| (Click on a 'Start Time' to view the video) |
| 00:00 | hello stephen hi hi hi there hi chris did you have a good holiday chris uh excellent perfect well nearly perfect apart from ba buggering us coming home so their i.t problems and we ended up two days late because of cancelled flights and things and just because of i.t well it completely screwed bc up because uh ba up because um it it just didn't affect like their website and things it affected um the planes the planning of the routes the pilots initially couldn't even know which gate they were going to go and load their passengers too the |
| 00:43 | whole thing was a nightmare oh yeah amazing they actually canceled all of their european flights for about um 36 hours at one point to try and get over the problems amazing yeah and it's not the first time ba has had it problems you may remember i don't know a couple years ago they had a major one as well yeah i i do remember them having problems could it be somebody hacking in and rushing it no no it wasn't it was it was not a hacking thing that was quite definitely excluded apparently so it was uh |
| 01:17 | i don't know maybe it was a an upgrade that was not quite what it should have been or something well all the best hackers know how to make it look like it isn't being hacked yeah i'm sure they do but that's what they claimed anyway all i can say is that's what they said i wouldn't be surprised if it's all homegrown [Laughter] well b.a has a history of cocking up i. |
| 01:40 | t so i i i tend to think the cock-up theory is more likely in this in this case yes they've had at least i think three or four episodes over the last sort of five to ten years yeah and i i i work i think you know i work in i.t yeah i've done a lot of teaching so i've met a lot of people and i think what i remember them saying about the airlines is they just have incredibly creaky old systems yeah and they they don't want to bite the bullet and uh just write a new system with a modern you know modern software you know tools |
| 02:15 | and whatever so they just try and keep the old thing going along yeah and i heard the same thing about the banks as well yeah no i don't have that this is an old story but but then well the millennium thing you know with the um worried about the two-digit year whatever it was thing yeah um that they were getting people out of retirement yeah to to try and upgrade old systems as i understand it some of these old systems were using the really old programming languages as well weren't they they're cobol and things like that |
| 02:46 | exactly yeah uh i think there's there's lots of things that can go wrong without hacking yeah i got your obviously i got your question um uh chris and uh so uh i'd like to put my own uh i've got my own thing i want to put on on the agenda as well which i'm hoping yeah well it hasn't been shot down in flames yet and but we've kind of been sort of talking about it a bit in in the last couple of sessions when you've not been there so i'm interested to see if you're if you shoot it down in flames but we'll |
| 03:23 | see um hi sev hi how are you doing looking forward to a good session today i've been having talks with uh our friends at ccrc and i think they said they might be along here too today oh amazing wonderful okay ccrc not quite sure whether he's a mad skier or what nothing wrong with skiing yeah it probably deserves it he seems to work very hard yeah um ccs i'm confusing um do you don't have any have any uh dealings with is it csiro the australian government people um i have recently on a a method i have for |
| 04:15 | um extracting uh nickel better from all's and they they came back to say um we want a uh an interview of a response but this is too innovative amused you well glad you got that sort of sense of humor yeah i forget clive csiro has got all sorts of arms that do different things it's not a single so it's a overall structure i think if i'm a right serve that has all sorts of different labs and institutes around the place exactly it was actually set up by my great grand great great uncle all right david rivet |
| 05:06 | so i know a little bit about it yeah but interestingly enough we used to have a csiro in the uk going way back far enough um it was in existence up until about the early 50s i think something like that right i've still got one or two reports actually to do with it to do with the marine things that uh they had a handling recently made part to uh going for the applied sciences rather than the the uh the basic research yeah i i had one uh one bit where they were wanting to improve uh uh micro agriculture and they decided to |
| 05:48 | to put their limited funds into a minor increase increase in an existing uh business rather than look at novel ways of growing algae i guess it's a tricky tricky thing there's so much basic research that can be done um right uh let's uh uh we have a script i have a screen full of people here so welcome everybody um and um we have uh i've invited david henkel wallace who's involved with our hi david um our friends um in the us with uh that we have there's a group there called methane action |
| 06:32 | um which is non-profit um and uh you know sort of campaigning for action on me um and uh welcome bro good to see brew again and we have um tom gurion okay i can't see your face tom but uh hopefully we'll see you soon um but uh if if your camera's not working nevermind uh and uh hi grant chris has a question for you in a minute um grant uh so david david we uh we just asked new new faces to introduce themselves it's too too long for everybody each time do you mind saying a few words about yourself please |
| 07:15 | uh yeah i live in uh silicon valley where i've lived on and off for about 30 years uh but i started out on this planet in melbourne so glad to see australia represented um uh as you can imagine if i live in silicon valley i've done a lot of uh high technology startups um not your usual cell shoes on the web i'm afraid um but i built micro solar thermal plants uh solar concentrating solar thermal plants that fit in containers built a bunch of those in india uh i've done uh some pharmaceutical research |
| 07:57 | before that uh got some drugs into approval mode and so this is kind of combining some of my mechanical and chemical skills and hopefully what we're working on which is uh using iron salt aerosols to try to remove atmospheric methane uh using technology pioneered by people like france is right under me on the on the screen yeah i think okay about it great thank you very much david and uh there are other people here that uh i got introduced to is what i ever saw aerosol from i first read about it um so this gentleman here uh sev clark |
| 08:37 | um talked about ferric chloride so i've got got anyway it's all a long story and uh good evening robert robert tulip from australia and uh who's sleepy d is that vit vaniez oh that's doug okay hi doug yeah yeah so okay so let's um do the usual i'm going to make an agenda i hope i've got something that's let's make it a nice uh picture here agenda screen um right so and um but this is oh have i shared my screen i don't think i've shared my screen did i share my screen here we go |
| 09:29 | yep so let's get to that yep so agenda um and uh yeah so this is everybody so david uh it's determined by the people here the agenda except i'd like to put something up myself so but first of all let's put up uh chris you you have a question so chris vivian um is um was director of cfas and the british uh i wasn't director i'm sorry scientist a senior scientist thank you okay um and lots of other uh accolades uh so question for uh for grant gower question question and comment i think you said |
| 10:13 | uh so chris did the end uh um okay now i'd like to so i've like to talk about so i've made it a few slides um and let me show you what i've called it how to make so this is you might think this is fantasy um how to make ocean cdr permanent scalable and sustainable so let's just say clive uh station on oceans um presentation question it's quite it's almost like kind of a question could could does it work like this on ocean cdr uh robert i see you have your hand up i'd like to we've just lodged a patent |
| 11:03 | for uh methane hydroxyl a bit quiet robert i don't know if you just get a bit it could just about here yeah that's and i okay just lodged a patent for methane hydroxyl yeah i saw that yeah patent for do you like to sort of announce that a bit and say a bit about it yeah so um what we what we suggest is a point source method for uh removal of um heath of methane yeah by linking a methane gas stream from a point source to a method to a hydroxyl generator okay great so and look forward to hearing about that um [Music] |
| 11:52 | yep so um okay that'll do then any anyone else anything yes i want to talk about the poles the temperatures that the at the two pearls 30 and 40 degrees above what they should be yes it's amazing i mean both at the same time um okay poles are overheating right anything else for anyone i heard a radio uh short brief yesterday on greening the sahara yeah and it was saying that it would actually warm the world and i think they're not doing it by mcb or all sidomizer methods they're doing it probably by um just irrigation and i'd like to see |
| 12:52 | whether anyone else heard the heard the article and what they they thought of it i think it's got holes in it go ahead i came across that uh somewhere i can't remember where just recently and i think it was it wasn't so much global heating i think it was heating the area and i thought it was through a forest station i remember rightly um but it was having a regional heating effect i think was what i came across is this the green wall project it sounded like it i'm not sure the green wall is right at the south |
| 13:28 | supposed to be the south margin of the sahara uh they've been at about 20 years i think they're about 25 percent done uh well 20 percent of the distance anyway uh and yeah it's already allegedly it's already changing uh drought and monsoon patterns um it's not clear to me i remember a presentation at the copenhagen uh about somebody had a climate model that could have trees included and she showed that if you planted trees in west africa anywhere up to 18 degrees north and let the model run it would all die |
| 14:06 | out and fizzle out but if you went a tiny bit above 18 degrees then they'd spread all the way up across the sahara right up to the mediterranean so you get another amazon rainforest in the sahara and if you look there you can find crocodiles and hippos bones and pictures of things in the cave paintings which show that once upon a time it was very lush and just as wet as the amazon so it looks as if the climate models were predicting this and it may be that it's actually going to happen we need to ask how it got flipped the |
| 14:46 | wrong way and maybe it was something as boring as goats eating everything i don't know but yeah uh certainly we it's a thing that we could look at and it might be a nice place to to to start a new uh tropical rainforest nice place to be stationed yes i found the place where i came across it there was an email from will burns that some of you will have come across um and his email said someone called francesco poroshetta's recent research on tree planting projects in the sarah is projected that large-scale |
| 15:18 | affordation there may increase summer temperatures in the region by 1.5 degrees in the summer over businesses usual scenarios due to albedo effects that was what uh he said but i haven't seen the original article i haven't had the chance to go and look for it yet but that's because you fly over the sahara it looks very very white it looks dancingly white yeah and if you plant trees they're not as dazzlingly white as the prison yeah nothing like okay not as white as bright cloud trees promote cloud formation |
| 15:54 | a there's a counterbalance there yeah you've got a decent ecosystem going with lots of fungal spores and such like coming up yeah it probably i mean it depends it's probably a model and frankly as with all models it all depends what you put into it exactly crystal yeah so you don't know until you do it right so um anything else for the agenda we've already got a pretty full agenda here uh but there might be some small things to go on give me i've got a bit of a cold this this time right um should we start at the top then |
| 16:30 | um i don't know if you're going to be able to answer this grant but uh let's just go for it shall we sure so so chris again um yeah obviously i wasn't present during the presentations uh the last couple of meetings and i did have a look at the presentation where we talked about the e huts uh proposals and um one thing i didn't see was any real quantification of the actual climatic effects of doing the e-hux in the presentation i wondered if there was any specific sort of estimates of doing the sort of things you proposed at |
| 17:05 | particular scales and how much effect that would actually have that was one question uh and then my other one is a cautionary comment really which is about this um six tiers could sum to full benefits and dilute all the uic risks by six times and i really really found that difficult to believe frankly um but i had a few questions first on that would presumably these these six different srms would have to operate in different locations otherwise presumably you get some interactions interference possibly um and actually what actually is meant by |
| 17:40 | dilute all the risks are we talking of scale or intensity of impacts or what so substitute dilution for divide by the concept is based on the various methods being deployed at different altitudes or different locations and uh believing that they would be uncoupled either by location or by altitude i should note that i just before i came on the session i've been reviewing the latest upgrade improvement on the presentation i made my lead author observed that lincoln's gettysburg address went through five modifications before it |
| 18:39 | found its current form and so we have followed that tradition i expect to have the fully reviewed version available for distribution tomorrow or wednesday and so that there is some quantification better quantification provided inside there chris okay so yeah but um in terms of the six srms though if you do them at presumably a um is it a potential as reduced scale or or whatever so therefore if you do them as a six full scale let's say which is what it sounded like um the impacts that would have would be a six of the full scale impact but |
| 19:29 | that full scale might be uh area dependent for example it might be over a six the area so therefore the impact on the area from that activity will be just the same per unit area as the full scale okay i can't argue with your mess i don't intend to so i just felt the way it was presented was well it was a little unclear and also therefore potentially could be misinterpreted i thought in the way it was framed i think you need to be rather more specific about what it means i think uh there is conservatively more |
| 20:03 | specificity in the next version in the process of uh reviewing right now yeah that's fine yeah okay that's that's helpful be interested to see that when it's available yeah okay all right so thank you chris and and grant for that uh okay so okay so i i'd like to put this up okay let's just go for it and do this presentation here um so so this is come from this has come from you know lots of discussions that we've been having over the months and especially recently um i think i'm just going to dive into |
| 20:47 | it um things need to be shot down in flames at some point so obviously um that the ocean was incredibly complex this is what we're talking about every time so but you if you're gonna talk about it or try and understand you have to have some sort of top level so simplified view of a highly complex process let's just try and get on with so um this is uh what uh you know some friends i've been supporting france working with friends on uh trying to understand the ocean and chris knows that chris has been helpful |
| 21:23 | as well uh over [Music] three years now and you can see so we've got two uh chemical equations there organic matter oxidation in the ocean so the way the way these conversations tend to go is yes we can make lots of um organic carbon in the ocean with iron fertilization and you know they get the whole thing about other nutrients as well and then there's the um [Music] point made that yeah but most of that oxidizes as it sinks in the ocean and uh so so what we're saying what the friends is saying and i understand this |
| 22:09 | is there's two forms of oxidation um we all know about oxidation oxidation from oxygen um and this is a whole thing that the makes acid acidifies the ocean um carbonic acid so but what's much less often mentioned uh very rarely mentioned is the form of oxidation that was that's been going on long before oxygen became abundant in the environment you know the atmosphere and it's dissolved in the ocean sulfate which is a weak oxidant and so this is very simplified that this is numerous chemical reactions |
| 22:51 | uh some of them go further than this they make hydrogen sulfide but this is a an important reaction to we suggest for people to be aware of uh that produces it doesn't produce acid it produces you know raises the ph and it produces this stuff stuff we we're calling sulfurized sap repel there's a picture of it there sort of black gooey stuff um it's the ancient source of today's oil deposits so you know organic material when it sinks in the ocean doesn't all get oxidized by oxygen some of it ends up as this stuff i mean |
| 23:29 | clearly it does it's it's sitting there you know we can see it for ourselves um so um so then my next question is so what determines the type of organic matter oxidation and the conclusion we've come to is the time over which microbes have access to oxygen so over hours today's biofilms microbial bio films grow on organic material um and um as you can see here so the biofilm outer layer shields the nla from the from oxygen this is how life has adapted to the great oxidation event two billion years ago it formed biofilms |
| 24:09 | um so that you can still get this sulfate uh uh we could normally call it sulfate reduction reaction going on that is how actually microbes extract nutrients from rock uh and they're extremely efficient at doing that they don't need acid they have we won't go into the catechols they use for that but basically you have to have this sulfate reaction going otherwise you don't get any nutrients anymore um and so it's it this is what never mind about that you know whatever the reason is this is what |
| 24:44 | actually happens anyway biofilms the outer layer shields the name for oxygen the inner layer uses sulfate to oxidize the organic matter in the chemical equation i just showed above if anyone's worried about there not being sufficient sulfate in the ocean there's a hundred times as much of it as oxygen so it's essentially inexhaustible in the ocean um and so yeah so it's actually particle size that determines the predominant pathway and so a small sinking particles hopefully this makes sense if you've got a small |
| 25:16 | particle then it doesn't take long for the whole thing to be devoured by oxic oxidation um whereas a large particle um [Music] you know hasn't had a chance for much of it to be oxidized by uh oxygen until the biofilm has grown on it and then most of it will uh oxidize using sulfate uh so i'm using broad broad brush this is a broad brightness hypothesis being put forward here and so large particles and they sink fast so they don't acidify the ocean very much or deoxygenate the ocean moment because they haven't got long in the water |
| 26:00 | column before they've sunk to the bottom um and particles that reach the sediment so so particles that reach sediment quickly where they pile up so of course in a shelf c it's much more shallower so they get there quicker anyway um yeah and so and also when it piles up in the sediment it's becomes further shielded by the fact that it's just under other you know it's part of the sediment and oxygen takes a while to get into there yep and also organic material passing through an animal gut it undergoes |
| 26:31 | sulfate oxidation so okay and so fish produce these large particles species uh often pert like in nature you know larger than a millimeter they then sink fast whereas we know that small particles of you know organic litter marine snow by the time it's mostly oxidized sinks very very slowly um and uh by the time it gets down to sort of depending on the temperature uh 500 meters down and most of it's already gone back to bicarbonate so now i this didn't come from francis came from me uh medieval quackery so i'm making an |
| 27:14 | analogy here um in you know doing medieval times people used uh physicians used leeches to drain blood and they and but you know sometimes the patients were starved so i'm looking for the point of view of the ocean as a carbon dioxide removal pump is suffering both loss of its lifeblood so the debt you know hugely lost wild fish populations and loss of food um and uh so this to me i wonder if we might look back if this is this is a valid way of seeing uh covenants you know removal sequestration in the ocean that this |
| 27:57 | idea that you know you can just take all the fish out if you want but don't feed anything it it it's it's a bit like medi you've got this sort of medieval approach um uh whereas perhaps a modern approach might be wouldn't you that's actually a good idea to feed the ocean so um and and there's a huge debate on what's the right way to feed the ocean is it um you know we've talked about multiple different ways you know ocean iron fertilization from ships or we've got very nice buoyant flakes so we've |
| 28:28 | got iron salts aerosol and now we're hearing about whale poop i do wonder if it really matters that much um um you know just give them give it some food you know if i was laid out um having most of my blood taken by leeches and and they were arguing over either you know should they give me a teaspoon of honey or a half a biscuit i'd just say give me something you know i'm starving and i need to get better so easiest way to resort restore wild fish populations um [Music] would could industrial fishing be constrained it'd |
| 29:04 | be very nice if it could be um or uh provide food to the high nutrient low chlorophyll regions so um now this is what um i'm kind of hoping and we've kind of been saying this and nobody's shot it down in flames yet and see what you say continual supply to kickstart a self-sustained ecosystem so we know that vertical migration brings up nutrients all the time um every night every night the zooplankton swim up and soda lanternfish and numerous others and whales swim down and eat the stuff down there and come up and |
| 29:39 | defecate on the surface the food web predation predation releases nutrients at the surface um um and there's some you know the main well well-known uh predators for doing that that's it am i living in a fantasy here questions comments please i could suggest you needn't limit it to h and lc regions you can do it to provide nutrients to the entire global ocean which is nutrient deficient in some way otherwise it seems reasonable okay thank you sev so quickly go even further yep could you go back to your uh second slide and just |
| 30:26 | just step through those quickly there's a few points i think i could make this one isn't it is that the second slide or uh that's the second is it oh yeah well it's number three actually according to but so that's the first one oh yeah that's that's the second one yeah okay oh hang on hco3 minus is not carbonic acid comonic acid is the combination well yes two together okay fair enough and we know that yeah uh and the other thing i would say about sap repel um i know you're very keen on it but actual fact |
| 31:01 | the number of places around the ocean where you find self-repair i think is pretty limited um because the conditions aren't so appropriate for it to be produced and preserved certainly happens in areas that are more anoxic and you need for this reaction to happen you need a oxygen deficient part of the water column to be maintained to be able to have that that happening and so if you just move on to the next slide i think it's where you get into your uh yup um yeah um i was going to say i think that you seem |
| 31:44 | to be you although you mentioned later on about things like marine snow and so on you seem to assume that most of the organic matter is distinct particles i'm not sure that's entirely the case certainly from phytoplankton uh degradation through being eaten by zooplankton and so on i think marine snow is the predominant form of organic matter that comes from that and that's why most of your organic matter is oxidized in the surface in the layer immediately under the surface mixed layer i.e the top |
| 32:13 | from about 200 meters down to perhaps 500 or 1000 meters depending on the conditions um and can i just ask a question about that chris so you're saying it's marine snow coming from zooplankton is that well from the degradation of um phytoplankton because not all of it will necessarily be you know some of it will die and break up and into bits yeah um do plankton will eat it and chomp it up and and excrete it but also other things will eat zooplankton and chop them up yeah um so there's a variety of sources |
| 32:47 | of it but marine snow itself has is a bit looks a bit like in some pictures i've seen a bit like a dandelion flower it's a very fluffy uh probably a massive surface area which is why it gets oxidized readily yeah um and you wouldn't expect that to be preserved um but in terms of your biofilm protecting earrings well yes it may do um but i i doubt there's a lot of sulfate inside that to do what you suggest because where's the sulfur if you've got organic matter with cover with a biofilm |
| 33:18 | the water the sulfur is outside that layer not inside it in the water i don't think you're going to have much sulphate inside frankly to do what you suggest yeah friends do you want to uh yeah we we it's not grown on on our own brains this idea because raven for instance yeah i've seen that paper i found that sulfate reduction is uh exists on the on the snow there's no particles which are falling down in the sea in very low in negligible oxygen areas you've got to have almost no oxygen whatsoever for that to happen |
| 34:10 | it's gotten very if you uh look at the several papers about this i've seen and you've got to essentially have zero oxygen for that to happen one or two of raven range papers actually say something like that i think maybe maybe our theory goes mainly to the big particles which falls fast and fall down on the sediment and then on the sediment they are rotting uh and the porcelain surface i don't think there's evidence for these sap repels in most deep sea sediments yes or something also i said yeah so if |
| 34:53 | you listen to most areas i don't think they exist yeah so coming back to that i mean that's i'm going to be giving an extreme example there um of sap repel it's mostly just lots of specks of of black or you know a bit like black mold um and uh and humic substance as well which is rather inert so it doesn't have to be a great big sort of lump of the stuff but remember also sediments get turned over by biology and that is actually in the bottom waters that actually helps to oxidize the surface the fairly thin |
| 35:26 | surface layer depending on how much biology is there so biology actually helps oxidize as well in this in the surface part it might be quite thin but it uh certainly does oxidize sediment but i i don't see uh this is so thin at all because you have some animals which uh dig in the ground and uh live from the organic material and they uh make holes and caves and so on uh the the uh sediment and if you look at uh uh sediments below an oxic ocean there is a lot of anaerobic uh sediment or shelf sediments or anaerobic |
| 36:22 | beneath the surface layer yes but not at the surface yes but but this surface layer is only a millimeters and if you have a whale or other things which fall on them or thick things like the seaweed you get surface oxidation but if you surface layer in shelf sediments you were talking then it depends they're easily disturbed by current waves and currents and they can be turned over through physical means as well as biological means and while they may be millimeters thick in muds they're not millimeters thick in coarser |
| 37:02 | sediments for example sands and things can have quite thick oxidized layers at the surface and they would not preserve the organic matter anyway uh there was one or two other points later on but perhaps you want to ask anyone else who wants to come in up to this point well no um okay okay chris um yeah so other people have been waiting um who was first i think brian might have been first hello brian uh yes well um i think you bring up the point that uh some iron supplementation in high nutrient low chlorophyll regions |
| 37:36 | can be helpful there is some evidence for that keep in mind those hnlc regions are seasonal and geographically somewhat limited so in that sense there's a certain uh seasonality and you know there's spatial and temporal limitations to it in scale the second is that uh for vast portions of the ocean and we're talking about hundreds of millions of square kilometers of subtropical and tropical ocean we have replete nutrient availability some hundreds of meters below the surface and i think it's important to |
| 38:12 | understand that nutrients for primary production are a limiting factor but that for most of the ocean it's not actually an iron limitation it is species dependent for algae but we see for macroalgae a predominance of nitrate limitation occurring across the pacific ocean uh the biogeochemistry is somewhat different for the atlantic ocean but indo-pacific regions um there's probably 150 million square kilometers of subtropical ocean and tropical ocean for which there are macronutrient limitations and so being able to understand those |
| 38:50 | and understand the increased stratification occurring in these regions and the decreased natural upwelling profoundly decreased in some cases particularly in the tropics where we're working today as a result restoring natural upwelling with wind wave and solar energy represents a distinct opportunity to effectively help to regenerate the uh flux of nutrients back into the epipelagic zone the top hundred meters to encourage a restoration of natural growth of macro algae and microalgae in those regions we see this already |
| 39:31 | happening in our sites on the philippines and look forward to scaling it so i think the prescription of what are the limiting nutrients is region specific and i'd encourage uh and inform this discussion of what limiting nutrient to apply where uh and our with our own focus in the uh subtropical and tropics thanks thanks brian and i know you're a great proponent of uh restoring natural light welling um and uh okay and you said temporal as well as regional uh variation and [Music] so as regards uh low nitrates uh in large areas of ocean to |
| 40:12 | is there anything that can be done so you think what you're saying is adding even you're adding diffuse iron doesn't really help um with that limiting nutrient i mean in many places where um you know it's macronutrients nitrate and phosphate or you're limited those are available in replete quantities 100 to 500 meters below the surface yeah and by using um nutrients that are already in the in the ocean if they're already in the ocean you don't run into a hazard uh of the london protocol which limits the |
| 40:47 | addition of matter to the ocean with the primary purpose of stimulating the ocean so if we can find nutrients in the ocean itself it's way better than adding nutrients from the outside particularly when you look at the supply of phosphate alone dissolved in the ocean as five times that of all proven mineral reserves globally so yeah it's a much larger quantity yeah great okay thank you very much all right well just briefly on following up a bit on what bran said one of the other factors to bear in mind is that when you start |
| 41:21 | out fertilizing something because something's limiting you quite often then find out you hit something else that's limiting down the track and this is what happened with the low effects experiment in fact when they didn't have the silica there and therefore their bloom was rather uh less than they might have predicted and also a different community of plankton as well because uh they had a silica deficiency problem when they were just trying to add iron so you've got to look at the whole picture over over time and |
| 41:49 | space yeah okay so i think good point that chris is bringing up and i think along those lines um that's one reason that we've been turning to integrative interventions that try to replicate the kind of processes we see naturally natural upwelling that occurs in uh metascale eddies and also coastal boundary regions where you have offshore winds so that that upwelling is very much a natural process it doesn't necessarily produce the iron that might be needed by some organisms but you know i think it is a |
| 42:24 | relatively low gain process that can be controlled and managed and monitored at small scale and uh you know we we're going to be inviting marine ecologists to really study the um the the positive impacts and any side effects at hectare scale and encourage that open discussion so that we can really identify where the opportunities are and um i i just encourage integrated rather than reductionist approaches to address multiple nutrient limitations yes thanks sir brian i've just i've just got one one question i |
| 43:00 | know you're waiting uh robert um so i what i'm trying to suggest in those slides is a small amount uh so okay a place where places where that uh that i are iron limited to put a little bit of iron but continuous that's very s this is what iron salt aerosol does it's it's continuous it goes on for you know hopefully for years if it's if it's allowed to very very diffuse uh a fraction of a milligram per meter squared per day and 20th of a milligram uh where there's very low iron and um |
| 43:35 | you know taking depending on the red field ratio we took 20 000 um that produces that thoroughly produces two grams of of carbon in the organic carbon it produces each day so the idea is is that that then provides a little bit of food for uh to encourage you know for a whole ecosystem to grow around that uh with whatever composition whatever whatever you know composition of different species evolves with that with that food source and for that to then become self-sustained and it may be that that that brings up so much iron so much |
| 44:10 | phosphate so so much everything that actually the difference made by a 20th of a milligram per day just becomes irrelevant because it's just got itself going again right now that's a good point i think there are a couple things worth noting one is that one thing that makes the biogeochemistry of the atlantic so different is that you have a relatively replete amount of sahara dust going across the central atlantic with the result that there's a fair amount more iron available in the subtropical atlantic |
| 44:41 | than available in other places and i think it's important in your presentation to give some sense for orders of magnitude perhaps uh one percent of the ocean has these hypoxic regions where sap repel is appropriate on the order of 10 percent maybe hnlc high nutrient low chlorophyll regions but we have the vast majority of the ocean being limited um you know by let's say the large uh subtropical gyres being limited by lack of availability of macronutrient and um and and decreasing upwelling and increased stratification |
| 45:15 | so i think uh imparting some sense of scale perhaps to the various processes you're describing in your in your paper in your presentation could be helpful just to give a geographic sense of order of magnitude of the order of magnitude of these different processes being described in the presentation okay thank you very much i mean i threw it together today for this group uh to get this feedback and it's very very useful thank you very much for that um robert please i just wanted to express appreciation |
| 45:47 | cliff for the sort of uh simple strategic framework in terms of the relationship between biomass and biodiversity just that the the key thing is we need to fertilize the ocean in order to increase biomass and that's going to be a key both a key cooling strategy for the planet and also a key method for restoring and protecting biodiversity okay thank you very much robert that's much appreciated thank you and sev please yeah you're just saying that the mesa cosmic experiments which are now being undertaken in the arabian sea |
| 46:32 | are in fact providing silicon iron and phosphorus so we should see the results of those when they get the publishing publishing out but it should avoid the uh the the successive uh nutrient depletions which uh uh have been been mentioned by brian great thank you for itself you're not not thinking of including uh nitrates in your bone flakes are you well yes we are because the the iron and the phosphorus uh will uh allow diazotrops to bring in the nitrate okay okay all right thank you very much thank you uh chris chris |
| 47:19 | yep uh just if everyone else is finished i just would want to if we could go on in your presentation uh to the next slide yeah i can't remember which ones i wanted to comment on but um get through quickly perhaps uh that was the one we just looked at i think on the last one we looked at yeah yep i think we've sort of dealt with a lot of that anyway already i think yeah um interesting about fish doesn't surprise me what you said in general what i don't know is what uh what is the differences in scale between the amount |
| 47:57 | of material produced by fish compared to that produced by phytoplankton for example i would suspect it's something like a hundred to one with phytoplankton favored because fish are obviously a much uh smaller um biomass than plankton i would suspect um so i think scale is important it's not just the fact that those voices may be correct but if you've got a hundred times much more coming from phytoplankton then fish may not be as significant perhaps as you would perhaps hope okay thanks okay step on yeah |
| 48:32 | uh yeah those are interesting analogies i thought good uh could i just add the analogy of anemia uh i view the ocean as anemic and uh so uh if we if we add an iron then we would um improve our health i would tend to think the anemia of the ocean is what it should be frankly um the way it's worked um i think if you're going to try and change the ocean that you're going to change the chemistry of the ocean one of the so what you might have missed um chris in the last couple of these is uh the oceans apparently had far more well a thousand |
| 49:15 | times as many whales so yeah i know i've seen all that stuff yeah but on that particular point there's a paper published in nature recently i don't know if anyone's come across it which said is there a decline in marine phytoplankton and this is by some folks at uh plymouth i think if i remember rightly um and they were using the global or not global but this certainly covers quite a lot of areas the um survey that's been running since the 1930s using the um plankton recorder device and their conclusion is in certainly in |
| 49:50 | the north atlantic and so on there's been no decline in first plankton at all so and i'm not sure if it covers any wider than that because i haven't seen the paper it's behind a paywall but i've only seen the uh report of it but uh that's just something to bear in mind that the um accepted figure which i think is based on a nasa satellite data if i remember rightly uh is not necessarily as as reliable as it uh some people might think i think you so i remember you sending me i think was you |
| 50:20 | that sent a paper some month maybe six or more months ago um that uh it varies yes it varies regionally so uh and some parts i think that was it you know that northern hemisphere um maybe not changing very much but but other other places have declined yeah but but this is conflicting with the the so-called data from satellite images there's a conflict of um of conclusion so this is not just saying it it happens differently in different places it's more fundamental than that yeah people actually disagree okay fair enough |
| 50:55 | we've actually been dealing with this for decades and i'd like to offer the following insights it's almost like a biphasal relationship we see um you know the mystery was that the hawaiian ocean time series data was not showing a big change and the bermuda time series the bats data was not showing much of a big change either but um i think the some of the papers palo vina berenfeld some others have actually are um uh distinguished or or disambiguated or resolved this apparent paradox and the way it's resolved is we think of |
| 51:31 | actually phases of the ocean that are either stably stratified or seasonally stratified or not stratified and these are boundaries that are commonly uh for example the the subtropical boundary that distinguishes a permanently stratified from a seasonally stratified kind of situation and what's significant is that these boundaries are moving forward and so the fact that the lowest nutrient the lowest productivity zones of the ocean are increasing in size has been articulated over the past decade and so by increasing the regions |
| 52:04 | that are low productivity and decreasing the regions that are high productivity we're seeing this global decrease in primary production even while those fixed eulerian points are not revealing a decline in productivity it's the regions that the areas that are changing and that's um an interesting hypothesis that in theory that i think we need to validate further but we are seeing some evidence for this certainly in the philippines and indonesia but the data i referred to brian is not point source it |
| 52:34 | is transects across the entire ocean so instead of a different nature altogether right well it's true uh you know it's good to have those transects and i'd simply suggest that we have to look for these boundaries and these uh i'm calling them phase changes but effectively um you know we we have the good physical oceanographic evidence for increased stratification of the ocean as evidenced by lee in nature climate change in 2020 and um particularly in the tropics where we're working right now you know it's |
| 53:04 | it's five percent increased stratification globally but up to 20 increased stratification in the tropics and we're literally working with people on the front lines of climate disruption today where that warm pool is deeper and look at the look at the um coral bleaching we're seeing this week in right here in my state of queensland you know it's like we've got this warm pool in the western pacific and it is deep and it is warm you know regardless of the fact we've got record rainfall we're |
| 53:32 | still getting massive bleaching and it'll take an el nino to perhaps reduce that although then you have such dry weather and you know probably more sunshine that there's a different parallel bleaching there so it's a complex picture for the gbr nonetheless um you know in these regions in the tropics we've seen declines of up to 60 percent in production of seaweeds to actual crop failures across indonesia and seaweeds because um they actually missed like a cold season in other words there was no |
| 54:01 | upwelling during the massive um el nino time uh i think 2014 to 2016. as a result we're seeing crop failures that are occurring in the sea and with we don't build the infrastructure to restore natural upwelling that becomes a serious food security issue yeah okay thanks thanks brian okay so i don't know if people have to agree to disagree or more research needed or what quite i think it just illustrates actually that it's complex and very simplistic um views about the ocean fighter planes declining full stop |
| 54:38 | are um misleading in themselves okay i would i would throw in the baseline issue again um you know a lot of damage is 300 years old and all the anecdotal evidence from the the logs of the early mariners suggests there was vastly more life in parts of the ocean that have very little that of macro life i would agree that doesn't necessarily follow that it's micro does it no the macro life can only exist there if the the yes the first part the food chain exists to feed it sure so mostly the macros gone because we fished |
| 55:19 | it yeah well efficiently but the um the result is that you don't have that nutrient recycling uh situation going on so it all collapses yeah and so i mean in evidence for the shifting boundaries uh western australia lost a thousand square kilometers of a colonial kelp forest in the last decade and that's because it just went from temperate to subtropical like in one year it was just like the giant flip so looking for these uh shifting baselines i'm going to say shifting boundaries of subtropical temperate and subpolar |
| 55:54 | waters is a key opportunity for us to investigate further and and that may be the primary effect that we have to look for so it'd be great to reconcile that with the recent paper that chris uh aptly uh referenced and so i'll give you a link to it in the chat thank you very much chris yeah so am i i'm just going to go back to this once just just for a minute um and uh ask this question again then so this was a uh a question easiest way to restore wild fish populations so um i'm i was kind of assuming uh |
| 56:31 | need to provide food but you seem to be saying chris that there's plenty of food still there it's just that the fish have gone well in the areas that um i think was referred to just now by brew he was talking of that but uh here an hnlc region that means high nitrogen low chlorophyll so there's plenty of nitrate there yeah um and but it's low chlorophyll because it lacks iron in those particular cases generally speaking right um so but of course there are other nutrients than just nitrogen which you have to |
| 57:04 | bear in mind as we said earlier yeah you can't just no no no no no simplistic i i realize i understand the whole thing is way more complicated than this so um and i suppose this wouldn't really be restore wild fish population make a new one where there wasn't before and i think your point was that um be careful um and if to restore it would be to go so i think what you're saying is to restore a wild fish population go back to where it used to be a lot and you'll find there's lots of lots of uh you know new food still there |
| 57:36 | lots of phytoplankton still growing there maybe i don't know i was just a question that i had a question okay but it may well be the case that uh actually the best way would be to you know just constrain the industrial phishing which is what people do talk about all the time you know it's not enough it's really not enough it's not enough well yeah no i mean it's like you know if you try to close the barn doors after you've let all the animals out you're not going to get more animals |
| 58:06 | in the barn yeah and so there are several things uh you know restore is a problematic world at word in the marine ecology establishment regenerate it's far easier because it's not exactly in the same place it's not exactly at the same time but it is helpful and the other um thing to mention is replace the word food with limiting nutrient because it's going to be different you know the platinum rule is due to under others as they wish to be done unto and that means more or less that you have to be contextually specific about |
| 58:42 | the limiting nutrient in different regions as chris has aptly mentioned yeah and then finally what we've learned over the last uh decade and a half is that for forage fish habitat is at least as important as food and if you have a billion fish if you have a billion sardines or herring the school is the habitat but if you don't then you need to have something like a kelp forest or an algae forest or some other structure to actually provide that physical protection for forage fish which represent the base of the finfish |
| 59:16 | food web if you will and so as a result um i think we need to not underestimate the role of habitat in terms of building forage fish populations and we're looking to macro algae for us as one potential such habitat that can help to regenerate fish populations quickly thanks um my point uh completely taken brian about the habitat as well yeah um okay uh i don't have any more unless anyone because we've now got 35 minutes until we get to the end and still quite a lot of other things to to do so let's move on shall we |
| 59:57 | um to where we were before this visit here oh yes robert um let's hear about uh what you want to say about the this new patent for methane depletion please are you there robert uh thanks clive yeah so uh yeah uh just to give a bit of background um john mcdonald and i have been working for the last four years or so well we were working uh earlier with uh france on um looking to commercialize his patent for iron salt aerosol and so we established a company here in australia called iron salt aerosol pty ltd and we continued to explore |
| 1:00:54 | the question of how do we commercialize france's pattern and that led us to the suggestion that some of the problems with implementing iron salt aerosol uh that it is in the open environment and uh the politics aren't yet available for for that sort of work and also that chlorine is a difficult element to work with in in a point source so hydroxyls whereby sunlight is the best disinfectant and it just busts a hydrogen atom off of a water molecule constantly by uv light has is the uh by far the biggest methane |
| 1:01:45 | sink uh around 90 of the methane sink and so these new machines called hydroxyl generators were established in about 2008 patented to remove smells from buildings and also to remove volatiles in the aerospace industry and so our exploration suggested that nobody had patented the a system to use a hydroxyl generator to add to a methane stream in order to convert that methane strain into eventually into carbon dioxide and water so a year ago john and i took out a provisional patent and this week we have finalized with a patent attorney |
| 1:02:38 | the conversion of that into australian patents plus a patent cooperation treaty option for international patents so we're basically taking a very commercial approach to global warming and saying we need to start with um atmospheric chemistry and say let's find a point source where we can uh remove methane in a safe and controlled way we see hydroxyl working for that franz commented yes uh water water is going to be a far simpler thing to to operate with on farms and mines and so on than chlorine but who knows we might we'd like to |
| 1:03:25 | articulate into chlorine based methods in the future but at this point we see a very simple permanent verifiable carbon credit available for taking a point source such as ventilation air methane and a coal mine or rotting vegetation in a rice field or agricultural landfill or other sources of methane permafrost and just hooking up a hydroxyl generator machine to it and developing a system so we are working with a toxicology company in melbourne um ctek and they have you may know vit garness the head of seatac he's joined some of these calls |
| 1:04:09 | and to do benchtop tests and once we have bench top tests then we'll be seeking customers clients and investment and so we we have it established as a proprietary limited company which means that we'll be looking to dilute share equity john and i uh currently own equal shares and so that's where we are now and i just very pleased to be able to uh share this information with such an august gathering today i uh really respect everybody on this call very highly and uh so but i i see that you know this sort of |
| 1:04:54 | uh commercial business path that we've taken uh has uh is uh contested in some quarters but uh we see it as articulating to i don't think anyone here is gonna contest it robert if they do then that's their problem but i don't think there's going to be much problem with this group there we are so i just wanted to uh provide that uh information and invite questions and comments robert what's your energy source well electricity so uh the the way it works the uh the pattern that was taken for uh the aerospace |
| 1:05:33 | industry has a very interesting model whereby they put the uv lights into a humid chamber and and run the methane through that chamber where the model that we're talking about is biohydroxyl generator machine and and hook it up to the pipe so um yeah uh and i ideally on a farm it would be solar or wind powered but you know that it's basically electricity you know how efficient they are we don't yet that's the uh that was we were hoping to do the bench top test uh last year and of course hydroxyls preferentially react |
| 1:06:16 | with with each other and the methane reaction is very slow and uh that's but we i have not yet been able to speak to people to uh to quantify uh and so speaking with people like the university of edinburgh sorry of uh copenhagen um would um matthew johnson there i haven't actually discussed this with matthew and i'd like to just get advice on uh many of those questions thanks sir friends friends you're free or muted friends could you use your earlier you know renault theresa he has his updraft towers |
| 1:07:10 | the combination without draft hours you can make electric energy and put away the mesa by hydroxide look i think there are so many ways to develop this renault has actually been our main scientific advisor in the development of the uh the patent and uh we haven't talked about all of the various combinations and applications that are possible france and and so that's a really good idea thank you chris have your hand up are you muted chris i can see how this works fine with perhaps a point source like your pipe |
| 1:07:54 | type source you can easily do as you described i think assuming it works as you hope i'm a little unclear though how you could manage things like rice fields and be able to reliably verifiably claim carbon credits in that sort of situation although um i did hear about a new satellite which some of you are probably aware of well methane sat that is um went up fairly recently i think and is going to be able to monitor in quite detail i think sources of meat whether that would be sufficient for this purpose i have no |
| 1:08:27 | idea but it just strikes me that points absolute point source is fine but more diffuse sources will be more challenging in terms of actually getting monitoring reporting and verification agreed i think will be more challenging great points chris uh uh now clive is it okay if i share a screen let me just give you permission yep go for it okay so share screen and i'll just share and now what am i looking for so i've got this powerpoint so we started off with this idea of methane removal with hydroxyl generation |
| 1:09:06 | and i haven't spoken to the rice industry so this is pure speculation on my part but it's the idea of a collector pipe system and uh adding to a hydroxyl generator and and then so from a point source you measure the uh methane inside the pipe and measure the temperature and ph and humidity then you optimize all of that then you add in the hydroxyls this is super simplified and then there's a whole series of uh chemical reactions that are required uh there's all uh renault pointed out that this list |
| 1:09:44 | uh left out carbon monoxide but uh yeah so measure so you're measuring on the way in and on the way out and that's your verification i can't see how you collect the methane from your rice fields though thoroughly oh surely well it's going to go straight in the air yeah rice might not be a very good uh industry for us but coal and um concentrated agricultural feedlots and landfills are likely to be better like this was just an idea you know one of our one of our friends said rice so i thought if you lay pipes on the water it |
| 1:10:20 | may be completely impractical for rice but it's uh it's just you know we'd like to exp it's one that we'd like to explore but i think rice is actually down the track as as an option thanks sev robert you might consider designing a bolt-on unit to go on existing wind turbines to generate the hydroxyl you've got then you all you've got your electricity possibly you've got your your erected structure and you've got it pretty well scattered over both land and over quite a lot of sea |
| 1:11:02 | yeah great idea and we've been talking uh john might like to comment about the bass straight uh suggestion but that's more with marine cloud brightening and possibly iron solid aerosol there are there are many things that that wind towers could do but uh john you you may want to there are some proposals just announced recently for a major offshore wind farms in best straight and the coast of victoria and so we have we have looked at that in fact we've got an innovation pattern between robin renault myself on this idea of |
| 1:11:35 | adding on to wind turbines so it could be marine brighton it could be einstein aerosol this could be hydroxyls there could be a number of areas but yeah having that having the power source right there a little little spare power yeah you know when it's not peak hour take time that would it would be very easy to do yeah yeah and quite a small unit i imagine they wouldn't be i wouldn't be large it could be retrofit well let's find out it could be purpose-built or retrofitted to existing wind farms |
| 1:12:07 | could be anywhere okay brian yes um one major point sourcing mission of methane is the oil production facilities uh will tend to flare the methane but it's come to my attention that flaring methane only results in perhaps 90 percent methane conversion so there's still perhaps 10 percent of the flare is going off to the atmosphere's methane and if there was a more internal uh perhaps even let's call it a um if there was a small turbine or a small um you know methane combustion process producing small amounts of |
| 1:12:58 | electricity followed by in a hydroxyl process you could be uh processing the flue gas coming off after the flare and uh with a bit more you know so marketing to the ironically to the oil industry to come up with a better solution than a flare that could optionally produce electricity and cut the methane by another order of magnitude then you'd be looking at one percent methane emissions instead of 10 methane emissions from those oil production facilities yeah that's a great point and the world bank had a big project on |
| 1:13:40 | trying to cut flaring and a lot of it is is due to you know wells opening up when they haven't got the infrastructure to uh to pipe it and uh it being very remote now uh the questions that we have is you know what concentrations of methane is this technology suitable for because obviously there's a threshold where you can collect the methane and use it for energy but like if that well we're imagining that there are situations where that's just impractical and uh and so so like i think the ventilation air methane from from coal |
| 1:14:15 | is really big but yeah flaring's massive and uh thank you very thanks very much brian pleasure okay anything else i might even be able to inject the hydroxyls into the methane before it burnt and i'm not sure that may still leave the hydroxyl radical after the burning process has happened and you've got it then intimately mixed with the residuals the hydroxyl radical uh reacts at nanometer time frames and most of it reacts with itself and then it just scavenges anything else so this is where the volatile organic compounds |
| 1:14:58 | is the main use of hydroxyl generators says smoke and food smells and mold and stuff in buildings but the methane one is very slow and that's apparently why there's uh there's so much more methane than many other compounds in the atmosphere so so the slowness of the methane reaction is the thing that we need to establish and that could it could make up this process expensive and difficult but we we're hoping that the c-tec work will prove that it's uh commercially feasible thought about any way to catalyze the |
| 1:15:37 | process to get over the slowness of the reaction because i mean in chemical industry if you've got a slow reaction use catalyst if you can to speed up reactions but what may not be practical this but i just wondered if you thought about it thanks chris that's a great point and we have not really uh explored that like we just it's obvious that you know we're just thinking at a fairly schematic level and we need expertise to um to develop the technology i see it as a really big new field because |
| 1:16:08 | i think that what we've got is a more efficient method of a permanent verifiable greenhouse gas removal than certainly than many things that are currently eligible for carbon credits and we were talking about the greening the sahara example and just how ambiguous the effect of that that is on radiative forcing whereas the effect of what we're doing on radiative forcing which ought to be the key metric is uh is definitely quantifiable great um thanks roberts for these express this experiment with ctec that |
| 1:16:49 | it's a simple drum test which they they're not far off completing and that'll give us some direction hopefully moving forward and maybe if they do these tests and they're successful and something starts happening maybe they'll just be more interested in using chlorine radicals which is catalytic well that's down the track you know we need to prove that we can cool the atmosphere with using water and electricity and then start thinking about you know sulfur and chlorine iron and all of these yeah just |
| 1:17:26 | getting some traction getting started is what's needed isn't it yeah we want we wanted a critical path towards because like i think franz's work really inspired us on this in in terms of taking the patent on iron salt aerosol and saying that we need a commercial approach i must say i was john and i were very disappointed with the way uh the iron salt aerosol discussion got to our view uh diverted away from a commercial path and uh that's uh so we see that the commercial approach is as the only |
| 1:18:01 | feasible uh way to uh to implement this technology and we hope that it will lead to uh ocean deployment of iron solid aerosol and that's why we retain the company name of iron salt aerosol fair enough robert i mean that it went that way for a while but that died about a year ago and um [Music] oswald peterson is has begun amr atmospheric methane removal company well good luck to oswald but i i i our difference with oswald is that we see um point source operation as essential as a as a first step and yeah so i think he'll be |
| 1:18:43 | he will face political challenge in implementing his technology whereas we're gonna get lots of farmers who are saying okay if i can get a thousand dollars a ton for me for methane from carbon credits based on its uh co2 equivalents then that's a fantastic crop right well the more people running the race the most more chance someone's going to get somewhere so we need to build momentum and build confidence to move forward that's where we we've gone right back to basics yeah and there are other people uh |
| 1:19:16 | engaging in sort of point source solutions as well robert um people no on the other side of the pond from here in the us david miller is doing something he's did you know he started a company well we uh introduced um david miller uh to the uh uh john well i was i helped france uh design the uh copenhagen the original suggestion for the copenhagen smog chamber uh yeah so i i hope that we'll be able to speak with them thanks that's probably enough yeah okay let's start the questions good thank you don't seem to be |
| 1:20:04 | yep and uh yep keen to hear uh news going forward um robin thanks for the feedback yeah sure uh okay i think next is uh the polls are overheating is it stephen did you want to introduce that please i think you might be muted stephen okay here it is yeah is that working now yeah yes as well i just wanted to make sure that everybody heard about it i couldn't believe it uh that you know 30 degrees extra plus 30 uh and plus 40 in the antarctic is just amazing um and uh if it had only been one of them i'd have thought it must be an instrument failure |
| 1:20:53 | but the two of them at the same time uh does anyone know why i just saw it as a headline it is it because of this polar vortex thing or is it what is it the reasoning for it seems to be quite quite like if you had some kind of thing that's bringing an awful lot of uh equatorial air up into the poles that i mean that would would do it um but i thought the polar vortex was much weaker in the north you know the arctic but still pretty strong in the south so yeah well it was 40 degrees in the south in 30 in the |
| 1:21:28 | north so that perhaps is linked so i have no no explanations at all except it sounds absolutely terrifying um maybe we should be asking peter adams who was predicting this kind of thing quite a while ago yeah it's it's a thing for a climate scientist really isn't it i sent a uh i i got this very early on from another bit of a geo blog and i sent a copy of it to the uk government department that's in charge of this it's beis and they don't acknowledge me anymore they told me that if i wrote any individual |
| 1:22:14 | there i'd be blacklisted and had to write to encourage and now uh i don't even get an acknowledgement from inquiries they there was a time when they said they'd like to respond in 15 days uh but they don't even do that now um i think it says more about them than it says about you yesterday there's a great deal about them yeah yeah i have not heard great things either um well okay so forget them um i don't know i mean it's it it is worrying how um it goes on i mean if it's only for two days perhaps it's not going to |
| 1:22:55 | be so serious but if it's permanent well just just the fact that it's happened it suddenly happened at all is a kind of a bit of a milestone isn't it and it's sort of thing that happens once now and again and then gets more frequent yeah so it's still not a not a great harbinger as chris got your hand up please yeah i i saw the brief sort of headline but i haven't seen any anything about the actual what's behind the headline and i didn't know if steven's perhaps got some links to |
| 1:23:25 | the sources of the information or maybe john has as well whoever um that'd be useful and the the report i saw did mention several well-known climate scientists who were extremely worried about it michael mann i think was mentioned amongst others and i think james hansen also said that it was rather extremely worrying but i i had no information about the source of it interestingly i've just come back originally recently for a cruise from the antarctic i have to say i didn't experience those temperatures at all |
| 1:24:00 | but i i suspect the temperatures may not have been across the entire polar region but within certain locations or regions of the polar regions so it's there may be some very specific explanations to those i don't know but they're certainly very worrying i think indeed yeah yeah yeah i think it would be more than worrying if the whole antarctic was was it 30 degrees warmer than usual and yes okay um thank you uh anyone else want to weigh in on that um grant uh the um i a lot of background noise so i must uh i'm sorry |
| 1:24:54 | did you want to say something about it we've got a bit of heavy drinking in the background here i'm sorry about that i was just gonna get into something did you want to say something more about the the arctic temperatures john that's what i would have said i i i'm mystified as well for the antarctic the the uh effect in the arctic um is what you'd expect from the wandering of the jet stream and the meandering so you get to streams of of what are called atmospheric rivers uh where where the waters picked up from |
| 1:25:37 | the subtropics and whisked up to the uh to the arctic in fact i saw on one occasion a jet stream going due north from about 30 degrees to to about 70 degrees i mean this is extraordinary and it's uh it's due to this arctic amplification but what's happening at the in neon antarctic is not at all clear is is there a kind of uh the same kind of amplification going on there because this seems to be a summer uh summoned phenomenon whereas the winter their vortex is is stronger and um and and the art kick is is cold out uh |
| 1:26:24 | if anything in in the winter but this is so this is quite extraordinary um they might be just referring to the to the uh wais the west antarctic um ice shelf but but i seem to remember some they were referring to bits of the east antarctic uh so it's it's very i don't know what's going on with the jet stream down there it's very puzzling i i will i will try and find out because i'm very interested um i'm sorry you could still hear a lot of background oh sorry john come down a bit i'm sure |
| 1:27:05 | there'll be something something will come out possible it might be a result of a methane leak with the methane oxidizing and releasing heat so we really want to get measurements from lots of different thermometers um we don't know whether it was just one at each end yes yeah i mean yes we can expect more can't we from people like jim hansen and who knows who sorry grant i was gonna say um uh that uh last time you very kindly offered to sort of coordinate marine cow marine cloud brightening uh sort of efforts with washington university and |
| 1:27:47 | so forth did you get anywhere with any of that you're muted uh grant you're muted grant click thing i got sidetracked by my interest in promoting uh getting a political involvement in the state of the nation state of california have taken advice from suzanne reed as to how to [Music] access the corridors of power in sacramento one of my tasks this week is to communicate with my state senator who happens to be a climate activist uh i am and so the answer is no i haven't got far enough on that because i got sidetracked on a different pathway |
| 1:28:48 | right i mean if it's if if i mean you if you felt like you took it on the duress then we don't want to kind of leave you with something you didn't really want to do but uh yeah the task is greater than me at the moment clive i'm saying like yeah live i'd like to chip in on this yeah please because i did write to my friend in the uh he's the director of the climate change section of the department of foreign trade here in canberra um to uh to say that marine cloud brightening around the southern |
| 1:29:22 | ocean would be something that australia could take a lead on now my my view at the moment is that the ukraine invasion makes a discussion around um refreezing the north pole very difficult uh when you've got such a crazy tyrant round it's it's quite hard to talk to him about not dropping bombs on people let alone um fixing the arctic and rush is a crucial player there the thing about the southern ocean my view uh is that marine cloud brightening around the southern ocean latitudes would uh firstly it would |
| 1:30:05 | um uh uh reflects the sea ice then it would freeze glaciers uh slow down iceberg carving and uh cool down the ocean currents and it would the cooling of the ocean currents would uh address the heat blob that that brian mentioned which has caused the uh atmospheric river that's uh just drowned the town of lismore and various other places in australia it's it's absolutely extraordinary what's happening now so i just take the view that marine cloud brightening for the southern ocean it would be great if australia could |
| 1:30:40 | talk to new zealand about it and to the g20 about it and get some international agreement to uh to expand the uh the barrier reef marine cloud brightening trial uh to uh to the southern ocean so uh you know it's a security issue you know we like australia the thing is it's the only sort of thing that will mitigate extreme weather in this decade so like we just really need to change our language in climate we need to stop saying that decarbonisation constitutes mitigation because it doesn't it doesn't do |
| 1:31:15 | anything to mitigate temperature for 50 years uh if if ever and the only thing that we that really mitigates it is stuff like field trials marine cloud brightening and and it's it's a very safe uh technology so i just think we should get on with it to add to that i have become completely disenchanted with the idea of moving the g20 or the un or the ipcc and they feel it's necessary to obtain local support for activities that can prove some of these nascent technologies inside spaces that are under their direct |
| 1:31:56 | control such as the economic exclusive economic zones of australia new zealand california alaska waiting for the u.n and the ipcc to move on this is not going to happen in a the time frame necessary to affect the cooling that is needed so well the g20 could take a lead grant because uh the the issue is that the un i think is murrabund but the uh like if a nation like australia took a proposal to the g20 then it could get that support so that's that's what's needed a a nation uh advocating for it i think australia good |
| 1:32:43 | and i don't i don't see why not we've already got quite a technological approach to climate change mitigation i think we'll have a a new government in may and uh let's hope that that they'll be interested in exploring this sort of work but uh chris has got his hand up too yeah i was just going to come back on the polar south pole temperatures apparently that measurement is just at the south pole itself not in there doctor generally it's only one thing i've just come across suggested that's where so it's a single |
| 1:33:15 | or a small group of measurements at the south pole almost it's like there's a hole opened up to the atmosphere to let all the heat out perhaps anyway that's what it was just the other point just quickly to grant eez don't necessarily give you full national control over all activities a number of international treaties apply to with ez's as well just to bear that in mind and for example i'll mention which is obviously my favorite subject the london convention loaded protocol uh they do apply within ez as well as |
| 1:33:48 | international waters a convention or a protocol to which the united states is not a signatory the convention though is the thing the u.s is a signatory to the convention okay and the politics means that uh it's not practical to uh to undertake large-scale field experiments without international support and agreement and so you need gov you just need governments on side and like that whole london protocol thing about ocean iron fertilization i found incredibly bizarre you know just saying that fixing the planet is polluting it |
| 1:34:25 | is you know it it's it's got all of this politics about the false meaning of litigation you know so anyway that's i think you've really got that wrong it's not right okay yeah okay i'm sorry chris that's my character then that's that's that's how i understood it so i'm sorry if i'm the ocean not wrong we're still still talking about what are we going to do nobody's doing it thank you but chris yeah go on chris the other thing i was going to say is you mentioned about |
| 1:35:00 | australia taking the lead well australia together with the uk uh took the lead in the london protocol to develop carbon capture and storage beneath the seabed so australia was a very strong proponent of that so it's not perhaps our favorite sort of way of doing things but um australia has a track record you could argue in taking a lead in something like that so there is something to build on perhaps definitely yeah there's a certain amount of work and effort you know you know you can't just be a tech not a tech |
| 1:35:35 | technologist you've got to be a fundraiser movie shaker and you've also got to read through all this stuff and so it's that that's the reason for having a group like this we with we're a resource to each other and uh chris's knowledge on uh the london protocol and so forth is is potentially very valuable to all of us uh i'm uh i'm this is my first meeting so i want to be a little careful go for it listen listen not speak but uh we are blue dot we're worrying a lot about this issue uh |
| 1:36:10 | on several levels we've got an anthropologist going down to ecuador later this month to talk to some indigenous groups uh to see what they think about the environment and about a gas they can't even smell and experience and experience directly um but to me the biggest part of the social license is the biggest way to characterize a social license is not the way it's written in the book but it's are there people really saying no and are you being morally responsible in getting to that point and uh we have this dialogue at the |
| 1:36:48 | government level and there's very little discussion of this topic you know in the regular news right it's a little bit of alarmist report in the news and then nothing ever happens and um and governments are not going to move if people aren't complaining on their own so uh we spend a lot of time worrying about this we can talk about this at at greater length um but this is a topic uh a big a big topic for us and um you know because we also want to do isa in the atmosphere and that's a different kind of you know |
| 1:37:28 | that's very different from the point source approach thanks david so you're saying it's really very hard to get in the news i mean there's so much competition and you know but people have only got so much bandwidth haven't they they come home from work tired got kids there but but i i think there's some that you know there's a ways of thinking about this problem that people haven't really internalized people who aren't in it i mean we're going to be curating the environment |
| 1:37:56 | for the rest of our lives and probably indefinitely and and that realization is uh is shocking to people because they really think you know it's like i'm going to put a splint on my broken arm and then a month later i'm going to it's going to be fine and therefore they think that's what's going to happen the environment too the atmosphere we're going to somebody's going to do machines suck the clock suck the carbon out or whatever and then suddenly it's going to go back to normal |
| 1:38:23 | that is most people's mentality of of how the problem is going to be solved and the idea of engaging in a long-term you know probably indefinite process is really uh really mind-boggling to most people hopefully to nobody on this call that's good point david yeah that's a good point yes it's it dawned on me some time ago but yeah most people think oh they say clive you're so passionate aren't you isn't it wonderful yeah yeah and i and i should say i come from i come from a pharmaceutical |
| 1:38:57 | background where you know there's a there's a trade-off and yet i see often the the dialogue at the ipcc level etc is in some kind of there's never a side effect if if there is any side effect it must something must be ruled out and uh life doesn't actually work that way life is much more complex um so we think a lot about trying to shift um the overton window the scope of the discussion as well as trying to fit in with with something that's morally and ethically sound yeah so that's all i'll say for the |
| 1:39:33 | first time thank you thank you david um chris yeah i just wanted to come back i think mark davis made some good points um i think time scale is a key one um something i've thought about recently is for example how are we going to deal with rising sea level which is going to go on rising for the next 200 years probably is government doing anything about it no not anything at all or hardly we actually need a really long term people to plan and people and develop it over a long term you need almost a standing group who are going to try and |
| 1:40:09 | plan this for the next 200 years but no one's thinking about that um the other point i was going to say is dave is also right that it's not very much in the public domain there are various public um these sort of forums that get put together with the public to try and see what they think of some of these things but they're obviously very small groups of people and it doesn't tend to make the news the only one that did make any news in the uk was there was a thing called i think something like the climate forum |
| 1:40:37 | which was a randomly selected group of about 120 150 members of the public to go through all the climate issues and how we should deal with it which did make some news uh about it and i think there's been a similar one in germany as well i think if i remember rightly and actually the other thing that's come out of that and these other small scale forums is that the public is very wary of technological solutions things that are consistent with nature is something they're much more comfortable with but i think |
| 1:41:13 | you've got to point out that nature includes things like physics and chemistry as well as biology uh it's not uh it's not just because some people seem to think conservation biology is all you need and of course there's a lot more to it than that and of course biology doesn't exist without chemistry and physics anyway fair enough chris to add to your point about a 200 year um time frame i think what what yeah at least what that illustrates is that we need to place uh climate stability as a primary planetary security agenda |
| 1:41:50 | and if we so so a couple of the points uh if we do start to cool the planet then that has very many beneficial effects on reducing conflict and if we can reduce conflict then uh we can uh move towards a stable and secure uh planetary future and so i would just like to see this sort of long-term vision that uh that you're intimating is is what's needed uh enter the security conversation much more so it's in terms of peace like i'd love it if you know for example uh china were able to cooperate in uh refreezing the |
| 1:42:34 | north pole it's and and also growing uh marine algae on on large scale across the pacific ocean like there's there's just so many things where the international cooperation dimension of climate restoration regeneration is uh has a profound security impact you know promotes dialogue and discussion and positivity well interestingly china does have a couple of large research programs looking to develop that culture on a large scale particularly for carbon sequestration i don't know much about it but i've heard just one or two little |
| 1:43:10 | things about it but they do have some ambitions in that regard but how big i'm not sure yeah people are thinking about sea level rise chris uh there's a gentleman called john england oh yeah i know i know i don't think people aren't thinking about it clive i'm just saying we actually need to plan for it that's a different thing how we how we've got to manage it yeah planning for it is all about you know accommodating it building more sea walls no one's thinking about the big problem |
| 1:43:40 | yeah exactly and this is where john england i think has got it wrong with with uh respect that uh it's possible for solar radiation management to slow down sea level rise and so if we uh refreeze both the poles then then we'll stop all of that um extra water from greenland and antarctica entering the system and uh yeah it's so it's not just about adaptation it's about mitigation stephen i can cool the stop sea level rise with 400 spray vessels working at full power in about 20 years uh they weren't always breaking it um |
| 1:44:17 | full power all the time but it's a few hundred that you need to take out the heat that's stored in the depression i will send you the calculations and that would also manage extreme weather sorry to drop seven yeah yeah if you do any marine car brightening anywhere in the world it's going to help sea levels you could do it be doing it for typhoons and hurricanes and that will help the the general temperature patterns of the whole of the oceans it's a bit slow but you can do it yeah so i i think people whether whether it's you |
| 1:44:55 | know i mean all with these like the g20 or the un it's always people and people what people need to see is uh scientists who got together and are collaborating and you know have a have a reasonably consistent message that lasts over a long time and says this can be done and gathers can you know more and more support so it's somebody someone who's willing to you know just keep going with that i'd unfortunately don't have time but pete uh stephen has this you know stephen has hangs on in there and sends |
| 1:45:30 | out the the documents every time um and then we've got people in what in the state of washington with a very nice video and a nice website and they seem to be doing things but there needs to be some coordination some some someone that just will willing to keep going and and make you know that build that social life a bit like they're doing with methane action in in the us they've someone taking it on you know daphne weinstein's the ceo there and we meet every wednesday afternoon so grant so you know if you're still the |
| 1:46:02 | man there if you're still the man um that wants to do that but you can't but nobody can do it on their own grant can't do it on his own no one could it always takes collaboration and people replying to actually being bothered to reply to emails even though we know that if you're anything like me you'll get 100 emails a day um are you still the man for the job grant i'm not sure my focus is on talking with my state senator to see whether he can listen to the concept that temperature reduction |
| 1:46:38 | cooling the planet is a priority yeah and and then if he is prepared to listen to that i'm seeking a face to face with him uh to then find a way to communicate this possibility okay grant that's okay a lot like much larger groups yeah all good okay that's fine essentially linked people to the climate reanalyzer which shows that antarctic anomaly hopefully it works good straight there but it's still ongoing and it's pretty dramatic uh what's that the link you've just said that link you get this it should take |
| 1:47:18 | you straight to the primary analysis thanks probably everyone here is is active in some way so it's you know but yes there we go that's it so if you just click on it it'll take you around you can click on the globe i've just clicked on it uh to get what to go down to antarctica it keeps yeah so look at the scale at 24 degree anomaly you know antarctica going on that that's east and octogo yeah they're also interesting to look at the catabatic winds and what they're doing and they'd lie out from the center of |
| 1:48:13 | antarctica they're uh they're changing it all as well they're changing you know it's a good site to play with if you're not used to it the other one that shows that the championship very well is windy if you put that into 3d mode this could go into 3d mode will it no no go go to windy and go to 3d mode you get a very nice picture of what's going on it doesn't i can't see what you're saying is another website i'm not familiar with hang on send you the link to that if i just type |
| 1:48:45 | in windy here yeah try typing a window and you'll get is it that one there yep that's windy if you go up into the um the right hand corner you'll see 3d ah yeah i think now click on that i'll take it to a globe and then you just squeeze it in so just but go down to here again yeah swing it swing it down there you go and you could you can just pinch that in and out or roll it but scroll it with your with the wheel on your mouse if you're on a mouse yeah are the colors are the colors temperature or if you if you look on the |
| 1:49:29 | right hand side you'll you'll see you've got all of the different um things that you can show wind temperature and you can go up and down through the the atmosphere any height so this is this looks like wind you're at the moment with um the surface winds yeah so temperature turn on the pressure it's not good it doesn't do anything when i click on temperature i've got to subscribe to a premium oh sorry i have a premium on it yeah right but it's not expensive and honestly it's the best |
| 1:50:04 | tool that's out there for all of this stuff yeah have you seen the null school one there's a there's another free one null school have you seen that one brew yeah you've got knowledgeable windy goes way beyond what those talk with you okay i'll be bookmarking this one it's about a couple of pounds a month or something for the premium right yeah and have lots and lots of fun with it but totally yeah yeah anyway let's do it another time yeah okay thank you very much yeah great it's uh time we stopped i think |
| 1:50:39 | um uh was there there was another thing but i think we've pretty much run out of we did begin to talk about that we talked about that yeah okay thank you everyone uh it's going to be a different time so it was a different time for usa people this time um but the clocks are changing so it's going to be diff different for uh for everyone and as well for us we can i can't remember what it all is but but i think australians it's going to be uh an hour earlier for you it's going to be an hour later for us in europe |
| 1:51:11 | so if you can still make it we'd love to see you next time but yeah yeah okay thanks everyone i'm i'm gonna hang on and talk to john um um but uh that's it everyone's uh i'll do the usual i'll put the recording up and see you in a couple of weeks thanks everyone thanks thanks |