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| 00:16 | hi clive hey sev hi chris good evening evening goodness me hi guy hey this is uh that's the small group that we begin with hi guys hi hi friends chefs hi there never stop say never yeah so i got your uh uh suggestions sev uh thanks and you've sent it out i know which is really good yeah you know it got rejected first time i never mind i had to do it again it's not your fault so make it smaller right um so this is about uh so we've got sev um uh |
| 01:20 | this is about what do you call it uh humidifying the air oh more comprehensive uh yeah like beautiful in the air is fine yeah yeah before seeding with ccn yeah right uh right have i spelt that right humidifying um yeah i'm hoping um uh herb um what's his name simmons is going to be here today um i don't have an invite to the uh link yet for thursday he's asked he's asked us to talk about toa and ara uh acroacy aerosol i don't know if i've mentioned that to this group yet it's all been moving so fast |
| 02:11 | what are those acronyms so tear waste titanium oxide aerosol but it's not just titanium oxide um but we we call it that um because it's got titanium oxide in it as you know sev you've been raising concerns but it would also have uh mostly probably mostly uh silic uh silicon oxide so silica basically i'm not sure if it'd be silicates in their france do you think yes yes uh and um silica that's just silica not silicate no yes right um and then aluminium chloride which is a flocculating agent um |
| 02:51 | so where franz says he's pretty certain having worked in wastewater that you know this is the standard stuff sev for flocculating uh for for uh clearing and even even the flux become disturbed by by a fast movement of water the nanoparticles are bound by the by the flocks and the particles are bound by the flocks so we could talk about that if you like so if you want to discuss that i i i i didn't want to particularly not border on anyone's idea so i i i think i'll let others discuss it okay fine you've raised the concerns and |
| 03:37 | thanks for that because we want to see though we'd rather see those sooner than than being sort of hit by them later so this is great um okay so more people arrive i can see brian von hurtson it was great to see brian and john mcdonald hi john um hi john and herb huppert yeah how are you great it's always wonderful to see you on these meetings herb because i can chase you up on the emails you haven't [Laughter] all right um that's so rude in the wrong places aren't i um and uh uh and um and grant did you want to say |
| 04:21 | anything grant you've uh released a couple of papers recently thank you uh i will say very brief i have a very brief report yes okay so let's put that put you in there grant brief report perhaps that should come up front okay i'm really totally open to this my idea about the about these meetings is that i moderate but it's for anyone it's literally anyone um unless we have to throw them off being particularly rude um but literally anyone to to join um and uh suggest questions you know and uh or uh you know points they want to |
| 05:09 | raise or whatever it might be under the general heading of nature-based ocean atmospheric cooling um and uh i mean we never we're never short of topics in the end hi brew nice to see you again beautiful background you've got there oh oh yes bit of the global coast behind me my morning warp traps that's that's pretty much where you live isn't it cornwall falcon right heaven right oh yes near enough you know and hi john uh john johnson uh yeah bath you're in bath right yeah and um so we've we have this ongoing uh and |
| 05:58 | stephen salt is not here today we have this ongoing concern that seems to be raising in volume that that it's obviously very important that the uh arctic gets cooled and you know re-frozen soon um and um of course john is saying we've i think i'm repeating what everybody knows saying it can be done with uh uh stratospheric aerosol in injection and every time france either says at the time or to me later well i hope they don't do that because it's going to reduce the oxidative power of the atmosphere by reducing uv |
| 06:35 | intensity in in the troposphere and then last time we said oh yeah but i hope it'll just balance out but then franz k found a paper that said it would reduce in the particular uv bands so i don't know if there's anything more that could be these these are important questions that just get you know we discuss them a bit um if we've got nothing more to say about them it'll just have to be left unsettled you know unresolved um um but um anyway no one's coming forth anything hi peter hi um i can't see you but you can't see |
| 07:12 | me i'm i'm here i'm on my own picture in the corner up there okay i see it now yeah yeah okay great so it's just so this is just setting the agenda peter um if nobody suggests anything then maybe you're hoping i'm gonna say something about ara according to aerosol in the last time i talked but i haven't prepared any slides i'm going to be talking about both uh perhaps i'll just write it up there uh i'll just put them up so you can see what they're toa is uh titanium titanium |
| 07:47 | oxide aerosol and uh our ara is aqua aerosol and uh some people are quite frightened off by acrylic aerosol because it's an extremely powerful chemical that's reason it's called regia i had visions of a plane dissolving in the air yeah right yeah yeah it was been used by royalty for a thousand years well certainly many centuries for dissolving gold um so it's uh and it's but okay so it's sort of partly nitric acid partly um hydrochloric acid but the point is it's got this really clever chemistry in it that we don't |
| 08:33 | have we maybe you don't have we we don't know we'd like to do the test but it seems likely that you don't need you can you can make chlorine atoms you know we want to make these oxidative particles mimic production of these oxidative particles that happens in nature anyway we want to make as many of them as possible to deplete as much methane as possible in a photocatalytic cycles so it just goes round around in a cycle it doesn't wear itself out in the cloud um but do it as make as many as possible |
| 09:00 | with whatever sunlight is there and with with whatever you know material is there in the droplet um and for it to do it as effectively as possible so it doesn't mean we it's going to dissolve gold but we want to leverage the same chemistry yeah benefit leverage is it not not a bad term there um so it has this kind of chain reaction it makes oh radicals and then they kind of kick off the chlorine radicals out of it as well so that's that's why we're um sort of working hard on it to get a cost costing done |
| 09:35 | um so i'm still working on that uh be nebulised above ship's flues um with some uh iron nitrate added probably possibly some hno3 some hydrochloric sorry nitric um nitric acid vapor additive makes it a little bit acidic um so that's it that's um but anyway we're trying to make i'm making the agenda here so i'll try and stick to the format um anything else who'd like to mention so herb hupper helped me a week or two ago uh when i asked about titanium oxide aerosol um being produced uh from um |
| 10:17 | uh glaciers just above where they're melting so so that i got the hill a bit and they're not melting up there but they are melting and pete wardens told me the other day that greenland which used to be pristine ice that there's so much uh some brushed smoke that's gathered there and the ice melting that it's not just sort of a black dark surface it's mu it looks like mud sort of sticky mud that you could get stuck in and and there are now rivers and waterfalls it's pretty scary um what's happening to greenland so the |
| 10:51 | idea of toast i mean you never know when you've got a new idea so i put this to herb puppet and said um if we make this this little haze from with this aerosol that contains not just titanium but as i said silicon aluminium uh chloride as well uh it that we have catabotic winds so winds that come down the mountain they come down from the center they blow onto the coast so they go down down the hill they take this haze down covering over this melting these melting glaciers and then out into the sea and he agreed with franz's suggestion |
| 11:29 | that uh over the sea a little bit of warming so it would actually rise up and make clouds it's more humid there as well so with uh aluminium chloride it's more it's hydroscopic um and so attracts water water droplets and basically clouds and titanium is very white it's what's used to make paint white uh as we would have to the extent that the particle makes any difference white clouds but i suppose the main thing is density of lots of small particles we know this is what makes white clouds |
| 12:00 | when you have lots of particles um but there's all kinds of questions i have all i've got all kinds of questions um is it going to make the clouds last longer is it they're going to rain in the wrong place they're going to rain instead of snow you know or at the wrong times i you know there's so much for us to learn and there are people um i'm seeing lots of presentations and and papers from people that renault put something reno director uh but it sort of led to something that people have just come back from the |
| 12:38 | arctic and they've just done a whole lot of sampling of aerosols over the arctic and seen that it they you know the density varies and some of it's from biological source and some of it's dust from who know they don't know where it comes they've got guesses of course um so my still big question is really to people who know about clouds and cloud formation i think brian might be more of an expert than most here um but what is it what what what are the risks here so perhaps i'll put this up |
| 13:13 | then so this is still coming up the agenda um uh i i'd just like to see if anyone's got any any help basically uh discussion on uh arctic cloud cloud formation um so i have a question could uh and again you know you never know if you're just nuts but uh again herb hubbard said no not necessarily nuts to think that clouds over the arctic in the summer if there's enough of them uh white bright white clouds over there uh that it might uh reduce the melting sufficient that it's still more more ice and snow at the |
| 13:58 | end of the summer than it used to be than um what am i trying to say that that it goes back to how it used to be that that it um you actually you build up it because you you lose a lot in the summer and again and gain in the winter so what you don't want to be doing is losing more so you want to put back enough that it's a little bit less right so it's a little bit more at the end of the summer than it was the previous summer so you actually build up the ice back up again and forming clouds over the arctic we did a |
| 14:30 | costing on this it comes out ridiculously cheap actually and it's less than a billion so but what i'm scared of is people piling in and saying no no you can't do that because it's going to make it worse you know make the you'll be snowing in the wrong place or snowing at the wrong times or actually warming the arctic during the winter and we don't think we want to do it during the winter we want to in the summer to cool it during the summer but there's you know people are asking what about during the winter |
| 15:01 | um so let's leave it like that anything else for the agenda so that that's i'll put those down because i've said a little bit about them there's uh it doesn't have to be just about these aerosols it could be anything uh anything else do we have any reports from any of the groups doing things uh cambridge people cambridge or seaweed or or um anything any other or any of our little initiatives gaining traction in america yeah sorry sir what was that last thing we get any political support from from the american government now |
| 15:52 | uh i think um i i wanted to put something um in the agenda for that because there's a five-year project being funded on climate intervention yes peter fikowski has submitted something already yeah suggesting uh the ambition should be to return the uh the climate to something which we could survive in the long term yeah yes um but there's a dead uh deadline uh fairly soon is it ninth of september or something like that for the this u. |
| 16:38 | s government's uh submissions they want short um submissions those should come after grant's report before my stuff okay um i read that the inflation reduction act which has only just been agreed has to put a lot of money into climate related stuff so i think what john's talking about can't be that because it's only just been announced um that's put tens of millions hundreds of millions in some cases i think into various climate related things but i think quite a lot has gone into direct air capture so it remains to be seen how much is |
| 17:16 | left over at the end okay maybe that's enough and maybe that's enough right okay so grant please hi there uh thank you the i had uh sent a copy of the two document or the two pre-release papers i think to most people on the screen today and i will certainly be able to send them on to others uh the it's probably too early for you to have digested or ask questions which is good because i'm poorly prepared to ask some in-depth questions today uh what i would suggest is if you can send comments and questions to me |
| 18:10 | what i will endeavor to do is to get bob fry to join us two weeks from today uh bob is much better prepared when he has something in in front of him to think about can you give us an overview grant what these two papers are seen roughly the uh so the first paper relates to the concept of using e-hux in a massive scale uh fertile fertilized e-hux in the cochlea the four isn't it so it's uh and to increase the surface albedo that concept was developed in the form of bob and others looking for a gigantic single |
| 19:02 | approach a silver bullet and so much of the effort uh in involved here had to do with scaling and timelines and it was during that that we explored the huge risks associated with uh relying on a silver bullet for anything and developed a multi-tier approach where both the costs and the effects and certainly the unintended consequences gets shared between different uh levels of uh multi-tiered approach to albedo and and that's carried over into the second paper which again was relating to uh can i just say ask grant |
| 19:57 | you say multi-tiered approach i i think you i we are you saying that your approach would be one and then there'd be other people's approaches yes as well to see which ones are the best yeah yeah the when you project out the costs associated with the uh tackling the whole cooling uh challenge from the oligotrophic spaces you're talking of trillions of dollars and that is something that is not going to be invested in until the human human kind is truly desperate and i don't think any of us want us to |
| 20:38 | get to the point of desperation before somebody tries something so the rephrasing from the uh here is our silver bullet to here is a possible approach to use in conjunction with other concepts uh many of which are still unproven uh is where we've concluded and what we have come to or what i have come to anyway is we need to energize the proof of concept and uh i john mcdonnell is here uh i inspired by what has happened in australia where there is a preparedness to tackle new things inside their economic zone and uh |
| 21:30 | he hex will thrive in many of the spaces inside australia's uh zone and would be a useful place to experiment we have a new government here too but i'm not saying they're going to leap into a lot of major geo engineering but they they certainly are pushing pushing the boundaries so there's a feeling of hope there and so it it's a matter of getting uh sufficient motivation amongst uh humankind to get these things proven and then similarly to the uh second paper which uh looks at the use of diatoms again on a massively |
| 22:17 | uh fertilized scale to capture co2 at the ocean atmosphere interface and i think there are some interesting and novel concepts developed inside that as to how we could accelerate uh the export or increase export from the surface to the the deeps now i had noted in the cover cover letter that some of the more recent work that we have become aware of has not been integrated inside this paper that doesn't mean that we think it's uh not worthy in fact the complete opposite my personal view is that we need to be moving |
| 23:08 | the first application of lb of diatom capture closer to the fertile spaces where brian is observed you don't have to lift the nutrients as far as you would in providing them into the elegant trophic spaces some of the comments that remain in the paper i am not completely in agreement with but i'm not going to explore them with you here but the uh certainly uh in both cases uh one of the fascinating things john is that john listen is that naturally occurring e-hux blooms happen after the diatoms have had their feed |
| 24:03 | and so the uh ehox has a lower requirement for phosphate and the so after the the diatoms have chewed it all up then the ehacks can compete more effectively so the underlying concept of a nursery production of seed applies to both solutions and i see uh if we look at farming the ocean as an analog to what we're all trying to do it's rotate it's crop rotation and i think it has uh direct linking and synergy with what steven salter is attempting to do as for the marine cloud brightening ems uh a production of e-hux |
| 25:08 | the recent observation of uh export of increased export to the depths but not just by kelp but the [Music] mesopelagic species middle middle section yeah yeah they love uh to chew on diatoms and they also love to chew on e-hucks which we thought previously would be a major carbon dioxide source which is the popular view of e-hux as a source rather than a sink but with other mechanisms of transfer and sinking i see a real opportunity to explore how this combination of fertilization uh for necessary elements rather than wide spaces could be very very |
| 26:12 | interesting to explore and so with that i will say no more thank you so much thank you grant that's that's great thank you very much uh john m well no i was just gonna ask grant grant uh now you have a third paper as well that you're working on is that along the same lines i mean can you give us this sweetener well this is uh something else that bob fry has been chewing on for quite a while and he is focused on that right now which is why he's not joining us today and similarly a multi-tier approach is being |
| 26:58 | explored i don't know where his preferences lie today for the exact species to be injected but he's looking at again the stratospheric injection above 50 degrees and below 50 degrees and latitude yeah in latitude yeah and i am not in touch with his most current work but i am expecting well i do have a uh and he's giving me a uh abstract and a conclusion and he's filling in the middle and so as soon as he gives me the release i will forward the abstract and the conclusion to you and then you'll have to |
| 27:59 | hold up hold your breath okay okay thank you very much um uh it's all work in progress isn't it it is friends do you have something to say about uh this uh sinking of uh cochlear the four and diatoms you're on mute friends you have to come off mute that's a good idea i think but the question for me is how do you ever uh feed the uh coco little forest you're on mute grant how would you feed them yes yeah the intention is that we would uh add necessary nutrients into the upper levels in edna as we release the uh nursery seed |
| 29:03 | the intention is that the nursery seed be released into the upper levels when it's in its exponential growth phase and that we would add nutrients at that phase with the intention that we would increase the intensity of the bloom and cut it short by cutting off the source of nutrients and and how would you do this nutrition feeding uh by release from the into the surface along with the uh nursery seat itself the nursery nurseries would be essentially floating in the ocean and would be themselves accelerating the growth of |
| 29:57 | the cochleaphores and then when they have reached their uh exponential growth released essentially dump them into the ocean with a source of required additional nutrients for them to continue in that exponential phase for a few days right when you say dump in the ocean grant do you mean to sort of pump it up the back of the ship or or spray it somehow so that it gets distributed widely essentially the nursery would be under the surface of the water and you'd either pump it out with a very uh low energy pumping system or expel the |
| 30:40 | whole thing by and and create a large space which will diff diffuse into and be washed around but expecting that the nutrient would move with the with the seed cocolifer for seed yeah with the with the diatom right because you made a presentation on this um a few months ago uh which is all which was very good and i've forgotten the size of did did you was it there a size of ocean because i mean one ship uh could only do so much and we have three is it 360 million kilometers square kilometers i mean of ocean it was |
| 31:25 | it was uh gigatons of seed to accomplish the then goal large scale temperature reduction but when we realized impractical it was we uh can you just take me through visualize how this seeding process works are they really small is it high density do they exist in the surface layers or do they sink deep tell me how it happens you're talking about the nursery processor your nursery yeah the nursery uh would be a significantly large isolated [Music] containment of that would be sealed it would be filled with deep ocean water |
| 32:27 | so that it is void of viruses and inside the space we would create a pressure of carbon dioxide to accelerate uh the growth of the coccolithophore and provide it with necessary nutrient to get it quickly to its exponential phase and then when it's in its exponential phase release it into the open water where we believe by the intensity of the release it would out compete the other species that are existing there now and obviously in the elegant trophic ocean there's not a lot of competition uh for the nutrient |
| 33:20 | and so this would be the idea would be you'd have multiple uh inside the concept as it stands now multiple uh nurseries several hundred maybe several thousand nursery locations and rotate the releases around space these floating structures in the ocean where you're creating these nurseries or on ships or the uh original idea is that you would uh have these floating in the ocean or probably around a mothership which would be so you right now we would need the part of the concept was on this uh on the ocean production of |
| 34:11 | nutrients which is a large part of the cost and the of the full-scale embellish application uh there's a lot to be explored through proof of concept here chris you have your hand please yeah um yeah it's a few interesting ideas there but um the um the idea of the succession of plankton is sort of a normal thing if you think of traps our waters during the uh springtime you get a session of different plankton coming along because they as you say the conditions each one changes the condition of the water to |
| 34:54 | some degree and the successing one take advantage of that um if you're going to do this in oligotrophic waters it's a little bit different obviously those areas have very low productivity however they don't have zero productivity and they do have some communities living there basically they turn over very fast on very little nutrients and they're very different types of um things like blue green algae and things like that so um doing this on a big scale would certainly completely change the ecosystem i would suggest for a start |
| 35:29 | i'm not sure everyone will be entirely happy with that whatever the benefit is clearly we're always dealing with risk risk trade-offs here um so you've got to look at the balance of benefit of course at the end of the day um but that could be quite challenging i suspect um i also wonder whether if these nurseries are floating freely um presumably even if you have a mother is it mothership going to be around them all the time or are they just going to be at times you know on their own they could be a bit of |
| 35:59 | a hazardous shipping potentially if they're in any areas where shipping comes from so there's quite a few issues there but it seems to me talking about gigs funds is getting a long way ahead of yourself and you've got to prove the concept on a small scale before you start talking about gigatons and that's the same for any of these techniques yes yeah that's where the desperation the element comes in well yeah i mean i i agree desperately we don't want to get desperation because then people will try |
| 36:26 | some truly awful things which will cause even worse problems probably than the problems they're trying to solve yeah of course we we it we we want it to to understand that it could be scalable if it's if the proof of concept works and so you have to kind of think big but start small kind of thing don't you yeah friends you mentioned something about the the these flocculating things that because for the the the next problem is um you know the old ocean iron fertilization that um you you make all these wonderful |
| 37:01 | phytoplankton and then they just remineralize they just sink down slowly and and go back to mineralize back the story says they are flocculated and produced uh produce bigger parts tickles as i understand it and they sink faster and in this way they can get to the ocean sediment without using much oxygen or yes there are two processes associated with the uh the diatoms one is a natural exudation from that causes clumping of individual diatoms and that larger accumulated ball sinks faster |
| 38:07 | the person who can best answer the issue around the use of the flocculants is i'll attempt to have him in the next meeting okay okay great i don't understand it well enough friends to comment okay but but you use uh organic flocculants or inorganic didn't you say that the diatoms exit you know they excrete something you know they produce something themselves that makes them flocculate that is the yeah they well they they clump yeah but does this happen naturally with diatoms i don't i have no idea you're |
| 38:55 | making some assumptions about diatoms that aren't entirely valid because a lot of diatoms are not individual cells they're they're chains and other shapes that are in big things to begin with they're not all individual cells which then clump up necessarily so you have a lot of these diatoms in a huge variety of forms it all depends which variety of diatoms that you actually produce that then will depend on the type of form that they're in so don't just assume diatoms are individual because they're not |
| 39:25 | yeah the exudation process is is a species specific to a particular species and it is stimulated by the existence of agitating bacteria so it's again a a magical solution sounds interesting if it works okay yes it is the question yeah it was always isn't it so was the question france you mentioned about um using an aerosol to make put aluminium chloride on these things so that you have that inorganic flocculant that i mentioned at the beginning we use in in the our concept we use also aluminium chloride the toa concept |
| 40:24 | we can use it in both okay all right okay and uh uh one one nanoparticle uh contains uh aluminium chloride but it is too less as to produce any any flock but we said they will act as cloud colonization nuclei and so millions and of such cloud droplets when the rain out will come together and produce a raindrop and then possibly it could also help to flock particles in the ocean yeah okay because aluminium chloride will hydrolyze in the moment when it hits the ocean |
| 41:27 | ocean has a ph of eight two or so and aluminium fluoride would flock at this ph right and in a raindrop it's still built but below ph five yes yes yes yeah it's a little bit uh right so it remains we think about um carbonated water if you just get sparkling water in the supermarket it's actually four pounds below five is highly acid well but uh if you buy carbonated water at the supermarket it's 4. |
| 42:07 | 6 yep yeah possibly it is also maybe a little bit less than four even less than four so but in any case it's going to stay as aluminium chloride because our aluminum chloride itself has a ph of say two or so two right yeah so the the benefit of remaining is aluminium chloride and then hydrolyzing when it hits the water frames what's the benefit of that yeah the benefit is the uh we have a different we have acilic silica in the droplet and also titanium oxide and these are in nanopartic particular form and when when |
| 43:10 | aluminium flux they will be can't uh produce any uh harm to the environment in because they are a nanoparticular they will be covered by the flocks and abound by the flocks so right and so at last uh this mixture of silica and alumina and titanium will uh transform to clay at last that that essentially is the sink sound to the no yeah this process the clay forming process is not so fast that it is in the moment right less isn't isn't uh titanium ox you know those these oxides isn't that what clay is or it's supposed |
| 44:08 | clay of course is hydrolyzed got surrounded by water as well clay is a polymer yeah and these flocks are all also polymers so to transform this one polymer in the other form of polymer right it lasts right so this the process by so the reason i'm saying all this is because this could be sorry just a minute let's try and try them at the door no sorry folks um um the process of aluminium chloride uh coming down um changing from aluminium chloride to aluminium oxide what happens france what's the yeah what's the big benefit |
| 45:06 | of it changing it it hydrolyzes and uh makes these flock yeah which uh binds the substances so if it's a nanoparticle yeah and then yeah not only nanoparticles it it takes all what is uh in the in the environment near around the droplets which is falling onto the water yeah and so sorry the idea of this is it might be helpful with phytoplankton that to get them to sink better or you know diatoms or whatever but if it if it came down already hydrolyzed as aluminium oxide let's say it comes down and it's |
| 45:46 | already aluminium oxide in these particles does that mean they don't flocculate no no no but i think it's no idea to get the the the diatoms the flock because they are not so much on one place you know this droplet has a small okay small diameter right i thought you thought it was beneficial at this moment uh when it hits the surface of water it changes into the flock yeah and this small patch there are not so many diatoms okay we've locked down oh sorry i misunderstood you i thought you said this was a way to get |
| 46:33 | phytoplankton to sink if possible yeah possibly if there is a is a bloom of diet and there are much more okay then you have uh possibly the chance to get them down yeah yes we if we uh that then it must rain for a long time in the right place in the right place for instance yeah at the right time maybe you you have a blue yes okay thank you chris you've had your hand up from i was just going to say um it's a question also the right time because if you go and fluctuate a bloom that's just starting you're actually not |
| 47:19 | helping at all so actually timing is critical too it's not just wear but it's when as well yeah and uh but just we're getting slightly we seem to be jumping between diatoms coccoliths and aerosols um and it's not entirely uh it's a little confusing sorry chris sorry uh that's down to me but um i'm sort of trying to include emails that arrived only this afternoon from france where i thought he was saying that we could use it out he said it's very interesting what i've seen from grant's paper perhaps we could |
| 47:53 | use our aerosols to make flock to flocculate the the phytoplankton and get them to sink so that's my reason for jumping about so much yeah i just if you're trying to go and flocculate naturally occurring blooms you're going to have to monitor the place first so you know where the occurring blooms are and what state they're in first of all no we we can think to the southern ocean the southern ocean has enough uh nutrients but not iron that's not no that's not the issue what i'm saying is no no no |
| 48:31 | please let me all right i'll let you go first come back with the rain we make a bloom ah that's the difference the rain we make it bloom because we can feed it with iron and then they can flock well you don't want to feed them and flock them instantly that would be self-defeating yes you know the the aluminum flocks are very uh they built as they stay long enough at the at the surface they were not uh my point is that you want the bloom start you don't want to flock it as soon as you generate the |
| 49:14 | bloom you actually will do it about three to four weeks later which is with the sort of length of time these blooms tend to last yeah so you can't do the same things all at once surely these i'm i'm rather sure that uh our flocks will uh be there even after weeks well if they're flocks the huge flocks usually have increased in density and will tend to sink it's the whole point of flocculation in a lot of processes is to help to help things sink down that's why you flocculate things in water |
| 49:49 | treatment works and that's another and similar processes our any any uh uh any bloom will produce a lot of uh substance to flock it's uh will it if it if it gets flocked and and sinks after a couple of days friends maybe maybe our flocculation will not work but uh we will try what we will see it was the trials yeah what drives you yes okay yeah you i don't know whether you were intending it perhaps also for the e-huts as well i think e-hooks is a little bit different um in that um when the e-hux dies of course it tends |
| 50:40 | to release all its little plates and therefore it's a slightly different uh condition to a diatom that still remains in its whole sort of state and sinks and the um one of the reasons you get these nice white blooms meat huts of course that it's it can remain close to the surface and those little white plates hang around for a long time because they're very little and and the density difference of the seawater is probably very small so they don't sink hardly at all in that case if you sink those then of |
| 51:07 | course you know you're sinking calcium carbonate there is a better off keeping them near the top yeah yes yeah okay i mean i i i could mention the age-old this goes round and round and round this question of of um making calcium carbonate acidifies the ocean and so ordinary we can't make chocolate force but um people seem to miss the other side which is when you make organic carbon it raises the ph uh and so you an organism like cochlear iv can do either can do both and it seems to me that um actually building a shell means you can make more |
| 51:50 | organic carbon you can grow your body you know your the other stuff more um without getting too alkaline um friends told me the other day is about three different ways that uh you know marine and phytoplankton can make organic acids and did you say bases friends they've got about three of each surely it can can react with the ammonia for instance right so it just it it makes always a basic a coccolita for us make maybe if if they if they produce a dms for instance or organic chlorine uh this of this makes uh basic |
| 52:51 | the water uh gives basicity to the water because it puts acid in the air and so left with basically in the water yes yeah yeah yeah so it it just sort of seems sensible or possible or perhaps more likely that you know given that um life i mean we like to have this very tightly defined temperature 37 degrees i think that's much more difficult to do um maintaining ph they've got so many different ways of doing it putting it up or putting it down that it would seem likely that they regulate their own ph and if there's |
| 53:32 | lots of them there that they regulate the ocean ph and so it just it seemed to us for a long time these ideas of putting trying to alkali set take the ocean alkaline or um isn't going to make much difference because the phytoplankton will just respond and say hey you've got the put the ph up too much so you know i'll make some more shells i i don't know i don't know bear in mind of course the ph has gone down and they haven't stopped that well they but they're losing nutrition this um stratification loss of nutrition at the |
| 54:11 | surface and they've got so much nutrition so they can't certain in some places yes it's not necessarily a generic problem everywhere now you've said this as well chris so it's a question of doing the study of exactly where we've got so many things that we're trying to do yeah and at the end of the day all these different processes it's the net effect that matters not what the individual bits do yeah absolutely yeah yeah yeah it's almost like saying well why is i but there was a point where i said to |
| 54:40 | friends why is the ocean ph or ph 8.2 and you couldn't answer but i think it's almost like saying why is the atmosphere what is it 28 uh what is it the oxygen i can't remember that was it whatever it is what is it so something like that well you know why is it whatever it is 21 why is it 21 oxygen it's a difficult question to answer um but we know that both you see both sides of the equation you see photosynthesis all over the place and you see lots of respiration anyway um let me say if you have a bloom |
| 55:19 | of a fruit of longstone it is they produce more dms than if there is less for the long term and this dms is produced from surphate and this process of dms production makes alkaline and that means the more and the healthier the phytoplankton is the the the more alkaline is the ocean surface and when it is not healthy it will not produce as much and then the the ocean surface is more acidic and so that's a new one france i think it also depends a lot on the fighter plankton because dms is not universally produced at the same level |
| 56:22 | by all phytoplankton some of the particular classes certainly do produce no but not everything produces it the same amount at a certain level a lot of uh uh organic chlorine is also produced by the piano yeah yeah again use and therefore a sea sword is used by methyl yeah and this also makes alkaline but it's new the knew that you're saying france that that they they uh don't produce so they can't though they don't produce so much if they're not healthy you say not healthy yeah if if if they they |
| 57:10 | have to if you have too much uh temperature which i uh they are not used in the natural world you don't really get much unhealthy stuff it just gets killed off by something else doesn't it you get a change of community composition yeah i i i see that uh coral reefs uh are not so healthy in the moment yeah okay when it's suffering and so it was okay possibly the future plans is also not so healthy okay okay i i thought one of the principles of of gaia was that the um the dms would actually provide cooling which would help |
| 58:06 | the organisms uh if they were overheating so if they were overheating they would die and they end the decomposition of the uh of the organism right is would be produced and that would cool through marine cloud brightening okay as i thought that was it was a recognized kind of gaia feature is the expert on gaia you could be right i i've got the books but again i haven't read it probably yeah i would say that it's if you if you follow a guy it's all interactive so you you look at the whole biosphere as an organism functioning together |
| 58:57 | and if you look at the ways that organisms function they're very good at self-control you're able to maintain your body temperature within parameters unless you get over-stressed and so it is with lots of different organisms organisms working together they tend to self-regulate until they get over-stressed which is how i would argue the situation is now yeah if we still had 100 gigatons of living carbon on the planet we could probably cope with an awful lot of the stress we're putting on it by adding extra greenhouse gases and |
| 59:37 | pollutants but we've seriously degraded that climate management system but you know that's that's just an overarching approach to it but nature does seem to follow these patterns and it's just a case of scaling it right up in the thought process it's it's why i uh favor working to restore nutrient cycles and adding nutrients in such a way that all the organisms might benefit than trying to do anything with the monoculture because wherever you look monocultures tend to be dangerous and not resilient |
| 1:00:19 | diversity is what creates stability general approach yeah yep your hand up your hands up my last comment is that i learned that a species of e-hux uh gets into an excited state we're in the presence of copy pods when they come on a feeding spree and stimulates the accelerates the production of dms relating back to bruise point the balance of nature is incredible in its complexity and it's amazing it amazes me continuously thank you press their way of saying uh stay away you know so this isn't going to taste good you |
| 1:01:10 | know here's lots of dms yes um yeah it doesn't seem so controversial this idea that organisms regulate you know on on mass they regulate the whole system i don't see what's so controversial about that just makes sense to me uh james lovelock came under a lot of flack for that right let's see there's a very overarching thing um that uh mankind has got to do some self-regulation [Laughter] and you know james lovelock was was always yeah had said we'll we'll we'll get round to it one of these days he was quite |
| 1:02:00 | optimistic but in the end we will realize we've got to do a bit of self-regulation the counter of the bad effects we've had yeah we're trying our best aren't we john yep we've got to use every possible means of persuasion now because uh things the things are getting worse and people are getting desperate but you can see what's happening in the uk uh people are getting desperate about paying paying their fuel bills and the government's doing bloody nothing that's a typical government reaction |
| 1:02:44 | isn't it well you don't do nothing well we do we really want them to hand out checks so that we can afford to use more energy yeah self-regulation means that we'll burn a lot less hydrocarbons yeah and we'll insulate our houses better because it'll pay it's interesting how would a commerce you know yeah has a self-regulating effect the transition though could be painful oh yeah yeah absolutely yeah um okay well um what else have we got on the agenda i'm very happy for everybody to um put your aura in and just |
| 1:03:24 | make comments and just try and stir up trouble this makes it lots of fun um right so just want to make a suggestion that if if they're going to do research uh they ought to be researching on some of these uh methods with a view to deploying them as soon as possible to the deal to fend off a climate crisis getting worse and worse i mean i'm hearing that some aspects that are perhaps at our paris aspects of the us government are somebody described it as virtually begging people to submit proposals so they can give out money |
| 1:04:11 | um so i think it's down to us partly you know i i don't want the money but i do i do want the the people who are doing the research to actually uh research in details for things like the brewer dobson circulation which is critical to the success of anything you put in the stratosphere um yeah and and and we know we need to have some idea of how much cooling power we need in for the arctic we've got got very little research uh data um put together by anybody just to say you know what is the albedo loss and uh how are the |
| 1:04:57 | negative feedbacks doing uh you know how how much cooling power are we going to need yeah and and then you've got things like if you if you do put cooling stuff into stratosphere you try to put it up somewhere can you actually put it up somewhere where you can say dislodger a jet stream which has got stuck because you know you might be able to do some brilliant things by doing a pretty uh a regional rather than a total hemispherical action so you know these things need to be researched pronto as a matter of extreme |
| 1:05:42 | urgency so that you know when we do start which i hope is soon we know what we're doing we've got the monitoring we've got the modeling right at the moment the models are hopeless on a lot of these things the the the modeling of the arctic amplification and its effect on extreme weather is atrocious and and this is why i'm hoping that uh peter you you peter you're listening there yeah i think you're muted peter are you smiling yeah but we should go to the uh met office and point out this business spell arctic |
| 1:06:25 | amplification uh causing the weather extreme and and and this needs to be acknowledged i mean okay it's not a hundred percent but if if there's any truth in it it needs to be followed up and uh an appropriate action taken now the the the met office have admitted that it's the sticking jet stream which is causing these weather extremes but they haven't said that the sticking is is uh a a result of arctic amplification they they just put it down to kind of global warming and um co2 emissions um which is |
| 1:07:11 | and so they don't suggest it could be reversed and we're saying it could be reversed if you if you've thought about it logically do you have access to people in that office well we can just uh try and arrange a meeting well what are you waiting for uh i'm i'm waiting for getting the necessary support uh for example from doug uh mcmartin captain mcmartin who's been working on this uh stratospheric aerosol injection right uh and trying to find all the things that could go wrong and what to do about it |
| 1:07:46 | and this but you could never be 100 sure i mean if if i i know but at some point you've got to to take the plunge yeah yeah and then the trouble is that there's a huge number of people saying it's it's far too dangerous to take the plunge or even to do the research some of them i would disagree with that personally you show us do research if you possibly can we want to know we want to be in the know we don't want to put blinkers on and say oh let's not find out i'm not i'm certainly not saying |
| 1:08:26 | stratospheric aerosols is a silver bullet we do we do need to have the black backups i'll be researching vigorously on on everything we've got to pull out all the stops because we're heading for catastrophic climate change and sea level rise if the uh if the arctic uh continues on it's melting yeah uh so totally agree with you john something must be done and soon so so i'm i'm hoping that the the cambridge people will come in behind this uh so we can go with a good delegation of of uh people to the to the met office |
| 1:09:14 | and uh uh help us persuade them that uh even if they don't go public on it at least in private they are aware of this and telling the government uh government that this needs to be supported and they they have tentacles all around the world with the you know the international met office whatever it's called um what what did peter have to say peter you were trying to say i'm wishing to be cynical but my experiences with the met office over several years have been back and in fact the latest scandal is just out this week and |
| 1:09:56 | it's typical of the met office thinking in modeling the way they think when they do modeling uh which is that they've come up with the fact that uh you're getting more rapid melting around this is not relevant to the atmosphere but the ocean you're getting more rapid melting around the edges of the antarctic ice sheet than is covered in their models and they sort of look vaguely into this and discover something which everybody's known for decades which is that there's the antarctic circumpolar current |
| 1:10:34 | flowing clockwise around the planet but then closer to the coast there's the antarctic coastal current flowing westward and they ignored the antarctic coastal current and all the heat that that carries because it's too narrow for their model it's 20 kilometers wide and their model only has a a resolution a resolution of something greater than that so this is but everybody knows that the antarctic coastal current is an important current except the met office because it doesn't fit their their modeling prejudices |
| 1:11:15 | that's the way their minds work and always have so i would say if you really want to work with people who know about models or know about science um you really have to keep clear what the british metal is it's something i just feel that we should we should at least try and confront them uh what's her name uh what was her name julius slango slingo yeah i mean that was the example of a very deliberately maintained ignorance that you couldn't you know you think they're fed up with being pushed around by government and |
| 1:12:04 | everybody else and then they just say look you know go to hell we'll do what we can with what we've got well they they do have a lot of responsibility for influencing the government so if we want to get to the government um that that might be our best chance i i i know it's going to be difficult um but the the fellow who spoke on the radio was was quite clear about what was happening to the jet stream and that it it formed into a a number five configuration where there were kind of five peaks and five troughs |
| 1:12:47 | around the planet and this was causing uh heat extremes in five different patches around the uh around the planet um we better better move on we are offering uh a solution um now they might be able to help us say uh tell us how our best we could they might secretly agree with us say we we can't do it because of our situation but you should you know we suggest you do that and it might be helpful i mean now i might say try the military so i think that might be or try the economists yeah insurance industry is one that's |
| 1:13:36 | always been reasonably positive about dealing with climate things despite all the other bits of industry about funding well you're having to pay for all the costs of it yeah right right yeah yeah yeah so and um i'm sort of hearing that there are companies that want to help you know i. |
| 1:13:55 | t computer companies that want to help so it might sometimes you get more out of people if you go them and say look you know is there any could you use help you know if you had more computing power they might be a bit more responsive there was a paper out uh quite recently i think it was that um it was discussing the uh the politics of uh srm and saying who was supporting it and who wasn't there with no absolutely no physics or well or or you know the effect of anything but it was just saying that there are some some people and it tends to be people like bill gates |
| 1:14:43 | and which uh he's supporting research um but there are some other parties who is who are supporting results you saw if some scientists all they read is papers you know that's the evan that's the conduit to get to them and there's a article in the uh latest scientific american that's the september issue uh saying that um scientists are very reluctant to give any kind of um uh advice on what to directly do [Laughter] which i think is is true but they don't want to get the death threats do they |
| 1:15:27 | yeah well i mean that that's that is one of the underlying thing problems isn't it if you stick your neck out you're liable to be get hit hard by the yeah the people who are so desperately anti um i mean yes that's a very sad reflection on the current society where you can have uh you can have uh social media whipping up hatred against uh anybody who suggests we should intervene in the in the climate system yeah i mean that's that's curtains for society if we let that dominate yeah absolutely |
| 1:16:13 | um okay thank you john i'm just thinking about the time and uh we haven't had sev yet we've only got 15 minutes left uh so um and i talked a bit about that anyway so uh so let's let's hear from you sev please okay i hope most of people had a chance to read that single page um basically mostly let me just ask so you've got an idea i sent out that page from sev uh with a picture of uh you know areas that are already super saturated saturated so you could only make you can only brighten clouds because you only |
| 1:16:50 | make clouds where it's where the the water is super saturated in other words it's just about to go to the dew point you know um it's only about 15 of the world which is which is near saturation fifteen percent right so i i i thought that stephen salter said that by making me injecting small enough particles you can convert an existing cloud make it brighter you can make it brighter by uh reducing the size of the droplets so there were more of them yeah greatest purpose area yeah let me let me just ask |
| 1:17:33 | just just put your physical hand if you don't mind if you had a chance to read that thing i sent out just thank you that's exactly that's a thank you it's about four people that's it's just five or something okay um so uh sev please sorry interrupted you said when you have some sort of idea go for it please okay well most marine cloud writing and cloud seating technologies have forecast only on generating the right size of cloud condensation nuclei in the right location at the right time |
| 1:18:12 | but that's only half the problem we the from that that the screenshot i put on that that the paper which i sent you single page paper it seems to say that only about fifteen percent of the world has humidity at fifteen hundred meters cloud-making height uh which is close to saturation in other words 85 percent of the world is not all that useful uh for for for mcb except for for making new cloud although it may be more useful for slightly brightening existing cloud and what i'm saying is that we really need to address that |
| 1:19:06 | that other half of the problem which is how do we increase uh humidity i i don't think we can do it by transpiration from forests and that because the the soils on the world are have been drying out for the past few hundred years so the but the only way i could think of doing it is by by spraying seawater up into the air to humidify it and then to have the ccns kept separate from that humidified water until it gets up to cloud making altitude and then you want to have the ccns coming together with the humidity to form the cloud initially the |
| 1:19:54 | reflective cloud and later on uh precipitation and of course when you get that precipitation you're also releasing that ocean heat out into space so you get a a doubly beneficial effect and i let's throw it open now to discussion whether people agree with me that humidity is the the other half of the problem oh chris please uh yeah uh well i'm not at all sure it is um and i'll tell you why um one there's only a modelling paper suggested you don't need clouds at all to be able to use marine existing clouds |
| 1:20:35 | to be able to use moon drive brightening you can actually generate clouds where there aren't any at all in the first place um but also if you look at the global pictures of all the ship tracks around those cover a hell of a lot more than 15 to the globe of the ocean much more probably i don't know 20 25 or something like that but i guess i don't know the figure but i think if you look at the pacific that's not the case for the pacific well i just north atlantic yes well the total ocean as a whole anyway it's a |
| 1:21:05 | lot more than 15 easily um and so in that case how are they forming if they haven't got those levels of um humidity that you talk about now i know very little about the atmosphere but that just my first thoughts about it i'm just not at all the burning of the fuel produces moisture in the ship's funnels so you're getting that it could be some moisture yeah i'll grant it but anyway i i don't know much about the atmosphere but i'm just i'm skeptical shall we say that the humidity is the |
| 1:21:31 | issue frankly at all [Music] okay thank you chris and brew yeah well i think the interesting thing going on at the moment is i'm reading and seeing articles about the chinese doing a lot of cloud seeding at the moment because they've got massive droughts and their rivers are running dry and i wonder if anybody's gotten a handle on that and whether we can get satellite data and record what's going on and if we can verify that but they may be carrying out some very important experiments as we speak um |
| 1:22:11 | but presumably we should hopefully we'd get it from from papers and from communicating somebody like planet.com who's monitoring the world on a daily basis the the data should be available we should be seeing it but by satellite yeah right from what i've seen of most um cloud seeding efforts they mainly don't succeed yeah the world meteorological organization is still very skeptical about cloud seeding as a lot of people are so it seems to work sometimes but not generally as you said france and you |
| 1:22:51 | must especially our concept of cloud seeding we use the titanium dioxide seeds it's a very brilliant very brilliant particle and it's not only the cloud ceiling it's only the haze produced so you can use it also in dry regions even if you make no clouds there is a rather good effect on the yeah but in this case we're mainly talking about whether the clouds whether the seeding forms clouds not whether it has an albedo effect i think that was the point of service paper i think well i think you you're interested in |
| 1:23:50 | making clouds to increase albedo yeah but the discussion about how weather cloud seeding works which is in the chinese is all about forming clouds for for rain purposes not for albedo purposes okay i mean sometimes cloud seeding means making it rain doesn't it yeah exactly yeah it's using silver iodide or something like that yeah yeah so we get we're talking across purposes here because there's several different things that we should don't necessarily fit all together yeah so we're talking about making clouds and |
| 1:24:20 | we're also talking about destroying clouds to make rain for ourselves um basically controlling as i sit when you have a hygroscopic particle so so2 from ships is highly acidic it makes a hydrochloric acid and it attracts lots of water and so you're going to get clouds and lots of cloud droplets whereas uh just a little piece of dust is not so hygroscopic it's not going to attract as much water so it has to wait until the much much higher humidity until anything really happens until it forms much of a droplet |
| 1:24:57 | that's that that's how i understand it well do you know what the hygroscopic characteristics of dust is uh well it depends on what's in it but um of course that's my point so i think well our dust we have aluminium chloride in it so yeah i know i was speaking just generally yeah you can talk about that the the dust which blows off the north africa out into the mid-atlantic doesn't seem to generally uh nuclear cloud whenever i've seen satellite pictures of it it's largely cloud-free so i i don't |
| 1:25:35 | think that simply having cloud nuclei without humidity will produce cloud yeah but we see it happening from ships all the time the north african dust clouds though are probably rather larger particles i think than the uh sort of particles we've been talking about for clarity um yeah but they should be they should also uh nucleate moisture or rain if they if they are there and there is moisture yeah but they're very but is that because after all if you look at the weather we've had recently we've had |
| 1:26:14 | effectively hot air coming out from more s from north africa which we've had dust at times in it i'm not sure that produce clouds necessarily uh so and also those dust clouds are very dense at times could a cloud even attempt to form when you have a very dense dust cloud yeah it would dissipate and then you'd think it would spread more widely but yes so i what i'm saying is i don't think simply having more uh nuclei there is a is a sufficient condition for getting cloud sure yeah yeah france but |
| 1:26:53 | a north african uh desert dust uh contains silica and iron oxide these are not very uh hygroscopic things no ship flu emissions contain sulfuric acid that's an extremely hygroscopic things and it produces also clouds uh as i would say 50 percent 50 relative humidity possibly makes a class with with as it with this acid i think it needs to be a lot higher than that i think you need to be above 80. |
| 1:27:45 | but surely it attracts every uh the argoscopic sulfuric acid particle attracts humidity and and then down down when you you get less cloud because you've you've removed that humidity okay yeah sorry i was just looking for uh sorry i'm just looking for uh i know i can't see anybody come back please um uh a picture of clouds being made a ridiculous cloudly made by by releasing titanium tetrachloride which is which immediately hydrolyzes um and it's very hydroscopic and we saw you see clouds uh and they did it so this this is so |
| 1:28:35 | this is i'm not sure if this is relevant sorry to the discussion i shouldn't go and look for things when people are talking um uh this was made in the they've been doing this since the first world war they released titanium tetrachloride and it makes a bright white fog and you can't you your enemy can't see what you're doing anymore and there's a picture of an airplane flying and releasing today in chapter coin and you get this sheet of white it's like a white curtain that come that comes down it was doing |
| 1:29:03 | to obscure a ship but what you see at the top so it's you've got a liquid falling down so that's makes this the the curtain i wish i could find i don't have it there um but at the top some of the particles are going to some of the droplets are going to be so small that they're just tiny droplets and you get so you're again and it's immediately going to react with moisture in the air and become titanium oxide which is a particle but whatever whatever it is that happens you see a cloud forming at |
| 1:29:32 | the top above it so you see a curtain falling and then a cloud forming on top so we it seems to me that if you can control the hydroscopicity um of the particles you're making by either including aluminium chloride or not then you know we could do all kinds of experiments that make make clouds or not or the right sort of clouds and and possibly even i i don't know about um seeding clouds to make rain that would be wonderful to be able to do that but i did also see uh some people in san diego saying that they recently did a study and they found |
| 1:30:13 | um that the low-lying clouds tend to be nucleated by biological particles uh sort of bacteria and pollen that sort of stuff and the they call them inps ice nucleating particles were rather higher up and tended to be mineral dust so this is all terribly interesting and you know topic of incense study for me at the moment with our proposals and we're basically looking for people that already know all this and so but i think not so i think we all have kind of similar questions in this group and so if anyone finds anything about |
| 1:30:55 | this then please do send it around i'll be most interested sir grant you've got your hand up yeah clive i i put in chat i linked to uh professor elan corrin at the weizmann institute who i had contact with a few weeks ago and groupers into cloud physics and things of he may have some valuable inputs right i'll look at that and then yeah let's make a quick note elon corrin thank you i've been given a number of names so uh um possibly yeah i'm not sure if that one's might have seen it thank you grant |
| 1:31:34 | that's going to be helpful we've come to the end of our time gentlemen is there anything else to mention that i haven't mentioned there's anything i've missed i don't think i have um i say i'm going to be i've been asked to um talk about our two aerosols uh titanium oxide aerosol and um and this aqua radio aerosol which we haven't even costed that yet and there's so many options so i i've got to do my best oh the h back on thursday so um but uh so i'll be there at that if you want to |
| 1:32:15 | come along and ask questions at that um otherwise uh that's it i'll see you in a couple of weeks and you'll get the the video recording thank you for every everyone uh for attending and for your questions and interaction see you soon thanks live all the best have a good week two weeks thank you you too bye do you want to talk friends do you have something i'm good not really uh |