| (Click on a 'Start Time' to view the video) |
| 00:14 | makes it very easy yeah we record these sessions i hope that's okay better because that's what we do so carry on don't don't let me i'm i'm doing things on the computer here yeah are we all besides grant and uh bald fry i beg your pod are we do you still have in your group of nyc participating today uh happy joining us grant is uh yeah he's i'm expecting him to join that's right okay well just to save time i will introduce myself okay yeah well uh sam do you mind waiting until um wait |
| 01:13 | until the hour when um people are supposed to be here at eight o'clock they might like to hear your introduction okay so we just we just chat until the start time just uh make kind of small talk sort of thing um i'm just uh clearing my computer screen a bit here this this is bob fry i showed up here bob fry hi hello bro hello bob yes sir you're with part of grant's team is that right you could say that could say that so we're just we just rapidly becoming the public face of the company okay were you uh there before him |
| 02:04 | yeah i started the whole thing in 2006. okay right okay so it's kind of your team in a way sam and i are sort of the uh mad scientists in the closet that the marketing guys would prefer to keep in the closet but sometimes we come out anyway out of that closet so that's these meetings are a closet for closet type people but for them for the mad scientists not closet people but for the for the scientists he's a much better speaker so uh uh but we're the kind of sort of the mad scientist behind the uh |
| 02:43 | nuts and bolts that's fine that's fine i mean um yeah so that so this is first and foremost uh well i i mean uh i made up this thing i called it noeck and uh it's attracted mostly scientists bob so we we get a lot of kind of in-depth uh getting into the weeds of the science which is all very interesting i think that that neat we need those conversations need to be had we need to hear that stuff because there's an awful lot of uncertainty about the way the ocean works and uh so uh i i really think that there |
| 03:20 | needs to be collaboration and conversation and of how different people see different things or how different people see the same thing you know and uh because i find that you know these arguments they go on and on and on in emails and uh when people actually speak face-to-face on a thing like this it gets things get resolved or developed much more effectively with speaking i'm not saying that you shouldn't email people that's i just think each communication medium has its place has has different different advantages and disadvantages |
| 03:53 | and too often just speaking is neglected between scientists or doesn't seem to happen very very much or very effectively and i mean this is why we we have conferences people go to conferences um and now we have this video conferencing and it's before the pandemic has forced us to to speak this way it's a great advantage i think it's it's i think it's an opportunity presents a great opportunity so i agree yeah great so science scientists such as yourself are welcome to speak i mean anyone i i prefer not to |
| 04:26 | have too many rules i mean the main the main rule is is to be you know reasonably clear what's that civility it's just civility basically yeah basic civility i think the main thing is i don't like to hear people bad mouthing someone who's not there if you're going to insult someone do it to their face that's my thing you know if you're going to disagree vehemently with somebody just do it there to their face um other than that you know people many people are polite you know curtis they put up their electronic hand |
| 05:00 | uh other other people uh just interrupt and uh so uh and i'm the moderator so for me it's just uh i make it my priority just to keep it moving just keep the conversation moving uh i don't like to stick my er or in too much because we're all grown-ups here you know um but if somebody's being polite put their hand up there for a long time then i'll try and make sure they get a chance to speak as well so basically that's about it really um okay so let's uh let's maybe let's so it's recording and uh let's put it on |
| 05:38 | on the gallery view well it does who actually does anyone who actually watches because i see i i look at the the um um the statistics on youtube i put these up on youtube and uh and see how many views they get and uh it takes me a few goes because i like to pick out the different bits you know what might what i think might be a highlight so it's got a it's had about three or four views by the time it goes up you know for anybody looks at it and then i might see 12 views or 20 views or something like that |
| 06:12 | can i ask how many people actually who would say you actually look at the the uh this is just idle curiosity on my part and then we'll get going that view the recording actually put your hand up if you don't mind actually view the recording only if i've missed one only if you've missed it so all right i'm the same club yeah okay thank you very much thank you everyone right okay let's let's get going we've got a couple of um new people welcome robert uh source good to see robert tulip |
| 06:44 | and uh and we've got uh grant who's gonna present today in france who i've been working with friends is a uh mate but first and foremost a chemist um peter woben bottoms who's professor of ocean physics at cambridge university and then we have uh manager green who's uh very concerned about all this disagreement between these different sort of you know this is another problem sort of polarized science silois you know silos of the anti-geo engineers and people like us that say no no we've got |
| 07:15 | to do something manager is trying to bring everybody together so it's great to have her on this call as well um so let's start pleased by uh new people introducing themselves so you're up as newport but you're uh chaudhary but um that's your wife's name you're actually saying that's my your first name my wife's name i'm using her you know zoom setup so that's why my name is sam chidori quickly i'm now a professor emeritus at kansas state university i've been professor of geochemistry |
| 07:53 | there at kansas state university since graduating from ohio state university receiving ph.d in 1966 so i've spent all my time in the academic world but my interest has always been on use of isotopes and sedimentary systems the rocks the water etc so i worked on brine's origin using strontium isotopes and lead isotopes tracer and also worked on caspian sea uh change in the sea level and the increase in salinity of these caspian sea and also more recent years i've worked on more on the interaction between |
| 08:47 | uh plant microbe and mineral interactions and i got some good uh results from my investigation and my conclusion was that actually the global river chemistry is influenced a largely by plant microbe mineral interaction not what people always think about water and mineral interaction plants do have an important contribution to it and so here i am i'm quite interested in what we are doing about mitigating the impending threats from climate change and i'll just finish yeah wonderful thank you very much thank you very much sam |
| 09:42 | and bob fry please yes i was uh educated at the university of illinois at urbana and uh did my graduate work at the university of arizona tucson i was a professor at uh analytical chemistry at kansas state university same as sam i don't know if you could turn your volume up a little bit bob it's a little bit uh a little bit quiet well it's it's that's better maximum try to speak louder and move closer here that's better better okay so educated at university of illinois in arizona i was a professor at |
| 10:20 | kansas state university 13 years like sam analytical chemistry is my field but i've worked in general chemistry as well and learned a lot about carbonate chemistry acid-base chemistry uh ph and so forth and a lot about aerosols i did worked in aerosol chemistry for quite a while and that stood me in good stead um i moved to industry and uh worked in manufacturing environments as a senior scientist chief scientist and uh operations manager and uh then eventually uh left and and worked on my own uh in in several |
| 11:00 | companies my own companies we develop uh laser systems optical systems uh systems for semiconductor manufacturing and most recently in 2006 i've kind of switched over to uh interest in climate uh science because it uh at in my retirement years it became apparent to me that things were going in in not a good way and so um i thought maybe i could contribute something to to help with that excellent thank you very much bob do you know there's some setting in zoom that it'll uh automatically um adjust the volume control |
| 11:40 | in zoom as a zoom setting and there's a little gear wheel hey i'll leave you with that you you can play with that if you if you want to um okay okay and then uh so all right so we're having this uh presentation and so bob uh tells me grant that he he i think began the project and um and you're the more the kind of the front man is that right something like that i'm the nominated lucky winner of the prize here and i will be presenting our material today excellent right so um let's just should we just do that then |
| 12:20 | should we just ask you to go ahead with the presentation i think actually no hang on so there was uh so i think sev you send an email uh suggesting something else as well so let's sorry let's just um put that up um and get uh something going here just two articles i thought was worthwhile folks reading and uh possibly bringing up if if they thought it worthwhile i always like it to be organized yeah so um right so we're having uh uh grants i can't give a better name for it so presentation so this presentation |
| 12:58 | on the e huxley let me know what this is all about um then can you just say a little bit about that uh what it was what what it was about again ah i haven't got the articles i sent them to you okay they just put articles let's say articles why don't you put the urls up in chat so people can look at them and then see if there's anything i want to talk about do you mind doing that sev so i can moderate because i find it's i i need to have my full concentration on what everyone's doing okay i'll see what |
| 13:32 | i can do you can um oh we'll just come we'll come back to that anything else for anyone okay so let's uh let's leave it at that for now and uh grant please if i give you permission to share great now do you would you want people to uh ask questions ongoingly or wait to the end i would prefer i'm afraid that we've got a full 20 minutes here uh clive and if we could have question time at the end of that i've got a couple of closing off slides after question time but uh if there is somewhere that i have |
| 14:18 | really blown it i don't mind being corrected oh you don't you okay if you've really blown it we'll correct you otherwise questions at the end is what you're saying so climate restoration technologies is a small private think tank with participants spread across the united states and in the yucatan and mexico as bob has advised he put this company together back in 2006 i came along in 2012 and have been uh vitally interested in in supporting this and taking it as far as we can earth 2040 is a concept that embraces an expanding |
| 15:17 | set of ideas that we've developed through the particularly through the last 10 years and today i'm going to outline the first paper in this omnibus uh earth 24 series and take a look at our ideas on whole earth cooling via ocean amplified soil reflection you can see the list of many contributors who have been part of this development through the 16 years we along with noac believe the climate restoration starts as a three-legged stool with the need to reduce emissions something everybody can probably understand i would like to point out |
| 16:04 | that the words skilled opposition is a carefully selected way of mentioning the fossil fuel participants who are clearly following their own agenda on their own time frame cooling the planet we see is essential and necessary and faster than other means there are some low-hanging fruit there's some costlier fruit to get at higher levels and it faces an srm fear largely coming out of stratospheric and injections we see ocean amplified carbon capture and direct air capture as essential parts of the school with legacy co2 as high as 100 times |
| 16:55 | annual emissions there's very little point in reducing emissions without taking care of what we've done already in our calculations depending on the scale at which you can capture the co2 suggests it'll take 65 to more than 200 years to have any measurable impact on temperature it's difficult and expensive it's got opposition so what takes priority all of them do so here is our view of planetary temperature reality this is information plotted by the reported by climate action tracker the straight line is the projection from cop |
| 17:44 | 26 uh information with 1.5 degrees the cop target for 19 sorry 2040 with 1.8 degrees projected by climate action tracker as being a reality where national declared contributions nationally determine contributions presently identified will lead us by 2055. the 1.9 degrees eemian impacts were written about by james hansen in his book the storms of my grandchildren and i'm not going to elaborate on those any further here we believe there is a soul of wheat radiation management based exit available from this highway to hell and high water |
| 18:49 | emission induction reductions alone are not enough and that we need to tackle the question of whole earth cooling to re leave us of this stress whole earth cooling is an ambitious goal we could have set a lower target of well let's just get under that 1.5 target which we know already is in jeopardy cooling produced by lowering levels of greenhouse gases are going to be too small too late to avoid climate catastrophe there's a huge amount of albedo loss to be recovered solar radiation management we believe is |
| 19:41 | immediate high impact it's currently controversial but is becoming essential in our views we believe that whole earth cooling could provide a good cooling foundation from which regional polar interventions and strategies for other particular regions could become successful where to focus everywhere we can so which cooling approaches can we use we believe along with uh you know ac that it's necessary to cool at every viable stratum to reduce restore else albedo and to share the scale cost and dilute the unintended |
| 20:30 | consequence risks the garage spray space shield may not be the fastest and may not be the cheapest but it certainly would be the easiest to maintain we are opposed to stratospheric aerosol injection with sulfuric acid but acknowledged that calcium carbonate could do the job dimethyl sulfide ocean seeding links nicely with steven salter's marine cloud brightening concepts iron salt aerosol cirrus cloud thinning and our contribution what we see called e-hux's ocean amplified solar reflection you'll notice that we see the best |
| 21:19 | possibility of eggs contributing at other layers as well dimethyl sulfide is a natural byproduct of the death of blood cells in the ocean and the intricate structure of the cochlea would make a fascinating medium for use in the stratosphere he hux has played a significant role in planetary albedo enhance enhancement in the past it's got a track record just that was that nobody was there to see it so here are some fossilized e-hux cliffs in a section of collapsed cliff suggesting that high purity cochlear calcium carbonate |
| 22:14 | may be nature's brightest whole earth cooling agent and here's the little algae itself on the left is the small soccer ball with its surrounding sphere of cochleus the in ideal nutrient conditions the hex algae will algo will split and reproduce two times a day when that takes place cocolus are shared literally billions i love that word literally but it's true in this case billions of released calculus float and create blooms in the ocean that can last for several days the image on the right hand side shows white to turquoise |
| 23:12 | uh blooms you know location close to many of you and uh the turquoise comes from scattering at lower levels in the oceans as you come close to the surface the brightness of the bloom obviously increases now terrell and ethel at the university of southampton in 1999 measured or calculated that bright surface blooming e height contributed 3 times 10 to the minus 5 of earth's then albedo so a 1. |
| 24:00 | 4 albedo goal is a huge lift for brighty hux blooms too big now the reality is that he cuts bloom only occasionally in the fertile oceans they don't compete well for nutrient faster blooming algae get to the front of the line in the cafeteria first and suck up all the good stuff there's a thiamine lack that prevents egghugs bloom abundant zooplankton come up at in nighttime and have a good feed on the e-hooks and just about any other phytoplankton they can find and there is a specific virus the e-hux virus number 84 which will terminate e-hux blooms |
| 24:48 | so our goal is to make blooms predictable and very bright and while conditions rarely favor e-hux in the fertile oceans that happens everywhere but in the great calcite belt so here is a nasa slide from 2008 where the it's actually re reporting chlorophyll levels chlorophyll a concentrations the blue and violet regions are the oligotrophic open ocean deserts and what we've learned is that the reason that deserts is the existence of the thermocline and the subsequent lack of nutrient in the upper upper layers |
| 25:44 | and what we've learned is that we could preferentially surface dose fertilizers in those spaces to transiently favor diatoms or alternately mimic what is happening in the great calcite belt that's this region down here again we're not looking at calcium carbonate here we're looking at chlorophyll belch and his team identified the great calcite built in 2005 after analyzing images from the modis aqua satellite which was launched and came online in 2002 and they found this huge space in which there was calcium carbonate |
| 26:42 | present e hex was the major contributor to that calcium carbonate and there's a reason for it in this space there's plenty of nitrate which is good for e-hux but there is no silicic acid which is a requirement for diatoms there's enough iron to support e-hux but not for diatoms now you could say well why don't we go there and uh seed that space well we believe that e-hux is maxed out in that space it comes back reliably every southern summer and it accounts for about 74 of the background albedo associated with |
| 27:39 | deep blooming uh algae in those spaces uh e-hucks are going to grow where the nutrient is and so they will penetrate the depths to wherever they're feeling happy and what our concept says is what could we accomplish from the surface if we were able to seed and properly nutrient the algae at that level in approaching this question we came up with the idea of pulsing the bloom and this is a way of illustrating what we would see as a an outcome from a single blooming experience the green reflects that here the exponential |
| 28:34 | growth of e-hux and then a leveling at the top where it's as bright as it can be this is the progress of limiters limiters include competing competing algae zooplankton which love to chew on anything that's out there and virus and as the e-hux population is growing the their population is also going to merit that we don't have scales on here but we can see that eventually the bloom will die it'll stop under the influence of starvation just the nutrients being exhausted and under the attack of virus and zooplankton |
| 29:33 | and we've decided that what we should do is uh pulse for a short time not try and extend this thing in these spaces for months and then allow a fallow period to allow limiters to return to their original low sparse condition and then we realized that's a lot of time to take in there and uh we rose with the idea of implementing selective flocculation at this point in the uh the month when the natural level has died down that would selectively sink organic carbon that is still floating around from the expired e-hooks |
| 30:24 | and limiters to the depths in this section here this is the essential part that where we are able to seed e-hux during its exponential growth phase that's the essential part and introduce that to the open ocean with replete nutrition believe that in this phase e hux will race away while the limiters are still trying to play catch up so 20 day is a theoretical pulse there's a lot to be explored in the length of the pulse and the frequency of repetition however that's we see this is a feasible approach so here we have delineated the |
| 31:18 | oligotrophic spaces the deserts they're big and there's a bloom followed by a reset followed by another balloon followed by another reset now each of those dots probably represents uh thousands of square kilometers but i think you've got the concept of how we would bloom and reset previously we suggested we'd mention multi-tiering and we see several benefits of tackling this cooling problem at multiple levels first of all putting all of our eggs in one basket is uh risky uh the burden to achieve the 1.4 improvement is too |
| 32:12 | heavy and cost too high the unintended consequences of lumping everything into a single basket may be extreme which would delay acceptance and possibly terminate investment we recognize that the actual thresholds at which unintended consequences could come about may vary wildly between the different methods and thought we can exploit that variation so if we were to share the albedo burden cost resources among say six widely differing srm methods at different venues different locations and different altitudes we can explore whether their |
| 33:08 | unintended consequence thresholds are related or not and there's a strong feeling that they're largely unrelated and decoupled from each other certainly uh from a geographical circumstance a bloomberg in the indian ocean is going to have quite a separation from a bloom in the atlantic so we see that if we were to use the multi-tier approach for six srms each at one sixth deployment scale of their potential we could sum up the albedo contributions to the full 1. |
| 33:50 | 4 percent while diluting the risks by six times unrelated risks may not be additive and so we see the benefits of achieving synergy while diluting the overall risk now in all of this managing the bioreactors and getting accelerated continuous ehox production is obviously key the good news an industrial prototype is now producing five grams per liter of cocolus and with the mass the low mass of of each cochlea that's a big number a sealed photobioreactor with 0. |
| 34:46 | 1 to 1 carbon dioxide will accelerate production by sharply reducing the doubling time this has already been established in lab experiments to make this run on light scale we need sterile and liquid co2 initially from inland ccs fossil energy we need the pure co2 you can't do it in the ocean because that little virus is everywhere and we've got to keep the virus out of the uh out of the nurseries and we'd need to neutralize acidity from the co2 we see initial trials could be carried out from shipboard nurseries and |
| 35:31 | eventually if this was to scale we'd need some way of sourcing uh ammonium iron from ammonia produced by ccs natural gas fueled harbor process which to reduce costs would probably have to be done on the ocean obviously nutrients and other materials need to be replenished as fast as consumed and we envisioned a small fleet of mobile bioreactors spinning around buzzing around seeing much larger secondary ocean open open blooms obviously nursery development and optimization is a key to all of the earhax-based applications |
| 36:19 | but i would know that if somebody is wanting to inject cochlears into the stratosphere you wouldn't want to source it from the middle of the indian ocean you would put the nursery by a reactor at an airport all of these things could be accomplished from land-based bioreactors and that is a suitable time to see whether i've give caused everybody death by uh what is it death by powerpoint by powerpoint or whether there's some questions that we could uh address i have a couple more slides after question time slide |
| 37:10 | client which will take no more than a minute or so okay okay thank you very much for that grant thank you so uh it's uh producing e-hux in uh nurseries on the coast by the sound of things or or in boats as you produce them in nurseries on boats uh we need to avoid the uh coastal rain uh coastal region uh too many other nutrients coming out of the out of the rivers i'm saying producing and then applying to these uh to these large oligotrophic ocean areas right i'm just trying to summarize yep i think grant meant that there uh |
| 37:54 | his reference to nurseries on the coast or or inland would be for the the special application where you'd be raising uh uh shed cochlears as a material to airlift for stratospheric aerosol as far as the blooms go as far as the blooms go those nurseries will be right out there in the open sea okay so they're on on boats but they will be sealed and uh and uh and accelerated in their in their seed production by special properties within the bioreactor but then they will they'll bloom much faster than they can |
| 38:32 | continue they can seed a variety of different secondary blooms okay so it's so it's producing the blooms on big boats that carry liquid co2 and uh and nitrates um and uh and and then applying them and then um uh how do they uh that you just spray them into the air so they go on the ocean surface it's got a big area of ocean surface to cover actually the uh probably the the big boats would start with the nurseries they may start there but you'll have probably a lot of them uh floating around individually right |
| 39:07 | out there in the soup okay and they'd probably be releasing their seed right out the side or the bottom of the of the uh of the sealed uh floating nurseries eventually you might start on a boat you know a research vessel but then eventually you'll want uh a lot of um uh floating uh seed nurseries uh perhaps millions of them you know that would be dispensing the the seed all around through the those polka dot rooms that you saw in those large open areas they'd probably be under a low speed power too so they can seed as they |
| 39:43 | kind of slowly move along yeah right so they're not boats but what are they then are they sort of floating it will be their own eventually eventually they will be their own floating bioreactor design okay this is where we if i can interject here this is where we need chemical engineers to come on board right because they are the experts in dispersing dispensing uh mixed media and there's a lot of those experts around the uh the challenge is to keep this this seed and nutrient close to the surface so that we get the maximum benefit from |
| 40:27 | the higher brightness at the surface but it's a big challenge and okay the liquid co2 would be brought out by ships from inland power plants yeah inland ccs power plants ship would bring it out and offload it into storage tanks and they would be used that boil off from the liquid nite from the liquid co2 would be used to infuse the head spaces with high concentrations so that the bioreactors can bloom more quickly and produce a whole lot of seed uh enough to to jumpstart the open ocean blooms uh to exponential blooming on day |
| 41:11 | one okay i get the idea and presumably the concrete manufacturer i mean anything that produces co2 concrete manufacturer brewery absolutely um so let me just ask say one more i'm gonna ask one more thing before because people are very pleased got their hands up are you open to people saying do you also have the question somebody tell me why this won't work oh yeah yeah you're open to that we've been uh yeah we've been telling ourselves we've been asking ourselves that question uh uh ever since the the |
| 41:44 | beginning of our pr you know we've become one of our own biggest critics great okay all right just on that clip we you know we really appreciate all the comments and inputs that we've had from this group and others and we're reaching out to subject specialists we are reaching out to uh some of the pro creators of the knowledge base we've been using and enrolling them into contributing at with their expertise and experience right okay so it's a learning experience for us that's very straightforward |
| 42:26 | just just as as it should be i think um did tom garrow take take any interest in what you were doing because i suggested to it okay take this off so we can see people go on please go ahead yeah uh tom mascara i have not we've not we've been very busy getting things cleaned up for this presentation john and we're looking forward to following through on some of those suggestions of yours thank you okay right uh sev please yeah two questions first of all what makes the dense coccoliths float and secondly you're doing a sort of a |
| 43:13 | series of pulsed boom busts with with the with the e hux wouldn't it be better to use my buoyant flakes to develop a balanced ecology so you don't have that boom bust and you simply have a slightly lighter general ocean right across the ring rather than up and down and having to neutrate things every couple of weeks good point thank you going bro i think the uh the answer to that is we have been uh uh noticing that uh like i said they're at the end of the end of the line in the diner for for blooming and we um uh they're also very |
| 44:04 | susceptible to stuff like uh the ehv 84 virus which will terminate them and you're really going to have trouble keeping going so we have to we have to move to that oligotrophic space to begin with to get those limiters down under control they're much much higher in concentration in the fertile oceans and we need to not only have them under con control but keep them under control because if we don't keep resetting that and tamping it back down every single month uh without a fail they will gradually cr you'll have limiter creep |
| 44:43 | and they will take over uh uh and and ultimately block e-huck's blooming the minute you give other uh species of competing algae a chance they'll establish themselves and and you just have to keep shutting that uh that new growth of limiters down on every you'll get new growth in response to the hooks blooms but then you need to shut it down every single month and start from scratch so you always have a new oligotrophic space and can and can keep the limiters out of the way otherwise they'll simply |
| 45:19 | rise and eventually uh shut you down as they do in the fertile oceans what about the floating problem why do why would dense coccoliths float they don't float per se uh they still will sink but be uh they they don't have flotation their their specific gravity is greater than one okay but the point is that the shed coccolis are only one micron across and parts of their structures are only 30 nanometers thick so they're like uh very thin little thin frisbees with spokes and and open webs so they sink |
| 46:08 | very very very slowly i wouldn't say that they float but they may they may appear to float because they sink so slowly it's just that centimeters per day is really all they they uh can do um so i wouldn't say that i wouldn't say they float so they're so small they just stay near the surf they just move around with the currents presumably yeah yeah can i just ask is that is anyone aware of uh cochlear iv um operating stably in the ocean as you know staying there for months on end the great calcite belt |
| 46:41 | right so why does it why does that not dis i mean it's because uh diet you know there's no competition from diatoms that's new blooming that's new blooming that just keeps going right but because of no competition there's no competition from other um phytoplankton there's no silicon not much silicon there yeah so that the diatoms and other phytoplankton or diatoms don't get a good start there's not there's just enough iron to keep e-hubs going and not but not the uh um not the salesic acid nothing else and |
| 47:14 | yeah okay also also phosphate he hooks will bloom well in quote-unquote phosphate depleted waters so they can bloom in lower phosphate levels not zero they have to have phosphate yeah but but they don't require as as other phytoplankton do so that's one that's one reason but you see the great calcite belt already has those properties okay yeah i understand yeah as grant said in the presentation he said that in the presentation didn't he yeah very very interesting to watch a video of the uh it's compiled from |
| 47:51 | the satellite images where you can see the calcite built emerging from the the austral summer and while the northern calcite blooms are disappearing and then having it come back again it's uh interesting cycle to observe okay and but that's like it's just that depth and that's not where the acceleration we see we need would be coming from yeah okay robert please sure i have uh two questions um first on the science and and then on the strategy so i'll i'll just ask the science question first and that is uh in |
| 48:37 | following this over uh many years in in the related uh discussion of large-scale ocean-based algae production i see uh nasa's uh omega project the offshore membrane enclosures for growing algae as uh an ideal starting point um and i'm just wondering if you've been in contact with dr jonathan trent who was the um uh the leader of the omega project the other uh scientific contact that i think would be really valuable for you is charles or jack grayne at cornell university and i i just wonder if you've |
| 49:15 | had contact with both of them not yet i i did uh have a look at the omega pro product project robert thank you i used to live within a couple of miles from there never heard of it but we can we are in the process of opening up uh communication with experts in the field and we'll go after everyone we think can help us thank you yeah whether where there's there's such a lot of related work that's been done in various scientific disciplines that uh i think it's it's so good for you to come into this sort of forum and other |
| 49:52 | similar forums to just sort of mind people's uh experience and find out uh where now uh the the second point that i want to ask is is about strategy and um the uh we've we've talked uh earlier grant about you know who uh who can uh support this now one of the the the uh big questions that i have is the role of china in um the uh global climate operations and like as as we know you know china plans to expand continue to expand its uh fossil fuel emissions and so will come under increasing pressure to |
| 50:37 | take action to prevent warming and i simply suspect that china in cooperation with the fossil fuel industry will be in a key place to support the implementation of of this work and uh so i'm i'm just wondering if you've you've thought through those sorts of uh strategic questions of of who will be your uh main supporters uh to that point yes we've done quite a bit of thinking around the role of the fossil fuel industry and obviously china and india as prime movers in this space i've been thinking along with doug uh on |
| 51:25 | how do we get this uh whole idea elevated to a level where leaders of government are gonna take interest and just alongside the thought that of that as i was driving around this morning i realized that the state of alaska has got a huge stake in energy and they also are aware of the consequences of the loss of arctic ice and as uncomfortable as it may be there's people out there in government who are in bed with the fossil fuel industry because as in the case of alaska it's their lifeline and so finding strange bedfellows appear in times of |
| 52:24 | war is something i thought i had heard somewhere the lion and the lamb and other illusions like that and so we are expecting to have conversations with some interesting potential advocates and supporters of this idea one of the attractive things just by sidelining to john's passion for a moment one of the things that i realized is that the aleutian islands are a part of the state of alaska and that the us and alaska's exclusive economic zone extends across that crescent that it through which water enters the |
| 53:15 | ocean arctic ocean and what an interesting possibility to see how you could put those two things together to cool the water going into the ocean and to help increase the return of arctic ice so we are sometimes uncomfortably aware that we need to engage with not just the financial resources and the embedded interests of the fossil fuelers to keep this their thing going as long as they can and they need to reduce temperature i see an interesting possibility that where people have been talking about the idea of carbon credits |
| 54:07 | what would cooling credits look like yeah exactly it should be about uh radiative forcing like the the ultimate measure should be radiative forcing rather than carbon removal uh for the economics of climate change yes yeah so um the i i think what i'm getting at is um uh sev shared this article uh from chatham house um asserting that geo engineering would cause war whereas i take the view that geo engineering is the greatest potential force for peace and cooperation and security and stability in the world and so what i'd |
| 54:44 | love to do is get back to my uh to share your presentation with my colleagues in the australian government with a view that they should take that to the g20 and uh just because i think that the g what we need to do is we need to get the big nations uh talking about these issues of the stability factor around climate change and the the very clear analysis that you provided in your powerpoint grant and similarly from brew and others is it just really picks up that security and stability and and and that need for international cooperation um can uh |
| 55:25 | can bring people into networks talking with each other thank you my our intention is to provide uh clive with a pdf version of the presentation and make it accessible to everybody and we would love to have it put in front of as many people as you wish thanks okay thank you um brew please i know bob's got a response first uh clive if that's okay yeah yeah yeah go ahead bob please oh oh yeah along the cooperation lines uh you know i think today in our society we have uh the leftover feeling that fossil fuel |
| 56:07 | companies are public enemy number one and we need to eliminate the fossil fuel usage but this provides an unusual opportunity i think for mission uh in that because this is a fossil fuel driven project through the liquid co2 needed to um enhance the bloom rate in in the sealed uh photobioreactors we're giving fossil fuels a place to put the liquid co2 from their ccs fossil power plant so okay we're also creating an opportunity because we need uh to bring our own nitrogen nutrient okay okay uh at the beginning we'll need to bring that |
| 56:54 | probably in the form of ammonium ions through the originally originating from a ccs haber process so there's more liquid co2 from the ccs uh haber process but we've calculated that between our carbon capture talk which is another story for another day uh in capturing carbon uh with diatoms and this ehux project taken together uh there will be so much uh haber nitrogen required at the beginning that it may uh and that comes from natural gas it may actually provide larger markets substantially larger markets for natural gas by 2040. |
| 57:40 | okay thank you that i think would would in in that would interest both the fertilizer companies and the fossil fuel companies okay thank you bob uh bru please yeah uh first thing i mean i see this as a really interesting adjunct to the ocean fertilization projects that we've been looking at particularly seth clark stuff um where you differ is you're you're actually seeding breeding them up producing large quantities and taking them to the ocean so it occurs to me that initially you should be going to the |
| 58:16 | shipping industries who are trying to reduce their emissions through the um fluid oscillator based technologies which we're looking at for uh capturing co2 out of emissions you could have a onboard ship reactors which were reducing the emissions the shipping companies and think in terms rather than pulses thinking i think of waves as the ships travel through the oceans spreading this out very very small amounts of change on a large scale would be possible and i i mean i see a route there where it's it's an add-on um |
| 58:57 | i wonder what the position is if you're not pulling down sufficient co2 in respect of more acidic oceans and whether you've got to add something to hold that back in order to allow you those blooms to build up and i'm also wondering with your concept what other phytoplankton and even zooplankton um one might be breeding and seeding to bring life back into the oceans because actually a healthy ocean ecosystem is what's giving your overall continuous small albedo change um because you're putting a lot of food |
| 59:33 | into the system um with this and of course you've also got an opportunity there of ocean productivity so you know you start in the fishing grounds and start building that up as well um yes i i'm fascinated i think it's really interesting because it was an add-on to the whole ecosystem solutions which is where i feel you should be so in response to that brew the we have been so singly focused on developing our concept to the stage where we're prepared to talk about it that we haven't expanded ourselves to look at all the |
| 1:00:15 | potential here your idea of a slow-moving ship just shedding uh cochlears and nutrients across the side is something that i had thought about at some time it's great to hear somebody else uh providing uh incentive some motivation to think further about that companies have a lot of money and if you can present them with a way of improving their profile in the first instance um and then you can put the you can put the calculations behind it one of the things about ships is they're tracked by satellite and you need |
| 1:00:51 | you need the satellite data coming back to prove the changes that you're making indeed indeed yeah so you can start to actually monetize the uh the impacts that you have yeah thank you and john please john mcdonald yeah i guess following on great great work by you by the way but as bruce says i mean there's the shipping industry and there's thousands of ships out there at any point in time but but ultimately do you see perhaps uh envision just sort of an autonomous self-guiding bioreactors who could |
| 1:01:25 | actually target areas rather than man vessels is that the ultimate i've thought of that the technology of tomorrow uh could change the way with feedback of actual nutrient requirements in a localized area and being able to adapt to that yes autonomous vessels moving around without 10 people on board and requiring food and vacations interesting concepts out there this is of course where stephen salt has been going with yeah we we need to speak speak some more with stephen too i think yeah needs to look at the atlantic at the moment and see what's |
| 1:02:09 | been going on up there for the last oh god but i worry about these little ships yep yeah i've got a question so you're saying that uh these ehucks they grow because uh they grow where there's enough iron but not too much silica so you know silicic acid and they need some nitrate um when there's a little bit of iron in the ocean um is it i think am i right in saying that um you have uh i don't know if it's cyanobacteria but there are or is it diazotrophs um microbes that produce nitrate in the |
| 1:02:44 | ocean i i think that's i think that's the case let's just so so where where i'm going with this is um so um some of us here have a proposal that you know the iron is which thank thank you you listed in your list of uh interventions iron sold aerosol and um one of the one of the things about iso is it goes in the into the air and then it it gets rained out wherever it happens to rain so somewhat random so i'm just wondering if if uh i mean that's a very cheap solution and um you know has its other |
| 1:03:21 | benefits of taking methane we think taking methane out of the atmosphere and other things other warming agents um whether that might just do it do the same thing it might um encourage ehacks to grow just very naturally and wherever it happens to land do you think that might be the case grant or bob well uh ehucks uh require more than more than iron so it won't i don't think the iron will do a whole lot in the vast oligotrophic oceans okay unless you also happen to have have cylinder um and nitrate there which |
| 1:04:02 | you basically don't um and and also and also a little bit of phosphorous there so just just iron i think if that falls in the oligotrophic oceans i don't think much is going to happen what i'm saying is that when there's a little bit of iron there bob um then the diazotrophs produce nitrate naturally that's correct yeah and so you might have just about enough nitrate and yeah and a little bit of phosphate is in most of the oceans but those those seas uh uh the you're talking about things like uh |
| 1:04:37 | trichodesmium uh there is a trichodecimum out there but it's largely uh uh largely inactive in the oligotrophic regions um so because uh it it is lacking iron is one of the things lacking but also lacking in other metals required as uh as enzyme cofactors so if unless you also add molybdenum there i think iron alone is probably not gonna not gonna bring on a lot of activity in terms of nitrogen fixing in those oligotrophic seas but that's we have that in mind to in the in the far future we want to start out probably with uh ammonium ions |
| 1:05:19 | but in the far future we would like to switch over uh to a more natural nitrogen fixing mechanism but do it in such a way that it still only fosters e-huck's blooming where we want it to but we'll also be doing some diatom not in the same space at the same time makes me wonder and provide both the lid and phosphate and anything else you want but that's uh that's good one question i had you talked about ships producing ammonia at sea and and co2 are you aware that you can split methane using renewable energy |
| 1:06:11 | into hydrogen from which you can make ammonia and nano carbon products which can bring down the the the cost of that ammonia quite a lot the high rock is the company doing it hey rock yep h-i-i-r-o-c okay we'll have to look into that sounds interesting it it probably won't start at sea we would probably start with uh inland manufactured ammonia and um initially move it out to sea so it becomes less expensive but i don't i don't see starting at that point but if there's a less expensive way to do that we're |
| 1:06:59 | we're all ears so we'll take a look at that okay great and ron please oh thank you thank you clive i just had a quick question it may be completely irrelevant but i thought i should just throw that in there there's a company i've been talking about global thermostat that is working with exxon on a research basis there's no exxon investment but they're using the research capabilities to uh to produce their their uh it's a it's a natural gas based well the original concept was natural gas you |
| 1:07:39 | put on uh use the excess heat to remove carb co2 at twice the rate that the natural gas emits but now they're i mean i think they're still working on that i believe but they're also now in chile trying to produce gas uh using both that that method with uh with wind energy anyway i don't want to go you know you can look all this up but it's geo it's it's global thermostat and they've been working both on you know what seems like i mean i don't know you know how related it is but |
| 1:08:12 | uh it's it's it's you know getting getting carbon pure carbon ceo uh oh co2 and uh and also uh you know these various processes to to generate syn fuel using renewable energy so my and also working with the you know major oil company uh on a research collaborative basis no investment there they're very exclusive about that so it might be you know useful uh to talk to them as well i thought i'm not you know just throwing that out there okay thank you ron thank you um anything else from anyone i've er so |
| 1:08:49 | sean are you with us sean you've said that you're interested yeah hi sean i'm really sorry i was late live but i'm gonna watch this afterwards um because i feel like behind the curve sorry not to worry okay well thank you very much uh grant and bob um yeah fascinating you've got interest you're you're uh muted grunt i thought you were speaking yeah i've got two slides no i'm i'm done i'm done yeah yeah grant is i think you've got another couple of slides that you wanted to put |
| 1:09:24 | up okay yep thank you so just wanted to uh identify that we are in the phase of taking next steps firstly we've got uh we've been focused almost exclusively on the oligotrophic spaces but there are many ideas around that i think we can share with people related to ideas that could utilize more fairfield spaces obviously we need to engage with engineers and chemical engineers particularly in moving forward with optimizing bioreactor designs looking how we take care and feed the ehox and most of all i want to thank you |
| 1:10:26 | all for firstly inviting us along and the interest you've shown in our concerts uh it is very encouraging it's encouraging us to get out to make contact with subject experts and fields in which we clearly need assistance and we look forward to keeping you informed of our progress as we go forward and thank you clive and everybody else for bearing with us today have a good day thank you yeah thank you uh grants uh no need to run away if you're if you can stick around i'm not going anywhere at the moment |
| 1:11:08 | yeah are you speaking uh sean you're muted i apologize uh grant you mentioned that you might be able to provide a pdf of this presentation uh because um we have a team at the university of cambridge that um and one of the areas is looking at is well we're looking at all sorts of things but i would be uh if you're able to email it to me uh grant that would be really fantastic and i've seen that you've got some lovely speakers notes as well uh in terms of when we were watching the presentation and it wasn't in um |
| 1:11:43 | when it wasn't in full screen mode and we so you've obviously got some notes as well with the voiceover which i found quite helpful as well so i don't mind what you're saying grant but i'd be very keen to have a pdf if you don't mind you're muted grant that's one all grant because i was doing that earlier i'm sure that i can find your email address sean and my expectation is that the rest of today i will be creating that pdf and making it available to you all and to for and to clive for his archives |
| 1:12:24 | we are in the communication game we need to share what we know with and discover what we don't know so that we can move forward and solve this problem thank you all absolutely right yes thanks um grant i'm just wondering if you have any comment um friends yeah you're muted friends yeah you said these these these uh these e-hucks they cut these ehacks also into the uh stratosphere the calcium carbonate yes and for a to get the the abello |
| 1:13:34 | increase so um it would take some some light from the from the surface of the globe and until you had an idea which different wavelengths absorb in different ways and especially if you take the short waves here the uv from the from from the ground it would be bad for the atmosphere chemistry i would like you do it all in the ocean not in the stratosphere okay thank you we the whole idea of floating calcium carbonate into the stratosphere came from david keith uh as an alternate to sulfur dioxide and |
| 1:14:40 | hydro sulfuric acid uh what we are looking at is what we have looked at is how the intricate structure of the cochlea uh would certainly certainly scatter a lot of ultraviolet and a lot of other wavelengths as well the light weight would allow it to float around in the stratosphere for a couple of years it would not rain out your concerns about unintended consequences on others other strata and other areas is obviously at the core of where this technology is going to go you know uh me saying and so on as they are taken from |
| 1:15:29 | uh atmosphere by uh uv yes uh they make oh radicals and so on and and also other other kinds of uh like uh isa as they base all on a shortwave lengths uh atmospheric chemistry yep these are really valid issues that we'll we we and others are gonna have to look at for us thank you for voicing them thank you yeah this is a long running dising disc well sort of conversation that uh or sort of disagreement you could say just between uh uh so so franz is is concerned about atmospheric chemistry being altered from stratospheric aerosol |
| 1:16:19 | injection but we have a big proponent of that on this group as well john nissen yes i went to i listened into peter irvin giving a talk from last thursday and he came up with uh lots of uh of reasons why people don't like uh putting all right john peter who uh peter urban right sorry yes i r b i n e he came up with the usual list of objections to essay 2 and none of them seem to be really crucial whereas the benefits are absolutely huge and and they're doing it in the stratosphere means you can't you can't weaponize it |
| 1:17:20 | you can't uh you really because the thing is the the sa2 is distributed uh uniformly um it has a uniform effect and if you do it for the arctic you can you can increase that temperature gradient which is the reduction of which has been causing the the storms and the uh extreme weather i think we may be uh getting a touch of that in the uk at the moment but certainly china got floods last year and the the us got a heat dome as a result of the sticking jet stream which was because of this reduced uh temperature gradient between the pole |
| 1:18:10 | and the tropics and what you've said um john is um perhaps if stratospheric aerosol injection could be done just below the stratosphere in the arctic during the summer months then it's going to come down and it's absolutely perfect to do it into the lower stratosphere uh at 50 to 50 degrees north and further north than that it cools most of the surface water flowing into the arctic and it comes out in a couple of months which is what you want because you don't want it there in the winter and it doesn't take |
| 1:18:48 | as much effort to get it up to that level and and is low uh peter irvin did point out that you'd need you could use conventional aircraft exactly to do anything special yeah i mean it it's absolutely a gift horse we've got and uh people have been put off because of a lot of scaremongering about so2 and films suggesting dreadful things would happen and then talk of the sa2 being put up by by uh shells or you know some horrible uh way of doing it and uh yeah well we'll leave that um john so i will write up some notes |
| 1:19:33 | on his talk and then you can all uh see what i said okay great thanks so so friends i mean you're are you um you you seem to be just about accepting of i mean given a huge risk of not doing anything of uh this sort of uh lower stratospheric summer months north only you know above the arctic is would that would i be right about that that you have that view and then then bob has points away i i i see it it is bad for for for the greenhouse gas all all greenhouse gases uh suffer from from orange radicals uh not too but but but or |
| 1:20:19 | for your c and uh you know we say that fair point so i think it's a difficult thing is there's so many disciplines the whole world is so complicated that this is why we need to have these multi-disciplinary conversations that um yes it uh provides that cooling effect but bear in mind that you're going to get less natural methane depletion while that's going on over the arctic because you're going to have fewer oh radicals being generated and actually generated by uae do you think you you can |
| 1:20:52 | keep it to the point well that's another big question yes once it's you do it on the polls then people might say oh yes well let's just do it everywhere now and it gets gains enough political support so i understand that concern uh friends i have the same concern actually yeah yeah bob please i have a question uh for those of you who are more familiar with the stratospheric uh uh properties than i am uh i'm i'm aware that the winds in the stratosphere are nearly horizontal uh in in most places |
| 1:21:28 | uh but i'm and so what what you put up there will will spread all around the world my question is does all true at the pulse the i know that the stratosphere is lower at the polls but is there a tendency for the slowing down of the if you put something up in the lower stratosphere you have uh what's called brewer dobson there's this thing called brewer sorry rob i'll just just in case you don't know this there's this brewer dobson flow uh um around the uh atmosphere that goes from the tropics up to the poles and |
| 1:22:03 | then down it comes back down to the down to the earth so that's how that's how the air moves so that is interesting yeah okay you see it on wikipedia so so it'll be it'll it'll spread uh east uh eastwards uh due to coriolis force um but moves northward very slowly so the thing will spread pretty evenly around round on a latitude and then gradually um more northerly latitudes if you put in a big pulse essentially it comes down it it just comes down right it'll gradually gradually uh flow out of the |
| 1:22:57 | stratosphere with the air and out of the system out of you know down into the troposphere and just down into the into the sea yeah yeah so if you've had your hand up for a very long time yeah grant um did you appreciate that my seatimizer technology would suck up your cochlears from the surface waters and put them into the troposphere and i suspect they'd be small enough to last for several days in the troposphere that might be another way of rather more safely getting your your calcium carbonate reflecting lots of sunlight |
| 1:23:42 | i wasn't serving you've gone uh muted there we go yeah i wasn't aware of that particular facet i would love to learn more about it what i did read the other day was a report from a group of israeli scientists who have found that cochles exist above the water surface they get ejected from the surface by bubbles bursting they get above the surface they rise in the atmosphere and they settle slower than salt particles good so some nature is already doing a little bit of that but something i wasn't aware of until a few weeks ago |
| 1:24:35 | and so again it just illustrates how interrelated sciences are and particularly when we come to trying to mess with nature we've got a big job on our hands thank you bob please yeah yeah that reminds me um the one thing about the shape of e-huck's cockless they kind of remind me of a little wagon wheel shaped frisbee okay and they're so small and so light especially because they're their thickness around at the rim and at the spokes is only 30 nanometers now what that will mean for the stratosphere if |
| 1:25:17 | you try to put them up there airlift them as david keith from harvard wants to do with his uh formerly sulfuric acid aerosols now calcium carbonate but he'll be talking about crisp crystal and calcium carbonate that he digs up and crushes and stuff that'll be larger particle size and what that means in stratosphere is you have to put a whole lot more up there okay if you got something really small and lightweight you may have to he may only require one tenth of the amount that you that you put up there so we may |
| 1:25:51 | be talking about very small amounts he's david keith already speaks of of restoring the pre-industrial temperature for the the cost of producing a single blockbuster movie you know because the rain is not up there to wash it out whatever you put there if it's small enough in life enough state like two years who knows how long he hux coca let's would stay up there you know so the bucket list looked like micro ufos yes that's right i i just have this envision of little little frisbees uh that that would stay uh uh airborne a |
| 1:26:24 | whole lot longer maybe than than crystalline particles you know so that's uh maybe cutting down the amount of material you would inject and and and also we're talking about multi-tiering the whole srm operation so that each uh each tier is only maybe one-sixth or so of what it would have to be if it were doing the whole job itself but if it's only one-sixth then what you do in the stratosphere is only one sixth as dangerous you know brad's photo of the e hux uh looked like a sphere but uh you're saying from side |
| 1:27:01 | on it's a frisbee oh no the cockalists which make up the the little sphere the little wagon wheels they shed what you're seeing that you're seeing an attack cocksphere in that slide i have another slide uh not with me but uh showing that the hooks shed their calculus they're on they're unique among coccolithophores in doing that they shed more cockles and most of the albedo that you see in the ocean blooms is from shed cockless and those those are the little frisbees indiv those little pieces come |
| 1:27:33 | off and and they're independent so the e hux itself is is spherical and it's but it's its surface is covered with uh with little discs yes well we just have five minutes left folks um could we hear a bit about uh ccrc progress sean either can i am indeed uh so um thanks sev look you know sorry look things are really exciting um the various big projects that we are pushing on um there's work a plenty going on with the role of giant kelp in the deep ocean that was me i met with somebody today uh doing some very nice modeling work on |
| 1:28:23 | that at the moment uh we've got our post doc uh working on the marine biomass regeneration and hence interest very interested in this grant in terms of an adjacency uh to the discussions of today and and sev with the buoyant flakes and things like that we have a project that we're trying to get off the ground on methane oxidation uh i'm talking with various potential funders but also some industrialists who seems to be rather interested in some of the ideas uh that they might be able to bootstrap to their own existing |
| 1:29:03 | products and processes for other benefits actually so actually the weirdly the carbon dioxide remove an equivalent the greenhouse gas removal which is the methane oxidation ends up being a co-benefit um but be rather nice and then sorry yeah keep going sorry that's right we've got the marine cloud brightening project going on with three people working under hue for that so a phd student has actually started doing some very nice modeling just getting started um and then two fourthy undergraduate project students who are doing similar |
| 1:29:39 | laboratory work um and um we've got one that's testing the stephen salter idea which is just injecting water so um but through really tiny holes they're really really tiny guys and then i mean it's just ridic anyway that's that's going ahead and we've got somebody else doing a droplet measurement but you can't measure any droplets if you aren't generating uh them so he's actually looking at generating some generation methods as well which is the effervescent spray idea which is where you have |
| 1:30:16 | air and salt water being injected but in different guises as well as an electro spray he's actually going to probably do both in just in the next few weeks we've got that set up which is really cool um so look you know there's stuff going on there at the la in the lab scale and some modeling work at the moment uh i've got some really nice work going on some social science work which is really nice at the moment which is to do with which is very pertinent to this group attitudes towards some of the things |
| 1:30:46 | that we're doing and doing some data mining on twitter when that paper is um in a form to be shared then i will share that with you but um the headline is you know we're in listening mode learning about what people think about this space and we're doing a critique of also where voices seem to be coming from and how they get amplified so rather than just being thinking oh gosh there's a lot of negative stuff or positive stuff it works both ways it's about just trying to get some transparency about |
| 1:31:22 | getting uh through the quagmire for example of some of the social media um and you and it's just a fun you it's not that we're picking holes in it it's just trying to make sense of some of the um what gets amplified isn't necessarily what the voices of the uh of the masses are and that can be positive and negative as i said so it's really just but we're doing it with the um by investigating things like hashtag geo engineering and things like this so i'm at i'm learning so much at the moment |
| 1:31:51 | with some of the team it's absolutely fascinating can i ask sean do you have a view on iron salt aerosol for methane oxidation um well i have a view of methane oxidation which is i think is a really good idea and in terms of iron salt aerosols um you know it's um it's gonna potentially have some challenges more on the i think more on the um perception you know it's not that it's a bad idea uh we you know i think you know we need to investigate everything at the moment clive and there are others investigating |
| 1:32:30 | this and therefore we're not pushing on that right now because i don't think it's an underserved research area at the moment there are others who are looking at this but there are other areas of methane oxidation that i don't think are as well researched and possibly don't have quite the same challenge regarding public acceptability as soon as you spray something into the atmosphere just you know it's we are where we are you've got you've got you've got um you've got some challenges |
| 1:32:57 | there but anyway um i i'm a fan of methane oxidation uh whether it's at a point source um or i say a point-ish source so like cow sheds and things like this or whether it's actually just downright atmospheric concentrations which are 1.7 parts per million um by volume and i think they're all worthy of uh exploration and we're we're working on one at the moment i'm trying to raise money for uh okay all right thank you sean can you explain a little bit more what that one is sean is that possible robert |
| 1:33:30 | i'm very happy to say it's we are intrigued by the idea of photocatalytic oxidation using metal oxides which deposit on a on a surface where the benefits might actually be nothing to do with methane oxidation that you're selling but other benefits thank you what sort of other benefits um so for example um self-cleaning glass and reduced maintenance costs which they use to tell you dark side already are plenty i mean at industrial scales but the morphology of the titanium dioxide that they use and it |
| 1:34:10 | hasn't been decorated so we're wanting to explore that clive because there's an industrial process already set up and are we able to find shipment for a small cost where it then does a much better job at oxidizing methane but the benefits are still primary okay and with you so it exercises me then got it yeah okay but the main benefits you're selling and the fact that it's the self-cleaning glass and then there are other things so i'm interested in trying to look at materials which are using this at the |
| 1:34:37 | moment that haven't necessarily been thought about in this complete in this in this way okay okay thank you very much uh doug please yeah sean thanks for that just taking a couple steps backwards um to the social media thoughts um i'm wondering if you're considering or have considered connecting with two biggies in the social media arena no mckibben and michael mann my personal feeling is that they could be swayed from their current positions and i'm just wondering if you've had any thoughts on that |
| 1:35:18 | so i i mean i haven't talked about reaching out to michael mann um as i said right doug grant right now i'm definitely in listening mode we're not you know we're not in the trying to educate people mode at the moment at all about uh attitudes we're just trying to get to base one which is learn about the attitudes first and get a better understanding of how that how the views are expressed and i think even that would be of interest to folks like michael mann um so you know the guy that's working on this paper at |
| 1:35:51 | the moment uh with so i mean i'm not a social scientist doug but as soon as that's then ready it's a good idea to reach out to michael mann because given he's so well known in this space um and it doesn't matter whether it's positive or negative doug actually in terms of just getting being more um more in tune or more informed about how you interpret it whatever you read i think is a really good idea so just so you know he's on facebook a lot he's promoting himself and his book yeah constantly |
| 1:36:23 | so um i've been i've been commenting and uh and uh sharing and he's acknowledged that i haven't actually had a direct communication to him uh although i have with bill mckibben and that's that's moving along slowly but uh my my approach is not to push anything but to at least create an awareness if there's somebody out here with another idea so with bill mckibben uh is somebody that um i am in in direct contact with through the methane action group because i sit in on their meetings when i can as |
| 1:36:55 | well oh good you're right engaging on this in this area is something that we can't ignore we have to work with it but what we're trying to do is just increase our level of understanding of the discourse um before we then start trying to sort of push a given message because i think it's rather more nuanced and more balanced uh than perhaps any of us realize no there's there's a lot of um let's say agreement and i think i'm working on a couple of concepts that could uh could raise that agreement to uh to a |
| 1:37:28 | level that it could bring somebody over to our side yeah um and i think this is really relevant for what we've been discussing today in terms of these attitude attitudes towards some of these approaches just wondering if sam if you have any comment at all uh on this evening or anything that's been discussed it doesn't matter if you don't have a comment sam we haven't heard from you since the beginning maybe not uh but if you're talking then you're muted sam i we can't hear you you might need to press the button to |
| 1:38:10 | unmute you have to unmute but uh maybe you don't have a comment i can't really see you trying to say oh yes uh somebody asked the question of the cochlear it's kept floating and not sinking those cocklets have a little cover of transparent exopolymer compounds which helps them to keep floating until they are consumed by bacteria and others then they start to sink rapidly so the fresh apocalypse that are removed from the body you know that those have some organic coating and that reduces the specific gravity yes |
| 1:39:08 | okay that was your question wasn't it i have a short question yeah uh uh the cookeries think very slowly and they should dissolve until they are on the ground of the ocean is this extra polymer which keeps the concrete compound around them not they solved i think does it do does the this polymer coating prevent the uh coccoliths from actually getting dissolved even when they reach the deep ocean sam i think is that the question france yes yes yeah i think they're on the way down they're gradually consumed by bacteria |
| 1:39:54 | and they start to get dissolved at the deep deeper part of the ocean many of those coccoliths that have been discovered from the ocean floor they are not in full tact so so even calcium carbonate can be consumed by bacteria there's there's no energy in calcium carbonate no the the polymer or the organic component yeah that's organic yeah yeah so we wonder about uh uh about uh remineralization of calcium carbonate because you know there's a this sort of snow line beyond which you know um everything just dissolves back |
| 1:40:35 | into the ocean apparently although there's plenty of shelled creatures you know running around on the ocean floor that don't seem to have a problem depends on the depth it depends on the depth but some of them are very deep you know down at you know four thousand meters four kilometers down you've got shelled animals quite happy down there well i think the lysocline uh uh uh cut-off point varies uh different in the atlantic than it is for example so i think right around 4 000 meters um you got variation of that lysocline in |
| 1:41:11 | different parts of the world so some of it might be only 3 500 meters some of it might be at 4 500 meters yeah if you're above that uh limit you'll you'll find a lot of a lot of seafloor carbonates not so much if you're below that limit but that limit varies depending on where you are and that lysocline is determined by the concentration of uh sort of dissolved in organic carbon then is it um bob that and the uh uh and and the pressure i think you know the uh great weight and pressure down there |
| 1:41:46 | things can can dissolve but a lot of it also depends on the saturation level yeah whether you're you're near saturation or or fully saturated or super saturated you can get different behaviors yeah yeah anyways okay thank you yeah so typical kind of uh uh discussion of scientists you know we're talking about nice uh uh sort of um you know furry things uh science social sciences and then all of a sudden we get straight back into the science so um manager anything from you we haven't heard from you today |
| 1:42:29 | no i don't think so i look i every time i sit in i learn a lot now i find myself doing a lot of homework um i think i represent a lot of people that are working on climate change and climate solutions and what we don't know about climate and what i'm trying very hard to catch up with i actually called the community college to see if i could take a course in meteorology but i i think that we have such a knowledge gap not that the scientists don't but surely the general public and and a lot of people in |
| 1:43:22 | positions of power and and so forth really don't understand how the world works how the earth works and uh that's really striking me as a need but i will say that as i talk to people about what i'm learning um there are some people that you know sort of consider like conspiracy theory and don't even want to talk about it but most of the people that i work with really understand that there is a gap between what we could do what we are doing and what we need to be doing and so there is an openness and |
| 1:44:10 | you know i'm just and and by the way you know i my degrees are in biology and and medicine nursing um so i have a strong science background what i don't have is the climate sci the science and and the understanding of you know i keep making a list of terms and looking them up and trying to develop enough of uh vocabulary that i can really follow this but i'm very appreciative of the fact that you let me sit in and um you know i may be able to be helpful because of the contacts that i do have they're not you know |
| 1:45:02 | top level but they're certainly um you know it may be able to be helpful but i i need to really understand and the other thing that um you know i've been reading a lot of michael mann's papers and watching his videos to understand where there might be um an opportunity to have i think what is needed is an international uh collaborative science-based uh planning process as i think you've said and and john nissen have said um and how do we get there um but one of the things that keeps coming up as a barrier is that |
| 1:45:56 | um you know dr mann is very concerned essentially that geoengineering will allow um the fossil fuel industry and the ongoing emissions release to continue because we'll be able to fix it down the road with technological fixes and to me what seems apparent is that um and and i heard the use several times of um uh multiple tiering multi-tiering and it seems to me the multi-tiering has to start with the stopping of the fossil fuel and the emissions but to me the gap is for most people not understanding the role of the oceans and the poles and |
| 1:46:54 | what can or cannot be done but i i did think that i i don't remember if it was grant or his um colleague who were talking about multi-tiering i thought that that's what they meant was you know focus on emission reductions focus on carbon sequestration but if it's for the point of allowing the fossil fuel industry to continue to generate the emissions i think it's not going to get a lot of support and i'm also listening for logical fallacies where somebody will say something and then their next comment is an extension |
| 1:47:45 | of what they said but it may not actually be so i'm i'm trying to sort all that out as i'm learning the vocabulary but hopefully together what i do think is that everybody here cares deeply and recognizes the uh scope and scale of the problem so i'll do what i can do thank you very much manager uh it's always great to have you on these calls as well last word from doug yeah as usual so i just want to reinforce amana's upcoming presentation to a very um what i believe is a an interesting group of people maybe mana could just |
| 1:48:34 | say something about what what who that who that presentation is to the one you mentioned earlier today she's got an incredible audience i think and i really appreciate her her activity here briefly manager we need to finish soon but tell us i'm just trying to sort this all out and as i learn i'm sharing it with various groups that i get invitations to present to so is that what you expected doug well something specific i i got a feeling maybe there's it's a it's an important group of influential people |
| 1:49:17 | maybe man is not for no not yet at all but she's tested she's testing the waters but in addition yes the immediate invitation and presentation is to a group of senior citizens that are doing lifelong learning and earth day celebrations senior citizens not senior people um doug but i am reaching out to the thought leaders here in the hudson valley um to see how we can educate ourselves and each other uh sooner than later so that we can participate in you can always participate um manager i mean i i think everyone's learning all |
| 1:50:03 | the time we're all learning from each other we really are and that's the purpose of these these meetings yeah yeah so any last comment any or anything a burning question or anything from anyone otherwise um that's it for this time i'll put it up again on on youtube please share it with your friends um goodbye everyone if anyone wants to stick around and chat to other people then i can uh i can uh just leave it running um but i'm gonna disappear myself and i'm gonna turn off the recording okay so the first thing i'm |
| 1:50:34 | gonna do is return off recording okay goodbye everyone and see you in a maybe next hope to see in a couple of weeks thank you very much thanks very much thank you bye everyone |