry but we can use factories all |
| 1:16:33 | over the world to do it and provided they understand the diameter of the pitching of the plugs and sockets that it'll all go together we can also quickly change the modules if they go wrong and the first one certainly will go wrong but with their quick change so it's like the cards that you used to slide into the back plane of a 1960s mainframe computer nowadays it's all on one card and everything like with one car but it used to be lots and lots of sliding ones yeah the maintenance thing was just you know one minute slide |
| 1:17:05 | it out and put a different card in yes okay replaceable modules yeah okay so um yeah so let's uh let's be in touch then and uh because i'm i'm wondering if that's it might begin as some kind of um marketing type of thing dermot with um you know seeing how many companies see which engineering companies want to get on board this fantastic new thing that's going to bring them loads of publicity and and uh make them look you know very shiny and then i think the easiest way to do this would be to put it into a little video |
| 1:17:47 | yeah take the complexity away yeah close nest view of what you're doing and what we want to do um and then get that when you're happy with that then get that over to these these type of you know uh clients that we feel would be good to partnership with financially if you wish i can send you over a video that i made recently uh regarding the technology um for another company it didn't cost a lot it cost about five thousand euros um i think if i if i had it done in in the uk i got it done in belgrade but if i |
| 1:18:24 | had done the uk would have cost upwards of twenty thousand yeah um but just to give you an idea um of what can be done because once you have this done then in a in a animated video it really gets uh you can sort of explain without going into too much complexity what what you're about and the and what's in it for a group of companies coming together to solve this problem and then the information is there for them to use it for their for their own internal marketing or whatever um and uh i mean this is very nominal |
| 1:19:01 | upfront expense for what i think for what you're getting across yeah we'll have have a think i'll i'll send you over uh clyde the link to this thing on youtube see what you think it doesn't have to be uh more than you know maybe maybe 90 seconds but probably oh no okay yeah grab it so it's very short yeah yes i have definitely got 90 seconds i can find 90 seconds yeah yes please and we'll take it from there and uh and then we'll involve uh we'll involve you know technical will get technical |
| 1:19:34 | when we need to hey guys i'm i'm going to head off and i'll catch you in a couple of weeks time thank you see you next time in a couple weeks okay um i haven't said good evening to robert thanks for joining us robert um and i think we might be asking you just we at least want to discuss your rebuttal um and brew is bruce still with us um yeah bruce there um great i can't remember who edo is this is he does oh that is that eduardo okay probably eduardo thanks for joining us edward right um so what's next uh we've |
| 1:20:08 | done the usual uh meandering around which is fine that's just where normal conversation goes we've talked about that we've done that so this there's this there's the video we could look at and possibly hear from uh peter so um is there anything more we want to say about this i mean we began really by saying it's appalling is there anything to add about that or anything you want to add about it term robert um i i've put a link to my comments on it um in the chat which uh from our uh |
| 1:20:42 | planetary restoration blog and um the uh a couple of themes that uh that i'd like to read you're a little bit quiet sorry robert i don't know if there's any anything you can do to get closer yeah so a couple of themes that uh that i'd like to raise the uh the paper makes the claim that uh geo engineering would promote conflict whereas i maintained that research in geo engineering would promote peace and i think that that's a really key strategic argument because for example refreezing the arctic |
| 1:21:18 | would be something that the g20 could lead as a program of of international cooperation and the overall uh cut to extreme weather is uh is an important benefit for stability so i really wanted to just raise that as a uh as a strategic factor and uh as others said uh the paper was just utterly appalling and i make a couple of other comments um about it in my uh rebuttal that i've uh that i've shared in the chat and uh but for now that's uh that's the only thing that that i wanted to mention here now |
| 1:22:00 | okay yeah yeah did anyone see uh roger pilker's uh um article on it or his piece yeah yeah i saw that very poor i thought it was poor i mean he seemed to be saying oh geo engineering shouldn't be done because firstly it's horrible and secondly because well because i think it's horrible and he thought it was horrible and secondly um the other thing memorable thing was um well scientists have been trying to measure weather effects and the more they're trying to understand the weather the less they are able to predict it |
| 1:22:35 | they're getting much much much better than they used to be really they're very good now for a few days ahead right that's what i thought and but even just to say well the more they study it the worse they get at it is is really a vote against science altogether it's but it's again it's like saying well don't bother galileo um you haven't you're not getting anywhere so give up i just that's surprising one of the key things that we've been focused on uh that we need to do something about extreme |
| 1:23:04 | weather in this decade and emission reduction will not do anything about extreme weather actually ever because the tipping points will come before any of the effects of uh of emission reduction on extreme weather arise and the same applies for biodiversity so these people who claim to be concerned about climate justice biodiversity and extreme weather are actually undermining the only practical response to those problems so it's an utterly bizarre situation yeah exactly yeah actually and it's a real and it's a |
| 1:23:37 | real shame that uh that this is not uh picked up more uh clearly in any mainstream media that's that's the that's the next really bizarre aspect of this of this debate yeah so so how do we get it into mainstream media that's that's all we've got to do or persuade a celebrated scientist to back off this view and do a a rebuttal except the kind of arguments that we've been giving who can we find who would do that jim hansen yeah who needs to be somebody that knows them knows the media that knows that works in the media who |
| 1:24:20 | know who has friends in the media or knows how to get stuff in the media jim henson is a scientist you don't want to be one of those trees which shocked me because he's he's a he's a good solid scientist the argument that that i've been trying to make you know spread around that that without a global agreement a cap and trade system that would transfer massive resources to developing countries we're not going to get you know a credible reduction plan certainly not in a in a timely fashion so that you could |
| 1:25:09 | use that argument you say look either you guys basically come to a global agreement to cut emissions or you need global cooling because you know otherwise it could take you know it could take a very long time to uh to get to uh to draw down 1500 gigatons or whatever to stabilize the climate so i mean i think you know if you kind of pose the argument the moral hazard argument that i think is the major argument against geoengineering you flip it around you say well you know uh the the the uh it's not that we need to stop generating |
| 1:25:45 | to get ghg reduction it's rather you know in because we can't get gh re you know it's without a global government without a global cap and trade agreement like the wto or something without binding agreements you're not going to get you know so that's yeah that's right and and the to me the moral moral hazard argument is utterly irrelevant when you look and see that there's about two dozen countries around the world who are planning to increase their coal-fired power power electricity |
| 1:26:17 | right i mean i did this paper you know you just look at the there's there's something like a fifth of the world or something yet their exports are totally dependent on on and now this was just looking at oil exports right for their foreign exchange so you know without something else just to replace that so you know there they can't give it up yeah without impoverishing their entire country so it's you know i'm trying to get people off of the the you know the moral argument the moral handwriting and so forth you can |
| 1:26:44 | only go so far i mean there's political economic reality that you have to deal with and if you cannot deal with that in a in a short enough time frame then you've got to have cooling yeah it's simple as that yeah uh the the other thing i was going to say was uh you can talk so that's one thing um i ended up thinking that uh a very you can very you can simplify this whole geoengineering argument um into actually what uh seven sisters we did uh right almost at the beginning last time we met with two |
| 1:27:18 | weeks ago which was just to say it's risk on risk uh you know the risk of of one against the risk of the others you could talk about all these moral things but what's what's the risk of doing it against the risk of not doing it to me that that just brings it down into a nice simple argument and there's not not much more to say after that and please comment anyone am i talking about buying up the wrong tree or what the biggest difference is it's gotta be on preparing the technology having the |
| 1:27:48 | knowledge doing the experiments and being able to do those experiments at a meaningful scale and then have more your moratorium on it but for goodness sake have the capability in the box don't spend five years studying it when you need it tomorrow i mean we should be that's the most powerful argument i feel yeah yeah so okay absolutely yeah don't put off the research which is what hugh said at the beginning i think we all agree with that don't put it off so so the argument for these people is no you |
| 1:28:21 | you need to be ignorant and inept um that that's the best way is is just make sure you stay ignorant and inept don't become skilled and don't become knowledgeable and skilled but stay ignorant and inept that's the best policy because then that will force them to to stop burning fossil fuels yes really yeah so we're all very much in agreement here there's nothing really to talk about mana police manager yeah um in listening as someone relatively new what i'm hearing a little bit muffled just manager and a |
| 1:29:00 | little bit quiet i don't know if there's anything you could do about it what is that oh that's better we can hear you much better now suddenly you're clearer yeah i leaned in okay that's better so uh you know it feels to me like this is the conversation where uh this group and um the group that i come from but i'm interested because of the the gap i agree that there is a gap that has to be filled and it won't be filled uh simply by reducing carbon emissions uh especially at the rate um and i'm |
| 1:29:42 | someone working really hard to ensure that and i i think i know as well as anyone how hard it is to achieve it but your conversations repeatedly are conflicting you have to have an enemy and they have to have an enemy and i don't hear um a genuine interest in working together so the the answer is both and i'm just going to give you my honest opinion and observation uh because i think that until the conversations and the values become additive um it's going to be an uphill battle and it's an uphill battle to begin with |
| 1:30:27 | because of people's fear of geo geo engineering uh but as long as you keep making those people who have a more conventional approach wrong it doesn't leave much room for creating consensus and an agreement which i think is really urgent there is no possibility of consensus with a group like etc absolutely none and you try and do that you just waste your time there are some groups we can persuade but there are others who are simply crazy what do you think's missing what what you was is it worth talking to |
| 1:31:13 | these people is it would it go anywhere or will we just end up just walking away from each other what do you think it's a waste of time they really want us to go back to hunter gatherers and i think they would like civilization to collapse um yeah stephen with one of the founders of etc group in may 2018 in rome um and i'll have to recall that but no i felt as though there was some common ground there i just uh it's a bit of a ray of light and it may be difficult since he may be retired at this point |
| 1:31:48 | yeah i remember you saying brian that it was uh this amazing moment talking to this guy who'd been against all these experiments that you and others have been trying to plan and trying to do and came down to a governance question and if we create a menu for the united nations countries you know of um all the possible solutions then they can select from that menu and then it becomes the governance becomes resolved so it's an interesting way of making it less of a um direct confrontation and more of a finding the common points of interest |
| 1:32:20 | what is meeting and discussing or what etc group originally you know it's mostly about governance so that you basically the solutions we we may create a menu of solutions but it's up to the global south to select uh from our menu and you know it's about giving plurality let's say to the global south on which solutions will actually work from the sea level rise or arctic freezing or other perspective and i think we can probably share some interest with at least the founders of etc group in that objective um i don't |
| 1:32:54 | mind going through a bit of a governance process through the un if that gets us to a plurality for uh support you know to um cool the planet right but it's the it's the indians from the global south who are now about to do the experiments with marine with the boyne flakes so they are the ones leading it amanda i just want to point out that that um i don't think you know like groups like hpac you know what we're trying to say all solutions on the table it's not really a confrontational what we're |
| 1:33:31 | saying is that in order to have ghg reduction work we're going to need time and especially if we don't have a global regime you know uh cap and trade or something to to make that uh to make that possible so it's it's really a complimentary i mean if that we're all i don't think anyone here is opposed to to carbon removal uh we all recognize that that's that's got to happen it's just in order to make it happen we need triage we need a tourniquet we need cooling to allow for the |
| 1:34:03 | possibility for that happen so i i think you know i don't think it's i mean i think people are you know get get upset about you know confrontational in a debating mode but in in a you know in terms of a underlying position i don't think it's a it's an opposition it's a it's it's the only feasible way to get to where everybody wants to get to i'm not sure i'm sorry i'm happy to follow up on this yeah i'm not sure that's entirely correct for everyone ron um certainly my |
| 1:34:32 | impression of some groups not so much well etc maybe to some degree but other groups like the henrich bold institute in germany are viscerally opposed to anything whatsoever to do a geoengineering you really can't argue with them at all they simply don't want to know full stop they're not open to argument i i was referring to the critique of i mean our group and you know us the the broad array of groups that were yeah i mean i i believe that's a shared position by all of us we're not opposed |
| 1:35:01 | to you know so i just want to make that clear yeah but also interestingly i don't if you look to the extended argument in that paper on non-use for cellular engineering in fact in that they're suggesting that any development of geoengineering should be put in the hands of the global south and they should be entirely deciding everything to do with it it'd be totally up to them because they're the ones who are going to be most affected which is depending on the particular detail of the different |
| 1:35:27 | places i'm not sure is 100 correct because it's not as if the global north is going to be unaffected yeah in fact the imbalance causes problems it could cause you know if you do it in one region and not the other it's a you know anyway yeah i haven't i haven't looked at detail at that their paper it's a it's a difficult question and how to make it fair i mean the whole thing's not fair in the first place it's so so it's so many things it's not know the politicians say oh don't worry |
| 1:35:57 | in the future it'll all be sorted out and okay the future's arrived if you sorted it out oh no we forgot uh we haven't done anything about it sorry so it just doesn't have it doesn't happen so this this just it's dysfunctional in so many ways and we expect that uh there to be a proper functional mechanism to you know to govern the whole thing i mean i i'd i'd love it to be a proper fair scientifically based and well-balanced governance mechanism to do it but is there going to be one |
| 1:36:26 | we're not even allowed to create the best solutions or any sort of solution then can be this seems hopeless which says that um i would consider you folks the early adopters reach out to the early majority who reach out to the later majority and and those who are most resistant are the laggards and they may never come along but by the time you have more than 50 percent or you know the full 85 percent uh it's a fact and it and it and it happens whether it's a hula hoop or a pharmaceutical discovery so you might want to focus on who |
| 1:37:14 | are um the early majority if you identify as the um cultural creatives or innovators and the the methane action people and and certainly and cambridge climate repair people uh sean fitzgerald would say this as well that uh um involving and uh at a top level the indigenous communities is vitally important i agree why should they have to just be told what to do i don't want to be told what to do i want to be told that sorry london's going to be have to be live under smog for the next 10 years so that we can save the planet i wouldn't |
| 1:37:54 | want that either so that's what dad harrison is doing for the great barrier reef he's fully involved the indigenous community with it yeah yeah so yes um okay so we we've been we've i think so i think we've all accepted that um we've accepted the engaging with indigenous communities but it's it's the people who appear to who keep coming at who occasionally they come out with something and say nope you can't do anything it gets our heckles up because we we volunteer our time and our you know |
| 1:38:25 | our hearts to this um and then it's like nope you've got to be closed down because you're with with no good argument um and they don't seem to appreciate the huge risks coming down the line yeah that the really nasty stuff coming down the line which we would like to think we we do so yes thank you manager um so i think but in amongst all that brian i think you said you were going to make some contacts and do something useful there is brian's still with us i think brian is not still with us he's gone |
| 1:39:09 | oh dear are we doing for time it's gone half past anyway maybe it was because we reached the timeline yeah i hope i didn't rant too much there well that's it then folks um thank you very much um i'll do the usual did we do the whole agenda or did we miss a bit i think we might have missed a bit um well is peter's still with us peter wadhams i don't think peter's with us either i think people have been quietly disconnecting there's the mcb video so there was a link to that i think that was a great video i really |
| 1:39:52 | enjoyed uh but it was just heartening to see it thank you very much stephen who arranged it stephen uh it was somebody called dale walkenan and i think there's a mention of them in the uh in the first screen i think there's a there's a very beginning of the video i think there's a link to it do you know how he managed how he found out about you did you know about him already uh well it was done it was a meeting at cop26 they filmed something with the three of us later on uh over over the web but we they were |
| 1:40:30 | organizing a press conference at cop26 and paul and peter and i were doing that we had half an hour there and they then asked us to do a thing on the web so you actually went to cop26 i thought you weren't allowed to go wasn't it no i they they didn't accept my submission i did i was developing a very nasty eye infection there so i was feeling very ill but we did this press conference in which about 10 people turned up and then after that they did a web meeting okay great uh there's um [Music] uh i think there's the thing |
| 1:41:19 | i think yes i think the um the stuff we did in glasgow is on the web as well um and i i think it's on below my signature i think there are three links there and i think it's the the second one but below your signature where on the emails i send out other emails okay okay thank you could we get this uh company that actually took an interest to to further take an interest and uh publicize the the paper that um robert has written on the rebuttal of the okay non-news i i will send you the contact details of the person who |
| 1:42:07 | organized that excellent thank you stephen uh should we let doug have the last word again yeah right uh just very quickly uh maybe a show of hands um i've been on facebook i've been getting daily notifications that an individual who is very well respected has been posting lectures that he's been giving at penn state and other places and they're very disturbing in that they they're all reducing missions reduce emissions reduce emissions has anybody seen any of these lectures that michael mann has done |
| 1:42:47 | one two no not terribly recently i've seen in the last week like almost every day so um what i'll do is i'll send an email with a couple of these lectures it's worth watching because this is what we're up against and i've been deliberating for two weeks now how to get to him and i've come up with an idea which i've shared with john but i won't take time now at least i'll get the lectures out to you so at least you can see what his message is i think it's important to understand |
| 1:43:20 | yeah because everybody has actually signed up to methane removal did you know that did you know doug well he has never mentioned it in his he's he's talking to students these are lectures at universities to students and he hasn't even mentioned the alternatives okay let's look out for those uh i'll send you those it's worth i think we need to really focus on i mean if we could sway him we could that would be the first domino and yeah with others could we actually uh find out which universities have had his lecture and |
| 1:43:56 | say that we need to for a balanced approach uh we need to give a presentation of an uh view of climate change and what needs to be done yeah i think that's a good idea but when you listen to the professor of the class applauding michael mann for this what he said i this is recorded so i don't want to say the professor i know he's he the professor plays up the reputation of man to the sky high doesn't he but nevertheless nevertheless the universities have an obligation to give a balanced view and i think that's a good point |
| 1:44:40 | we should prevail on that that's a good point we're going to get somebody angry at us for sure but i i mean even getting somebody angry at us it might give us publicity at the moment we don't have any oxygen publicity that's a good strategy good strategy if anyone gets the chance i i have a question for michael mann which is at what point do you start researching just start even just researching marine cloud brightening and and uh stratosphere aerosol do you actually wait until the thwaites glacier is |
| 1:45:18 | is pouring into the ocean and sea level has already risen up to two feet and there's hasn't been any ice in the arctic for about the last three or four years is that when you start doing it or if not is it a little bit before at what at what point do you start this research i i've actually posed that question and not a suggestion to bill mckibben to write about that because he's actually admitted next decade we should be doing this so i haven't finished that conversation with bill mckibben but that's where i'm |
| 1:45:51 | going with bill good glad to hear it okay folks yeah thank you thank you everybody thanks uh see you in a couple of weeks yep cheerio cheerio bye-bye bye bye john |