| (Click on a 'Start Time' to view the video) |
| 00:13 | I like life my friends hi Chris hi Chris and Sev here we are again it comes around so fast isn't it I'm very pleased that you I believe working full-time apply to to do the you've got a very slow connection today Sev it's a great benefit thank you thank you very much yeah I mean I I yes let's see |
| 01:18 | um I better let's get going because it's yeah you're gonna you're saying uh Sev okay agenda um oops okay welcome everybody hi Robert Robert Chris good evening thanks for your uh write-up analysis well it doesn't start just a few thoughts yeah I mean you must have spent some time anyway you're going through it all and thinking through and you know what what are the positions here um okay let's see I think we'll probably hi David |
| 02:23 | from the International Space Station above the clouds yeah very good yeah yeah right sorry I was going to say give me the relative size of the planet behind David he's a long long way out into space yeah a bit further than the city Space Station you said it David well um I think there'll be more people coming along but we can still I I um wanted to suggest something and uh um that was I've got a lot of things I'd like to ask people actually um so that was um yes now I really should have got my email |
| 03:22 | um let's see if I can find it from my email um no just be able to copy it across uh so dated Sunday at 10 34 I think you're looking for okay thank you very much there we go right the role of black carbon thank you very much yep yeah okay so it's quite a lot to read um um and it did it oh well that'll do um yeah so the role of black carbon we think that's playing quite a big role um a potential role of floating habitat and yes um and I last time I wanted to ask you Chris about um |
| 04:24 | I think what do you call it so uh sewage emissions I kind of a nicer way of saying it from from ships yeah human waste or something uh I was um surprised actually to see um there was a helpful email from will Burns you know the the new engineering yeah lawyer guy uh with a link to a paper recent paper from I think his university he works for Colombia um about 60 pages and had a table of what you can and can't put it was very you did you see it Chris no I haven't seen that table actually yeah it serves 60 pages on the law of the sea and oh I |
| 05:08 | think I've seen the an article about the law of the sea but I have no chance to look at it okay it's it's a big read 60 Pages yeah but it looked very helpful if it's all set out very neatly and organized and the paper said that um sewage sludge can be dumped in the sea um at the minute under the London convention and London protocol they can but at the last meeting of those instruments they agreed to take it off uh-huh right uh only last uh October mainly because no no one is dumping sewage sludge you guys remember |
| 05:45 | sewage and switch sludge are two different things yes yes yes uh switch slices after wastewater treatment so it's the solid material left after wastewater treatment exactly yeah yeah and we've been discussing this because people love the idea of whale poo um and um well we think it's you know everybody knows that uh you need nutrients you need macronutrients phosphates um um and that's you know a lot of phosphate in that sludge um and uh but there'd be there's also a lot of other stuff that |
| 06:19 | that comes from in waste water from people's gutters and roofs and things and so some heavy metals and things anyway uh but but it'd be nice if it would if it was possible to if it didn't you know if it did more harm than good uh enough more enough good more good than harm um around the right way um a way of how how different can it be to you know sort of whale poo if it's uh dispersed pulverized in a way and done in a sort of diffuse way uh in the big ocean anyway so we've got all kinds of |
| 06:59 | things to talk about that yeah um uh another thing we're being asked if we can find people so our aerosols people are saying yeah but that's all very well you know you'll remove more than half the uh radiative forcing uh by removing the suit we call them the oxidable superpollutants or methane black carbon um sorry ozone and the Halo alkanes some of the haloalkanes um uh with our people iron salt aerosol and some other aerosol things we've been working with um and uh but people say oh yeah but but |
| 07:41 | it might go up into the stratosphere and we're saying look hygroscopic aerosols nucleate Cloud droplets and they rain out in days or weeks basically up to three weeks I think the average about nine days and so we're looking for for uh people I mean we stand and say that that's the way it works uh other scientists who who can who would willing to stand and say the same thing or something similar um so is anyone so let's just put this do high grosscopic aerosols yeah rained out within uh Within days or weeks |
| 08:32 | and where and how do I know it rains the same amount I probably doesn't rain the same amount in the tropics as the Arctic okay well maybe we might say get snowed out in the Arctic now you might not have the same level of precipitation yeah and it varies okay yeah so I'll leave that in there and where so that's me with a lot of things a lot of my own things anyone else who's got something you'd like to do something we might want to touch on if it's been in the news today is the AR6 synthesis |
| 09:03 | report has been in the news um I'm not sure it is only the summary that's available at the moment I've had a very quick whole thing's been published the whole thing's been published no we could go online if you go on the website only the summary report of the census report is available the full report it says coming soon I'm just looking forward apologies yes yeah agree Clive can I just ask one question yep you called will Burns a geoengineering lawyer and I thought he was a flat out anti-geo engineering lawyer with a very |
| 09:40 | broad definition of Geo engineering am I miss miss uh is that not fair uh I don't think that's fair you know um okay he is a lawyer who's been very interested involved in due engineering amongst other things uh he's generally I would say not very keen on certainly some aspects of it um but um I think he's I don't think he's a flat out proponent by any means at all he's probably more like more likely to be negative than positive I would say in general but but not absolutely not an absolute list so oh no |
| 10:20 | no no because I mean he I think he's involved for example on one of the advisory boards the ocean Vision set up I think the one for running time maybe something like that so he's involved in endure engineering things both in his actual sort of University work and other things but he's by no means a proponent he's more about governance oh yeah that governance his thing as a lawyer definitely right all right well thank you for that clarification I'm glad I asked sure well we we don't have too many people |
| 10:57 | today so we will get more air time we can maybe add my oh yeah consensus thing at the end if there's any time Sev uh um by the way have I I had a chance to work through all the emails that have come through from no I can related things I think I've got about 300 odd I've got to work through so could you actually send me that uh save so I can find it easily uh it'll be uh not now not now just after yeah but there'll be an update which um uh Clive will will show um and and be able to send if we do any |
| 11:40 | work on it yeah yeah yeah it's a Google doc yes okay anyone anything else uh I don't want to hog the space here good morning Brian I think Brian's still waking it hi Brian yes I am still waking up yeah very early in the morning for Brian uh yeah still 7am I think um okay anything else sex actually it's six o'clock okay I think as you're on the west coast is that right of of Australia wow so uh Queensland Queensland yeah uh I feel terrible Brian because uh next week in a fortnight's Time the clocks |
| 12:32 | change and it becomes better yeah but the Xbox change as well I know but in the other direction not here not in Queensland no not in Queensland oh okay so it gets it'll be seven o'clock next week because if you're um the other eastern states are okay Queensland is an outlier okay right so do they go in opposite directions then Queensland no we're just we're just too tropical we just stay on uh gmq plus 10 all the time okay all right all right okay so let's not worry about that too much |
| 13:11 | um okay well um so let's go with this then I think I don't think it doesn't seem to be anything else right the role of black carbon to Arctic warming by Arctic Haze the additional accelerated ice melts by its snow and ice discoloration and its potential removal near its source with iron salt aerosol well that's what Franz and I have been looking at and uh working on uh We've also been uh looking at the way that um that because black carbon it can be characterized it can consists of soot and Char particles some friends |
| 13:58 | will correct me if I'm getting into this wrong which a little bit like activated carbon are extremely efficient at absorbing other chemicals especially what we call lipophile chemicals in other words sort of um hydrophobic chemicals which include halogenated chemicals so actual halogen molecules bromine chlorine iodine and um so chloro Halo methyl halides so chloromethane dichloromethazole there's a whole load of them um and activated carbon can absorb per unit of volume 4 000 times as much it'll be an equilibrium with it with the |
| 14:49 | air when it contains four thousand times as much material this halogenated materials than what then the density in the air of hydrated materials and that's the only black carbon is the the main aerosol that actually drift does drift up into the stratosphere because it gets heated by the sun it's what I've called a sort of mini or a micro thermal around a particle that heats up the air and goes up and uh Finds Its way into the stratosphere and because the stratosphere is that much uh the air is that much thinner |
| 15:28 | the equilibrium then changes the particle loses a lot of what it's been what it has absorbed to be an equilibrium with much thinner app so it's going to release a lot of this stuff into the stratosphere so that's our hypothesis we think that's happening so I think it's useful to remove black carbon aerosol from the air and iron salt aerosol is the ideal way of doing that we have come up with other others we think our the original iron aerosol is the best for that because iron undergoes a what's called a Fenton |
| 16:00 | reaction that oxidizes the iron that the particle the black carbon particle if I use franz's language decorating it with oh radicals that makes it hydrophilic so it rains out much quicker and another thing about black carbon aerosol is uh in in the stratosphere we know about the Brewer Dobson circulation that drives them to the polar regions so the anti you know the Antarctic and we're worried about the Arctic because it's four times warming and uh two weeks ago we were talking about the um incidents of the the angle of the sun |
| 16:39 | over um the slant angle that gives it a thick atmosphere to before it reaches the surface so if you have lots of black carbon coming down into the stratus into the troposphere in the Arctic region uh you get this Arctic Haze and a lot of warming there of the air and then of course it eventually precipitates out because it doesn't oxidize in in the air naturally it takes longer um and uh comes down in presumably snow what precipitates out onto the snow as the snow melts you've got this black stuff in it so it discolors the snow and |
| 17:15 | we know that snow is melting faster during the summertime so we think it's be rather a good idea if uh we could be used close to these uh sources of black carbon you know industrial areas um over the ocean not too close uh in remote areas of of ocean uh to remove it from the air so it just rains out into the ocean instead of finding its way into the stratosphere and so forth any comments one comment for me the temperature goes up to 53 degrees Celsius of these carbon particles they go up is this in the trouble yes |
| 18:02 | yes and therefore they they move up so fast and another thing not only iron I found out meanwhile which makes the fat reaction but uh the graphene you know a suit is made of graphene plates and graphene Plus a titanium Acts at least as good as iron plus plus graphene the oxidation the fin reaction and so on because they are both additional activated by sunshine okay and even a suit |
| 19:06 | the particles can accelerate this activity of iron this photolithic activity of our and also from titanium so both are very good and act together much better than each alone they oxidize each other okay so a mixture of titanium nine is better than just iron alone or titanium yes yes okay and I've had it's used for instance for uh West uh what a cleaning answer mm-hmm okay all right I've got my own question but let's look at the hands up uh thank you friends uh Sev please yeah um the concentration of Isa uh likely to |
| 20:02 | be so thin that I can see no good reason why Isis should not be uh released upwind of cities such as New Delhi where they burn all the all the uh the crop waste and and create a lot of these black colored particles and that should indeed clean a lot of new delhi's air rather than do to do harm so I think you can do it pretty much anywhere not not just at sea okay thank you that's interesting if iron if iron three chloride is corrosive to metal and exhaust systems then would it be corrosive to lungs as well |
| 20:54 | friends surely uh iron streak chloride is is acidic and it's corrosive but the amounts you use it are extremely extremely low and this is in the in the region you know where uh you you oxidize for instance the material safariately in the ocean and produce sulfuric acid from it which pH of the particles lower than o and it doesn't corrode lower than zero point two yeah can we point to a harmonic uh so iron III chloride at which biology is apprecially unaffected um you know below a certain concentration is there a safe level of iron three |
| 21:55 | colloid rents for human breathing out there I would I would prefer in in near human uh populated zones populated lands uh titanium instead of instead of iron I would agree there you go who's next Brian it's well documented the PPM 2.5 has certain carcinogenic and teratogenic perhaps I may be wrong effects on the lungs uh and I'm just wondering is the size range of the titanium below the PPM 2. |
| 22:49 | 5 level where there is potentially these problems with with lung tissue yeah it would be below 2.5 microns would be a hundred we're aiming for the ocean 100 nanometers but we we have it together with the silicon and aluminum which would produce a kind of gel as soon as they come in onto a wet surface with inhalation into the lungs you yeah yeah sorry David Let Brian finish his thing and then it'll be you yeah yeah I'll just say that silicosis of the lungs as well established uh from the from fine particles that comprise silicon so I think it's something we |
| 23:44 | really need to research before we're using this on land um because there are people almost everywhere and I can see over the ocean you know doing this in a controlled way uh we're Downstream you don't have appreciable uh life but um you know they're whales out there too so I think we have to look at all of it I mean but the the actual um Isis would actually be reducing the black carbon and the other uh particles so even if it did have some negative effect it might have a much greater positive effect |
| 24:19 | okay yes you're referring to uh okay yeah let's use that um I mean there are trade-offs I think we just need to make it you know ensure that side effects aren't too damaging for life and Wildlife on the planet absolutely yeah yeah David uh Chris was ahead of me I'm sorry Chris so let's let's say Chris then yeah yeah okay um just one thing I've just had a quick look online and there is a an Airborne exposure limit for human health being set of one milligram per cubic meter averaged over a 10 hour work shift so |
| 24:59 | that's a workplace exposure limit um which gives you some Clues to you could work on to see what would be acceptable perhaps for ferric chloride um but besides that the other thing I was going to raise originally was um your description of the Fenton reaction didn't quite meet with my understanding and I had some dealings with this many years ago when we were looking at um and in some Industrial Waste and means to actually um treat them and the Fenton reaction was one that was um thought to be quite potentially suitable particularly it was |
| 25:34 | actually accentuated by UV light which is of course of interest if you're doing things in the atmosphere but the fence and reactions I understand is a reaction between iron chloride and hydrogen peroxide that is the Fenton reaction yeah I think yes yeah I didn't hear that mentioned uh specifically in in your description but maybe you've missed it out I don't know I I didn't mention it but I probably should have done I think hydrogen peroxide actually forms in clouds yeah yeah so as long as there's |
| 26:00 | hydrogen peroxide there then you can get that reaction and the UV does actually to accentuate as I remember my long long time ago I think 25 years ago yes got a good memory because I think friends you call that the photo Fenton reaction event and reaction acts always with H2O2 and H2O2 is in the in the atmosphere and you produce hydroxide radicals then react with the uh some things that you're interested in so it's a hydroxyl radical sir that are doing the uh the business as it were that's right yeah |
| 26:39 | rather than chlorine atoms or chlorine radicals yeah and H2O2 being hydrogen peroxide yeah that thanks David I just lowered my end I mean oh yeah the general the general question is you'd have to do more of a study I think in general that breathing in corrosives and flocculants is not the kind of thing you want to have in your lungs or gels um they'll collect in the bottom of your lung and that's pretty unpleasant all right but uh we could do it you know we can do a study and worry about that you |
| 27:11 | know that's the thing to look for and just do a study so I don't need to talk about that anymore okay thanks I was going to say that a milligram per meter squared is is much more than I think we'd uh sorry meter cubed yeah peanut volume yeah um is is much more than we envisage but they're nanoparticles as well so that always that's right excitement yeah that's right but it but in the water they flocculate to become clay mineral and they just stick to it something else so that you you the the nanoparticle |
| 27:44 | problem goes away as soon as they're in the water are quite humid yeah yeah that's right so so that's what up to now we've said in the in the remote ocean um so that's right so a study um Brian yes and can someone help me reconcile these three facts uh we know that aerosols have are cooling The Atmosphere by approximately half a degree celsius the claim is made that black carbon aerosols warm the atmosphere so apparently uh all aerosols are not equal uh how do we distinguish between these |
| 28:24 | and what's really going on is that in altitude dependent how do we reconcile an aerosol is not an aerosol or is it at all created equal uh aerosols there's all kinds of uh aerosols atmospheric aerosols there's all kinds so over the oceans I understand it's mainly sulfuric acid aerosol which comes from us for friends we're saying um dummy Del sulfide um emissions from call it that for now from um phytoplankton which oxidize in the air to form sulfuric acid that's mainly the marine environment |
| 29:01 | um over um over land you have lots of um emissions of you could call it essential oils oils from Plants um uh trying to think what's what's left that um type pain is it something like um so Furs pine trees yeah and this stuff so all kinds of things so you've got dust you've got chemicals and a lot of these chemicals they react slowly in the atmosphere to become particles in in clouds and they become solid so these aerosols the ones that are not black carbon nuclear Cloud droplets which are reflective |
| 29:47 | um it's just a black carbon aerosol particles that don't nucleate Cloud droplets because they're hydrophobic and so they just absorb heat they warm the air very good that's helpful and so as black carbon current fossil fuel combustion thing another kind of bio feel I don't know about primarily certainly fossil fuel uh combustion is is but I think that's mainly people call that brown carbon so it's um uh un uh burnt Diesel and stuff like that um whereas soot is wildfires um coal-fired Power stations |
| 30:31 | any uh any more to say about it than that friends yes no no yes but uh they they need about a week until they get a Surface oxidized and get a little bit uh of uh hydrophilic and so from that perspective it sounds as though fossil fuels are not adding appreciably to the black carbon problem that is coming from other sources other than quo it sounds like maybe call it does contribute to it coal um as you're saying agricultural waste burning for and wild wildfires of course um every time I see a picture of an |
| 31:20 | ammunition dump going up up in um Ukraine and all that black smoke coming off so I wonder how much or or an oil refinery getting blown up uh I wonder how much burning from the oil industry yeah yeah you see the flame but above that there's coming off it doesn't burn very well yeah yeah Diesel and wildfires both produce blood carbon they do okay and yet the net effect of all our fossil particulates is a cooling effect which is interesting because there's a lot of sulfur comes off got it yeah like yeah yeah |
| 32:03 | uh okay yeah I was gonna say France we say that um that uh I don't think this is not the right place to ask uh Andre chloride gets rained out so it doesn't go into the stratosphere but black carbon we're saying does go into the stratosphere because I as as I told before yeah yeah it gets warmed up to 53 yeah degrees Celsius and uh so it goes up and down right and that's a well uh reference yeah great okay and we've also discussed um black carbon in ship flus where they have scrubbers uh and which is sort of |
| 32:51 | sprayed sea water and they spray sea water into the hot gases as they go up in the flu but you were saying that the sea water the salts the salty water um doesn't really get absorbed into the background because it's hydrophilic hydrophobic rather I I thought it would not but the most of it say three third of it is washed out but they wash it into the sea yeah okay but I don't think so they uh put it in a tank or so right right but they it depends on what scrubbing system you have some of them are not discharging |
| 33:34 | they some of them draw systems that have a solid waste that they can go back to shore so you can't just assume it's all going back in the sea most of the problem with um scrubbing emissions currently which are done for Sox reasons not any other reasons um the main problem there is actually pahs in the water not black carbon per se right so they have toxicity this is the poly uh uh poly aromatic hydrocarbons this is not this is not the forever chemicals though this is just no it's not pizza no yeah just toxic stuff yeah |
| 34:10 | the fresh suit it collects at the surface of the sea uh there is these uh layer of a thin uh organic theorem which is produced by by the life at the Surface by the life yeah City surface sea surface micro layer which is about something like 50 microns thick yeah yeah so sorry and this it gives a a swiftness a fresh fruit which which is washed out is a hydrophobic and it it gathers in this surface layout right so for the sea is not so good that it is washed into the sea right and you say washed into the sea is is this the ones that discharge it or is |
| 35:08 | this the black soot that gets wet and then just falls down onto the ocean there's a black suit which we that comes from everywhere else coal-fired power stations and wildfires no no it's a it's a suit or also from the ships yeah when when they wash wash the flue gas out they uh put out the the the washing the right so that's sulfuric acid and and the they pump out the dirty water yeah I think you're a little unclear about the process for this washing and I've been involved in it through my working |
| 35:51 | Gazette it is not simply washing this flue gas with sea water and discharging it that is not the process um they use other chemicals to trap particularly the Sox's that's the main target of the current system and there are so they precipitate these materials out so there's solid waste produced in most of the systems some of them are hybrid systems sometimes they can be completely contained some of them do have a discharge as well but that is the result of the um the process that's used not just |
| 36:22 | simply washing with sea water in fact I don't think they use sea water actually to wash the uh scrubbing process as far as I'm aware at the moment anyway so they need to be a little bit careful about assuming how that process works because I don't think you've got a proper understanding of it but they must use an alkaline solution I'm sure I don't know the detail but I think yeah probably do yeah but they they actually bring chemicals on board to use that and they recycle some of the |
| 36:51 | water I assume in as part of the process after having taken the solid material out I only saw some some diagrams and these diagrams told me most of the suit is washed out also say well all the studies I've seen never mentioned black carbon in the in the actual um what comes out they've mentioned other chemicals like ph's and they can talk about pH and other physical constituents as well and I don't remember reading about black carbon I looked from the side of through dancehall these references yeah okay well I'll |
| 37:34 | look back at my exam reports to have a look again and see can these scrubbers be selectively turned on and off uh yep okay that's helpful in case we need something in the mid-ocean at some point the other thing I was going to say is um there was a unep report about black carbon and other short-lived climate um substances published a few years ago I'll see if I can find it because that might have some useful information in it and there is that I have said I've come across another one which was particularly looking at um black carbon |
| 38:14 | and stratospheric ozone for example unit published that about 10 years ago oh what happens with ozone uh I can't remember because I haven't had a chance to look at the report but I've I've got a copy of it myself on my in my on my computer I'm good I was just reading in the Caldera paper in climate dynamics that stratospheric black carbon ends up calling the Earth by um reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the surface and then there it absorbs sunlight in the stratosphere and then re-radiates it into space |
| 38:51 | that's a cooling effect yeah so the the location of black carbon in the atmosphere matters in terms of altitude yeah absolutely yeah yeah um and as far as we're concerned by releasing halogens into the stratosphere I mean they are especially bromine and iodine an order of magnitude more efficient at destroying ozone than chlorine is in the stratosphere um okay yeah I was um maybe we'll move on I've got specific questions I'll ask friends another time um anything else on that all right so um with some of us again again me and |
| 39:44 | friends and a few others um have been talking about floating and we know that you obviously this is a big part of your um project Brian as well floating habitat uh to uh to produce fast-sinking particles into the ocean maybe we've already discussed all this um we've been um thinking about um same sort of idea as you Brian but some smaller uh in the open ocean we've been thinking of using little pieces uh uh mimicking pumice pumice stone that that uh the pumice usually sinks within a few months because it becomes |
| 40:34 | waterlogged uh but there's a building material called foam glass that's actually made from silica and it's full of uh you know little cells that'll pause that um that are so-called closed which means it doesn't leak and so it just is buoyant it's very buoyant stuff and so we've we've so this is this is one thing I'm quite keen on uh so something like 10 centimeters wide so it's not a hazard to shipping um and kind of have a little bit of phosphate don't try and pump as much |
| 41:10 | phosphate in as possible and we can also make it dissolve away gradually so it doesn't last forever it dissolves its nutrients into the ocean but the main thing is it's a habitat for shellfish you know Barnacles all kinds of things um and also kelp rafting what we thought could happen with this thing uh these things is first of all if they're put in a place where there's some other Nutri who knows somebody else putting like serves boy and flakes that it provides a place for the larger organisms to grow |
| 41:43 | um providing food for foraging fish you've got bits of shell falling off or they just fall off anyway or it gets so heavy that it starts to sink if it's got some kelp on it as it begins to drag the kelp down the kelp bladders uh get compressed and so before long it's sinking pretty fast and it finds its way all the way to the bottom uh where everything dies and falls off or gets eaten by worms or something at the bottom and then it flows up again it's and starts again any any thoughts yes uh some interesting questions there when |
| 42:23 | the when the kelp and other seaweeds by the by the time they reach 100 meters depth uh they the pneumaticists have collapsed and they will sink um usually the the change in ballast of such rafts comes from calcifiers like briasons that increase the density now you have to be a little careful because by producing solid calcium carbonate uh you are reducing the amount of calcium bicarbonate that's dissolved in the seawater and so in a sense you're leaving one carbonate ion unresolved in the surface ocean and that would tend to |
| 43:04 | increase ocean acidity so you have to be that effect is compensated by any uh carbon fixation that occurs in the organisms so you have to weigh that product primary productivity versus the respiration and the calcification uh to get a net life cycle analysis for this I recommend having a program senescence for these particles because otherwise it'll end up like sargassum on the beach of some distant Shore and you'll be liable for whatever Beach cleanup is involved which comprises around 10 million tons when it |
| 43:38 | comes to the existing sargassum pool per year plus or minus a factor of two or three so I it's much better to have these uh sink after a certain time scale as long as they're not otherwise polluting the ocean uh and so you know the pumice stone concept is is attractive from that perspective so that it sinks halfway across the ocean rather than ending up on some distant Shore thank you yeah Chris I was going to say this concept is very it has echoes of what running tide are proposing for their sinking seaweed it's very uh there's a |
| 44:13 | lot of similarity there they are producing some quite small boys of the order of about six to nine inches in diameter I think from the pictures I've seen which are made of um last I heard at least of some sort of wood waste which they also coat with some carbonate material which they hope will help the alkalinity of the ocean and then they put the um spores or the initial little growing bits of kelp on it which again as you've described will think when the kelp that's growing on it is sufficient |
| 44:46 | to overcome the buoyancy of the little boy and as you said once they fall to the seabed and um the kelp gets degraded those boys presumably will be popping up again at some point yeah and as running tires proposals probably entertain the possibility of millions of these um they're probably going to wash out on somebody's sure in numbers at times because I assume that they'll be directed by the prevailing currents to particular spots rather than generally spread everywhere so um yes there could be some legal action from some people |
| 45:20 | for cleanup I should guess as Brian suggested yeah yeah I've been presuming that it was a one-way trip for their buoys um but I could be wrong about that well I think the thing is Brian they're using wood waste and given it's this is terrestrial stuff with a lot of cellulose in it I don't imagine it's going to degrade very fast it may not I just recall seeing some cellulose once it gets to a depth uh that it becomes perhaps denser than water but a lot depends on the educator structure yeah density change could |
| 45:51 | could affect you I agree okay particularly Under Pressure yeah yeah yep I think you find that your foam silica when it goes into deep water would be compressed and shattered so you wouldn't get it rising up again well one once even a small bubble or a hollow bar a bubble of silica got below a couple of thousand meters I think the pressure would just crush it yeah we do have some examples of this uh syntactic foam is stable down to hundreds if not thousands of meters yes and that's generally designed engineered glass |
| 46:33 | microspheres which you can purchase and mix in with your Matrix to produce a syntactic foam that remains buoyant but that is a engineered product that's not sort of really something you want to throw away particularly it's probably quite costly oh it's not too bad I mean uh Hollow glass microspheres are being proposed by uh oh let's see uh yeah yeah it's a it's a moderately priced product and you can get it mono dispersed uh so you can choose different sizes um and we've considered it for using |
| 47:09 | syntactic foam floats uh so it's it's doable um I I think it may be somewhat different than uh just random uh silicon Foams which I expect would be weak and would you know maybe desirably uh you know it would collapse after a certain pressure um is highly desirable and easier go ahead friends it depends it depends on the on the poor structure and on the war thickness between the paws and you can make these from in a in a way uh you can make open poor Foams and you can make absolutely close performs but that's no problem |
| 48:01 | let's say make question of making the pause so small and the walls a little bit thicker you don't need so extreme small uh they they would uh live in the Thousand meter without cracking and they're both the 5 000 meters yeah yeah that's immensely high pressure yeah isn't it yeah but the smaller you go the stronger it is uh just keep in mind that glass tends to be hydrophilic so it would tend to you have to balance that against other surface tension effects you know as a uh on the uh a small time down there until the |
| 48:52 | organic things are rotten then they come up again so maybe a month or so then they come come back yeah it spends most of its time at the surface yeah you can you also can make them them bigger and so and uh put them on a on a on an anchor and then they can't escape they can go up and down but they can't escape yeah so that's that's that's one um of our ideas another idea is much bigger things on on the end of ropes um with foam glass and uh activated carbon to make Nitric and other things to make uh the other |
| 49:45 | nutrients no yeah yes yeah yes so how does activated carbon magnitude that's interesting is it a a biologic process yes yeah this doesn't happen in water or in air you know uh activated carbon it takes up the organic come from the sea surface and when it is uh it absorbs and then the microbes eat them and so the the carbon pieces become anaerobic because they are covered by by these beer films correct and then you get a little bit ammonia and the ammonia makes nitrate when it comes out |
| 50:51 | so you have a defeat 40. okay for the next so that makes sense all right so now because a lot of organisms can use ammonia or nitrate yeah um we're not exactly uh converting dinitrogen into available nitrate it's it's manipulating the organic pool of nitrogen uh and either forming nitrate or or something else okay that's helpful I was thinking it was a nitrogen fixer which would be a very different there are diazotrophs in the oceans you know they require specialized conditions the these sediments anaerobic sediments |
| 51:36 | where you have anaerobic sediments they produce lots of uh nutrition a phosphate the iron what what else you want I agree and you know I think it's helpful to track the amount of nitrogen fixation that we can get in the ocean since nitrogen is a a bioavailable nitrogen is a limiting nutrient for most macro algae production and perhaps in microalgae as well and so we do rely on diasotrophs and other biological mechanisms to fix nitrogen as distinct from just converting the various biologically available forms of nitrogen |
| 52:18 | from ammonia to nitrate Etc yeah I hadn't but been aware of that friends so the this is just converting existing presumably sort of protein material is it or something it's not it's not actually fixing nitrogen from the air to make nitrate no no it's just making it available taking it from somewhere else and nitrate is in the water also a and to enter dinitrogen is is also in the water and uh the the the diazotrophs uh the nitrogen fixing microalgae um and and bacteria actually uh do manage to create a somewhat anaerobic |
| 53:05 | environment within their cell walls and manage to fix nitrogen from dinitrogen there's a half a dozen species or more that have been studied yeah now near the coasts there was a the much life you see the micro algae and and all these things it comes only from you know the the the waves the surf produces a lot of micro uh flower from the from the minerals and also the Most Coast near sediments are anaerobic so you have this rich life in the coast and if we can bring this rich life and and this mechanisms from the coast into the deep sea |
| 54:08 | it would agree in the sea the greens yes that's a great idea I think there's a key aspect of this and that is those coastlines are also primary regions of bathymetric upwelling that occurs due to boundary currents and these upwellings deliver one primary macronutrient and that is uh biologically available nitrogen and many of these ecosystems including kelp forests and to some extent microalgae tend to be nitrate limited occasionally there's an ultimate phosphate limitation that's depending on which C you're in |
| 54:42 | but for example in the Pacific Ocean there's an overabundance of phosphate from the biologic red field ratio and so nitrogen is consumed first and you can track the nitrogen and the phosphorus and determine a lot of that primary productivity as a result so I still encourage effectively restoring natural upwelling or otherwise using deep cycling to bring nitrogen phosphate to the surface even in the open ocean and either of those mechanisms should help to restore productivity in the subtropical and tropical Pacific regions |
| 55:18 | which have become larger in recent years due to global warming yeah and and this phosphate you can bring in if you if you put these for instance a great containing a phosphate uh uh like like simple uh iron melter slag for instance it smells just like yeah yes I think that's why you just want to avoid the eutrophic regions of the ocean like the dead zone of uh of the Gulf of Mexico but um yeah I'd say the vast majority of the ocean is limited in nitrate and phosphate and I would just encourage us to explore the |
| 56:04 | message mesopelagic sources of nitrate and phosphate which have Millennia worth of nitrogen and phosphate presently in their organization in their in their Waters and furthermore there's a an additional source of nitrogen phosphate from the deeper zones that was recently recently described it turns out internal waves that can approach 500 meters in height have been shown to produce enough pictinal mixing particularly in the Atlantic to have significant effects on vertical mixing that occurs in these in these water layers so um you know when |
| 56:44 | we can let's find the leftover amounts of of macronutrients and micronutrients and the ocean is relatively replete in most of those micronutrients so what extent do you think we if there's lots of little things mimicking pumice floating about in in the Deep you know on the surface of the deep ocean um that and they've got things growing on them to what extent do you think that that uh again if the if the ocean's protected from just constant fishing if it's allowed to grow back to what extent |
| 57:19 | do you think that there would be how much vertical um upwelling would there be from Simply from the the life that that comes up and down and and feeds off these things and then kick-starts the whole process again small effect uh at this at the smallest scale there are organisms such as salps that are deal migrators and uh every day go up and down several hundred meters one thing they do is they eat plankton at night uh near the surface and during the day they they sink down and six hours later poop out a fecal pellet that |
| 57:54 | drops very quickly to the deep sea so there is a form of carbon export that occurs through such operations um they may actually be reducing the amount of nutrients that are available at the surface because it's known that a a healthy herd of salps can draw down the uh Plankton concentration by a factor of four in one night uh so it's really surprising uh how quickly they can eat a surface layer of a plankton or a mixed layer of Plankton so they're quite active they're probably I wouldn't be surprised if the salp said |
| 58:32 | greater biomass than quails and other megafauna that said the micronutrient effects of whale poop could be very significant particularly in the Southern Ocean by some estimates there were hundreds of times more whales pre-industrially than there are today those whales spent half their year in the Southern Ocean and I believe that the whale poop was a store of biogenic iron which was quickly adopted by algae and quickly adopted by Krill and thus the uh the biological stores of iron could have been orders of magnitude greater than |
| 59:08 | they are today simply by the fact that we had hundreds of a factor of 100 more whales producing a lot more whale poop and maintaining of iron in a biological Reservoir in the Southern Ocean yeah thank you yeah so to what extent do you think because Wales are going to take a long time to grow back if they're allowed to and and the others you know dolphins and everything else but to what extent do you think fish uh I mean I don't know what types there's all kinds of fish in in the ocean uh feeding on salp salps and doing their |
| 59:47 | own poops at the surface does or does that sink down fast some some of it like whale poop spreads it doesn't really sink and I think sharks certainly some sharks but to what extent do is other light would other life you know especially life that that's that feeds uh hundreds of meters down and then pooped at the surface to what extent do you think that that that uh allowing the uh whole ecosystems to to regenerate to what extent do you think that is self-sustaining or does it does it really rely mostly on up what you know |
| 1:00:20 | as you're saying natural light Welling is is Currents coming up to up to up against continents to to what extent do you think the biology can do it yeah there are multiple effects I mean whales uh there are some whales that eat giant squid at Great depth and then poop on the surface or anywhere else uh and so um there it certainly works both directions and that does require let's say more in-depth analysis um that said you can find effects on both sides generally speaking life uh you know the diversity of Life In an |
| 1:00:54 | ecosystem is a measure of the resilience of that ecosystem so you end up uh by increasing diversity of an ecosystem you'll oftentimes increase the um the con let's say the sphere of stability uh to to which the the ecosystem can adapt before collapsing and so that's actually a beneficial increase in the guard rails so to speak but uh fundamentally um I would say that uh Humanity has done a pretty good job of decimating uh marine ecosystems and thus we're seeing a lot fewer ecosystem Services than we |
| 1:01:30 | may have pre-industrially and thus as the planet's thermostat we may need to consider um you know the loss of iron reservoirs and biogenic in areas like the Southern Ocean due to these these biological ecosystem effects thank you thank you um Chris sorry um I was uh I'll hang fire a minute I was just trying to think of something okay uh Sev then please yeah most of the marine species which come up to feed at night um this is a cruel and bristle mouth and Latin fish Etc actually eat at night and then they defecate Down Deeper so it's |
| 1:02:13 | the reverse effect to what whales do correct and those pillows tend to sink yeah I was going to say Clive um you talked about ordinary fish pooping and so on in the surface yeah that's just what they do is part of the the normal um biological pump mechanism in that probably um 80 or so of that is recycled in the surface waters uh only maybe 10 to 20 will get down out of the mixed layer and a lot more of that will be recycled again and re-mineralized before it gets to a thousand meters so you get quite a small amount from that natural process |
| 1:02:53 | that gets down into anywhere near the deep sea bed yeah yeah in terms of a carbon export alternative carbon export yeah so we know from all the day all the experiences we've done over decades and maybe even centuries the vast amount of material is recycled in the surface zone or you know edio percent of it that's correct and I'll just say that macroalgae is somewhat the exception in this case because with a cellulosic exterior and hemicellulosic exterior and a sink rate of 800 to 4 000 meters per |
| 1:03:24 | day it's just a matter of hours or days till the seaweed reaches the Abyssal seafar and so it sinks much much faster than people pellets yeah by the way Brian is there any updates on the soil code natural amount of stuff that's supposed to be sinking because the ocean's 2050 project was supposed to be coming up with some natural much more hard data about the natural sort of losses that get into deep sea or it gets sequestered anyway in deep not quite as a deep sediments yes there's been a paper I believe that |
| 1:03:59 | Carlos Duarte is a co-author in the last six to nine months that articulated roughly 0.7 pentagrams of carbon per year uh not carbon dioxide that I believe is considered to be a net export from natural occurring seaweed Forest globally 0.7 what teragrams pedigrams of carbon per year gigatons then same thing yes sorry 0. |
| 1:04:28 | 7 gigatons of carbon times 3.8 gives you maybe three two or three um gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent export through natural mechanisms which is encouraging I think you know it indicates that forests seaweed forests have a a role to play as a climate wedge and it's our goal over a dozen years if we're really ambitious to set an audacious goal of tripling in the area under Deep Water Irrigation each year for the next Dozen Years which could lead to a climate wedge being documented in the mid-2030s climate wedge |
| 1:05:10 | yeah that's defined by Princeton University um a couple of professors there yes that's it um it basically described how we need what is it a couple dozen climate wedges to get us I think the original one had about 10. yeah let's just call it a dozen climate wedges to get us uh on the land and the Sea uh to to some point of equilibrium if not carbon drawdown once we achieve let's say Net Zero in our our industry we could be drawing down say um up to 10 gigatons of um carbon per per year 10 climate wedges you get tons of carbon |
| 1:05:54 | which is yeah each climate wedge is considered to be roughly a gigaton and uh that's what we're we'd like to get uh you know offshore seaweed mariculture and deep water irrigation on the map with a climate wedge over the next decade and a half yeah great and the climate wage is like a sector from a pie diagram isn't it so that you you have enough wedges and you've got you've got the hole there and uh remember when they were talking about this it was a giganton of carbon yeah this is 3.6 gigatons of Casio too |
| 1:06:27 | yeah yeah I'm well aware of that so yep one gigaton of carbon is uh that's right so 10 wedges is equal to about roughly equal to human emissions because human emission is about 40 gigatons as far as I know and so that's right and the emphasis here is uh we certainly need to reduce emissions we need this would be in the removal category and the wedge actually comes from a Time series uh plot where you're looking at Carbon over time and you want to use these wedges to achieve drawdown uh and and actually get |
| 1:07:01 | substantial drawn up and uh so I think you add up 10 wedges and you form a negative slope to your carbon trajectory in the atmosphere and that's where the term wedge may come from the idea is that over time you increase the magnitude to build a wedge that you know let's say it's a gigaton by 2050. |
| 1:07:20 | yeah okay I'd just like to go back to what you were saying before Brian about uh sinking carbonate as as as I understand it from France from many conversations over quite a while now uh the the reaction the photosynthesis reaction that fixes bicarbonate makes it into organic carbon uh raises pH and making carbonate lowers pH so correct so they and so cognitive 4 does both so it kind of manages its own pH uh phytoplankton that don't build a shell they just raise the ph making it easier for Shell building uh organisms to build |
| 1:08:06 | shells so as I see it the thing just you don't the thing doesn't need to be managed it's been managing itself it's been managing its own pH at the surface at least um for you know presumably billions of years um I don't I don't know but we could likely you know hundreds of millions of years um and uh and so what's what's the point here um that uh the the problem is the lack of nutrition this is the problem that and this is the whole thing about your upwelling um that that and that now we've got the |
| 1:08:43 | warming it's the Strat that the surface is stratified so there's less flow of nutrients to the surface and so that so that's our unders that's our kind of hypothesis and any friends you know it makes sense to me that lack of nutrients means you the phytoplankton simply can't be there to to raise the pH of the ocean does this sound credible is it I I know this is a long-standing conversation uh we've had with you um Chris Yeah a different point um yeah the point is while pH in phytoplankton blooms and so |
| 1:09:13 | on goes up increases during the day it goes down again in the night when they respire yeah so it's a it isn't there isn't it should be net imbalance in fact so it's a process that's good to and fro over at the 24-hour cycle yeah right it's important to understand that the net respiration tends to be smaller than the net photosynthesis and that there is an export and the exported uh carbohydrate to the extent that it sinks into Abyssal Waters at depths of one thousand to well it sinks and it's usually eaten by |
| 1:09:53 | microfauna heterotrophs and uh and macro fauna it's respired into carbon dioxide at depth and that also produces carbonic acid and that selectively actually finds a calcium carbonate molecule that is in the sediment and actually dissolves and forms bicarbonate at depth And So It produced that this process of effectively um you know dissolving calcium carbonate at a depth of 1000 to from one thousand to thirty five hundred meters is a significant effect that really buffers and balances the uh then that uh |
| 1:10:34 | carbonate then that carbon and then that uh um uh total pH uh in in the ocean so this is a very beneficial effect where there's replete levels of calcium carbonate and sediments at these depths and thus it's a very effective way of getting ocean instead of acidity out of the surface ocean and into the middle and deep ocean where it's nicely buffered by the existing calcium carbonate sediments but don't forget that once you get below the carbon compensation depth and then you do have no carbonate sediment in deep really |
| 1:11:05 | deep sediments because it's all dissolved uh that's why it's limited to a few thousand meters depth but that's a very practical range of depths in the ocean so there are some very nice benefits that occur in these are some deaths that we should try to maximize yeah but but nevertheless despite that the pH in those Waters the mid to deep depths is higher than it is in this it's lower sorry more acidic than it is in the surface waters but uh yeah there's certainly there's more carbon I I just wonder at the |
| 1:11:36 | intermediate depth if you're getting um I mean you get a significant amount of calcium carbonate compensation and buffering um friends you might I think if we look into the geological past we see ocean ocean produced lots of carbonate sediments and they they mantle produced a lot of fear too and all CO2 which had been produced went through the ocean and uh was uh sedimented and letting it goes to a limestone and so on dark and and thermite and so you can see the ocean permanently produces a solid carbonate and is not in |
| 1:12:44 | a in a equilibrium that which you can take yep dick Feynman once said there's there's plenty of room at the bottom he was applying it to small machines but we can apply it to the ocean and since the ocean is holding 45 times as much carbon as the entire atmosphere today uh ensuring a healthy biological pump that can safely uh return uh so much of the uh some sort of the fossil carbon back into the middle and deep sea would be a very effective approach to uh you know to to uh to to have sensory scale if not |
| 1:13:21 | Millennium scale sequestration of carbon with potential buffering by the calcium carbonate sediments yeah yeah thank you very much everyone for that uh okay so what else have we got here uh oh yes so human waste from ships uh it really just that was a question I wanted to ask last time uh Chris is it allowed what do you think about it the one of the annexes of the marpole convention which is the marine pollution convention which was done in two phases in 73 and 78 um deals with uh sewage discharges and what has to happen in terms of treatment |
| 1:14:10 | um I don't know the full ins and outs or it's not something I've ever had to deal with but I know that there are um limits on what you can do certainly uh how close to shore I think there's a limit I can't remember what the figure is 100 miles or something um where you are more restricted than you are in deeper waters but I think most ships need some type of treatment mechanism as far as I'm aware um rather Annex I'll have to look at the annex to actually find out exactly what it is but it's not something I've Ever |
| 1:14:43 | Needed to look into but I'm aware that it's there to give one of six one of six annexes to that convention others cover things like air pollution uh and stuff like that hmm yeah because it strikes me that if uh you know rather than sort of spend a lot of money trying to simulate you know make some sort of artificial whale poop why not allow uh these big Cruisers that have got thousands of holiday makers on them uh not near the coast not near the coast yeah yeah but there's a very big butt there yeah |
| 1:15:18 | um cruise ships have actually probably the most sophisticated waste treatment facilities of any ships um and the point you've got to remember is these cruise ships have all sorts of other things going into that waste tonight than just um sewage um effectively it's not too dissimilar to what the sewage Works would have on land where you have Industrial Waste and things going into it as well so for example cruise ships have photographic laboratories on them which that material might be going in and that's not |
| 1:15:49 | necessarily very nice they also have uh dry cleaning facilities and with various organic chemicals from that and so on and so on so I wouldn't Advocate to cruise ship sewage being discharged into the ocean because without re-jigging the architecture of the ships to ensure that it was pure sewage and nothing else yeah which it certainly isn't at the minute yeah then um I don't think it's a a very likely uh option right one of the things that worried us worries us is antibiotics well yeah that too that's just another one the |
| 1:16:22 | possibility of various things just imagine all the things that can happen on a cruise ship yeah yeah also also cruise ships don't spend a lot of time in the galagic ocean where the whales would have been yeah spent a lot of time close to shore yeah when they're obviously doing a trans-oceanic trip like across the Atlantic or across the Pacific or something like that but a lot of the time you're right they're just cruising along the coast yeah and and the human human gut is quite different from the uh |
| 1:16:51 | whale gut I don't know the name for whale actually um remarkably good at getting all the useful stuff out and that's why human is pretty so horrible uh was a cow cow you know you can burn it or do whatever because it barely takes any nutrients on the way through so uh I I don't think it's a saving throw it's not the same thing I'm looking for the point of view of phosphates and nitrates but okay all right that I asked the question and there's the answers thank you very much everybody |
| 1:17:24 | um okay so um along those lines uh just a couple of follow-ups one is uh yeah that there's evidence that some Wastewater has milligrams of iron potentially per liter uh and sludges could have up to hundreds of milligrams per liter of iron so depending on the particular application it's orders of magnitude higher than what you're finding in seawater so too much it is a source of iron well no the point is it'll get dissolved and diluted and in seawater but um there it is a I would say that wastewaters |
| 1:18:04 | represent a source of iron for the ocean so that's you know it's perhaps significant yeah yeah so it's not it's not an immediate solution something would it would need to be with all these things it has to be carefully managed and engineered so that it's safe uh yeah there is a group and actually there's a specialist in Southern California who uh has had a career in Wastewater management and he is proposing um you know the the responsible disposal of waste Waters sufficiently offshore to |
| 1:18:40 | assist in in biologic production in the ocean he's in Southern California he works with Stuart and it'll take me a while to find his name but um let me know and I'd be happy to put you in touch uh yes please yeah all right I could send you a Chase up email John that'd be fine thanks yeah great thanks Brian okay uh uh let's click the right button yeah uh yeah so uh I'm gonna ask my question again we're being asked to find people to uh in a sort of high level political process to find people who are willing to say do |
| 1:19:28 | hygroscopic aerosols get rained out is it what is it that because we're we're proposing einstall aerosol and something we're calling TOA edara which is I think we talked about just a minute ago um uh to remove it's important because this the occitable what what we can think we can call the oxidable super pollutants methane black carbon um Tropics where it goes Zone and some of the Halo alkanes if you add up all their radiative forcing it's over half of total rate of divorcing and these are |
| 1:20:04 | could be much easier to remove from the atmosphere than carbon dioxide um if it's safe of course you know nobody I don't do if it's not safe um and so um and another benefit is uh preventing these uh halogens entering the stratosphere being shuttled up there by black carbon aerosol um and so and people are saying well it sounds great but how can you prove that your aerosols won't go up into the stratosphere and so we've been racking our brains and thinking okay so if there's if wildfires go up the |
| 1:20:44 | stratosphere we know that volcanoes blow all the way up to the stratosphere um uh these tropical thunderstorms with the cumulonimbus clouds they they carry air right up into the stratosphere but other than other than those you know extreme uh you know unusual events but important events but if if our emission is happening where none of that's happening and it's in the ocean uh in the remote ocean would these aerosol particles get rained out the same as any other hygroscopic the important thing is it's hygroscopic |
| 1:21:18 | in other words they absorb water from these particles absorb water vapor from the air which is what how they form Cloud droplets and become a cloud droplet and eventually get rained out is that the important property of an aerosol particle in terms of proving or guaranteeing that that it's not going to find its way into Stratosphere in any sort of you know measurable importantly measurable quantity at all any comments on that I asked you thank you for your answer today Steven as well um if it's right or not but it's a way |
| 1:21:50 | of thinking about it yeah [Music] um is there any other way of thinking about this is that is that what determines whether an aerosol particle gets rained out or whether it ends up into this going into the stratosphere I think if you measures what the aerosols were at different levels in the atmosphere you you get the answer for it if you find that there aren't any that means that none of them have moved up if you have the concentration is let's say 10 of what is slow down that suggests that you you've got an another movement rate |
| 1:22:24 | um yeah I'm quite sure that I'm assuming that all our soul Towers sold it gets Ray that is rained on will be lost and I don't mind that because I can replace it easily uh all I want all I wanted there is that to be there for a few days um yeah if you're up if you go up uh near the tropopause you can look at the concentration of these aerosols and get some very clear answers right the paper I sent you seemed to have an awful audio I only had a quick glance through it but it seemed to have be a very efficient job and you could |
| 1:23:00 | squeeze it and maybe talk to people that wrote it right I'd say if they reply it'd be good thank you I had a look at it it said that uh these there's a lot of the the main uh thing you find in the stratosphere is sulfates um and the main source appears to be not not anthropogenic in other words volcanic um and so that kind of that pretty much tells me it also is talking about lasting for two years uh a long long time presumably asymptotic Decay but it it's there a long time which ought to be a cause of |
| 1:23:39 | concern for the the stratospheric sulfur um proponents perfect yeah yeah that lasts for two years in the stratosphere well it won't be a sudden step function it'll be a an asymptotic yeah yeah it could be a half-life perhaps yeah but I think you can call that uh exponential decay as well is that the same thing yeah yeah yeah thanks yeah friends yeah I I never heard that in the stratosphere had been found some uh sodium and if if any sea salt Haze would have gone up into stratosphere sodium must be found there yeah I agree |
| 1:24:26 | yeah and uh if it's sea salt it goes into Stratosphere that's sodium chloride they build an awful lot of chloride in the stratosphere [Music] yeah but um but you know when it's what I'm learning is it in a political process you can explain to your blue in the face but they they're not they're not scientists and so they just need um a recognized you know um what's the word uh respected scientist to say this is how it works it'll be safe so so they can say look that person said said it so you know don't blame me you |
| 1:25:04 | know yeah um five I just did a quick search of um Google and to look for atmospheric chemistry chemists at UK universities and the whole load of them so you could always think of approaching some to see if any of those are willing to give you the answers you want and support your your theory where did you get that list from just Google and I just Googled atmospheric chemists UK universities and there's I must have come on because just in the first page or two there must be a I don't know 10 or so different |
| 1:25:34 | universities have got atmospheric chemists around who would some of them must know about these sorts of things right I'll do that thank you very much yeah and just going back for a moment to the Wastewater topic uh oceanforesters.org has been working on this for many years and uh Mark capran is the expert who's worked in Wastewater for decades and has been actively uh considering for the better part of a decade how uh wastewaterers could help to regenerate life in the ocean his colleague and partner Jim Stewart is |
| 1:26:09 | also I believe with ocean Foresters and they've been working on effectively reusing the nutrients from Wastewater for the better part of a decade mm-hmm would be interesting to look them up see what they're doing see how they're getting on yeah I'm happy happy to make a warm introduction if desired okay thank you uh I think I've got a lot on my plate but I'll uh hold it in advance thank you yeah thank you very much check out oceanforesters. |
| 1:26:47 | org yeah okay yeah this is what it's like working with friends you have so many ideas gives me an awful lot to do there's a lot of a lot to talk about and it's all all wonderful um okay uh we've got five minutes wow doesn't doesn't that the sorry um Sev that's okay so AR6 synthesis report we've got five minutes did you want to say something about that Chris uh yeah I'm just gonna say I've just had a very quick squint at some headlines from it which is about all we had time for because these the reports |
| 1:27:20 | about 36 pages long um what did I notice um well there's a heading B2 which said let's just read that make it a bit bigger so I can read it um it says for any given future warming level many climate related risks are higher than observed in Annex 5 and projected long-term impacts are up to multiple times higher than currently observed which I suppose is a great surprise to us but um it's certainly interesting that that's said that there's another point which I was going to mention let's just scroll |
| 1:27:58 | down to it um yeah limiting Global surface temperature does not prevent continued changes in climate system components that have multi-decade or longer time scales of response rackets high confidence sea level rise is unavoidable for centuries to Millennia due to continuing deep ocean warning and ice sheet melt and sea levels will remain elevated for thousands of years however deep rapid and sustained ghg Mission reductions would limit further sea level rise acceleration and projected long-term sea level rise |
| 1:28:31 | commitment anyway that's just two particular points I picked out of it for it just sort of interest but basically the picture the science picture is hasn't changed from what we knew already um all it's saying now it's becoming more urgent because we're not getting anywhere without doing much about it and it's and I think the quotes I've heard online on the radio and so on have basically said this is all down to political will now we've got the science we've got enough technology that we can |
| 1:28:59 | actually do this in these political will and obviously money to actually make it happen Okay thank you and I I searched for geoengineering and uh couldn't find anything at all that was relevant to or any of the stuff that we're doing yeah but it is a very short very short summary so the the longer full version may have something in it I I would like to know if you did get to Net Zero how much CO2 comes back out of the oceans to the atmosphere is is it a question of just the vapor pressures uh they've been sucking it up |
| 1:29:39 | a lot for a long time will they give it back well of course Net Zero you won't actually you'll be at a uh a fixed and high level of steady state I guess it'll start to draw down yeah stand still but there is there are some processes that will draw it down uh and you know it's estimated I mean I think humanity is emitted 2 400 uh gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent over two centuries so uh some good fraction of that would be coming back I would say it's somewhere between 500 gigatons and 1500 well this means that |
| 1:30:14 | you really need to get time travel to be any use time travel or else just be ready to suck out another factor of two of carbon as it comes back out well you know once you've got the machine running you can just keep turning the crack right so yeah it's a steady state actually is a falling ratio it's a little note about this to uh to to to I think all of you who are on the on the address list but I'm it's only one page but it's it's really saying that they're hopeless I'd like to Hope people will check my |
| 1:30:52 | arguments and see whether there's a terrible mistake the other thing it will come out of course even if we get to Net Zero is that um all the extra heat that's in the ocean over time will come back out as well when it comes back to the surface yeah we're gonna have to keep calling but Stephen when you say hopeless what are you referring to uh I mean the collapse of civilization you're saying it's inevitable or is there hope no no it isn't inevitable if you can do direct cooling I mean I can |
| 1:31:23 | send you the calculations about how much uh how many spray vessels you need to remove the deep ocean heat and we can easily afford it for less than what they're spending on football transfer fees it's pretty amazing Chris just uh as a follow-up it almost says as though the ar-6 synthesis report is saying that even if we uh get to Net Zero there are natural effects uh does that include warming effects perhaps in the Arctic uh are they going so far as to acknowledge the fact that warming might continue |
| 1:31:55 | even in a net zero world uh yeah I think so well because the summary is that the heading is likelihood and risk of unavoidable irreversible or abrupt change and it says some future changes are unavoidable irreversible although they can be limited by taking various actions um and then there's a whole series of points underneath that and I just read from one of them and then there's things further down if you read it into it you may find some more so I haven't had a chance to read through it there's |
| 1:32:24 | something about uh deep uncertainty link to ice sheet processes and Global sea level rise so yeah there's a lot more in there and again this is a only a 36-page summary of what will be and the other thing to remember this is the summary for policy makers so this is the one that governments had its finger on it's not pure science one yeah wait a minute but this is an output of the scientific group so is that the audience policy folks or is it written by policy I don't know I'm not sure because it's called Summer if you're |
| 1:33:00 | policymakers and normally that's the one the government has an input to I see all right so it goes a little bit both directions uh that's great and now is that uh synthesis summary uh public at this time yeah it's on their website um and all the other bits all the main reports just say coming soon very good thank you good reading this this morning this morning I only I only read the summary of the summary that it is on the Press um but two things struck me uh one is sort of magical thinking right Stephen |
| 1:33:36 | Salter refers to also which is that somehow we've got a problem we'll fix it and then we're done not we'll be curating the climate indefinitely um we'll go to rail but the other thing that concerned me the most was a quote which it so disgusted me I can't I just threw it away so I threw away the article but it said well look we really need to keep to 1. |
| 1:34:02 | 5 but that's not possible so really we should try to keep it to 1.6 and if 1.7 6 isn't possible then at least try to keep to 1.7 and it reminded me of the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch you know we're going to proceed they say that at all at all you know at all effort we must not cross 1.9 because after 1. |
| 1:34:24 | 9 it gets even worse and I just thought could someone really say that in the sun right this has been really dangerous to think about just the mean what you need to happen is the extreme highs and the extreme lows and we've had examples of plus six in Siberia and minus 12 in Texas uh and it's the duration of the the extremes that's really hurting yeah and at the frequency and intensity is also increasing as well of these things because also there was those extreme temperatures in Antarctica yeah um a while ago it's also the duration of the |
| 1:35:00 | extremes yeah you get you're getting more of them but they're lasting longer too yeah if I just read something on that today they were talking about the atmospheric rivers and the impacts on the west coast of the US and they were saying exactly that these things are happening more uh more longer much longer and therefore having more extreme effects and and does that I'm a model of Southern California it's bloody cold here and it's raining California thank you but the longer it goes on is an indication of the |
| 1:35:34 | possibility that you're getting nearer and nearer to a complete flip and the way to think about this I think I meant this before the way to think about this is that you've got an uneven tray with Hollows and and crests and there's a ball in it oh it's a number of balls that are rolling around because you're shaking it now if you get nearer to uh flipping out over the the the the the the slopes of the of the hollows are getting less and therefore the rolling period of the ball is getting slower so |
| 1:36:07 | look by looking at the periods of changes between the highs and the lows is a marker of you getting too close to where you might go over a Crest and then down into the next door completely different and you'll be stuck there in one of his uh explanations of tipping points so that the uh when when the ball falls out of the bowl um you reach the Tipping Point but I thought that this summary for policymakers was totally absurd uh it's uh the the basis of it is entirely political which is the idea that the main climate agenda is emission |
| 1:36:50 | reduction and uh the uh the moral hazard reasoning is that increasing Albedo undermines emission reduction and that's actually it's actually completely true you know that increasing Albedo would lead people to uh a slower approach to emission reduction and so because that's politically unacceptable it's it's assumed that Albedo must not be mentioned it's it's the Voldemort of climate policy and uh so uh it's it's hardly exploded from this report which is extremely dangerous because really |
| 1:37:26 | Albedo is the only thing that matters at the moment the big message from them is how Bloody awful the previous ones were I think just a quick comment to respond to Robert I think it's not true that it was only saying remission reductions there's been plenty of mention of carbon dioxide being essential removal as well may not be Albedo but they did mention carbon dioxide removable being an essential component of the way forward that's what that is repeatedly yeah yeah yeah I'm lumping um a greenhouse gas |
| 1:38:03 | removal together like you know the carbon-based policies are the only thing that's yeah yeah right to us to Steven's Point um the longer we've just completed the longest lasting tropical cyclone and that was uh Cyclone Freddy which managed in 39 days to cross the Indian Ocean and attack the African Coastline not once but twice yeah and so here we are with our weather system slowing down in the southern hemisphere as well as the Northern Hemisphere and then I'll go back to uh DV uh Angel Wallace and his |
| 1:38:36 | comments about uh you know the rising and Rising temperatures uh 1.6 1.7 1.8 and I have to ask isn't that how we boil frogs slowly yeah oh wait yeah I also just one other thing I heard just this week that the uh the third year of La Nina's in a row which is most exceptional has just come to an end we're best we're gonna head into an El Nino which will probably just accentuate to the warming uh in the around the globe yeah we're locked and loaded for a solar maximum and an El Nino 2024 James |
| 1:39:11 | Hansen's calling for 1.4 to 1.5 degrees Celsius achieved achievable as soon as 2024 which is really devastating it won't matter because there was a Carrington event uh last month fortunately with the sun pointing away from the Earth so uh and those are increasing as well so you know it's a good chance that all our Electronics will be fried anyway in the next year that's cheerful so it just happened to this giant electromagnetic pulse just happened to move would be going away from the earth instead of towards the Earth it just it |
| 1:39:46 | just yeah the not 180 degrees enough that we could see it from Earth but this huge glob of uh energized plasma um with a huge B field around it right would it have been enough to have taken out the power grids of the of the planet uh I don't think anyone's actually done that calculation but it wasn't that wasn't there one of these events in the late 1800s or something that's why the technology we had at the time yeah that's why it's called the Carrington event I think most Carrington |
| 1:40:19 | reported on it yeah Harrington oh okay anyway anyway the end on that cheery note yes we we love all this demon blue okay thank you everybody see you again in two weeks oh and it's going to be an hour later for uh Europeans um and I think I can't look closely at the timing um uh because it was just the clocks are about to change so just be careful about next week I'll work it all out bye |