Franz Oeste, Clive Elsworth, and Peter Fiekowsky are working on several climate change reduction experiments that arose from the study of Ocean Iron Fertilization. They would not use iron salt aerosols in the Arctic, for example, but titanium, since it is white and does not discolor the ice and snow and interfere with the planet-cooling albedo effect. Stephen Salter is developing nozzles and specific plans for marine cloud brightening in Hudson Bay. The purpose of this forum was to consider whether the two innovations could be explored at the same time, both on Hudson Bay. This does look feasible. However, even with both cooling mechanisms operating simultaneously, it is unlikely that they can cool Hudson Bay enough to retain ice in the summer. We discuss whether the demonstration of ice retention is a necessary condition for persuading the Canadian government to pay for such projects. For the video, audio podcast, transcript and comments: https://tosavetheworld.ca/episode-553-two-experiments-at-once.
Guests:
Franz Oeste
Clive Elsworth
Peter Fiekowsky
Stephen Salter
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
Hudson Bay, methane, ice, spray, titanium, cloud, experiment, carbon, chlorine, iron, people, black, arctic, stratosphere, project, Franz, oxidize, convince, Stephen, aerosol
SPEAKERS
Peter Fiekowsky, Adele Buckley, Stephen Salter, Franz Oeste, Metta Spencer, Clive Elsworth
SUMMARY
The conversation discusses the various methods proposed to cool the Arctic, starting with experiments on Hudson Bay. Peter Fiekowsky notes that we can expect to see zero sea ice in the Arctic by the summer of about 2040. The last time that happened was 50 million years ago and there was a big burst of methane that came out of the melting permafrost under the Arctic Ocean. We don’t know whether that will happen again, so we need to take preventive measures now.
Unfortunately for our experiment, the Hudson Bay is already warm and therefore using sea-water spray may not be effective in whitening the clouds to reflect light and cool the area.
Metta Spencer is therefore interested in possibly adding a study of ocean iron fertilization (OIF) to the research on marine cloud brightening in Canada’s north. OIF is a natural process that has been used by nature before ice ages to cool the planet, and it involves spraying iron salt aerosols into the air, which reacts with sea salt to produce hydrogen chloride and Iron III Chloride. The Iron III Chloride then releases chlorine atoms, which are effective at oxidizing and removing methane from the atmosphere, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to global warming.
Using iron salt aerosols over the Arctic would darken the ice and reduce the albedo effect, and therefore Franz Oeste and others are proposing to use a pure white alternative in the form of titanium dioxide, which, like iron, is photosensitive. It produces OH radicals instead of chlorine atoms, but these OH radicals produce chlorine atoms, and therefore it acts like iron. It will have the same effect as iron salt aerosols but will not have color the snow and ice and counteract the albedo.
Oeste also discusses black carbon and its impact on the environment. Black carbon absorbs sunlight, which can cause adjacent areas to become warmer and contribute to global warming. Black carbon also absorbs halogens, which are known to destroy the ozone layer, and therefore, preventing black carbon from migrating to the Arctic and falling on the ice is a crucial aspect of cooling the Arctic.
Black carbon, which comes from various combustion processes like wildfires, ship engines, and power stations, gets into the stratosphere and settles in the Arctic, leaving black soot on the surfaces, which causes the Arctic to heat up faster than the global average. To solve this, Oeste proposes to color the black carbon particles with titanium, which will change them from black to yellow. This requires only a small amount of titanium and operates as an oxidative process. The process uses titanium over and over as a catalyst which is powered by sunshine. It doesn’t enter the stratosphere but stays in the troposphere where it also reduces methane.
The panelists discuss how to apply this process to ships and factories emitting black carbon, and how it can help in removing methane from the air, thereby creating a cooling effect. They also mention that iron salts can be used instead of titanium to color the black carbon particles everywhere except the ice-covered areas; this will be cheaper.
The conversation then returns to marine cloud brightening over Hudson Bay, where the proposal to Pugwash is to set up four stations along the shore with wind turbines to spray seawater into the clouds, creating brighter clouds that will help cool the area. However, the panelists acknowledge that this may not be enough and that it may take several years to implement. They consider combining this research with spraying titanium over the Hudson Bay or the region to knock out some of the methane coming from the south shore, which is one of the largest wetlands in the world. The team agrees that the two operations can complement each other. Salter would not want anyone else doing other experiments in the same place at the same time, but Hudson Bay is huge, so they can work in the summer but in different areas. Salter would want to do his experiments between May and August and could complete it in two years.
It is important to consider in advance any possible side effects of the experiments. It has been speculated that marine cloud brightening could cause floods in Africa and Pakistan. However, Salter said that the project he is proposing for Hudson’s Bay would not have any such effects in those areas. He could produce the nozzles and have a land base ready in two years if there is money for it. He would like to have about 100 spray nozzles going for a period of time. He has calculated that about 100 spraying vessels would be needed to freeze the whole Arctic Ocean
Metta Spencer worries that, while the images produced by Salter’s experiment may convince those who understand the science, it would be necessary to convince policymakers that the experiment would have real-world benefits, such as creating jobs or helping the livelihoods of Indigenous people living in the area. She believes that no one in government is likely to support this as just a research project unless it is likely to actually keep at least one square mile of ice frozen in the summertime. It would be acceptable to combine several different technological innovations to do this, but it seems unlikely that this can be done in Hudson Bay just with Salter’s experiment.
Salter believes that it would be sufficient just to show a change in cloud brightness. Spencer disagrees. Salter replies that we could put thermometers into the sea and show a reduction in sea surface temperature. But that’s a lot more expensive to do than to produce photographs from a satellite, which is what he intends to do. The water will be a lot cooler, but it probably won’t be frozen.
Again, Spencer insists that the real criterion of success is to restore summer ice, which will be beneficial for the Indigenous people who live in that region. The group discusses various ways to increase ice formation, such as marine cloud brightening, iron salt aerosols, and spraying water over winter ice to thicken it. Another possibility is to thin the cirrus clouds in the winter to allow some of the earth’s heat to escape. However, there is skepticism about the practicality and efficacy of these methods.
Spencer says that the the indigenous communities in the area must consent before any research can occur, and the elders of these groups may be convinced if we can create some ice, but probably not otherwise.
The panelists consider creating a small patch of ice in James Bay, which might be easier than Hudson Bay. They discuss the need for scientists to be involved in the project and the potential for private investment. The conversation ends with the group acknowledging the difficulties and complexities of the project and hoping for a positive response from the scientific community and investors.
The following 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, I’m Metta Spencer and it’s great to be back with my old friends, it feels like we’re all old friends, because we’ve done shows, and forums together several times already about a particular project that the Canadian Pugwash group is investigating. And, and that is the possibility of chilling Hudson Bay, possibly even refreezing it so to stay warm in the summer, if we could. I say, frozen in the summer. So there are various possibilities for attempting such a thing and we’ve been investing one already. The Stephen Salter’s favorite project, marine cloud brightening.
Stephen Salter 00:48
It’s due to John Latham not me, I’m just the engineer, John Latham. Okay. And Sean Twome are the people who must always
Metta Spencer 00:56
And you always give credit to them in that is very honorable of you. But I, the face I see repeatedly is Stephen Salter, so it’s always great, that you’re here. And the idea there is that we would spray a sea water, which would somehow why in a very long chain of events, whiten the clouds and therefore reflect more light back into space and, and save a little bit of the cooling underneath the clouds. So that’s the approach that we started with. But we found there’s a possibility that it might not cover it enough, especially since the Hudson Bay is already pretty warm. And we, you know, can we refreeze it? I don’t know. And, and it’s all going to be a big experiment to see. But there are other ways of doing things. So maybe we could combine two or three of the other options, and with using them all, have quite a significant impact on the temperature of the water and the ice. So that’s the thing I want to explore a little bit today. And so I’m bringing in other friends who have already talked separately about their proposals, which would be I guess, ocean iron fertilization. That was the original idea. But there are a number of variants on that idea today. So I don’t think that term works. In fact, I hope you guys will come up with a snappier title than that silly acronym. OIF, because I myself had to keep looking it up and finding out what exactly that stands for. And it’s very off putting, we need a, we need a good brand for your proposal. So think about something really catchy. So I’m going to introduce, I’ve already said hello to Stephen Salter. But the the three fellas who are most engaged with this, the spin offs of the ocean iron fertilization idea, are Franz Oeste, who is in, in Germany. He’s a physic chemical engineer, a Clive Ellsworth, who is a computer software professional in London. But he is very much involved with climate change issues and founded the Citizens Climate Lobby in UK, and Peter Fiekowsky, who’s an engineer and philanthropist and all around good guy. He is the author of Climate Restoration, which is my favorite book of the year, if not the decade. And if you have to hold it up again, Peter, if you have it, and I want everybody to read this book. There you go. This beautiful
Peter Fiekowsky 03:50
Climate restoration, the only future that will sustain the human race.
Metta Spencer 03:54
Exactly.
Peter Fiekowsky 03:55
It will make you smile, and make your children smile.
Metta Spencer 04:00
That’s wonderful. All right, let’s get started. And I think you’re a good one to kick off. Because I think you you really are good at explaining this whole set of oh here comes Adele Buckley, bless her heart, it’s good to have a Pugwashites among us. And please explain this, all of the variants of this notion of ocean iron fertilization, and how we might apply it in Hudson Bay, if at all possible.
Peter Fiekowsky 04:20
Welcome to everyone who’s listening, to get the terminology straight here. Overall, we’re looking at climate restoration, which is getting restoring the climate to levels that humans have actually survived. And so without getting very scientific, we just know that as parents we want to get the climate back to something that are that we’re that we’re humans have survived and we’re confident our grandchildren will survive. So that’s the overall goal, then getting the co2 levels back down is a separate issue that we’re not discussing today. And the ocean iron fertilization you referred to, is the method that nature uses before ice ages. So we know that it works. Nature has done it 10 times, we know how nature does it. And the only reason we’re not doing it is climate restoration isn’t yet on the on the table, right? The UN back in 1990 said we have to stabilize greenhouse gas levels, and it didn’t occur to them 32 years ago, that we would actually have to restore them first. And so because it’s not on the table, it’s not being funded and not being done. And that’s a different story for a different week.
Metta Spencer 05:54
Can you give us a capsule? Because this thing has had so many iterations, you start off with the idea of spraying iron particles, or finding dust being blown across the Atlantic, from Africa to Brazil?
Peter Fiekowsky 06:12
Yeah.
Metta Spencer 06:12
And all of the chemical effects that go with that, and then there are many implications where you start using it in different contexts and different kinds of aerosols instead of iron. And I am particularly interested in it, why don’t you explain the basic idea? And then how it would have to be changed to be appropriate for an arctic environment that’s white?
Peter Fiekowsky 06:42
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Okay, good. So, as I said, first, we want to restore the climate. Second is we know how to do it. We know how nature does it, it’s not difficult, we just need to change the context. And now we get down into the nitty gritty of what do we need to do. And the two critical things which has the Clive and Stephen and Franz and me here, is, there’s the cooling the planet, that actually reflecting more sunlight out, which doesn’t affect the chemistry at all, but does cool the planet, then there’s also methane removal. And methane is really important for two reasons, two very important reasons. One is, it’s a very, even though it’s, it’s a very potent greenhouse gas, it produces about a half or a third, a third of the warming on our planet right now. So if we can oxidize it, if we can reduce the level by half, then we can almost end climate global warming, just from that cooling. And that seems to be eminently doable. That’s really thanks to Franz and the work that he’s done. And along with colleagues, including Clive. So that’s using methane to cool. The other thing that’s critical Metta, about methane is our planet, of course, is warming and the polar ice cap is, is being lost. We’ve lost 80-85% of the Arctic sea ice in the last 40 years or so. And an 80%. And we’re headed straight to zero sea ice in the summer in 2040. The way there’s 2030 or 2045, we don’t know but probably 2040. So the last time that happened was 50 million years ago. And there was a big burst of methane that came out of the melting permafrost under the Arctic Ocean. And most scientists figure that it’s not likely, you know, it is probably less than 1% chance that that’ll happen a second time. On the other hand is a lot we don’t know. And we do know that the last two times that our Earth lost the polar ice cap, we got did get a big methane burst and huge extinction events. So it makes a lot of sense to protect ourselves and be able to oxidize that methane before we go extinct.
Metta Spencer 09:16
I know that we have two different approaches to cooling Hudson Bay. And we’ve already explored marine cloud brightening a number of times, we’ve also talked about the possibility of using iron to, to oxidize methane, and that would reduce global warming. And have and also do things like feed the phytoplankton, which have an additional benefit and and also create gases that would like whiten in the clouds. So some of these things have triple purpose functions but the problem is, you can’t do all of these things in the Arctic, because you don’t want to run your albedo effect. And if if Clive will explain what you folks are working on in your secret lab to find out to find an alternative to iron and why that is necessary, I think we will be able to make begin making our comparisons.
Clive Elsworth 10:27
Okay. Well, let’s just say that I mean iron salt aerosol is, is ferric chloride is what we’re talking about iron three chloride. And this is produced naturally from the iron content of mineral particles. The mineral particles, they tend to be oxides, iron oxide, and over the ocean, there’s, we have phytoplankton in the ocean, they give off the smell of the sea. It’s called dimethyl. sulfide. It, it actually oxidizes in the air to produce sulfuric acid aerosols. Sounds scary, but that’s the natural world. And this is the main, these are the particles that nucleate clouds most of the clouds over the ocean itself, sulfuric acid aerosol, reacts with sea salt to produce, you know, we’ll just say hydrogen chloride, which is sodium sulfate and hydrogen chloride. Now HCL gas, hydrogen chloride gas, reacts with the iron oxide to make Iron three chloride. Now the thing about ions re chloride is it’s photosensitive and it responds to photon by giving off a chlorine atom, giving, so you got a lot of chlorine atoms coming from iron three chloride in the presence of sunshine. The main thing that removes methane from the EM (sic) things methane doesn’t, we know it doesn’t spontaneously combust. If you use it in your gas stove, you have to, have to light it, don’t you? So then when it’s very diffuse in the air, it doesn’t just combust. It needs a chemical radical, kind of hit it and oxidize it. Mostly how this happens is with the hydroxyl radical OH radicals. And these are produced naturally in the troposphere, again from the action of sunlight. But the interesting thing about chlorine atoms, chlorine, we normally think of it as a chlorine molecule co2, but chlorine atom on its own, is much more reactive than a chlorine molecule. And it’s reactive enough to oxidize methane molecule. Same kind of way that RH radicals do, just that they does it 16 times faster, 16 times faster in dry air. And in humid, very humid air, OH radicals tend to get absorbed into sort of water droplets. And you know, that gets taken away by the humidity, but the chlorine carries on. So it can be as as much as 50, 250 times more effective at oxidizing and removing methane from the atmosphere as as OH radicals or the hydroxyl radical. So that’s why we think it’s pretty compelling. You know, this is a natural process. And it’s been proven in laboratories in Germany in 2014, and 15. It’s nicely written up by the by the researchers at the time. And we’ve been promoting it ever since. And, again, more open to it these days. It’s fantastic.
Metta Spencer 13:29
You have something, spray this stuff in the air where you think there’s methane, and it it knocks out the methane, turns it into water and co2?
Clive Elsworth 13:39
Yeah, methane spreads throughout the atmosphere. It’s, it’s there, throughout the atmosphere. And iron three chloride is a can be made into a vapor can be soaked, it’s called we call it sublimating. It goes directly from solid to gas to vapor, the gas. It’s not really sprayed, but it’s but it’s dispersed into the air. Yeah.
Metta Spencer 14:03
great. My understanding is that that’s not what you want to do over Hudson Bay..
Clive Elsworth 14:10
I don’t know. I don’t know what the proposal is for Hudson Bay. As regards iron salt aerosol, My friends do you know about that?
Franz Oeste 14:18
Yes, you know everywhere. Where some ice surfaces or snow surfaces are iron color’s them. For instance, Greenland. So and in the Arctic region, but we would not propose to use iron because it colors and each coloring. It makes reduction of the albedo and,…
Metta Spencer 14:57
It falls from the snow and the ice and, and then the snow and the ice don’t reflect the way they should? Because they’re darker. Yeah. What do you propose to do instead?
Franz Oeste 15:09
We take a similar reacting alternative to iron. Which is pure white and that’s titanium, titanium dioxide.
Metta Spencer 15:25
And have you experimented with this? And do you know that it would work? Does it work pretty much the same way that the iron salt does? Or does it? I mean, in that it would knock out the methane?
Franz Oeste 15:39
It’s about known in the scientific community that titanium dioxide is a similar photosensitive like iron, and it produces OH radicals instead of chlorine atoms, but these OH radicals, they produce in the in the adjacent chlorides. Also chlorine atoms, and therefore it acts like iron.
Metta Spencer 16:25
So it would have the same effect?
Franz Oeste 16:27
It would have the same effect, but don’t color their ice.
Metta Spencer 16:31
Yeah. Okay. That’s what I was fishing for, because I’ve heard your story before. Now, I think you also in the last time we talked, you mentioned something that’s a new angle on this and I don’t really understand how it relates to the other work that you’ve been doing on the iron salt and the now the titanium spraying, but you mentioned something about carbon, black carbon.
Franz Oeste 16:59
Yes
Metta Spencer 17:00
Your experiments with how to prevent black carbon from migrating to the Arctic and falling on the ice and cleaning the albedo effect by by absorbing light instead of reflecting it.
Franz Oeste 17:18
You know black carbon takes up all sunlight which is shining on it and transforms it to to heat. So, it can be 50 degrees Celsius warmer than its environment. Hence, it makes the adjacent environment warmer and it keeps an updrift which brings the black carbon high into the atmosphere until the stratosphere. And it is well known that black carbon it takes up especially all kinds of chlorine and the which, which exists in the in the environment. For instance, the organic (inaudible), cloromethane’s, bromomethanes and Euro methanes. They absorb on the xOP on the black carbon, and also other, all other even inorganic kinds of them. And they go up into the stratosphere and is better known that’s the that’s the halogens, the chlorines and iodines and bromines and so on. That they destroy the ozone layer there. So the black carbons acts as a shuttler of these substances, they shuttle them into the stratosphere and there they destroy the ozone.
Metta Spencer 19:26
Okay so how would you, your, your proposal, I don’t see the connection, how this thing about spraying iron or titanium? How is that going to affect black carbon?
Franz Oeste 19:42
So, let me, let me let me put the cycle to an end and then I will
Metta Spencer 19:50
Yeah sure finish I interrupted you sorry.
Franz Oeste 19:54
So, as you know, in the in the stratosphere and between stratosphere and equator, there is so called Brewer Dobson.
Clive Elsworth 20:06
Circulation. Movement, circulation of the, of the air. And these black carbon, which is going into the stratosphere, or gets down in the brewer into this Brewer Dobson circle. And this air from the Brewer Dobson circle in comes down in the Arctic. Now we come to the problem of the the Hudson Bay, and Greenland and so on. And in, in the in the Arctic, you find, especially in winter time, a dense haze of black, black carbon, and soot on particulates in the air. And this goes onto the surfaces.
Metta Spencer 21:07
I’ve seen pictures.
Franz Oeste 21:08
That’s color the ice…
Metta Spencer 21:09
Of the ice that is practically black. Yeah. So I imagine large areas are really affected.
Franz Oeste 21:16
Yes. And that’s a great problem. You know, the Arctic heats much faster, then the globe in average, three or four times faster. So, how can we stop this? And we can do it by, by a similar process. When we use our iron is rechloride or a titanium process? We color also the carbon particles, they get a wider yellow color instead of a black color, so they can’t get up…
Metta Spencer 22:12
While they are in the stratosphere?
Clive Elsworth 22:16
Before they get to the stratosphere.
Franz Oeste 22:18
Before, before.
Clive Elsworth 22:20
in the troposphere. where it is dispersed. Yep,
Franz Oeste 22:23
Yeah.
Metta Spencer 22:26
Oh and you’re gonna go up there with a paintbrush and paint all those black carbon things before they can do any damage.
Clive Elsworth 22:32
Yes, they paint themselves. This is tiny particles that oxidize.
Metta Spencer 22:37
Okay, now you are painting them with what? Your, your when you send this titanium up there. It could that’s what’s going to do the job for us? It’s going to cut recolor the black carbon?
Franz Oeste 22:49
You know these black carbon, it comes from any combustion processes from ship engines or from bushfires.
Clive Elsworth 23:05
Wildfires
Franz Oeste 23:07
Bushfires, we cannot, we should put it on the bushfires. But in stacks of power stations or shapes or any other kind of technical combustion processes, we can use our process of producing these ISA aerosol or TOA aerosol which we called…
Metta Spencer 23:46
So titanium is that it.
Franz Oeste 23:48
Yes, yes, yes.
Metta Spencer 23:50
And you in other words, you’re going to try to mix these things while they’re around us. And then they’re going to be colored before they even get to the stratosphere.
Franz Oeste 23:59
And yes.
Clive Elsworth 24:00
You want to mix them around people.
Franz Oeste 24:02
And you really don’t need much of them, you need only to colors, the surface. And these compounds, we use touch to the carbon surface.
Metta Spencer 24:19
Okay, now this is going to be a separate operation though. But when you actually go out and start doing the work. These are two different processes. One of them is you’re going to go up to the I’m imagining now let’s see you’re going to go up to Hudson Bay and you spray titanium around in the air and the and that’s going to rock out the methane. But the other process is you’re going to go around to factories that are emitting various kinds of carbon and you tell him to spray a little of that stuff as your stuff comes out into the atmosphere. And that’ll handle it that way is that Right, you’ve got two different, you know, in terms of logistics of how you can do the work?
Franz Oeste 25:05
Yes, we can do it, we can do it in two ways. But the result is the same.
Peter Fiekowsky 25:17
Franz, I need to go in a minute, just ask a quick question. Have you calculated how much titanium will be required to per, year to keep our glaciers? White?
Franz Oeste 25:33
You know, we if I think of say, as a black carbon, we are at the beginning of our, we are writing a paper. And then we can give more details. In the moment without Clive, I cannot say anything, we are calculating it now.
Clive Elsworth 26:04
it’s not huge amounts.
Franz Oeste 26:06
It’s a very fresh idea.
Peter Fiekowsky 26:10
Do you have any estimate like per square meter is like a gram per square meter, or milligram?
Franz Oeste 26:17
I think we only need to color the, the black carbon particles. When they when they come off the stack, then we can be we don’t need to use the much very, very low dosage.
Clive Elsworth 26:42
And the reason is because it operates in a photocatalytic cycle. There’s this does this work in a cycle as well, Franz, where it just goes round and round and round using the titanium as a catalyst but powered driven by sunshine.
Franz Oeste 26:55
But it will not this, which you give on the on the black carbon, it doesn’t come down in the Arctic? Because the break up and kind of act as a shuttle.
Clive Elsworth 27:10
Right, Doesn’t go into the stratosphere. Yeah. more easily as well.
Peter Fiekowsky 27:16
And I need to go as well
Clive Elsworth 27:17
Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
Adele Buckley 27:19
I have read that the international marine organization has got an agreement with ship owners to either reduce or eliminate black carbon. So how does this fit into the picture?
Franz Oeste 27:35
They they use scrubbers to reduce stuff, so2 emissions and also the black carbon emissions. But these processes are not totally complete. 10 or 20% will always leave the the stack, the approved stack.
Adele Buckley 28:03
But wouldn’t that be sufficient to have a very beneficial effect if if if only 10 or 20% of current emissions are you know are remaining.
Franz Oeste 28:18
If you can, if you can’t stop it’s flowing and in the atmosphere, it’s very effective.
Adele Buckley 28:28
Well, it would be cheaper than and try to, you know, get it after it gets to the atmosphere.
Franz Oeste 28:35
But we want also to get the methane depleted. So we should use the the amount that a methane is reduced in an appropriate way.
Metta Spencer 28:54
So now when you’re out over the ocean someplace and there’s a ship emitting black carbon and you want them to capture it not let so much out. But whatever gets out, you’re going to dose it with with some of your your titanium and that’s going to, it’s going to have the both effects is that right is going to lighten the color of the black carbon. And whatever methane is around it’s going to convert it into water and co2. So it has a dual purpose is that right?
Clive Elsworth 29:33
Multi-Purpose. Removal of black carbon removal of methane in humid air makes clouds like any aerosol particles, so that has a cooling effect as well.
Franz Oeste 29:49
And the black carbon becomes oxidized by this process and becomes also to cloud condensation locally.
Clive Elsworth 30:01
Here we’re talking about a natural or enhancing a natural process. So this is going on all throughout the atmosphere anyway. You mean there is titanium out there doing that already? Not so much titanium. There’s a little bit of Titanium in mineral dust.
Franz Oeste 30:18
A very little bit.
Clive Elsworth 30:20
A very little bit. Yeah. So but it’s the, the process of oxidation. Do we generalize it as this is an oxidative process, without the troposphere being oxidative, there’d be all kinds of, you know, pollution still in the air, I mean, removes pollution from the air. So we’re mimicking enhancing this natural process that cleans the air anyway, in the case of ship smokestacks, if they’re going to remove all the pollution themselves, well great. We, but we think it’s, it’s a platform that moves across the ocean through, you know, remote areas of ocean, where most of the areas that’s most of the world is, and it’s a good it’s an ideal place to disperse this stuff, if it’s allowed, if it’s obviously proven to be safe, which we think it will be because it’s mimicking a natural process, and enhancing that process that removes methane anyway. So we’re talking about strengthening the methane sink, strengthening this sink, that that removes black carbon from the air, hopefully fast enough so that hardly any of it goes up to the stratosphere and doesn’t take up these halogen halogenated compounds up to the stratosphere doesn’t come down in the Arctic, doesn’t stop the heat coming out during the winter, because you’ve got all this black haze hanging over it during the winter. doesn’t discolor the ice? This is what we’re proposing.
Metta Spencer 31:48
That’s beautiful. Yes. Also very expensive, I imagine.
Clive Elsworth 31:52
Doesn’t have to be ships or going across the sea anyway. And it’s a very small amount, but…
Metta Spencer 31:59
Titanium it’s not, I assume not cheap.
Clive Elsworth 32:02
What’s a titanium for the for the Arctic. But for most of the nonpolar world? You don’t need titanium iron salts, we’ll do it.
Metta Spencer 32:16
Sure. Okay. Got it. Okay, well, I think now we’re going to just today, we’re gonna leave a lot aside, you’re the business of aerosols over the ocean, and focus just on the titanium in the Arctic. Because I want I mean, not to denigrate anything, because this is wonderful project clearly. But I want to see how it would fit together with Stephens proposal of marine cloud brightening over Hudson Bay. Now, we’re going we have pretty, pretty clear plans, we have an idea that we’re going to set up about four stations along the shore of the Hudson Bay, and we’re going to have a wind turbine that will provide the energy and stuff and whenever we, the satellites tell us that there’s a good looking cloud coming along, that could use a little whitening, we have a special nozzle that Stephen is building or will built and and it’s going to spray seawater up there and we’re going to have a brighter cloud. And that’s going to help cool the Hudson Bay. But you know, that may not be enough to do it. And it’s going to take a while anyway because he doesn’t have his nozzles ready. So be several years before we have these nozzles. In the meantime, I believe you folks are almost ready, you could start this summer, if somebody gives you the money, and the government would say okay, you could start spraying titanium over Hudson Bay or the region and knock out some of the methane that’s coming out of that, the wetlands on the south shore, which I think is a very, you know, one of the largest sources of wetlands in the world. So now, Stephen, I want you to I’ve been I’ve been keeping you quiet while they expound on their theories. But why don’t you talk about your vision of how these two operations may or may not fit together?
Stephen Salter 34:31
Oh, right. Well, first of all, I want to emphasize the dangers of methane. It really is a very, very nasty greenhouse gas. In the first year that it’s released, it’s about 200 times worse than than co2. It’s sort of 28 times worse if you have averaged over 100 years, but in the short term, it’s, it’s very, very bad indeed. And the trouble is, it’s going to be released. If you have any warming up of the permafrost or the seabed under the Arctic. There’s an enormous amounts of methane that have stuck now, in things called clathrates. If the, if the temperature is below a certain amount and the pressure is above a certain amount, they’re stuck down on the seabed, but they could easily come out. And there’s evidence that they are already you can see, see it bubbling it up. And occasionally in Siberia, there’s a great big explosion, where the methane has been collecting, underground and gets gets released. Now, I think I’d like to ask the chemists here, I can make chlorine at sea. I’m trying to use technologies that don’t need large amounts of materials being moved around, but I could make chlorine at sea and I could release ordinary chlorine gas. And I’d like to know if that would help with methane. I’ll be doing some chlorine anyway, because it’s a good way to sterilize the water that I want to spray. And I don’t want bugs growing in water. So I’m stripping all the oxygen out of it. And I’m stripping all the carbon dioxide out of it, which I can do just by putting it into a vacuum. But I can also make chlorine co2 with electrolysis, electrolyzing salt. So would that be useful for getting rid of methane? If I can produce some some chlorine?
Franz Oeste 36:28
Yes, sure. Sure. There exists a process of Matthew Johnson from the University of Copenhagen. They use chlorine, for this purpose. You can also.
Stephen Salter 36:50
Can you tell me? Can you tell me how much chlorine is needed? How many atoms of methane is one atom of chlorine? You need one, one, one to one? Yeah, that means rather a lot of chlorine then?
Clive Elsworth 37:07
It does. It does. But because it’s not doesn’t operate in a cycle that it’s used. And then it’s gone. It goes as h HCl, but it’s highly compatible with iron salt aerosol, because iron salt aerosol needs HCL to be in a gas to be in the air. Because then it’ll then recycle it, keep it going round and knocking out more and more methane.
Stephen Salter 37:26
So it would be a good thing to do on its own. If you’re doing the the titanium.
Franz Oeste 37:34
And if you sterilized the water. It’s a very good byproduct.
Stephen Salter 37:42
Yep, yeah. Okay, well, I might have to have a bit more power going into the chlorination, right? Well, okay, so we really do need to worry about methane as well as heat on its own. And the experiment that I’d like to do is to take photographs of cloud patterns, from a satellite, and to rotate them. So the wind directions, at the level of where we’re going to be operate, are all aligned. And then I won’t, I wouldn’t expect to be able to see a brightness of a cloud because I need to see a brightness change of about 15%, to be able to detect one gray bar from another gray bar. But I wouldn’t be able to detect the amount of contrast change in the cloud that we need to save civilization, but what I could do is to take a large number of your 100 satellite images, do the rotations and then add all the numbers up. And this allows the contrast to be enhanced. And I’ve got a computer modeling of this, and I can show you the results of it. And this allows you to pick up a very, very faint change of contrast, which is enough for what we need to solve the temperature problem. And right, I can know which direction the winds blowing, and I can align the images in a computer, then I’ll be able to detect a very small release of the amount of salt were putting up and this might be able to convince people who understand it that it’s going to work. I don’t want to have anybody else doing other experiments in the same place at the same time. But because we’re unable to tell who’s who’s to blame or, or who’s to get the credit, but I’m sure that we will be able to to either be far enough apart from one another, or different in months. You know, you could have May and I’ll have June and you can have July and I’ll have August. So that’s the kind of where we need to do it. I think the Hudson Bay is big enough for everybody to have a go and keep it private. So let’s, let’s assume that’s going to happen. There will be infrastructure and offices and energy supplies, and food and transport and stuff that could be common to both experiments.
Metta Spencer 40:21
I’m just wondering, is there a special time of year? Because I guess you need light also, don’t you? Yeah.
Stephen Salter 40:31
Yeah. So I want to do it in May, June, July, really, May to August, perhaps.
Metta Spencer 40:39
It wouldn’t work…
Stephen Salter 40:41
There would also be more methane in the warmer time of the year, because it’s coming up, coming up from the seabed, that will be coming up in the warm time. Which probably will be a bit later in the year, it might be summer to autumn rather than spring to summer.
Metta Spencer 40:59
Okay, now my impression is that both of you need sunlight in order to have your experiment work, right.? The I know that iron salt requires light. But I presume that the titanium of chemical reaction also is is triggered by light, and therefore you don’t do it in the winter when it’s dark in the Arctic. So both of you want to work in the Hudson Bay at in the summertime. Now, is it possible in Hudson Bay is a huge thing. It’s about, it’s just enormous. And I’m just not sure. But whether or not you could do you could take clouds that are in different locations and experiment the same time?
Stephen Salter 41:47
I’m sure we could, Yeah, I looked at the map and it is big. I’m sure we could both be there in different bits of it.
Metta Spencer 41:55
Okay. So it’s possible that if we were to set up a, one of the things that Peter Wadhams was keen on was maybe having a research base in Churchill, Manitoba, where there’s a wonderful new marine laboratory, and it would be a good place to to have the headquarters of the operation. And both of them of these things could be done there, with maybe a common set of staff, people, whatever is needed to run this thing. I have no idea what what the, you know, administration of a, of a project of this kind would look like, I know that, Stephen, you estimated that, including the cost of developing the nozzle that you think your experiment can be done for about $30 million? And I’m wondering if, how quickly, Franz, how quickly you think you could put together the, if somebody gave you all the money you need? How soon could you start doing this? And, and how much money would it take to do an experiment? How long would it take? What would this this whole project look like from your point of view.
Franz Oeste 43:20
We have to ask the person who is responsible on the other side, who has the money, how fast and if, if he would help and so on, because we need some. We cannot do it I think in two or three months, or in this summer, impossible. We need a longer time to prepare all the things we need.
Clive Elsworth 44:00
Yeah, so we have a partner, as it’s kind of getting started. And you know, we’ve been sort of in the wilderness for so long. And if if, if money and you know, regulatory authority comes along and says, you know, we need you to do this, we need to test it. And then when it’s, you know, we want it neat to see it’s working and we make some guidelines and do the field trials as fast as you can, if the money’s there. Fantastic. We’ll go for it up to now it’s been can you do another paper? Can you do another paper? Oh, we’re not sure about this. It does that and it does so many things. It can’t get our head around all this. But people are now coming round to it, you know, that is a natural process tend to do lots of things to remove moves methane, and other pollution from the air. You know, people can’t cope with that. But they’re coming round to the idea that these natural processes, I said to friends the other day, you know, the sun warms the earth, and it grows plants. It does more than one thing. That’s it Yeah.
Franz Oeste 45:00
A little bit more.
Clive Elsworth 45:01
This is how natural process? Oh, so yes, if if the funding is there, then we will run as fast as we can. What we’ve been doing with what we’ve got so far.
Metta Spencer 45:13
Let’s talk about your friend then, because you say you have a partner Hooray for you! That’s good news. Because I don’t, I don’t think the marine cloud brightening idea is even close to having a partner yet. What I’m thinking, and this is maybe pie in the sky is that we suppose we could combine not only your two projects, the Marine cloud brightening and the aerosol business. But there’s there are other operations that that might work. One is cirrus cloud thinning. And we have yet to talk to some people who have experimented with that or studied a little bit, I think it’s not very far advanced. And I think that the people promoting it are not particularly confident that it will be successful, but we ought to look at it. But let’s imagine that we have three different projects that could all do something in Hudson Bay. Now I believe the cirrus cloud thing can be done in the winter. In fact, it would it would prefer to be it would need to be done in the winter. So there wouldn’t be any contradiction between your projects and that, but what I was thinking, I suppose we all work out the details of what it would look like and what it would cost. And then let’s go to talk to Environment Canada. And let’s see whether or not we can convince them that this kind of experiment in Hudson Bay would be a huge contribution, and that the government ought to fund it. And it we should probably find some Canadians, I think we’d better find some partners in Canada, who are interested in this because Canada is not going to want to invest money unless we have some people here who are academics or other other scientists, maybe people in government, I don’t know. Anyway, let’s think in terms of actual planning, what it would take to make something like this work, your guess how long are you going to take to do this thing? Because I think I think Stephens project is going to take well, you can see some results of first year, but I don’t think you’re is going to be conclusive until the thing is run several years. Do you, Stephen?
Stephen Salter 47:28
No, we can we get a result from about a week’s for images, we can put them together on average, when we’d see the results. So I think if I wasn’t doing anything about the sea vessels, just doing spraying from a land site and not bothering at all about how the energy is generated to do it, we could get something done in two years. That would just be (inaudible).
Metta Spencer 47:52
You don’t have the nozzles yet. Do you?
Stephen Salter 47:55
No, but that would, I would make the nozzles and put them into an ISO container in two years.
Metta Spencer 48:01
Okay,
Stephen Salter 48:02
Yeah, that would have the filtration to get the the water very, very clean, and make the spray. And I’d get energy from something like a wind turbine and have to be a clean energy source. But you can get little wind turbines very easily now that will be fine. I’m sure the winds are good in his way. And so I could have the land base source in two years time, if there was enough money to do it.
Metta Spencer 48:34
But now we’re going to want to run this. I don’t want to contradict you, you’re the man. But the problem is, people are saying you got to watch out for all the dangers that might affect. So one of the things is the possibility that there’ll be side effects. It primarily I guess the worst prediction is that there would be floods in Africa and Pakistan, because of the water, this being injected to the clouds that might fall, where we don’t want it to fall in the new amounts that we don’t want. So you’re going to have to run this same for a period of time, one week is not going to be enough to tell you whether or not you’re going to have negative side effects, right?
Stephen Salter 49:17
That we’d be doing in Hudson’s Bay would not have any effect at all in Pakistan. That’s a long, long, long way away.
Metta Spencer 49:26
You’re pretty sure of that you don’t have to worry about it.
Stephen Salter 49:29
No.
Metta Spencer 49:30
Okay. So you’re saying that we one little experiment and within a week you get your results and we can all go home?
Stephen Salter 49:41
No, I would like more than one week, but it was in one week you get your first result. And then you repeat it and then you get more competent in it. But I need to get about 100 images from a satellite and then the image changes it In the time it takes for a cloud to move one cloud I mentioned. Okay, so you get, you get, probably you get 20 or 30 images a day, and I’d like to get 100. But some of them will be in the wrong wind direction. So that’s why I say it would take about a week to get enough enhancement of these very faint results, that you could convince someone.
Metta Spencer 50:22
Okay, you can convince people that you’re brightening the clouds, to convince people that you’ve actually changed the temperature of the water, you have to measure the water don’t you?
Stephen Salter 50:33
You will have that because the, the the extra energy that’s been reflected up from the clouds didn’t get into the water. So you know how much.
Metta Spencer 50:44
Ideally we want to be able to freeze the water? Question, is you not I don’t think you know how much it’s going to cool the water, do you?
Stephen Salter 50:51
Yes. I think, yes. I want to cool it by about four degrees.
Metta Spencer 50:56
Do you know that it will?
Stephen Salter 50:58
This would happen if I had more than one, one set of sprays going I’d want a few 100 of them. I’d be detect, I’d be able to detect the result from one, one spray spray unit.
Metta Spencer 51:15
Okay, now, our experiment. Now let me see, let’s it’s mine now too you’re gonna let me in on this. We’ve got these four stations along the shore, and they’re spraying, but you actually need to know whether this thing is going to actually cool a little bit of Hudson Bay, a significant amount of Hudson Bay, you’re going to have to have 100 spray nozzles going for a period of time. Is that right?
Stephen Salter 51:45
Yeah.
Metta Spencer 51:46
Okay.
Stephen Salter 51:47
But you’d know the answer that you want. From a small unit spraying and having its cloud images treated and processed, you’d see that really isn’t a pot, I can, if you let me take over the screen, I can show you what it would look like I got a computer model of it, run you through this. This is a satellite image of South America. Okay. And as cloud, alright, and what I’m doing is I’m going to be releasing some spray from four different places here. All those those that’s already happening under the real reality, I’m going to modify this with the computer editions. And what I’m doing is I’m going to be putting on the amount of brightness change that I get from a number of assumptions here, which are fairly average. And this is going to be changing the CCN concentrations in four places along the port graph with narrow or medium or rather wide spray divergences. Okay. And if I didn’t have any clouds, the (inaudible) would be looking like this, right? This is a very narrow spread, and this is getting wider, and there’d be another one over there. So that’s, that’s what the mathematics has been doing to this image. And that’s showing you that bit more contrast, you can see it. Okay, so that’s going into the computer. And I’m now going to be changing according to the Twomy effect, which is just a bit of algebra here. And this is what it does to the clouds. And it takes a bit of convincing someone to pay me money for this result, it’s very disappointing. The branches, the narrowest one is under this V here, and no sorry. But if I take 100 of those Okay. This is what’s going to be happening to the brightness of the pixels. And you can’t see much difference, but you can, if you look at the difference between the reds and the blues, and that’s, that’s what we’ve done to different places across the width of the satellite. And when I bring that up and take 100 of them all together to the image of South America, and you can see the brightness. If I do a bit more, a little bit more aggressive spraying, I can get other ones like this. And this is now less miserable. Just putting in a bit more spray coming in, and a longer lifetime and that kind of stuff. And we’re getting results like that from the four different (inaudible) angles. Okay, so that’s the experiment. This is enough to convince someone who understands the science and it’s working.
Metta Spencer 54:47
Let’s pretend you’ve got an appointment with Justin Trudeau. And you take this thing and you show it to him. Now, you convince him showing that picture. Tell him what you would Tell me what you would say to him, and why that that particular photo should be so impressive?
Stephen Salter 55:07
Well, we’re proving that we are changing the brightness of the clouds. And if we
Metta Spencer 55:13
How so, explain, say, I don’t I don’t understand Metta. But we can’t. Three little images, prove anything, what am I to infer from looking at them?
Stephen Salter 55:25
Right but we can’t what the images are doing are adding together lots of different card images. And that means that they the, the very small changes that you couldn’t see before, you can see if you average it over a large number.
Metta Spencer 55:43
From we, if we go from left to right, each of these sprays is progressively what more what?
Stephen Salter 55:50
They’re different widths. The I don’t know what the spray width will be how far it diverges, so I did for them. And that’s the narrowest that is likely to be and this is a wide one.
Metta Spencer 56:05
Is this, is this…
Stephen Salter 56:06
That will depend on the local turbulence. You can (inaudible) any of them.
Metta Spencer 56:11
Is it the same amount of spray that’s coming out of all four nozzles?
Stephen Salter 56:15
That’s right, okay. And the spray comes off, and it gives you a sort of bell shaped concentration. And these are different widths of bells. And we can see any of it doesn’t matter how much richer we get, we can still detect the four of them.
Adele Buckley 56:34
Side by side, before the spray and after the spray. If we would do much better looking at the both of them together, then we could really see that it was bigger.
Stephen Salter 56:46
Yeah, I’m not sure if I’ve got them on this image. But I could find another place where you can see them side by side.
Adele Buckley 56:54
But you don’t have to do that for us that but you just maybe have to do that. Well, you know, for whoever needs to know about this project, if it is worthwhile or not.
Stephen Salter 57:06
Let’s go back. And that’s what I would show them. And I’ve got 100 of those. There are all kinds of different positions, there’s 100 different ones. And you can see the result of a ship that’s already there releasing material is this is probably three ships. But they’re they’re producing a lot more than we were getting from our spray vessels.
Metta Spencer 57:29
Sorry, is that what we’re seeing some some ships down there are spraying something?
Stephen Salter 57:34
Around here? Yeah. And
Franz Oeste 57:38
That’s sulpheric droplets.
Stephen Salter 57:43
These are ordinary, ordinary clouds. Yeah.
Metta Spencer 57:46
Okay. Now I want to I want to think in terms of what we’ve got to convince the people in Ottawa to do and we’ve got to get, tell them that, at the end of a period of a year, or two or three years, how long as you’re going to say, you’re going to actually show that you’ve been able to cool a certain amount of the of the water by a certain amount of degrees. And this is going to be if if you combine, if both of these projects take place simultaneously, or could be combined operationally in a large scale, say covering all of Hudson Bay, then you could refreeze all of Hudson Bay, and you want to be able to share that. That’s right.
Stephen Salter 58:32
I’ve not got the sums about freezing all of it. But certainly I’ve got the sums for freezing the whole of the Arctic Ocean and and how many vessels we need for that. I think it will be similar. I think we should be able to do that with perhaps 100 vessels, we might be able to save a lot of the ice in Hudson’s Bay.
Metta Spencer 58:55
Okay, now listen, Franz. Can you see going to see Justin Trudeau and making a pitch that’s going to be consistent with what we’ve just seen? How soon could we get something going with your project and, and how much money is it going to take? A wild guess? And how long will it take to complete the thing?
Franz Oeste 59:24
Okay, we’re gonna discuss it in our group.
Clive Elsworth 59:28
Okay. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we, we just have to make something up now. Yes, we we have been talking with other people as well, including a Canadian person.
Stephen Salter 59:38
If it will work in Hudson Bay, you can be very confident that it’ll work in other places, too.
Adele Buckley 59:45
That’s what I mean, that’s why you need to do the project. Otherwise, I see. Not not enough reason to put all that money into the project unless it’s used to show you could do it elsewhere.
Metta Spencer 59:58
Oka, my impression is that to be convincing, you’re gonna have to actually refreeze at least one square mile of, of Hudson Bay, and say you say we did it, we can do it, we could do it on a bigger scale, if you let us. And but now, I’m not sure that you can do it with marine cloud brightening alone. I don’t think you know that yet. But the, the two things together might do it, but you’re not going to have them working together, you’re going to have them experimenting in different places, so you don’t confound each other’s results. So you want to be able to show at least one square mile where you actually combine forces and produce some ice that you can then use.
Clive Elsworth 59:58
Absolutely.
Stephen Salter 1:00:44
No, you just have to show you really just have to show the change in cloud brightness?
Metta Spencer 1:00:49
No, I don’t think they’ll convince people in Ottawa.
Clive Elsworth 1:00:51
It’d be nice to as a publicity stunt to free some ice, that would be nice. If there’s some money to enable that to happen somehow, then that’s great.
Metta Spencer 1:01:05
To sell this thing, you need to show that it’s actually going to have some benefit. Even the experiment is going to be beneficial.
Clive Elsworth 1:01:12
We definitely do, I agree we need to it needs to on a scientific level, it needs to have certain goals, setting goals that it can demonstrate, it then needs to demonstrate those things. This is how much methane got depleted. This is how much cooling.
Stephen Salter 1:01:26
We could put thermometers into the sea. And we could show the reduction in sea surface temperature by a lot which is good, that’s a lot more expensive to do, than to look at a photograph of a satellite.
Metta Spencer 1:01:40
I want to make a different pitch, which is that there are people living there. And those Indigenous people are having a hard life. And if you can say we can do one little thing to create a job for these people or to create ice so that they can actually go out there and catch some seals, then that is a doubling, impact on the argument for funding this thing in Ottawa. If you can’t say we can do anything that’s of any value to real people living there with this experiment, then I don’t think it’s going to work. It’s not going to catch fire, or get any, any support. That’s my guess, that you need to show that the Indigenous people there would like to have you do this because it actually could help their livelihood. So let’s It’ll be a lot more expensive to be able to really produce increased ice that you can not, there will be no arguments about that. That’s you having to build a whole fleet of boats to do, what I’m trying to do is to find the cheapest possible way that will convince people that it will work. I don’t think you are going to convince unless you can show that the Indian people want it?
Clive Elsworth 1:02:56
Would that be some scientists among those Indigenous people? That would understand?
Metta Spencer 1:03:02
They can research. We have a guy named Lawrence Martin, who’s conducting some sort of research, but, uh, but I don’t, you know, yeah, it’d be great if we could find some Canadian scientists who also want to be part of this. Do you happen to know any?
Clive Elsworth 1:03:19
Do we, yes there is Paul Beckwith, we know, we know, Paul Beckworth.
Metta Spencer 1:03:24
I don’t think he’s in a position to do the research.
Clive Elsworth 1:03:29
We can we can certainly do some asking.
Metta Spencer 1:03:33
There must be people in government who are responsible for things like that.
Clive Elsworth 1:03:37
Must be so many.
Metta Spencer 1:03:39
So look at it, look it up. And and Peter Wadhams. We know anyway, because Peter has contacts.
Adele Buckley 1:03:46
Far too much to say, we need to make more ice for the Indigenous people that that that’s just out of the question. The other topics are to prove that it could be cooling. That’s, that’s a big enough project. The it would take a lot to make the ice safe. I mean, just it’s too much.
Metta Spencer 1:04:12
I don’t think that anybody will buy it unless you can show Yeah, we could really make ice.
Franz Oeste 1:04:17
I think the most important this is the first thing to stop them the heating.
Adele Buckley 1:04:26
Yeah, yeah.
Franz Oeste 1:04:29
And then we can’t speak about to begin the cooling.
Metta Spencer 1:04:35
Unfortunately, Lawrence Martin said that the elders are the most influential people in Indigenous communities, basically believe that global warming is a natural phenomenon and that nothing can be done about it. And you shouldn’t try. So he’s not of that mind himself, but he finds it a bit challenging to try to have a conversation with him about it. So they’re not looking for ways of trying to change global warming. But if you were able to show them that you could refreeze the ice in a certain area where they live, that would be very, very impressive. And that would make all the difference in the world. So, you know, think about it.
Adele Buckley 1:05:17
It’s a two or three or four of a project.
Clive Elsworth 1:05:17
Yeah, if…
Metta Spencer 1:05:24
Well that’s not necessarily the case Adele, we, what we have to do is figure out the temperature of the water and how much you have to cool it. In order to get it to stay frozen in the summer, it freezes in the winter. We just have to keep it cooler. You have to stay all summer. That’s the name of the game.
Stephen Salter 1:05:41
I will show you one more screenshare. I’ve got everything on one page. All right. All right. So I’m gonna go back to screen share the green button. Yeah. Right that. That’s our mathematical spray patterns. Here is what happens from one image. Okay. And this is the result that you get. And this is what happens if you put 100 images together. And we know how much sun was going in to the top of the clouds here. And we can say, we definitely know that that the this bit here is getting more sun than this bit here. By this, this this amount. So underneath that line here, it’s going to be colder than it is here.
Franz Oeste 1:06:29
Yeah.
Stephen Salter 1:06:30
All right.
Clive Elsworth 1:06:31
Yeah.
Metta Spencer 1:06:32
Question is is gonna take me impress me with that?
Stephen Salter 1:06:34
I wrote a paper about this. And it was I sent it into Environmental Research Letters, which was one of the most prestigious journals for this. And they rejected it, they wouldn’t publish it.
Metta Spencer 1:06:46
Why do you know why? Why not?
Stephen Salter 1:06:50
I think they completely didn’t understand the the point. They thought I was trying to do a computer model.
Metta Spencer 1:06:57
Well, you have to be able to explain it clearly and convincingly. And this is, frankly, not convincing to me. And I don’t think it’d be convincing to Mr. Trudeau, if he’s the guy we’ve got to convince. So we got to think of a way to actually get the ice on the water.
Clive Elsworth 1:07:15
Yeah. What Stephen is saying is you don’t need to change the brightness of the cloud very much over the whole, you know, over the amount of clouds that you’re changing around the world to have the desired effect does not look very different. It just doesn’t look very different. And the problem is, how can you tell if it’s worked. And so what Stephen is saying that here’s here’s a technique he’s using, sort of photo enhancing technique to see that there is indeed an effect, you know, this the spraying did actually have the desired effect.
Metta Spencer 1:07:44
Look, I want this project to be accepted in Ottawa. I don’t think it’s going to be I don’t think I don’t think they’ll buy it. I wish they would, but I don’t think they will. I really think Pugwash will support it.
Clive Elsworth 1:07:58
Do you mean, the the marine cloud brightening or the iron salt aerosol or both? Or tht titanimum one?
Metta Spencer 1:08:08
I would like to combine them? I don’t think either one of them right now would be enough to get millions of dollars and the go ahead and do it.
Franz Oeste 1:08:24
But Metta I think if we can see that the temperature is going down. Thats the effect we we want to see. To see the sea frozen is much more than can can be done.
Clive Elsworth 1:08:53
Can be done. Yeah.
Stephen Salter 1:08:54
But it’s very expensive to put out hundreds of thermometers in the sea. Yeah, yeah, that’s that’s a major experiment. I mean, there are there are things that are floating around the Sea now taking temperatures we can look up what it costs but they have buoys that are floating randomly. And every so often they plunged down on measure temperatures and (inaudible) and everything down in different decks and I think they called arco flutes.
Metta Spencer 1:09:20
When we talk about the problem in the Arctic, it’s all about how the sea ice is melting. And and we’re going to end that’s the conversation, the ice when is the ice gonna be gone. We know that the black water is you know, when when the water when the ice is gone the darkness is going to exacerbate the problem. It’s going to be like a tipping point, etcetera. So the whole name of the game is to keep as much ice as possible in the Arctic. Unless you can show that you can make some ice. I don’t think anybody’s gonna be interested in your study.
Stephen Salter 1:09:51
We can show we can reduce the temperature. Everybody believes that if you can reduce the temperature you can write the book.
Metta Spencer 1:09:57
It wouldn’t convince me unless you can show me that you can do something to maintain the ice, real ice, white Ice that reflects light, then I’m not going to want to invest in your project, I don’t think I can get Pugwash to buy it.
Stephen Salter 1:10:14
Well we’re done that we have to forget it.
Clive Elsworth 1:10:18
Yeah, it’s for scientists, this is for scientists to take an interest in.
Adele Buckley 1:10:21
Just reducing the temperature is, which would be extremely difficult anyway, nevermind the ice, just reduce the temperature. And then such a technology could be deployed globally, if we desperate or apt to need global engineering everywhere. Geoengineering. So that’s why it would be reasonable to say Canada, you have to step up in the global geopolitics geopolitical world do something useful to help the world. And this is one, if you could show to just reduce the temperature that it could be deployed in a wider place. And that’s, that would be my only reason for supporting it. And I think maybe private investment from some of the concerned billionaires, like, you know, the Microsoft people or somebody, might might take an interest in such an experiment.
Metta Spencer 1:11:21
Okay. I mean, I hope I’m wrong. But let’s see what we can do. And yeah, there’s, that’s, you know, this is almost our final conversation about this subject. Because there may be one more show, I probably put on one about cirrus cloud brightening, which I don’t think is a very promising thing. But if if we don’t have a convincing pitch.
Stephen Salter 1:11:46
Between getting 30 million to do it to prove that it works, and 300 million to actually do it 300 million, I could produce a lot more ice. But the chances of getting 300 million without having the proof.
Metta Spencer 1:12:00
Maybe Hudson Bay is just too big. You can’t do it on Hudson Bay. Find a small lake that you can actually do it on. I want some ice.
Stephen Salter 1:12:11
I could do a small Inlet in Hudson’s Bay.
Metta Spencer 1:12:15
How about James Bay?
Stephen Salter 1:12:17
Okay, yeah.
Metta Spencer 1:12:19
Refreeze James Bay.
Stephen Salter 1:12:22
The smaller bit you do the better chance you have of being able to get the result?
Metta Spencer 1:12:26
Okay. It can’t, can we take a bay off? Or you know, a little corner of James Bay? And say, let’s freeze some ice there.
Stephen Salter 1:12:39
Yeah. And then that’ll cost maybe 100 million. 800 million does the whole world. Alright?
Metta Spencer 1:12:50
For experiment, instead of trying to cool a part of Hudson Bay? Let’s take a part of James Bay. And cool that because it’s smaller, and maybe we can actually get some ice.
Stephen Salter 1:13:05
Yes, that we there’s a good chance you might be able to do a small bit. And that that won’t add a great deal more scientific value than the cloud change.
Metta Spencer 1:13:16
To your mind. But if you can show some ice, I think that’s going to be persuasive.
Stephen Salter 1:13:24
Well, with
Metta Spencer 1:13:25
One square mile of ice is all it will take. If you can show you can make it that is going to be convincing.
Stephen Salter 1:13:30
You’ll be able to produce some proper ice, but it will be much more expensive and slower.
Metta Spencer 1:13:36
Why?
Stephen Salter 1:13:38
But you’ll be able to do it. You know, the..
Metta Spencer 1:13:40
Instead of James instead of Hudsons Bay with four stations. Let’s put our four stations on James Bay, which is smaller, and maybe we can that’s that that’s maybe we can make some ice. Why would it cost more to do it there?
Clive Elsworth 1:13:59
Well, do you think you can stop the wind blowing over because if you’ve got wind, air that’s been warmed a few miles away, you know, 20 or 30 miles away and it’s been warmed by the fact that there wasn’t so much cloud, then it warms over the part of the ice that you’re trying to melt, then it your whole experiment is ruined. So you need to erect an enormous wall around this piece of ice, this square mile of ice to make sure that no warm air can blow in there. It’s not the way it works. It’s an impossible. It’s not a real experiment. It’s just a demonstration.
Adele Buckley 1:14:31
If you made a little ice, you would then have to prove that this ice did what wouldn’t have occurred naturally. Because otherwise, people would and others would just say well, how do you, maybe that ice would have formed anyway.
Metta Spencer 1:14:49
That’s what that’s where your mathematics from the and his little pictures with 100 composite photos would work. I mean, he can make his case, he can argue, but unless he shows the ice, I don’t think anybody’s gonna buy it.
Clive Elsworth 1:15:04
But let’s see what people say when they see this. Let’s see what was what response we get.
Metta Spencer 1:15:11
Time’s up and then some we’ve done an hour and a half. Okay guys, thank you and I’ll be back in touch.
Clive Elsworth 1:15:18
Thank you for having us.
We produce several one-hour-long Zoom conversations each week about various aspects of six issues we address. You can watch them live and send a question to the speakers or watch the edited version later here or on our Youtube channel.