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| 00:00 | dwelling was completely erased um all our boats were damaged and um four of the five buildings on the least site were erased down to the foundations yeah of course the trouble is now when i was involved it was back in 2004 and there was international aid available now it's spread out very very thinly it is um yeah i think the disaster relief efforts are or slim to none and you know we've had in seven years two major tycoons hit the area um and so you know we were practically the only seaweed cultivation that survived |
| 00:45 | in the direct path of the hurricane which is the central third of the philippines yeah so we have a recipe for resilience and it's all about submergence and of course to appropriate depth yeah yeah we're well and truly into cyclone season in queensland now so it's it's important lessons here yeah from this exercise although you wouldn't wish it on oh definitely i agree uh whether it's you know from queensland to the philippines to florida to the east coast of the us um to hawaii you're dealing with uh |
| 01:26 | hurricanes throughout that region that are only going to get more frequent with climate destruction so it actually adds a new chapter to climate disruption that we need to address in the subtropics i also read recently brian that someone's predicting that the zone that hurricanes will affect is going to expand with climate change well you know it's funny in the higher latitudes they have hurricane force winds they call them storms [Laughter] that happens all the time i'm watching hurricanes spinning off new zealand and |
| 02:00 | you know up in in the new england area they call them nor'easters and storms but they're still yeah that's what they are yeah we've had a few of those in the uk as well over the years agreed rather amazing mind you when it gets up in the sort of 200 miles an hour and starts throwing off little tornadoes everywhere it's so quick observed in grenada it's pretty there's not a green leaf left or anything oh and we've seen that in florida as well and we've seen it in the philippines and the answer is you know |
| 02:35 | with depth because we can put our platform meters or even tens of meters below the surface uh we can ride out the worst hurricane that nature can has dished up so far so i think fingers crossed we have the recipe for resilience when it comes to storm reliance and we'll be able to regeneration resilience exactly just a pity you can't sink your buildings down as well well they do i've got to tell you the this is one of our amazing stories is after we prove that this works someone said oh yes didn't you know about the |
| 03:10 | indigenous habit to take your outboard motors off of the boat sink the boat to a scuttle the boat to a depth of five or ten meters or more ride out the hurricane and then you know retrieve your little um milk jug and and pull the boat back up and then float it and then put the motor back on it this is like a standard practice now so we can weave in the indigenous knowledge as well yeah yeah well good uh uh evening and good morning um everybody um this is my meant to be well it's as i said it's your show as |
| 03:46 | well um um i just feel the need to step in and make an agenda and uh just give it back to you again although there is something i'd like to put on the agenda myself um yes so let's just do the usual um which is this but let's get get to this what do we want to talk about today can you see that have i shared it yes i think i've got a snippet on uh the uh the assessment on buoyant flakes for uh risk risk and governance from uh will will burns is doing that from northwestern university okay uh of i better say buoyant flakes |
| 04:34 | yeah you call it pfo yep it's important that you say risk to risk risk to risk okay yeah because if you only take the risk of of doing it and not the risk of not doing it you've got a false result yep okay yeah i'll second that so i think that's really important yep especially when you've got a moving baseline yeah well risk risk risk dash risk okay yeah yeah okay happy with that i'd like to just discuss um uh well this whole thing about the way that we had the whale poo pump introduced um well |
| 05:20 | uh discussed last time by uh jew um i was thinking about it and so just a few thoughts i just want to put something to you all and see if you shoot it down in flames or not so um wishes uh well i just call it the whale palm tree that's just just that's what it's called on wikipedia um uh i think it's could be incredibly important um to just these other interventions we're talking about um so that's that's what i'd like to do but um but back to everyone else what else uh oswald just uh two minutes for me to introduce |
| 06:07 | uh cool planet earth okay right okay yep okay anything else i mean sometimes we don't need many things because as we know it uh the conversation morphs around i don't know if it's uh appropriate for this conversation but um let's see brought it up a couple couple weeks ago that michael mann posted an article that referred to an article and referred to an article about earth shine measuring the reflectivity of the earth as it appears from the moon taking measurements off the moon so what the point of the whole thing was that |
| 06:56 | we've lost a half a watt of um albedo the earth is less bright it's dimming yes um you know it might be because of climate or it might be causing climate i don't nobody knows for sure but the point is that michael mann posted it yeah yeah maybe there's an entree uh my kale man yep that's professor michael man that'd be a great way to measure global reflectance increase so that's interesting it's not easy they take hundreds and thousands of measurements on different parts of the moon |
| 07:42 | at different phases of the moon i was reading about it's like crazy how can how do they keep track of this i thought to send a satellite up to the moon and leave it going around taking pictures of the earth perhaps well in that that satellite is what they've done is they've calibrated this um it's it's down in los angeles i forget that it's on mount baldy but they've calibrated this telescope that has been focused on that for two decades and uh with with the satellite measurements and it's off by a factor of |
| 08:15 | two over what length of time when's the baseline for this measurement uh it's 19 years from um it ends in 2017 so it's like 1998 to 2017. that'll be very useful for both the the boy and flakes and the setomizers are to get a global picture over at several years if we can um green up the seas that should increase the uh the moonshine and likewise with the extra marine cloud from the mcb and sedomizer effects we should get an even greater effect what's wrong with it and the ice shields but for that better yeah one the one |
| 09:08 | comment i remember they they think they haven't drawn any conclusions but they believe the uh the main area is around the tropics of course i would speculate that this is principally a change in cloud cover yeah yeah yeah right so let's get to that then um anything else from the agenda well just the point of order i've tried to send out my basic restoration plan which is it's the pdf of the powerpoint with notes which has got to some people but not to everybody and um i've had some great feedback so if |
| 09:45 | anybody hasn't had it please let me know and i'll get you a copy so what did you call it restoration plan the invision bias restoration plan bias approach of the whole thing uh i um might have had it from you i don't quite remember how long ago did you send it um a couple of weeks before christmas i would think okay anyway i've had some very good feedback from several people so i'm sort of putting it out a little bit more widely right okay that's a good idea yeah but i've got i've got two hours on |
| 10:19 | it tomorrow with um um okay do we know him um he appears i think he's on on doesn't appear often on here but i think he's appears on the chat uh what the sort of a aca sort of chat and cdr sorry yes yeah okay right yeah thanks for bringing that i mean that's as i say that's the point of these sort of yeah actually meeting and speaking um because stuff gets lost and people think well that didn't go anywhere did it but people were just busy at the time you know you could sort of highlight something when we're |
| 10:57 | speaking yeah i think that's lost as well brian well i've got you um can you get back to me on the nda because i need to get it to foresight group yeah it's happy to do that i'll put on the agenda first day brilliant thank you i i had a nice notion from dan wanting to move forward on stuff great so anything like that actually i'm i'd say i'm very happy to hear uh you know even people saying oh let's swap numbers or can we meet at certain times so much easier to do when you're |
| 11:26 | speaking assuming other people don't mind too much of that that's a little bit of that that seems to be helpful we want to get things done it's all very well chatting i've said this so many times um okay um all right so if anyone thinks of anything else please chime in but i think we've got enough now so let's start with sev please okay well i thought that with the um imminent um experiments by the cambridge university and the national uh institute of oceanography in in india to have a mesocosm experiment that's a big |
| 12:04 | plastic tube going from the top of the sea to the to the bottom to check the effects of buoyant flakes on that and then possibly later carefully uh gated sea trials it'd be a good idea to uh try and bring in the the the governance people and the the risk evaluation people early so i contacted um uh will burns who's sort of running the c2g to i get his uh i think which which assesses uh the risks and and i sent him the the my theoretical stuff on on the boy in flakes and he seems quite interested in it and he's |
| 12:49 | recognizing it as being a very different proposition to just chucking a a a shipload of soluble ferrous sulfate into the ocean and um he actually uh they've begun doing the the assessment but they haven't got through it yet and they're wishing us uh good good luck with the with the experiments so i thought that was quite a a positive way forward and it'll give provided that it doesn't doesn't go silly i i i've insisted it be a a risk risk uh evaluation not just risk and it should give cover once some of |
| 13:35 | the indian experiments start coming through from the more rabid egc and and green groups that yes it is being looked at uh first of all theoretically and then more practically down the line to to the to the r d side okay so what was that you said about sulfate in the ocean oh the the ferrous sulfate in the ocean is typically how who was talking about them because that's not what you're saying sorry uh so that's not what you're doing is it you're you're pointless nothing to do with that so i |
| 14:09 | didn't know that suddenly that camera will now appreciate the the the major difference between an ultra slow release buoyant thing and a artificial soluble stuff which goes away in a couple of weeks right so he he just said he was distinguishing buoyant flakes with that and with with this sulfate yeah yep okay so that was that was quite you know it's it's by no means i uh get out of jail free but at least it's it's a an apparent wish to look at it objectively and to say yes this is a a different method |
| 14:45 | right so he he's looking at it and he's happy to assess he and his team are looking at it it's great i'm not i didn't give him no deadlines than that but i'd expect it should come back in in a month or two great okay and um uh so the mesocosm experiment basically and and modelling mesocosm modelling and then small uh ocean trails the the west coast of india is particularly good because the the indians uh um extratorial seas eez goes out for about three years 300 and something kilometers so it's far enough |
| 15:26 | away from land not to have the runoff from the the rivers but it's also got a coastal current which reverses every year twice so if you if you say uh uh start your small experiments in the north you can watch them moving south slowly or for a couple of months and then it reverses and goes back again north so it can say within uh territorial waters and be easy of access for measuring and testing results and that great okay and um uh dave king has said something about this recently i think did he has he got some interest in this at all or not yes yes |
| 16:16 | he his ccrc is is getting in bed with the the with the indians okay great right and so you've got a manufacturing you've got a way of manufacturing these things now these buoyant flakes from ligthen and sort of rice houses i've given the formulas and how to do it and there are a couple of crowds who are i believe making the flakes but um i haven't heard of any any detail about it they have got them they've the indians already proven that the the rice husks do slowly release their alkaline silica |
| 16:53 | over over over months which is really good and and we know that same thing would occur with uh with the you know finely divided iron oxide and finely divided uh phosphate right good what do you how do you respond to the criticism that uh oh they're just going to become waterlogged and sink after a month or so um the lignin is a hot melt glue and it's it what you what you do is you you you make make the thing it's a bit like making breakfast cereal and then you you you heat it up and the lignin melts and it ends up |
| 17:36 | enclosing tiny air pockets within the the coated flake so that it's it's it's like a it's like a breakfast a puffed up puff puff wheats but which don't get waterlogged okay it's kind of sealed on the outside the lignin or whatever it is from the outside so yes eventually the the water does go right right in and all the the fertilizers released but it's it's a very very slow process depending on you know uvc radiation abrading the the the organics on wave action on fish fish and other things nibbling and on the |
| 18:20 | the ligands which are in phytoplankton which actually suck out the minerals which they need yeah yeah and so i mean as as it sort of um erodes away it needs to stay buoyant basically until it's sort of something yeah if you've got these these buoyancy pockets throughout the the flake it should remain buoyant yeah yeah okay um sounds very promising and interesting i was very impressed um well i had first just bumped into a bit the video made by brew some years ago um and was very excited about it so it's great it's taking a long time |
| 19:04 | um but despite you you know you and no doubt brew campaigning for it um any other questions uh oh ron's raise your hand ron yes thank you uh so i i just hopped on the call um and interestingly i i just i was i i read uh bruce uh envisionation document i don't know if that's i don't the same as the video but um he refer and i don't know if brew is on the call here yes he is yeah he is oh okay maybe brew could answer this because i um many of you know he has an estimate there that 87 of carbon sequestration |
| 19:47 | needed by 2050 for the specific targets he lays out there could be achieved by fertilizing the ocean could potentially be achieved by fertilizing the ocean the other uh 13 would be split between geological you know enhanced weathering and those kind of methods and uh and uh direct air capture kind of technological methods so i'm just curious uh and bruno's i've been i've been asking if he has you know to uh the backup for that and i'm wondering what i go ahead i think you have i sent you an update |
| 20:24 | the this is an increase in the total amount of living carbon on the planet right the majority of that living carbon occurs on land it's a much smaller amount in the oceans with currently around 550 giga tons of living carbon and that is pretty much recognized as being less than half of what they would have been on the planet eight to ten thousand years ago if you add another 550 gigatons of living carbon to the planet you will end up drawing down enough atmospheric co2 to take you back down to around the 300 |
| 21:04 | parts per million mark um with this considerable allowance for off-gassing from the oceans um and an alliance for the unavoidable emissions that will carry on between now and sort of 2050. the majority of it is going to be on land a great increase in the marine biomass though is really important because marine biomass is much more active and has the ability to draw carbon down very much faster it also has an albedo impact so you have to take the two things together so there's a couple other slides you need to to read with that i i anyway i've got |
| 21:40 | into your version 17 and sent it back to you uh okay okay change is on okay so so so just just to clarify so you're so uh the the the the effort would be to to recover a large amount of that biomass uh within a relatively short period of time through these fertilization as you see you know you say in the areas of the ocean that are sterile uh would be fertilized and and but it so my understanding is that most of that the the the carbon sequestered from now until 2050 under that proposal or plan or effort would be uh in the oceans no no |
| 22:29 | no it's gonna be it's gonna be on land the whole point about this is that um there is a huge generally forgotten carbon sink which is the living flux and the size of that engine has been reduced by about half and if we can recreate increase the size of the engine the engine will contain another 550 gigatons of living carbon and that that's that's the active part of it that makes the biosphere run so it's a from mice perspective it's a key point of the damage that we've done when we |
| 23:06 | look at cause and effect the the the cause of all of our problems comes back to anthropogenic disruption and damage to natural nutrient cycles so it all flows back from there if you have 11 000 gigatons of active carbon on the planet instead of 550 000 or thereabouts um clearly you're making a major major difference but it's it's all that active life that's putting up fungal spores and bath more sulfide off the oceans that's you know a big part of the engine of the system so the interesting thing to me was to |
| 23:49 | say if we if we came back to where we were what would it do and it would bring it back how did you get there you have to restore vast areas of land as well as the ocean oh that this is a lot of control so so i i will look at your your material but brew i'm just so so you know the the the notion of uh using uh recovering uh you know forests and and using the land as a as a sink for carbon has been uh as you know as i'm sure you know you know there's a the critique is that we can't do that because we need to grow |
| 24:25 | food and other you know it would it would uh luckily so so i'm hoping that you have some you know you address that in some way because i'd like the ocean you know wouldn't have that problem but the land could encroach upon human you know and we're and our population's going to grow i mean we're not very good at uh you know uh uh reducing our our footprint on land but we might be able to achieve something so i'm just wondering just in terms of the feasibility of the proposal and i'll i'll shut up right now and look |
| 24:57 | at your that's your material where is this new biomass coming from where is it go you're saying not the ocean so where where where is this extra food yeah this is this is both you will have certain amount of some in the ocean and you'll have a huge amount you put back on land the fortunate thing is that our agricultural techniques are racing forward and we're getting very good vertical farming and food synthesis and we can grow algae on five percent of the space that we need now to produce sufficient food |
| 25:30 | that will free up vast amounts of land for rewiring so all the year wilson stuff half earth stuff starts to become possible and if you do that i mean if you look at the work that's being done by um jamie arbit and the the rethink x group which i thoroughly recommend reading those documents um they're contemplating putting the south american beef industry out of business within nine years on the basis that the synthesized meats that we will produce will be better quality better tasting and a third of the price |
| 26:05 | now you have to you have to put mechanisms in place to start paying the ranches to grow vast areas of deep rooted grass and restore forests to draw down the carbon we put those mechanisms in place we have sufficient space to actually do that i mean i'm i'm looking to a a planet of 8.5 9 billion people living well by 2050 it's a target so so that's what we've got to achieve and the great thing about that target is it's agreed that is what the un sustainable development goals imply so if you're going to deliver that |
| 26:49 | you're going to find a way to that and it it's pretty dynamic i mean you've got to restructure the whole earth system accounting um but i my vision of this is a carbon account based on the total amount of living carbon on the planet so we're in 550 gigatonnes of deficit at the moment and as you restore that you could actually put a mechanism together to have a sensible accounting system for everything which would be a base currency for the world which was based on the health of the planet which is the only true viable |
| 27:25 | matrix okay all right thank you very much for that i love what you're saying um i i sent the paper out to everybody i can pray have a good deep read through please yes thank you i i just checked it's all teachers because i don't do scientific papers right was it an attachment or was it a link i was like i just had a quick like i couldn't see anything i'm sending it out selectively to to um people will understand it before i go too far okay and i'm getting getting uh peer feedback fair enough climb i found it it's |
| 27:59 | december 17th it's an attachment it's december 17th thank you yeah was that to all of us i'll check i'll check anyway yeah all right before we have any more responses can i just quickly sorry can i just very quickly ask uh arya mckenna if she's still there are you still there yes she is um because you're new so we just asked you people to introduce please yep yes yes hi uh aria here uh great to be on this call i i love the focus on the the natural systems rewilding you know bringing uh biodiversity back it's just |
| 28:38 | beautiful to be here i i know several people on the call i've been very involved with healthy planet action coalition and been involved with prague and healthy climate alliance um i i don't know if you want me to give you my entire background you're you're uh act an actress or actor do we say um yeah sort of an activist as well so so that's i mean that i i originally i'm an actress uh but i just got increasingly after my daughter was born got increasingly pulled into environmental activism um trained with |
| 29:12 | al gore uh did lobbying with citizens climate lobby american sustainable business council um and i worked at the clio institute for over a year uh just been i know i'm missing things uh but but have been you know increasingly involved also uh american renewable energy day uh did that for several years in a row and got to meet some really wonderful people and i think that's where my real uh i feel like that's where my real training began because i got to have so many amazing discussions with with so many people are actually working |
| 29:50 | on all of these issues sorry i'll just that last bit there oh and then i met peter fakowski who brought me into healthy climate alliance so that's how i ended up with with so many other people on this call great right and and i am working on some message framing too just to you know throw that out there i've got some things i'm working on and i'm hoping to start having some more conversations creating some video content about the kinds of things that we're discussing here right thank you that's great thank you |
| 30:26 | very much i wanted you to everybody to hear that so that they can look to you as a resource indeed and vice versa um as it goes along so uh yeah yeah i have a i have a question as well that i wanted to pose um there's been some discussion aaron i think his name is franklin who's who's working uh you know watching all these uh yeah we see his emails a lot um yeah and you know they're very concerning and so i just wanted to get uh some feedback from you guys i'll tell you what we'll do um we'll put this on the agenda i think |
| 31:08 | you might have missed the very beginning um uh see if we've got a little bit of time to see what people have to say about aaron i did i actually went and spoke to him just a one-on-one uh off because he was on this group um sort of couple two or three weeks whatever it was um the last but one um so so that's arya um um what about so uh aaron's aaron let's just make it polite aaron's warnings because she always should be um okay okay um right because we've got um so thank you very much aria uh did is |
| 31:45 | there anyone else that's joined that's new that i might have missed i don't think so ah there's hugh good to see you here happy new year yes good days uh sorry no doesn't matter some australian i get it yeah yeah i i hear you're very busy it's a good seat um chris has had his hand up for quite on time chris please yeah there was just a couple of things i wanted to ask um sev about um one was in the um cdr google groups ilco rowling said that the arabian sea was not a high nutrient low chlorophyll area and |
| 32:24 | therefore had plenty of iron so the implication being that perhaps you wouldn't get a lot of bangs for your buck by putting extra iron uh and the before and flakes there perhaps um and which perhaps we'll believe that was said first perhaps and then come back to the other point it's a bit different yeah well burn flakes of course have also phosphorus and silica and um the the area where where it's been planned to have the tests is in fact not not very high in iron and is seasonally deficient in phosphorus and |
| 33:02 | the silica should do quite a lot to encourage diatomic growth which are very good at sequestering carbon so we should get both a a a fish population increase and uh possibly a modest sequestration effect even though it's not necessarily the the the the best place for uh for for iron fertilization yeah okay okay the other point was perhaps more general not perhaps for sev but there's been quite a lot of talk about restoring um upwelling in different parts of the world and i understand that and we know that |
| 33:41 | stratification has increased which has reduced nutrients and caused reductions in phytoplankton and so on um but um the central part of the oceans the ocean gyres are i believe always have been naturally low in nutrients because it's because of the ocean current systems um and they are they're not actually deserts as such they are they have low levels of productivity but they have some quite fast turnover of what there is there and they mostly have things like um i can't think what these things are now |
| 34:16 | um but kind of some quite small plankton uh which uh thrive in that sort of environment so i i think we should be careful about when we talk about restoring upwelling you you you're not going to turn the whole ocean over and have upwelling all over because that would frankly disrupt the ocean and not um be something we should aspire to um trying to improve or uh get upwelling back to where it was particularly around the coastal margins is certainly something that's worth considering and uh trying to achieve |
| 34:49 | but uh completely removing stratification the ocean a i think is probably impossible and secondly we are highly undesirable as well a couple of comments on that i think that we need to recognize and that is there's two kinds of upwellings some of it is caused by wind shear but there is significant upwelling associated with the mesoscale eddies and those mesoscale eddies do in fact uh have propagation through a subtropical gyre regions and in other regions as well and it's worth mentioning that uh because of the stratification |
| 35:23 | increase we see this in oligotrophic waters and there's been evidence over the past two decades showing the increase in area of the lowest nutrient zone regions and so it's not that those are becoming even more oligotrophic but that they're increasing in area and in fact we're seeing a forward migration of the transition between tropics and subtropics and between in particular subtropics and temperate regions and so that's causing a decrease in productivity that has been estimated by some of 30 to 40 globally and that does |
| 35:53 | affect deep ocean regions as well yeah i just think we need to be a little cautious about being wildly ambitious about with the ocean on a mega scale because um we probably don't know all the consequences of doing some of these things that's basically a little bit yeah again trying to go too far right no i think we need to use risk on risk and the reality is you know as was stated earlier by sev we're looking at increasing risks on the climate disruption side but yes there's plenty we can do probably even on the |
| 36:24 | scale of a gigaton or more uh within exclusive economic zones which are just a few hundred kilometers from the shoreline so there's plenty of room of course for us to work just within the in-country areas to start with so i did notice by the way that seven made an error when he talked about territorial waters when i think he meant he zed at one point um because territorial waters of course are only 12 miles ez is 200 nautical miles that's really easy yes yeah that's a good price sort of some ownership rights but not not not |
| 36:59 | not full territory you're right oh yeah yeah there are no territorial rights in the ez outside the 12 mile limit um it's strictly um what is allowed is controlled by the law of the sea if you're signed up to it of course which the u.s isn't um but um customer international law comes in as well so the the us does tend to abide by most of the provisions of the law of the sea even though they haven't signed it yep i did have a couple of quick comments on the earlier conversation with bru and ron |
| 37:31 | um first is that bruce correct that i think when it comes to measuring environmental damage we can look at the decreased biomass on land and sea as a measure and of course we've lost millions of square kilometers of living biomass on land and at least thousands of square kilometers of uh coastal kelp forests from western australia to tasmania to the west coast of the united states uh and that's and probably more in the portugal area as well um and so that's several thousand square kilometers that's been lost |
| 38:05 | now when it comes to regenerating that biomass it is true that more biomass is helpful however we look to um the ocean oh and terrestrial fluxes of carbon as being relevant and i note with interest that the macro algae have demonstrated fluxes that have exceeded the carbon flux even of the tropical rain forest by measures of 15 or greater and so um i think we can look to flux as being highly relevant in a context where we can see um significant percentages of that seaweed sinking one way or another to depths of hundreds to thousands of |
| 38:43 | square meters uh i mean thousands of meters depth and then the other comment that ron made was something about ocean fertilization and i think there are some perhaps significant limits to the rates at which we can ultimately do this we've estimated oxygen flux into the deep ocean as being able to support um on the order of up to 10 or maybe up to 10 gigatons per year in the in the world oceans and half of it comes from the southern ocean and half of it comes from labrador current and then the major anoxic basins may be |
| 39:20 | able to sink some additional gigatons per year but i don't think we should look i mean as far as sustainability is concerned oxygen speed limits with respect to the oxygen fluxes into the deep ocean could be a significant factor unless some intervention was taken there so we have to monitor oxygen in the deep ocean as we scale to gigaton scale one other concern would also be the mid depths of the ocean because the oxygen minimum regions there have been expanding both in area and in uh depth and so although |
| 39:51 | most of the uh macroalgae may sink through that some of it will probably get oxidized in that region and therefore have an effect in there as well so you need to consider i think the mid depths as well as the deep yes that's a good point clive and i'm happy to report some results and that is that we've measured the sink rate of our seaweeds between 1 000 and 4 000 meters per day uh in using the two sinking seaweeds that we have presently in the philippines and so that means that we're achieving |
| 40:17 | uh getting through the oxygen minimum zone in less than 24 hours and i think we can demonstrate 90 plus uh transport through those depths which we're looking forward to a thousand meters per day is is kind of the sink rates that we're looking at and in 24 hours we can document macro algae syncing reliably with very little degradation on a 24-hour time scale would that necessarily apply to all types of microalgae that might be used though um yes and no so we can say that there's some macroalgae with pneumaticists which are |
| 40:53 | bubbles now normally those bubbles cause a significant amount of buoyancy however with some approaches for example the published depth cycling work from usc and colleagues they're showing that when they death cycle the macro algae the macrocystus which is normally a highly floating seaweed those pneumaticists become filled with fluid and they become the entire seaweed becomes negatively buoyant and we look forward to measuring that degree of negative buoyancy and we wouldn't be surprised to see similar |
| 41:24 | sink rates of a thousand meters per day even for those normally buoyant ones so for the ones that are depth cycling because they're going up and down 100 meters every day those pneumaticists are either being collapsed or ruptured or somehow shrunken as they grow and the net result is important no the the depth cycling is to depths of 80 to 100 meters is what has been reported by usc and so as a result um you know we've got experimental data on this as well we believe there's a good basis for negative buoyancy even for |
| 41:59 | seaweed with pneumaticists that are normally floating and where about where abouts are you measuring this in the philippines in the pacific ocean from across the pacific ocean we measure these think rates how do you measure them if you're based in the philippines you must have some stations we we actually have you've heard of this ancient game called poo sticks as uh publicized by winnie the pooh so we do poo stick races you know where we uh drop our seaweed off and we actually measure the meters per second |
| 42:33 | that it's sinking and uh i think there's some good arguments that even at depth the um the seaweed will be colder the water will be colder the sink rates arguably we think are going to be about the same much so we should start doing whale poo sticks yes well two sticks are you volunteering then yeah uh well well someone off australia has already just done an experiment yeah what is the experiment off australia it's called whale eggs some scientists of southeast australia put some simulated uh whale poo about |
| 43:13 | 300 300 cubic meters of it or something i think it was as a fair quantity but not vast um and then they've been studying it but we haven't heard any results yet just that it's happened actually the 2000 liters by the end of january that the 300 liters already is equal to two whale poos apparently yeah that's right there's a there's a fertilizing company that's manufactured yeah they're measuring the nitrogen and the phosphorus and trace elements yeah quite interesting i heard um i was |
| 43:48 | listening to abc news radio and it was just before christmas i can't remember but edwina tanner who is the um the sort of spokesperson for whale x i mean she came across extremely well i mean i think it's it's one of these things where you say forget the science it sounds great how much money do you want i think there's something to be said for having a really good persuasive um media presence she was fantastic even though i suspect the science is a bit dodgy read the article i've just put it in the link yeah |
| 44:35 | okay in the chat thank you in the chat sorry yeah yeah okay thank you we can second that that media presence is highly valuable yeah yeah chasing elon musk's climate prize so they'll get some good publicity if they get out of 100 million from that it's a bit of a lottery though yeah that's fine you've got all the experience brian as well true okay uh ron and chris i see you both have your hands up is that because you've got something else you'd like to say yeah just yeah just just a quick a |
| 45:09 | very quick ques i mean so i'm i'm just just following up on the you know the conversation with brew and brian's comments and others comments what i mean what do people feel that that estimate of regenerating biomass you know doubling what we have currently uh has a major you know 80 or more carbon drawdown potential uh method is is realistic because i'm i'm as as brook point you know mentioned i'm i'm working on this this paper and people already requesting it and i don't want to put in estimates that are wildly |
| 45:47 | unrealistic i i believe that brew has a backup for all this uh but uh i'm just curious because the what brian was saying sort of suggests that at least from what we know right now for ocean sequestration sounds more like the order of maybe 10 gigatons i've heard you say this before brian uh 10 gigatons uh may be an upper limit or may not be uh so that means the rest of it would have to be land and then you know it it just i'm just wondering is this something that we should be promoting uh uh or or perhaps uh promote something uh |
| 46:29 | you know less less optimistic uh with regard to to natural sequestration uh in living organisms of carbon yeah so ron i think there's some good insights on this and that is it starts with living carbon but what we should measure is the area that's available for rewilding and times the flux of carbon that those living systems can produce and so it's great to start with the living systems but i'll point out that well we have the saying that kelp forests don't burn the concern is that if it's living land forest |
| 47:02 | biomass we are looking at you know eight of the last dozen worst fires in history have occurred in the last dozen years and so we're looking at an increased risk let's say to that living carbon that said in the soils there's an opportunity to increase the flux of recalcitrant carbon that's going into soil microbial communities that that goes into long-chain molecules that people commonly call humus and there's a multiple on the amount that you could put in biochar or other forms and that is soil carbon that was |
| 47:35 | living but now it's simply a recalcitrant humus kind of carbon similarly in the ocean you know the macroalgae fluxes are very high it doesn't get stored locally in the kelp forest but to the extent those fluxes end up sinking into the deep sea that's going beyond living carbon to carbon that's um sequestered in the deep and so i think the actual sequestration potential i mean if you take 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year times 100 years you get to a thousand gigatons of carbon dioxide so it's a |
| 48:08 | matter of starting early and going you know for a while and it could be if you include the anoxic basins you can get beyond you know a dozen gigatons per year so i wouldn't exactly diminish it i think it gives way to the idea that we do need to decarbonize by a factor of 80 well say 80 decarbonization and then we draw down the rest on land and in the sea but we should be cognizant of some of these speed limits as we're scaling to gigatons and you know keep monitor oxygen levels in the deep oxygen uh monitor oxygen levels in the oxygen |
| 48:37 | minimum zone monitor upstream harmful algal blooms all of these will be important and then on land i think looking at the soil microbial communities and regenerating the biodiversity in the soil that is able to do massive amounts of recalcitrant carbon formation in soils again with a time scale of decades to maybe a century those are very useful as well so i think if we maybe start with splitting biomass and move beyond that to carbon fluxes supported by the living biomass and look at where those can end up in soils and |
| 49:11 | in seas and that goes beyond the living biomass to biomass that's resistant and resilient to uh forest fires and other future climate disruptions okay thank you thank you brian i'd just like to do a little poll if that's okay um who uh i mean because i'm sort of there with brian at a probably about an 80 20 but other people might be closer to brew or the other way around maybe um i mean who would um who would say that uh you you could you would sort of go along with something like what brian said sort of eighty |
| 49:46 | percent that that the most plausible carbon draw down would be eighty percent um the ocean and twenty percent the um the uh the the la uh the you know the and they clarified just before you do the poll uh i was referring to 80 decarbonization of our civilization followed by tens of giga tons on land and 10 giga tons tons of gigatons in the sea to take us actually carbon negative as a society okay so i misunderstood that um sorry okay so sorry so i mean whatever the decarbonization is of of civilization which ought to be |
| 50:22 | as much as possible but i'm not i just really want to do a poll on how much because i think this is coming from what what brew said um suggesting that you know it could it could be and i think was really was really ron's question um really 50 percent you know can be drawn down into into you know the land and 50 in into the ocean um i i i wouldn't be quite so optimistic about the land um personally i mean it's just opinion i'm just looking for this is my opinion but i'm interested in others as well |
| 50:50 | i think sev just put his hand up and just go for because what we've tried to set out is a pathway as to how we could get to a point of delivering on the un sustainable goals i.e 7.8.5 billion people living well on the planet right brought up to a level and we make the point that's going to require an enormous amount of energy it's going to require planetary cooling it's a band-aid to start it so i see um over the next 10 years developing the boy flakes technologies and the ability to green the oceans to a great extent and a |
| 51:29 | certain amount of albedo change i see what i've been talking about in terms of the way we produce our food very much more efficiently and freeing up vast amounts of space within all of that uh you then bringing the energy on side and using that energy for very large scale irrigation and huge land restoration plants i mean i i i also make the point that i think we're in a very dire emergency and that we have multiple uh exponential curves working against us which will come together to be hyper exponential |
| 52:02 | and i think within five to seven years of now we'll be having very very different conversations because i suspect that what we're seeing now will be happening tenfold in terms of scary climate events and i wouldn't be at all surprised we don't see some wet bulb situations over large areas and tens of thousands of people dying and entire ecosystems being put at risk and once that happens one's ability to start seriously talking about emergency cooling will happen and so some of these emergency um |
| 52:39 | uh cloud shielding propositions we're talking about with aerostats up there um putting out very fine mists to protect cities and these sort of things uh massive cooling tasks we are going to have to do all these things and we need to have a consolidated plan that covers everything uh and it has to cover the legal structures we need to really get behind the law of ecocide the fifth crime against peace we need a level playing field for business and we have to encourage business to get on board with this and one of the things you've got to |
| 53:12 | recognize about having 8.5 billion people on the planet living well is that implies 10 15 times growth in global gdp and that is a powerful argument for getting business on board because if they don't everything else is going to be lost but actually getting our planet to that point presents a very bright future a key part of this whole plan and i'm looking for everybody to come in and help and develop it and get it right is building a narrative that the young can get behind the appeals to business that appeals to politicians |
| 53:46 | show them a way to get reelected put something out there there's an awful lot of people calling calling saying how terrible it is and a lot of us fighting about my texts over yours we need every single tool in the box and and we need to put out a truthful message and not the sort of stuff that's coming out of the ipcc at the moment which is just garbage i mean net zero by 2050 is is just a ticket to suicide that that's my context okay thank you i mean do we want to do that that aligns very closely with the kinds of |
| 54:18 | things that i think as well brew and you've your imagination goes in slightly different directions which is very interesting i'm also keen on the uh you know legal angle uh do we want to do a poll is uh is the moment kind of gone if there's not much enthusiasm we'll just move on actually um let's move on um okay so i i would like to put in a plug for land uh because uh putting carbon in soil is very easy to measure and um and effectively if you if you put the carbon in the soil and you get |
| 54:57 | the the micro rhizomes working and all that uh you can uh it it will stay there for hundreds if not thousands of years yeah nice very reliably and and then you can you can get the fossil fuel companies and all these nasty people to actually invest invest in this stop well maybe you can put their money get them get them to go doubly uh um zero so um negative right seaweed sinking can be measured and proxies can be generated i mean it's we know about the land because this is where we are in the ocean it costs money to go there but it doesn't mean research |
| 55:48 | can't be done um well i think i think we've got to promote both equally and i hope that one at least one of them will succeed well yeah i just wanted to ask as bruce says as bruce says we're really facing ghastly thing and it's all coming a lot of it's coming from the arctic so if we don't really freeze the arctic things will get really bad yeah yes we we know this john we've we've er and i know that you're a great proponent for that um can i just i just what i sleep and i can see you've got your hand up i just |
| 56:32 | wanted to uh ask france because brian is talking about carbon sequestration with uh seaweed sinking um friends i think you might have something to say about well sediments on the beach or you know sort of coastal sediments you have this sulfate reduction and sapropel forming in sediments and that's also a form of carbon sequestration isn't it uh i think this seaweed going down it must it must produce a separate petal and it will also maybe uh use uh suffer reduction uh to to become separate and yes according to professor carlos duarte |
| 57:27 | they uh estimate uh 10 to 30 percent ends up in sediments uh approximately 30 one-third of it gets eaten by microbes and maybe one-third of it eaten by uh macro fauna it's a seafloor and is that the whole ocean brian because i mean the ocean is more than double the size of all the you know unimaginably large you know landmass we have and so every part of the ocean has got a different fish swimming through it hasn't it all the huge shoals or not much and some seaweed gets it happens to get eaten this time or not |
| 58:00 | that time i wonder if this research i mean nobody has nobody can research the entire ocean can they so they all these have to be sort of approximations don't they no but there's a in the well well oxygenated regions um there is usually an increase in sea life uh in the uh in the benthos at near near the sea floor and that's true in the shallow regions that was just recently discussed it's also true in the uh deep ocean regions even at 4000 meters i mean you get hagfish and pelagic sharks and i mean |
| 58:35 | deep deep benthic sharks and all sorts of things even even down the marianas trench you see these so there's plenty of life on the on the bottom and um so you know the mac you know i would i would agree with professor duarte that um you know roughly a third gets eaten by macrophana call it a third gets microbially respired and maybe 10 to 30 percent ends up in the sediment i think it's a reasonable estimate for now and it's a working good working figures that we can all agree on and move forward with until there's evidence |
| 59:06 | for something to the contrary okay thank you thank you yeah um sorry steven salter have your hand up and it's time i allowed you to speak where's stephen oh they there you are now we were talking earlier about soil carbon uh there's a chap in australia called tony lovell who's been working on a project where he can increase the amount of carbon in the soil enormously simply by arranging for barbed wire fences around livestock and at the moment if you've got livestock just moving around randomly a |
| 59:50 | little green shoot pops up and the goat comes over and gobbles it straight away so what he's trying to do is to make livestock eat absolutely everything in one region and then go on to another region and leave the first region a chance to recover and the amount of material below ground is about the same weight as the amount of material above ground and he's got some very convincing photographs of of the difference and he earns a living by buying up desert and then managing the fences in it so that the there is |
| 1:00:26 | time for the grass to grow back up properly i will uh send you uh uh i send clive if you were to circulation uh a note that i did with him a while ago about livestock control and there's amazing pictures of two ranches close together one looks completely like a desert and the other one has got grass growing up to the stirrups of the cowboys and these run these photographs are taken on the same day next door to one another it's quite amazing so yeah that sounds interesting you might have heard of alan savory |
| 1:01:02 | sorry brian yep yeah we can confirm a couple of things uh csiro has done some excellent research on electronic fencing and that's using radio gps collars and occasionally drones to act as carrots and sticks and the net result is that without all of the carbon cost of deploying all these fences you can have electronic fencing and that electronic fencing will actually guide the uh livestock on a one to two day rotation among a bunch of pastors and of course alan savory has indicated look if you graze for one to two days |
| 1:01:37 | and lie fallow for the rest of the month you get increased growth and increased carbon retention in the soil so that's looking very promising and i think this electronic fencing is is proving to be an approach that will reduce cost of deployment and increase performance for these regenerated soils through combined in australia they call it grain and graze there's been 20 years of research in this area and we think that grain and graze is going to be a leading opportunity because they actually graze the livestock on grain crops |
| 1:02:08 | stimulate their growth and then increase the food production you get almost the same amount of food production and the livestock bonus that you've you know gotten fodder for the livestock amazing very interesting thank you very much brian um oswald you've had your hand up for a while yes thank you um i've just got a visitor so i will have to leave in five minutes so i want to use last two minutes for my again the item yeah awesome it fits in very well with all the things said right now because if i can just um share my screen |
| 1:02:39 | is that possible right now let me okay yep works we have uh gone live with this new website about day before yesterday so it's really the first group i showed this to and it's an initiative called cool planet earth and i will not read all this because you know that and that's basically uh that's what we call the planet earth cool kit it's a list of measures which cool the earth and um we have found that the only place where we could actually find such a discourse in anti-geo engineering places so the only place where there was |
| 1:03:29 | actually a list of all cooling methods where people who hate cool and um we wanted to counter that and say uh well actually it's a great thing and we don't want to call it geoengineering we want to call it um yeah the planet earth cool kit yeah uh we won okay cool so i think you welcome um uh you'll be you're welcome other suggestions from this group then will you oswald on that well i want to just show what we've done we have divided it into three different groups so we have said well there's actually three |
| 1:04:13 | different kinds here two removable method removement solar radiation modification as groups and then of course since we are amr we are always furthering our method and saying that's the only method that does them all so it's a bit of a website that will further our course then you can of course break into each single method and there you will find you will find this single explanation and i would welcome any input which will add methods for example i have heard now about those buoyant flakes i didn't know |
| 1:04:58 | about so that would be a great thing or is that is that the same as the whey pu or is that another i know it's completely it's sort of different really it's not maybe somebody can point me to sources we always we only um show things where we can have links because we don't want to explain the whole world here basically rather give links to the people who know more about this for example for calc growing i know hardly anything but i put in some links and that's that's all and that would be the same for new |
| 1:05:33 | methods of course we want not to introduce every single little method like painting the glacier white or so stuff like that now something that is worth that is powerful and that is cooling the planet and this came from the kinds of conversation we've been having on this group didn't it um oswald from the the same kind of conversation in the group age pack actually i'm not here very often but of course this the conversation is very much the same and also in math and action there was always a complaint about geoengineering |
| 1:06:07 | being such a such a brick wall we always run into this brick wall actually in science that's not true anymore but in the public in journalism in the politicians minds it's still there still geoengineering is a no-go and therefore it's still very important to to work on that okay all right thank you oswald any comments or questions or should we um from anyone i i want to talk about um i'll take you off then uh off the sharing oswald if that's okay uh so oswald is obviously welcoming yep i think we should uh add things like the |
| 1:06:52 | ice volcanoes and the multiple methods of arctic refreezing that uh should be a key part of cooling planet and those have limited references one from arizona state university but then there's a number of other uh developments that we should try to include and get on the roadmap yep that was well i i i've already put together a review of all the techniques that i've heard of um the document on poke it's called post-rest polar restoration as well so you can have a copy of that yeah as well yeah you're |
| 1:07:29 | muted as well um did you just wanted to say could you email me those uh suggestions i will of course put them in but if i have to go now so i can't and john nissin has just said that you can contact him uh oswald he's got a comprehensive list so excellent can you please mail that as well to me thank you yeah have to go bye-bye okay bye bye oswald yeah now i'll um so coming back to the agenda i wanted to say something about this um so and just see what uh people are saying maybe people have been saying this and i |
| 1:08:08 | didn't really understand it um or i don't know what so let me sh uh okay share the screen again and uh come back to this i just want to make it as short as possible uh so brew kindly sent me this um uh thing from uh quote from john cabo's voyage crew uh in so what's that about 600 years ago um 500 years ago probably the year 2000 right um the cso full of fish you don't just need you don't need nets you can just scoop them out with baskets essentially um and so i this was a presentation it's |
| 1:08:52 | not not really meant to be for a scientific audience more of a sort of lay audience so forgive me if it seems a bit bit general general for generalization um so isa iron sold aerosol was given a new name by the people a meteor action enhanced atmospheric methane oxidation because i want to focus on the methane removal we'll but we if it's iron in the ocean we'll pump prime so this is what occur to me if you're gonna have a little bit of food in the ocean surface even if it's buoyant flakes this would apply the same |
| 1:09:25 | to buoyant flakes um or because boiling flakes would cover a wide area and would be the same kind of drip feed um continuous supply of nutrients you've so you're vertically migrating species your zooplankton and lantern fish are one place saying possibly up to 10 giga tons of biomass in in lanthanum fish coming up every night to feed on this a little bit more food on the ocean surface so makes me wonder if when there were 400 times as many whales they're not pretty not just whales but dolphins and porpoises and and other large and whales |
| 1:10:08 | who knows what else uh predating you know eating catching and eating this uh virtual migrating biomass huge biomass coming up um every night they've got echo location so the dolphins that it doesn't matter if it's still dark if it um they've got their kill location and then turning it into their whale poo fertilizing the ocean surface seems to me that we might that i had been missing a trick maybe other people saw it but if you if you're going to if we have this problem of lack of nutrients at the surface you know barely |
| 1:10:45 | enough there's hard you know not enough iron as soon as you've got enough iron you've not then not got enough phosphorus in a lot of areas nitrate and okay possibly silicate if you've then got this vast nutrient well it's it's nutrients in bodies in swimming bodies and and guts but then getting eaten and um okay turned into into feces excrement uh liquid at the surface which then spreads on the surface then isn't that the natural upwelling isn't that a form of natural light welding that's that's but if we're |
| 1:11:19 | storing up natural way that's what that used to be hundreds of years ago exactly right um so so then what the next thing that could occur to me let's make this big so you can see it probably um but okay but then all of a sudden so but if you're going to do that you're going to have a wonderful new fishery um well it's just lanternfish let's say but the fishing industry can go along and scoop all that up scoop up the lanternfish turn it into fish mills for salmon farms and who knows pet food or something um |
| 1:11:52 | they're gonna be wherever you're going to have your buoyant flakes uh you're going to have industrial fishing fleets following you around to scoop up the you know every night to scoop up the vertical migrating uh you know mesopelagic um uh community of sp of species so so and there's all sorts of threats if we if we wanted the whales and the dolphins to you know um for their population numbers to be restored um well that's not that direction they're going at the moment they're getting |
| 1:12:25 | killed in all different ways they have coastal slaughtering events they get caught in nets they drown um as there's all these other problems discarded fishing gear obviously ocean plastic we've got dead zones on the on the coast which are increasing i saw an economist film about that um whales suffering because of pollution in the sea um so and i just put um if you can see that there somewhere can i get rid of this yeah people addressing these problems this was meant to be for our emo people i don't know if we're going to give it |
| 1:12:59 | to them we're all partners basically in the same thing if we want to uh increase biomass in the ocean then essentially all these things are a great help um clive what are the axes on that graph oh that's not a proper graph that's just that's just an inf that's just uh somewhat any old picture of lines going up i took all the axes off what's the light blue and what's the dark blue nothing it's just it's just i wanted to have some sort of picture rather just a blank slide so it's nothing forget it |
| 1:13:30 | it's just an increase it's just life's going calling for is good husbandry good husbandry yes husbandry and proper societal structural systems that's right so that here's my next not that slide this slide after so two this one and one more i promise you no more no more than that um of course this does i promise i'd add a slide about getting permission from the imo and so forth yes yes yes um so this is the thing economists say any valuable result i've been told this by an economist who's lists his friends |
| 1:14:04 | uh nobel laureates amongst his friends um okay any valuable resource will be exploited to destruction if unprotected that's why i mean these problems have been solved we've solved these problems over centuries shops have security guards imagine if the shop big supermarket doesn't have a security guard nations have and so forth the list is endless of ways that valuable resources are protected but shared resources are difficult especially the atmosphere the whole ocean we haven't managed it our ancestors did protect resources at |
| 1:14:38 | village scale we wouldn't be here if they hadn't worked out and sat down and thrashed out okay we're going to have you know grazing rights irrigation right we're going to sort it out so we're not fighting each other all the time but of course the challenge global i think i've said this before but what i suppose again i hadn't quite appreciated the legal profession again huge partners vital partners of agreements with appropriate penalties for violation actually work that's what |
| 1:15:03 | a treaty is as i understand it the even the paris agreement isn't a treaty so of course these agreements they're not working so this is just a list of other things i'm going to stop there because i um yes you whizzed through the previous slide it looked interesting okay let's go back back to that one it's just a picture just to take having a picture so yeah um this is never mentioned on the media any valuable resource will be exploited to destruction if unprotected that's why you need fishing limits and |
| 1:15:44 | and uh policing yeah yeah so i was actually thinking of the slide previous to that one oh that one all right we can go back oh the dead zones yeah that was taking one example um yeah okay so uh this um the economist came out with a nice well not so nice film a good film on this um the sea snot as it's called in off the turkish waters in the gulf of mexico is a huge dead zone um so excessive fireplace blooms they rot they deplete the oxygen it wipes out the coastal fisheries uh i'm kind of making this uh as how do you say a certain assertion that |
| 1:16:27 | drives fishermen further out to sea well they can't catch fish in the dead zone because all the fish are dead um and i asked friends about this and france has a lot of experience you know in waste water treatment industries chemistry with that chemical engineer uh the volume of rivers like the mississippi for example is too much for you and can't have a wastewater treatment plant treating the whole of the mississippi that needs improved farming practices so and this is what the economist said it's |
| 1:16:57 | too much fertilizer getting run running off but they had an interview with a farmer who wanted to we was using sort of modern technology to work out how much fertilizer each bit of soil you know each sort of uh square whatever hectare or something a half a hectare of his field needed and we're saving money on fertilizer because didn't all need as much um reducing fertilizer runoff and i mean i again i'm not an expert on low till you know agricultural regenerative agriculture and so forth but uh there's a lot of people who are |
| 1:17:32 | expert on this how to reduce uh fertilizer runoff and we've just been hearing about it just now improving agricultural techniques did you want to add anything to that hue no not at all that's just uh i mean i think that um so getting back to the the sort of straw poll that you were half thinking of doing okay um i mean doesn't the question arise sorry i've got my um my world war one fighter race picture up there um doesn't the question arise that um the ocean the ocean is a valuable a value a valuable asset |
| 1:18:25 | and are we willing to experiment with it so the thing about the land we know we know that if i develop a piece of land then that piece of land is affected but the adjacent piece of land probably is not and i think what people fear about the oceans is that the oceans are a as an exactly the same with the atmosphere which is why stratospheric aerosols are kind of taboo is that once you put something up there it goes everywhere once you put something in the oceans it goes everywhere so so that would be my concern so in doing the straw poll |
| 1:19:18 | i would on the face of it say hey yeah let's go for it but i'm then left thinking you know what is it reversible is it you know we're very good at coming up with great ideas and we can think of asbestos and we can think of i don't know pick a picker pick a technology once is it reversible i can i can see brian is um he's championing at the bit on this let's just say if you shipwrecks have been in the ocean for centuries hugh and uh sea life is attracted to them because of the iron that comes off so putting a |
| 1:20:07 | little bit of iron in the ocean yeah i i i i don't i don't i think if i were to to to put my vote into the straw poll i would go for it it's not really an experiment the experiment has just has been has parents have been done many of them not all of them but yeah i i'm not disagreeing but i think that the perception is i think the perception is that chuck something in the oceans it goes everywhere okay see what you mean it's the perception that goes everywhere yeah sorry friends um brian i only wanted to |
| 1:20:40 | say uh not only the oceans uh if you if you uh produce chemicals which can't uh be uh destructed by nature you will find them on on the poles uh like uh chlorinated special chlorination of ruinous long-chain carbons they they don't go the the waterway they go through there the atmosphere and they had been produced to make shoes and clothes a water size and they've ended up in the air so but yeah unintentional and the the people the the scientists warned in the 80s not to produce it because they knew what happened |
| 1:21:44 | but no politician not nothing has been done the only the only thing which which has been worked has been the montreal protocol that did its work but nothing more until now thank you friends thank you yeah brian yeah so first we should recognize that we no longer have a pristine ocean in the last 30 years we've harvested more than half of the fish biomass out of the oceans and um 90 of the big fish are gone so you know a decimation of the large uh pelagics the large uh the big fish um and so enormous effects on the |
| 1:22:32 | biomass and uh of course uh stratification of the oceans is now one of the most profound effects of climate disruption resulting in less nutrient availability in the eco epipelagic zone and then secondly an increase in frequency of the hurricanes like super typhoon rai category 5 that we just experienced last month so we can expect both of those to continue that said i mean i think hugh's caution is valid in the sense of reversibility one of the reasons we synthesized the innovations of marine permaculture has been specifically to be able to |
| 1:23:09 | address those concerns about high gain irreversible processes i would claim that restoring natural upwelling is both low gain in the sense that you have to do a lot of upwelling to do any good and the secondly that um you know we monitor for harmful algal blooms other effects increase of those or exacerbation of those naturally occurring blooms and the point is that um as soon as we see a problem we can stop the upwelling and within a matter of minutes you're actually cutting off the source of the nutrient restoration of natural |
| 1:23:43 | upwelling so measured as reversibility you know you're looking at a time scale of minutes instead of two years for stratospheric aerosols so these are the kind of metrics we'd like to encourage and and you know i think we do need to have the area of triage risk on risk as seven mentioned and that is um you know the alternative of a return of the permian mass extinction that wiped out 96 of all marine species is a daunting one and we need to show that as a baseline risk because we're like several percent of the way towards |
| 1:24:14 | a deoxygenated ocean measured by the increase in the oxygen minimum zones and other challenges so i think um we should do risk on risk analysis in this decade or i should say century of triage in the 21st century thank you very much brian uh uh brew is it yeah well i just add that um you know when the ocean goes the land will follow but actually you um you know anything you do on land will affect the adjoining land and will run off i mean whether you're thinking about car tires on roads or uh whether you're |
| 1:24:53 | just changing the micro climate on the little land next door to you it's the same thing there's it's washed by rain what you do gets run off onto the adjoining land there's no escaping it watched often into joining um oh the adjoining land okay and then into the rivers and then into the ocean yeah yeah so it's perception is wrong yeah yeah i just like to ask chris is what i've said about uh sort of putting a little bit of bait at the surface with it with a little bit of iron fertilization or buoyant flakes and |
| 1:25:25 | then expecting the mesopelagic species to to come up more and more and for the for them to grow and for this whole biomass to become a great much bigger thing but let it do its do its own thing you know am i talking rubbish i i don't see that it's going to increase the natural upwelling a lot because it's doing that anyway now you know that's what's happening the whole system works like that um so by increasing you would increase the biomass if you obviously put nutrients in which increases the productivity that will |
| 1:26:00 | increase the biomass but i i can't see it it's going to increase the natural upwelling per se it will increase the biomass in the surface waters in particular and the surface sort of two 300 meters whatever the uh wherever the thermocline is i don't know where it is in the arabian sea for example in the area that um has been talking about it may be deeper so i can't see this can increase the natural upwelling a lot it may have some effect but i wouldn't i wouldn't look at it as a major way of uh |
| 1:26:32 | increasing the carbon sequestration it could increase biomass in the cell in the surface zone yes okay i think you are touching on something that's very important that is we're writing a paper right now with um dave david holmgren who's one of the co-founders of permaculture if you will on the permaculture design principles and you're touching on an important design principle and that is to kind of observe what nature is doing you know we make some interventions but usually if we're intervening in a permaculture |
| 1:27:02 | sense we want to see three or four paybacks for every intervention and so that means you know kind of observe what nature is doing in fact i can say that you know we're growing we have a platform where we're growing one species of seaweed we've got five or six other species of seaweeds and we're noticing the fish liking some of those species of seaweed so we're actually looking at a co-cultivation of seaweed and fish and then looking at what's coming off of that and you know we were gonna like |
| 1:27:26 | sink five or ten percent of the seaweed at the end that we weren't using for other things but it turns out you get 10 to 50 percent additional on top of the harvest that simply falls off the platform during growth now we happen to have the deepest moored system right now so far 350 meters depth so that means in eight hours anything that falls off our platform has gone past the export horizon of 300 meters and is now you know sequestered at a nice depth and that's a proxy for ultimately what will be a thousand meter deep deployments |
| 1:27:56 | where in less than a day we'll have this um the sequestration so it turns out the greater carbon sequestration is just what's falling off the platform and we need to document that and measure the flux and really quantify that so these are the kind of permaculture design principles we're really saying let's observe nature doing something right make a minimum number of perturbations and get multiple let's say food feed fertilizer and carbon benefits to and regenerating life in the ocean these are |
| 1:28:22 | all key benefits we hope to accrue from minimalist interventions that are very cost effective great thank you totally agree with you about all this and getting back to your business about the myth of pristine ocean whether we like it or not this is what this is what people perceive now this is our beautiful ocean this is this is the beautiful stuff we have at the moment and i think it's really difficult to get this myth as you say i'm totally with you that the myth needs to be dispelled but i think you know you can show |
| 1:29:07 | pictures of plastic floating around in the in the in the middle of you can show all this stuff but i think the perception still is that that's only a little bit the rest is beautiful the rest is lovely and i don't know whether you agree brian but i think that we don't we don't have the the the public dialogue on on site no yes the oceans are screwed up but it's only a bit of the oceans the rest is beautiful well actually yeah i think that's very good we're pushing it's a struggle to get that message |
| 1:29:50 | across it is and i think we can do several things we can work to make the invisible visible and that is to really talk about you know we we're you know a lot of people are working on plastic and you you know nation says you know we're gonna have more plastic than fish by 2050 or something and a lot of people are working on less plastic we're working on more fish and i think that's a place where we can really touch on governments because fisheries of course are extremely powerful if we can find some good |
| 1:30:17 | partnerships with the major fisheries to work on making the pie bigger that is going to be really essential because when we have a lot more fish we can do a lot more fishing and harvesting and that can be done sustainably so i think it's going to come to really making the decimation of fish highly visible and i've experienced that personally in 40 years of diving uh the maybe it's 50 years now the uh you know the the decimation of fish in the ocean has been noticeably visible to me we can make that visible |
| 1:30:49 | by extending the legacy of jacques cousteau and others i recommend becoming cousteau and really moving towards regenerating of fish in the ocean for example and that of course hits the breadbasket for billions of people who rely upon fishing for their primary sustenance so i would encourage us to work to make that visible we are working with number of filmmakers to try to document that and i would focus on the food security for billions of people on the planet so when when when russ george got into trouble i mean |
| 1:31:18 | you know it it kind of was a great opportunity to say hey look look at look at how the fish have come back oh but no he didn't he didn't he didn't do it legally um that's like bloody you know novak djokovic best tennis player in the world oh well not legal you know come on how do we change perceptions to look at things in a in a rational way well i'll tell you that you know we had a bit of a train wreck of ocean iron fertilization coming off 2008 2011 and 2013 um and uh we synthesized the fields |
| 1:32:00 | those particular dates uh 2008 because that was the ocean iron fertilization conference during which greenpeace and nrdc pledged and committed to not interfere with basic research on ocean iron fertilization in front of an audience of hundreds and then secondly in less than three or four years later greenpeace is suing victor smitachek in german high court and getting an injunction on a cruise that's already left germany for the southern ocean to do an ocean iron fertilization experiment in a in a mesoscale eddy so |
| 1:32:33 | there was a loss of tens of millions of dollars arguably in um in research funding in addition we've seen the destruction of several startup companies and tens of millions of venture capital dollars so the challenge is those were high gain processes with controversial um let's say science and politics we've designed uh well that was probably the that was when the salmon came in but um let's say the aftermath of the heidegger salmon restoration company so um exactly and so we've designed marine |
| 1:33:09 | permaculture to be non-controversial lower gain and fundable in other words it's a restoring natural upwelling is sufficiently non-controversial that we've we have raised five million over five years and we're anticipating raising tens of millions to actually scale like we're we're going for a tenth of a hectare this year and a factor of 10 scaling this year a factor of 10 scaling next year we'll be at a commercial hectare next year and scaling by factors of 3 to ten in the years thereafter so the point is uh we need to |
| 1:33:38 | get to scale quickly there's a great new book out by billionaire john doerr called speed and scale and um we're on page 122 or something of that but the point is um it's it's really essential for us to get to scale and to do it exponentially and um so we're designing marine permaculture to be low low gain enough and uh non-controversial enough to raise tens of millions now and actually get to practical scale to the point we're doing square kilometers i hope that answers your question here it does it does it |
| 1:34:10 | does i i think uh chris did you you had your hand up for a while yeah i just wanted to make a comment about victor smith jets crews what brian said was right but a very big but victor did and his whole colleagues did not go about it the right way in the very beginning so they carried out no environmental assessment in advance of their crews it's partly to do with the german law and the german scientists view that they have a total freedom under their law in germany to carry out scientific research and they did not or |
| 1:34:46 | should have carried out an environmental assessment in advance which they did not if they'd done that they would have gone through without any problems frankly oh thank you it's not wholly on greenpeace at all on victor's side as well all right all right well i stand corrected but um no it's great to understand the full history there and uh i was at a meeting in the imo when one of the not victor but one of his colleagues gave him quite an explanation along with others of exactly what had happened |
| 1:35:15 | thank you very much i appreciate that clarification chris thank you okay um we're just about done for time aren't we folks um what did we not do um we talked a bit about earthshine talked about that um did you want to talk about aaron uh aria are you still there arianna uh yes i am um you know if we don't get to it today i can bring it up on another meeting i can i can talk about it with uh people here on hpac and yeah you know i think there there are people that there's a whole spectrum of people um and uh |
| 1:35:55 | so i don't know if aaron's the canary in the coal mine the you know the so-called you know canary in the coal mine um he's certainly been very worried for a long time and he keeps whenever something happens um in in one of the polls we hear from him so we hear from him quite a lot um whether it means imminent doom you know in the next sort of couple of months um i don't i don't know uh i'm not sort of losing sleep put it like that personally um so perhaps i could just leave it at that and there's anyone who else has |
| 1:36:25 | something to do yeah i'm just continually trying to get a sense of like how much time do we have left to do the things that we're all working on um because sometimes it gets a little scary in terms of okay well you know it's like we're going to be going underwater at some point unless there's some kind of major um the answer the answer is arya the amount of time we have left is i mean if you were to go back to 1942 if you were living if you were living in leningrad in 1942 and you asked the question how much time |
| 1:37:03 | have we got left if you were living in the black death and you said how much time would we get look we've we've gone through crisis after crisis after crisis this crisis will it'll turn out one way or another and it'll either be better or worse depending on what we do now but in answer to your question how much time have we got left we've got whatever time we like but whatever we do now the the better we the things that we do now that are better then that's great but we can't give up we can't say |
| 1:37:46 | hey we've run out of time that we cannot do so yes you're right where every minute passes another minute passes it's we've got to get on this stuff but there's no point in time where we say we've run out of time we that we will never have run out of time the optimism is that whatever we do now to make things better will make things better and that will be the same in 10 years time in 20 years time in 50 years time yeah i think there's some steps in in the in the you know we're sort of |
| 1:38:24 | expecting a sort of step change uh at some point i mean when the uh okay tipping when when the thwaites glaciers and people have been saying well you know maybe we'd be lucky if it lasts ten years before sea level goes up to two feet and that's very bad news for a lot of coastal settlements and and certainly that's going to up the ante in a huge way if it doesn't cause massive comments and it will but then we still yeah and the most recent stop then you know the most recent thing i saw was talking about you know we've got 10 in |
| 1:39:00 | you know if we don't stop the the greenland you know collapse that we've basically got 10 years before it's going to go up 10 feet and that's you know the estimate like i know it's it's so hard to predict exactly um you know what what's happening where we can't see things um but you know just because of i mean i'm on the coast of florida so i'm constantly thinking about things in terms of okay how much longer can my family stay here uh you know things like that so you know |
| 1:39:32 | it it's hard to you know none of us is actually a soothsayer in terms of that but when it comes to seeing some of these warnings from aaron sometimes i'm like well you know well yeah i i i personally i i wouldn't be too uh too worried by what aaron says he's a he's somebody who believes in conspiracy theories so uh uh he um yeah okay that says it all john and i just want to say john coming from you i really appreciate that that means a great deal to me coming from you thank you i mean he's warned me about uh |
| 1:40:18 | the uh tsunamis that are going to hit the uk in an hour's time and failed to materialize but yeah but it sounds like all of greenland is just dropping off into the ocean right now yeah tsunami's coming toward you florida the the reason the reason aaron is a kind of quite a valuable person because he's very highly intelligent it's just that he's he's got these kind of premonitions and he kind of sees things that aren't actually happening but he understands that some of these things could happen |
| 1:40:58 | and so you can take what he's saying as a warning of something that could happen uh uh he's valuable from that he is also very good at um then he's a brilliant engineer he designed a carbon fiber a bicycle mic my son knew his name because of this uh you know he has some mad engineering ideas as well uh which stephen has knows about because some of them are a bit ridiculous but still yeah i think he's he's i i don't want to completely squash him and knock him off the circulation i think really |
| 1:41:50 | arya you're what you're really saying i think you're more interested in how long have we got than what what do we think of aaron i think isn't it would i be right with that interpretation and we the reason we're talking about cooling from clouds we haven't actually mentioned it this evening but almost every time we meet we talk about stephen uh salter's marine cloud brightening because that's immediate cooling you know once you've got these clouds that are brighter um and last longer they're reflecting |
| 1:42:20 | more sun sunshine away and so this earth shine that's the earthshine thing we were talking about and that that has an immediate effect it starts things cooling and john nissin is talking about you know there's again a spectrum of opinion but you know um the aerosol injects stratospheric aerosol injection and with our uh more phytoplankton on the ocean you know that seems to be more clouds where there's more chlorophyll so immediate cooling if if there's a risk in five years of of glaciers sliding into the |
| 1:42:49 | ocean raising sea level two feet that's what we need to be talking about and that's what we want what we try and talk about on on this group i mean we know we need to do carbonation removal and other greenhouse gas removal and the emission reduction thing is just so far away it's so far in the distance to being anything useful in in the in the near term we hardly talk about it here in on this group but so we're just amazed that that's all the politicians thought oh yes we're going to reduce emissions you know more |
| 1:43:18 | electric cars that's good we're going to reduce but meanwhile the emissions continue to go up and there's i read um that there's about two dozen countries that are going to increase their coal fire uh energy electricity over last year we broke the record we did learned that ever before but on a bright note i had an interesting uh exchange with roger shaw on the em drive recently oh the em drive is this the thing that sort of takes off that's just by sort of magnetism or something emission is thrust and very |
| 1:43:48 | low cost getting vehicles into space civical satellites into space so there's a big effort for uh energy from space to solar generation and then beam it down to the planet and i've just been introducing him to that lot but um roger is is looking at very low cost of getting satellites in space and then putting the light into distant stationary orbit in order to always station as far as the the earth the sun orbit is concerned to create movable shields to literally shield the earth mechanically right and um his the technology is not so far off |
| 1:44:30 | well i'd never say never right never say never yeah so we don't give up i do not subscribe to guy macpherson and his ideas there's nothing we can do about it you should all live well till you die yeah yeah um yeah john john and i had a good run in with him a few years back to hear it yeah i mean otherwise you just you might as well we wouldn't be talking here you know just down the pub giving up um anything else yeah i i prepared that um if you expanded the james webb uh heat uh heat shield uh by about a a billion times you |
| 1:45:12 | shatter you'd have a very very good uh sun shade for the earth because it's sitting at the ground lagrange two point which is uh uh directly between uh the earth and the sun yeah but by the time you send a billion rockets based uh methods is that they have military applications and that could be really scary i i think it's scary i think even be you know if you can beam an energy from satellite down to earth i think what destruction you could do uh on the military installation of your enemy if it goes wrong but there's a big |
| 1:45:49 | um not if it goes wrong if it gets into the wrong hands and who who do we trust now i mean if you get trump and you you trust him not to to zap uh something if he feels like it because he thinks he's god i mean that's really scary uh the breakdown of the u.s uh political scene i mean it's it's it's really scary we worry from the decided atlantic what's going on in the the u. |
| 1:46:28 | s of wealth to poverty in america is higher than in france at the beginning of the revolution the french revolution so that's a ratio of calculating the the probability of a revolution you you bond it beyond it do you think you can hold out any longer arya hold out what are you hold out hold out any longer well you and your countrymen you know um with this huge wealth gap between the the average poor person and the the rich person is stephen's just been saying it's that they didn't it wasn't that much but to kick off the french revolution where they |
| 1:47:06 | started chopping people's heads off um you know it's hard to like wrap my brain around anything other than climate right now and how to start moving forward on having these conversations and i just keep hoping that these conversations if we start having the deeper conversations and making them accessible to people that that's going to start shifting things in in the right direction because it's all connected you know the the corporate corruption that we're dealing with and the wealth inequality is you know um |
| 1:47:44 | it's just it's it's it's all connected yeah yeah i i did tell you yeah i think that aaron has one conspiracy theory which i think might hold water um quickly the reason why there is such complete silence about what's happening in the arctic from the ipcc is that the pcc is a governmental body the most powerful people in that are from countries which want to exploit the arctic for wealth for minerals and so on and what struck me about uh aaron mentions uh some various names of you know bob um about bill |
| 1:48:37 | gates and others very unlikely to be involved in that but trump is evidently involved in that he wanted to buy up greenland why did he want to buy raymond to explain those minerals did did he did he really understand that when greenland uh melts the whole of his trump empire in florida is going to be underwater does it does he understand how absolutely stupid he is because he doesn't does he and there are there there are other people influencing the the trajectory of human endeavor who who just are a long-term effect of what the arctic |
| 1:49:36 | melted down means and i just want to exploit the arctic and have got ipcc to shut up and not say anything uh useful about what's happening in the arctic yeah that's just conspiracy theory which i think does hold water let's maybe doug have the last word he's put his hand up you get the last word yeah so hitchhiking on what john just said arya our task is to come over the sound bite as greenland goes so goes florida you know rafe pomerantz's idea of uh tying florida to uh to the to the arctic so |
| 1:50:19 | let's come up with a sound bite and just blast that everywhere i mean we got to create some awareness and we got to start measuring a downturn if we don't start measuring a downturn in some key variable temperature we should be chopping people's heads off i i had a good conversation with him and i know we're trying to wrap things up but i did have a good conversation with with rafe about uh you know being very strategic about florida in terms of influencing politics overall and this concept of the upper limit that |
| 1:50:53 | we can get to and utilizing that politically as a strategy um i don't that's still being formulated with rethink energy um i can get back to you on that we can talk about it further but one thing we could measure and that's the million was it a million tons an hour that's melting off of greenland whatever the number is wow that's absurd it's 50 cubic miles a year do the do the math do it about thirty thousand tons a second thirty twelve thousand tons a second once a second thirty thousand thousand times a second |
| 1:51:33 | unfathomable it's it's really you know and that's the thing it's really hard to wrap one's brain around so much of this and that's why a lot of people don't um we need to make that clear what they want to believe because it it's easier to get by and just exist in the world so you know to me a big i find my own family members people very close you know they hear it all the time from me and they're sick of hearing about climate change um or they thought i was wrong you know and now they've it |
| 1:52:06 | turned out i was right and this is the worst thing for them and so they and friends as well they just don't want it mentioned you know they're they're they're in their own sort of state of denial um and it's very difficult to know if it was and i was lucky and they were unlucky that they were wrong and i you know sort of i don't really care it's just the climate change is the problem not who was right and who was wrong so i think a lot of people just find it difficult to to even accept it or it's scary that you'd want |
| 1:52:32 | to talk about let's talk about something else i mean i think human beings are extremely good at blocking out things which we don't like you know things that are inconvenient we don't know how to deal with it so we'll just pretend it's not there i think this is a human condition and i do wonder if all this finger wagging you know you should do this or you should fly less or sort of you know it's like oh go away and i don't want to stop just anything first not to have people wagging fingers it's emotional survival |
| 1:52:57 | if you start having conversations with people about interesting solutions and the the upside of doing things i find people get really engaged exactly absolutely shouldn't do anymore i just talk about all the exciting things we can do and what it can lead to and that goes down really well i think yeah i think we've had the the wrong approach for too long it's like you have to understand the the dangers we're approaching but we spent so much time talking about how awful the situation is and how hopeless it is that |
| 1:53:27 | people don't want to pay attention to it their lives are challenging enough um so i think that's really at the core of why the environmental movement you know i feel like we're on the verge of failing and this is something we have to we have to reverse our messaging to in order to help reverse the climate uh situation is is how i see things yeah it's very tragic that the environment movement has completely bought into this idea that the mission's reduction to zero is the solution to climate |
| 1:54:02 | change i mean they're barking up at a tree and they're taking the whole world uh with them it's a tragedy i mean i think the thing is is that they're not wrong it's just that they're it's completely incomplete it's you know they're they're wrong in the sense that this is the only solution it's the core pro you know it's a core problem that has to be reversed but they're just behind the times in terms of how much time we have left to fix that particular problem in that particular way |
| 1:54:34 | they've been misinformed by the scientists who should be telling them what's actually happening right scientists who are in the authority they have just a few handfuls of them who will huge power through governments are suppressing the information that is uh necessary and and the solutions that are necessary you know to cool the planet and could call the arctic represent uh there are a few i think there are just a few scientists in keeping who who are you know ruining things and they're doing it for their own you |
| 1:55:17 | know short term gain and and you know huge power within in governments i mean i hope you've all watched i really think there's a lot of corruption behind this are you gonna name yeah yeah it's a great analog for this it's fun they are very very good at hiding themselves they don't need to expose themselves they just talk in the inner circles of governments and they're completely hidden from view and and and they who lobby the uh the you know people like the europe european research group john this is the same thing |
| 1:56:24 | i think i don't i think i'm gonna what i'll do actually is it doesn't cost me anything to keep this going if anybody wants to stay and carry on talking about this then i'll leave it running um but otherwise i'm gonna close um where there's a dog saying agreeing with me there uh uh say that this is the end of the sort of official meeting anybody who wants this is the end of the world this is the end all right this will be the end of the world then so as we know it save us having another one of these |
| 1:56:55 | right here otherwise it'll be same time where are we so that'll be the 24th two weeks monday the 24th and two weeks so clive can we um can we put on the agenda for the 24th i'll i'll do my best to do an update on what we're up to in cambridge oh yes please we always want to hear that yes please yeah yeah we'll put it on the gender at the time we assume we'll we'll see so that'd be great thank you hugh um thank you everybody uh i'll do the usual uh it'll be there for you to watch i think i've watched the |
| 1:57:34 | last one i'm time to watch these all the way through this is a rather long one to watch all the way through um but uh there's usually a lot of good stuff that's it thank you it's it's it's more fun than watching watching the ashes washing the ashes yeah certainly at the moment you're giving it to them there luckily they didn't follow cricket yeah me too on you australians aside of course isn't he no no all i'm saying is that we bloody welsh if if if if if steve smith had taken that catch it |
| 1:58:11 | slips in the about three quarters an hour before stumps you know look you know what side i'm on goodbye everybody i'm going to leave it to you to talk about the cricket turn off turn off the recording so we can talk all right i'll turn off the recording |