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| 00:12 | hi clark can you hear me yep can i hear you stephen good yeah how are you just about managing just about yeah is that an office in your home stephen yes i was assuming it was in the university but i suppose you wouldn't be working there that late i had 48 meters of shelf length uh when i retired and they moved me into an office that had a share with somebody else which had two meters of shuffling so i decided that i had to be at home this is just a bit before the curve and the kobe came along very neatly and so |
| 00:51 | it's not not really allowed to go in there anymore um yeah they've got they've moved out in the nick of time then right so yeah i have quite a lot of shelf space here as well mostly books that i've bought huge investment very few of which i use i suppose i've read bits of them well i've got an awful lot of papers from various projects which uh really ought not to be thrown away and it's a nightmare to sort them out and get them all around so you can find them but um france says the same thing |
| 01:28 | you've seen friends off seeing franz's office yes i noticed that he says the same thing yeah keeping them all sort of indexed and so forth but but he's recently been saying it's just easier to find things by from google anyway um not everything yeah great many things yeah in fact it's probably easier to google than to walk across the room in the book can't be sure everything and you can't either be sure that it's going to stay the same it's easy for someone to change things um yeah true yeah there's some things |
| 02:08 | that i've seen and tried to find again and couldn't and it's been altered or lost yeah sure enough yeah so stephen you keep turning up at these meetings and people keep turning up i'm amazed actually i'm really amazed and i've invited uh um new people um i keep inviting new people we've got a hopefully a korean lady coming today who does who's uh um moved to cambridge she's a post-grad a post uh doc now i think um she did a nice big long paper on on all the fertilization experiments and |
| 02:48 | and so forth and she was hope i think she was part of some sort of plan to make something happen in uh the southern ocean the korean experiment but she told me recently it didn't didn't happen um i i know the paper by yoon that's i'd like to try and encourage her to look at the idea for the accelerated corrosion okay uh i've been trying to find um i have spoken to russ george and to victor sveticek about this um but um i think i think that paper by yoon showed that they were really measuring how well people could keep |
| 03:35 | track of which bit of c they'd put the stuff into and the that that the and it was victus metacheck who got them got the best logging of where he squirted the arm and what i wanted was to have a much lower dose over a very much wider area yeah yeah and looking at it for years not just i think the longest was about three weeks and most of them were around about ten days to try and measure what was happening yeah to me that's that's completely out of it should we say hello to chris hi chris because this is very much your subject |
| 04:13 | chris rather obviously thanks for that link actually i read uh the uh fertilization chapter oh here's here here is uh ju yoon welcome uh how should i call you ju yoon what's the best way to pronounce your name hi sylvie clevy how should i call you clive i cried hi coley my name is jun don't call me june june no that's easy yep right i was just saying to clive what a very good paper that you wrote about the iron in the southern oceans and how i learned a great deal from it but that i thought that they were not looking at the |
| 05:01 | um for long enough and i wanted to have a much lower dose over a much wider area and if you give me your email address i would like to send you a paper about a way that we might do that but anyway it was a very good paper very useful i learned a great deal from it yeah i think the practical reason for why the longest experiments have been about 30 days or so we've been about about a month rather than three to three weeks is is just simply um cost for one thing because selling out a large ocean ocean-going oceanographic |
| 05:34 | research vessel is a very expensive operation yeah and sort of 30 days or so is something like the normal length of a segment of the different cruises they do which tend to be on a whole range of different subjects and so i think the only practical way to do things much longer is to have much more automated uh unmanned uh devices i absolutely agree with you it's got to be unmanned it's got to be completely free to have another couple of years if you want and that's what i'm trying to do yeah tracking tracking things over that time |
| 06:10 | becomes difficult of course as though inevitably what you put out becomes more dispersed and and so on that's why you keep on doing it you want to you want to do it for long enough for the the species to migrate and even maybe evolve a little bit so this is why i want several years of treatment and i think we can measure everything that we want just by looking at satellite and chlorophyll and stuff [Music] so i can give you i can give you long tracks and i can give you patterns of crosses and circles which will be useful so you've got a |
| 06:45 | comparison but it's done by i thought i i think i've told clyde about this is it about um maybe we should get the agenda sorted out before yeah we'll get the agenda sorted out a little bit yeah jew's email is uh in the in the invite list okay um anyway so so steven's going to send you a paper due if that made sense yeah he's you're going to get a paper so that's going to be about um unmanned uh measurement unmanned iron injection yeah okay right yeah okay right welcome everyone um hi doug and franz and uh john mcdonald |
| 07:29 | hello hi hi chloe hi hi john um we've been emailing back and forth today this morning well this last yesterday night for you and uh we have mana joe um hi manor i can't see you but now my my ah it's done it again my video keeps going off i don't know what that's about let's just unplug it and plug it in again um that's the only thing i can oh clive while you're doing that i think manna joe has a couple other commitments at the same time but she'll be dropping in every now and then multitasking |
| 08:07 | right okay all right well okay so um we we uh before i do the agenda prior to the agenda your default speaker has changed too much so can you still hear me okay it must be says has it changed it's okay to me yeah okay this looks all right yeah yeah i'll get this funny message um uh is it okay jude to ask you to introduce yourself this is what we do just a new person we asked to introduce themselves very briefly yes it is really nice to meet you everyone i'm junior who is working as a post-doc associate researcher in century for |
| 08:54 | climate repair in cambridge my background is ocean biogeochemistry and satellite oceanography i did complete my phd last year during phd program i have worked on the variability of phytoplankton and the relationship between hydrochlorotone and dot also i have worked on the living sorry the relationship between phytoplankton and what was that salt oh salt got it yes okay yes sir continue including iron yes and also i have worked on the review of the ocean i unfortunate fertilization experiment so based on my background and experience |
| 09:37 | i i'm focusing on marine environment lead generation project in ccsa team now yes oh thank you for inviting me to this meeting sure welcome very welcome here uh jew um thank you thanks that's a great introduction so uh okay and hi manna we can see you now that's great uh so okay so what i'll just do what you usually do uh time is always pressing uh share my screen so the these meetings are um uh just it's everyone's meeting it's not my meeting it's everyone's meeting so please uh everyone |
| 10:20 | this is the same as usual um uh suggest something for the agenda so this is um so chris suggested uh did anyone get a chance to look at the um look at that uh report that nassem report that would anyone like to discuss that yet it's i highly recom recommend i only sent it out kind of a couple of days ago with the reminder invite i read the nutrient fertilization chapter about 20 pages and uh it's very interesting to see having for me it's from from my point of view anyway having volunteered with friends |
| 11:01 | now for three years working together um for you know it's mainly franz's research um [Music] review review paper i think we call it from it's because looking at other other papers reading other papers um to see and then franz's ideas and franz's contribution of chemistry many rock weathering and other things um to see what uh so it's been a learning experience for me then to see what the the kind of state of the art is according to the sort of general um scientific community is about nutrient |
| 11:40 | ocean nutrient fertilization so it's been useful from from my point of view it's like ah you know all this that france talks about all the time it's not i kind of knew kind of got to know that now already but it's kind of confirmed it yeah that these people are not aware of this stuff that france is putting out so it is important that we keep saying we're going to do this paper we are going to do it aren't we friends it's going to be next year definitely um quite a lot about rock wedding so |
| 12:02 | anyway so we're not so let's if we're not going to talk about that what do we want to talk about if we don't want to talk about anything we'll just say good night and happy christmas just a point clive the the report covers certain issues um they were determined in advance they did not have an open book and decide to concentrate on certain things they had an agenda essentially set for them by the funders of the of the uh of the study so it was not uh that they they don't know about other things they just |
| 12:30 | were not as it were within their remit to potentially oh okay okay thanks for that okay that makes sense yes okay didn't think of that okay thank you very much uh clive um this is not something we necessarily need to talk about but i want to put it on people's radar everybody here is welcome to join zoom next monday at two o'clock night time which would be an hour earlier than this so okay in the uk would be an hour earlier to discuss um and this this came up on um saturday on the hca zoom i've been trying to get a hold of mark |
| 13:11 | hibbert for the last two or three weeks and we just miserably failed at connecting but um we're we're going to talk about um a point that um rafe comrades brought up and that is we need to the the question was asked how do we and who do we talk to to elevate our our desires regarding cooling the um the arctic etc and he said figure out who you want to talk to and then map out a strategy yeah so uh mark and i had mapped out a strategy for the rock group uh spent a couple of hours and and he he agreed and everybody on the |
| 13:54 | basically on that meeting decided next monday at two o'clock they all wanted to participate so i'm inviting you all and um i can't see everybody but if everybody here i can't say okay and i think manna was on the call but if everybody here would be like to be on that call i'll send you an invitation actually the invitation will be coming from uh leslie um she hasn't failed it'll go a couple of hours uh we don't think this is something we can do in an hour it's going to take a couple of hours |
| 14:26 | okay all right and i was on um part of that call and uh rafe the main thing the two main thing takeaways i got from that first of all mike mccracken uh said uh um the risk of not doing something not not and then they're really talking about uh stratospheric aerosol injection weren't they he said the risk of not doing it is is less than the risk of there's more than the risk of doing it very very right in the right way yeah and then um and then rafe said uh people are saying should it be this or should it be should we do this or |
| 15:04 | that what should we recommend he said a policy mix is what's needed which i think we tend to agree with not just that might be um true but um in response to john nissen he said maybe with somebody else find one subject and go after that and then branch out but but don't just go in with a shotgun approach to begin with because then you'll lose them okay so anyway that will all be discussed we need to figure that out yeah because so far we haven't really talked about a strategy and who is the right i don't think cough is the right |
| 15:42 | people i just i'm i'm done with cop and i'm done with my congressman and so uh maybe other people disagree but uh you need to we need to sort that out okay okay so that's have i written that down correctly meeting two hours earlier next monday it's a bit complicated to put down everyone's time one hour earlier one hour earlier not two hours early but one hour two o'clock my time right now it's three o'clock so one hour earlier okay so shall i say expect an invite and invite you |
| 16:13 | what time zone are you in hi brian east coast east coast us so it's an hour earlier than right now thank you whatever time you have brian you must be like seven o'clock in the morning or something four or five five okay so that's gonna be earlier for you yeah um but it's going to take two hours so um you know if you want to come in late we can do a little summary and let you participate in the last second half or whatever right it's not 5 a. |
| 16:49 | m for you i hope john uh brian you're muted i thought it was 7am in australia or are you not in australia anymore you're in the philippines now in the are you then brian brisbane is one hour earlier on australia eastern australia standard time all right okay brisbane's out of sync with the other states in australia i see always has been so all right but then um but but it's i thought anyway let's not get into that but an invitation will be sent out and i can't see everybody i just have a little short so if if everybody what |
| 17:29 | i'll do is i'll do a snapshot after we get back to the other view of the gal review and i'll ask leslie to invite everybody here unless somebody doesn't want to participate i think email invitations for people like us doug i wouldn't worry too much um just send it take a snapshot we'll send it to everybody yeah uh you take a snapshot now um often more people come later okay so um uh does anyone want to discuss the thwaites glacier which has been in the news yeah yeah very scary very scary uh yep |
| 18:17 | okay um anything else i mean sometimes we talk about something and then it just morphs into something else we've uh discussed so many things jew uh maybe we feel like we've talked about everything now and we don't want to talk about it again oh actually i let it do any any sap liquid nisap yes the report report okay you'd like to talk about that report yeah oh oh actually this report showed the potential the carbon c castration for the scale of potential yeah yeah but i think we also we need to to have to discuss about at this stage |
| 19:17 | and at this time which is strategy and we see technology is moved to or most effects most or effective among the or or technology which technology is most uh effective there's a if i write that is most effective did i get that right yeah i i think i i i'm just focused you're suggesting yes okay this uh we often have uh too many things you know eight or nine things but today i don't know if it's just because it's christmas or what um anything for you john so maybe we should um use the opportunity to just reflect |
| 20:17 | a little um on our whole approach and and how to communicate uh to others um you know it's uh how to win friends and influence people it's it's it's something this this i think that we're missing the right approach in some ways uh getting our message across and and maybe that's it's i'm not sure we're being bold enough as well yeah i have some thoughts on that that'll be a good time yeah and brian working with you i've i've learned over the years uh uh some interesting techniques that you |
| 20:53 | use to convey a message um but let's talk about that too yeah okay and that that was uh yeah that we talked about that two weeks ago as well but it didn't really get too bad so yeah let's develop that some further but uh develop it further okay so this is this is done unless there's anything else maybe say something else later if you want to doug this uh i mean uh so let's do what we do first any other suggestions because i'll tell you what if you've got any other thoughts then let's add them |
| 21:26 | to the list if they come to you i think we've spent enough time on this now so um this is a a question from you then jew which is the most effective technology for carbon sequestration yeah can i let me ask you first what do you think about about so we are very interested in um direct immediate cooling in in this these discussions so uh steven salter um has been um pioneering promoting marine cloud brightening for many years um to make cooling and uh also we're it's uh we see when we see a map on the of the oceans with uh |
| 22:10 | chlorophyll growing uh there's always more clouds in those areas we know dimethyl sulfate makes clouds um so that's another way of providing direct cooling um so a common i'll just say this briefly video everybody knows this a common uh argument we we're always arguing and shaking office um those people they say only only reduce emissions only reduce emissions but we say you must try to understand immediate direct immediate calling also because it's too slow to to just make less greenhouse gases but also we know |
| 22:53 | we must also we are also of course interested in in uh carbon sequestration as well of course we're interested in that also so um do you have a favorite do you have a yeah so that report shows the or when we scale up the methodology for the carbon sequestration so so we ocean fertilization was a shorter or the highest effectiveness right the highest effectiveness is ocean fertilization yeah first chaos first for a large scale okay for scalability and and they among the ocean-based technology so but or also we need to think about |
| 23:51 | then at this stage then not for the largest game only for the small scale also we need to think about which or technology is most effective for small scale yeah so at this stage for experimentation of we're only allowed to do well supposed to be allowed to do small scale um that's the only thing permitted um i think that's what you're saying you must start with a small experiment yeah i think where she was saying that some technologies might be scalable and others might not be scalable okay please correct me if i'm wrong to you |
| 24:36 | yeah so some um you're saying that uh some technology is not scalable and some is more scalable like like ocean fertilization is more scalable yeah i agree that's that's my interest that's the reason for my interest and i think many people here also it's it should be scalable so um and we've had we have many discussions about uh but then ocean acidification uh if you make more cup carbon in the ocean and also deoxygenation um so i think that's uh do you want to um give your account brian you've got your |
| 25:17 | hand up i think yeah i think there's a framing problem people are asking why are we we're failing to get the message across well if you talk about farming and fertilization people are you know farming and fertilization has a huge negative association with it and that is adding inputs to an environment and causing runoff and causing ecological devastation so we need to frame it in a way that's going to actually be consistent with um some of the approaches we're using for example reforestation of kelp forests for |
| 25:54 | example regeneration of fisheries near shore and offshore um focus less on the negative impacts to the point where we're we're not calling it aquaculture anymore it's offshore seaweed mariculture because agriculture is so polluted with the salmon fish pen effluents coming off of there that are basically driving the near shore waters and noxic it's just a political liability and we've got to be cognizant of these liabilities as we go forward and that's what we've done over the last dozen |
| 26:29 | years as we moved past ocean iron fertilization in 2008 and the associated corporate train wrecks and uh designed marine permaculture as an example to focus on the regenerating ecosystems feeding humanity and measuring carbon export so it's just that kind of political framing that will get us a lot further um you know it's it's just like framing something better than solar radiation management because who wants radiation in their environment nobody yeah yeah yeah we want a tiny bit less of it yeah right so yeah associate radiation with |
| 27:12 | the radioactivity yeah so just to recap what you've said there brian because you've said this uh and it's worth remembering um and so it's regenerating fishery regenerating feeding humanity and promoting carbon export i think it's those three things i think first heard that imbalance right because if you don't if you don't talk about them in that order then they think you're at least 50 carbon removal and that's your primary purpose and you'll run afoul of the london protocol and spend another |
| 27:41 | two decades arguing about it yeah yeah at the same time at the same time so there's two sort of areas of conversation there's the what the scientists must think about um and talk pretty pretty straight and openly and then there's the public framing where you only say one thing and then you suddenly the whole world is against you so you must use your words very carefully yeah the most you'll get from most conservative scientific establishments is no objection and no objection comprises consent okay so that's our goal the only |
| 28:19 | goal you know really in the scientific community is that and then by saying things that get no objection from the scientific community but that have forward engagement with the with the public then you get a lot more traction because when you get a grassroots effort going then you can start talking to political leaders and then you can start getting traction with groups like the arctic nations group and that's a key opportunity as well as we see it yeah yeah okay make sense uh jew anything for you to add a big sense |
| 28:54 | good good to see you because you you both um presented climb uh cambridge climate repair didn't you let's go to the next thing anything else about one one question if you what kind of methods do you prefer for common sequestration in in the ocean me um i would put my money on ocean alconization but not as a global scale more local regional scale um because i think globally it's probably unmanageable because of logistics unless it's done electrochemically electrochemically if that was to work might be scalable but i think using |
| 29:46 | rock materials um the scale of the effort will be just too massive you need the entire world's fleet of vessels to distribute the stuff around and the other thing the other reason i like it is because it's genuinely permanent unlike a lot of these other types of permanence there's a really nothing of the sort they're really anything up to a few hundred years is not permanent even 1500 years i don't regard as permanent either so i i think geological essentially when i think of permanence and i think anyone |
| 30:16 | who talks of permanence in hundreds of years or even a thousand or two should find a different word for it because i think it's misleading and would deceive the public frankly to use the word permanent yeah there's also a rather nice feature of having something that's reversible if you find it over that isn't quite exactly what i wanted you want to be able to stop it and that doesn't gel with permanence you know i mean mcb i i think has does sound to me that have some potential and because it is also you can stop it very |
| 30:48 | quickly um unlike some of the other like the sai ones um which would have a an effect for some considerable time even if you stop them immediately they probably an effect for a couple of years at least i should guess for the sound of it so for me um i think um ocean recognization say on a local regional scale not global and certainly mcb sounds to me like it's something worth exploring and there are some others ideas around which are probably much less well developed and i think um seaweed aquaculture sequestration for me |
| 31:22 | is a lot more efficient and effective than ocean fertilization in for in terms of phytoplankton so for me because i think you can actually genuinely put a lot of material down in the deep ocean quickly you don't get that with ocean virtualization of phytoplankton because uh a large fraction of it remains in the surface mixed layer you don't sink most of it at all and so therefore you're if if the sake of argument if you only sink 10 to what you're producing you're having a huge effort and only 10 to what you do is |
| 31:55 | actually really having the effect that you want to have and that's sort of putting that against seaweed uh sequestration it seems to me seaweed has got that that one beat very easily uh based on what we know at the moment and you know things can change and all the rest of it of course research and we'll always reveal new um new things that we'll have to change our minds to some degree as we go along we mustn't be too locked in to any anything absolutely because knowledge will change as we go along |
| 32:26 | seaweed seaweed needs also uh fertilization i think yes but you you can use as brian's um doing in his work you can use upwelling for it you don't have to introduce surf fertilizer taken from land as has been the case up now for ocean fertilization experiments uh and even some of the proposed ones using macronutrients even larger scale amounts of material would have to be dug up and out of rocks and so on and and used so that's uh i i don't see that as unnecessarily a problem i think i still think the |
| 33:01 | seaweed one has a lot more traction than uh ocean fertilization of phytoplankton but uh let me ask you again uh what do you prefer well i don't have a single one as i said i think yeah the the three i mentioned no i i would prefer um i i i based on what i know at the moment and that could change um so um i don't have a single one because i think it's a mistake to think there's a silver bullet for a start i think we'll inevitably end up with a portfolio of methods because just geographically around |
| 33:38 | different parts of the ocean things will work probably better and have good reason to work better in in some areas than a technique a different technique would in that area so i think you can see a mix and i think that also provides uh some sort of reassurance because if you put all your eggs in one basket you could if that doesn't work out in the end then you've really lost a lot of time wasted a lot of effort and money um and so i think a portfolio is a much more uh sound approach and frankly it's uh just to go a |
| 34:11 | slightly off-piste is i wish our government had taken some similar approach to tackling kobit on the same sort of basis right yeah is that your hand up brian did you do you want to say some more friends yeah i i wanted to ask you the young girl the yeah jude do you have a favorite which favorite yes yes actually i'm interested in the or the neutral fertilization to the ocean because our my team is aimed to induce artificial wave proof by addition of the bioavailable nutrients by strengthening strengthening strengthening our wealth pump |
| 35:08 | yeah so i'm i'm really interested in the addition of the limited nutrient to the ocean yeah so whale poo pump i haven't heard it said quite that way before um yeah so so you're interested in the world you've seen the number of whales yeah you have to grow them and they're a bit slow to grow you have to have a food source in place oh because you know rails transport nutrient to the surface water by releasing the vacant plant and urine and enhancing the primal productivity however by the commercial |
| 35:52 | the whaling the wave population has declined by 99 percent this has induced or the decline in bioavailable nutrients there is from the welfare and the subsequently these would would have caused the decline in pythagorean decline biomass over the or the past century so we we are interested in the inducing artificial warfare via or the addition of bioavailable nutrients okay so i think we are saying um that that we cannot grow the whales very fast they take too long to reproduce and so you want to uh replace the put some equivalent nutrient whatever |
| 36:45 | the whale poo is uh get the same thing so what what's what's your ideas for that is it to get it from the farm from the uh farms from the cattle farms or something what's what is it no all the area will be or the or the limited or the earlier that is so limited by any nutrient any ocean yeah any ocean that's limited by nutrients so not casey not any farm right so how how will you provide what's your plan to to um replace you know to provide the same thing as the whale nutrient what's what where will you |
| 37:31 | what's your way to put these nutrients in the ocean yes actually so to find the optimal site for our project my project so we are uh looking at the nutrient concentration based on the ocean or the open of that database yes so based on the based on nutrient concentration data we'll find the optimal site for the wave proof where pool projects right so of optimum size of ocean to or to ocean yeah so maybe some square kilometers yes or we actually we are thinking about we are we are thinking or we are propos proposing the scale so |
| 38:22 | thousand square kilometer and then yes that was good so then oh no no no no oh yes thousands character yes yeah okay and then it's uh iron concentration phosphate silicate is this what you're looking at oh actually or we should or we should look at the nutrient concentration to for the target area if we find the or the site that is limited only iron by ion we can just add iron but that reason it's diligent or is limited by other nutrients we can also add other nutrients okay yeah and so this is to make the ocean |
| 39:15 | as it was before when there was many whales is that right yeah right so or before the wave please defer the commercial railing so about before the 400 years ago yeah so uh what where where where yeah we know it was very hard yeah yeah so this this all produce very high amount of nutrients to the surface by increasing pipe plankton yeah but or the population has declined yeah yeah of course yes so do you have a favorite method to put these put the iron in the ocean oh actually we are we actually thought we will follow the |
| 40:06 | ion fertilization experiment by releasing the iron surface but we also consider or the really adding some other type of nutrients such as the bulking ash yes we're we're looking at all kinds of nutrients okay volcanic ash okay yeah that's uh interesting yeah yeah and so uh chris you know do you have i know brian you've got your hand up but uh chris you're just saying sorry let me just ask chris because chris you just said um well just having more phytoplankton on the ocean surface what's the point um |
| 40:45 | but here we have an oceanographer saying in terms of sequestration i was talking only i can see that there are potentially other benefits if you could increase the phytoplankton in terms of fisheries and things like that i was only i was only considering sequestration okay yeah because as i said you know only a limited fraction will ever be sequestrated in the deep yeah okay i think brian ought to have a chance okay brian stand up for a long sure okay sorry okay go for it yeah and kind of second thing what chris |
| 41:16 | said um there's a balance uh of you know you will need many uh wedges in order to actually achieve uh you know 10 gigatons of carbon sequestration for example that'll be a major achievement by itself and that works we get to draw down if we include 80 decarbonization first of our civilization and then put in the 10 gigatons you know it has to be done concurrently but um that's the real challenge in many ways uh jiun is correct that there are a few places in the ocean that are iron limited for particular species she's probably |
| 41:52 | talking primarily about microalgae but i think chris aptly pointed out that you get a lot more phytoplankton on the surface but how much sequestration do you actually get that's an open question um most of the ocean is actually nitrate limited for macaroni and so there it's a very different situation where you don't have to look at adding any nutrients because inputs and additions are going to be viewed very skeptically by the marine ecologist community as we saw in 2008 and you know like it or not there are |
| 42:30 | many in the reactionary portion of the marine ecology establishment that will be diametrically opposed to inputs and additions so we can expect a lot of political headwinds and i've seen those since the last 15 years i was at the ocean iron fertilization conference in 2008 in woods hall and directly witnessed greenpeace and nrdc perjuring themselves when they said that they would not interfere with basic research in um ocean iron fertilization and then just a few short years later greenpeace suing victor smitachek in court in german high |
| 43:08 | court and obstructing the um crews already underway to proceeding to actually provide those uh nutrients in a worm in a cold core eddy maybe it was a warm car ready also off the probably warm party um and so but what is wrong already that's a that's a location is it no no no just an eddie in the ocean yeah yeah warm core eddie sorry i got it yeah um so you know what's interesting to me is a slightly different framing and that is that by some lines of reasoning and in many circumstances to the extent i mean |
| 43:46 | nitrate is ubiquitous in the ocean at depth so um we have approaches for example and i'm not saying seaweed is the only answer but for one wedge or maybe several wedges um we can actually restore natural upwelling get uh replete neutra uh nitrate available for the seaweed locally in a local irrigation and enable replete growth uh on the thousand square kilometer scale as julian was discussing and uh that would enable well it's roughly one to ten thousand tons of carbon per square kilometer per year um so just call it a thousand times a |
| 44:27 | thousand we're in the megaton range for carbon so where kilometers do you see so it's between a thousand and ten thousand tons per square kilometer per year of carbon fixation yeah some fraction of which could sink to the deep sea yeah right so it's kind of a balanced approach and i think this one that uh may you know get no objection from the marine ecological community sooner um there might you know in terms of at least getting consent from a majority of marine ecologists with that in place then um that opens uh the gates to |
| 45:02 | capitalization and development of sustainable business uh and that enterprise can scale and enable that to work and the context of paris commitments great do you know any uh senior marine ecologists brian who might be willing to come on a meeting like this that we can just uh i have to hear from them i know many marine ecologists i'll have to think about one's willing to talk to us well at some level i mean i would like to think we just speak openly about what we actually think and for but which is based on what we know |
| 45:39 | and that's important you know equally important is learning how to speak uh in a for in a context that will not trigger a bunch of problems true uh and i think there's an opportunity to frame it in a way that is well received by different um different groups segments of society in different contexts so it just i think it requires a bit of um framing because framing ultimately determines the outcome of those conversations the thing is in the end the truth will out won't it you know and and mother nature |
| 46:15 | will tell the truth in the end well the point is there are um approaches that i would consider to be um how would i frame it it it helps to go to i mean i've spent a better part of a decade learning and teaching at the marine biological laboratory in woods hall it helps to go to those cultures learn the issues and what and just do a lot of listening first as we've done over the past decade or two and i i could tell you right now that adding fertilizer to the ocean is not one of those approaches okay you're just not gonna like that's been a |
| 46:53 | 20-year discussion if you want another 20 years of discussion go ahead okay but i think we should get our message pretty clear and then invite people to speak and to listen um and that's fine it just we need to proceed with multiple communities in mind including the marine ecological community including the priorities for the politicians and then ultimately i think a lot of it has to be translated into sustainable industries that can um have multiple objectives including food security uh clearly in mind yeah because you don't get i think more just |
| 47:32 | on framing clive i think brian's absolutely right because sometimes you get the framing wrong on something it'll stymie an area for decades yeah even if you ever get over it because getting things wrong at the beginning can be absolutely terminal no matter what the reality turns out to be scientifically uh because sometimes the politics will just you know discover that completely so framing is very important indeed i think right i don't want to be that person that's stymied something for another 20 years |
| 48:05 | yeah uh okay any other points from anyone franz do you have anything to say about nitrates no no i i it's okay or what what has been said i can underline just could i just come back in a couple of things following up on one of two things brian said um well there's a lot of marine ecologists who may have some concerns but you know maybe some of them would come around to some of the possible techniques i would say one community that is somewhat concerned about brian's type of technique is the deep sea scientists |
| 48:47 | um because they're somewhat worried about the effects on the deep ocean for this now obviously there's still a hell of a lot unknown uh i wouldn't deny that but just to illustrate sometimes the um the way the message gets wrong there was one um event at cop26 i can't remember if it's one of the ones i sent you client where some person from canada i won't mention his name at the minute unless anyone really wants to know claimed that the deep ocean is anoxic anyway which is a horrible untruth to put it marvelous yeah and |
| 49:20 | this guy gets a huge platformer 26 and that wasn't the only thing you said like that either you know and these people get wheeled out by a particular group of particular sort of angle to grind and that really isn't very helpful but it happens i have to agree with uh chris on that um we need to get this clear and and it's really great to hear these concerns because that's where we can address them scientifically and that is we have plenty of examples from whale falls to plankton snow where there are much greater inputs |
| 49:57 | biologically to the ocean on a distributed basis or in the whale fall even on a concentrated basis so i think distributing any kind of sequestration of seaweed in the ocean in a way that monitors deep ocean oxygen levels ensures that they remain highly outside the hypoxic zone that's very important and in fact it's worth noting that pre-industrially we had a significant higher level of algae snow raining down on the abyssal ocean than we do today and that's because we had more natural upwelling and more |
| 50:36 | productivity especially in the tropics and subtropics so by trying to regenerate that carbon flux in in an industrial era it's a matter of monitoring those oxygen levels ensuring they never get into the hypotoxic range and distributing appropriately so it does require ongoing monitoring of oxygen and probably ongoing monitoring of harmful algal blooms upstream to make sure they're not exacerbated downstream thank you ron you have your hand up you're on mute ron and we can't see you are you there yeah yeah hold on |
| 51:26 | just trying to get my my act together here uh uh i'm i'm in the middle of doing things for the holidays uh um i'm just i just had a question for for brian uh would with that the the uh the the i i forget the phrase regenerating uh restoring uh was that a uh it sounded like a tagline and i'd like to get that down and uh and float that by some of the hpac people uh because i i uh you know i i have to say i i find your your uh your political uh analysis uh very compelling in terms of you know trying to trying to uh |
| 52:10 | to get some political traction on on our efforts so if you could just i mean i had have you already put that in the spreadsheet or uh i'm not sure which spreadsheet you're referring to but generally the hp yeah i just don't know which spreadsheet you're referring to but uh generally speaking we're talking about regenerating kelp forest ecosystem services offshore but in the same region as they used to exist uh pre-industrially and that's because offshore is a lot less contention for space than |
| 52:48 | near shore similarly um i think it is possible based on benthonic or benthic foraminifera to identify the sedimentation rates of marine algae in tropical and sub-tropical environments that can provide a baseline of the prehistoric levels of productivity that were present in the oceans and that's um supplemented by sexy disk data and satellite observation data on the increasing zones so to answer your question uh regenerating production of algae offshore is is a first way of describing it and i think we can point to |
| 53:32 | several thousand square kilometers of lost seaweed forests over the past uh 100 years and because that's the case our first task let's say for the first few thousand square kilometers is to simply regenerate the macro algae production that once existed before um industrial farming take off right i i you may have you may have misunderstood my my question i'm just in that we're you know as as you know we're we're looking for a very short tagline and you i thought i had heard you say some i think maybe brew put this in the |
| 54:11 | chat is that right yeah i just said restoration of natural nutrient cycles i like that interesting question in terms of the framing of the whole thing you know we i would say i would say restoring natural upwelling works but i wouldn't use the word restore when it comes to multi-dimensional climate things i mean you can say restoring natural upwelling i would talk more about regenerating c4 you know c4s production offshore i would talk about regenerating um macro algae and production offshore because that's less |
| 54:46 | controversial in an established industry and then we'll have to see when it comes to microalgae and the level of i would say scientific acceptance and and then public acceptance of of that dimension in the future yeah i'm i'm adding i think ron's looking at tagline that's more global than biosphere terms um i think one of the problems we have in terms of uh framing the whole thing is actually framing the damage that the humans have done to the planet and pointing out just how much of the natural nutrient cycles we've |
| 55:25 | taken out because we've removed so much of the living biomass and if people understand that then they're going to be much more receptive to the idea of putting it back but there needs to be much more awareness of what's happened and not just the fact that we pulled hydrocarbons out and stuck them up in the air that's only the problem so we we view regenerating kelp forest ecosystem services offshore as being a viable proposition yeah uh okay well so so yeah i think i'm i'm thinking in terms of the you |
| 56:00 | know the three the three asks in in the hpac letter so yeah so this could be one part of it but yeah let me say right i think what it's regenerate um you know uh algae or something um feed the world and uh promote upward uh promote um carbon drawdown isn't it those three things brian you'd be able to say it much better than me it was something like this i would refine it a little bit because um algae has some pros and cons i would focus a little more on kelp forests which are considered to be charismatic mega ecosystems and i |
| 56:37 | would say you know regenerating kelp forest ecosystem services offshore um it has a lot less objections scientifically than some of the other interventions i'm only just trying to remember the three things brian so yeah yeah regeneration feed the ants so i you know that we we need the cooling in there somewhere i think but but no i i it's interesting i mean i i appreciate your perspective and maybe it's something to kind of work on trying to get i mean we're still kind of you know kicking this around so |
| 57:10 | thank you yeah well we are working on the cooling dimension with respect to the great barrier reef and i'll tell you it's been a very long a slog just getting to doing 10 by 10 meters uh but we are submitting uh with john mcdonald's help hopefully um this month uh an application to the great barrier reef marine park authority to try to do 10 by 10 meters i get approval for that and um i'll tell you it's pretty slow going but um yes uh being able to restore natural upwelling being able to uh grow a bit of seaweed being able to |
| 57:52 | document the reversal of thermally induced photobleaching those are all things that we started and actually succeeded in doing in 2009 and look forward and that yet the politics has taken a dozen years to just catch up with um the technical reality of what we've been able to achieve yeah right right no i i don't i don't i i know you're working on it i'm just i mean and your your project i'm just you know trying to trying to get some language did you get what you wanted then ron or maybe you could continue on email with |
| 58:26 | brian and get yeah yeah i can i can i can i can continue this off offline yeah yeah thank you i mean i i yeah yeah thank you okay thank you thank you ron yeah chris you've had your hand up i just wanted to come back on uh you've got to be careful about this thing we've just taken all the nutrients out of the ocean or a large part of it because if you look globally at nitrogen we have doubled the amount of nitrogen in the global cycle human effect now a lot of that of course happens in the ocean in the coastal regions rather than |
| 58:58 | in the open ocean but we have massively perturbed the nitrogen cycle of the globe absolutely hugely and that's something which if we say we should be putting more in then some people will go down your throat so we need to be careful how you frame this simple words sound good but you've got to be very careful about framing it and then the only other point i wanted to make just to sort of add to brian's point about growing macro algae offshore i think yeah absolutely fine with the restoring that i think it although it's |
| 59:25 | probably less significant i think restoring the blue carbon nearshore uh in habitat as well is also should be highly encouraged they probably won't ever sequester big quantities but i think the um nasm study of a year or two ago suggested you might get something like 0.7 of a gigaton per year potentially out of that and there may be ways to accentuate that so i think i would couple it with that as well because i think that is a it has other benefits as well there's lots of win-win wins there because you can get people involved you |
| 59:58 | can get habitat creation you can get all sorts of things out of it as well so i think that's another one to add to the list right so this is uh seagrass and mangroves and stuff like that exactly yeah great thank you very much brian uh yeah so i would concur with chris on this um just keep in mind that it's very slow going uh on the near shore restoration because uh there are a lot of players there's a lot of contention for space there's a lot of discussion about what's really restoration and what's just you know |
| 1:00:32 | kind of glossing over uh so it becomes a highly contentious and very slow going approach but i concur with um chris that a fraction of a gigaton could be done that way um and just to reemphasize there's uh you know dick feynman said there's plenty of room at the bottom he was talking about small machines but we're um applying it to the deep ocean and that is there's plenty of nitrate already in the in the ocean we've analyzed that while on the mixed layer you know you could have a significant |
| 1:01:03 | effect of on nitrogen in just a matter of a few a couple of decades in the twilight zone the top thousand meters you have accessible thousands of years worth of nitrate to fix multiple gigatons per year of carbon so there's plenty of room in the mid ocean to you know to actually restore natural upwelling use natural nitrate that's in the mid ocean and enable or replete kelp forest and seaweed growth as an example with some microalgae production as well right it does mean using pipes and this is the thing that always comes back to my mind |
| 1:01:45 | means using pipes and pumps to do this upwelling ryan i'll say yes and no uh there are multiple ways of achieving deep water irrigation and most of them don't use pipes so the original ones might have used pipes but i think they're they're new approaches that are you know at liberty to say what they are so you liberty to say what they are bro um one of them is i mean there's been some published work on uh depth cycling and um you know we're uh we're working on that uh quietly uh to explore it we're getting some good |
| 1:02:20 | results that takes time well that's where the seaweed um collects sunlight during the day and absorbs nutrient uh at night down deeper so what you lift it up with a rope or something i think you mentioned this a few a few of these meetings ago yeah okay all right that that may take an order of magnitude or two less energy less energy and and it's sort of less disruptive it seems it seems more i mean to have to have a massive industrial complex of pipes and pumps this is uh sort of to me goes against the grain for |
| 1:02:57 | me but just if it's just ropes and seaweed being lifted up it's not so bad yeah one question friends let me uh let uh jew speak and then their new friends yeah can i ask brian very basic questions oh i'm wondering oh then how long did the swede leave how long during sorry how long days or fluid can't survive to can leave how many days can the seaweed live for yeah yeah ah and also i have one more question and when they when when the seaweed dies when the seeds die how can should we how should we manage that |
| 1:03:49 | those seeds that's seaweed when the seaweed dies okay let me see if i understood the questions um the first one is how long will this seaweed live in uh the deep in the dark and um to answer that question uh are indication so far is that the seaweed wants some light every day so if you take one of your house plants and you put it in the closet for 36 hours it won't be a very house happy house plant when it comes out so um the analogy is somewhat similar in that um you know uh plants want some amount of light every |
| 1:04:33 | day so uh there's a question of how much you know we just um we just uh survived uh super typhoon rai on thursday uh which was a category five hurricane it was a direct hit on cebu our coastal facilities were largely destroyed but i'm happy to report that our seaweed platform which we'd lowered to a depth of five meters survived the a storm tide of five meters um waves of uh likely five meters as well and winds of over 100 knots so um i'm very happy to say that uh we have um you know survived that and demonstrated |
| 1:05:26 | one of our fundamental tenets that to outrun a hurricane uh the best approach is to descend and because we're getting those um very unusual and unexpected results it's an opportunity to um ensure resilience uh however um you know it's good to have the seaweed deeper when you have storms or even large vessels passing over so we can address navigational hazards and we can address storm hazards by having an appropriate depth and it's a balance between getting enough sunlight and being deep enough to be safe |
| 1:06:06 | so uh we're working that balance presently and that's an opportunity i'll need to remember your second question um what happens to seaweed when it dies oh yes okay well two key benefits uh yes um the first is that the seaweed should get some sunlight every day um the second is that um the seaweed that falls off the platform uh by some studies represents 10 to 50 of what is actually harvested so it's an addition to what's harvested so you have 100 of your harvest and then you have a national 10 or 50 percent |
| 1:06:51 | uh that falls off the platform the sink rates that we see for many seaweeds including our tropical species is roughly one thousand to four thousand meters per day which means that we reach the 300 meter uh depth horizon at uh just in eight hours and 324 hours well three thousand three hundred meters is a depth horizon commonly discussed as a hundred year time scale or returning to the surface and a thousand meters uh approaches a thousand years depending on your location in the ocean okay and um the thousand meter threshold could be |
| 1:07:30 | achieved for those seaweeds in uh 24 hours so um there are many species like saccharina well let's see and some others that don't have pneumaticists which are bubbles and even the ones with bubbles sink pretty well under a depth cycling regimen so as a result we can measure those sink rates we have a grant right now with the commonwealth of australia to collect and sink seaweeds of various kinds and observe the sink rates and track the sinking past 300 meters and we hope to do that in the coming 12 months and establish some data baselines for |
| 1:08:16 | the actual sequestration and the amount of sequestration that occurs through a threshold of 300 meters if not a thousand meters so there's a substantial sequestration go ahead yeah did that does that answer your question jew yeah france last question uh you say uh brian you say um when you when you let the seaweed think for for uh into the fertilised waters maybe 300 meter or 500 meters depth the bladders wouldn't they be squeezed from the pressure yes in fact the observations from university of southern california |
| 1:09:12 | are that even if you grow seaweed with bladders for example microcystis and you depth cycle uh 80 meters each day the bladders grow to be very small and they're filled with fluid and so while a regular macrocystus has a significant buoyancy a depth cycled uh macrocystus is uh negatively buoyant uh-huh okay thanks so they don't suffer the bends when they come up then uh yeah and most importantly if they do fall off and they will uh they'll sink and the point is not to stop at 300 meters or a thousand meters |
| 1:09:56 | but these seaweeds will reach the seafloor in a matter of days whether it's 1 000 meters deep or four thousand meters deep and as a result um you know we'll get uh we're expecting to see over ninety percent sequestration we'll see what the experimental results are but we're expecting ninety percent of that seaweed to reach the seafloor in a matter of days yeah great and so just can you just remind me when you depth cycle how far down do you go 15 meters did you say uh no i think the experiment at usc was |
| 1:10:25 | 80 meters 80 meters 80 meters yeah yeah right and i i we consider that to be a minimum because really the nutrient the nitrate supply just begins at that yeah yeah fair enough yeah our experience is that deeper is better but okay and so by taking the seaweed down they kind of absorb nitrates and then they bring them up they bring them up again is that right otherwise you could just have a sort of bamboo platform you lower down and just sort of swish that up and down a bit can you bam let's see can you see your question |
| 1:10:59 | again or just some just some sort of thing that um you know some impeller type thing just made of wood or bamboo on on ropes that you just lift it up and down to kind of waft the you know nutrient-rich water up from as far down as you want to you know what's the point of taking seaweed down with it because you don't have to move water it takes uh orders of magnitude more energy to move water than to move seaweed okay so the seaweed sits there in this nutrient rich water and then you bring it up again okay yeah that does remind |
| 1:11:28 | me clive and brian there is one of the rpa projects i've seen that they're probably working in shallow water that has some sort of impellers that uses uh used to push water up for macro algae but i can't remember the depths involved i think they're probably of the order of 80 meters or 100 meters ish rather than really deep ocean anyway but um there is certainly one project i can't remember what it's called now which does that sort of thing that's true i'm familiar with that i i |
| 1:11:56 | was never impressed with the impellers given that um the the fact that our own work on negatively buoyant plumes has demonstrated that uh it really doesn't get to the surface and doesn't stay on the surface um the plume immediately falls back down uh so i i think since then they kind of gave up on their approach and more recently i've been working on wave driven upwelling uh which is where we were a dozen years ago or maybe five five to ten years ago uh but we've moved beyond that since then since the |
| 1:12:26 | uh for many reminding parts of the subtropical ocean um the critical renewable energy that's available is solar and so we've been doing a lot more with marine solar more recently but um i think there are some approaches in temperate latitudes where seasonally you can get enough upwelling with wave energy and uh that's probably a good approach in those regions okay thank you everyone anything else about that or anything if not we have 25 minutes um so we talked about this a little bit um let's say some more about it then john |
| 1:13:10 | i think he probably had more to say are you there john john mcdonald sean's still with us yeah i'm still ready sorry clark yes i'd i'd like to hear um uh brian i articulate this as well but it's it's just the it's it's just as a way of communicating with one if you are if you open the discussion with too much information you often people glaze over it it's sometimes better to stimulate a conversation and then open up a question questions following it not i noticed you do this whether you do it |
| 1:13:46 | deliberately or not brian it's quite a useful technique but it does invite a dialogue which uh which keeps the discussion going could you comment on that perhaps yes i'd be happy to thank you john um we found over the years and with perhaps a lot of arrows in our backs over the last 20 years or at least watching other people get speared that you know it's good to first of all begin the framing with our audience in mind whether it's perhaps a marine ecological audience or a scientific audience or a |
| 1:14:20 | perhaps a business development audience and then ultimately the the social acceptance of various approaches is really important and a lot of it has to do with something that um jacques cousteau did very masterfully in a recent biography becoming cousteau articulates this and that is that he managed to get uh people to fall in love with the ocean or fall in love with the creature and when they do then um they champion the uh the health and and environment and ecosystems for that and i think we could say the same for |
| 1:15:00 | ecosystems whether it's tropical coral reef or kelp forest these are charismatic mega ecosystems and by appealing to regenerating those ecosystems and understanding how we can help make that work even i would say the level of whales that we had in the southern ocean would be an ecosystem and by appealing to those charismatic megafauna we can build a lot of social acceptance that then would drive the political acceptance within many audiences including even cop26 generally speaking those last groups may oftentimes be be |
| 1:15:42 | trailing in the sense that they really will follow uh the social acceptance and the public opinion rather than lead it and so by identifying the leaders in it often cases that's going to be the business community as gated by the advice of consulting marine ecologists that defines a sequence of audiences for us to work with to actually develop a level of social acceptance to the point where it becomes socially acceptable for uh political support to be developed for approaches that can sustainably regenerate a healthy climate |
| 1:16:27 | and then i was also just by just thinking more even beyond the science yeah than the content that just just the technique of starting a conversation you know just to lead him with a with a with a stimulating comment that that leads to more discussion uh well that's really true i find it helps to um go and listen to a particular community that may be non-technical and understand their concerns and their interests and their points of resonance and then by perhaps tailoring and framing the conversation to address the interests and concerns of |
| 1:17:05 | that community um there tends to be a lot more engagement and so we found it helpful to uh do that in a number of contexts and we do need to bring um the marine ecology community and the scientific establishment along with us to the point you know i think ultimate success is is no objection and then um and then from there engaging the business development community to be able to address key challenges and a lot of it begins with food security because with the high prices of natural gas many fertilizer companies have indicated |
| 1:17:45 | they're shutting down nitrate production which is going to have an immediate impact on food supplies and food security we can only already see the prices of food going up globally and um these shortages will then uh you know cause either either cause some it's an opportunity for solutions but i'm concerned that may be happening slowly and a bit too late but we need you know we need to avoid the real challenges of food riots and water wars which we've already seen some indication of and has the potential of |
| 1:18:20 | generating hundreds of millions of climate refugees so this needs to be addressed uh early on to the point where we can rely upon the seas and the soils for biodiverse food security that will ensure a stable political environment for years and decades to come chris has got your hand up chris please yeah i was just going to say also i think in general um generating a clear understanding of the need for carbon removal widely is still something that we haven't yet got to and i think that's something that we really do need and |
| 1:19:00 | on the ocean side that's part of the story and maybe a significant part of the story but it's important i think to get because if you can get people to understand that real need then you're part way there at least with some of the other issues i think um and i think and that's not just the sort of i think beyond what brian mentioned i think i would also say the public but also some and i emphasize some of the ngos the environmental ones who are let's say you can talk too sensibly and talk to scientifically |
| 1:19:31 | there are some who we clearly can't and brian i'm sure to have experience with some of those um because if you can get them on board then you are certainly helping yourself because if they're on the opposition some of them can be quite influential and with the politicians and they can really stymie you if you're if you get it wrong so i think trying to build the community understanding of the need for carbon removal including the ocean in particular in this case is one angle that you need to also uh develop |
| 1:20:00 | because once you get the once people accept the need to remove carbon then they say okay well how do we do it in the best way so that's the first step i think people have got to accept that if they don't accept that and then some people still think oh we can all still do it by you know reducing carbon emissions that's all we need to do um and uh clearly that horse is bolted i suspect a few decades ago frankly so i think that's another angle i'd just like to mention yes and then um you know embracing what chris said and |
| 1:20:31 | extending it further this group in particular is aware of the fact that carbon removal alone won't get us back to a healthy climate this century unless done at drastic scale and as a result we probably need to consider approaches that can help to restore a healthy temperature for the arctic regions and finding sustainable ways of refreezing the arctic and getting back to a healthy climate in the arctic in particular is going to be uh important to uh getting back to a healthy climate this century yeah i just like to underline what you um |
| 1:21:10 | what you said a minute ago brian uh uh the cousteau's method of getting people to fall in love with uh with nature um i mean time again i watch things on tv and or it just goes through my head that that's worked on me you know long ago when i was a kid watching jack cousteau and then all the david attenborough stuff and uh you know i started off as not particularly interested in biology and not particularly earth-loving i was more into engineering and maths and things chemistry and you know anything that you could manipulate was was a good |
| 1:21:45 | idea and gradually over time you know that's i've changed and and that cousteau cousteau's method has worked a treat on me and that whole thing about listening as well i mean i like to think that i'm i i do that as well these days that's been a lesson of my life um another lesson you know of my life um sorry chris your point that you made it i think you were saying um uh people need to recognize the need for um carbon dioxide removal greenhouse gas removal sorry i didn't grasp maybe i was the only one that |
| 1:22:24 | didn't yeah i think that um there is certainly a lot of people out there even in the scientific community who who still think that the solution is simply reducing emissions yeah um and as i said i think that you know we're way past that point now right and then yeah and that that's really all i was saying i uh and i'm not sure that uh what's come out of cop 26 or even other things has still got that clear message across i mean it's also effectively also said in the latest ipcc ar6 report as well they've |
| 1:22:57 | basically said that you know carbon removal is needed as well right but i'm not sure it's widely understood or accepted certainly by politicians um and i think that that's one of the things that if you get that widely accepted then people they've got to look for ways to achieve it and that's when you start feeding into some of the things we're talking about yeah yeah to me if you're going to have net zero as a policy then how do you get the net you know if you're going to keep |
| 1:23:24 | emitting then how do you get get get it that's a net zero well even if you get to net zero all that means is you you end up static at that level of carbon in the atmosphere and it stays there well there is that as well but i mean and the other effects of climate change are still going to be going on a lot of them as well some of them for a very long time absolutely right but what i'm saying is something very simple is that how can you have net zero if you haven't got some kind of carbon dioxide removal |
| 1:23:49 | how are you going to get to how how's the is that is that what it means that the actual emissions is zero because what you're pumping out you're also putting you're also drawing down isn't that what it means yeah effectively uh mind you that there are net zeros beginning to get a bit of a bad rap there's one have been one or two publications that's saying that zero is effectively a com i come across me too and and um i i'd started saying that a few months ago i mean i just thought it through and thought what you |
| 1:24:21 | know this is bonkers to just leave it at that level i mean these people haven't thought it through really you know um so to me it's uh you know targets we don't we don't trust targets anymore so it's just the latest that's their framing so they're not so they can't say we've got a target to do x by 2030 so they just say net zero now it's just a different framing for them targets are all very well but how to get there is something that's still missing oh yeah yeah exactly so nothing's really |
| 1:24:52 | changed they still don't have a plan they've just got a different the target looks the sound looks and sounds if it's a slightly different sound bite um anyway so that's that's probably not going to take us anywhere useful um john's question was uh was great um well we've we've got 10 minutes left um and uh anything else we could finish early before christmas is a bit of a chat we haven't uh choice yeah we could talk about this weight okay all right so yeah if there's yeah |
| 1:25:26 | uh perhaps i'll just quickly say that um i had a a chat with uh aaron a few days ago who was on our thing um two weeks ago and as said and you know he's very passionate about about us he was saying that um greenland he said it's about these um blob tsunamis he's called call them i didn't there's something i didn't know that he was saying that um when the ice sheet you have a certain amount of volcanic you know green has a huge place and there's you know volcanic activity some of it and and when you |
| 1:25:59 | have a collapsing ice sheet um it sort of it doesn't sort of collapse slowly it sort of suddenly drops and so i think it's like a you know when you put a lid on a tupperware you kind of push it down and it pushes a bit of air out it's like that it's something that's flopped like that and it pushes out water really fast and he said it's going right up channels in elsmere island and going right across the atlantic the arctic ocean and and it said it's coming down the north sea as well and we're going to be getting the |
| 1:26:25 | english channel from these from these blob tsunamis and that's what's causing it sudden ice sheet collapse that pushes water anyway but um i just wanted to say that um okay what is there to say about do you want to say something about sweet um friends friends no i i haven't heard from it there was something about something the size of britain that started to break up maybe you have more to say about it chris yeah the there's a paper or came up in was it science or nature just recently i think the last week or two |
| 1:26:57 | very recent um which is seemed to think that the thweight case glacier may be breaking up um and i think the whole glacier i can't remember the precise figure was it something like if if it all melted it went in the ocean you're talking of something like somewhere between five and ten meters of sea level rise i think if the whole lot went if i remember rightly something of that order anyway it's it's significant and the reason is because the um the sea from the outside the sea water is getting in underneath |
| 1:27:30 | the ice shelf and underneath the glacier and melting it from the underneath and the also the um the gracie is grounded on towards just behind the ice shelf and behind the ice shelf it's not the glacier goes much deeper the actual rock is deeper than this much deeper than the sea so if it recedes far enough beyond behind that current grounding point the ocean then has total access to the rest of that glacier going back quite some distance i believe i don't know what the distance is i can't remember um quite a way i suspect |
| 1:28:05 | so basically the whole thing may be destabilized essentially and there are they have i think seeing significant cracks in the glacier in some areas at least in in certainly in the ice shelf um they've seen them through radar and other techniques and so there is concern that the threats gracious may be not going to break up like tomorrow but um certainly um much quicker than people had sort of anticipated only a few years ago i think yeah the report is staying here in the next five years that the big front portion of it piece almost the |
| 1:28:42 | size of the uk could actually break up yeah very fast and deep and that that but it can't i think for a potentially up to a couple of foot but then everything starts sliding behind it and you you then get up to sort of 10 meters much quicker than people have talked about yeah yeah the thwaites uh glacier currently contributes to roughly four percent global sea level rise and so an order of magnitude increase could be you know resulting in 40 percent increase so it's certainly a concern and reflecting something that uh clive had |
| 1:29:18 | mentioned earlier uh we've seen evidence in alaska of seawater inundations up to 300 meters in the fjords uh 300 meters uh in terms of resonant waves moving up the fjords with tsunamis so 800 meters is a change of depth you mean a wave 300 meters high or away 300 results in inundation at a 300 meter seal above sea level that's amazing that's that's very high sorry it's it's it's uh verified by um uh natural historic um deposits that have been observed at those altitudes but not not in recent so not |
| 1:30:00 | in the last few decades this is in sort of prehistory is it in the evidence of yeah evidence of marine high water marks if you will got it yeah okay sorry i understand yep those are extreme events but um yeah with catastrophic ice falls uh you can get those that order of magnitude yeah yeah you can get those currently of course a bit similar to that uh disaster in the himalayas when a huge block of ice and rock fell down in that valley and washed down if that happens in a field something similar you get a massive wave that can wash up as brian |
| 1:30:35 | said like 300 meters up uh upper in onto the land and and have very devastating local effects obviously but not wouldn't be a global effect but has still has a quite significant effect locally exactly what happened in the himalayas i missed the this ice cream in the himalayas this was um i think i can't remember if it's in nepal or in india anyway a large block of uh ice on a mountain side gave way and and came roaring down this mountain several thousand meters above the valley and it picked up a load |
| 1:31:08 | of rock and basically the friction of that going down the mountain turned a lot of it underneath some sort of water so the thing was on like ice skates almost and there was i can't remember how many millions of tons of material but there was millions of tons of material that smashed into this valley and then washed down this valley and it destroyed two hydroelectric stations on its way just blasted through because there was masses of rock and ice and it killed about a couple hundred people as well some workers on some of these |
| 1:31:35 | things and if you look it up somewhere i can't read the name of the place but it was a massive rock slide and i slide and it was absolutely incredible this is some video that were taken of it do you recall which year it was uh this was um earlier this year or last year was this year was this year was that yeah a few months ago yeah yeah how long ago maybe five six months ago somebody yeah something like that earlier not very very recent yeah okay well the you know this this raises the significant concern of irreversibility |
| 1:32:14 | uh with respect to these um catastrophic events and you know the thwaites glacier should unleash with this um undermining there's this i don't know if in january 2019 nasa discovered an underwater cavity underneath the thwaites glacier with an area two-thirds the size of manhattan and the cavity formed mostly in the previous three years nearly a thousand feet tall and it would likely accelerate the glaciers decay this seems like a potentially irreversible situation and something that is uh of a major concern |
| 1:32:50 | you know brian this almost sounds analogous to know people don't see permafrost melting in the arctic they're witch melting in the arctic sea ice yeah i mean um yeah i mean we have to consider what interventions might be possible but i think it underscores the irreversibility of some of the changes that we're witnessing i mean even cooling if you if we were to take the cooling of the arctic like john is suggesting and cool the antarctic i don't think that would stop the weights from what i hear yeah i don't know how far gone it is and |
| 1:33:33 | uh you know it would take some concerted efforts to consider what uh mitigation efforts are possible some very large spikes the the water that is warming the underside of the glass here has got warmed up somewhere else so if you understood the current flows and you could water where it had been getting too warm you would also reduce the evaporation which is causing the increased salinity so if you knew enough about the current players you could do marine crowd brightening to at least slow the the earthquakes uh i have a map of all the currents |
| 1:34:14 | which looks incredibly complicated which i will uh uh as i will send to tai thank you yes and keep in mind there's more put some bombs out there and blow it all up well there's along the lines of what stephen was referring to there's more energy in the eddies associated with those currents than in the mean currents themselves and thus a map may be less capturing of the actual dynamics then what we may require is an animation that shows these eddies and how they vary over time and um the time dependence factor there is |
| 1:34:55 | really significant in that these um eddies come and go yeah exactly and so it actually puts to shame the complexity of the atmospheric weather system and um tracking those dynamics it's interesting because there's so much energy in the eddies you can actually work your way upstream in the gulf stream and even in the curacao current uh because um you know by suitably hopping from eddie to eddy you can actually work your way the other way so um it it means that uh you know i think the mean flow is important |
| 1:35:28 | and steven's correct that both marine cloud brightening in one region you can reduce the temperature input in another region at large scale but yeah these eddies are dynamic and on a time scale of months they change their uh location and position and that requires dynamic monitoring yeah i mean i'll put this in the chat i put a link to the thwaites in the in the guardian article on at least anyway in the chat but that's excellent but let's uh but this is just like a link into that uh himalayan glacier |
| 1:36:04 | thing as well there's a video you can see thank you chris oh yeah thanks thanks so that's this this is uh i don't know if it's a sort of um someone's done it for labor of love i think um i don't know exactly but anyway there it is i found it and i use this a lot and you can you can uh so what i've been doing recently is looking to see how the eddie's changed you can just click and it puts a little can you see there puts a little circle there and then you come back the next day and |
| 1:36:33 | see if it's still in the middle it generally isn't it's generally drifted over a bit and uh this is an excellent if anyone hasn't seen this this is really superb yeah yeah where is it located it looks like a numeric ip but let's see i i found it on a different link but um yeah an old school yeah yeah and this is ocean currents but it shows winds as well does it forecast in the future only show historic oh it's only showing now i believe it's current yeah um yeah i mean you can get yeah you can get |
| 1:37:08 | oh hang on no you can choose a date john uh brian you could choose a date so it's on now right now choose a date i i can't be surprised if it forecasts well let's just try two days ahead and see what it does well it's uh it's it's it's accepted at least it hasn't sort of said you can't not gonna do that i hadn't hadn't tried that yeah the kurushio current that's why i went there i happen to know that one yes um and this is where where you are uh here brian so you just had that huge um |
| 1:37:49 | uh typhoon cebu i don't know that's that one there as well isn't it let's let's see uh i'm getting there to the screen i want to see what you're seeing on in cebu uh yes uh that's is it is it reflected in the ocean current there's not really much ocean current according to this which is not surprising the the wind typhoon was really impressive and that was reflected on windy. |
| 1:38:16 | com and maybe some other satellite reports but a super typhoon rai is now in the south china sea to the left uh-huh but it went from east to west straight through the central philippines right and it looks as though 10 more than 10 million people will be without power for more than a month and um the entire island of behold 1. |
| 1:38:37 | 4 million people has no mobile communications now that's correct um no mobile communications for at least a week so far about a week and um we're concerned and we can't even reach one of our staff in bohol to confirm that he's safe yeah bit scary you know in many ways those three million seaweed farmers are on the front lines of climate disruption when it comes to these super typhoon intensities and frequencies as well as um in terms of high temperatures and low nutrient levels yeah brian if i sent you a paper about how to |
| 1:39:20 | moderate hurricanes could you flash around decision makers in the philippines i'll do it yes i'll do what we can we are interested in finding all the ways of doing that and in the long term some amount of restoring natural upwelling should help as well but happy to look at the marine cloud brightening approaches to this as we'll need all of them i think to address the myriad numbers of intense hurricanes we can expect in the future happy to do that steven thank you um we're time everyone um so i'm going to say happy christmas |
| 1:39:55 | um unless there's any other last comment from anyone good to see you all yeah yeah likewise good ugly discussion today that's great yes thank you very much yeah we all have a must-read reading list uh i'm going to read kim stanley robinson but uh i'll tell you everyone's got something i'm reading it now nearly three actually stanley robinson what do people think about his solution with regard to pumping the water out from under the glasses to try and re-ground them so they stop moving so |
| 1:40:28 | fast you pump the water up but it's gonna another bit of water will get back in well we thought so yeah i mean the i the idea put forward is you have loads of pumps which slows down the brings the glasses back down to the original um speed i i think you could make a uh a curtain with a float at the top that would slow the water getting in by putting up a safety curtain and if you're not trying to resist the pressure you're just trying to reduce the flow rate but yeah this was referring to um as they speed up you get heat |
| 1:41:10 | um sort of the friction of the moving ice and then you use more water sort of a paper quite there was a paper i've just come across this last week that said some parts of greenland they're actually uh getting higher levels of heat coming up from the crustal rocks yeah that effect may affect the glaciers over a period of time as well yeah changing the stress pattern on the rock so that you can get great big volcanic eruptions the rock has got an incredible incredible load of all this it's actually reduced that all right and if |
| 1:41:50 | you take that away yeah the isostatic rebound yeah yeah waking the giant [Music] well i like the idea of um spending less money than it takes to for the police to uh make the cop secure and uh solve the problem with that with marine cloud brightening might be more useful if it would i actually had to increase the cost of moon crowd lightning to to approach the police cost whether this was really really true i don't know but it's uh it's in a little video that i'll i'll send you yes please okay well that so now the next one is uh |
| 1:42:34 | three weeks from now because they've grabbed our spot the other those other people the uh you know what [Laughter] so yeah so it's the 10th of uh 10th of january monday the 10th of january so happy happy christmas and merry christmas and happy new year everybody yeah great holidays merry christmas bye-bye bye everyone friends live yeah i sent you some things today i saw them i i i'm not through the |