A discussion took place among the panelists on whether it’s possible to restore the climate. The goal is to reduce atmospheric CO2 to around 280-300 ppm by 2050. Pre-industrial times had around 280 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, whereas current levels are around 420 ppm. By 2050, if the goal of net-zero emissions is achieved, levels will still be around 460 ppm. To restore the climate to pre-industrial levels, around a trillion tons of carbon would need to be removed from the atmosphere.

Peter Fiekowsky argued that it’s possible to restore the climate since nature itself had removed large amounts of CO2 during ice ages. However, no one has been paid to research the best ways to do this, so there’s nothing in the scientific literature to support this claim. Oswald Petersen added that while some aspects of the climate, such as glaciers, might be difficult to restore, temperature restoration is key and should be the focus of climate restoration efforts.

Peter Fiekowsky suggested that focusing on reducing CO2 levels would provide an engineering solution to the problem instead of a political one. By targeting CO2, engineers can work on a definitive and measurable goal that has a clear impact on climate change.

Petersen notes the importance of considering all greenhouse gases, not just CO2, as 40% of current global warming comes from methane and other gases. Oeste focuses on the role of oceans and phytoplankton in regulating CO2 and methane levels.

The conversation highlights the role of iron-containing dust in reducing CO2 and methane levels. The dust feeds phytoplankton in the ocean, which can absorb CO2. Additionally, the dust triggers a chemical reaction involving sulfuric acid that can reduce methane levels. Oeste explains that the dust can deplete methane and fertilize the ocean, leading to CO2 absorption. Petersen adds that there is a third effect – increased cloud production, which cools the Earth by reflecting sunlight back into space.

Spencer raises concerns about potential negative consequences of introducing iron dust into the atmosphere. Although it could reduce greenhouse gases and promote cloud production, there may be unforeseen consequences that could negatively impact the environment or human health. The conversation emphasizes the importance of considering all aspects of a proposed solution to avoid unintended harmful effects.

The discussion focuses on atmospheric methane oxidation, a natural process that occurs continuously and is not harmful. The idea is to enhance this process to reduce the amount of methane in the atmosphere, which has increased by two and a half times due to human activities. To do this, a catalyst called FeCO3 is added, which is already present in the atmosphere but in smaller quantities.

Tropospheric ozone, another greenhouse gas, is harmful and can be depleted by iron 3 chloride. The conversation touches upon potential unexpected consequences of enhancing atmospheric methane oxidation. A decade ago, iron fertilization experiments in the ocean off British Columbia led to the unexpected growth of different species of salmon and the birth of new orca whales. Although no negative consequences have been reported, some concerns include the potential for harmful algal blooms and oxygen depletion in the deep ocean.

Ocean stratification can cause problems, such as hydrogen sulfide emission, which may have been responsible for previous mass extinctions. Restoring whale populations can help counter this stratification effect. Lantern fish, which migrate up and down the ocean daily, also contribute to the movement of nutrients within the ocean.

Iron salt aerosol (ISA) can be used to promote phytoplankton growth, which serves as a crucial part of the food chain in oceans. The conversation also explores the possibility of using iron salt aerosol to mitigate the catastrophic release of methane from the Arctic. This could serve as an insurance policy against potential massive methane bursts, which may have serious consequences for the planet. The iron salt aerosol would be applied in sunny areas over the ocean to oxidize the methane, reducing the risk of long-term damage to the environment and civilization.

Franz Oeste mentions that the brown color of loess dust comes from iron, which also colors ice sheets brown, reducing albedo and causing warming. The end of the ice ages may have been triggered by increased dust on ice sheets.

The Permian extinction event is thought to have been caused by volcanic eruptions that released large amounts of ash, which fertilized the ocean and led to phytoplankton blooms. This caused oxygen depletion and the release of toxic hydrogen sulfide gas. The group acknowledges the risks of introducing ISA into the atmosphere but emphasizes that they plan to start small and gradually increase dispersion while monitoring the effects.

Oswald Petersen explains that with financing, they could build a prototype methane-removal plant (MRP) within one and a half years to demonstrate the effectiveness of ISA in reducing atmospheric methane. They propose building 40 MRPs over 20 years to reduce methane to pre-industrial levels, potentially lowering global warming by 0.5 degrees Celsius. The cost is estimated to be around $2 per tonne of CO2 equivalent.

The process involves converting methane into CO2 and water, which is preferable since methane has a much higher global warming potential. The group encourages interested parties to visit their website, www.AMR.Earth, to learn more about their project and the potential of enhanced atmospheric methane oxidation.

TRANSCRIPT

This transcript has been machine generated using “otter.ai.” Prior to using information from the transcript, please watch the video to catch any obvious errors.

Metta Spencer  00:00

Hi, this is Metta Spencer, and we’re going to have a conversation today about some very important question. Is it possible to restore the climate to pre industrial levels? Or is that a crazy idea? And we’re then going to talk about a particular technology that has a great deal of promise for helping control the climate crisis. So I have three friends here with me who already know each other; they have worked together, and on some of the same issues. So in, I guess, in California is Peter Fiekowski, who is the founder of something called the Climate Restoration Foundation, which I haven’t actually explored too much in terms of what they do. But you can tell by the title it’s good. And in Switzerland is Oswald Petersen, who works for something called an Atmospheric Methane Removal. But really the same bunch of people doing the same things, I think, and I don’t know where Franz Oreste is? In Germany. Very good. And he’s one of the two guys, I guess, who mostly invented the whole idea of being able to remove methane from the atmosphere by shooting some iron salt aerosols into, into collision with the methane molecules. So we’ll talk to talk about that in a moment. But let me start off by saying that I was surprised. On Saturday, we had a wonderful Pugwash Annual General Meeting and I was pitching the idea of having a series of hearings about several about four different tech, technological, let’s say, methods of helping solve the climate crisis. And mostly they would be a measures that would actually help restore the climate to pre-industrial times. So when I read my proposal as a motion, everybody got agitated and said, No, no, you can’t use that word “climate restoration to pre-industrial times”.  You can’t do that. It’s not possible. And so I thought, well, this is not the place to have that debate. We’ll have that debate sometime else, but let’s just get on with it. So I don’t know what they finally wound up saying. I let them tinker with my motion as they saw fit. Anyway, it passed, and so we are going to have a series of shows that deal with the four measures that I think that are most urgently needed and promising. And which Canadians could do – start right away, get it going within five years, whether or not anybody else in the world helps. So those are measures that you will be hearing about consistently over the next four months or so. Four months, we’re going to do once a week, we are going to have a show once a week on one of these topics. So hang in there and watch these shows and then you can you can send your questions in, there’ll be Pugwashites joining us to interrogate the experts that we will invite, and they will help pick the experts to make sure we get a fair representation of all points of view. Anyway, I was so surprised that people don’t think it’s possible to restore the climate, that I decided, okay, here, let’s have that conversation right off the bat. Now, the first thing you need to know is that in pre industrial times, a couple of 100 years ago,  there was in the atmosphere, there were about 280 parts per million of co2. And, if we actually achieve the goal that most people think is realistic, and that we should aim for by the year 2050,  unfortunately, there will be 460 parts per mission million most likely in the atmosphere. That’s a stupendous growth, from 280 to 460. You can see what industrialization has done for us. We’ve been spewing all kinds of things into the atmosphere. And that means that if we are really successful in the year 2050, there will be no more additions of co2 than there are subtractions. So we’ll call that net zero, and the the amount of carbon will stop increasing, but that’s a long way to go: 2050. And it’s by now about, I think 420 parts per million, if I’m not mistaken, which means that if we are going to try to do something to restore the climate to the level that it was 200 years ago, we’re going to need to remove from the atmosphere, about a trillion tons of carbon. Okay, which I’ve been reading, refreshing my memory with Peter Fieskowsky’s marvelous book called Climate Restoration this morning. It turns out that that comes out to being a removal of about 50 Gigatonnes per year of carbon, a gigatonne is a billion tonnes. 50 million tonnes a year from, oh, pretty soon, we should start. And removing this stuff. So, if we can add, I think we can learn to subtract, and there are ways of doing it. So we are going to pay attention today to the ways in which it’s possible to subtract, to remove carbon from the air that’s already been put there, so we can go back to something like 280 or 300 parts per million. That’s what our goal is, and I don’t think it’s ridiculous. But let’s see. So, who wants to start us off with this little conversation? And then we’ll move on to talking about iron salt aerosols.

Franz Oeste  01:09

In Germany

Peter Fiekowsky  06:33

I’ll be happy to start since I sort of started it eight years ago. Whoever was it who said that it was not possible to restore the climate? If you imagine that you’re in his or her shoes, and think about what’s the evidence that that person would give that we can’t do it? And there are probably two things. One is it’s never been done before by humans. That’s good evidence that it’s impossible. And the other is, if it were possible, we would be doing it. It’s obvious. And so:

Metta Spencer  07:11

Like fun!  No, it’s not.

Peter Fiekowsky  07:14

Right, exactly. But when I talk with scientific experts, when they actually sit down and think, they say that, you know I always assumed that if it were possible, we would be doing it. And since we’re not doing it must impossible. QED proof made. Now, I don’t have to say that this doesn’t hold water when you actually look at it. So that’s almost the end of the conversation, because the flip side is, what’s the evidence that it is possible? The first one is that we’ve had ice ages over the last million years, 10 of them. And each time that happens, nature removes that same trillion tonnes of co2 from the atmosphere, and eventually puts it back in. We know, we’ve seen it done. And so we have no question that it’s doable. And then, can we do it 1000 times faster using our engineering? And I’ve talked with a lot of experts, and no one’s ever proposed any reason that we won’t be able to do it. Now, it’s very clear that in the scientific literature, no one has proven it. Right. No one’s no one’s been paid to do the research to find the best way to do it because that’s never been a topic before. And so it is true that there’s nothing in the literature. But I think that’s the beginning and end of the question.

Metta Spencer  08:48

Well, okay, but no, I think it’s not because you could say that there are certain things that we can do and certain things that will be really a lot harder to do. And, for example, Oswald, both you and Oswald, sent me little emails with your ideas. And Oswald said, Well, you know, we can’t put the glaciers back on top of the Himalayan Mountains, etc. That’s probably true. I assume that if we restored the climate, we might have the the air temperature back to normal, but I don’t know how we’re going to put all those glaciers back.

Peter Fiekowsky  09:26

That’s a good one Metta. I said, it’s a really good example, that if the only problem we had was to get glaciers back on the Himalayas, we could definitely do it. Right? Because, it’s water. We have water pumps, the amount of energy to pump that much water up on the Himalayas in the winter and freeze it. It would be expensive, but you know, probably less than a 10th of the global GDP. It just happens that just restoring the Himalayas is not the top priority of humanity.

Metta Spencer  10:04

Well, yes, there are some things that you  can’t do because it’s too inefficient, it would take too much energy to do it. It would cost you I mean, you’d have to put up more co2 or something to do it. I don’t know, Oswald, what’s your thought about this? I’m butting in.

Oswald Petersen  10:22

Thanks. Thanks, Metta. There’s a couple of things that we cannot restore. I think the Himalayan glaciers are very obvious example. The same is also true for all the ice they’ve lost in Greenland or in the Antartica. As long as this ice is on the land and 1000s or hundreds of meters above sea level, I cannot see any any way to restore that. But Peter is absolutely right. It’s not a very important question. It’s important, but not as important as temperature. Temperature is the key to all of this. So we can really confine this discussion to “can we restore temperature, global temperature,” and leave all the rest out? Because that’s just many, many, many, many things, which like forestation and desert, and all this cannot be immediately restored it takes 1000s of years. But it’s not so important. Can we restore the temperature? If we can answer that with a “Yes”, man, that’s, Wow, that’s great! If we can, if we can go back 1850 temperatures, that would really solve the problem. I mean, it wouldn’t restore the climate completely, exactly. To 1850. But it would do 80% of the job, or 90% of the job. So that’s what we, what  I call climate restoration, temperature restoration, if we confine it to that then it is possible. Yes.

Peter Fiekowsky  11:56

Now I I would take a different tack on that. Certainly the UN has taken the temperature approach;  when I first started work on this, I did the same. But I realized that there are so many different ways of measuring temperature and the causes of global average sea level temperature, are there just hundreds.  How many water clouds? How many ice clouds? How much sulfur dioxide, and you know, ozone? All of these different factors. And so we don’t really, so what I realized as an engineer was that, putting on my engineering hat, we don’t have any easy way to change the temperature. But the co2 on the other hand, there’s universal agreement that the fundamental cause of climate change is the increase in co2. And we do know exactly how to get co2 out and measure it definitively. And so by focusing on co2, rather than temperature, now we know it’s an engineering problem and not a political problem. I think the scientific community was brought in by the political community for political reasons, and then they developed the political approach of temperature. But again, from an engineering perspective, co2 is is the only way I can see an engineering solution.

Metta Spencer  13:31

So the goal then is to bring the carbon, the co2 down from the atmosphere to 280 or 300 ish, parts per million by the year 2050. And then you would say, let’s have a party because we’re we made it!

Peter Fiekowsky  13:51

Yes.

Metta Spencer  13:52

Okay. Yeah, Oswald.

Oswald Petersen  13:55

But I want to add that it’s not only co2, Currently, the global warming, that we get this year 40% of that additional global warming we get is not from co2 but from methane and other global greenhouse gases. And therefore, we cannot only look at co2. It is a very common mistake. We have to look at all greenhouse gases. There is methane, very important. There’s ozone, and there’s many others. I’m sure Franz knows many more. But just concentrating on the four most important, there’s one that is actually cooling the climate.  that is SO2 — sulfur-dioxide. And we have to really look at a whole bunch of GHGs, or greenhouse gases,  to get a clear view on what is to be done. And that is restore the green house gases to their previous levels, and in that, if you formulate it like that, but then I’m with you, but not only co2.

Metta Spencer  15:09

Can I ask Franz your point of view?

Franz Oeste  15:13

My point is, I look on the ocean and the sea. The ocean surface is warming, the warm climate. The  climate is this year is very warm; for instance, in Germany now, we have more than 20 Celsius per day. That’s totally unusual, these high temperatures shortly before November. So, the ocean is warmed at the surface and that makes stratification and this stratification keeps the exchange between deep ocean water, and which is good when fertilized with the ocean surface where the algae and the plankton live. They get not enough nutrition and so, they cannot work as they should. And they are the main things to get the co2 into the ocean and into the sediments at last. And if you see the glaciers when they come to the oceansides in the Antartica or in Greenland, they they are not thawing alone from above, but the ocean water which is thawing these ice sheets from below and that’s the main problem. We must cool the climate as to restore the ocean too. These problems must be seen in coordination. We looked at how nature did this and in the glacier times there had been doubt times which suddenly abruptly stopped warming and then the cooling again came. The ice cores taken in Greenland and in Antarctica showed there were times when the dust in the atmosphere had been very, very dense. You know, in the cold times in the ice ages, the food for loess layers had been produced. It was all the dust which came from the atmosphere during this time. And every time when we had this dust in the atmosphere, the ice cores showed that co2 and methane went down. So there is a mechanism which did this. The dust has some ingredients which can reduce co2 and methane, both.

Metta Spencer  19:35

Aha! I see where you’re going! I couldn’t see what you’re driving at for a minute. What’s this dust all about? You’re getting at it. This dust must have had iron salts in it. Is that it?

Franz Oeste  19:49

Yes, the iron! The same iron.

Metta Spencer  19:52

I thought you figured it out okay. Yeah.

Franz Oeste  19:54

 — yeah, the iron, and when it falls into the ocean, it feeds the phytoplankton and this takes co2 from the air into the ocean. And then there is another chemical mechanism of this iron, and that is sulfur. You know, phytoplankton produce chemical like dimethysulfide. This dimethysulfide is emitted in air over the ocean and is oxidized by the natural mechanisms of the air. And what is the end product of that? It’s sulphuric acid. This sulphuric acid makes very tiny droplets lower than 0.1 micrometer. And these tiny droplets make our cloud condensation nuclei everywhere. You can see it even today where you have a greenish ocean with plankton in it, you find also much more clouds on the ocean, which is produced by this Dimethysulfide, sulfuric acid mechanism and produces not only clouds, but the surface of these clouds are whiter than a cloud.  And these white clouds act as, increase the albedo of the earth — the sunshines on them. These white clouds reflect the light back into the space. So you know, below every cloud in summertime it’s much cooler than in the sunshine. That’s the effect.

Metta Spencer  22:33

This is fascinating now. So what you’re doing is you’re tying together two of the different mechanisms of cooling the planet. One has to do with the production of the aerosol iron, which knocks out the methane, right?

Franz Oeste  22:50

Yes.

Metta Spencer  22:50

And then you’re tying this to the production of the growth of phytoplankton in the ocean, and the production of sulfuric acid, which brightens the cloud so that we have two different mechanisms that are working together or somehow working in opposite directions.. I don’t know how it’s working. But it sounds like you’ve tied together two things that I didn’t realize were connected at all.

Franz Oeste  23:23

 I forgot. We must mention also how does this dust reduce methane! Sure. That part I knew we were going to talk about. I didn’t know you’re going to tie them together. You know this sulphuric acid reacts also in the air over the ocean with a salt [haze?] particles which are there. Yes, it changes them, these particles from sea salt into sulfate and the hydrochloric acid is evaporated from them. And this hydrochloric acid reacts with mineral dust particles and changes the iron of the mineral dust particles into iron’s [weaker ide?]. And this iron’s [weaker ide?] is very sensitive to sun radiation. This is reduced. It goes from iron 3 to iron 2. It’s “chemical reduced,” we say, and this reduction needs an electron and iron takes this electron from the nearby chloride iron from iron3 chloride, so it produces iron 2 chloride. And this frees iron atomic chlorine and atomic chlorine is known to be 16 times at least 16 times more active than the O H radical, which in the atmosphere is the main oxidant of methane and other organics, which is in the atmosphere. So, this dust produces by this chemical way, methane depletion and iron fertilization in the ocean. And so, we get methane depleted and also co2 absorbed in the ocean.

Metta Spencer  25:47

So, the same chemical reaction knocks out the methane and fertilizers the plants! Hot diggety!

Franz Oeste  26:07

Uh huh. The phytoplankton itself is a motor of this action.

Metta Spencer  26:15

Thank you! Oswald, I know you were a moment ago just eager to speak. What was on your mind then?

Oswald Petersen  26:20

I said three. You already mentioned two Franz did. That was methane plus the clouds that were generated. But there’s also a third one. And that is that the fact that this phytoplankton, when it grows, it binds co2. So so we have really the three effects here with one, with one  action. We do one action — insert ISA  into the atmosphere, and we get three effects. That is methane depletion, co2 decreased, and we get additional cloud production through the…

Metta Spencer  26:22

Brilliant? Oh, God had his thinking cap on that day when he invented that. Now let’s see — tell me though, are there any downsides to this? Because if people watching this, the first thing they’re going to say is Yeah, but there’s going to be something unexpected consequences that you hadn’t planned for, and it’s going to kill us! What do you think would be any of the potentially negative consequences of doing this? By the way,  we should say what we’re doing. The chemical reaction that you’re noting here is something that can be produced and done. We could get more of this iron dust and spray it around where there’s methane, and knock out the methane and fertilize the plankton and create clouds. It was wonderful. That’s a strategy or a tactic or mechanism. But then people are going to say, Aha, I am scared to do anything like that. So what what might go wrong?

Oswald Petersen  28:09

Let me say two things. First, this process happens now. It’s not a new process. It’s not something we introduce. It’s happening now. It is a natural process that happens all the time, millions of years. It’s not something new that we introduced in the atmosphere. No, it is already happening all the time. And we can observe it in nature without adding anything, we can just observe it, we can see it happen, we can see that it is a natural process. And that natural process is not harmful. In the opposite; it’s very important for us that this process happens. All we do is we suggest is to enhance atmospheric methane oxidation. Atmospheric methane oxidation happens all the time and we only enhance it. We add a catalyzer — that is FeCO3. That again, already exists in the atmosphere, it’s not a new substance, but we make more of it; we add some more and then that process will happen faster. So we will accelerate the oxidation. And that is not harmful because we have much more methane in the atmosphere, we have two and a half times more methane in the atmosphere than we used to have. So therefore it is a good idea to make that methane disappear faster, because then we go back to the normal level that we had before. Basically, we are only giving the answer to the fact that we have added all this methane to the atmosphere. So the bad thing that you say — it has already happened. It is already happening. That is the fact that there is so much methane in the atmosphere. That is the bad thing.

Franz Oeste  30:11

What I wanted to say there is another greenhouse gas — the tropospheric ozone, The ozone in the stratosphere is very helpful because the sun radiation UVB  is blocked by this. But tropospheric ozone is not so healthy. It comes from where much traffic happens and so on. And this is also depleted by iron 3 chloride — by this this mechanism. But …

Peter Fiekowsky  30:58

If I can add just a explicit answer to Metta’s question of what unexpected consequences might happen. When the iron fertilization was tested 10 years ago, there were several unexpected outcomes. One was that the species of salmon that they were hoping ate the phytoplankton and grew was a different species than the one they had expected. So just the dynamics of the ocean were different. I forgot which one is which, but they ended up growing a lot of pink salmon. I think they wanted coho. And the other consequence that was unexpected was birth of new orca whales. There hadn’t been any orca whales born for about nine years until then. And the orca whales have a two year gestation. And sure enough, two years later, there are about seven whales born, presumably because they had food. And so the female whales’ bodies knew that it was safe to give birth because there was food. Unfortunately, it was just food that one year. And I don’t know how many of the young, young whales actually survived. But most of us who I think would consider that good consequences, not bad consequences. And to this time, no one has ever described any actual bad consequences. And so the healthier fish, healthier whales is good. People fear that if you produce more phytoplankton, that that could be a bad algae bloom. And those do happen, of course, where you have rivers and estuaries, and you have a lot of nutrients, and then you can get dead zones. That never happens in the deep ocean. That is to say, it’s never been reported. And no scientists who understand the ocean expect that it will happen in reality, so that’s a good sign. Now, one thing people worry about, if you get phytoplankton growth, if you get any kind of a healthy ocean, as the phytoplankton and fish grow near the surface, when they die and fall into the deep ocean, when they decompose, that will suck oxygen out of the deep ocean, which is already oxygen depleted. So since the beginning of time, that’s always been the case. And if you if you grow more organic matter at the surface, you will have a bit more oxygen depletion underneath. But the only way to have less oxygen depletion underneath is to kill the surface, which unfortunately we’re doing with our pollution and our climate change, but recovering that is going to improve  the health of the ocean surface, and it will consequently deplete oxygen in the depths.

Metta Spencer  34:25

I’m glad you mentioned that because that was one of the few things that had sort of bothered me, but I thought it was too complicated to bring up here. But there I’ve had shows with Peter Ward and Paul Werbos about  extinction. phenomena and  previous extinction phenomena, like the Permian, I believe, several of them may have been caused by the emission of hydrogen sulfide from the ocean, which was, according to this one account I heard, was caused by stratification of the ocean, so that the different levels of the ocean have different contents. And when in a very stratified ocean, when biological products fall to the bottom of the ocean, they can create hydrogen sulfide there, which then could be lethal. And apparently, that was the thing that killed off 95% of all living creatures. So we want to watch out for that. But I’m also glad that you mentioned the whales, because one of the things that we’ve done that’s really exacerbated the stratification of the ocean is kill all the whales. Whales go up and down all the time, and they’re stirring up the ocean. And there were hundreds of them, and now they’re many, many less. So if we could bring back a whole bunch of whales, that’s going to help offset the tendency for ocean stratification, which would be the one condition that makes what you’ve mentioned more risky. Am I right? Or not?

Peter Fiekowsky  36:11

Yes.

Metta Spencer  36:12

My scientific knowledge is very thin but…

Peter Fiekowsky  36:14

Go ahead Franz.

Franz Oeste  36:18

I wanted to tell us of the lamp lantern fish, Lantern fish go up and down in the ocean. And they are the hugest mass of fish. Most fish are lantern fish and they go daily up and down a 1000 meters.

Metta Spencer  36:42

Really?

Franz Oeste  36:43

And they eat in the night the phytoplanktons there. But if if the phytoplankton  is reduced, you have less lantern fish and so this up and down, which also moves the fertilizer from the depths into the surface, this also would would be reduced. Not only the whales, but also other kinds of zooplankton makes these up and down to get away from their predators. What I wanted to say the fertilization, which had been done by solutions of iron sulfate and so on, which put from ships into the ocean, that is not the same as this raining down of iron 3 chlorides into the ocean. We have less than one milligram per square meter a day so the the fertilization effect is a very low effect.   And we don’t do it on land because it helps not so much, we do it away from the coasts in the in the ocean deserts where we have been not much green phytoplankton. There the ocean is totally blue without much phytoplankton.

Metta Spencer  39:06

We had a guy Brian von Herzen on, talking about raising seaweed in farms in what turns out to be large areas of the oceans, which he calls deserts because they lack sufficient iron to nourish the fish and so on. So by putting kelp and other seaweed farms out there, you can create habitat for a whole lot more fish than we’re able to remove for food at present. Right? So this phytoplankton would have some of the same effects — creating more food for fish right?

Franz Oeste  39:50

Surely, yes, that’s fine. And this macro algae, breeding and farming, what is done by Brian von Herzen, it falls down to the ocean floor much faster and doesn’t oxidize meanwhile. The phytoplankton are so tiny are very tiny particles; most of them oxidize, but it is a carbon which is re-oxidized in the depths. It may come back in 1000 years. It lasts very long if it comes back to the surface, but Phytoplankton is the top tip of the food chain, and it feeds many other species in the ocean. At last also the whales, which go up and down. And these species also will die, they live not forever. They fall down on the ocean ground and bring the carbon into the sediment also.

Metta Spencer  41:24

Yeah, yeah, one of the other things that I want to explore because I’ve been very concerned about the Arctic and the methane deposits at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. Under, it’s sort of held down by a layer of permafrost, especially on the shelves of the ocean of the Arctic. And we know that there are enormous deposits of methane under there, which every now and then get perforated and these gases come up. And it’s really a problem there now, but it can become a catastrophe if a huge explosion takes place because the melting permafrost enables something to blow up. And we don’t know what the odds are. But it would be probablly the end of life on the planet, if all of that came up in one big burst. So the idea that, you know, keeps me awake at night is: what if something like that happens, and we have absolutely no way of repairing the situation once a terrible burst of that kind occurs. But then you know, what Peter mentioned or something came out of this conversation was that you could use this iron salt aerosol dust and fly over the big burst of methane and scatter a huge amount of it and knock out the methane that way. So it could be potentially a solution to a catastrophic explosion of methane. Is that Is that crazy or not? I see Oswald…

Peter Fiekowsky  43:05

Let me clarify, because you got a detail wrong there.  So the methane burst, a fatal methane burst, a massive methane burst could happen and we don’t know of course that’s the last time our planet lost its polar ice cap, the sea ice, that’s the last time that happened and we did get a massive burst, which extincted about a third of the species. So that would be very bad. And we don’t have any proof that that won’t happen again. So as a parent and a grandparent, I really want an insurance policy. So then the insurance policy is, if the methane does come out, can we oxidize it fast enough so that perhaps we lose one harvest? Maybe two, but not not eight? If we lose eight consequential harvest because the planet got so hot,  that could be the end of our civilization. One harvest? Those kinds of things happen in our civilization. And iron salt aerosol, you would actually just do it in the sunny areas. As Franz said, it’s activated by light from the sun. And so you would do it in dry sunny areas over the ocean. And there are quite a few of those areas. There’s enough wind in the atmosphere that it’ll blow the methane around so there’s no need to apply the iron salt aerosol over where it comes out. The wind will mix it and it’s free.

Metta Spencer  43:10

Okay.  Okay, now you say you corrected my mistake. Where did I misinform?

Peter Fiekowsky  44:57

Oh, you would apply the iron salt aerosol in sunny areas, not in the Arctic where the methane is coming out because the Arctic tends…

Metta Spencer  45:09

You could do it anywhere on the planet as long as it’s over water where it is sunny?

Peter Fiekowsky  45:15

Yes.

Metta Spencer  45:16

Okay thank you.

Franz Oeste  45:17

Can, excuse, can. 

Peter Fiekowsky  45:21

Go ahead.

Franz Oeste  45:23

You know, iron makes loess dust brown. It colors the {inaudible] dust. If you do it too close to the ice sheets, it will color the ice sheets brown. That’s what happened also in the glacier times, there became more and more dust in the atmosphere became more and more and colored the ice sheets brown. And at last these albedo reductions induced the short [inaudible] times between the –

Peter Fiekowsky  46:17

That’s very good. I’ve never I’ve never heard that before, Franz. That makes perfect sense. Thank you very much.

Franz Oeste  46:24

I can give her the reference for that. It is not my idea.

Peter Fiekowsky  46:30

No but it’s one of those things that you wonder what caused the end of the ice ages and the co2 has gone down which increased the amount of dust and the amount of dust on the vast areas of ice would warm the temperature.

Franz Oeste  46:48

Yeah. And therefore we created also solutions for the ice for the oceans near the ice sheets, which use not iron [except?] enriched with a titanium dioxide. This is a very white substance and it cannot produce any coloration of the ice.

Metta Spencer  47:34

Thank you. Oswald.

Oswald Petersen  47:35

Well,  I just wanted to confirm from my personal life that here in Switzerland, we often have Sahara dust coming over the Alps. And then the snow gets really red. It’s not white anymore. That happens here every year. Then meteorologists in the TV will say okay, you will have Sahara dust. You can really see it. It’s very red. And then for a couple of days it’s red and then maybe there’s more snow coming then it’s gone again. So it’s not very long lasting, but in the Arctic it might be all winter because maybe it doesn’t snow anymore. And then a full season of not white but yeah brownish ice or snow cover.

Metta Spencer  48:22

Yes, Franz?

Franz Oeste  48:25

You mentioned the Permian extinction. It’s in combination, it happened in the combination with the Siberian traps — and there were huge volcanic eruptions of basaltic lava. They produced and they came through the layers of coal and emitted from the coal, lots of methane and co2 and so on. And additionally they produced produce large amounts of ash. And this ash is known to be a very intense fertilizer for the ocean. And if you if you look at the Icelandic glaciers, or even the Greenland ice sheet there you’ll see black layers in these ice sheets from these volcanic ash. And this ash produces surely phytoplankton blooms, which may have produced lots of organic carbon in the ocean, which beecame, took the oxygen out of the ocean, and also used sulfate. You know, there are bacteria which use sulfate instead of oxygen. And this sulfate then becomes reduced to H2S. This, you know this gas you mentioned that Ward —

Peter Fiekowsky  50:38

I need to go. So just want to say thank you, and we’ll talk to you later.

Metta Spencer  50:42

Thank you so much, Peter. Good to see you. And this H2S makes a toxic ocean and this depletion, what you said. Uh huh. Hydrogen sulfide. Yeah, Oswald,yes. And then I want to I want us to get down to talking about the practicalities of what your project would involve, you know, because you actually want to do something. But speak first, and then we’ll get to that.

Oswald Petersen  51:14

I just wanted to add one thing regarding the risks, because you had asked for the risks. And of course, since we would introduce ISA into the atmosphere, we cannot be 100% sure of what will happen. Because it’s a new thing. And therefore we will have to observe it. But if you look at our plants, it is a steady growth, which we propose over 20 years. So we will start small and we will add and add and add. And during those years, we can observe what happens. So we are not like coming with a big bang. Suddenly we do something and then we will look what will happen. But we’ll introduce it over many, many years. And there we can observe exactly what implications it has. And if there was any risk, we can still stop it at any time. So there is, of course, no absolutely risk-free management of the climate. I always use this word “global climate management,” because that’s what we’ll have to do. And there is no risk-free options. But there’s certainly one very risky option and that is not doing anything.

Metta Spencer  52:36

Exactly. Whatever we do is much more likely to be helpful than what we know we’ve got coming at us. Okay, look, please explain to me what you would like to accomplish. I mean, what can you do within the next five years that would set us on a course of being able to actually use this iron salt method as a way of reducing the methane in the atmosphere now.

Oswald Petersen  53:10

Okay, so if we had the finance (that’s the problem) if we had the finance, we could, within one and a half years built a prototype that can actually show in a very small scale, how this machine works, right? It’s a small disperser. We will place this disperser on an existing oil rig because it has a tower, we just use that and show how we can disperse our catalyzer into the atmosphere. Of course, this will be a machine that is 1000 times smaller than the actual machine that we will want to pose into the ocean. However, it will be big enough to show the effect. Right? So it’s like a public demonstration. At first, it’s kind of the trial version, and then we will try to optimize it and all the technicians will work on it and get it all optimized. And then we will do a field test, which means that we will invite the public to see that it actually removes methane from the atmosphere. Once we have done that, it’s very small scale. It’s about as big as a truck engine, I always say it’s about as risky as running a truck engine on an oil platform. So it’s not risky at all. But of course the big machine is [thousands of truck engines] so that’s a bit higher. That’s a bit more. But the small one will already be able to show – okay, that is FeCO3, maybe a couple of kilograms dispersed in the atmosphere – and we can show that the methane is actually reduced in a very small scale. So that will take about two years. And then once we’ve done that, and it’s all approved, and we’ve gone through all the necessary steps and all the necessary permission and (oh, it’s very, very complex) then we can actually build one of these machines. We want to put 40 into the ocean, but we would build one,

Metta Spencer  55:19

Forty of them?

Oswald Petersen  55:20

Forty, yes, that’s our idea. That’s what we need to get methane out of the atmosphere. And if we have one that cost $200 million, so that’s not $2 million, but $200 million, that would be custom built. It would not be just an oil platform but would be custom built for that purpose but be 400 meter high –  quite a big building on the ocean that can float, so you can pull it out into the ocean, place it exactly on the right spot where we need it in the subtropic oceans, where it’s really hot and windy, because we need wind for dispersion. And we need heat for the process to happen, as we already pointed out. And then we have the first what we call methane-removal plant MRP — out in the ocean, and then we can double that. And then we can build 40 of them. So that will take twenty years.

Metta Spencer  56:18

If you had forty of them and you start off small. You’re using the 40 but you’re not dispersing so much of the dust right away. But gradually, year by year, you spray more of the dust out into the atmosphere, right? And over what period of time could you project removing what amount of the methane? And how much effect would that have on global warming? People are going to say, Well, what do we get for our dollars? How much result will we expect to achieve by building these things, and you need to be persuasive that you can accomplish something.

Oswald Petersen  57:01

It’s really very simple. Methane produces 0.5 degrees of warming. Right. So that’s the additional methane that we have produced since 1850. So we are limited, we don’t want to go under the natural level. So we only want to go back to the natural or the pre-industrial level. Right? So that’s potential, there’s no more than 0.5 degrees, because that’s all the methane. We can reduce it to the pre-industrial level, then we have 0.5 degrees. Now that can be done by either emission reduction, that means we we just stop putting more methane into the atmosphere. That’s hopefully, that’s the best way. And there is, you know, the global methane pledge signed by all the big leaders to reduce methane. So hopefully that will be done, plus methane reduction with our ISA. So we say probably, hopefully, the methane emission will do half the job, and we do the other half. Potentially, we can also do the whole job. It’s not limited. We just need more methane removal plants to do the full job. But hopefully, emission reduction will work and therefore we don’t need to do the whole job.

Metta Spencer  58:22

Sometimes people estimate how much per tonne of co2 reduction something costs, and then you get things estimated as $100 to $200 per tonne.

Oswald Petersen  58:22

That’s right.

Metta Spencer  58:24

What kind of, if you were trying to turn it into costs, what kind of estimate ….

Oswald Petersen  58:45

Yeah, we estimate that to be to around $2 per tonne of co2 equivalent. Now, we think in methane so of course, we think in how many dollars per tonne of methane, but then you have to convert it into co2 equivalent because everybody talks about co2 equivalent, and we are not talking about the co2, we are talking about the methane. Therefore, you have to say how much methane is equivalent to the co2.

Metta Spencer  59:16

Wait. We will just clarify for people because we’ve never made that explicit. When you knock out a methane molecule, what you’re doing, ultimately is turning it into co2 and water, right? Now the co2 is not anything we want. And we’d love to get rid of that, for sure. That’s what we mostly focus on. But we’d sure prefer having a co2 molecule rather than having a methane molecule because the methane is 20 or 30 times worse as far as greenhouse gas, right? So we are not getting rid of co2. We’re actually increasing it a little bit, but it’s a whole better deal than it would be.  Am I right?

Oswald Petersen  59:24

Exactly right.

Metta Spencer  59:28

You know that it also put away the co2 when it falls in the ocean by the next rain? Okay.

Franz Oeste  1:00:12

Then that takes the co2 also, which it had produced before –

Oswald Petersen  1:00:21

The fact that we have three effects. But if we concentrate on the methane, if you only look at the methane, then of course, there’s co2 coming out of the methane because methane is converted into co2 and water, as you have said, but still methane is about 120 times more warming than co2. The only reason why we always talk about it being only 25 times is because methane naturally oxidizes anyway, right? So all we do is shorten its lifespan, right? And therefore if we look at 100 years, then in those 100 years, after 12 years, the methane would have oxidized anyway. Right. So now, if we shorten the lifespan by six years, for example, we have it, then we have six years without methane, out of those 100 years. So therefore, the calculation is a bit different, and that’s what they call the “global warming power.” And the most conservative numbers that you find is 25. So that means that 25 tonnes of co2 are equivalent to one tonne of methane. And that’s what the IPCC uses. That’s what all the scientists use. And other people say it’s more but we always take the most conservative numbers, okay. 25 years.

Metta Spencer  1:01:47

Okay. Listen I want you to name,  if people are interested in your project and want to find out more.

Oswald Petersen  1:01:54

Yeah, our website is called “www.AMR. Earth” and I will show a little picture. That is a little graph that shows the process: Enhance Atmospheric Methane Oxidation. You see all the methane being produced by cows and by volcanoes and by some.

Metta Spencer  1:02:21

Up at the top is the link, I’ll put that up.

Oswald Petersen  1:02:25

Here’s our website, AMR.Earth. There you’ll find many pages.

Metta Spencer  1:02:30

Let’s hope many people all get enthusiastic about it, because I am. Okay, thank you both very much.

Oswald Petersen  1:02:39

Thanks a lot. Bye bye.

Franz Oeste  1:02:41

Goodbye. Goodbye, Oswald.

Metta Spencer  1:02:44

Project save the world produces these shows, and this is episode 516. You can watch them or listen to them as audio podcasts on our website tosavetheworld.ca you can share information there to about six global issues.  To find a particular talk show and or its title or episode number in the search bar with a name of one of the guest speakers. Project save the world also produces a quarterly online publication peace magazine. You can subscribe for $20 Canadian per year. Just go to press reader.com on your browser. And in the search bar. Enter the word peace. You’ll see buttons to click to subscribe.