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| 00:01 | this is all about iron salt aerosol safe scalable inexpensive negative emission technology and this is uh my name is clyde ellsworth and uh it's the brainchild of friends so friends i will be calling upon um mostly i mean he might uh interject um with answers and uh answer questions quite a lot at the end every climate scientist i come across is is concerned about the situation especially at the moment we don't know if we've already entered a tipping point um with interacting amplifying feedbacks could be underway |
| 00:39 | looks as though they are especially in the arctic we've had these very high temperatures melting permafrost we're worried about methane release um and doesn't bear thinking about what could happen so there seems to be a need for negative emissions um so now people say oh no no but you know the policy should be to reduce greenhouse gas emissions well yes yes yes but that's now inadequate as the only policy that's our stance certainly mine uh greenhouse gas removal is now essential if we want to avoid these short-term |
| 01:15 | risks you know on all these very long lists of things i've just listed a few things here uh i don't have to be hot regions um and you know people dying of heat stroke and really the thing that i wouldn't say keeps me up at night but it just seems incorrect it's wrong to allow settlements that have been there for thousands of years um what was what were fishing villages and how big metropolis is to just be overwhelmed by sea level rise there are people who say that it's too late for even that now |
| 01:47 | um but i think there's something that can make a big difference in that respect then we should be talking about it we should be uh funding it and learning as much as we can about it so this is iron salt aerosol these are here's a list um sort of full list of its cooling effects and the australians actually have a website it's been there for at least a year uh einstein airsoft. |
| 02:11 | com and it had lists 12 cooling effects so this is the main ones depletes greenhouse gases as you can see they're methane by i'm going to say a little bit more about these and how these work in a moment so this is just the overview me then by oxidation yes it's like combustion um but oxidation is really the correct term to use co2 by absorption into the ocean controversial we have a lot to say about that i'm planning actually initially for this to actually skip most of those slides on the ocean if there are questions about the ocean i |
| 02:47 | may go back to those as appropriate okay tropospheric ozone is also contributing to warming and iron also triggers its sudden destruction on a large scale so also it makes black brown carbon particles more hydrophilic so they will more washable out by rain and that's another significant warming agent then the other thing it does the other cooling effect is albedo increase increases the earth's reflectivity where it's in operation so acting as these ccns cloud condensation nuclei seeding clouds makes them whiter makes |
| 03:28 | them last longer and if uh ironside aerosol is operating in the ocean then phytoplankton also they produce what people know is the smell of the sea which is another aerosol emission from phytoplankton it's a little bit acidic and it makes more condensation nuclei get marine clouds and they also make there's enough of them a difference to the colour of the ocean so it brightens the ocean a little bit i first learned that from bru pierce actually from peru from your video talking about the the oceans used |
| 04:00 | to be turquoise and now they're rather dark blue okay so what is iron salt aerosol uh which we abbreviate to isa so aerosol it's like little invisible tiny particles that's what an aerosol is they carry around in the air it's like a smell is an example of an aerosol i think you know you spray it under your arm um as another example occurs naturally above the ocean and it's already removing greenhouse gases uh and the ones i've just listed must be um and we don't measure it yet but we've done there's been some lab tests |
| 04:43 | done um formed over several days this stuff is naturally occurring substance forms over several days iron in dust or smoke particles i've got a diagram in a moment that's going to show all this so basically it's the down from the iron from particles uh that blow over the ocean the salt in sea spray and natural acidic aerosols they all combine to make ions of aerosol and it usually rains out within about three weeks so what is it exactly it's ferric chloride not ferrous chloride but ferric chloride |
| 05:18 | uh so that's iron three chloride fe cl3 symbol for iron okay droplets so aqueous droplets or if you have depending on humidity if it's very dry air then basically just get solid particles water evaporates away here's a little bit of chemistry so um i'll just give an overview of this looks quite complicated so let's start down here we have some acid h2so4 is sulfuric acid quite naturally occurring coming from the phytoplankton the idea is the oceans under here cut off that bit of the picture uh reacting with airborne sea salts |
| 06:00 | sodium chloride giving off hydrogen chloride gas that's hydrochloric acid this all occurs i was quite shocked actually when i learned that this is all going on above the sea quite naturally obviously in not in concentrations which are harmful to human beings or any other animals but they're there nonetheless reacting with this is iron kind of oxyhydroxide is basically rust a little bit of tiny speck of rust in the dust particle um reacting with hydrogen chloride to produce ion three chloride the next thing that |
| 06:35 | happens is we have a photon um coming in from the sun so in presence of sunshine iron iii chloride is light sensitive uh it becomes iron it goes from being iron three chloride to ion ii chloride so iron has these different oxidation states changes to iron ii uh and then loses as a result a chlorine atom not a chlorine ion but a chlorine atom chlorine normally goes around as molecules of cl2 so it's a bit unusual to get a chlorine atom like this and atmospheric chemists um know very well that this is well they |
| 07:12 | call it chlorine radical they know that it's very reactive it's a strong oxidant and this it turns out oxidizes here's a methane molecule oxidizes methane in the air about 16 times faster than oh this is no h radical so this is a little circle in front means it's a it's a radical uh so not not a charged ion um okay and and in humid air it turns out that well um methane does not get is not very soluble in in water so it doesn't get absorbed into droplets of water oh radicals do rather get absorbed um by several orders of |
| 08:01 | magnitude chlorines are about halfway in between and so basically when you have very humid air the speed of oxidation by oh radicals which is the normal mechanism by which methane you know that's why it has quite a short half-life oxidizes methane uh it goes right down whereas you know this chlorine carries on so it would be quite a good idea making the case you know for iron salt aerosol it keeps going oxidizing methane and the once methane is oxidized you just get co2 in water water hasn't been put on here maybe it's |
| 08:40 | a bit too obvious but it produces co2 and the other thing that's happening here is we see a bromine radical it tends to be bromine that breaks down or triggers the destruction of a large amount of ozone o3 being ozone which is becoming o2 okay and then also becoming a cloud condensation nuclei and even sea salt so that's the chemistry in the atmosphere when um a particle settles into the ocean something very different happens um if it's iron poor if it's an iron poor uh region of the ocean then uh you know |
| 09:22 | phytoplankton needs iron so that makes a big difference so you get quite a large increase um depending on on the species of phytoplankton you can get quite you don't need much iron to cause quite a large increase in primary productivity um basically co2 draw down and convert it into organic carbon from an iron particle settling in the ocean a little bit more on that and at least one slide on that in a moment so so that was all what occurs naturally um here we are so thinking about well okay if that works so well and it's a |
| 10:02 | natural process could that be could we boost that could we do a little bit more of that artificially um the answer is well we're saying yes um yes so very simply more iron solid aerosol in the atmosphere would remove greenhouse gases faster methane now this is it's difficult let's say we all operate from our personal resources um we think really from as a properly as this kind of scaled up uh operation that we can think of you know methane could be getting depleted from the atmosphere four times faster |
| 10:40 | that's very much an estimate um we we want to do research to be able to understand that better and be able to predict that better then co2 possibly we'd like to think we can't see right now franz and i well it's really franz's work cannot see harmful effects from and this is a big number oceanographers look at that and they say what you know that's a that's a big number this is the rate of human emissions um let's slide on that in a moment okay bit big numbers here it's not expensive um this is |
| 11:16 | really uh a a very conservative estimate to include well first of all one of the most expensive ways of putting iron iron three chloride aerosol to put it into the air and also including a lot of money for research work so again it's a very rough estimate iron three chloride is a substance as you know chemicals already widely used it's used in water treatment go on wikipedia you'll see a very long list of things it was also used in very first photographic film due to its life light sensitivity yeah i'm told |
| 11:58 | um do you have an estimate of price per ton of methane can we deal with that at the end peter let's let's have all the questions at the end if that's okay okay uh and i don't have an answer off the top of my head right now so let's see if someone else has an answer so i'm going to whiz through this these slides as quick as i can so we can get to questions um so next nebulization what do we have in mind uh as you can see away from where people live the plume needs to be it's a we call it a plume got to call it |
| 12:38 | something wouldn't be visible um it needs to be lifted up above sea level so that it can disperse over long distance spread out into the air and be effective over a wide area um low concentration the smell of chlorine would already be a thousand times more than this concentration we're talking very low concentration by the time it's spread out very small particles less than a micron and emission should stop when it rains we don't want to have a high concentration of ion 3 chloride settling into the |
| 13:16 | ocean and causing a phytoplankton bloom um now to prevent further warming amplification we're worried about a spike or a sudden change in the climate we should be thinking mostly about the methane we talk about we talk this about this amongst ourselves every two weeks and we keep saying to each other make it about the me thing this is the uh has the highest warming potential and it's the easiest to remove so that should be the first response have something ready to remove large amounts of meat name from the atmosphere to reduce the risk |
| 14:01 | sudden spike okay so it has a high radius of forcing we estimate roughly about a third of global warming potential third a third of global warming forcing is coming from methane now we say that in practice a realistic way to understand the global warming potential from methane is to say that it's 120 times out of co2 now i expect everyone here has seen no no it's 33 times or something different numbers you see but these these uh these metrics these estimates these guidelines are based on this arbitrary figure of |
| 14:36 | whether it's 20 years or 100 years on the natural the you know the half-life that today's half-life of me thing over a period of time but you know methane is rising concentration is rising so every methane molecule that disappears is replaced by more than one other one so it makes more sense really to say that each existing methane molecule is exerting this amount of global warming potential so it's it's a large um contribution to global warming it's quick and easy to remove uh with iron salt aerosol as i've just been |
| 15:12 | saying oxidizes and an iron sight aerosol program would shorten methane's half-life essentially globally uh that would be the aim because methane moves around the atmosphere mixes around the atmosphere co2 is much more persistent in the atmosphere certainly historically so i i just proposed to show this one slide on co2 unless we have questions okay so this is very diffuse uh ocean iron for fertilization there has been um addition of sulfur sulfate or some kind of slurry you know liquid from a ship into the ocean and |
| 15:54 | researchers have seen very large in some cases phytoplankton blooms um but using an aerosol it's very very diffuse as these later points make so to absorb if we're going to absorb 40 gigatons of co2 be careful whether we mean carbon or co2 so this is 40 giga tons of co2 per year um we would aim to this is as a first approach increase primary productivity by this much two grams of carbon per meter squared per day in the ocean if you if we if this happens over i mean the north atlantic it's not iron poor this is plants well i |
| 16:36 | wouldn't say plenty of iron but there's certainly a much higher measurable amount of iron in the ocean wouldn't make much difference go to the pacific huge areas of the pacific like deserts very low iron concentration this is our proposal needs a settling rate of now this is a 20th of a milligram per meter squared per day this again estimated some oceanographers will say you're not going to get much for that so we prefer to start small if you want to try and imagine that um a kilogram per 20 kilometers squared per day that's |
| 17:09 | what that's equivalent to and given everybody has to talk in terms of football fields 20 kilometers squared is that many football fields so we're talking about roughly about a third of a gram of iron per football field per day over it's very large 16.4 million square kilometers that's about four percent of the ocean and this much iron per year uh 280 000 tons iron and plus of course the chloride each emission facility would produce let's is trying to imagine what would this look like um five tons per hour of iron three |
| 17:50 | chloride serving an area a thousand kilometers like this um means you've got to have only 25 of these facilities i don't know if it would probably be a little bit more than that but you know that order of magnitude i think is rather interesting it doesn't have to be perhaps such a huge you know multi-trillion dollar operation it's more like actually just billions at most all right so no more of this uh whiz down through to the rest of it um and we have so so then people say no no no no this is just sorry but we're |
| 18:26 | not interested this is just too good to be true it's got too many benefits so you must be fraudulent um because and we haven't heard of it elsewhere so we just don't know what to say about that um you're not telling us what the harmful side effects are we can't see any um we have looked at the stratospheric ozone layer uh we don't want to find that that gets affected but we think it would be protected because these methyl halides are a natural um substance from phytoplankton and they do tend to find |
| 19:03 | their way into the stratospheric aerosol uh ozone layer and uh deplete it somewhat so there's a natural depletion going on which would be curbed these things need to be researched and for that obviously needs funding this is the whole point of this presentation so there need to be strict guidelines for an iron solid aerosol application both for trials and production this this all has to be kind of signed and sealed just simple things as i said some of the things would be quite simple like not emitting uh the aerosol when it rains or |
| 19:36 | when rain is forecast next uh we have um we say okay so another benefit boosted fisheries and people might i'm just trying to imagine harmful effects people could say well the community composition of your fish is sea life is going to change you know if you're going to boost fisheries you know some will benefit and some might not benefit so much or or be pushed out of out of their normal habitat i just say you can see here some perspective needed there is such plundering of the oceans going on with collapsing fisheries |
| 20:12 | their scope you know if you have more of something to manage it well and protect species um okay then there's the moral hazard but greenhouse gas removal will take the pressure off governments to reduce emissions um so you know you can't do this because they need to be kept under pressure but the political reality they don't really respond anyway uh it's economic pressures that overwhelm uh dominate climate concerns in most parts of the world by the same token should we keep all plastic pollution in |
| 20:48 | the sea um you know to curb further plastic pollution i don't think so it tends to be technical progress that offers solutions more about this you know the biggest moral hazard is is doing nothing um so kevin and i were talking about this earlier today he was saying that that's the biggest just doing nothing that's the biggest hazard um and you know endless debate with not taking action it's as if we're on the titanic titanic steaming towards our iceberg we're not prepared um research we suggest into this |
| 21:24 | is needed at the very least and just saying that we should just produce emissions is it's tantamount to giving up the situation of siberia um which kevin is much more familiar with than i am is now beyond most climate models uh um the ipcc tells me are saying that the polar amphi application can't be predicted or modeled this these amplifying feedback processes they can't model them because there's too many unknowns so therefore better to act now well in a situation that was you know mostly reasonably well |
| 22:01 | understood if we wait for the system to get into an amplifying feedback mechanism then our models are going to be less useful to us but isn't geoengineering a bad idea yes concerns do exist over some other climate repair proposals so there have been calls that don't have any geoengineering we try not to call this geoengineering climate repair but the planet is already being hugely geo-engineered changing the atmosphere by increasing its greenhouse gas by a third uh effects needs to be reversed it's so |
| 22:38 | simple well kind of uh at least not in the top level by the same token some drugs are bad so should all drugs be bad uh so so should all drugs be banned you know ban tea and coffee and antibiotics so climate prepare proposals are not all created equal a few people have heard of arn's sold aristotle which is why they're able to say ban audio engineer once they've heard of ions or software people will say well okay let's think again about that so why iron salt aerosol it tackles both short-term and long-term |
| 23:13 | problems we see it as fully sustainable it's nature-based it looks harmless we'd like to know for sure we'd like to just more research to be done it's not high-tech and it's inexpensive um especially over the long term after the research effort tails off so our immediate plans uh we're in discussion with the university of copenhagen one of the professors there initially to determine parameters uh to do some atmospheric modelling find out the kind of thing that's needed the kind of oxidation |
| 23:50 | amounts that's needed to deplete methane and then do some smog chamber tests to see what effect we get from different droplet sizes then go to field trials of course this takes time to get permission do impact assessments and then scale incrementally um with lots of measurements before and after this is the things we talk about every two weeks what measurements we want to take and so on we want we would want this to be properly governed by a governance mechanism you know that's that's fully public and |
| 24:26 | we're in the process of incorporating um we've got a new website restore our climate dot earth on the way um and that's what we that's what the american um it'll be an american non-profit called restore our climate um and we're engaging in fundraising basically would like to know that so this gives us a mechanism to receive funds in a way that's fully above board um with board of trustees and by laws so that any donors can be reasonably confident that the money is going to be spent properly |
| 25:04 | that's it thank you everybody it's just about 30 minutes so so let's have peter's question first obviously we've got some raised hands um can you ask your question again peter please uh yeah so guys it's asking what estimates you have for the cost per ton or cost per something for methane removal the cost per ton of methane removal right it may be a better way of measuring it i'm not sure i understand the question um i don't have an answer for that um can i say something yes please friends um the methane |
| 25:52 | concentration is about 1 000 of the co2 concentration and we calculated uh similar numbers we need for methane depletion then for co2 depletion so one one ton of methane to remove should should be similar to the number of uh should about a thousand times that of co2 a remover yes a thousand times the one one ton of uh co co2 removal thousand times of that would be uh okay so we're saying one dollar per ton to remove uh |
| 26:56 | co2 costs one dollar per ton so are we is that then a thousand dollars per ton of methane yeah yeah you you know we we have only two uh ppm uh methane in there yeah it's also fair to say peter it's one of the things that we want to look at with modeling it's one of the first objectives yes yes that's only an extreme rough estimation from me the there's there's a number of um variables which um it's potentially very sensitive to so for example um the height that we release the uh the iron sole aerosol could |
| 27:40 | influence quite significantly how effective we are it's getting rid of meeting the reason for that is as we go up in elevation then hcl starts increasing in as we go up in elevation which then improves the effectiveness of the isa also as you go up in elevation you get more uv so it could well be that if we inject at say 100 meters or injected a thousand meters we get two completely different performances so these are all the kind of variables that it's really important for us to try and start getting a handle on |
| 28:13 | as as early as possible the other thing as well it's not just about getting methane out the atmosphere it's also about where you get the methane out the atmosphere so potentially getting methane atmosphere in the middle of winter in the um in the arctic has much more effect than getting methane out the atmosphere in the middle of the summer in the arctic so obviously we have no uv in the middle of middle of the winter in the arctic so um so as i say depending on where we get the methane out the atmosphere |
| 28:50 | impacts on the change of radiative forcing that we are able to deliver and again that's one of the things we want to try and use modeling to start optimizing just how we design our response to to um to most effectively reducing the radiative forcing first so there's a lot of variables at the moment good question actually two questions first franz you said it's a thousand to one uh the methane is one two hundredth the density of co2 i was wondering where your 1000 came from right it's 400 only only from the uh |
| 29:32 | from the concentration in the atmosphere right you see you have about 4 15 of 180 ppm co2 and about 1500 or 1800 parts per billion past a billion uh yeah okay peter's estimate is slightly closer to a thousand yeah yeah so okay and then kevin the other question i can remember it was um oh you said that it matters where and when and i would argue that it doesn't because the atmospheric mixing mixes within um a year or so correct again the half life of the methane is eight years so hopefully we'll reduce it to four years and so the |
| 30:31 | methane will be mixed so it doesn't matter where you do it to to to a degree it will be mixed but um methane distribution in the atmosphere is not entirely homogeneous it's quite heterogeneous at the moment we've got significantly more methane in the arctic region than we have in lower latitudes and we've got significantly more methane at various altitudes up the way so we haven't quite got that nice homogeneous um distribution of methane in the atmosphere what we've also got as well peter |
| 31:05 | is is the emissions into the atmosphere are also not homogeneous so we've now got large methane releases coming from the permafrost um from the land-based permafrost and also now from the uh the thawing and collapse of the subsea structures and so when you look at the greenhouse gas um monitoring network up in the arctic there are just frightening uh spikes come coming coming coming in in the arctic measurements at the moment so it may well be that if we um tackle the arctic in the middle of the summer we can get rid of an awful |
| 31:40 | lot more methane per input of isa and and per unit of time than we can maybe in the in the in the lower latitudes but again it's it's stuff that we're going to kind of have to try and evaluate in um in in in the testing and and you point right yeah that's looking at the distribution and how that and the mixing rate is one of the things that we really want to get get to to grips with understanding there as well yeah when i've looked at the nasa data the variation you know they have these color |
| 32:13 | maps and the variation is um less than ten percent from the densest the least yes and yeah and ten percent could be quite significant depending on where that variance intent into ten percent is so if if the methane is 10 higher in the arctic then the warming impact the global warming impact can be a lot greater because we get heat flowing from the middle of the planet to the arctic regions so if you then have a slight increase in the insulation of the atmosphere in the arctic regions you are stopping a huge amount of heat |
| 32:48 | being released in into the atmosphere so potentially you know if you could take the the arctic median level say down by say 20 percent in a relatively small region that might potentially give us an enormous heat release into the into the into space that's not happening at the moment so it depends on you know a number of sensitivities but my hunch at the moment and it is that you know we you know it's not even a hunch you know we have higher methane in the arctic and my hunch is that the meat thing in the arctic is creating |
| 33:24 | much more warming per unit of methane than we get in the lower latitudes just because of that heat flow dynamic yeah got it okay thank you sure thank you peter uh david koeig please yeah thanks um you know i saw your uh estimates for the oceanic carbon uptake um from diffuse iron fertilization of 40 tons of two per year um you know and luckily there's about three decades of scientific literature of ocean fire uh ocean iron fertilization experiments you know and these are these often show that there's you know really limited carbon export |
| 34:06 | and also that there can be downstream consequences so if you rob uh if you take macronutrients out because you're adding in iron you depre you deprive downstream ecosystems of that productivity and so that needs to be discounted from your entire uh from your entire carbon removal so yeah you know i guess i would say i'd urge you guys to take a look at that take a look at that do you want to say something about that france yes we have a very different sort of view uh a very different uh import uh input of |
| 34:53 | of uh iron uh death into the ocean uh what is uh the the trials which had done uh until now they used a liquid iron or so and uh in a rather high concentration but if if we look back to the glossier time during the times with very high dust in the air um then the co2 levels went down and also the methane uh levels in in the uh ice age went down uh only during the dust events but all the trials until now had been done |
| 35:55 | with liquid iron and not with aerosol like like nature did and so i think that that's a real totally uh different situation to the trials which have been done until now yeah perhaps i'll say something here as well that it's the if you take an area of ocean i mean those numbers are big because we're talking about a very large area of ocean david if you take a a small you know a unit area of ocean what we're talking about what we're suggesting and proposing is to increase the primary productivity of |
| 36:37 | that area to tenth of the primary productivity that is found in quite naturally in other parts of the ocean for example the west coast of south america particularly peru and chile as the the most productive fishing grounds in the world uh have a primary production of phytoplankton 20 grams per uh of carbon per square meter per day so they seem to be working very well you have the most productive fishing grounds in the world there as i say so we've said okay let's with our fertilization aim to produce a tenth of that so |
| 37:23 | and then we've looked at the concentrations of uh it's mostly oxygen calcium and and other nutrients we don't really see a problem does that answer your question david uh yeah partially i think it's really interesting this idea of you know adding aerosols and what you know franz said about the difference between liquid iron editions and uh and aerosol iron additions i would urge you guys to think about these downstream consequences because when you take nutrients when you take nitrogen and phosphorus out by adding in iron and |
| 37:59 | allowing for productivity to happen you deprive a downstream ecosystem of the productivity that would have happened and so you have to discount that when you're considering carbon dioxide removal on decadal the century time scales uh i understand you're urging and yes david we agree that that should be looked at and um we have looked at that and we will continue to look at that um okay um thank you um i'm just gonna say just an announcement to dave's uh comment as well we've just had a massive um dust storm |
| 38:36 | um blowing off the sahara over the um the atlantic ocean and um yeah certainly that might give us a good analog to try and answer some of those questions that you are raising at the moment yeah right now we don't have funding this has been produced by people from their own resources at home uh and in france's case for 20 years we think that that this is this would be one of the many measurements that should be taken uh if there's a begins with a small trial absolutely downstream nutrients should be measured |
| 39:21 | i totally agree with you david um so there's i think there's not any argument there we certainly began with the same concern and then we realized well you know we don't think it should be a problem because we're really only doing what nature has done in the past as francis said in the glacial periods when iron blew over very lots of very fine dust blew over more widespread over the oceans and it induced a faster drawdown of co2 which is why it ended up less than 200 parts per million um thank you uh andrew lockley please |
| 40:06 | if the golf mute yeah i was just scrambling from a zoo map um so uh i'll put my face on in case anyone wants to see it as well um i can't see very much of it because there's a light behind me um so yeah i've i've got a couple of concerns with this um the the methane thing i'm not so sure about that um putting a lot of um chlorine radicals into the atmosphere has got a range of possible problems um if they if they get folded into the stratosphere as they will tend to if they get lofted into the upper |
| 40:41 | troposphere by thunderstorms um then the chlorine radicals in the stratosphere are generally pretty bad news for the ozone layer and that's going to require quite detailed modelling to make sure we know the effect of that if we're going to deliberately load the um uh the the troposphere with a lot of um uh sources of chlorine radicals now obviously salt itself has chlorine in it and the huge amount of sea salt ends up in the atmosphere durasol lofting so it's difficult to untangle those effects and that's going |
| 41:10 | to require detailed computer modelling but a more more fundamental concern i've got i've got is with the um is with the iron budget because the iron budget is uh you know the idea of using iron for geo engineering purposes has been you know reasonably well tested much more so than most other geo engineering techniques and frankly widely debunked um there are a couple of fundamental problems um with this and so you know some of them have been discussed on the call and macronutrient scavenging but there's |
| 41:41 | also um more general issues in that um the carbon fundamentally the carbon exists in one of two states so it's either label or carbon or it's exported into benthic layers where it remains now if it's labile carbon then it's moving around and around around the ecosystem and it's a fairly good way of making fish in a really bad way of doing carbon sequestration now um if it goes down into benthic layers then it'll either get recycled and remain remain labile so it's deep water global carbon |
| 42:16 | um or alternatively if there's enough of it then you you get excited uh conditions in benthic layers um and you know to describe that as you know a major disruption to ecosystem um is like describing the bomb dropped on hiroshima as quite a warm day um it just doesn't do it justice you know you're looking at a catastrophic change to the global ecosystem uh if you're exporting um un um non-metabolized carbon at scale into benefit layers it you you know you're looking at um the kind of um environment that is |
| 42:51 | typical of hot house earth conditions um and uh and and you know stationary oceans i understand the question andrew um i'm just wondering whether to put a slide up um the amount of carbon perhaps i'll put this slider let's just do it um but just to summarize what you're doing that it either doesn't it either doesn't sequester carbon or you wouldn't want it to yeah can i say something yes please friends yeah um we want to use maximum 250 or 280 000 tons of iron that's a little bit more |
| 43:44 | uh double or three times more than a naturally fourth sound of iron uh into the ocean so and uh celuba island that uh is good reference and uh has been found so uh to to increase the amount by by the factor of three of the naturally falling down uh iron into the ocean will not disturb the ecosystems in the you say well if that's the case then it's not going to sequester much carbon because what you'll do is you'll introduce labile carbon in into the ecosystem which will form fish and plankton and um and and macroalgae and all of the |
| 44:34 | other joyous things that are in the ocean but but it won't um it won't have a lasting increase um on on export from the surface ocean um into benthic layers and into sediments and and if it did it would be a major problem so you know the idea that that can be counted as a significant benefit in terms of carpal security is it's not defensive in my view yep i understand your logic andrew i think we don't agree with your initial initial premise different parts of the ocean are very different uh we're talking |
| 45:06 | about um applying an iso aerosol to parts of the ocean which are very iron poor uh where nothing much is happening i'm aware of that i'm not disputing that but what i'm saying is that that alone doesn't do much to export carbon to benthic layers yeah okay so let's uh well i've got a top level question there uh clyde peter can i let me let me can i just let's just see if i can deal with this with andrew um and then let me come back to you peter because i think there's another question as well |
| 45:40 | um so this here's what we see the effect on the ocean carbonate system without let's not go through this stuff here the amount of dissolved inorganic carbon in the ocean is 38 000 giga tons of bicarbonate and and carbonate anions so if we're talking about putting in 40 tons of co2 that's 10 gigatons of carbon that's a 0. |
| 46:04 | 026 percent increase in dissolved in organic carbon per year i don't see anything catastrophic about that you're not putting that in it's dissolved in organic carbon you're putting that in as organic carbon because you're using the iron to stimulate the um uptake and bioaccumulation of carbon and if if if those plankton or whales or whatever it is you form die that the only way they can export from the ocean surface ocean system is to descend to the benefit layers as marine snow right that's you know that's the only |
| 46:36 | option they become oxidized until they are falling down they they uh they they will not come to the ground yeah yeah but this is the reason we're working on this very long paper and it says just what friends just said uh fish and it's mostly microbes yeah organic carbon it oxidizes uh within the first mostly 500 meters this is why you see a drop in ph in every part of the open ocean um where it's oxidized back to bicarbonate mostly bicarbonate okay but that that the ion associated will then return into the surface into the mixed |
| 47:21 | layer of the ocean um during that process so your iron will cap out fairly soon or it will they they they go into hydrocarbonate that's all that they oxidize yeah the iron remains available so um yeah so there would be a buildup of iron in in the ocean so primary productivity continues so if you've got a bill to provide and then you know one or two things will happen either you'll have diminishing returns where the the iron is just building up and building up but it's not making any difference because the |
| 48:00 | new the systems no longer are unlimited right or alternatively you'll have a situation the islands being actively exported in marine snow um and in which case you're back to you know the problems that we discussed but your argument is that this that i mean as far as i can tell taking your argument at its highest you're looking at an increase increase in ocean biomass in the mixed layer and slightly below but you're arguing that that won't be exported to benefit that is where it would be problematic so |
| 48:26 | you're basically turning a desert into a forest now if that's the case then that's you know it's not trivial but you'll quickly cap out you're not you're not going to be removing that amount of carbon for very long because that layer will quickly saturate you'll become light limited or you become mac nutrient limited and and then and those productivity gains will cap out so you might have noticed a relatively swift change um uh as ross george's experiments suggested but after that there's no further |
| 48:54 | increase to be had unless you start conducting you know really serious large-scale changes to benefit systems which are pretty dangerous we certainly don't want to do anything that's dangerous um i'll just go back to the answer i gave before what we're proposing is to take areas of the ocean that are doing very large areas of the ocean are doing virtually nothing and give them a productivity induce in them a small increase in productivity that over a very wide area adds up to a lot you know i understand that but yes |
| 49:33 | and we will uh look during our trials what happens down there and we will look for the oxygen content and all other parameters has to to to rule out such catastrophic scenario what's the long-term budget you expecting in the long term are you expecting the iron levels to plateau or are you expecting the iron levels to continue to increase and if the eye levels are plateauing then that is indicates that there's an export of both iron and accompanying carbon into benthic layers and that if that that is only going to |
| 50:17 | end up by the you know we have in the ocean a very different kind of iron concentration and we would not get uh higher than than than normal for instance in the atlantic is a much higher consideration and in the pacific or in the in in in the in the deep sea you have much higher uh iron concentration than on the surface [Music] um what's the in the long term where is this iron going to end up what's the sink we we don't think we need this action 50 years long because this is a rather short uh uh uh |
| 51:27 | what we what we uh yeah but basically what we're what we're proposing wouldn't make do anything to the ocean that isn't already that there isn't already some ocean that's that's like that anyway i think guys you're missing the point because let's get back to the whole concept of restoration and um yeah one of the fundamentals that we have is that we have dramatically reduced the biological nutrient cycles across the planet by reducing the overall amount of life if you go back into the old fisheries records |
| 52:03 | it quickly becomes apparent that the total amount of living biomass in vast areas of the oceans is dramatically reduced and that's that's the whole function of biomass it's the whole tropic triangles that were functioning within it so you look at the old fisheries logs off newfoundland and the the north atlantic what people used to catch and the amount of weight of of fish that is recorded per ton massively reduced now if you've got a lot of biomass functioning in the ocean all of those nutrients are in continuous |
| 52:37 | circulation so you get a big dust storm coming off africa like the one we've had and that dust lands in the ocean it just sinks through the water column if you can maintain it over a long period of time so that you build up that life and it lands on a healthy ocean it'll take those nutrients and keep them in circulation and then the next one comes through and refreshes it but without lots of life there that process doesn't maintain you won't maintain the nutrients in circulation so the floor in all of the |
| 53:11 | studies have been done ocean fertilization so far that i'm aware of is that their duration has been very short you create a plankton bloom but you don't grow the ecosystem underneath it you don't have time to monitor it as you build up a complete ecosystem the way the carbon gets transported through it becomes quite different vast numbers of zooplankton that are transporting up and down day and night and defecating when they get down below a thousand meters are drawing carbon down into the system and it gets |
| 53:47 | trapped lower in the ocean so the whole host of things we don't know but what is clear is that if you've got a lot of biomass on the planet if the whole system is working properly then it becomes much more robust and it's capable of dealing with further emissions um so what's going to be long-term over this someone's got to think about nursing ecosystems back into existence so this is particularly true on land and it's also very true of the coastal ecosystems as well but the first part of this |
| 54:24 | objective is to try and draw down atmospheric breathing and try and reduce the very intense heating effects we've got when we're looking at the siberian that keroses and those sort of places where you've got effectively a heat lens holding temperatures really high at the moment um so yeah we need we need research we need to i think to have it focused um one needs to get away from the fear of talking about massive problems of course because we need to be working with small areas consistently over time and get experience of |
| 55:02 | of recovering ecosystems and um drawing i think something like they'd be the arctic c there latvia cara taking one of those c's and working on it to see what you can achieve and get proper measurements and look at what's happening to the the biomass in that water um and then we've got a whole series of questions over the uh summer winter cycle that's going on and what times we should be working on that and what other technologies you need to be integrating it with at the same time i mean um you know if |
| 55:43 | you're gonna take one of those seas you might work really hard as the winter approaches to stop the sight the ice forming so you get maximum radiation of heat back out of the oceans um and then come the spring do everything you can to retain the albedo okay so thank you very much yeah thanks uh uh very helpful answer thank you very much uh bru i'm just thinking about the time it's um five past ten um i'm happy to continue um uh if anybody needs to leave now i said it would be well i just said it'd be a |
| 56:19 | 30 minutes plus q a then um we can't stop you leaving um um thanks for those questions um let's have this uh sue lee has had a hand up for a very long time sue please uh yeah so my question is about chlorine radicals and the concentration of chlorine where you are applying isa i've heard that folks have expressed concern they're not sure if it's a safety issue i've also heard that it's only local and maybe even only at the nanoscale and also that chlorine could be recycled to reduce the overall |
| 57:05 | concentration of chlorine can you comment on those uh yes if you have the plume the chlorine doesn't uh disappear from this blue you've got uh the aerosol blue you know it will not disappear it recycles always you know and uh the the uh chemistry uh what uh clive uh told before in this picture is a rather complicated because the chemicals of the atmosphere there is for instance h2 hydroperoxide hydrogen yeah in the atmosphere additional to these clarinet tones uh also oil atoms are produced |
| 58:10 | so we will attest the uh the uh mechanism and look what uh what happens in nature outside because we until now we have some trials in climate chambers there are three or four papers made from climate chambers tests in the university of and we hope to get go on in copenhagen in another climate chamber to get more results before we go into the field so i think your question related to safety sue susan is that is that right yeah so um when we talk about isa we |
| 59:17 | hear concerns about safety and want to know whether it's something that can be easily put to rest by explaining that this is local i think someone earlier raised the issue that um it's only applied where the ocean is there's not much going on in these remote areas these local areas of the ocean so does that mean we can just respond and say look it's not going to be a big hazard to a huge ecosystem um yeah we don't think it'll be a hazard to any ecosystem because the concentrations are still very low |
| 1:00:00 | is that right friends the concert range is still so low that nothing is going to be official fly through it they won't even notice uh you have one slide with the with the uh milligrams per square meter of iron yeah yeah it's it's uh extremely low you yeah you i think in in a town with uh next to a street you have more uh iron is that recycling that you referred to via a action and that goes on already and and um there's a good paper i'll i'll i'll send you a link um where there was um there's a i think |
| 1:00:55 | there's a factory in china it has has a fair amount of iron in its um um in its chimney which is acting in the catalytic effect that we are that we're looking for so the kind of things that we are looking at the kind of chemical processes that we want to enhance and natural processes that are already happening in the atmosphere and it happens when you put your washing out if you put damp washing out on the line you bring it in once it's dried it smells then you have that lovely fresh um um sort of odor in your washing and |
| 1:01:32 | matt johnson who's working with us in copenhagen was the author of the paper looking at that that effect that gave washing on the line that that nice clean um um odor yeah and it's it's basically that you know what's happening in the damp washing is the same process that we're looking at it's um it's um replicating it in the atmosphere and you know so we've already got particles in the atmosphere doing what we're looking for what we're trying to do is increase them by a relatively small |
| 1:02:03 | amount and capitalize on the on the photocatalytic effect so coming back to what franz is saying and what clive alluded to before the concentrations that we need are minuscule and and um so you know we should we should inherently be safe the other thing that um andrew raised as well was what's the risk of the chlorine um atoms being wafted up into the atmosphere well generally what what um one of the things that we have with iron salt aerosols is that they get washed out the atmosphere very easily it's not like hcf gases and ccf's that |
| 1:02:48 | did not get washed out the atmosphere and and rose naturally up into the stratosphere so we don't envisage that this will rise significantly up into the atmosphere though it's obviously something to for us to look carefully at but i think we're not talking about something that is on anywhere near the same kind of magnitude of risk that we've had in the past with other unwanted gases going up into the stratosphere so i think yeah the point your points are right and we're gonna we're gonna |
| 1:03:16 | have to really make sure that we've we've got those well and truly established hopefully when we get the computer model we should get a better idea of that but the initial perception at the moment is safety wise it's not a big issue at this stage um and it's a sufficiently low risk at this stage for us to start betting on it as opposed to something like ccf which just went straight up and ripped the atmosphere to to to to pieces i think it's quite as brand said as clive said as well this may actually |
| 1:03:52 | have some ozone protective effects so for example if we can release isa in lower um levels then we can deplete ozone at the troposphere and we also deplete um other ozone depleting gases from the troposphere as well it has an effect on hcfs and ccfs yes yes it can potentially stop those gases going up into the stratosphere so what we actually hope to see um is it has a stratospheric positive effect the the the the other thing on the stratosphere as well that's extremely um alarming just now is the the the rise of methane |
| 1:04:37 | in the atmosphere so methane is slightly lighter than there and it's now being released at a sufficiently uh fast rate so that large quantities of methane are now already ending up in in the in the stratosphere so it really becomes an increasing owner so um for us to try and find a way of intercepting the the the methane as it transitions from from release at its ground level up into the stratosphere because once it gets in the stratosphere it's not depleting exactly yes yeah once it's in the stratosphere |
| 1:05:12 | it's half-life is something like 200 years so it's bad enough in the troposphere when it gets into the stratosphere it is you know 20 30 times worse so so the the global warming potential of methane i would suspect is going to increase significantly as the concentration increases it's the ultimate um um mechanism for creating a totally unstable feedback loop on top of all the other feed lock back loops which you'll then interact with as well so it really is a a a a a an incredibly delicate situation |
| 1:05:50 | that we are in at the moment and and and the warmer it becomes uh here below in the the troposphere the korea the stratosphere becomes and it makes these uh uh stratospheric clouds which destroy a zone uh it's another reason another feedback mechanism i'd like to just correct something kevin uh um the the total amount of air above this the in the stratosphere and above is about six percent of the atmosphere as i recall and so um the the the uh the concentration of meth of methane is going to be fairly similar |
| 1:06:40 | in the stratosphere and the troposphere obviously it's removed in the troposphere that there's no way for the stratosphere to have higher concentration because it'll diffuse back down into the troposphere my point is that um if you when i've done the calculations that there's not going to be a significant maybe two percent more warming from increased methane in the stratosphere which is really i don't think significant yeah it's it yeah um yes good point peter um the fact though remains that we are getting strat |
| 1:07:15 | methane getting into the stratosphere the methane then has a number of impacts in in that area it depletes methane so it depletes ozone it starts creating level clouds as as well so it's not just the methane that is causing the warming when it gets into the stratosphere it's all the other knock-on effects and again coming back to what brew was just saying it is the longevity of methane when it gets into the stratosphere bear in mind in the past it never used to get there it does now of course because it's not going away |
| 1:07:53 | anymore so yeah it's not like the the thing yeah that we talk about because it gets depleted yeah yeah it is it is a different set of equations that are now coming coming into play and everything is cumulative but the bottom line is reduce the uh uh let's do the isa and reduce methane levels in the troposphere and then we can stop the discussion yeah great yeah yeah just to say one more little thing that about susan's question this can you see this people i i'm slightly concerned that people will look at this diagram |
| 1:08:31 | and they will see a very high concentration of characters talking about things talking about chemicals this all looks like a huge concentration of chemicals but this this has to that these characters have to be big so that we can read them it doesn't mean that this this is the kind it's a representation of the concentration does that make sense susan it it does and i think messaging and how you communicate it to the general public is going to be very important because people will you know have knee-jerk reactions so i mean i think |
| 1:09:04 | one thing that we do one thing that we do is you know we we try to do messaging targeted for specific audiences and we'll keep that in mind to make sure that we talk about it as something that nature is already doing and something that we already see happening when you dry your laundry or things that we are already doing and we don't see a catastrophe in the ecosystem yeah very good thank you very much okay and then uh yeah yeah i said that that segues to my question of um who's the audience so um in the chat i said why do you think |
| 1:09:44 | there's no funding um if there were funding who would fund it and why would they fund it anyone like to answer that i think there's there's no funding for for a number of reasons peter i think as we all know on this call that there has been a big push back for years from various ngos and governments against any form of research on geoengineering not just having geo engineering but even having any research in it so there's there is that momentum that that we have to push back and fight against and |
| 1:10:25 | there's still no clear position um that's been advocated on this from the from the um ipcc so we've got that as a as as an issue the other issue is there's really not much of an easy way to commercialize this yet so when you look at things like the only carbon trading mechanism of major note at the moment is the eu egs and that doesn't cover methane nor does it cover radiated forcing so there is no market mechanism at this stage and it's it's very much a it's a horse and a cart kind of thing |
| 1:11:06 | or a chicken and egg or whichever one you want whichever analogy that you want to use i mean somehow we need to prove this and then once it's proven and demonstrated to be safe and it meets the concerns that people are raising here then we can have a dialogue and a conversation with government but then governments say well you're not going to get any funding or or any political support and until you can you can demonstrate safety and so we are trapped in the horns of of um of this this dilemma all the time |
| 1:11:35 | i've always been a believer yeah there may be one source of funding one day might come from the insurance industries who who would surely it must be in their interest to be able to address climate change and i have spoken to insurance organizations and even they're not interested it's incredibly difficult so are we trying to solve a problem that's not a problem that is i grew up in a family of economists i was the only one who didn't get an economics degree somehow but they would say listen if you don't have any |
| 1:12:06 | buyers you've got a product that nobody wants is it we do we have a product that nobody wants everybody wants to stay alive on this planet we just don't know the key to what's the evidence for that most people to the idea that they need the product once you tell them they need it then they understand it then they'll buy it yeah so that's remarkable so if it were a marketing issue who would the buyer be who would we be marketing to well what we need what we need to be doing is we need to get into governmental policy transform to to |
| 1:12:39 | have this now as the number one target that the number one target has to be thinking how we intervene in the climate system that that's where we need to be going with any final comments from anybody at all before we say goodbye we do actually have a a young man felix talbert in germany so you're from the business school of chemistry and uh you've been sent along to learn about iron south aerosol to do a research project on is that right yeah um i will write my bachelor thesis about the topic um methane emissions from permafrost |
| 1:13:22 | yeah yeah and um the reduction from methane with water catalysis and iron sultan method yeah yeah that's fanta that's fantastic so is it is your work ready to publish no uh you you you are in the state of uh uh how do you say it uh a bachelor you make a bachelor's uh work and i hope you you will go on working on the university and make your master and so on on the same thing yeah i mean it's a really interesting topic and yeah um are you sad mister that's what yeah okay it's you no um i mean the |
| 1:14:23 | admitting is a big problem and global warning global gvp potential yeah global warming potential and um it's a topic for the for the future so i mean isa is a really helpful method to being the right thing yeah well done keeping yeah great thank you very much thank you everybody and anybody who wants to stay in touch you've got my email address if you'd like to be included in these in the future let me know um thanks thanks everyone and if felix has any question he can ask me directly yeah thank you mr thank you |
| 1:15:19 | okay okay guys thank you all please thank you everyone sure |