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| 00:06 | gosh uh we're starting the recording already here's hi clyde hello there hi clyde i've just put up an article i've just begun reading it it talks about the importance of krill in the arctic antarctic for sequestering carbon i haven't finished reading it but it looks pretty good it's by some australian scientists with their new new icebreaker vessel right you just put it in the what uh in the email in the chat uh i haven't it hasn't appeared in my chat what's in mine john can you see it maybe maybe because |
| 00:48 | i have only just connected and so i missed it hi oswald hey everybody hi hi john hi hi household do you mind just sending it again um sev sure yes we uh that's right all things so oh great that's it yeah we'll see that yeah thank you that's in isn't that in the antarctic yes you said that you said arctic i think atlantic regions yeah yeah because the cold regions yeah okay polar regions yeah yeah okay all right thank you very much sev yeah right antarctic krill so uh i suppose i could quickly share this |
| 01:39 | well yeah yeah um [Music] click through it so what does it say at the beginning yes krill are essential to understanding climate change essential antarctic voyages have been unable to catch krill for four years so it sounds like an untested idea into the south seas in hope of success you scroll down about four slides right maybe six uh cameras in the water is killing the young okay protection that's right climate change scientists need to study the live crew and laboratories the category is naturally difficult |
| 02:24 | okay this is a 39-day journey to collect samples using a daring and untested method your icebreaking vessel is loaded with portable aquariums right headed south and typically flood a room in the name of science right carbon eating talent of krill right yeah that heavy industry and governments across the world are investing billions of dollars trying to mimic carbon capture and storage right yeah krill this is the next bit go go scroll a little bit lower right okay it's a conveyor belt for carbon carrying on the water service |
| 03:08 | that's even that's right matt yep here's what happens first crew algae algae near the surface yep swim deep waste which sinks that's what i've been saying i'm glad you've proven it yeah yeah i'm doing having the bodies in the bottom you can see my deep sea creatures yeah got to get it to the bottom somehow yeah hi john hi hi john hi there john mother john here john we've got john n and john we need both ice breaking to get to the place and then ice making to get the reflection and the other things |
| 04:04 | that's it yeah hello dog can't hear you doug it's just starting with the snow outside i just took about a half an hour walk in the snow very very light but it's going to get up to a quarter of an inch out with the shovels no i wish it would just snow big a couple of feet would be nice a couple of feet yeah you're in maine as well aren't you from vermont well actually uh massachusetts got uh inches last week it's a lie we have just a dusting just a dusting all right good evening manager thanks |
| 04:52 | for joining us and uh grant is with us uh hi grant um grant uh said um would i like him to present um for 20 minutes i said could he do 15 and so you're going to be here you want to i mean you could speak this evening grant but i think if you and your uh colleague wanted to work over the presentation again and come back because you came back and said come in two weeks time can you hear can you hear me grant maybe grant can't hear me uh michael ruth that's a new name michael ralph sorry ralph okay ralph |
| 05:39 | yes ralph even um welcome uh you must we must be getting famous or something grant and i are colleagues oh you're with a grant okay i'll use my accent okay uh hi grant um uh right there was a beef fry as well i think this is uh um barb's not able to join us today okay all right so i'm going to do what i always do uh which is make try make best uses of the time i can and so let's get something going here and so please be thinking about what you'd want to talk about so i've just said that i'm really wanted to hear the uh |
| 06:34 | ccrc progress update we should be hearing from a few of them today oh yes right but quite a lot of them maybe in person i don't see any of them there at the moment no they'll probably come a bit later yeah well perhaps we should just talk amongst ourselves then but no let's just see what else transpires because we shouldn't have to just rely on them let's put put that there as a kind of placeholder yeah uh ccrc i don't like to assume too much that's the um center for climate repair at cambridge |
| 07:17 | uh so you can all laugh while i try and type this in peter prince yeah yeah pretty pretty like that yeah update uh progress report really yeah okay progress research progress report yeah um progress report on research okay let's say let's say research progress report make it as short as possible yeah yeah um right okay okay i mean it's amazing that there's this time at the beginning where um we don't really want to talk about lots of people come along we don't know what we want to talk about and then somehow |
| 08:06 | it just the thing takes on a life of its own and then we run out of time at the end as usually um yeah chris uh vivienne sen sent his apologies away on holiday this time but he'll be back next time good mr ralph introduce himself that's a good idea yeah is that okay michael just just a briefly a few words please sure um my name is michael ralph i'm retired president of ge analytical instruments background in analytical chemistry um several degrees there and uh have worked both in uh uh the u.s and outside the u.s worked in |
| 08:51 | australia for a few years and worked in uh in switzerland for a few years my interest is [Music] been in the last 10 years or so in the climate science space working with bob frye and grant gower to develop some technologies that we're going to be pleased to talk about at some future time not too distant future on ways to capture carbon but just as importantly ways to increase reflectivity in places other than the atmosphere right so say that last thing again i just got a bit distracted so uh the the last part is uh we've been |
| 09:41 | working at a company called climate restoration technologies to develop concepts specifically to increase reflectivity at the ocean surface using coccolithophores and optimizing their growth rates and ability to both capture carbon and reflect light okay thank you yeah yes and we heard a little bit from this from grant last time cochlear the four being uh they contain calcium they have calcite shells so they're a little bit uh brightly bright colored so increasing the albedo of the ocean to reflect more sun away and actually |
| 10:24 | provide some cooling yeah okay thank you very much michael yeah great how long have you been working with uh grant on this um bob fry and i were grad students together uh his uh his and my collaboration go back um to the last century quite a while and uh but focusing on this oh in the last 12 years or so um crt was formed around 2010 uh specifically to look for ways to capture capture carbon which led us to you know our studies with uh coccolithophores yeah but uh in discovering that there were others focused on cooling um we we |
| 11:15 | began to think more about the ability for coccoliths to uh to reflect light and and the potential contribution they could make to overall albedo increase great yeah as well as uh carbon draw down yeah yeah i've just seen a thing from brian von hurzen uh e huxley i um i think that's the species that you're that's right focusing on yeah yes okay so do you want to leave it until um do you want to say any more more about that this evening is it anything i can put on the agenda to say any more about that or do you |
| 11:53 | want to leave it till you do a sort of full um can i just add something that yeah please yeah our original work focused on uh cooling of the whole whole planet and since uh getting engaged with john and others we're now doing a little pivot on ourselves to see how we could maximize the contribution of our our concept to cooling the arctic and we are learning more and we'll probably focus our conversation in a couple of weeks more specifically on the contribution we have technology might be able to make to kong arctic particularly |
| 12:40 | oh john seems to like that john this is going to like that we think we all like that actually yeah yeah can you give a a a two uh explanation about how you might do that well the uh e-hux is a species which sheds its white cocolutes and these are very small which are very highly scattering and if they they're concentrated to the surface they can reflect an enormous uh a part of amount of light and in it heat energy the uh ehacks have been doing this for centuries i'm sorry millennia uh john will recognize the white cliffs |
| 13:36 | of dover as being a repository of uh the cochleus compressed cochlears uh so it's it's one uh certainly one of nature's uh powerhouses for carbon capture and photosynthesis so that's the finding a way to create surface level blooms where you want them when you want them in a controlled manner has been the challenge that we've been tackling through the last several years and will you try and make them more buoyant so they stay at the surface the cockatoo algae itself uh the cochlears are shed during their |
| 14:25 | life cycle but they are also shared when the the uh species dies and so the reflection you see is not from the algae itself but from the shed calculus so this calcium are lighter than water yes they are they have minute they're of the order of uh one micron across and they've got a substructure under that the photographs are very revealing uh the the challenge is to do it where you want it to be done and one of the things that we have learned in the the last few weeks is how the species does thrive in cold waters |
| 15:16 | and we learned very recently about the great calcite belt which surrounds the antarctic and that is primarily formed from uh he hux and it's cocky lithophores cockrolis so it can be done nature has done it it's a matter of uh how can we intervene to make it useful for mankind more useful if if i might add to one sentence or two to what grant has just said um our expertise is stronger in optical sciences so we understand uh the reflectivity uh we understand energy absorption and dependence on on wavelengths what we don't understand is the biology |
| 16:13 | to the extent that we would like to understand it and part of our our challenge is finding that kind of expertise to go along with our understandings of of the optics and the physics and potentially some of the engineering so that we can optimize the number of caucaliths we produce where we produce them um to maximize their reflectivity where where they ultimately end up and to be able to reproduce that cycle in a in a in a very systematic way and uh that's where our our thought process has evolved great uh brian |
| 16:59 | has been trying to speak for a while please yeah i was just wondering how calculus float presumably after shedding they are made of calcium carbonate i presume yes they are they are very pure calcium carbonate yeah there are a couple of trace elements in there as well but they they're just drifting around they eventually will agglomerate with other particulars particularly organic materials and they will find their way to the the bottom of the ocean and they've got uh bubbles of air in them they i don't think so |
| 17:41 | well they wouldn't float otherwise heavier than water they are hanging around along so there must be some buoyancy element in it as well as the calcite they're very small sev yeah it doesn't matter how small they are if they're heavier than water they will slowly sink they will this they would sink otherwise unless they've got gas in them otherwise the white cliffs would be spread across the surface of the ocean there are well they were originally indeed possibly they they have a hydrophobic uh surface of the |
| 18:21 | death hydrophilic they can swim even if they if they are heavier than water hydrophilic france yeah phobic hydrophobic means it repels water yeah yeah it is an organic compound shielding them yes uh well that could be lighter than water so that could that could help yeah yeah and now you can even put a razor piece on the on the water and it swims if it is uh have an oily surface a razor piece you mean a very thin piece yes yes yes yeah it may have a much much uh heavier uh whiter weight yeah i observed come from a depth |
| 19:20 | over accumulated depth of about 50 meters but obviously the closer you are to the surface the higher and the brighter is the activity yeah have you got any uh photo micrographs of them oh yes it'd be interesting to see what they look like i do have gas in them they look like a basketball um that has been very finely woven about two microns in size um i'm not sure i have one i can bring up immediately but i have one here try now grunt i gotta get their share screen while you're doing that i mean stephen i |
| 20:12 | can't not sure if we do we have stephen salsa here we've had this conversation about um just quickly said this about um the particles there we go um in aerosol particles in the air which which stay mixed because of the turbulence you know if you use enough turbulence then aerosol particles even though they're heavier than air they stay mixed yes there's a nice width there yeah so there's the cockasphere on the right they these organisms reproduce at a rate of about split twice per day and so when they are splitting the |
| 20:50 | calculus gets shed the copulas are formed internally and they pop out through the surface and as an example of the brightness of a of a bloom there's that nasa image from a large surface related bloom in the english channel do the under soccer ball shape or do they shed the individual little donut shaped bits on the outside to grow they fall apart oh sorry the the individual calculus are ejected from the cell itself individually oh so those are those are the children growing on the outside are they yes they are and |
| 21:43 | they're okay it's a fascinating species and we'll tell you more about it in a couple of weeks did brian were you trying to speak again yeah two things i guess uh you were saying that they primarily reflect after shedding or while they're alive after okay so the key it sounds like is to encourage the calculus to float if they don't already and then um their buoyancy time will then give a certain period of high reflectance yes you'll take that entire water column and presumably get it to the surface if the alkanones |
| 22:24 | are sufficiently buoyant yep these are the alkalines so the goal is to get the bloom to maximize close to the surface and to see how we could peak it to a maximum the the reproduction the peak peak to a maximum are you saying uh yeah yeah yeah we're getting in too deep okay let me just say that uh our initial studies into these were to be a sink for carbon uh as sev pointed out um ultimately we would like these to reside on the bottom of the ocean because they're fairly stable stable for many many years so as a sink for carbon it's a wonderful |
| 23:17 | choice in thinking of it as a reflector at the surface it's how how long can we keep them uh circulating at the surface so that they are a good reflecting uh device if you like before they sink we don't know i mean i have to say we don't know that perfectly but um we know that they will reside at the surface for a period of time before they sink question is how to optimize that a bloom typically lasts 25 to 26 days and then disappears from view from the satellite so that sits that's its life cycle |
| 23:58 | would that be because of grazing pressure that they disappear mainly because of what grazing pressure being eaten yes yeah they run out of nutrients [Music] and get out competed and they they also have a virus yeah very specific virus which in terms of maximizing reflectivity is a boon a gift because it kills them yep the bucket lists are shed as the cell membrane is destroyed by lysis okay so then they but then they they run out of nutrients so that's um that's the main problem sporadic appearance in nature is driven by nutrient |
| 24:52 | they are out competed in very fertile waters by diatoms as an example and so i i refer to them as the last guy in the line at the cafeteria he he gets what's left interesting and so the object is for us to jump him up the queue to be first in line yeah did you have another thing brian yes um i learned just in the last few weeks that there's some interesting chemistry associated with this friends might be able to confirm it and that is there is a a bit of a tactical problem but in the end i think it does get resolved and that is when you form |
| 25:38 | calcium carbonate shells at the surface you're actually taking a calcium bicarbonate soluble molecule and turning it into a calcium carbonate molecule and sinking it and what that means is uh you have two carbon atoms dissolved for every one calcium in the form of calcium bicarbonate then when you form that shell you actually eliminate one calcium and one carbon carbon carbonic acid and that goes away but you're left with uh unbuffered uh carbonic acid or carbonate in the form of co3 minus or co2 in the mixed layer of the of the of the |
| 26:22 | ocean so it presents a bit of a challenge in that the buffering is decreasing during this precipitation event now there may be other things we can do to fix carbon some other way but the actual shelf shell producing chemistry uh is a bit uh makes the ocean acidification problem in the mix layer a little bit worse perhaps electrons might confirm there is a long-running controversy about whether this process is actually a carbon dioxide sink or a source and there is a excellent paper by steven smith from the university of |
| 27:02 | hawaii who has passed this whole thing and identifies that it depends right which is a great solution for chemistry there could be some sequestration of other carbon in the form of carbohydrate associated with the huxley eye that could compensate for this also i recommend the paper by professor wally broker from columbia lamont doherty 1987 where he talks about the buffering properties of seafloor calcium carbonate to buffer uh carbon that has been converted back to dissolved inorganic carbon in the abyssal waters so as you |
| 27:50 | put more and more dissolved in organic carbon or other forms of carbon into the abyssal waters they will react with the precipitated calcium carbonate and form calcium bicarbonate in solution in abyssal waters and buffer the amount of carbonate there and he shows how you could get down to sub 300 parts per million by adjusting either the carbon or phosphorous ratio or increasing productivity or other effects that's what my ice shield technology is designed to do in part to take the the concentrated co2 down to where the |
| 28:28 | seaweed carbonates are to react them and produce alkaline bicarbonate excellent so anyway i recommend walleye brokers paper that i was recently uh on point it was pointed out to me you can also compensate in part if you make organic cipher compounds or organic chlorine compounds agreed and even uh when you uh let things down uh they and you you act with a biofilms with with which cover the particles and you get a sulfate reduction you also would produce alcohol basically yeah actually there was an interesting um conversation i had with a marine |
| 29:28 | ecologist last month who said underneath a fish pen you can see a transition from aerobic to hypoxic to anaerobic processes and they have witnessed the transition to sulfatic production and then eventually to methane production and even to the point of bubbling methane so it's a rather interesting cascade that you can move through and i'm thinking of it as a spectrum of [Music] biochemical decomposition that occurs depending on the level of oxygen remaining near the seafloor um all right and grant i've i've just put |
| 30:13 | up dr richard kirby's website he's basically thank you at the plymouth just down the coast from me um which is where that shot of the the plankton bloom you showed was yeah he's studying this stuff on all day long yeah so i'm trying him to join us but if you've come across his work but fantastic pictures uh so we had distributed a pre-release version of our a paper uh to a select few people too and we're getting all sorts of very valuable feedback from that which so i'm calling our paper at re |
| 30:53 | like an actor it's resting at the moment uh why we accumulate uh inputs from people who have greater knowledge and expertise in the real subject matter so that's where we are right now and it's generating conversation as we have here and it's generating new information which we will be assimilating as fast as we can is that paper like able to be distributed to to our little group or is it is that a little bit too too wide for you i think at the moment uh we we've got some modifications that we're in process |
| 31:33 | of as soon as it is ready to roll you'll be amongst the first to see it serve great have you looked at you said nutrition is the issue grant um the uh i mean diatoms they uh forgive me from other people might have rather more to say about this than me um don't be rather better informed uh diatoms they build their bodies with silicate um yes silica so they'll need more silicate in the in the water so um so are you looking to looking at sort of controlling um the amount of silicate or perhaps concentrating on areas where |
| 32:15 | perhaps silicate is low in the ocean we're starting to look at those aspects the uh first there have been two revelations in the last uh last two weeks since we started gathering inputs on this a person known to many of you russ george let me know he's done it he created a uh and he hurts bloom in the gulf of alaska um yes we know about russ jordan and his uh his uh results were then destroyed yeah we don't know where they're destroyed they may be in a canadian vault somewhere confiscated confiscated okay russ |
| 33:02 | reports that he created a 4 000 kilometer square kilometer bloom of e-hux and i think he said he got the ehacks to jump the cue behind the in front of the diadems uh partic in particular the this great belt of the calcite and the anti antarctic is in a region where silicates lower and so the just by natural competition e hux has prevailed so yes silicate is a part of it the chemistry is fascinating we are relieved that we pivoted away from positing this idea as a primary pump for carbon dioxide because the the albedo effect at the scale we would |
| 34:03 | we had projected as a carbon capture pump would turn us very quickly to the next ice age so that's probably not a desirable outcome for any of us oh a little bit of ice now wouldn't be undesirable in the right place indeed well almost anywhere i want i want that mirror yeah that'd be a good problem to have grant so this uh yeah it probably easier to manage than cooling uh so look forward to meeting and getting deeper into this and your meeting in two weeks thank you for your interest sure um i think you s i think i had a |
| 34:50 | copy grant and i uh forgive me well i for whatever reason sorry i forgot and i didn't get back to you um will you be sending out okay so um what i guess you want your presentation you you're preparing for for a couple of weeks and we are modifying and improving the the draft that you have clive and that's why we're calling it in resting stage yeah okay okay oh i was interested in the idea that you might use it for the great barrier reef in very short order for cooling purposes john is that yeah |
| 35:29 | cool because the great barrier reef is the problem of the temperature that's what brian was telling us uh the other day and so getting some immediate cooling this is no secret uh one of the byproducts or one of the e hacks's other claims to fame is that it is one of nature's major sources of dms dimethyl sulfide just to give you some input on our eye view of the chemistry john we understand that dimethyl sulfide is very volatile it emerges it is released as the species dies and it emerges from the ocean |
| 36:24 | rises quickly in the atmosphere where it is oxidized during the daylight by sunlight and oxygen and overnight by nitrites or nitrogen compounds and it is the dimethyl sulfoxide that is formed from this that is nature's primary cloud seeding agent so we grow these little bugs in the ocean and john gets clouds and stephen gets clouds to inject salt aerosol into sounds too good to be true guys now we we know about dms uh grant um a little bit more there yeah the dms also will brighten clouds that are already there |
| 37:17 | so so we're doing the mcb and this albedo all in one and surely that's going to cool the uh capable of cooling the great barrier reef isn't it i would think so don't get on to the blooms tend to get the glutes tend to get broken up by storms and cyclones they degrade more quickly with a violent activity like that there's there's mixing going on all the time in the nutrients are drifting around and the species are drifting with them and so you yes you're under the impact of those we have |
| 37:58 | we've got some ideas as how you could create these sources where you want them rather than having them drift around and just occur spontaneously which they've been doing for a millennia well we're into experimenting on the barrier as you know the government's just throwing another billion dollars at the two billion dollars they've already promised so there's some serious money around for for the rights to experiments and there's a few hurdles getting approvals as brian and i know but uh |
| 38:32 | there's certainly money if you can tap into it there is nothing that i can see in the concoction that is needed to generate these things at will that is not already in the ocean it's it's natural process yeah or naturally present present so just be naturally energy used using sunlight natural energy rather than having to generate the energy to put put the uh the aerosols up there to form clouds so that's a bit of it too john can can you put cooked ground in touch with the appropriate people yes it's a there's key people that |
| 39:22 | grew up in ames and these various research organizations down here yeah we should have talked further i have had a previous contact with john be it all at monash but uh we'd be happy to have a conversation with anybody well almost anybody no go for it this would be wonderful if uh that would that would make people feel happy about using it for cooling the arctic perhaps indeed you know wet wedge no i got it yes hey john uh this is doug um since i'm working on this communication strategy i'm looking for |
| 40:08 | specific names are those people that you're talking about are they public or i mean could i put them into our um our next work work task task force what do you call it work work group well it's morrison that did the announcement and it was contingent upon his winning the next election in may so um there is another two billion floating around somewhere um so i think we have to go tracy this is not a promise oh is it 2 billion over 25 years that's probably spread out over a few years is he just is he just integrating the uh |
| 40:45 | aims and the grumpa budget over 25 years of deciding to that and the the great foundation uh budget as well which is the 400 million yeah right it's very political it's the whole thing um either michael or i have any problem with working with australians i lived in melbourne for 11 years and mike uh had an assignment there for three or four and so there's no problem here john you're qualified that's fine i can say g'day with the best of you of funds already committed over 25 years and the 1 billion is a campaign promise |
| 41:29 | that's right you're right all right we'll save the rapes if you're like this again i see a comment um that brian made and this is one of the focus uh areas of our studies of ehux is you know how to care and feed them and to make them not sporadically bloom but bloom on demand and uh and it is this management of competitors um competing for um for nutrients uh when the virus is there when the virus is not there uh at what point on the growth curve is an optimum to manage each of these things and where is the best starting point to |
| 42:21 | reduce the likelihood of these other competitors altering the the process so you're right on exactly on on the area that has been our challenge is to try and understand it well enough and to propose you know how we can alter it from being just a natural bloom uh to a bloom to our benefit right and i note with interest that wikipedia says that ehux forms in nutrient depleted waters after the reformation of the summer thermocline so that bodes well for a seasonal bloom in antarctica and possibly a seasonal or maybe longer term |
| 43:03 | bloom around the great barrier reef so um yeah that's great i look forward to hearing more as you work on that we're focusing on actually seeding the blooms um exactly to initiate the growth and and how that seeding can be done very efficiently and wherever we want um if you wait for it to initiate on its own then then that's uh that's not going to be as effective as we want we need to initiate it and then uh that's the catalyst for larger blooms but i put up my hand for my boy and flakes concept to give that initial |
| 43:40 | nutrient yeah right and then as a complement to what sev is suggesting um we've been working at the climate foundation over the last decade on restoring natural upwelling that can bring nutrients from below the thermocline uh and restore natural upwelling into that thermocline into the mixed layer and then it'll typically sink back down to the base of the thermocline which may be a good place for e-hucks to grow and then shed calculus which presumably will flow to the surface so both of those would be strategies with different levels of |
| 44:21 | intervention to uh provide a perturbation and the uh supply of nutrient in the mixed layer right so when you say sink to the bottom of the thermocline you mean that the the there's that the mixed layer to the to the boundary between the mixed layer and the and the layer beneath the mesophalangeal um uh so and you and you said so this is a one of the crucial parts of what you just said brian that uh the cockworth um if they're lighter than water that they they're less dense that they float up so that's an important question |
| 44:55 | and um right and i think you were saying that uh that at the end of the was it that was one of the periods was it summer what i can't remember what you said now but the end of some um summer thermocline produces this um you know base of a mixed layer and now the the photosynthetic maximum the chlorophyll maximum occurs near the base of the mixed layer as well so that's where you actually get most of the organisms i wouldn't be surprised if e hux maxes out near the base of the mixed layer as well when you say the base |
| 45:28 | do you mean at the top of the or where it joins the mesoplasty it might presume you mean right near the top no the base of the mixed layer is you know you have a mixed layer that's constant temperature and then you get into the sigmoidal temperature scope and right at the base of the mixed layer is where the water will come to equilibrium and that's where you see the photosynthetic maximum as well right and possibly the the most uh e-huxley eye could be near the base of the mixed layer right so this i'm learning something |
| 45:56 | here this so you have a mixed layer which goes down to whatever 600 meters and then you've got the mesa magic but there's a base is that or whatever is different and where it depends where you are um but anyway that's that's the thermocline is that that what determines the boundary between the mixed layer and the mesa planting yeah the depth can vary between 50 meters off panama and 500 meters in the western pacific and the base represents the top of the thermocline and the bottom of the mixed layer |
| 46:30 | the top of the thermocline and so do you mind if i just um put this up and just make a little diagram actually yeah so i mean it's at the bottom of the of the mixed layer i'm just going to top the thermal point right sorry brian i'll just see if i can uh just uh um draw a picture here i think this is going to be useful i'm hoping hoping it's going to be for useful for people i'll just make it like this so that's that so that can be the surface of the ocean um and uh let's just make another one we'll |
| 47:06 | just just make it very crude so so this is uh that that'll be ocean surface uh so i'll just call it the surface uh then if i put down here and if i just go down there and make say this is the meso because i'm sure we could find a diagram on this but i hadn't heard about the base before so and now you have thermocline and halocline don't you this and they're different are the different things or they're usually the same thing well sometimes the halocline could be non-existent all right but the |
| 47:43 | thermocline's always there yeah sorry the thermocline we've seen reverse haloclines even in the south and the south pacific but the thermocline is always there in the in the um open ocean right and except except i would say in antarctica during the winter or it's a deep mixed layer polar regions in the winter have a deep mixing which is why you get bottom water formation yeah in most other places in most other times sunlight will warm the surface waters enough to uh develop a thermocline and a mixed layer |
| 48:19 | right so uh so the mixed layer is underneath here and and is that rises the mixed layer here no the mixed layer is between the surface and the thermocline right so this is this here so let's put but this here is next layer right now down near the bottom of that you're going to accumulate waters that have mixed between the mesopelagic zone and the thermocline and so that's you know if you've if you brought water up it's going to form a density that's intermediate it will find equilibrium uh somewhere in the |
| 48:49 | thermocline usually near the top of the thermocline so near the top of the so the thermocline is is an actual uh boundary between isn't it all right so this is not a single dab right so sorry uh right so you're saying this this this this zone here this is the thermocline yes yes okay so let's put that let's put that there and then you run into the mesoplagic zone between 200 and a thousand meters and then abyssal ocean after that yeah yeah so yeah okay so okay so i was thought of the thermocline as as a sort of boundary between one |
| 49:31 | layer and another layer it depends if you scale if you zoom out to the scale of an ocean then you have four thousand meters into the support it's time thermocline might only be 100 meters or 200 depending right yeah so but when we zoom in like this then this we're talking sort of minimum 200 meters maybe up to 600 meters but um it's let's if we just take a an area of the ocean of interest where let's say where they would they'd want to um increase e-huxley what what would be would you what are you thinking brian |
| 50:07 | would be a sort of typical place where they wanted i mean like the burial reef or some sort of typical place are we talking the abyssal i think we're talking about the abyssal ocean here rather than a shell seal well no i mean the great barrier reef has some vertical walls that'll drop to 500 meters or deeper and those so those uh you might have a one to two hundred meter mixed layer and then you have a thermocline that could be one or two hundred meters and the mesoplastics down to a thousand meters |
| 50:34 | right so this might be um this might be 200 meters 50 to 50 to 400 meters is the range of the mixed layer depending on your geography right right where are the uh hux likely to be in greatest is going to be a photosynthetic maximum it's also that's where you start you get a combination of enough sunlight and enough nutrients to actually grow a lot of phytoplankton and i seem to recall that e-huxley is an autotroph that will produce you know it will photosynthesize and produce organic carbohydrate and calcium carbonate shells |
| 51:23 | um and probably hangs out there while it's alive and then if it sheds cockles and we can figure out a way that they float they might make it to the surface or it might be random next time would be interesting to contrast the photosynthetic maximum is where you have the ideal mix of insulation and nutrition presumably yes i should qualify this it's really a chlorophyll maximum um because that's where you get the most density of um of autotrophs that are making uh that are photosynthesizing right so i think that's the best way to describe it |
| 52:06 | so he hacks both synthesizes for its own existence and it forms the cochlea through a related proper process we've defined as coccolithogen and there is still a much speculation about how that actually works but it is it happens because the species is alive for photosynthesis obviously very good yeah one of the things we saw in terms of the barrier sorry good job then brian the um the e-hux would would be best out over the coral sea uh it would it wouldn't be over the the reef itself in shallow waters it would |
| 52:55 | tend to flush over it um but it wouldn't form directly over the reef uh you have no no you'd be out in deeper water um and yeah you'd want the um calculus to drift uh with the wind generally southeasterly prevalent trade winds with a left-leaning a left-turning tenancy because of the coriolis forces and so if you're a little bit offshore of the reef crest and you're in a few hundred meters of water then um with the right kind of upwelling uh it's possible to get uh e-huxley to form again finding those optimal |
| 53:38 | conditions would be key but a um by restoring natural upwelling with marine solar other technologies it's possible that we could get an e hux bloom i think the challenge is to document that we're not forming a harmful algal bloom and um so presumably ehox is not associated with toxicity but it's something we'd have to monitor yeah ee hux doesn't um clog reefs it it stays reasonably high and and doesn't uh suffocate the coral i think you'll find it right it's only the other other varieties which do |
| 54:14 | right and and your point fakes the plagues to be the same wouldn't they yeah yeah similar yeah they provide nutrition yeah so go ahead please if i could change the subject in the absence of the folk from from cambridge is uh is peter able to give us a any indication of of progress at turin and cambridge or is that is that still under wraps you're on mute peter well it's not under wraps it just hasn't been much um the cambridge cambridge has got a couple of graduate students onto it but not doing really serious work yet |
| 55:10 | during because um uh there's a couple of of the of efforts um but they're not quite the same thing and one is working with uh phytoplankton and uh with with uh targeted nutrients and this is the beer native folk no no no no they're native sort of do their own thing this is the chewing polytechnic um and that's that's then uh but their native have got quite a nice document out which i haven't they put humble generally out yet sort of summarizing their approach and what they've done up to now and what they plan to do so |
| 55:58 | that's that's probably would be quite a useful thing to get to get rounded to everybody um but richer in one effort is involving the um targeting different species of of phytoplankton and feeding them until they die um and that's done in a kind of uh special piece of approaches in which you have a kind of ribbon uh endless ribbon which contains the plankton and uh that that's uh one effort and then there's um the the other effort is really concerned more with with with re-freezing so they've got uh |
| 56:46 | some work going on starting anyway in in a cold room and uh looking at uh trying to to re-freeze up sea water in the arctic but um so that there hasn't been much done up to now but they're very keen to get going on things they sort of stopped everything because of covid so i'm sure they would be very very keen to to to work with you and see what you're doing and and see how what they're doing can be correlated with it who's the main researcher there beside yourself well there's uh two there's carlo campo |
| 57:33 | really who's the glaciologist and [Music] uh ice person and um vincenzo rijo who's the the phytoplankton person can can you type their names in the chat room so i can see if i can correct them yes well because i'm seeing them tomorrow so like i can just type it in here we i can i can look them up then yeah i i i well i'll see i'll be seeing both of them tomorrow so i'll aim them at you and tell them to okay catch up so i can't confirm something by the way and that is that a lot of these alkanones do have a density less than um |
| 58:23 | the seawater so they would provide some buoyancy um they're very various levels of toxicity of ketones and other alkanones that i would have to understand as well but if there are any information on what are called harmful algal blooms would be good to know if e hux is involved or not have you got uh that uh can you share that brian but that uh about the um less dense than water um yes uh it comes from wikipedia uh if you search alkanones uh you can look up each individual one and notice that most of them have a density around 0.85 grams |
| 59:08 | per cc 1.8 i was going to say that the chemistry very very basic chemistry that uh are we still saying this friends that uh when you assimilate bicarbonate to make organic carbon uh you uh you're very huge you're jesus yeah you make it uh that's right uh um and as you increase the ph and then as brian said a little while ago that um making uh calcium carbonate it does the opposite so that lowers the ph so it can't compensate yeah exactly that's right so that seems to us that uh that's a it's a very good uh evolutionary |
| 59:58 | um how do you say adaptation to you're gonna you don't want your ph to go too high because you can't operate anymore so if you build shells oh hurrah then you can go as much as you want until you run out of views right yeah that's right and i should qualify at the the smallest and lightest alkanones have a density less than uh seawater but as you go into longer ones uh then they get more dense so it's all about the right mixture of alkanones to uh that are surrounding the coccoliths the length of the alkalo that was it the |
| 1:00:32 | alkanones that are surrounding the cockpits right yes yeah yeah okay and the same wikipedia yeah and there's certainly been papers around that talk about um phytoplankton community compositions uh i saw one i can't remember a lot a while ago um people saying well okay we're gonna have ocean acidification and increased temperature of water and you know changing in nutrients and how are the how is how is the community composition going to change of phytoplankton in the ocean um so that might be something to look out |
| 1:01:06 | for for grant and michael maybe if you if you remind me send me an email i can it's hopefully still here or you you if your experience of the internet is anything like mine you just put something in and google finds it amazingly well one of the uh papers uh from i'm going to say about 15 years ago identified that he hux was unique in its ability to thrive in acidic increasing acidity and it's got its own little built-in uh compensation there uh but as you are hearing it's a complex game out there nice and enormously just one thing that |
| 1:01:52 | i grab hold of is that at if we're looking thinking of the great barrier reef as a great target which i think it is the and if in those waters the e-hux should be a co2 source the amount of co2 emitted would be less than the uncertainty of australia's emissions by far yeah so not much and now yeah that's good sorry brian go ahead please yeah it's worthy to note clive that we've already seen these perturbations for example around 2014 to 2016 off the coast of california the big warm blob and el nino |
| 1:02:40 | conditions produced unusually warm conditions and a partial failure of the california current upwelling this was associated with a damoc acid bloom that was associated with a dinoflagellate and that resulted in a high level of neurotoxicity if you will and significant effects on sea lions and birds so there are huge transformations in plankton planktonic assemblages that occur uh in the oceans when the conditions change just by to agree to agree a degree or two and understanding that succession in the context of e-huxley |
| 1:03:19 | is going to be an interesting and complex uh ecological study yeah domoic acid you mentioned and i think this is the toxin isn't it the new that gets mentioned a lot yes and it is a key component and you've got to track these and understand how they get uh managed uh in the earth naturally yeah so there's a lot of reading to do it's what we find isn't it friends there's an awful lot of reading to do yeah yeah so is your paper going uh we keep getting distracted but it's going did you want us do you want to say |
| 1:03:57 | some things about it france keep everybody waiting i can shall i do something about the antarctic yeah why don't you i thought it was interesting the below the shelf eyes is found rich alive on the ground of of the southern ocean below the shelf eyes expanded as you were saying sorry and the paper asks where comes the energy from there is no light it's absolutely dark and it's mainly filter feeders which live on the ground like sponges and so on uh we we have another theory what happens there |
| 1:05:01 | and this is the melt water which comes out of the antarctic continent flows below under the shelf eyes and because it's fresh water it is in there it is a layer below the sharpies and the ocean itself has no directly contact with the shelf eyes it's divided from the melt water there they yeah yeah so you have the ice the melt water and then the yeah yeah and the melt water is full of methane contains also iron two in the surface form and the ocean water is toxic |
| 1:06:05 | and contains a lot of sulfate and so between melt water and ocean water develops a hemocline chemical chemical a redux divide and this is the energy which is needed to feed what what is down in the ocean the uh there is lots of life in this chemical and especially iron reacts with the uh h2s and not with the edges with the uh surface of the ocean in the camouflage and this produced |
| 1:07:08 | uh pyrite a very tiny parrot crisis these uh chemistry is known from meromytic lakes and so on which also have these kinds of chemo clients so the period rains out onto the sediment and so the iron disappears from from the melt water and arrives not the ocean itself in any kind of arm so and the melt water itself because it divides the ocean uh the warmer ocean the lower warm ocean from the |
| 1:08:12 | shelf it helps the shelf to keep away from the warmer ocean water below and this uh concept the melt water layer and the shelf they helped themselves to exist without melt water the shelf would get in contact with a warm ocean and would saw a way so everywhere where you have these shelf eyes you have below a shelter ring a meltwater and what happens in spring when when the winter ice is produced |
| 1:09:16 | the layer of melt water can spread because the winter ice uses the melt water below for freezing it takes uh it takes also iron from the milk water and when it's when when the winter ice uh uh the iron content away and the bloom and then the bloom of normally physioplankton can can be produced that's some some things we can yeah |
| 1:10:19 | yeah that's uh i think it's kind of new to pretty much everybody uh friends um uh franz you've been saying this to me for a few months now that uh and so just had some time to look it up properly and find the you know references um that this is the reason why that these the southern ocean you've got this huge ocean with virtually no iron it's got everything else all the other nutrients but virtually no iron and how come all the other oceans have got at least a little bit of iron but the southern nation has got virtually |
| 1:10:51 | none and it's because of this this uh this melt water coming out full of iron but because it's underneath the shelves there and it gets it reacts with the oxic water at this redox gradient and uh reduces it all to pyrite and for instance uh mount water brings a lot of glacial flower and this makes the southern ocean so rich in in silicate and other things and also nitrate it has it comes also from these reactions in the in the uh chemical uh ammonia changes to uh to uh nitrate |
| 1:12:01 | the the land surface below the ice in the antarctic a continent contains lots of organic carbon and some some the lakes which have been found there they are all unaerobic and methane is there are some references that antarctic continent contains huge amounts of mesa and this comes out with with my importance and and this is the origin of uh it's uh reducing conditions yeah normally today |
| 1:13:06 | this is more important as a process than the iron deficiency in the southern ocean than the fact there isn't a lot of dust blowing off of continents over the southern ocean feeding it with iron dust you're saying this is a more important explanation for the iron deficiency this is this is the major explanation you asked me yeah yes yes could you repeat the process you're talking about is the major explanation for the iron defense yes yes yes yes not not the fact that there are continents with a lot of dust |
| 1:13:44 | blowing over the yeah the dust that just never came from from the antarctic it came from southern uh from patagonia and so on yes yes yeah but the the the reason people said that okay the the all the iron in the most of the iron in the ocean it comes from dust we've been saying that as well friends aren't we the dust blows over the ocean yeah you have not so many places like antarctica it's it's not a place that's right yeah a greenland surely you have a similar but if if the the melt water would not |
| 1:14:36 | touch the ocean directly it comes from below the eyes and in the antarctic it it comes out under the shellfish and it never meets the the atmosphere while uh in in other places where you have a glacier and the melt water comes out uh almost come what's coming out under the uh is is in in touch with the atmosphere and oxidizes and it just mixes with the oxic water straight away is that is that is that how you see it friends this this methanogenic water just mixes with the oxic water so that you you lose the this |
| 1:15:20 | this boundary where you have this uh reaction going on this habitat where all this stuff lives because it's this deep redux this stuff only only microbes if they're above yeah only microbes but it's but um this is another point in the paper that you always find i mean i remember when uh so when franz actually came to london and uh we had that presentation with sir david king and we we had to walk as the bus stopped in a different long place away and we were walking on the paving stones um in westminster |
| 1:15:57 | and um friends were saying look down at that look down at that paving stone do you know what if you walk on limestone you often get this this uh sort of streaks of brown or dark or dark colored streaks and and friends were saying look that that that's there'd be a steep uh uh redox gradient there that's where you get the fossa millions of years ago this is limestone you know real limestone this so and but here we're talking about the same principle but actually in water with two layers of water you in |
| 1:16:39 | groundwater you find it everywhere where you have for instance where you have uh contamination by oil or so you get always these uh chemo clients yeah call it a chemical yeah and it's always a very specific depth is what what you've said you and then you find that lots of things growing there at that depth because there you have energy yeah you you have it not in the oxygen you have it not in the reduced but only at the at the uh where they touch each other each other yeah so and that that was also the same |
| 1:17:18 | time where uh i was learning the very basic chemistry from francis saying look you know uh we everything every living thing needs uh an ox uh uh a uh oxidizing agent and a reducing agent yeah a a reductant um so and uh including us and every other life form on the planet that there's ever been it's in its redox reactions and uh we breathe oxygen it's a very strong oxidant and we eat pizzas and burgers you know that's our reductant um and every other piece you know life form is the same but that but for them you know |
| 1:17:55 | probably the same in in our bodies you know be places where it's this chemical there will be these chemicals let's not go into that um but uh you find it in nature and as you say in groundwater where you have the oxic ground you have methanogenic which means it's very reduced um in in nature very reduced and then oxic and then when you have this boundary where this sometimes it it's it's it's not steep and it's it's a it's a sort of gradual change from from reduced to oxic and you |
| 1:18:27 | see in sediments in sediments or in wetlands and so on you can have it only in millimeter thickness yes it's very very uh uh steep gradient yeah yeah but it's it's only millimeters to get from one one to the other i have a question france that this you're saying that this uh the glacial flower comes from the i mean maybe we'll see if this glacial flower comes from uh in the water from antarctica and it flows out and it provides nutrients to the rest of the southern ocean but this glacial flower also contains |
| 1:19:07 | iron so that isn't it why isn't it protected in the glacial flower before it arrives out in the ocean does that get converted to pyrite actually in the grains of dust itself no you have uh surface mostly out in the ocean the concentration of surface in the ocean is so high the concentration of surface in the melt water is very low um in the melt water is very low so uh so so so so the iron so why does the iron and you know the the concentration of oxygen from of oxygen in the ocean yeah is only less than 10 milligram per |
| 1:20:00 | liter or so but surface is more than 100 times of that right so the mesa and oxidizing microbes they use mainly surface for for oxidation of we say okay to to these microbes are everywhere in the ocean because nissan is everywhere the ocean right two okay one more call to mate tonight so i have to leave yeah yeah so let's just um that so i i missed that dope friend so when you say oxidize the methane do you mean uh okay oxidizer because methane is produced from reduction but this this question so that the iron in the dust |
| 1:20:54 | it comes out in it comes out in this glacial flower and it with all the other nutrients you know the glacial flower is in it it contains uh if it contains uh iron it is in an iron two condition not in in the oxidized in the very condition yeah and this is rather dissolvable okay and from the from the glacial flower so it dissolves from the glacial flower so this dust arrives by the time it arrives into the open ocean it's lost all its iron the iron ii is dissolved away is that right the the the glacial flower must also pass |
| 1:21:45 | this chemical layer well but you have okay so it's going to be affected by that layer yes all this must must pass this layer right all uh ingredients of the uh of the melt water right all the ingredients and or in the flat in the glacier in these dust particles the dust particles they're waving about they go for is it several kilometers underneath this this ice shelf because they stick out a long way don't need the ice shelves and they're and they they they may also you know if you're on the alps also |
| 1:22:40 | below a glacier the the rivers and the the waters are always white colors have a white color this is a glossier flower uh-huh right it's different okay and so the other and it's a very fine and it it's also sediments it falls also through this layer sediments to the bottom of the glass but it must also pass this layer okay this chemical layer yeah yeah but the so the other nutrients that the uh like the phosphates for example the phosphates they survive mainly also you know in in a reduced uh condition |
| 1:23:42 | phosphate uh which is bound to iron two or other it is more dissolvable in in in reduced environment than in oxidized environment because for instance iron 3 phosphate is much more insoluble than rn2 phosphate yeah right so it's soluble uh and so it's it uh moves out in this you have a kind of solution of phosphate also in the melt water it brings it down so it brings it out and then it uh it comes out at the other end it comes into the open ocean and you still have phosphate yes yeah but you lost the iron because the iron |
| 1:24:45 | even if you have a phosphate and iron the sulfite contact with iron sulphide takes takes iron uh as much less solubility than phosphate okay so it takes the iron and uh phosphate gets rid of it okay so the phosphate loses its ion content and so the iron is most vulnerable to precipitation from uh so from this reduced sulfur like sulfide including presumably hydrogen sulfide it would take it out yep anyway so we're taking up a a long time uh so i hope i i i i didn't uh no friends i think everyone's stunned into silence |
| 1:25:40 | that's a that's a masterclass for us that was great well one important thing to understand in this cycle is that the ferrous iron starts out soluble and then it has a time scale measured in days or weeks in cold waters and minutes to hours in chop in warm waters that transitions from the iron 2 to the iron 3 becomes insoluble and sinks to the seafloor perhaps as pyrite or other compounds and so it's the solubility that's key and preserving the solubility is something that biology has been doing a very good job |
| 1:26:19 | in the southern ocean to try to keep the iron available within cells and whatnot but by default the chemistry will tend towards uh you know move oxidizing the iron towards iron three and then eventually sinking it so it's an ongoing challenge for the ecosystems to retain enough iron to continue and that's of course an ongoing challenge for various ecosystem communities what i forgot to say is the production of i from of pirate is catalyzed by microbes because they use the hydrogen which is produced in in when when |
| 1:27:10 | iron sulfide goes with h2s to iron to pyrus and produces hydrogen okay so they get that's how they get the hydrogen from the h2s and that's okay and they lose the iron which is a terrible loss yeah yeah um one one thing you've said to me on multiple occasions franz you said the best chemists are the microbes they they make the best chemists which is i think it's uh i think it's for better grain yes yes yeah uh brian's nodding his head there so just was saying that so that that's this whole thing you know how do they |
| 1:27:50 | preserve and we heard matthew we had another chemist and they they uh do the best weathering in uh reduced condition in yeah that's one of the most one of the big themes of the paper sev um that in reduced conditions is where the where the strongest weathering happens and so uh it's it's making me think it's for some time the the by far the worst uh environmental disaster on earth happened two billion years ago with the great oxidation event because or the or the biggest you could say the biggest is we don't |
| 1:28:31 | care do we because we it led to us but the this weathering of rock but the chemistry was all working so beautifully it had been for a couple of billion years and then oxygen came along and completely ruined it and so they've they had to evolve to create these biofilms to protect the the reducing bacteria the producing microbes to let them keep going and weathering the otherwise you've got no way of getting nutrients you have to have this stuff weathering rock to get your nutrients so they're kind of being farmed |
| 1:29:04 | by the by the the oxic the the microbes that can cope with oxygen to keep them in this state where they keep the oxygen away so they can still do this sulfate reducing that so rather than oxygen being reduced it's it's the weaker oxidant sulfate being reduced as it always was for two billion years until oxygen came along i suspect that our huge iron ore deposits in northwest australia were created from when that oceanic iron was oxidized out and sank you have a lot to say about that as well france don't you the abandoned iron |
| 1:29:42 | formations so yeah yeah yeah yeah and the surface in the arcane ocean which which we have also some some explanations for yeah what we can't explain is is when we're going to get this paper published [Music] yeah brian you've got your hand up yeah two examples of this and how biology is the best chemist um occur in soils where microbes in soils render soluble nitrate insoluble and that's the key to holding nitrate into the soil now nitrate just increased in price by a factor of 12 thanks to russia so |
| 1:30:23 | preserving your nitrate is very important and the ocean i think that the biology has an enormous amount to do with rendering insoluble ferric or preventing insoluble ferric iron from sinking to the sea floor and keeping it in its ferrous state within a cell wall as well or within the cell yeah yeah and there's friends nodding his head as well well folks um it's nearly half past nine we didn't quite get to doing the agenda this time um but uh we had a wonderful uh well there we go a wonderful discussion |
| 1:30:58 | and a masterclass in chemistry um it's become a bit of a uh tradition now for me to say doug can we have the last word but it's before doug has the last word for no apparent reason it's just me being silly really but doug usually has something great to say the rest of you michael uh grant uh or uh anyone else is any uh john john n um any last comments no so let's let's have the last word for you and then i i think if anyone wants to carry on chatting i'll just uh i'll just last word for you please doug |
| 1:31:38 | i was uh curious who the egyptian host of cop 27 was so i googled it and i found a tweet from alex sharma congratulating the two individuals who are the foreign foreign affairs minister and the energy and environmental minister um one male one female from egypt so i um i retweeted that and i put into the tweet my little 30 second elevator speech with hashtag cool the earth or compartment hashtag cool the arctic so i've taken the first step to uh toward communicating with them so now we have and now we have to strategize |
| 1:32:23 | what's next okay great and we can always rely on you to you're you're the man that goes to the top straight away aren't you doug you go to the top you don't oh you're an activist that goes straight to the top i'm thinking who is who are the right people you know john and i were trying to figure out who's the right person to get the message to uh whomever at cop 26. |
| 1:32:46 | and obviously you got to go to the next person in line who in that case was john kerry it didn't necessarily succeed but we may have planted a seed who knows but yeah i i work backwards i start at the top and work down i i would just like to raise an issue that i think i've come across russ george was saying how there were people who just didn't want uh carbon uh captured to be as cheap as he could provided so the people who want to keep the price of carbon high like a hundred dollars or perhaps even a thousand dollars |
| 1:33:33 | um so there are there are people who who don't want things to happen for commercial reasons and i think one of the things that conclusions i'm coming to is that governments don't really want the arctic to be re uh represented [Music] they don't no they don't they're not being told what the repercussions are by the scientists so they assume it's okay to just to dash and exploit the arctic and we had trump wanting to buy greenland and the russians are building their their northern route and so |
| 1:34:17 | on yeah um so so we do have to think very carefully about uh how we get to the government in a way that that doesn't great with this or or somehow we could combine their interests with our interests in in refreezing the arctic uh perhaps by some co-benefit but it's it's quite a complicated thing to work out and all brains on this can we that's all i'm asking yeah yeah you have an extraordinary persistence and perseverance john and and ability to focus on the fact that there really is a potentially horrible problem uh coming down the line |
| 1:35:14 | and uh no matter what people say i mean they don't look up kind of said if that you know that's kind of said it didn't it and how many times we have to say it how many times we have to jump up and down and say look this is this is a really big problem i guess it's the the solutions are not so clear uh and there are so many sort of solutions that are far too expensive that you know 100 a ton of co2s just today we saw someone saying well really 100 dollars a ton don't think so the oil companies have |
| 1:35:51 | huge amounts of stranded assets in the arctic and they have them on their balance sheets as this is something i came across years ago and so having the arctic refrozen means that their assets become stranded basically and the value the value of the company suddenly goes down which is bad for their you know invest people investing and that kind of thing my impression john is that you know someone like you who's very aware of so many as parts of the pros of the problem would would that make sense to you and uh it's maybe the case for certain |
| 1:36:37 | oil competitors that's a feature in in their you know as you say in their sort of strategies and and and uh motivations and so forth but but when it comes to government decisions and governments and people like boris johnson and alex sharma and and people sort of waving flags it seems to me that it just ends up with almost nothing i mean we had the insane rebellion people was it about a couple of months ago so it's almost you know risking themselves being run over in the road to insulate britain i mean that was the |
| 1:37:11 | solution to climate changes we're going to insulate britain we're going to fix our leak you know our drafty windows i mean people don't really know do they they don't don't don't seem to know what you know what would be a strong solution you know i i found myself saying you know people said hey you've got to do this you've got to stop the leaders but make getting together and with flights you know it's their their their flights they're sort of private jets and i say well you know they okay |
| 1:37:38 | that'll make some difference but you've got to look at the big the other strong solutions look at the strong solutions and and they don't like that they don't you know how dare you say that that how dare you think that a strong solution is more important than how dare you call my solution a weak solution you know i i find it hard to uh we're getting back to this whole the same old thing about um i don't like to uh so mana joe might pitch in here and say look you're making people wrong |
| 1:38:10 | but so i say to myself well but there are books isn't does doesn't this get explained to people that or haven't they had a chance to think about it it's the media so rather than blame ordinary people it should be the media that but maybe they just need help but then how do the i ring up the bring up the bbc and say listen to me you know i can give you some good education they go who are you goodbye i'm not a professor of anything so it does help to have the people who do have you know a badge or a title uh is |
| 1:38:45 | that perhaps we should be talking to more of them and see if we can get them to persuade them to help the media a bit more i don't know hello manager yes please okay um i i want to say in being primarily an observer um although i am going to reach out to lamont dougherty and have them start doing some education uh about the ocean because they and and the arctic and antarctic um they're in our area and we have good working relationship i heard them mentioned earlier um i want to say that um i did review the video i've read uh john's |
| 1:39:28 | white paper and i reviewed the video um that noac made uh which i think is really excellent and then i reviewed the um geoengineering uh piece and i see how i can't believe i'm saying this but um my allies and mentors do have very close minds but um what i what i want to stress is focusing on the gap i've said this before but as i talk to people and say talk about my observations and um how my my shift my thinking has shifted um focusing on and working for terrestrial solutions that we really have to look at |
| 1:40:29 | the entire global system the oceans and in particular um the polls and um i can't tell you how many people are open to hearing you know i've been sending the white paper and now i will send those two i would say diametrically opposed um videos uh and the more i observe the more i believe that um we have to use a consensus building process which allows people to uh set aside their what they're determined and what they've believed and what they've worked for enough to listen to each other because this is so critically important and it |
| 1:41:28 | may be that well first of all i think some of the um solutions um are much easier for people to um accept and not worry about unintended consequences and others uh are more of a stretch but i caution all of us not to get stuck in a perspective where we end up you know making others wrong but trying to focus on providing good evidence as i've heard so much of on this call and i do think that there are many many people out there that are understanding how desperate the situation is and wanting to find solutions that |
| 1:42:29 | are within the scientific community as acceptable as possible and i i the only way i can see that happening is through a facilitated consensus building process but um it was quite eye-opening to to review those two videos and and see the degree of the um you know extreme disagreement that currently exists but we're all here on on the same planet in the same boat and um you know i i will try to be a voice for the scientific community uh finding a way to work together to save the world and so i i do appreciate and i'm learning as fast |
| 1:43:25 | as i can um and you know i i would like to um ask if if there are people that are willing to help those two videos are very uh clearly informative and john's paper is excellent but a lot of people who are not even going to read that um and i i just wonder if there's a way of providing you know a a list with a glossary which the white paper does include but um introductory information so that i can i can send people information or send them to websites so that they can learn how serious the gap is between what we could accomplish if we |
| 1:44:27 | were going at full speed and god knows we're not with emissions reduction and terrestrial forms of carbon and other greenhouse gas sequestration the sources and sinks and and also particularly help in you know for for the average person to start to understand what you folks are talking about and i've listened and i have enough science background to pretty much follow but um you know to understand what is happening with the poles and what is happening in the ocean and understand the solutions that are uh being brought forward so that they |
| 1:45:20 | if they're going to be implemented and i think that if there's enough consensus that they can be and and many of them need to be urgently but i think there's a lot of convincing to do not just of the people in power but the general public we're all stakeholders in the outcome so thank you for hearing me out i'll probably say the same thing in different forms over time but um i do really appreciate all the work that everyone is doing uh in this global climate emergency thank you very much thank you very much |
| 1:46:06 | uh manor and you're welcome to say the same thing again you know in the same probably in the same way or differently i think it's something we need to hear and and things need to get done don't know that this material needs to be made and i think we it is moving slowly some of us have more spare time than others um but feel free to make requests now of of people here to to help with uh as you say introductory materials i agree that's very important to have because a lot of people they've got |
| 1:46:40 | many other commitments they don't have only got a certain bandwidth you know they've got to put food on the table and everything else you know that but they do want to they do want to do something so yeah so this stuff has to be introductory as you've said one thing one more thing to say um so i've made this i've made a um email group out of it and uh i'm a little bit worried that that i might have spooked everybody by saying oh you know don't send an email um unless it's uh you don't send an email that's only |
| 1:47:12 | one or two people so i don't know i mean i get 100 i get about 100 emails a day from these things and you just you just have to kind of delete them don't you any thoughts on that so we just say look there it is it's an email group just just write to each other because people have been writing been clicking reply reply all on there are 54 email addresses on there so it's just the same thing it's to say it's the same thing and people just need to tell me if they don't if they want to be removed from |
| 1:47:38 | the group i'm managing it as an email group now so i think that there's i think there's really nothing to say about that is that please just use it as you were before it's just there to communicate with people um okay thanks clive thanks for doing it much appreciated a lot of effort there yeah yeah it takes takes some clicking yes you're welcome bro yeah i thought it was about time yeah okay we'll see you in a couple of weeks grant and for your presentation look forward to that um with you and your colleagues thank |
| 1:48:13 | you very much for giving us what you did this evening uh it's uh it made a great evening um i can uh if if people does anyone want to stay and chat at the end sometimes that happens so i'm i'll tell you what i'm gonna do i'm just gonna um i'm gonna leave the meeting and uh and i was going to stop the recording as well so that anyone that wants to hang around and talk about talk amongst themselves that's fine otherwise thank you very much everyone see you in a couple of weeks and i'll put the |
| 1:48:42 | recording out as usual oh |