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| 00:04 | hello stephen hello thought you've given up on us oh no great to see you been a bit distracted okay okay a long time ago i did design a machine for clearing anti-personnel lines oh wow okay the russians are leaving them in enormous numbers threatened agriculture and some people in finland heard about this and i've been resurrecting it sounds very very potentially very valuable well i thought so 20 years ago but nobody else did but they remembered so well i thought if you put dervish and mind clearing into google |
| 00:54 | we built built a machine which we had to make our own minds we made them all right we tested it out and it worked well and it worked well um well i i uh perhaps i won't do that now um i'll take your word for it tim stephen you see uh sort of mine some great big heavy machine like a bulldozer or something with something rotating that goes into disturbance how they mostly do it i wanted something that three people could move without any other lifting gear so that's something they push is it or what is it uh well it's if you can |
| 01:45 | imagine a a three-wheeled vehicle like a pyramid with all the wheels working radially okay so that they're like the wheels are on the circumference of this circle and they adjust their speed so the thing moves around so it sweeps uh a path about five meters wide and it moves 50 millimeters um a second okay very very thin but it's more like a a net than the sail so it's right it's not damaged by the blast i think i'll have a quick sort of quick look at this quite dervish mine clearance and you'll get it |
| 02:34 | but it'll the russians can wreck all the agricultural land that they've been over the thing about mines is that the cost ratio of the mine to the damage it does is absolutely enormous you know you can get mines for about two pounds each and they can wreck uh people's lights that's it yeah yeah okay uh those aren't the right wheels but you see the way it was rotating it just goes around yeah but it moves across as well it moves a little bit more but you've got people walking right where there might be a mine no there |
| 03:14 | aren't that's in our farm in scotland we may see some more minds later on uh where we put but we mark where they are yeah so there you are all right wow uh evening uh just i'm just hearing why why we haven't seen stephen f for a few weeks uh it's because he's been um doing some work for people for the ukrainians to clear mines brilliant yeah that was that was our on number one and that wasn't very good in the soft ground yeah [Music] see the way it's moving it goes i see concentric kind of circles |
| 04:01 | but every every um every business ground is is taken subject to the weight of a human for i see that's the number two and three had electronic guidance so you could follow lines on the map so you can have quite a lot of wires and lines and things hanging down are they not vulnerable to getting uh well that's a real [Music] are there any wires on that i don't think maybe there was some on them there it was on the ground but they're there wow it's impressive yeah we know where we put them yeah that's the mind being laid |
| 04:53 | it's a it's a electrically controlled detonator so we have to say that's it and the final one had electronic navigation that's the decker navigator i think we should better get on with climate change okay stephen thank you very much for that people are all turning up if people are all here yeah yeah that's it yeah friends with you've got a white screen again yes so sorry my my machine is defect but you know maybe it's the uh the camera about the wire just is a bit tarnished you have to unplug it plug it back in |
| 05:54 | again okay i i had someone here today he couldn't he couldn't find the mistake yeah feel free to just disconnect and connect again yeah that might be at france it's okay well now i know what you're doing uh good morning grant i guess it's morning for you still yesterday just afternoon yes nice to see you again i never know if i've offended people but apparently it doesn't seem to be the case people just get busy doing other things yeah and sean fitzgerald says he won't be able to be here he's got another |
| 06:37 | meeting uh that that's the director of cambridge climate repair uh thanks for your uh good morning sev it's early in the morning for you hi hi yeah i uh read your uh um thing a piece about uh measuring uh that's a seems like a very innovative idea well i'm hoping so but i'm also hoping that some of the people here can offer constructive criticism in case i've missed something important or got something wrong right yeah um it seemed to be quite an easy way just with simply measuring the the changing |
| 07:22 | amount of uh antarctic krill each year yes you should be able to take in more than the whole southern ocean with for a cdr yeah i think maybe the only problem might be the fishing industry will say no no no that's ours we want to catch it all yeah but if if if each megaton which they catch is measured is making um five megatons of extra co2 in the air i think the world may have something to say about those those fishes yeah fine to catch the fish but don't touch the bloody krill because they're the ones who are taking |
| 08:04 | it through a sequestering taking it all the way down my apologies i've had a very intense five or six days and i haven't had a chance to read it could you give us a just a quick overview of the problem can we put it on the agenda let's put it on your agendas so um it needs to be on there anyway so um so let's just get start going with that um in fact this is okay so that's the yeah that that's it there um but go to the top it'll give brew a bit of an idea the introduction oh but i'm gonna |
| 08:42 | i mean i'm gonna write an agenda anyway so all right okay and there's a conceptual method to measure marine carbon dioxide removal and the idea is to measure krill because uh krill but anyway let's let's talk about properly on the on you know when we get to it so um now i've kind of deliberately um i can't literally do this you have to watch the painful process while i type all this in but the idea is that you you can be thinking about what you want to talk about because this is meant to be for |
| 09:21 | the participants to determine the agenda and sev has put something uh forward to discuss and so has chris oh gosh i haven't read all those things from chris um but i'd talk i've been emailing chris back and forth be good if we if he's here that we can talk about that stuff which is about carbonate chemistry if people wonder about it um right so uh sev um cdr measure uh krill right um was it's an ocean cpr um okay and anyone else you said that chris had something uh chris so uh so chris hi hi doug |
| 10:18 | and ron and brian um hey um chris so what was chris's thing well if he's i mean if he's not here hi robert morning um i'd like to talk about um the hill article on ocean pasture restoration yeah okay yeah that'd be good has it been received i'd like to know too robert well very badly by greg rowe he greg rao thought that um uh the the policy was hope for the best all right but we'll come back yeah we'll come back and talk about that yep um perhaps i'll put that i'll put that in |
| 11:07 | there so everyone uh yeah yeah hope for the best i think i might have been a bit tackles with that as well so apologies for that robert anything so is do we have chris this evening yet anything for you brian good morning good morning um interested in picking up topics of people's interests okay well i'm going to suggest this that's it's just a kind of beef of mine um carbonic carbonate chemistry i'd like to sometimes i write to the group and don't |
| 12:10 | get any reply and i just think is that because it's everyone just thinks it's completely wrong i don't think it's that i think a lot of people don't haven't had a chance to think about morning john morning ah and chris is with us yeah um chris yep sorry i pulled you down a bit late i'll just finish you off comments on serve paper on sev's paper yeah which i've emailed okay you and everyone else oh great thanks um i think sorry chris you sent that uh an email with suggestion links suggestions |
| 12:50 | um um i haven't read those but um is that something we could talk about which one are you talking about now i think you sent and you sent an email a couple of days ago with a bunch of links and saying yes some bits of information which people may not want to talk about any of them in detail it was for information but uh if you want to talk about it by all means uh but some of them are just for you to be aware of i think rather than have a particular discussion on okay okay if anyone has seen it and wants to raise something fine but i |
| 13:22 | think otherwise i wouldn't specifically raise them not that inside i think chris was making the point that the general scientific community doesn't think there's any uh way of measuring uh ocean carbon circuit sequestration easily and i'm hoping that maybe we've discovered one right i i wouldn't necessarily say that sev i think there's there are ways but they're they're they're expensive right i think there are i think any way you come up with to really provide reliable measurements in the ocean |
| 13:57 | will be expensive the only trick to get around it is to be able to demonstrate your method it might cost you a bit up front but then rely on modelling yeah okay we'll get to that um and uh good uh i guess it's afternoon is it or morning manor joe no no thank you let's see am i on uh yeah i can hear you loud and clear that's great i i just i'm still listening and learning but if i have something to report i'll always let you know that's that's fine that's great um i'm sometimes i'm sort of mindful |
| 14:34 | afterwards that i haven't mentioned you know that i thought last time i didn't didn't mention your name or say hello or anything at all um so everyone hello everyone anything anything else i mean maybe that's enough uh because sometimes you know we just talk for a long time on things and waiver around um okay let's uh and please if you think of something we can just add in uh so yep seven chris please you were in you were just about to get into full flight okay can you put up the uh the paper yeah |
| 15:11 | uh is this oh yeah that's the hill right uh yep uh the paper that's it there so now i've got all the faces here are they obscuring the document that's good so if i just scroll it up to about there for that for now okay well i'll try and encapsulate um yeah the um a lot of methods a lot of terrestrial methods uh somewhat easier like um pumping co2 down into um geological depths or putting biochar in the soil but a lot of the um the ocean methods are a lot more difficult because in a sense the environment is |
| 16:15 | much more complex and three-dimensional and uh organically based so when when for instance russ george um did his his work the the best way he could try and measure the effect was to ac the green bloom which he made and then see the change in pink salmon populations going up uh one of the rivers in canada every other year for four years but that's uh that's reasonably indirect although i think it's a a pretty good measure but the the other the other methods um the sinking methods are quite difficult to see how you can be |
| 17:19 | sure you've captured that that that is uh really what you what you're measuring the the effect of your uh experiment is is is this and so i i thought a bit about the buoyant flakes you know i came to the conclusion that possibly the the thing which is doing the most um long-term carbon sequestration in the ocean is in fact krill krill eat the phytoplankton at the surface they they sink down to the dark depths and wait uh digest their meal defecate breathe out the carbon dioxide and then rise up again to get their next meal up in the surface |
| 18:10 | and because of the biomass of krill and i reckon that they their gut contents might be something close to 15 of the of their biomass that could mean that we are sinking um about 11 million tons of biomass every day to about a kilometer deep which would be far and away i think the most effective uh an important marine carbon dioxide removal effect possible so if we if you accept that hypothesis and it can be proven by by science and measurements then you can say okay well if we can then show that the krill population is |
| 19:08 | increasing and they are getting a a good gut full every every night then we can say that the the increase in krillin and that is or could be fairly directly attributed to ocean fertilization in that area provided you have the right sort of ships and the right sort of measurements and the only measurement you really need to have to do was to have ships going probably only once a year over the over that uh that southern ocean and measuring by active and passive sonar means the amount of krill nearby as they go along and from that |
| 20:05 | if that does increase you should be able to use that as a sample say okay well these are these three vessels going these complex uh roots over over the southern ocean have shown you know um three percent increase this year in cruel population okay that should mean about 30 million extra tons of krill and they typically would over a year would sequester so much more carbon biomass so with one one measurement really granted a fairly extensive measurement you could determine the actual you could verify the effect of ocean fertilization |
| 21:01 | and therefore you could do carbon credits and uh and fish licensing and and all that sort of stuff that's about it yeah it seems great to me chris uh sev what's the easiest way to measure uh again what's that measurement method so given passive sonar i think it's highlighted sonar to measure krill by just measuring their populations during the day uh actually you yes but but the the um you'd measure it continuously but the crew if the crew will come up at night you'd get your highest measures at night |
| 21:45 | right although it's interesting we're we're thinking about using um somewhat similar sonar techniques for the identification and location of macro algae at various depths and so i think um you know these are low contrast measurements but something we should consider at various depths so that we can try to understand the limits of what can be detected yes grant sir if they can if i can sorry a single krill which is maybe um 50 centimeters 50 millimeters long they should be able to detect a small frond of macroalgae falling |
| 22:40 | yes ideally so it's just a very small density difference so um and a liquid to this solid transition so be interesting to understand that better yes it depends a bit on the reflectiveness of the material of the of the biomass and its density and how far it's away and whether any complicating factors by other fish being there but if they're good they can i've i've got various um i've seen how they they picture krill's forms using sonar and it looks as though they can do it pretty effectively |
| 23:19 | so that's great if you have any if you have any references on that it would be helpful because we'd like to talk about yes thank you do you mind sending to the group um sev or just send to me yep do we know this is um by ship or can you do it potentially from satellite or a car they've got about five different ways but most of them are by ship but you can do it by by these uh these are little robots which go go down you can do it by long strings of things tied behind a ship or or uh sonics on the ship itself |
| 24:02 | i'll send you there's some nice little diagrams yes please yeah grant please from my memory uh which is never great the first discovery of the rising tide or rising mass of sea creatures at night time was discovered by the us navy were sailing through a portion of the pacific suddenly found this weird anomaly where they looked as if the depth of the ocean was a thousand meters less than their intent expectation so i'm just suggesting that the us navy has more information about the use of sonar to detect things in |
| 24:58 | water than we could imagine and so this is something that tapping into that pool of expertise may be hugely valuable thank you those um those false depth soundings were made by squid down down about uh four or five hundred meters but but other things can do it too yeah hey they they they found the seabed coming up towards them so they weren't sure if they were sinking but they could still see that they were still floating um john please so there's an enormous amount of netting of krill in the southern ocean and |
| 25:41 | the fishing industry would would have data on this of i'm not sure whether you could trust that but then they they they pull them out between about three about 200 and 600 meters depth i think most of them can concentrate it but no doubt that there's probably information there as well as the navy i think the existing fishing industry would no doubt be recording their catches and and the abundance of krill and of course we're consuming too much omega-3 opens where it's all going uh could it be better used staying in |
| 26:16 | the ocean and being more abundant in the ocean but um yeah there would be information there as well like this yeah fishing industry yeah they're going to say if you approach the u.s navy and ask them to give all the way that their secrets on sonar then uh you might not want to speak in a russian accent that sort of thing yeah not just the fishing industry um because where the fishery is regulated and it is in some places like by the falkland islands for example in their area um those sort of bodies actually carry out |
| 26:51 | regular stock surveys both using sonar and trolls and other such devices and in order to set the quotas so they're not just reliant on the fishing industry by any means in terms of coming to conclusions about what's there at the time although monitoring what happens with the fishing industry is also actually important because um it's a well-established uh practice of fisheries management generally that if you can understand what the fishing is doing and how efficiently they're fishing you can get a pretty good idea |
| 27:23 | of the stock as well so there's a you can and you can cross reference these different techniques of course to try and make sure that uh things are actually uh correct so there are a number of ways of going about it this sounds like so it's already happening anyway um by the fishing industry and also people monitoring the fishing industry yeah i mean the um the camel are the body responsible for the antarctic area sets quotas for krill and they review them every year and i i don't know the details but i assume that |
| 27:59 | i believe there are studies done every year on the stocks in order to come up with those uh estimates of what could be fished as well as obviously what they have count the last year as well which is obviously important so how do you spell camelot is it cnn [Music] it's the convention on look it up otherwise i won't get it right i'll look it up just as i can tell you okay thank you yes it may be that uh so as i often find this the case that uh we say we need information on so-and-so but if you all right i don't |
| 28:43 | know if you find it that someone's already done it uh yeah the um convention is the commission for the convention of antarctic living marine marine living resources and there's like i've put the two links to the cruel stuff on the on the chat page the second one is the best one right can we let's all right great so let's i just want to see if i can um type in what's uh chris convention see if we can find it um yeah there's a wikipedia or another uh something there's the convention site itself so |
| 29:24 | i've forgotten what you said already chris sorry it's the conversation it's c-c-a-m-l-r maybe maybe just get that that might be enough yeah it's always called camelot so here we go that's it so great there we go all right so that that's going to be interesting okay the the the csiro here in australia is also doing a lot of measurements of krill they've got specially designed cameras and acoustic devices and so forth they operate out of hobart of course straight into the southern ocean |
| 30:02 | yep that the sort of feedback you wanted seth yeah that's good just one of the other devices that have been talked about for measuring sort of carbon sequestration it's been proposed by the um uh ocean-based carbon lot the one who wants to do uh artificial upwelling um they're doing what's called using biogeochemical argo floats these are the argo floats the ones that go up and down they can zigzag up and down to ocean depths of several thousand meters measuring various things and there's a particular version the |
| 30:39 | biochemical one which measures various biochemical parameters and they've proposed actually to use them in a sort of moored array where they'll actually go up and down to about a thousand meters uh beneath their upwelling pipes to try and establish what's being actually sequestered so there are some other uh ways of looking at that particular sort of aspect not in terms of the krill itself but the uh sequestration of carbon that's good to know about these tennessee because i'd only heard of sediment traps and |
| 31:13 | which just seemed hopeless well sediment traps said the uses but they are not the universe the panacea by any means there's there's one more thing that might be relevant uh i i need to explain a bit about the spray vessels we want for marine corps brightening the they'll be cruising around the oceans at um a few hundred of them perhaps uh probably mainly in the summer hemisphere which is maybe where you want to know most uh but they have a number of canisters the canisters are one and a half meters in diameter and three and a half meters |
| 31:51 | long and they are connected up to ac and dc and communications for measuring and we are also already going to be stripping oxygen and co2 and whatever other gases there are in the feed water that we're going to be using for making the salt spray so you've got a vacuum system there that's sucking in water from about three meters below the surface so to try and avoid some of the scum on the top and there'll be a canister that's free you can put into it uh i don't know gas chromatograph chromatography equipment or whatever |
| 32:33 | else you can use to analyze chemicals and you can measure all the gases that are dissolved in seawater and probably quite a lot of the liquid chemicals too before we filter it and use it for spray so there is a bit of real estate compartment available with power supplies and communications for anybody who can put anything in there that's not too heavy and we can give you half a ton perhaps so that's going to be cruising around the oceans we will want to take them to the places that we think are best but we'll measure the gases and |
| 33:09 | chemistry of what happens in those places so that would be available i don't know enough about chemistry equipment to know what's what could be measured but um i just thought quite a lot could be done i'm trying to tell might get myself uh yeah everything uh bicarbonate and carbonates and dissolved organic carbon those sort of things we want to know measure some of the nutrients but not all of them you can measure nitrate for example remotely you can't measure ammonia i don't think you can easily measure |
| 33:44 | nitrite either you can measure phosphate i think some of these bits of equipment are already on some kept that does go out there on these uh geochemical floats or other devices because there's these uh things now like these um autonomous little sort of kite-like vessels that can wing around the ocean on their own which uh quite a number of countries are using now the more the more sources you have uh the better it will be especially if you can get cross-checks it sounds as though you you there might be some progress with |
| 34:24 | marine club brightening is there are you saying we're going to do this we're going to do that well but when i say that i mean i've got the drawings and the culture okay yeah we're still running at an infinite progress to cost ratio there's no progress so far people on the great barrier reef are still working on their research to do that have you heard anything back from cambridge people stephen presumably not not very much no no yeah yeah it does remind me there's going to be a talk sometime soon i can't remember |
| 35:00 | which one it is now where the um um that harrison the guy from the uh mcb stuff on the barrier reef is giving a talk i'll see if i can find it and i can alright thanks if you didn't hear what that is yeah i daniel yeah daniel harrison that's it but there was there was a meeting about various um sort of um ocean things cdr and he or other not just cdr but he was giving a talk at it and i can't remember which one it is now but i'll see if i can find it stephen have you heard from daniel harrison in response you were saying you |
| 35:49 | were warning him about the apk in effect maybe again have you heard any response i haven't heard from him recently i did send him a copy of the paper and he sent me at the time the size distribution of what he was spraying and a great deal of it was in the aitkin mode and uh i've tried to explain what aitken might be working the wrong direction and i'm not sure whether he accepts that uh but there's um this this paper by uh two people in norway uh altascar and christensen uh shows that there are three modes of size of aerosol in in in |
| 36:35 | the atmosphere and we need to be in the middle of the of the middle node the accumulation mode and that if you spray either the course or the aitkin mode it works in the wrong direction and the reason that they're suggesting is that there's a very large number of aerosols which are too small to nucleate properly but they can still take quite a lot of water vapor out of the air without producing a proper cloud drop and this also fits in with something called the green field gap which was the size distribution of |
| 37:14 | aerosol which is the least efficient that's scooping up nuclear fallout there's a chap working on nuclear bombs what happens after them and what happens to the fallout and the green field gap is where we want to spray but it's got an enormously much better scavenging than the the sizes to other side so size matters i think but uh almond noicemans and daniel harrison disagree with it so with me about it and i don't know who's right what what are they saying what it doesn't size doesn't matter who's making it |
| 37:55 | the way they make the spray gives them a very wide spread of sizes including a lot in the aitkin mode i i think it's very important to have a very narrow spread because uh the the biggest the heaviest uh nuclei will um nucleate first and when they do that they soak up all the water vapor and that means that the relative humidity nearby is reduced and so this reduces the chances of other nuclei the smaller ones getting anything to nucleate with and so you you get a a bit like hyenas feeding it's the biggest |
| 38:37 | ones to get mostly um this is why i want a very narrow spread of sizes and this view is not shared by almond and daniel well uh but um presumably experiments everybody will know once enough experiments are done uh i hope so yes it would be very good does it depend on humidity as well what size what's the best size well no you you it has to do well everything depends on knowledge immediately it's got to get above 100 by an amount that depends on to oh anyway sorry yeah because it's got to be super saturated anyway otherwise |
| 39:17 | don't bother yeah but if if if the big ones have grabbed the humidity and reduced it that means the little ones don't get any they don't nucleate at all because they don't they don't get up to over the hump right all right i just need somebody to just get on and get find the funding anyway um i mean we could talk talk about about that that sorry that was me it's okay that was me uh asking for that digression thank you um stephen it's funny so you hear it again and it gets clearer um for me at least |
| 39:48 | anyway um okay anything i think we're moving on actually from um from this uh very good idea from sev uh uh and okay so next uh this hill article um you wanna talk about that robert thanks clive so people i hope saw the uh the article by um alex carlin and um and brent brewer in uh in the hill that i have circulated to several lists and uh i simply thought it was an extremely interesting analysis of the politics around ocean iron fertilization and the fact of of coming from somebody who's very engaged with the policy debates in washington |
| 40:54 | gives it a a particular importance and i included in the chat the the chart which has been the subject of of some debate on the carbon dioxide removal a google group and that actually relates very closely to the conversation that uh that sev uh introduced about how to measure ocean cdr because the uh uh what that chart uh shows i'm i'm happy to share it if clive lets me uh there we are uh what that chart shows is the uh the orange line the pink salmon was uh was what the hater salmon experiment in 2012 targeted |
| 41:49 | and you can see very clearly the the quadrupling and with the salmon ocean lifespan of two years there's a natural biennial there and so this assertion that that this measured fishery by from the alaska fish and game report was worth a billion dollars for a five million dollar investment is uh is something that's uh very eye-catching for uh commercially minded people and uh so the uh uh brent fuels interest is uh in particular uh to uh to say how this uh keys into the moral hazard debate because uh he's arguing that actually if |
| 42:40 | we find methods like this that uh that enable us to slow down the uh transition away from fossil fuels then uh uh from his point of view that's a good thing and uh and that's something that would would lead to a much wider interest in this sort of technology from from a range of people with quite deep pockets and and political power so i think the the way this boat has been confined to within the uh climate activist community has uh has been has really uh stymied progress because of the the strength of of moral hazard |
| 43:26 | reasoning the the uh i mean the argument is that the uh the means is more important than the end so the means is to shut down all combustion on earth and and the end is um cooling the planet but uh clearly shutting down combustion is not particularly feasible but uh i'm sorry i'm exaggerating there but the uh the end of uh um slowing warming is something that's uh that this sort of commercial method can support i think a further point uh which has come up a lot in debate is that the haida experiment was |
| 44:08 | rejected because it wasn't um managed within the university community and uh but uh and that's that's led to uh you know for example uh greg rao's uh comment um just uh questioning the uh the advocacy and and the methods so uh i think overall quite an interesting debate and i just wanted to raise it here as something that i'd be interested in in people's comments on ron bowman i just say that it was iniquitous the canadian government to to steal all of uh russ's uh results and then not to |
| 44:56 | release them yeah yeah they weren't russia's results only don't forget it was a group not ron you've had your hand up a while but he's still on mute so we can't hear it might suggest chris well ron's working out yeah ron you're yeah okay thank you i i just had a quick comment um uh i think it's a it's a mistake to to counter pose those two i mean i uh because the people will will you know you what you want to do is set two different targets one for removal and one for emissions |
| 45:38 | reduction and uh and we lost him okay uh a lot more waiting for him to come back uh yeah yes please related comment and that is that the canadian government didn't just um seize the results they destroyed the water samples so the results could not be brought to light there was a systematic book burning campaign on part of the academics suggesting i don't know it was department of environment enforced with the royal mounties or whatever and destroy all the samples that were being stored so that results couldn't be be sent out |
| 46:20 | it couldn't be distributed it was a very systematic destruction and i commented that that was an extreme scandal and which has not been sufficiently publicized in my uh uh email to the uh various lists so um yeah uh happy to see uh the hill picking up on it and and i think that's um as uh people in the community who read the hill uh find out about this scandal uh i i do hope that it's um hits the mainstream media finally as a direct beneficiary of the of the uh salmon walmart uh procured as far as i can tell millions of pounds |
| 47:05 | of um frozen salmon and we were literally getting i believe six pounds of salmon for seven dollars in california during after that uh 2013 spike so the food security implications and ramifications were highly significant [Music] chris has wanted to speak for a bit uh chris yeah thanks um personally i'm still very skeptical about this um i think you are in danger to some extent of confusing correlation with causation um they are not necessarily one follows the other they can do but they don't have to of course |
| 47:46 | um there are some issues with the actual how they did the experiment i'm afraid i haven't had time to look through these um reports in the last few days or so because my wife's been in hospital i'm running to and fro every day for about three hours every day so that's limiting my capacity to to do anything besides just this um but um there are some quotes that are just ridiculous frankly so the the one that russ has promulgated and um was in this brent and uh fool and alex carlin one was about how within days the ocean |
| 48:21 | was teeming with life whales dolphins tuna salmon etc that had absolutely nothing to do with the ocean fertilization experiment because all the evidence from ocean fertilization experience we've had shows that it takes something like four or five days before the plankton blooms really take off and these whales and things that appear within a day or so i think russ said in one of his uh presentations almost certainly or i think guaranteed absolutely had nothing whatsoever to do with the experiment at all it's just |
| 48:51 | coincidence um uh and i haven't said i haven't had a chance to look through everything else um but i think one of the other things i saw alex carlin's presentation to the madrid um cop when he first brought out this idea of these eddies being the ocean pastures and well i saw those so-called pastures and i just said they're eddies that doesn't make them pastures and if you look at things like for example the eddies that spin off the gulf stream and eddie there's one side of that boundary may have higher levels of |
| 49:27 | nutrient than around it but the edges that go the other side have less so half your eddies in that area generally will not be any use at all anyway for uh growing plankton particularly compared to those that were the other side so just showing an eddie doesn't show an ocean pasture at all i think the whole concept of ocean pastures per se is just an invention that has no evidence for it at all there may be issues around ocean fertilization but i think to try and put it forward as ocean pastures i think is got no evidence to support it frankly um |
| 50:02 | i may be they come back next week well next two weeks time perhaps and appear a chance to have a look through some of the the other stuff that's there but um that's just a few content isn't the idea of ocean pasture to apply ocean fertilization to an eddy and so that the idea is it's meant to kind of stay in the same place rather than just spread all over the place well it's not at all clear actually that's one of the problems this ocean pastures thing has been put forward without any clear explanation of what it |
| 50:30 | is they mean how they propose to do anything and so on but the implication certainly at alex carlin's presentation was at the cop in madrid all of those eddies were ocean pastures per se and they're clearly not without any ocean fertilization at all right okay i see so a couple of points chris i think you i mean you have valid concerns uh but we should recognize that under the eddy covariance model an increased number of eddies would presumably improve or increase the net vertical advection of nutrients over |
| 51:03 | time probably based on eddy covariance so that's one aspect i think it's worth recognizing the second is couldn't the correlation and causation model be further investigated simply by repeating the experiment sure yeah i don't understand it as well though just to come back on you brian um although they may have destroyed the physical samples i understood there were a lot of actual measurements that were made and had been at least some point saved whether they were destroyed as well i don't know but they were actual |
| 51:32 | measurements you know data not uh samples and i don't know what happened to them that's a good question i do um know one or two folks that were involved in it and something we could ask further um and the other thing i might i mean the way i interpret ocean pastures it's a bit of a popularization i don't think it's hard and fast um i think they're simply using it as a short metaphor if you will for the the notion of having an improved reservoir or an adequate an improved supply of iron i |
| 52:07 | suppose um but i think i'm keen to uh build support the hill article isn't encouraging to me because it seems that doing uh a suitably third party verified replication of the perturbation of 2012 would be a very interesting experiment to conduct under ideally under uh academic uh review as well i think the the other thing which i forgot about was um the way they added the material on one of russ's web pages i don't know if it's still there there was a video showing them doing this and they did it |
| 52:46 | in a completely different way for any from any other ocean fertilization experiment they had a shoot at the back of the boat and they had sacks of ferrous ammonium sulfate they just slipped the sacks and tipped it in um i suspect that um a large fraction of that sunk through the surface mixed layer within hours so um i suspect a vast amount of that material had no effect whatsoever the other thing is because they the way they put it in compared to the way the other ocean fertilization experiments were caused they had very high levels of iron |
| 53:21 | immediately behind the vessels extremely high and the vessels were certainly weren't going fast they weren't putting into a weight to encourage turbulence so they have massive amounts of iron which was never going to be all used by plankton because they can't plankton need a tiny amount of vine you know very meniscal so you need to dilute it very quickly if at all possible in order to maximize the benefit so it wasn't carried out in a very effective way at all in my view i would agree that dissolution on chip |
| 53:48 | is far preferable and ideally maximizing dilution at high velocity would be far preferable as well yeah so chris and the ironstone the iron salt aerosol method is is a way of uh enabling a much more diffuse um distribution so uh but uh on on chris's point about correlation causation i think uh when you have a correlation between five five million dollar investment and a one billion dollar return then that correlation is something that really should be investigated yeah no reason no no i don't know probably be investigated i just don't |
| 54:27 | think one can jump to the conclusion that you know a equals b sort of thing um that's all yeah on a sample of one yeah chris we just just now when you said um some people uh it wasn't um being dispersed by the wake of the propeller of the ship we were still talking about russ george's experiment yeah sure yeah i mean just to clarify that when the other ocean fertilization experiments were done they dissolved the ferrous ammonium sulfate in a small volume of acid then diluted that this is all on the ship |
| 55:03 | they diluted that with a lot much larger volume of sea water and they they introduced it into the wake of the vessel that steamy long into the sort of immediately behind the ship so you maximize the turbulence and dispersion and that would have produced far lower levels of iron than were found in rust george's experiment because of the way that it was added um and you do really don't want to put vast amounts of ironing because as i said you're wasting most of what you put in by tipping vast amounts in |
| 55:30 | it's a very efficient method to uh to do it chris do you see any benefit in actually making a bloom so the whole thing goes green and you know an intense amount of growth do you see any benefit i mean if you have x amount of of iron um people talk about creating a phytoplankton bloom but do you think it's better to just make it as diffuse as you possibly can um or is it better to have a sort of certain kind of common bit like what steam was just saying about you know that's you know i'm not sure there's a simple answer to |
| 56:05 | that um the thing is with phytoplankton blooms um as has been proposed for example with the emiliano hutsey ones we talked about a few meetings ago you get a boom and bust basically they last for a period of time and then the blooms collapse because they've used up the nutrients the zooplankton have chopped them up and so on and so you get a natural cycle um and that's what happened in all of the experiments it's usually of the order of maybe four six eight weeks ish at most uh but when these sort of things have |
| 56:36 | collapsed now if you do a diffuse one putting it in as i think i said last meeting or two you're only going to have a very modest blue and i suspect that you will get very little uh sequestration from that because i think the zooplankton will chomp up the phytoplankton pretty quick and if you've only got quite small amounts within the mixed layer that you're much less likely i think to export it from the surface mix layer than if you have significant quantities but you know it's uh one would have to |
| 57:09 | actually study that just don't know i would say that you actually actively don't want a bloom if you have a bloom that you get eutrophication and you also get um the um the viral attacks on the bloom which kill them off if they're much more diffuse you get a a balanced ecology building up and you don't get that high viral attack i suspect your diffuse thing will be much better for fish than it will be for sequestration um but in in cold oceans you should get both well uh we're really cruel i sent some people a copy of a paper and |
| 58:03 | an idea for putting on and it has did people see this was this the electrolysis thing um stephen yeah yeah i think that's the one i commented on to stephen some time ago isn't it yeah yeah so i don't think everybody's seen it but there is i think one of the problems with the the the big ocean on experiment was that they didn't look at it for long enough it was all done in i think the longest was 30 days and i think you really need much much longer and i'd like to have something which gives a |
| 58:36 | fairly low dose for years for several years and you you can look at it either on the fish catch or on maybe on on satellites but putting in a really big dose and only looking at it for for a short time i think isn't isn't the right way to do it we need a much longer but i think that's partly historical um stephen because i think with the kit they have nowadays they could use more remote sensing autonomous things to extend the time scale quite easily beyond that sort of period they were basically limited by the length of a |
| 59:06 | cruise you could go out on a on a research vessel for that was the reason for the length of time i know and that was the bad thing what we need is something where it's yours that you're doing it and you don't this means you probably don't want uh um a crew there you want some unmanned vessels they don't even want to come back for fuel the design that i have allows them to stay uh at sea for months i think it's not just a question of vessel when i'm thinking of autonomous things i'm thinking of underwater type |
| 59:36 | things as well not just not just ships i mean auvs that go underwater argo floats and all the other types of things that are around these days would uh be much more powerful tools than what they had back in the 80s 90s when they did those experiments i think the other the only other thing i'd say is very diffuse um spreading of iron will be much more challenging to verify i think it would be a lot easier if you do a long line of it than if you do a number of points if you do a line or maybe a cross your lines crossing each other |
| 1:00:12 | or maybe a big big circle gives you a much easier pattern to detect than splurges and there is the indirect verification that comes from the fish yield and so like if the diffuse spread is targeted to the life cycle of a fish species that would otherwise die then which is what russ george did then then that presents a very good proxy provided you can make the link yeah yeah making that making the links scientifically is quite challenging yeah um now we're highlighting the elegance of sev's idea with this buoyant flakes |
| 1:00:52 | which makes minerals available long term which uh i think it's really important this the other one i i spoke extensively with russ george and looked at a lot of his paperwork um uh because there was a potential legal case there if he was able to provide some of the evidence and we were helping him find some litigation financing to work with it now russ didn't come forward with the necessary evidence at the time so i couldn't get the legal finances to work on it but one of the things i did pick up was |
| 1:01:25 | that the um source of the iron that he was using was actually pink pigment and of a very very fine grain and the the argument about russ's argument that was that the particles were so fine that they sank very very slowly through the water column but and i also thought that he'd been doing this over several days and my understanding was that um you know it was 10 or 12 days and actually he was seeing that the difference when the ship went back out into the area that they fertilized in terms of life coming towards it so you know if |
| 1:02:06 | you've got an area of ocean where you've successfully created additional pact and boom yes other fish will find their way to it it's just like putting food on a bird table um so wasn't that wasn't hell right yeah that wasn't how russ said it though that when i listened to his thing but anyway as i remember it now anyway it's a few little couple of years i remember this chris and i i remember questioning him on this and saying hey but i think it was it was reported in a press article something he had said and |
| 1:02:37 | he was arguing strongly that uh that hadn't been the case okay but he may be defending yourself about other things that was said a question um how do we feel about rust because when it was all about publicity was around it uh a lot of people shied away from involvement but he seems to be becoming more accepted let's see more more people behind his work now but i mean i've i've reacted very cautiously to it i think he's a bit of a lightning rod and i think actually he'll be more harmful to it than beneficial i |
| 1:03:14 | would have thought yeah what brian what's your view um yeah i i think it's not not an accident that there's such controversy i was trying to advise russ before the heidegger salmon restoration expense experiment and you know i just said look why don't you go get the results and you know bring them back ideally have some third-party academics working with you and validating the figures and then published a nice paper on it and then and then publicize it and there was no you know walk softly and carry a big stick it was all about |
| 1:03:53 | the press releases and it was all about creating a controversy uh so he seemed to be more in favor of sticking it to the man than actually doing the engineering and scientific work to validate the hypothesis he seems to be making a lot of noise at the moment and and i think he's very active and i haven't reconnected to find out what's going on but um that's why i asked the question about you know if he is doing other things is it going to be a problem for us or does anybody know is he doing it in a way that's |
| 1:04:24 | going to be acceptable yeah he did give a presentation by video in a a cop 26 event i think i saw a short presentation so he's certainly around i think the other problem is russ's track record in other areas doesn't help him either because he's had quite a number of very dodgy uh things all the confusion stuff yeah well not just that no no i was also thinking of uh selling various carbon credits to the vatican which was uh there was um things like that so his track record doesn't actually help him |
| 1:05:02 | to be seen as credible so that's why i think he's not actually necessarily helpful if people really want to get on and do this i don't think involving him will actually help yeah all right we'll stay away from them fair enough well he does continue to blog quite regularly i don't read all of his blogs but i i just found this hill article particularly interesting and i i think it it brings the geo engineering debate into the washington um content much more vividly than i think has uh has occurred before |
| 1:05:42 | yeah well it would be nice to see some other body having a go and and doing it in a good incredible way to see if it can be those results can be repeated well don't forget the um an asam report has recommended spending something like 400 million dollars on ocean fertilization actually a hell of a lot of research so if that gets done that will probably give quite a lot of useful answers one would have thought yeah is that limited to uh micronutrients or is it looking more broadly uh i can't remember off the top of my |
| 1:06:15 | head i think it's mainly related to micronutrients very well chris i wanted to if you don't mind me stepping back about 10 minutes ago um you said because you said um you thought that diffuse fertilization would pro would you i mean i think you're speculating and so yeah sure i don't want to be too too unfair with this but i'm interested to know what your rationale might be behind why why is why do you think diffuse fertilization is better for fish than the than carbon i think it'll be all recycled in the surface water |
| 1:06:55 | and if it's kept in the surface layer the benefits there will go to fission and the other life in the surface makes left basically uh i don't see that a lot of sequestration coming from it you don't see uh vertical migration species coming up and grabbing it and swimming well sure they'll come with that but i mean if you're putting really diffused low levels in you're not going to generate huge amounts so the increase will be quite modest the best i would thought and and after all the um you're still |
| 1:07:26 | the normal sort of processes in terms of sextation of carbon within the water column still apply no matter how you do it so if you generate more productivity in the surface layer then yes you will get some more that goes down below the surface mix layer you know if it's within a particular area for sake of argument it might be 20 of it on an annual basis will will get below the surface mixed layer so if you increase the surface productivity by 20 then 20 of that will go down so you will increase it uh by the percentage of |
| 1:07:58 | whatever you produce in the surface layer um but i i just doubt with very personally just thought i know i did come across a paper which wasn't related to fertilization but was related to plankton blooms and how they reacted to nutrients they did suggest low levels of nutrient additions didn't generate uh very much additional benefits i can't remember now i think i did send it to you a long time ago now but i could try and find it but it was only by analogy it wasn't a direct sort of thing that |
| 1:08:29 | related to ocean fertilization yeah okay thank you for that as uh yeah brian please yeah a related comment on this is that we've been studying the age of abyssal ocean waters and there's several papers out on this and it's interesting to note that the high nutrient low chlorophyll regions where one might try to apply ocean iron fertilization also corresponds to regions where the time to next outcropping are relatively low so for example in the northeast pacific you're dealing with you know a relatively short |
| 1:09:05 | amount of time decades to a century to actually see another upwelling there perhaps in the western north pacific you would still like in the sea of acosta bearing c or something uh it might the time scale might be a bit longer because uh the the time to next outcropping is longer but again in the southern ocean you're dealing uh with a lot of deep cycling and um so the the time scale of sequestration would be more of a concern whereas we're working with a number of groups on subtropical [Music] biological pump effects |
| 1:09:43 | and the associated multi-century time scale for those abyssal waters to reach a point where outcropping can occur like the northeast pacific or the southern ocean right outcropping being a co2 coming back out again well some water coming back to the surface yeah yeah could i just pick up on bruce point that uh buoyant flakes are likely to be a very effective um experimental method and just i just wondering um sev uh your thoughts on uh on the uh on the hader experiment and and how it provides model for uh for further |
| 1:10:29 | buoyant flex experiments uh i don't think it provides much of a model because the buoyant flakes is extremely diffuse and extremely long they should uh diffuse and be consumed over about a year and you might only have a few flakes per square meter of water surface so the the it's it's it'll be a million times less iron than what what uh russ's experiment did but it will also have the silicate the phosphate and the and the and the iron uh too so uh is to what extent is the buoyant flex targeted at a fisheries restoration |
| 1:11:25 | then um it's targeted at least as much as the cdr effect and it should also have a bit of srm effect for uh sea surface and marine cloud writing aspects but the the in the southern ocean it's i'm looking to it have most of the the cdr effect whereas in warmer waters i'd expect it to have much more effect on fisheries yeah well anyway that's perhaps something that you know alex carlin and brent fuell might be interested to uh to follow up um in giving it more publicity the the the indian government is has run |
| 1:12:16 | some mesocosm experiments in the arabian ocean uh just recently using buoyant flakes they had some weather problems and technical problems they were using a a mesocosm made in germany and somehow they they had holes in the bottom of the mesocosm and gropers started going up and eating all all the fish inside them and sorry what what's a meat what's a mesocosm in this context made in the german closed bag of seawater separate from the environment yeah okay the big big hollow plastic tube normally they're not open at the bottom |
| 1:12:54 | but these ones were and they they actually found that they were getting on the short time they were able to observe it with the the rough seas they were actually getting a very useful uh response from uh blue-green cyanobacteria for for generating additional nitrate in the surface and so they've now gone back to their to their going labs and they're replicating the mesocosms onshore in their labs we're hoping to get uh reports on those fairly soon but they they should go out and do it again in the mesocosms |
| 1:13:35 | taking a long term yeah i several months that's the best way to do it that's great thanks sorry chris one one more question is just you've got me thinking you're saying um uh better for fish uh do you think possibly then uh if you know this sort of long-term consistent you know continuous fertilization um that uh controlling the you know having sort of controlled fishing to not have too many fish that would mean that you could you could increase your uh vertical migration you know without it all being you know |
| 1:14:16 | gobbled up by fish and you you know uh you sort of determine you're well i appreciate it i would say good luck to controlling fishing know what's all this about quotas then i mean well yeah but it depends where you do it of course the open ocean is a bit of a cowboy land for the fleets from places like china and other parts of the world to go roaming around and catching anything they want in large quantities um and the so-called uh iuu uh i unregulated uh fisheries yeah um so if you start producing a lot of fish |
| 1:14:53 | somewhere you can be pretty damn sure pretty soon there's going to be one of these fleets appearing on the horizon to go and scoop it up which might not be such a bad thing then well maybe uh it depends i mean that usually though they they over exploit the fisheries of course rather than just uh exploit them a more manageable way of course you sort of wipe it out yeah but uh whether that's a good thing or not of course there's another matter maybe if there weren't fish there in the first place and now all you've got is |
| 1:15:24 | lots of zooplankton swimming up and down um [Music] might be hard to argue against that well i think if you deliberately removed all the fish by some magical means from areas of the sea i think you might have a few knock-on ecosystem effects frankly as well well i don't think it's necessarily a good thing no no i mean it's very clear that destruction of fisheries is is up there with um global warming as as a part of our ecological process yeah i mean it's not i'm i'm just playing playing devil's advocate here um |
| 1:16:00 | we rather think that fish feces you know as we said before they they rot in a way that uh makes them again this is to be researched this is all we speculate we don't know until research is done that they rot away and become inert uh or somewhat um and don't ruminarize might have to think i mean if if there simply isn't any decent scalable solution to climate change and the the the cert you know the us military for a long time been saying it's a huge problem it's a threat multiplier that maybe uh you know they |
| 1:16:41 | wonder if they might be willing to have a few frigates out there protecting waters in the pacific or wherever it is might we might have to think that big might start a war if you're not careful there clive well from what what i see i'm a bit of a youtube watcher here uh the us have got i had you know x many are ten relevant aircraft carriers the chinese have got about one and it's about can only go a few thousand miles before it runs out of fuel yeah china's got a very big navy though and it's growing fast apparently mm-hmm |
| 1:17:14 | yes well i mean if cha but china's will suffer from climate change as well uh hugely uh so it'd be nice if they'd sort of talk sensibly um uh brian so i yeah um i think it's worth noting on the fisheries side that um according to some measures uh something like half the fish have been harvested from the ocean in the last 30 years and 90 of the big fish are gone so this experiment's underway uh you know and the perturbation of taking most of the fish out of the ocean is true fully multi-decade experiments so |
| 1:17:50 | you know 14 out of i don't know 30 odd uh you know large forage fisheries are completely gone i mean you know i think japan was harvesting a million tons of herring a year out of hokkaido in 1899 and by 1953 that herring population was destroyed it was uh you know commercially extinct and uh perhaps did it all say as well brian what's that happened to the north sea as well yep oh yeah and it happened right off the coast of monterey with the monterey sardines and the cannery row and it's by stable because those |
| 1:18:26 | populations don't come back and what's even more significant those herring of hokkaido fertilized the uh saccharina kelp forest and actually laid their eggs there and a few decades later the saccharine kelp forest has now been decimated as well so we've seen uh mutual collapsing ecosystems and uh getting the saccharine kelp forest might even be a getting it back would might be a precursor to actually getting the hearing back so it's an ongoing challenge that remains to this day absolutely although complicated by |
| 1:19:00 | climate change as well i agree a little more than everyone and what it points to is that geoengineering is needed to regulate the planetary temperature and so let this whole concept of global cooperation is is something that's essential for peace security and ecosystem uh restoration and you know regulating the fisheries in the open ocean is uh is just a really key uh factor in global cooperation for uh sustainable flourishing i have to agree with you there and i'll just add that i'm not sure the planet |
| 1:19:43 | can afford uh any more autocracy than we're seeing presently and in fact in many ways the autocracy is unsustainable and uh if if nothing else putin's greatest legacy may be galvanizing the rest of the world to unite and actually solve some problems together yeah that's exactly right hasn't gone so well for vlad in ukraine no no but it'd be good if if uh yeah if we will learn a lesson and it looks like uh xi jinping is changing his alliances as well oh riley what's going on uh well he's uh |
| 1:20:23 | i but what i saw was that he approached the canadian government he wants to do a trade deal with you know he sort of kind of what's the word he's sort of um moving towards him i can't think of the expression he's he's approaching them and saying look can we be friends please but but i think the the general interpretation is um he's kind of really saying that to america and say i think i'd rather be have an alliance with the us you seem to be the strong one you seem to be the sensible ones you've certainly got the |
| 1:20:52 | weapons i don't think i want to be backing the loser here very well encouraging um we could talk about about the whole ukraine thing but um um yeah i want to talk about carbonate carbonate maybe we do that yeah let's do about that yeah let's do that because stick on message yeah so um chris i hope i um i was i'm afraid of uh irritating you too much but um anyway carbonate chemistry did you want to just say anything about what we talked about today in the email you tell me i'm wrong um trying to remember now what it was |
| 1:21:35 | so you you so what it was you said um why did i say oh yeah what why why did you say yeah i mean because the the um the diagram that you you sent is actually what i sent to you originally some years ago you just sent back to me again fair enough um but that equilibrium is dependent on the ph it's not a concentration one so that equilibrium is maintained by the ph so if the ph stays the same yeah then let's show the people that chris this those things that scroll up a bit and blow it up a bit and then you can see it better yeah |
| 1:22:26 | that one there yeah so this is the buren plot the gerund plot and it's showing the concentration of three uh three things is that yeah so co2 so here's ph going up and uh at ph eight there's not much dissolved co2 um quite a lot of like uh bicarbonate hgo3 we call it bicarbonate and and that's the carbonate one but we're really we've just been talking about bicarbonate and so these all are all in equilibrium so i was saying that a certain ph if you remove your co2 well you just lose some of this and it just |
| 1:23:03 | becomes co2 but you're you're but there's something i'm missing chris well i i'm not sure i mean the karmalake uh system is quite complex and i wouldn't claim to be an expert on it at all but um since it's governed by ph i assume that if you take some material out it'll try and re-establish equilibrium yeah at that ph now whether that happens by changing one of the species into another or by drawing co2 in from the atmosphere for example if you take co2 out i'm not sure how what the balance is between those two |
| 1:23:42 | processes um but certainly if if if it only was to change the bicarbonate then it wouldn't be a lot point of taking co2 out of the surface waters because if you're not going to actually modify the uh pulled co2 out the atmosphere then it defeats the whole object of quite a few of those proposals for uh doing cdr well that that's yeah brian yeah i've identified a um a good way of thinking about this actually in the deep ocean um and partly in in conjunction with our colleagues at princeton and uh what he found is the spatial |
| 1:24:20 | dimensions of these ph values are highly important as well as the ph itself so the point is that um there's a there's plenty of carb calcium carbonate in the sediments between depths of say one kilometer and three and a half kilometers and before it gets the carbon carbonate compensation depth is reached and um what happens is as we sink biomass towards the uh seafloor in these depth ranges what will happen is most of it will be respired back into carbon dioxide re-mineralized and then that carbonic acid will work on the |
| 1:24:58 | carbonate in the sediments to actually dissolve more calcium carbonate and buffer the um the carbonic acid into calcium bicarbonate dissolved in the abyss so the reservoir is is enormous and it's this huge buffering reaction so as we drop more and more of this carbonic acid you know return it to the deep sea there's a this diet this buffering mechanism between one kilometer where you have again sufficient oxygen and three and a half kilometers where you reach the carbonate compensation depth you have enormous reservoirs of |
| 1:25:32 | carbonate calcium carbonate that are available to chemically buffer the carbonic acid yeah that's a good way of thinking about it so that that's obviously in deepwater which is i think what we were talking about clyde was more what happened in the surface wasn't it well yes um i was talking generally just just generally with chemistry if you have i was ignoring any for a moment you know the gas exchange with the atmosphere and saying that you've got dissolved co2 in water and uh if you somehow remove it sort of |
| 1:26:11 | scoop it up some some other way that doesn't affect the carbonate chemistry then you're going um you're going to the the equilibrium will be maintained but so this some of this will get lost some of the bicarbonate would go back to co2 to maintain equilibrium the other the other point i made clyde was that you said well why don't they just take up bicarbonate so then i'm so so that's the thing that fran suggested some time ago and it makes sense to me algae so everybody says um we know that plants take co2 out of the |
| 1:26:47 | air they have to they've got no other choice but algae could remove they could to assimilate or obtain their carbon by just absorbing bicarbonate the hco3 ana you know this this iron but the problem is the reactions that are in the calvin cycle don't deal with bicarbonate so i don't do that and i think there's been plenty of studies using things like stable isotopes to show how that cycle works so the fact of the matter is they don't use it and as i said to you i don't think it's just |
| 1:27:16 | a question of concentration there are other issues as well including things like kinetics of reactions uh that actually matter in terms of and also how did this thing evolve originally because we're talking back here into the archaean era back in sort of three and a half billion years ago when some of this stuff started to evolve and i don't think anyone's got a total handle on exactly how that happened at that time there's quite a few theories around of course but um i don't think we've got a really good |
| 1:27:45 | handle on exactly how it evolves and how it evolves probably determines where we are now of course whatever we may think now three and a half billion years later yeah yeah well franz uh suggests that uh the uh that it was um that was foreign photosynthesis so everything was very weak reactions in those days because it wasn't there weren't any strong oxidants around and so um it just managed it by transitioning so you know iron has two oxidation states that that don't take much energy to get from mine |
| 1:28:18 | two to iron three and he he reckons that uh ion three was produced so there was this transition from ion2 to ion three and that that was uh the oxidant that was produced iron three um and uh so a lot of it you know precipitated out and got these banded iron formations um and then some time later they worked out how to um split water and and produce oxygen and so um but i mean i have to take what you're saying chris and i haven't had time to read up about the calvin cycle i suppose what goes through my mind is that there would have |
| 1:28:56 | been a huge amount of research into plant photosynthesis for the purpose of farming and it's easier um we keep we know that every time you researching ocean water is uh more com more expensive that i just wonder if the if that's what all the research has been been done you know lots of research on that but maybe nobody's really looked closer but but as you say the kinetics in a sense it doesn't matter for the overall chemistry it doesn't matter because if they remove co2 then it's still going to |
| 1:29:25 | reduce bicarbonate from from the uh ocean and um so yes if you're removing co2 you have to think about it why that raises the ph you know if you remove it i suppose if you remove co2 it moves you moves you in this direction so you've got a higher ph um and well as you say it reduces the partial pressure um at the ocean surface as well so you'll get a difference in partial pressure between that and the ocean in the air and that in the ocean and so you're going to get a movement down into that remember that the concentrations here |
| 1:30:00 | are not absolute no no ratios these are ratios so it's not as straightforward quite as it looks yeah but it gives you means you can get this the general principle still applies yeah yeah brian you've got your hand up yeah first of all i think it's important to recognize that the stromatolites of three and a half billion years ago probably uh exhibited photosynthesis so it's far older than the one billion years i don't think you have to rely on oxygen i did say three and a half billion brian good yeah oh good good good now |
| 1:30:37 | yeah the evidence also suggests that a photosynthesis first occurred in something like some bacterial type of things that were later assimilated into plants uh type creatures as chloroplasts so uh it evolves in a in a sort of different form originally to what it ended up in yes that sounds wonderful i'm glad to hear that and i think there's a rich history of photosynthesis that may extend back 3 billion years or longer so it's important for us to recognize that secondly um we like to think of the calcium carbonate sediments as being |
| 1:31:13 | antacid pills for the abyssal ocean and in many ways you know it's it's the tums if you will of the ocean and um that might be a popular way of of sharing that metaphor with people um but i think it's highly effective in that you know a lot of people confusingly think that forming calcium carbonate shells will somehow reduce ocean acidification but in fact it makes it worse because a single calcium ion in the solution carbonic acid molecules in in calcium bicarbonate and when you precipitate it out |
| 1:31:48 | you've addressed one of the uh carbonate molecules and the calcium goes away and now you're left with the other carbonic acid still in solution so it's unbuffered yeah so really in many ways you're better off with dissolved calcium bicarbonate than precipitating a bunch of shells yeah all right interestingly will burns did do a published an article where he called um our clear ocean alkalinization the uh the um something like the you describe the uh you didn't call it tums i think he just called it the antacid i think he |
| 1:32:22 | called it the antacid for the ocean exactly exactly so that's something we should uh bring forward in our circles i think it's a it's encouraging and that i think is encouraging to to suggest that um restoring some of the functions of the biological pump in the ocean could actually do you know a good job of getting the the carbonic acid down there where the antacid can do some good that's a nice metaphor um yeah antacid for the ocean's tummy which is already down there it's uh lots of calcium carbonate well there's |
| 1:32:58 | lots of calcium carbonate on the sea bed and on sea mounts and and beneath the carbonate combination carbonate conversation death depth it's so cold and so the pressure is so high that actually it uh it dissolves in the water correct yeah so you don't have a reservoir a supply of it but you do um down to that point yeah right yeah continental margins continental margins right yeah remember that an awful lot of carbonate sediments are all formed in much shallower waters as well of course things like the places |
| 1:33:37 | like the bahamas bank type places you get vast amounts of carbonate formed in much shallower environments than the deep sea that's some dover yeah yeah yeah as so um yeah because the pressure is less and the temperature is higher uh a lot of it's biologically driven yes biologically mainly right yeah well once again sulfate reduction produces carbonate yeah but these waters are those waters are very oxic so it's not sulfate reduction in those places yeah well when you have your organic material sinking to the sea |
| 1:34:17 | floor where if it's an oxygen in the sediment you'll get it but fair enough you you have lithium fours and so i guess that's what you're saying you have these cockpits if you look around lots of seashells quite a lot of different uh creatures that produce carbonate shells in the shallow waters environments which are different to the deep ocean yeah yeah yeah lots of creatures yeah not just cockroaches yes well that takes us to half past any other topics thank you everybody for that that's um that's been helpful |
| 1:34:48 | certainly helpful for me the whole this whole uh being able to discuss these things on a regular basis and think about them in between and then discuss them again is helpful to me so i hope it's helpful to everybody for everyone it enables us to kind of uh ground our truth uh refine little idiosyncrasies and actually get a consensus that we can take forward and uh ideally uh get much more broadly distributed just as a quick comment that does seem to be more proposals for ocean alkalization coming out the woodwork recently i've come |
| 1:35:22 | across several just in the last few weeks it seems to be gaining in popularity even more than i thought it was right so here's the question chris do you do you think i mean can we say that there's is there a clear advantage of using these calcium carbonate sediments than than alkalization or are both going to be independent processes what's your sense on well i think the ocean alkalization are targeting the surface waters of course rather than deep on the grounds that that ought to be in terms of helping the |
| 1:35:51 | climate that's going to be much quicker than doing the devotion which is going to take you at least 1500 years to go round again and have an effect you don't want to wait that long yes i think we'll need multiple wedges so we should pursue the biologic and a biologic processes i mentioned and of course doing things in the deep ocean might benefit the deep ocean itself of course there's life in it and so on oh yeah i mean look they've lost a good fraction of their food supply just with the stratification of the last 60 years |
| 1:36:21 | and on the benthos [Music] um another question people um any of you dealing cryptocurrencies yep i've got some peripheral um communications with crypto experts meeting with the people who are launching just carbon um tomorrow and um so going through that process worth watching you know it's one token will be linked to a ton of carbon sequestered and it's got some very heavier weight backers behind it uh very interesting team of people so we're just just flagging up as one to watch if you're interested in that area |
| 1:37:06 | yeah we'd love to get updates on that uh we are looking at how to do it but we're actually considering that tokens that are more integrative and actually look at food security and ecosystem regeneration in the ocean balanced with carbon um may be easier to move forward in the near term this one brian and i think you know some of the people there just carbon uh justcarbon. |
| 1:37:31 | com yeah good to know well i'm happy to hear more about it same mate of mine behind it who i hadn't seen for years but i caught up with him by sheer chance um have you ever seen it for 25 years yeah well happy to be in the loop on that and provide some thoughts i think uh on the crypto side uh the security models are absolutely essential as evidenced by the loss of some of the um stability of these stable coins yeah absolutely they're just carbon people addressing the um energy intensity of the mining the the |
| 1:38:04 | uh cryptocurrencies it's uh it's ethereum based at the moment um so they they thought very hard about the carbon cost of what they're actually doing to keep the thing neutral but it seems to be reasonably well funded certainly there was a stellar group of people together for three days in london last week yeah the carbon intensity of these uh computational activities can be fully addressed um and you know there's no reason that we can't move from proof of work through proof of stake to proof of plant |
| 1:38:36 | um so there are some interesting essays on that by epsilon theory and others so right now it's going to be buying existing carbon tokens or carbon stiffness so it'll be it'll be going to rates projects forestry projects that sort of thing but the idea of the blockchain mounted is that it's going to get a lot more money to the people who are actually doing the sequestration growing the trees so cutting out some of the british broker network so it's kind of a payment system then is it is that how you can understand |
| 1:39:11 | the efficient payment system initial payment system it's it's raising money for that but at the same time it's doing it on a crypto token so it allows people to invest in and trade in that market so i'm i'm learning and i'm i'm quite fascinated by what to do okay i just i just saw a i mean um i just saw a chat from uh ron saying be very careful of crypto we've i think we've seen them oh yeah they they run they're well done i got a few bitcoin and then they're worth half what they were but that's |
| 1:39:46 | just because it's like it's the tulip bubble anyway yeah but i don't know i mean there's some you know these things will come they'll differ it helps to understand what it is so if it's an efficient payment system or fair enough you know if they want to give it a sexy name you know crypto as long as someone's getting paid people are probably getting paid properly and the people who expect to be paid are getting paid as soon as they nee you know are getting as soon as they expect to be |
| 1:40:17 | then that's that's not too bad but if it's some kind of thing that nobody quite understands then yes or maybe no yeah we'll see how it develops but anyway the team that i met were all seriously good people and um so you know like i'm not paying a lot of attention i'm glad to hear they convinced you then right um yeah yeah and i've done the verification of the individuals so no question about that but first the maybach's just come in my office it's getting warm anything else folks before we call it |
| 1:40:56 | call it a night we've had our 90 minutes thank you very much everybody good night a couple of weeks yeah okay thanks bye everyone bye |