| (Click on a 'Start Time' to view the video) |
| 00:21 | morning globe hey sev i'm just getting your files ready good yes do you know what you want to say about them you must know oh i'll wing it you'll wing it hi there hi chris hi chris nice to see you back again yeah yeah have you have you uh you've watched any of our videos no i haven't had a chance actually no not sorry too many things to do yeah but yeah it seems as though these people who are pseudo-retired are almost doing more work than the others well i think that's generally the rule isn't it do you retire you end up |
| 01:08 | working harder than you did when you were at work well i'm still at work i'm doing both let's get some bits of paper and uh make sure i see when people are coming in hello grant hello client hello everybody well good thanks hello guys hello yeah yeah we've been yes so so this is where about three different conversations happen all the same time uh just to let everybody know i've been um emailing a guy who's introduced himself to us |
| 02:11 | who's interested in all this and invited him along today so uh um and you've got your microphone working guy it's great i don't know can you hear me yeah it's a little bit good it's a bit tinny but uh but yeah okay good yeah it's uh yeah so um yeah we're working away on that uh on that stuff but i got your email so we'll as and when yeah yeah yeah can we have a rundown on clive's background and interest well it's gone it's time to start so yes do you mind uh saying a couple of things about yourself |
| 02:53 | guy so i'm not i'm not a chemist i'm i have a bsc in chemistry and biology like decades ago but i'm a poor chemist uh i'm actually by trade and identity management architect i've led lots of large complicated global projects which has nothing to do with global warming and i've i've also done lots of change management and uh through my interest in climate i came across a guy called hermann gear who's out of silicon valley who's like me he's not a climate expert at all |
| 03:25 | and both of us are scared shitless over the climate and particularly the atmosphere and we we understand we have to basically geoengineer it and reduce the co2 and methane which leads us in a way to you guys so we we partnered up and we realized that we're change agents we think outside the box herman knows lots of people around the planet as i do and um we're basically in discovery mode we want to meet people like you understand the science first number two understand their costs and businesses and then we want to understand |
| 03:54 | particularly the politics and our goal is to basically take people like you put you guys into work here end of my spiel okay thank you very much that's great let's uh let's everybody know uh okay and there's friends hi friends are you kind of hi all day yeah great and uh manor joe who's a very passionate uh educator and campaigner uh i'm anna joe yeah and uh yeah grant has a project he presented to us a few months ago and and his own partners um yeah chris vivian is a retired government scientist uk government |
| 04:35 | scientist who keeps putting us right about the ocean uh so we look we love him being here um and uh doug um hi doug on the east coast uh engineer so not a lot of people here are not chemists guy so uh we have a whole mix um okay so let's uh and people kind of they sort of drop in over time haven't seen brian yet he's usually here brian von hurts and he he recently won a million dollar x prize from elon musk for his uh ocean projects um i'll do what i always do now uh which is bring up uh this uh bring up the menu and bring up |
| 05:18 | the uh the agenda so so what do we want to talk about today and because this is completely open so obviously the you know the the name of of the meeting is nature-based ocean and atmospheric cooling um but that's it uh anyone can say anything because you can ask a question um just point to something in the news or present something or anything at all you know as we lose it's reasonably on topic um last time we were talking about framing we spent most of the time talking about how to frame discussions um that don't put people off you know |
| 06:02 | that let people know of the urgency of doing something so so that's it so what do we want to talk about i i have a couple suggestions i'm not an expert but i do know that um it appears that both bill mckibben and jim hansen are starting to look into something more than just emissions reduction as important as the emissions reduction is but i think it sounds like they're beginning to um realize that we have to take a more aggressive measures and i wonder how you know what people on the call are thinking and how to best proceed |
| 06:57 | with it seems like a long-awaited opening yeah okay um what do we think about that okay let's let's have that that sounds a very good one yeah i think we've seen that and i'm sure lots of people have people have things to say about that um we often have i wonder if people are having trouble again i really don't so i'm gonna just look at my emails for a minute no sometimes people have trouble connecting um uh so i know franz has things to say about that um but if john listen were here he'd be recommending and saying |
| 07:37 | come on we need to get on with it um and stephen salter has things to say about it as well doesn't like it much um okay anything else so say if you've got you want to talk about iron salt aerosol methods methods of distribution and logistics yeah yeah logistics yeah yep anything else is friends going to give us a rundown uh what do you want to say something in this meeting france yes i would like to speak about the first again okay yeah you'll speak about that first point yeah yeah that you don't have your |
| 08:34 | own topic of conversation seller shut up shall i begin no uh well not just yet friends let's see is there anything else it's nice to have about three years but i think we only took managed to talk about two things last time but anything else yeah clive this is doug um you know with uh joe manchin basically opting out of anything climate and destroying joe biden's efforts it occurs to me that we have a dysfunctional congress that's irrelevant and the question then is how to get anything done without involving the congress now |
| 09:18 | joe biden can do executive orders but i don't know that he can you know cool the arctic for example so i my concern is what can we do without government yeah we move without government yeah yeah that's probably not the same problem in the uk particularly with the current government yeah yeah okay exactly the potential new prime minister the potential one as in this trust whichever either of them yeah yeah okay maybe that's enough uh oh hi john hello yeah i've been kind of out of back um action since uh last monday oh you've |
| 10:03 | not been well you've had kovid is that right no not covered a different uh something else a uti okay let's not get into that john so um yeah i'm pretty much recovered i did um there was a lot of talk in the in the by the met office about how unexpected the growth in weather extremes was and and the arctic wasn't mentioned and it seems they don't have right their models don't embrace the the idea that the um what the captification causes the jet stream to get stuck with great amount meandering and |
| 11:08 | yet they talk about the heat domes occurring uh five five uh it the jet stream is a is a number five i i think six or seven was the old norm okay so let's number five right let's we'll have that on the agenda as well okay i think that's enough things okay thank you john okay what do we want to start with any particular thoughts let's start with the first one then um embracing srm which uh so srm means solar radiation management so that could include marine cloud brightening or uh and so the iron soul aerosol makes |
| 11:55 | clouds and some of these other aerosols we're talking about now um but it also includes uh the one that's best known uh stratospheric aerosol injection which is um begat began by the idea of sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere but they have talked about other things as well titanium oxide or something uh who wants to kick off with that friends why don't you say something about that i i wanted to say if there's all we use is a stratospheric measurement we should at first try to to use all other methods because uh especially |
| 12:39 | the uh stratospheric aerosol production would uh reduce uh uv uh radiation and if we get less uv radiation here we get less uh mesa and depletion by the natural oxidation that means the uv lab the methane levels would rise so maybe we we can increase the uh uh available of the of the planet but but uh if we uh at the same time increase the mesa and also the methods we use for uh uh |
| 13:42 | depletion of missan under and and other things and also a co2 would be a reduce in in their effectivity yeah because we also need uh the sun radiation for this so i i'm totally against to start with the stratospheric srm okay i thought you'd say that we make it very clear thank you yeah that's the question um is that the case for all forms of stratospheric aerosol or is it just so2 version that has that effect no i think all because all reduce uv more than than other sun radiation spectrum even cirrus cloud singing |
| 14:42 | i uh uh i i uh don't uh uh speak of serious thoughts any uh as art of uh the aerosol injection okay just a comment i did see something in the last week about how methane levels have been rising faster in recent um five years or a few years now i think i can't remember the details but they had gone up quite a bit faster yeah yeah we talked about that um the time but one ago and uh we think that uh one of the things that could be doing that is less acidity in the uh particularly over the oceans because the ships have to scrub their |
| 15:33 | sulfur out of their smoke now and also so this is known as as well that the the getting rid of pollution it's already underway they're putting so2 scrubbers in in coal-fired power stations as well in china they're cleaning up the pollution um but it's the as it's this is what we're talking about with this new aerosol um that um the acid natural acid or and it was of course increased by this pollution over the ocean actually was doing a pretty good job of depleting huge methane releases and now that that pollution is being |
| 16:08 | cleared up the methane is on the rise again just a question though um that pollution is relatively low level so is the methane problem just at low level or is it at much higher altitudes that wouldn't be affected by the ship pollution because i suspect the methane is not not uniform uh from uh top to bottom of the troposphere i think it mixes fairly well from i think from what people have said in the past it mixes reasonably well i mean you you can see pictures of methane concentration and they show the pictures look dramatic but when you |
| 16:42 | look at the concentrations they only vary by about 10 percent and they tend to be higher concentration where the methane source is it seems to be wet things like wetlands rice paddy fields you know and these great big swamps i can see horizontally that's the case so i'm just thinking more vertically yeah okay vertigo i believe it mixes pretty well vertically i think so yeah there was also one of the comments i saw suggested one of the problems was there's been reduction in the oh radicals which may |
| 17:13 | have caused the um yeah that's going to increase that's it oh radicals are produced by um acidity it's not just acidity but uh the the acid aerosol droplets are more efficient at all producing oh h by photolysis radicals yeah okay so and and cl radicals as well so john john i'm sure you want to say something about this uh yes um interesting that stratospheric aerosol probably it doesn't reduce um in the stratosphere it's not going to be doing much about me thing it probably does reduce uv but that's |
| 18:16 | probably beneficial uh since we're we're in the problem of having uh increased uv from the ozone health the loss of ozone yeah and there's no i don't think there are any been anyone seriously arguing that the productivity is decreased by stratospheric aerosol injection what productivity uh plants productivity in fact i think it's probably increased to some suggestion because diffused light actually is more effective at um productivity than direct sunlight yeah exactly i'm not i'm not sure what from |
| 19:03 | france is yeah so friends what so it's a question of how much the uv gets reduced and john is saying you'll get they're already getting more uv because this errors the ozone layer is getting depleted so there's more uv coming from that could be this might be but nobody has revealed that it is so in the end it's probably a question of a trade-off because it's not an absolute one way or another you've probably got to look at the trade-offs between them and see whether uh where the balance lies the benefits |
| 19:46 | yeah yeah absolutely yeah yep go ahead um oh missed that grant please i think you're on mute grant hit you hit your own mute uh brings up the question you talk about a balancing act and i've had the same concern about uh the some emissions from concepts that could uh increase albedo and realizing well you get a little emission here but if you have a big carbon dioxide pump going over here what's the net benefit and what is concerning me is who is going to make that sort of balancing move a decision |
| 20:50 | with what authority where is an authority i'm not talking about technically qualified i'm talking about somebody who's got an organization that has got the power to implement anything who can do anything today we talk doug mentions a long functional administration in in the us chris observes what we can all read about a similar situation in the uk you have the fossil fuel producers who continue to thumb their nose at the rest of the world where and don't start talking to me about moral authority i'm sorry i'm i'm |
| 21:46 | getting to be frustrated if if you're not sharing my frustration welcome yeah yeah it's all down to governance and that is a big area where there's a lack at the moment even if you came up with some system it would still probably default to individual countries to implement rather than having a global sort of control as it were and if you get a few players who aren't going to play by the rules let's say russia or china say then what can you do so i you know the other part of this is that we have |
| 22:27 | collectively got great ideas which need to be moved through proof of concept at some scale and it's not going to happen in international waters and so as robert tulip has opined we need to start figuring out how to get things done in inside uh economic uh the economic zones of participating you know people who have got governments who've got an interest and concern and prepared to to trial these things now when that comes to stratospheric aerosols i don't i don't know whose economic exclusive economic zone covers that |
| 23:18 | but certainly ocean-based methodologies for capture and albedo can be trialled uh closer to the coasts and uh where decisions can be made by independent in the individual governments so my own view is that i got to stop thinking about global solutions and find a way to get to proof of concept in available space otherwise we're continuing to dream about well one day somebody's gonna come along and yeah pull this whole thing together okay thank you thank you grant yeah you got your hand up ron please yeah thank you uh clive um so i just |
| 24:15 | wanted to on on doug's comment just just to note that the the these cap and trade mechanisms that do include you know these uh these attempts to uh to set up protocols for offset uh to do exactly what i think you were talking about you know measure the net effect of uh you know pulling out carbon here releasing carbon there whatever to make it negative uh are are are rolling out in many countries in many regions uh the eu has one that you know california has one their areas of china and so you know various places uh and of course that was |
| 24:49 | the uh the goal of the kyoto uh global agreement that the eu has continued and i think successfully i've been on this to you know uh before uh they're the only major region in the world that actually has reduced uh uh emissions uh now a lot of that was exporting production to china but uh uh the us did that as well and the eu has uh has uh reduced uh quite a bit more than the us the us is not reduced at all actually relative to 1990. |
| 25:19 | so but on the other point i fully agree you know so so that does you know i i agree that the uh the the attempt to uh to achieve a similar kind of global accord of course the kyoto was suspended and right now it does not look real promising that uh you know the the global community will agree to something similar we kind of miss that boat it's really unfortunate um and until we do that it might take a very long time actually to to get the uh you know to get the ghgs out of the out of the atmospheres you know just using |
| 25:57 | market processes and and voluntary kind of kind of uh goals and so forth uh but you know in a in a within the national context and within these agreements you know you can sort of uh try and have a more planned approach uh and finally to that i would just again appeal i know i'm sorry sound like a broken record but uh the uh we do have a why is my video off it was supposed to be on i'm sorry uh there we go we do have a uh a um the cooling document is ready and i really would urge many of you i know many i i sent an appeal to cooling |
| 26:38 | method experts i think it's a way to you know i've actually shared this with some important people in that you know people have asked to see the document when i showed it to them uh and uh so i think it it has you know it potentially could have an important some you know useful impact uh and um it would be really good if you know i know sev and clive and a bunch of you uh you know uh uh um uh who else is are involved in various methods that do include cooling and i've tried to put in a space for that in this document and |
| 27:20 | i'm really you know would love it if you would be able to provide a short summary it doesn't mean you have to sign the document that will come later you know whether you want to sign it because or not but uh i think it would be really really nice thank you that's your request then send me your stuff don't just talk about it i'm doing something about it and i can't do it if you don't send me a information is that what you're saying that's exactly thank you clive yeah i will send a link yeah i'll |
| 27:45 | put it up on there yeah we actually do have a list of uh ironsoul aerosol methods that's put together by some other people which i can send you so it's always you know so many things you know to do what do you prioritize um right so this so this would be a short and short paragraph yeah yeah so many methods yeah so if you could put it together and it would be best if the experts you know could do that because you you'll know what's most important yeah so to put in there so send a paragraph on your um |
| 28:13 | yeah yeah i'll put the link up so people can put in the chat you're talking about yeah great okay thank you very much guy thank you uh uh sorry uh ron yeah uh i'm just wondering guy if you have anything to say on this subject of you know sort of governance and who decides i'm listening very carefully so i realize how darn complicated politics are and herman and i have talked at a very high level about creating a methane reduction program in southern it's the arctic circle of countries as an insurance policy |
| 28:49 | that's that sort of makes intuitive sense but can we do it i do not know and then you basically need to dive down into your heads figure out the science figure out the cost then figure out the politics and i'm a firm believer by doing plc's and pilots rapidly but to make all that magic happen is really complicated as you guys know you guys are living it i'm just joining the conversation you guys have been living this for years yeah end of my spiel okay thank you very much yeah poc pointer proof of concept sort of thing |
| 29:20 | like that yeah yeah yeah okay yeah and then we have lots to say about that we've been talking about that maybe the best way to reduce methane so in fact this is a front the iron salt aerosol um method with the iron sole aerosol method uh you need sunshine to photolyze these radicals um either you know oh and cl radicals and you got the most sun uh in the tropics and you got nice and so not true not true no there's more sunshine going into the south pole in uh december than into the equator yeah okay in december well yeah so in the end |
| 30:04 | at all in june yes it's actually quite quite a lot more in in christmas okay all right we don't want to do a picture of it fine we don't they're okay we don't want to put so the the what we we don't want to put iron near the ice stephen because iron on ice fertilizes growth of lots of moss and things that you don't want growing on ice because it reduces the albedo further um so that's another reason for putting iron salt aerosol in the tropics um but these other things that need photolysis uh this nitrate type of stuff |
| 30:46 | um but certainly that you know bear that in mind for the polar regions as well so this is what people have some we've had other people saying no do it where the source is you know if you've got a methane bubbling out of the sort of laptev c uh then put your methane depletion there because it'll be more effective fair enough you know if it's do it there and when it's sunny um yeah so there are these are the issues about methane depletion so we talk about methane depletion and we also talk about |
| 31:16 | uh albedo modification so we just began by talking about stratospheric aerosol injection uh stephen uh and stephen's uh main proponent a long time preventative marine cloud brightening we've learned a lot from stephen um so perhaps if i just put this uh put the uh put it up again so this is the agenda um so one or two people have joined since we started so this is from manager saying there's been in the news wow you know jim hansen and bill mckibben are now saying oh goodness me it's got to the point we've got to have solar |
| 31:52 | radiation radiation management so anything for anyone else to say about that before we move on i would uh look at the word embracing and say that's a little bit of a stretch but all right maybe i shouldn't have said that then there's that's my words that's my and i think this is a great step forward to have particularly hanson i haven't read his what his actual inputs but i hear that somebody else has that it's accepted as a necessary tool to have it in the conversation in that format is a great step forward |
| 32:47 | uh short of endorsing it because what can you endorse right now yeah yeah i mean it seems to me we're in a tipping point that the fact that the arctic ice has got so small and uh that's only gonna accelerate because it's going to warm that much faster there's nothing left to reflect the sun away and greenland melting and we've all felt the heat this this year uh so far and it's we're not even you know it's not even the hottest period yet manager you had your hand up did you want to say something |
| 33:27 | actually it was a thumbs up but i do want to say that in the past week two people that i know that know that i'm a climate activist reached out to me about geoengineering and want to know more so i think you're you're spot on that we are at the tipping point and um [Music] you know my my question to the group was you know what makes the most sense in terms of next steps um you know as as we make what i believe is an inevitable transition uh from so much focus which i completely agree with about emissions reduction |
| 34:17 | to um considering the many uh forms of of climate engineering or geoengineering um just wondering uh you know i don't know if doug wants to for example i don't mean to put you on the spot but um send jim hanson a note given that you know there there is a little bit of a green light uh not jim hansen uh bill mckibben and you know if others um have a relationship with johannes yeah bill mckibben has been introduced to iron sold aerosol and he he he didn't say no to it i think he sort of said okay well maybe |
| 35:03 | maybe we'll need that he didn't sort of reject it out of hand from me my understanding is that mckeben has acknowledged carbon removal not aerosol injection in a couple of his papers that he wrote publicly last year in february and july i think he said well maybe in the next decade we'll think about he didn't say the word geo engineering but you know the the cloud the what do you call it the milky white sky uh elizabeth colbert article where he did a book review he said maybe in the next decade we |
| 35:42 | might have to get there so i don't i'm not sure about bill yet but uh hanson told me around february that he was going to write a paper and i haven't seen the paper yet but herb was thinking maybe this announcement that came out last week was the paper i don't think so uh that was totally unrelated to um to aerosols now he's talking about aerosols but i haven't seen a paper so i think it's premature to go back to hanson uh until he you know give him some time that's my only thought there and i'm |
| 36:14 | still working on bill you think it's i miss what you said mature to go back to handsome it's a good idea to go back to that premature premature premature premature give him some give us a breathing space he's a busy guy oh yeah yeah he's had a couple of papers in the works and i think the one we want is still in the works okay i don't want to waste any silver bullets you know yeah yeah but what we can do is uh uh reply to ron and yeah uh and give you some a paragraph each so um i'll just say here that uh |
| 36:53 | that about the politics i said this last i said one of these things last time uh there was a stephen cotkin who says um professor of uh out of history um he was on the hoover institution uh saying um polarization is not really the problem he said it's demonization that's the problem in politics um and um and then i saw a thing that was in the the in the financial times uh just a you know the heading it said um was it saying um that um people's uh understanding of science is or something like the view of reality is based on |
| 37:39 | is unexamined tribal loyalties and so this is what um i'm seeing elsewhere as well um so and people on this group robert tulip um he told me about the in the australians talk about the wizards and the prophets are always fighting each other um and um that uh so for me i i quickly said i have this this image of the wizards and the prophets going into this minority they go into a restaurant together and uh they don't like each other they they just you know they because the wizards sit on one table all together and order set menu a |
| 38:19 | and then profits go and sit on another table and they order set menu b and they spend the whole time hurling insults at the other group for the their choice of menu and anyone who wants to order you know anyone who member of the group who actually wants to order a la carte from you know from the menu for you know their own choice isn't you know it's immediately spurned by the group you know you can't be a member of us if you if you're gonna choose one of the things that they like you know so they're gonna have to go and |
| 38:50 | sit on their own and they don't have any friends so this is you know to be a thinker about climate change i mean i i've been saying the fossil fuel industry they they they'll kill half of us it's half their fault and sometimes it's the rabid environmentalists who's the other half of the problem so but so it's a huge educational problem but for if the politicians could realize that it's not about just tribal loyalties but about understanding climate science this is the problem or maybe i'm just preaching to the |
| 39:24 | converted maybe anyone in this group could have told me the same could have said the same thing um anything else before we move on i think i've got a somewhere i think that might not be part of this agenda item but ron senate sent out an mit announcement about the new program that biden has established to i think is like 2. |
| 39:49 | 6 billion dollars aimed at setting up a structure or regime for experimenting geoengineering for researching geoengineering and what whatever that entails i'm not sure i'm not sure it includes sai or specifically arctic some some some freezing of the arctic but at least there's something going on in washington d.c where they got 2. |
| 40:14 | 6 billion dollars to start not geo engineering so i just want to throw that out there so and who was initiating that he was an mit right yeah yeah okay so all right good so there's hope some people are doing some things you do if you search your emails on ron you'll see it about a week ago two weeks ago okay okay thanks doug um okay uh so we had a bit about that yeah could i follow the discussion with um this idea of of confronting the authorities with the with the argument that the it's not just global warming stupid it's the |
| 41:05 | well you wouldn't say they're stupid because that would upset them but um the fact that the met office seems to be neglecting yeah we've got that on the list john we've got that on yes i think i i'd like to deal with it so so i can have an early night um well i suppose it's related so go on then john yeah especially for you so i i think if we can get it recognized that the arctic needs to be cooled uh if we want to uh reverse reverse the the trend the dangerous trend yeah um and i think the first step in that |
| 41:57 | argument is is the explanation of about the complication and how that's affecting the jet stream now i'm hoping that everybody here present agrees with that argument that the antarctic amplification is affecting the jet stream and using is causing at least uh one element of important element of the extremes we're having i don't i haven't seen anybody disagreeing with that i think it's pretty well accepted because if we could get the uh i think um i think sir david king agrees so we in fact bring along the whole |
| 42:51 | of the ccrc yeah center for climate change at cambridge yeah climate repair yeah climate repair yeah i got i have to think hard to work out what yeah you know what it means um or work out um then i think we could have a significant force against the met office's uh approach so what they that they are disagreeing with it then are they they they disagree that that this arctic amplification is causing the jet stream to undulate like like it is well the metals seem to be ignoring well okay but do you know anyone apparently it's not in their models |
| 43:45 | and that's something that bill um not bill michael mann has pointed out that the climate models don't uh model this effect so we we have we potentially got quite a lot of scientific authority behind this does the world meteorology meteorological organization have a position on arctic uh amplification uh well that's a very good point uh one of the reasons for addressing it at the met office is that i think the met office kind of leads all the other metaphyses around the world um in the opinion yeah i think i disagree with you |
| 44:57 | deliberate but the mention of noah the oceanographic and aerosol atmospheric yeah thank you yeah uh i don't know if anybody who has acknowledged where's the source uh documentation who was the guru of arctic amplification jennifer francis jennifer francis okay but she's gone over to the scientific american and um our article on climate change i was hardly mentioned yeah her own hypothesis but it uh to me it's it's it's a logical necessity the the author has is not promoting her |
| 46:03 | her uh concept as a cause no it doesn't although she originally uh earlier had an article exactly about the psychically complication i haven't evaluated explored at all so i'm not i'm just asking ignorant questions here so i've been following her for well we know at least two ten years we know two people i think you're talking about a a cause that is not established as being accepted in the scientific community we're blowing smoke up a stack again yeah well john this doesn't need to be a huge |
| 46:49 | problem because with i'm trying to think jim uh the guy that presented at uh our conference on ironsoul aerosol in 2019 he's he's a met office guy and a professor at exeter um renault knows someone that does atmospheric modelling part of associated with the met office so we do have people we could get to if you think that's if you think they're that uh the problem isn't being acknowledged for what it is because they're ignoring the the uh arctic amplification then fair enough but i'm i thought i'd seen |
| 47:26 | the weather forecast you know they have the sort of weather show don't they and then i thought they were talking about it on that that this undulating is because of the the the loss of the temperature gradient i think the problem is that the the modeling uh these things are too difficult they are too complex they depend on too many factors and too many tipping points and the the modeling community just can't handle so much uh so many different effects going on at different times at different levels yeah that's why they don't |
| 48:05 | that's why they don't model it because they basically can't yeah i've certainly heard that before from kevin lister said this used to say the same thing it's just too complex to yeah but i think everybody knows that it's it's not good whatever it is when you have multiple interacting feedbacks positive feedbacks uh it's not going anywhere good and we just we just what we don't know how quick it could be extremely quick it could be we could be out of control next year well i thought i think we could perhaps |
| 48:42 | get somebody like michael mann to endorse it and i think jim hansen might endorse it and we've got we could get the scientists at the at cambridge to endorse it um so we could have quite a powerful uh a powerful argument backed by scientists as well as really good science yeah that'd be good john so i think what sev just said that that sounds more like what we're really talking about here what the problem is that it's just too difficult to model um and uh so we don't even know i mean it strikes |
| 49:26 | me now that we might already be too late it might be there's nothing we can do now even if we did a whole load of you know interventions i think probably not though because i think you've been saying that stratospheric aerosol injection it's and i think that it's people people have said it's a last resort and i think it we're reaching that danger point now we simply don't know if we're a last resort uh place [Music] uh and so that that's what uh that's it that's so this has been useful in john |
| 49:56 | to get that clear that it's the it's the inner impossibility of modeling all these different interacting feedbacks but we do know that uh it's it's looking pretty risky and certainly the climate in the past has changed very very rapidly at times not not all the time but on occasion it's been known uh so yeah dave king please yeah so the the analogy from the past uh i've written there's a memo about it i think i might um submit that as a paper to the agu is the american geosciences union |
| 50:43 | uh meeting which is in november or december right okay all right john i can see you're not too well um and so we'll let you go there's some people with hands up uh thanks for that contribution we'll see you in a couple of weeks yeah yeah okay bye-bye john all the best who had the hand up first chris yep just a quick point i just had a quick search on the internet for rc amplification and just about everything i saw talks about arctic application as just being the temperature difference that's caused |
| 51:20 | but not about the implications on the rest of the climate so that seems to be it seems to be almost uh a closed sort of issue uh in in a lot of people's minds perhaps rather than actually something that's affecting the rest of the climate so that's that's the sort of issue we've got to get over not amplification per se but its effect on the climate yeah yeah okay yeah good yes thanks i'm glad i didn't leave too quickly thank you chris cheers everybody cheers john yeah grant you have your hand up is that |
| 51:54 | because i was just had a thought uh that rolled on from the identification that there is no modeling that is accepted which gets to the difficulty of how do you prove some something is effective in this space you know you can with a solid model you can say well let's uh let's evaluate this parameter and change something and see what the impact is but if we are sitting here without a an agreed model you could randomly change everything and still have the same situation i can i'm bothered by that by the inability to do if we don't have |
| 52:44 | an agreed structure or a hypothesis about how this is actually happening if you want to correct it you need to experiment with playing with the controlling variables and we're saying we don't have any uh do you mean you okay so he's saying uh so do some field trials here there's some other field trials there and see what the response is but you can't even control that anyway that's i'm sorry yeah you can do empirical things you can't model it it seems uh all you can do i suppose is look back |
| 53:26 | at what the situation used to be under you know decades ago perhaps and say what do we need to try and get back to that because we know if we get back to something like that presumably things would get better um but how of course is the big question yeah yeah as far as so many things were different then so many things were different yeah [Music] it's all pretty uh i can't think of the word uh this is the most doom and gloom meeting we've had so far i think uh [Music] well franz you have your hand up yeah uh you're unmute friends unmute unmute |
| 54:14 | friends um some sayings which we can do are easier to model and something on not so easy it's a model i think the the most important must be to change the to to reduce the greenhouse gases because they are the cause of the problem uh if we if we act in the stratosphere and uh uh whiten the heaven this may a cool for the moment but the greenhouse gases exist there and acts there and possibly |
| 55:17 | become more so i think we must uh reduce the the problem and we know the problem and this must be reduced and not uh it's it's like if you have a patch a sick person and you cool down the fiber the the temperature of it but not the uh illness which is yeah producing that yeah well you're in favor of whitening you know with with bright clouds aren't you france cooling with with clouds no uh we we can do both yeah that's right but the main thing is the uh is a greenhouse gas reduction yeah but that's slow to we already have |
| 56:09 | lost so much albedo in the in the arctic brian von hurston said last time france it's gone from 0.8 to 0.2 in the arctic so we could we need to get the greenhouse gases down to about 250 and that's not going to happen anytime soon and ever but we should start with it of course we should start yes yeah i mean ideally you'd have a program integrating both things and you can trade one off against another as the greenhouse gases come down you can reduce the the air results but of course managing that is is not as simple as it sounds |
| 56:49 | but in theory at least that's the way you would do it it's also how you would potentially avoid any termination shock type thing in case anyone decides to stop any aerosol things suddenly yeah and we must we must find uh a method to reduce gigatons of material and not well there are there are people around trying to do that and there are some claims and i do say claims that they can do something like 10 gigatons a year doing things like sinking a pile of seaweed for example um but that has yet to be proven of course |
| 57:29 | um and 10 gigatons is a hell of a lot yeah it certainly is yeah yeah we do have some ideas in the pipeline uh but um anyway let's do that this time is moving on we've got half an hour let's we haven't talked about so let's talk about the iron salt uh these your point um set of your suggestion here right well um atmospheric methane has been increasing at a far faster rate than has co2 um and they they are beginning to be almost equivalent problems but the good thing about methane is it is far more um easy to manage |
| 58:21 | than is co2 the the montreal protocol showed how we could manage the ozone problem and that was a wonderful success i believe we can do the same thing using france's and the university of copenhagen's iron souls aerosol method of of photo catalyzing atmospheric methane in the troposphere i'm not quite sure how how much whether these uh aerosols would go up to the stratosphere but if they did we don't think so we don't think so they're too heavy yep um so what it boils down to then is what is the best way |
| 59:12 | to get these uh catalytic particles up into the into into the troposphere and the the people at university of copenhagen have been working on using uh ships funnels as the the principal method but they've they're running into some problems with that i understand from from from shawn um the other way which which um franz has mentioned and i've been pushing a bit harder is to to use sublimation of ferric chloride into nanoparticles which then um even more effective than larger scale particles in in the photocatalytic process |
| 1:00:08 | and what the um i've sent a an email off to several of our colleagues and i think that um clive has possibly got them ready to yeah to send to the rest of you on i i've done a comparison between doing it by ship and doing it by sublimation preferably but not wholly on existing wind turbines i figure that with a with a unit totally not much heavier than a domestic fridge we can get we can use a small part of the power of the wind turbines when it's summer when it's sunny to volatilize iron chloride pellets |
| 1:01:02 | into nanoparticles of about 30 nanometers in diameter which is enough to intercept the ultraviolet rays and to produce these chlorine radicals which peter fukowski france and university of copenhagen have shown are very effective at reducing atmospheric methane now i recall way back that there were some other tests done in the atmosphere using photocatalysts and with some of them you can get the the photocatalyst can change the molecule you want it to change at many times per second sometimes up to thousands of times per second but but typically many times |
| 1:02:03 | now if one little nanoparticle of iron chloride can do that then having each wind turbine and there are about 700 000 of them at the moment in the world and they're growing at around 14 per annum is a far better option than going for the the shipping company ships which of which are only about 50 000 in the world and they're only growing at about one and a half percent and so you could retrofit these fridge size unicef if you like onto as many wind turbines as you liked and get them releasing these uh catalytic particles only when it's |
| 1:02:54 | sunny you don't want it when it's rainy overcast or night only when it's sunny and the the hot plume which the the uh sublimation needs i you need to heat things up to up about 300 degrees um that would also tend to loft the tiny particles fairly high fairly quickly and so they would be largely above any marine cloud brightening effects we were doing by by other means be it by stephen salters or mycentimizers or whatever and you would be getting a substantial reduction in atmospheric methane and i reckon that's this is a |
| 1:03:46 | a really good and cost-effective way of controlling the methane problem and once we've got that under control then we've got a a success you can it can be done in in very very locally of course you could do it over rice paddies you could do it over uh fracking operations you could do over feed feedlots or whatever and so you could show from satellite pictures that you were in fact reducing the methane concentration in that feedlot by i don't know maybe 70 percent because you could you might do it on just one plume and having the |
| 1:04:31 | the ordinary methane on either side being much higher levels yeah let me just ask if friends friends might have some things to say about this that we're not so sure about is it what do you have something to say about it friends i i find this idea good i thought you didn't like the idea of iron iii chloride going near where people live because they're breathing into their life that's uh that's vegetable you should uh uh produce it on uh if you if your produce is onshore you should uh look that the wind |
| 1:05:04 | direction goes to sea yes right yep and when the wind direction changes uh you should uh stop the the image that can easily be arranged and of course most of these wind farms or many of them are now being built far offshore in the north sea yeah so there it should be fairly safe but yes if you have a proper artificial intelligence system a little one built onto these units they could say when we want to release them and when we don't want to yeah that's okay and as we know the the winds of the sahara brain bring |
| 1:05:53 | iron containing dust over the atlantic and from patagonia also to the south atlantic and uh we we know uh that uh that happens um miserable depletion yes and so we could those winds only blow occasionally but we could use this method to do it all the time it's sunny so when when when the dust wasn't blowing we could use the the iron chloride uh particles to do the same job as the dusk in the mid-atlantic yeah yeah probably a lot more efficiently in a lot more places if you can put them in a lot more places as well |
| 1:06:47 | yeah yeah and and of course do it in um in low humidity areas such as from off the sahara the the the effectiveness of the photo catalytic effect is much greater because it doesn't work well in high humidity yes and of course the ship's funnel has high humidity and so it's it's self-defeating but if you can keep the particles dry they do all fairly dry they do much better and can do the acidity in that which which francis explained so that that that was that was my idea and uh people would like to look at the uh |
| 1:07:32 | yeah i think we've got scalability and we've got risk in that covered so do you want to stephen has his hand up but um it's very important to look at the size of the particles you mentioned 30 nanometers now if you can get them down to that size you need to worry at all about how to distribute them because the falling velocity the stokes still air falling velocity is so low compared with the turbulence velocities and the updrafts uh i don't know the number for 30 nanometers but for 800 nanometers the falling velocity is |
| 1:08:11 | about 20 uh microns a second i think you'll be a few microns a second if you're down at the 30. once they're there it's like putting cream in your coffee and stirring it the random updrafts up to one meter per second and the what you have to really assume that's going to get to everywhere in the turbulent layer the turbulent marine boundary layer uh maybe in a day or two but it you know it'll get there quite quickly uh it's it's rectified the velocities are rectified down on the sea surface but |
| 1:08:46 | they're in all directions and they'll go everywhere so think of the cream don't worry about how to get them up at all um they'll just mix yeah and they're very hygroscopic so um we expect them to make clouds from any humidity that's there they probably won't make clouds until they get with if they are going on to land until they get blown up uh high in mountains and out at sea they they will only do it when there's um when there's enough humidity to to allow those tiny droplets to act |
| 1:09:24 | as cloud condensation nuclei and that may not be for as long as five or six days okay i mean um okay let's take chris you've had your hand up for a bit yeah um just a question i assume that um you're working on the assumption that the atmosphere is well mixed with methane so it doesn't matter too much exactly where you do it i'm just thinking from the the data i've sort of come across or from these uh satellite things now there are some very concentrated sources of methane in some places i think the |
| 1:09:57 | most recent one i heard of was i think it was a coal mine in russia that had a vast methane released and i just wonder whether in those sort of cases there may be some mileage in actually targeting the sources where they are really huge uh rather than just relying on atmospheric mixting because if you have really a limiting number of very big sources in the me think the mixing time of the whole atmosphere must be well at least weeks i would imagine possibly longer i don't know um but it might be worth targeting those |
| 1:10:26 | resources and the other those sources um the other question i had is i'm not sure that from what you said that sublimation is the right word for what you're describing um i think it's more volatilization because you're heating it and driving off the the iron chloride i think is that what you said it says in the scientific literature that the the iron chloride actually does sublimate but yes it's the same volatilization if you're heating it then i think it makes it a little different i just i |
| 1:10:54 | would feel confused by the word sublimation i think of that of like co2 going straight from solid to gas it uh it goes from sorry to gas yes but you're doing this through heating it yeah so it must be the sublimation normally is a natural process that just happens at the temperature and pressure it's at rather than by deliberately putting energy depends on the chemical you're using and atmospheric uh standard temperatures others require elevated temperatures yeah i would call it volatilization anyway okay |
| 1:11:27 | just a detail serve did say that word before and i'd never heard it before so i'm glad you brought that up chris valatas that begins with v is it volatilization yeah as in volatile for life volatilization okay yeah okay we might need to change some of our documents yeah um i was gonna say sev i think the um uh well i heard about clouds over the sea they don't get we don't make clouds over the sea not because it's not humid but because there's so little aerosol there's much more aerosol from pollen |
| 1:11:57 | and so forth and dust over the land so we get more clouds over the land and so that's why you don't get because if we have this you know iron aerosol iron through chloride aerosol might get a lot more clouds over the surface indeed yeah that mycetamizer diagram shows that it shows first of all a a um a getting rid of methane effect and then after a while it'll show extra cloud formation due to the ccns cloud condensation nuclei yeah great thank you yeah of course the other big thing you know we've we've stopped sort |
| 1:12:33 | of sort of uh how do you say uh championing and and uh talking about iron going in the in the ocean even though it's very very very very diffuse um because uh you know and fair enough oceanographers say that uh well you know you'll grow some phytoplankton you'll use up all the phosphate um and then you're gonna have downstream effects where there's no phosphate in the ocean you'll use up all the macronutrients so that's where my buoyant flakes comes in yeah you replace the nutrients yes |
| 1:13:06 | yes yes yeah and also we're very interested in we want to have trials because uh we're interested how much vertical migration how many fish are going to come up from these extra phytoplankton growing at the surface how how much extra vertical daily vertical migration is going to be happening and with your buoyant flakes growing this we could you could find that suddenly that there's a huge who knows how many times migration coming up from from deep in the ocean bringing up the nutrients which are much |
| 1:13:43 | more uh prevalent much more concentrated in deeper layers of the ocean and the whales would help going down up to the whales and the fish moving yeah if we could stop killing them so much yeah and drowning them in nets and so forth so this is what we've discussed in the in the past france yeah um chris asked we could do it for instance in the russia mine where big emissions of a missile now happening that's that's not so good this aerosol system is method is better to do it will be good for low concentrations if we have too high |
| 1:14:34 | concentration we must use a much denser and much more of this aerosol and that's over uh land that's not so uh optimum well why not yeah it it is uh you have a dance uh you see uh yellow clouds that's not so good okay remember some of these mines and things are in very remote unpopulated areas so it's not necessarily a people problem apart from the people working of course for this um kind of the copenhagen hasn't found another solution they use chlorine directly that's not so so uh uh economic uh like uh |
| 1:15:30 | what we we want to do but uh possibly it might be more effective yeah because chlorine others use hydroxide generators okay oh it's radical generators yeah yeah so you may be able to tackle concentrated sources by other means yeah yeah yeah yeah i only learned recently that chlorine atoms uh chlorine molecules split they also split in the sunshine making chlorine radicals highly which are they they use uv light to do the copenhagen yeah to split doors they use chlorin uv light and uv light in a closed chamber yeah right over the |
| 1:16:19 | emission right yes the sun does that as well if you have chlorine if you just release chlorine the sun doesn't do it they don't they yes the sun does but they don't use the sun because they uh yeah yeah chamber yeah with their experiment yes so so what chlorine concentration do you want to to get do you know friends what's concentration of chlorine uh the the normal concentration in the atmosphere to the uh where it is two thousand uh uh ppp uh about 2 000 parts per million yeah billion so that's 2000. ppm will be toxic |
| 1:17:13 | yeah so you want two parts per million then yeah this is not us this is matt johnson's uh idea of putting but in these coal mine emissions you have much more emulsion but but it would be easy to make chlorine at sea with the energy yes by by electrolysis yeah so that that i will look into and see how much you you you want to get but but we're really talking about point sources here stephen these this huge russian coal mine i saw that as well um uh so whether that's near the coast or not i don't know but i think it's somewhere |
| 1:17:52 | in the north of siberia somewhere if i remember rightly up towards the arctic i think right yes maybe you could just burn it strike a match during the meeting yeah if it's if the concentration's high enough it's like like flaring from a oil or gas rig right yeah kind of stand well back this mesa and came all times from these coal mines so much explosions show this yeah you don't want it to expose a whole load more coal yeah and everything else yeah or start a coal seam fire which then burn for centuries is it |
| 1:18:41 | centuries they bound for yeah yeah you just can't put that they they try to get them out but yeah in china they're burning so much and how do they catch fire is it just because it gets warm in the sun they contain periodic okay and this is sep surface nations so pyrite is what's that again that's so sulphite yeah and what was the other thing france marcus it's a it's another another mineral kind of form marker site it has the same chemical formula like fvs2 it's both okay it's another iron so it's a |
| 1:19:27 | physical similar process uh compost heaps can sometimes self ignite or rubbish dumps consumption ignite yes yes yeah i thought that was bacteria that's sitting living in there that got yeah bacteria help yeah yeah richard carter's as well scrap tires right they spontaneously combust yeah that's pretty difficult because they've got sulfur in them i suppose yes yeah okay anything i mean this is uh every meeting is different because we have different people we don't have brian this time and we've had a very i |
| 1:20:07 | think intelligent useful conversation um uh it's great to have different people coming along guy i invited a very short notice and uh found the time to come along today so thank you very much again uh any comment before we say goodbye i'm listening very intently and uh i liked i liked all the comments about reducing method which is my it's my first intuitive thought that's when we have to go up because politically you can sell that uh so i'm listening really carefully i'm gonna shut up because i have to do my |
| 1:20:45 | homework and then i'll i'll come back and ask you guys lots of dumb questions no worries yeah any anyone that can make a difference we're just you know you can see what what how it is for us we try to get these things as ready as we can we try and talk it all through uh as much as we can and then um uh and then we don't know what to do after that so i think i sent you a paper about putting a big big big sheet of plastic on the seabed to capture me thing did that get through did i send that to you i saw |
| 1:21:16 | something about that uh it um john nissen asked me to think of a way to stop meeting the seabed and i told him i thought it was impossible and i wrote down a list of all the objections to it and every time i wrote down when i could then see a way in which we could do it i still think it's impossible but i can't think of reasons why it wouldn't work but we can put down square kilometers of plastic and then uh pipe it up and burn the plastic or maybe even take it ashore it might be commercially reliable and then you have |
| 1:21:54 | to recover the plastic afterwards but it there are ways and i wish if i if i sent it to you maybe other people would like to yeah i mean send send it to everyone i think i came across that some years ago stevens it's not a new idea of yours is it no it's a long long time ago that's what i thought was like 10 years or something that's right but yeah i'll just remind you of it but um please think of ways of why it wouldn't work that's what i'm trying to do and maybe i can find our own |
| 1:22:25 | it's uh the hardest thing is actually to make really big uh sheets um for the same thickness i think we can make really really big sheets but uh it's keeping the thickness controlled correct correctly right um it it doesn't sound particularly appealing to me stephen will decimate the and the ecosystems living on the on the seabed yeah absolutely i agree with that and if you use what's the ratio of the uh methane source bubbles coming up and the total area that you have to deal with if you just had to to block two or three |
| 1:23:08 | percent of the ocean bed from emitting methane bubbles then it would be great yeah you could lose you could lose that percentage of the seabed for a short term and without worrying about it okay um i prefer the idea of putting an aerosol in the air that just sort of fizzes it all away yeah um so um i prioritize but i i don't don't want to uh i'm not in a position of authority to just reject it but so yeah you need to understand the numbers for every possible solution yes you say we're not going to do any work about |
| 1:23:51 | that you're preventing anybody in the future from from from doing something yeah well i i don't have the authority to do that anyway stephen i'm just giving my personal opinion yeah and you should have the air time to promote such a thing but the etc group are preventing future generations from researching and using things that might actually work if there's any chance at all of it going let's let's study it it you can find out whether it's impossible without very much work and it's it's wrong with us to stop |
| 1:24:27 | future generations from yeah i'm not trying to stop it stephen i'm just saying i'm very busy with other other things yeah so don't count on me um i think your mcb i do like that idea and i often promote that um it's just some things will get promoted by me and some won't and i'm being open about which ones i like and which ones i'm probably just going to put on the shelf but i'm not saying you shouldn't do it and pl please prove us all wrong um no i'm going to concentrate on marine |
| 1:25:00 | clouds but uh right the plastic is there if anybody yeah i mean i think the methane issue if you will come to the fore if you start getting very large volumes erupting out of the siberian sea i mean irene really big then that'll focus people's attention yeah well it's when you see great bubbles gushing out uh this is what i was looking at it's to handle those yeah i mean the thing is with normal seeps of methane you get quite a lot of it chewed up by bacteria in the water column but if you have large bubbles then they're going to |
| 1:25:33 | get to the surface and they won't and because of the surface they're in a volume ratio they're not going to sneak any um chewed up by bacteria well it's seeing seeing bubbles under ice and then watching people poking a hole in the ice and setting fire to it and getting a terrific whoosh of flame and but really rightly scaring themselves that's what you look at it yeah yeah yes yeah we can finish five minutes early today folks and have an early night or a fuller afternoon so let's leave it at that then let's |
| 1:26:12 | let's let's break the record and finish a little bit early today and this is any final thoughts okay oh i've got a question questions did did how many people read the transcript i wrote out from the last meeting two weeks ago i thought so i'm not going to do that again i'll just write short notes a lot of fun because it was a it was a very dramatic conversation um okay thank you everyone uh you'll get the record in that case i'll go back and read it yeah you you'll be the first probably the only |
| 1:26:53 | we'll get a blue ribbon okay see you later bye see you all in a couple of weeks all right bye everyone thanks for having me bye sure you're welcome france did you want to talk to me |