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5 ways to save the world
| Date: |
08 April 2007 12:00 |
| Producer: |
BBC
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| Show: | Carte Blanche |
Ian Curtis: November 2006, NASA are playing host to the world's top scientists. They're meeting in California to put forward radical solutions to the greatest threat humanity has ever faced - global warming. All believe we may not reduce carbon emissions by enough in time to stop the devastating effects of climate change.
Prof John Latham: We're approaching a situation that could be absolutely catastrophic...
Stephen Salter: And we need an emergency panic button to stop the damage that it is doing.
Ian: So dramatic plans are now under serious discussion to engineer the world before it's too late, and many of those whose livelihoods are at risk say it is time to listen.
Andy Beckstoffer: We're meddling with it already, so we need to meddle with it some more and maybe do something good this time.
Ian: From a giant sunshade a million miles from the earth to growing microscopic organisms in the oceans, these ideas may look like the crazy musings of boffins in white coats, but we've been given access to what could become the world's silver bullet, pulling us back from the brink of environmental disaster.
Paul Crutzen: We cannot wait another generation doing what we are doing now, it will really get out of hand.
Klaus Lackner: It'll take time, it'll take effort but it can be done.
Ian: The first of five ways to save the world is the most expensive and ambitious. It's aim? To cut the amount of sunshine which hits the earth.
Ian: For as long as the sun has been shining, man has been sheltering from it using sunshades of one sort or another to protect himself. Imagine if you could do this for the whole world. One man thinks he can do just that, by putting a giant sunshade consisting of 16 trillion glass disks a million miles from the earth, diverting the sun's rays. British born astronomer, Roger Angel, has turned his attentions from looking out at space to looking back at the crisis here on planet earth.
The issue of our own planet has become so acute, when I'm feeling depressed, I tell my astronomer friends that they're like the band playing on the Titanic, like this is... you know, so I'm worried about the ship going down [laughs] now. The last thing we want to do is wait until we know that we're in deep trouble.
Ian: Roger Angel is one of the world's foremost minds on glass optics. He's responsible for designing the mirrors on telescopes, like the large binocular telescope here in Arizona USA, the world's most powerful. He believes glass could be the answer to solving global warming. Taking ten years to build, the telescope is the world's most advanced, boasting the highest resolution anywhere. It can create images ten times sharper than the Hubble space telescope. Roger Angel is the brains behind the glass optics that make it work, but having made the world's biggest, now he wants to make the lightest.
Roger Angel (Optician): The same laws of optics and mechanics that hold for these enormous mirrors of 20 tonnes, hold for the one gram optics that will make each piece of the sunshade.
Ian: Roger Angel has calculated that he would need to divert only 2% of the sun's rays to reduce global warming. But even that would require a sunshade an incredible 100,000 kilometres wide. It would be positioned a million miles from the earth, and orbit the sun at what is known as the L1 point, the point of zero gravity between the sun and the earth.
Roger: The reason I went to very small pieces is that I can do all the building of these one gram little spacecraft on the earth, launch them to this L1 point where they'll orbit in front of the sun, and then don't have to build anything there.
Ian: But the challenge is how to make the sunshade as lightweight as possible.
Roger: So this is a piece of the kind of glass we... exactly the glass that we use to make the big mirrors in the telescope. The mirrors in the telescope have to be rigid, hold their shape precisely and we want it to be lightweight but not.. you know, ridiculously lightweight. So we found that by melting this porous silica glass we could make very good mirrors. And now the new task we have is to take a gram of this glass and make it into a piece that's two feet in diameter to make the sunshade. So what we're trying to do, Charlie, ultimately we need a million square miles of really, really thin material and just like a regular bubble can be very thin, I think we can make the glass a very thin bubble. So it's a long way to get a million square miles, but the first thing we need to do is see how see how thin and whether we can make a thin bubble.
Charlie (Glass blower): Now I'm heating one side of the glass here.
Roger: Now that's beautiful, and it's so thin, it just breaks away. So that's something we're going to have to figure that out, right.
Charlie: How thick do you think the glass is there?
Roger: Well I measured the piece that you did before, and it was three microns thick which is like a ten thousandth of an inch, so we need to figure out how to make something like this only two feet across, and then how to get it up into space without breaking it, in pieces that are a couple of feet in diameter but trillions of them. So that's the job, but this is a start.
Ian: All around the telescope is the evidence for the urgency of this project. The trees on this mountain are dying. Ann Lynch, from the US Forest Service, knows the reason why.
Ann Lynch (US Forest Service): On the tree bore here you can see where the bark beetles have engraved on the bowl of the tree, and this is where they've been feeding in inner bark tissues, the tissues that conduct water and nutrients up and down the tree. So when they're feeding in here they're killing the tree.
Ian: In the past the insects would die during the cold winter months, but with the warmer temperatures, they are now able to breed more profusely, and their increased numbers have overwhelmed the trees.
Ann: This is one of the worst insect outbreaks I have ever seen, and I think that it's a result of climate change which we've caused. In this particular eco system you simply have tens of thousands of acres that are dead.
Ian: Beetles are not the only problem for these mountain forests. In 2004 after years of drought, the area Roger Angel's telescope was a tinderbox waiting for a spark to ignite it. The telescope itself was only just saved, but other communities in Arizona were not so lucky. They were burnt to the ground.
Ann: I don't know about sunshades, but I do think that we need to be thinking about that type of technology or other technology that might work, because I think that we're at a point where this is a crisis. All the government's on the planet need to be addressing this issue.
Three, two, one, zero!
Ian: Getting a huge sunshade into space isn't cheap or easy. Roger Angel has calculated that the total weight of the sunshade is 20 million tons. The space shuttle carries a total payload of 23 tons, this would require 870,000 trips costing $450-million each - a total cost of $392-trillion, or 29 times the annual GDP of the USA. But could there be an answer to this Stella sized problem in a simple campus physics experiment.
Roger: This is a disk of aluminium, weighs about ten pounds, and it's very pure aluminium that conducts electricity very well, and you can actually make this jump up into the air just by putting current in a coil underneath it's the principle of an electric motor really reduced to its simplest form, you pass the current, you get a force, something moves. But in this case, the motion, instead of being round and round as in a motor, we can get magnetic force straight up.
Ian: The real launcher is a series of electrical coils inside a 2 kilometre long vertical tube. As the rocket rises past each coil, it gets an electric jolt making it accelerate faster.
Roger: Very high acceleration, 400G, so people would end up.. you know, as red jam on the bottom of the rocket if you tried to launch with this. But we can design mechanical parts so that they can withstand this high G-force.
Ian: Electro magnetic power has never been used to launch rockets into space, it's too expensive for a one off, but with huge quantities of glass needing many launchers, the figures could start to look more viable.
Roger: Alright, let's see how it goes. Hey! Well, that's the principle of the thing. We do that many times up the tower and get it out into space.
Ian: To boost the journey into space, the electromagnetic launcher would need to be located near the summit of a mountain, where the air is thinnest and the resistance of the earth's atmosphere lower. The rockets would begin their journey deep inside the mountain. A massive electrical current powered by the launch's own hydro electric power station would propel the rocket skywards. One of them firing off every few minutes.
Roger: You can imagine the sound of thunder when we put electric arc through the atmosphere and the air is heated and then crashes back on itself, well it'll be like I think an enormous clap of thunder every time one of these goes up.
Well the first thing after it leaves the atmosphere is that you need to correct the course and get it headed towards where it has to be at L1 which is a million miles away, and that's done with this iron propulsion technique that was pioneered by the Europeans in the Smart-1 satellite that went to the moon. You then have within the rocket a stack of a million of these very thin fliers, so the next trick is to get them off the top of the stack. You put an electric charge and then the top one is repelled away. Once they are released from the rocket then they make their way to somewhere in the cloud. It doesn't really matter where, so they're all randomly spread out. The whole thing weighs a gram which is the same as a large butterfly.
Ian: On each glass flier would be a computer, a small camera to align itself between the sun and earth, and solar sails to guide it.
Roger: So each one will be getting signals and will be doing two jobs. One is to hold itself perpendicular to the sun, so it causes the maximum shadowing, and the other is not to move very fast so it doesn't hit its friend. If you were flying around in a cloud, because the cloud is so big, even though there's 16 trillion of them, there's only a few cubic kilometre. So you could fly right through the cloud and you wouldn't hit one, and if one job for each of these things is as the sun shade... as the sun light comes through, it just has to be deflected a couple of degrees so that it misses the earth. So the sunlight that would have come through and heated and warmed the earth, just a small fraction of the sunlight that's deflected away so it misses the earth.
Ian: Roger Angel is convinced the sunshade will work in principle, but he estimates it will cost $4 trillion and take 30 years to complete. He hopes, however, mankind will be wise enough to deal with the now widely accepted causes of global warming and cut carbon dioxide emissions, so his sunshade will remain just a dream.
Roger: We are not happy campers, right, we're not saying Wow! This is a great idea! Let's go do it right, that's the... the feeling is.. you know, this may be a way that we hope will never be wanted, but which we have to think about in case the dire situation comes out.
Ian: A sunshade isn't the only plan to deflect the sun's rays and reduce global temperatures. A second team of a NASA gathering are wondering if clouds could do the same job. If only we could find a way to make them more reflective.
San Francisco, California, the city of fog. It has its own microclimate with the fog acting like a natural air conditioning system, cooling the city by filtering the hot sun.
KFOG Radio: Good morning San Francisco, good morning Bay area, this is 104.5 KFOG San Francisco the Bay area's KFOG and you're waking up to another typical foggy morning here in San Francisco in the Bay area.
Ian: Engineer Stephen Salter, and atmospheric physicist John Latham think they could protect the earth from further warming in the same way that fog protects San Francisco from the sun. They're on their way to search for clouds, but a particular type, ones that are shiny and bounce the sun's rays back into space.
So we're flying now over the tops of the clouds of interest to us, the so-called marine stratocumulus clouds. They're probably a few hundred meters thick and we can see how shiny they are, and that's telling us that they reflect solar radiation into space.
Ian: What John Latham and Stephen Salter propose to do is use a fleet of futuristic cloud-seeding yachts, which atomize sea water and then spray this fine vapour into the clouds, making them denser and more reflective.
Prof John Latham (Atmospheric physicist): If we can see the clouds on a global scale, the affect can be a major cooling that could compensate for global warming.
Ian: Climate change and rising sea levels pose a huge threat but could the oceans also provide a clue to a possible solution. John Latham's spent his life with his head in the clouds, literally. As an atmospheric physicist he understands how clouds form, but it was the way that breaking waves behave that gave him the inspiration for his big idea.
John: What I've been looking at is the process of wave breaking, the normal beautiful swoop and dive which actually pushes under the water a lot of air, which then rises to the surface again as bubbles, and that's the white stuff that we see when waves break, and each one of those bubbles eject hundreds or thousands of little droplets, which happen to be about the size that we need for our experiments. So we have to find a way of generating sea water droplets of the same size but in much greater quantities.
Ian: Scientists first began trying to manipulate clouds in 1946. They found that by firing tiny particles of silver iodide into rain bearing clouds they could induce rainfall. Stephen Salter has been working with clouds since the 1980's but the challenge now for him and John Latham was to figure out how not to make it rain but to increase cloud cover. Stephen Salter has designed a remarkable vessel, we've reproduced it here with computer graphics, it's designed to deliver the tiny droplets needed to boost the clouds. But it's a vessel that wouldn't produce any carbon emissions, emissions that are now thought highly likely to be worsening the very problem these scientists want to solve. It's an extraordinary wind powered yacht but with one rather obvious difference to a normal sailing boat.
Prof Stephen Salter (Scientist): Now, no sails, but instead of that we've got these three rotors, 20 metres high, and they're gonna spin, which gives you a thrust vastly more than a sail would do.
Ian: The Flettner rotor was originally invented by Anton Flettner, a German engineer in the 1920's, the rotor spins around at high speed performing the same function as sails, but 15 times more powerful, providing the forward thrust to drag a huge propeller through the water.
This propeller is meant to drive the boat - ok - but in our project it's gonna be the other way around, the boat is gonna be driven through the water by the sails and instead of a propeller this size, we're going to have one about 3 metres in diameter, it will come out to about here, and that will be being dragged through the water and it will generate the power that we need to work this to work the spraying mechanism.
Ian: The boat will be radio controlled and unmanned, sailing backwards and forwards through the ocean spraying sea water vapour into the clouds like a giant spray gun.
Stephen: Well they're cleaning the fouling off this ship with a water jet and the water's coming in and it's hitting the side and you can see it's breaking up into very fine spray, now the plan that we want to use is having about 3 times the pressure than with 2 jets hitting each other like that, and it will produce a sheet of spray that goes out like that, and this will break up into very fine drops. At the moment we're using fresh water and so the entire drops can evaporate, if you was doing it with sea water there'd be a little salty residue which can't evaporate, and that will be dispersed through the atmosphere and a certain fraction will get up into the clouds.
Ian: As the spray leaves the funnel the water in the droplets evaporates leaving only glistening particles of salt, they rise up into the clouds where they attract water vapour which condenses on the salt particles making the clouds thicker and more reflective. John Latham and Stephen Salter have calculated that to make enough shiny clouds to control the temperature of the earth they would need to spray 500 kilograms or litres of water per second every year.
Stephen: Now that's an incredibly small amount, it's just a barrel full, to keep the...for the whole world, to keep the temperature steady, and it looks as though one ship could spray about 10 kilograms a second and that would mean that we would need about 50 ships to be built every year.
Ian: If they wanted to cool the planet even more they would simply have to increase the amount of water sprayed. The mobility of these vessels means that they can be positioned where they would have most effect, like over the southern oceans where the majority of marine stratocumulus clouds can be found. So unlike San Franciscans, we wouldn't all be living under a cloud of fog. Just outside San Francisco are vineyards owned by Andy Andy, while the debate on our rolling climate change goes on, how far our carbon emissions are causing it, and what we can do to stop it, Andy's very livelihood depends on the weather.
Andy: I don't think anybody's immune from global warming, we have to farm today, but we have to think about 5 years, 10 years, 50 years, from now, so I think we have to be concerned about it. The temperature change would be very important but it's more important how it happens, and one of the most important things is the...is the sun and the sunburn on the grapes. As an individual I'm very concerned about it, I'm very frightened about it for my children, I don't think it will happen to me, but I believe in the...the fact of a tipping point, and if we get to the tipping point at some point, that will be very serious, and I'm very concerned about that. We can't, in my view, totally depend upon the elimination of fossil fuels to solve the global warming problem so we have to look somewhere else, and I would hope that the scientists of the world are looking at all those places.
Stephen: I really like working on things which are on the edge of being impossible and then actually making them be possible. The...the attraction to me is that it's very cheap to do, very much cheaper than a lot of the other things that are being considered.
Ian: The scientists may think it's possible but is it advisable? Interfering with the planet and changing the world's fragile eco system could have unforeseen results.
Stephen: We can try a little experiment and adjust and decide where you want to do it and how much, and another very reassuring thing is that if you find that it's not working the way you thought, you can stop very quickly and in a couple of weeks it's all over and forgotten and you haven't done anything permanently irreversible.
Andy: We agree to these cars, and we're...we're giving off these carbon dioxide emissions and so we're meddling with it already, so we need to meddle with it some more and maybe do something good this time.
Ian: John Latham is encouraged by the response he and Stephen Salter got from other scientists to their cloud enhancing idea at the recent NASA meeting.
John: It's pleasing to know that this idea is receiving a better press than it has done in the past and I think it's now regarded as a pretty strong contender for being a system that could work, it could be helpful in ameliorating the global warming problem.
Stephen: I want to do this project because I think humanity's so foolish that it will go on emitting carbon to burn, and we need an emergency panic safety button to stop the damage that it's doing. Will I ever see it in my lifetime? A lot of course will depend on the intelligence of the politicians, and I'd better not say too much more about that.
Ian: Another sun and heat blocking plan on the table, behind the locked doors of the NASA conference, is one born out of some of the worst natural disasters this planet has seen. It's being advanced by a modest professor of atmospheric chemistry in Germany.
Ian: 71,000 years ago there was a catastrophic volcanic explosion at Mount Toba, Sumatra, Indonesia, sending a huge plume of volcanic ash and sulphur 34 kilometres into the stratosphere, it blocked out the sun, and was followed by a 6 year long volcanic winter, and then a thousand year long Ice Age. Could this volcanic eruption that almost wiped out the human race hold the key to saving the planet from global warming. Paul Crutzen believes the only way to save the world for future generations is to duplicate the effects volcanic eruptions have on the planet.
Paul Crutzen (Scientist): The action should start immediately, we cannot wait another generation, doing what we are doing now, then things really get out of hand for our children and grandchildren.
Ian: He wants to launch hundreds of rockets filled with sulphur into the stratosphere, these aren't just wild musings, in 1995 Paul Crutzen won the Nobel Prize, explaining how the ozone hole is formed over Antarctica. Partly as a result of his work world governments took action and banned CFC's, the pollutants found in fridges and aerosols that were destroying it. The hole in the ozone layer has now started to close, but today Paul Paul is again on the warpath, this time he's targeting CO2 and the greenhouse effect, which traps heat from the sun's rays within the earth's atmosphere. He's found inspiration in more recent volcanic events. In 1991 there was a massive eruption in Southeast Asia.
A column of molten rock, boiling mud and volcanic ash shoots thousands of feet in the air as Mount Pinatubo continues to erupts after 600 years lying dormant.
Ian: What was special about this eruption was that scientists like Paul Paul could observe it's affects in detail.
Pinatubo was a test case because we have the information, we know how much sulphur dioxide was injected in the stratosphere there, it was injected, what happened to the sulphur dioxide.
Ian: When Mount Pinatubo erupted it ejected 10 million tons of sulphur into the stratosphere, 20 to 40 kilometres above the earth's surface, but it wasn't only the amount of sulphur released by Pinatubo, but its location close to the equator that made it a perfect model.
Paul: After the injection at high altitude it started to move around the globe with the air motions, first in east-west direction, but also with time in north-south direction, so after about a year the initial input of pollutants in the stratosphere by the volcano had spread rather evenly around the world, it takes about a year.
Ian: For 2 years after Pinatubo erupted the average temperature across the earth decreased by 0.6 degrees Celsius. The sulphur from the volcano had stopped some of the sun's rays from reaching the earth, it was a naturally cooling device for the planet.
Paul: In some ways it may be cruel to say so, but what we as scientists long for is another big volcanic eruption, hopefully with very little loss of life.
Ian: The sulphur in the stratosphere cools the planet, but at lower altitudes within the earth's atmosphere it does a lot of damage. Since the industrial revolution began over 200 years ago the combustion of fossil fuels has put just over 1 trillion tons of CO2 , as well as sulphur, into the atmosphere, and by the mid 1950's the effects of the sulphur were killing thousands of people through repertory diseases, it also caused acid rain and had a devastating effect on plants and animals. To combat this Clean Air Acts were introduced, and sulphur emissions in many parts of the world have been significantly reduced, but ironically filthy factories shielded us from the sun by filling the air with sulphur. Just a mile from Paul Paul's home, the local incinerator, like other factories in his town, has cleaned up its act.
Paul: Well in this factory the garbage of the city is burned and produces then, of course, this smoke plume, it emits carbon dioxide, and that means that it's adding, a small amount of course, to the global warming.
Ian: In the past a factory like this would have emitted sulphur dioxide too, but it's now being filtered.
Paul: There is a paradox because we want to clean up the environment because air pollution is unhealthy, but this pollution basically cools the earth by reflecting solar radiation to space, you see the clouds above us, this has a cooling effect and we all feel it, it's cold here now.
Ian: With more CO2 in the atmosphere to absorb heat, and less sulphur air pollution to reflect the sun's radiation, the world is getting warmer. For Paul Paul's idea to work, one million tons of sulphur needs to get 25 kilometres up into the stratosphere. His solution? Rockets!
Paul: You burn in the first stage hydrocarbons, that gives a lift to the rocket material, and the rocket, it goes then into the stratosphere. In the stratosphere you burn the hydrogen sulphate, which you have brought up, and the sulphate particles reflects all the radiation, now when that is done the rocket will just tumble back in to space and probably fall down in the ocean, somewhere, I mean you don't want to do this experiment over inhabited regions of course.
Ian: But there are big risks, putting vast quantities of sulphur into the stratosphere could have unknown consequences, it may increase acid rain and even damage the ozone layer, the very thing that Paul Paul has dedicated his life to protecting.
Paul: You cannot have an ideal world, we do things to the environment, some things are positive, some things are negative, and we have to understand when the negative effects are much worse than the positive effects, and I think the sulphur experiment, in that sense, can be recommended because temperature rises by 2 or 3 degrees are causing major problems all around the globe. I'm prepared to lose some bit of ozone if we can prevent major increases of temperatures in the future, say beyond 2 degrees or 3 degrees.
Ian: Three hundred miles south of Paul Paul's lab the cost of doing nothing is clear. High in the German Alps the ski resorts of Garmisch-Partenkirchen is feeling the heat, it's hugely dependent on tourism, so losing its white gold would be a disaster. Here they are already artificially manipulating the environment to suit their needs. Ten years ago to stay in business they introduced 26 snow making machines, Anton Osler is an operator.
Anton Osler (Snow machine operator): If we didn't have snow cannons it would be a small catastrophe for us in Garmisch because we couldn't have normal skiing or hold skiing competitions anymore.
Ian: There have been skiing competitions here since the 1930's. In 1936 there was plenty of snow and Garmisch was home to the winter Olympics, that year in front of the Fuhrer's furtive eye alpine skiing made its first Olympic appearance. Katarine Golik is a ski instructor at the resort and has been skiing here since she was a child.
Katarine Golik (Ski instructor): When I was a kid we just went up and skied and you could ski longer, now the winter's are just getting shorter, maybe there's gonna be a day where we can't ski at all in Germany anymore. Well the Professor Paul's ideas I think are very interesting for me, I don't know if it's gonna work or not, maybe it's a good way to look into, and maybe it will help - that would be awesome.
Ian: The artificial snow will keep Garmisch going for a while but if the temperatures keep rising the snow making machines won't be of any use at all because even that snow will melt. Paul Paul believes global warming has not yet reached critical levels but that this may only be as little as 30 years away. Has the time come at the very least to test his idea, to see whether it will work and see what effect it will have on the environment.
Paul: We should start now and then the future will tell us how much time we have left. My message to the politicians is listen to the scientists, but it's not only a message to the politicians, it's a message to everybody. We're on the wrong track, very much on the wrong track, maybe we have gone too far already.
Boy: If we don't look after the planet then people are going to die, then there will be no world left anymore and that would be a shame. My grandfather does a lot so that humanity lives on. He wants to discover a lot of things, he is clever, he knows a lot, which is good that he is here for other people.
Ian: A sunshade out in space, denser and more reflective clouds, and a sulphur blanket - big ideas to reduce the power of the sun. But the sun itself is not the only problem, mankind has pumped too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, exacerbating the greenhouse effect, if only we could engineer a way to take it out again. On first impressions urine may not seem like the most promising solution, but one of its components, urea, is a nitrogen rich fertiliser that helps plants grow, and plants absorb tons and tons of carbon dioxide. But the plants that one scientist has his eye on aren't on land, they're in the ocean. Ian Jones is an ocean engineer from the University of Sydney, Australia, his idea is to make the oceans bloom by using urea. Our oceans are teaming with phytoplankton, millions of microscopic plants beneath the waves that are vital to the marine eco system as they form the base of the ocean's food chain.
Prof Ian Jones (Scientist): You and I can't see the phytoplankton but the fish rely on them, without phytoplankton all these fish will die.
Ian: Visible from space, as this satellite image shows, phytoplankton form enormous green swirls hundreds of miles along around coastal waters, which are rich in the nutrients these plants need to live on. They use photosynthesis to absorb sunlight as well as carbon dioxide from sea water.
Jones: Just like trees they take the carbon dioxide and give us back oxygen, these phytoplankton, these amazing little plants may be holding the key to saving the planet.
Ian: Ian Jones believes that by adding nutrients to areas of the ocean that lack phytoplankton he can turn them into a lush forest that will reverse the effects of global warming by absorbing carbon dioxide, but how is Ian Jones so confident that adding nutrients to the oceans will increase phytoplankton? It was a natural disaster, flooding, that was to give him the brainwave for his idea. When rivers burst their banks and flood, agricultural land, fertilizer from the farmers fields washes into the sea. Jones has been studying the accumulation of nutrients in Sydney harbour.
When it rains all the nutrients come into the harbour and the phytoplankton numbers increase, and then after the rain has gone they decrease again back to the kind of background level we're seeing today. This process allows us to make measurements of the response of phytoplankton nutrients. We're able to determine the amount of phytoplankton, using this instrument, which makes a light, and the result is calculated by the computer. And we see that there's 2.1 micrograms of material in this sample. If we take this and assume it's the same over the whole harbour, this is about 50,000 tons of phytoplankton.
Ian: This quantity of phytoplankton is able to absorb about 80,000 tons of CO2 , or the annual emissions of 20,000 cars, but as Ian Jones was planning to test his idea of feeding the oceans he discovered he'd been beaten to it by a team from the other side of the Pacific Ocean, but they weren't using urea. In 1995 a team of American Oceanographers set out to study the desolate zone. That's an area 250 miles to the south west of the Galapagos Islands, where there is little phytoplankton. They wanted to find out what was making the desolate zone so desolate. The theory? That it was missing a vital nutrient - iron. So half a ton of iron was added to the sea. Ken Cole was one of the scientists on board and witnessed what happened next.
Ken Cole: The results from the iron X2 near the Galapagos were dramatic, and turned the ocean green for miles. There were scientists that would walk out and look at this green ocean and burst into tears at the dramatic way in which a small amount of iron would have such a huge effect on a community, and this was sort of like discovering.. you know, the key to climate change.
Ian: When CO2 is absorbed by phytoplankton it releases oxygen with the remaining carbon staying in the plankton. When the plankton die they sink to the deep ocean floor taking the carbon with them. By the end of the expedition the scientists had calculated that this small area of phytoplankton had absorbed an additional 7,000 tons of CO2 , the equivalent to over 2000 fully grown redwood trees. But back in Australia Ian Jones is convinced that his plan to use nitrogen rich urea will have a wider use than iron. Only 20% of the oceans like the desolate zone need iron to grow more phytoplankton. Nitrogen would act as a more general booster in a whopping 80% of the oceans. So Jones thinks that his idea would be more effective. Three hours away by plane from Sidney Harbour and a world away from the boats and water fronts farming communities like Bourke are living at the sharp end of global warming.
[Radio: Weather Forecast]: Now to TWEB's weather forecast for Bourke, New South Wales to all our farmers listening. Unfortunately there is no rain in the forecast this week. Six years without significant rain, times must be tough but hang in there, rain has to come soon.
Ian: The Thomsons have been farmers for generations. They have 2000 acres of cotton that relies on water to grow. Unfortunately they have been stuck in the worst drought in living memory, and haven't been able to grow anything for six years.
Mr Thomson (Farmer): Normally this time of the year the crop would be up about two feet high, just almost starting to be a solid mass of grain, you know, you'd start.. it's almost to the stage where you'd start to struggle to see up and down the rows.
Ian: And the situation gets worse when you get down the river.
Mr Thomson: Well we're in the bed of the Murray-Darling River which is the longest river system in Australia. As you can see, it's bone dry. To my left here is our river pumps which is what we use to extract water out of this river for irrigation.
Ian: Only 14 months ago this arid field was a lake. The Thomsons remember the good times playing in the water.
Mrs Thomson: We've got a jet ski and the kids all can ski and wake boards and knee boards. It's really good when there's water here. You get sick of seeing the dirt and the dust, and the beautiful blue skies. [laugh]
Mr Thomson: The worst case scenario is that.. you know, the drought continues on for a couple of years and the equity that we have in our farm diminishes back to not much or to nothing, then I guess it's a 'for sale'. Oh I'd be devastated. Yeah, I'd be totally devastated. We started with nothing when we came here. [emotional] To have a drought that's now it's been classified as a one in 200 year drought, sort of makes me think that there's probably something else going on, you know, and I guess the issue of global warming probably has some merit.
Jones: The climate change will get progressively worse because the carbon dioxide is rising all the time, but of course if we leave the carbon dioxide in for the next 25 years we're going to have a big problem getting it out of the air, so that's why we need to start now taking up the carbon dioxide while it's still a manageable problem.
Ian: But Ian Jones' idea of making the oceans blue by boosting them with nitrogen may have a very serious downside. Fish have died where there is an excess of phytoplankton, but Ian Jones thinks he can control the phytoplankton at levels that wont kill marine life. So his plan will only work where there is not much phytoplankton to begin with.
Ian Jones: Something important about Ocean Nourishment is we're not doing it where there's lots of productivity, we're doing it in the desert regions of the ocean. If you don't like the outcome of Ocean Nourishment of course you can just turn off the tap. This is like irrigating the desert. If you irrigate the desert the plants bloom, but if you turn off the water they just die and go away. The same thing will happen in the ocean. When you turn off the food supply for the plankton, they'll just die and fall to the deep ocean.
Ian: The benefit of urea as a successful fertilizer is evidenced on most agricultural land. It is rich in nitrogen used by farmers to fertilize their crops. So Ian Jones has turned to an agricultural solution to produce his nitrogen in a form that can be added to the ocean, urea granules. He's met up with environmental scientist, John Ridley, at this fertilizer factory.
John Ridley: Nitrogen is a very common element in the atmosphere. About 80% of the atmosphere is nitrogen and about 20% is oxygen. So nitrogen is readily available, it's just not in the form that we can use for nourishing the oceans.
Ian: The nitrogen, fixed in urea granules, should be easy to transfer and dissolve in sea water.
Ridley: Okay, what we're going to do here is just put some granular urea into just a pure glass of water. This will demonstrate the solubility of the urea. This is similar to what will happen in an ocean nourishment plan because we'll convert granular urea into a liquid form which can go through a marine pipeline and out into the marine environment to nourish the ocean.
Ian: Gallons of urea in the ocean off Australia, perhaps not every surfer's idea of fun, swimming in a component of urine.
Jones: It's pretty strange that phytoplankton can prosper on this white granular material, isn't it.
Ridley: Mmm, it is, yeah.
Jones: But that's all they need to have a good life.
Ridley: [sampling water] So this is a pure form or urea, it has a slightly bitter taste, you know, but it doesn't taste like this.
Ian: So maybe putting urea in the ocean wouldn't be so bad after all. Ian Jones plans to run a pipe from a nitrogen factory and pump gallons of urea into the ocean, feeding the plankton which absorbs carbon dioxide, then sinks to the bottom of the sea, reducing global warming. But should we be meddling with an eco system that's taken millions of years to evolve?
Jones: We've changed the planet and once you start managing nature, you have to continue to manage nature. It's no use hoping that it'll restore itself to a new equilibrium set up by humans. Nature will need to be managed forever now that we've changed it dramatically.
Mr Thomson: If there's other ideas out there than actually can chew up some of these emissions that have been created then I think that's fantastic. It'd be good to see those explored.
Ian: A fifth plan was on the table of the scientist in the California Conference to take carbon dioxide out of the air. Not this time by altering the ocean but by mimicking the action of one of the greatest carbon capturers on earth - trees. New York City, financial capital of the world and home to over 8 million people. Like many coastal cities, it's under threat from rising sea levels. Geophysicist Klaus Lackner is working on an idea that many believe is the front runner in cutting greenhouse gasses. He wants to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it deep underground.
In order to stop climate change we need to collect the carbon dioxide back from the atmosphere. We believe we can do that and once the carbon dioxide is collected it can be put away safely and permanently for thousands and thousands of years.
Ian: So has Prof Klaus Lackner found a way of accommodating our excessive burning of fossil fuels, so we can, for the time being at least, continue living our energy rich lives?
Klaus Lackner (Geophysicist): Today is a cold day. It has snowed, people will need heat, and in the summer they will need air conditioning. Energy is just critical and it's very difficult to take the largest energy source out of the system, and at the same time provide much more energy for more people who want to get to a decent standard of living.
Ian: Klaus Lackner has designed an amazing machine, a synthetic tree which will remove CO2 directly from the air all around us giving the world some breathing space whilst alternative carbon neutral energy sources could be developed.
Klaus : Because there's this analogy to leaves on a tree, who also pull CO2 out of the air as the CO2 flows over it, we call them synthetic trees. Just like a real tree, a synthetic artificial tree would have a structure to hold it up. It would have the equivalent to a trunk, probably a pillar, and above where there's wind you would then find the equivalent to branches which hold up the leaves over which the air flows to collect the carbon dioxide. Now unlike in a real tree, these leaves could be packed much more tightly, and the reason for that is that these leaves have to see the sunshine and have to be exposed to it because that's what you need for photosynthesis. Since we do not do anything like that in an artificial tree, we can pack them in much more tightly and that is one of the reasons why an artificial tree can collect much more CO2 out of the air than a natural real tree.
Ian: It was Klaus Lackner's teenage daughter, Clare, that gave him the inspiration to solve this problem, when she was looking for a school science project.
Klaus : And I said, why don't we pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and so she actually showed that this can be done. She took air, blew it through a solution of sodium hydroxide and she showed that overnight she'd collected half of the CO2 from the air which she bubbled through her sodium hydroxide solution.
Ian: So taking his daughter's experiment a step further, Klaus Lackner began a series of laboratory tests.
Klaus : To give you a little feeling how this works, these walls here are perforated so it's easy for air to move through. There's a similar wall on the inside, opening a tube where the air goes through. There's a fan right here which will suck the air through the system and blow it out towards the top. As the air goes through, it goes through this layer in between here which is filled with this packing material you see here. This is material that is very open. If you blow air through, it easily goes through. They are wetted with the sodium hydroxide solution.
Ian: Sodium hydroxide is the key to the success of this idea. When CO2 comes into contact with sodium hydroxide it is absorbed, producing a liquid solution of sodium carbonates.
Klaus : The liquid percolates down, is eventually collected in this bucket at the bottom. As the air comes out it has less CO2 in it, substantially less CO2 than when it came in.
Ian: The liquid containing the CO2 is then piped away to be processed turned into a concentrated gas in preparation for its final storage. Nature has its own way of storing carbon. Once trees and plants have absorbed CO2 the carbon is retained in the plants. Todd Forest is Vice President for Horticulture at the New York Botanical Gardens.
[Todd Forrest]: Plants of course play a starting role in the carbon cycle. They take carbon dioxide from the air through their leaves in the process of photosynthesis and convert it to simple sugars and starches which are the building blocks of everything from the smallest blade of grass to the tallest most majestic forest tree. Trees are wonderful carbon sinks, plants and forests around the world store huge quantities of carbon in the form of leaves and bark and wood. But trees aren't enough to compensate for the amount of carbon dioxide that we produce.. that we humans produce. So while we should all plant more trees and do our part, we can't look to trees as the solution for the problem that we have created. The concept of artificial trees, scrubbing the environment of excess carbon dioxide is interesting, so I suppose if the neighbour all agreed and the technology was proven, that anything that we could do to limit.. to try to turn back our carbon emissions is worth investigating.
Klaus : One of the good things about the collation of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is that you can do it virtually anywhere because the air mixes very rapidly just like the CO2 leaving a power plant, mixes into the air and it can be found just about everywhere, that taking out CO2 can be done anywhere.
Ian: Klaus Lackner's vision is to have thousands of artificial trees like wind farms filtering out the world's carbon dioxide. He estimates that a single one of these artificial trees would remove 90,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year, the equivalent emissions of over 20,000 cars. 80% of the world's energy supply still relies on fossil fuels. It feeds every aspect of our lives, something that New Yorkers understand well. In 2003 the whole city ground to a halt when the power supply failed. It was plunged into darkness. From the skies above, Manhattan looked like a giant black hole with traffic jams for once a thing of beauty. With a state of emergency in place, the police feared lawlessness and looting, but the only problem: 60 fires caused by candles used to stave off the darkness. It illustrated clearly just how much of our lives depends on energy. This huge dependency creates massive amounts of pollution. Last year alone more than 29 billion tons of CO2 was pumped into the atmosphere. Klaus Klaus's synthetic trees could remove some of this, but the carbon dioxide he collects needs to be stored away forever.
Klaus : One possibility for storing vast amounts of carbon dioxide is below the sea bed where the ocean is very deep. The sea bed floor is a rock not unlike this and it's quite porous, you can actually get carbon dioxide squashed into the porous of this material and it will stay there because it's denser than water.
Ian: Using existing oil drilling technology channels thousands of metres deep would be drilled into the sea bed and the carbon dioxide gas would be injected into it, permeating the surrounding porous rock. At this depth, and low temperature, the carbon dioxide is denser than water, locking it in place.
Klaus : It cannot rise from there to the ocean floor, so it's put away literally for millions of years.
Ian: It's going to take a great sea change in lifestyles to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to a manageable level. So Klaus Lackner believes his synthetic trees would buy us the time we need by regulating carbon dioxide levels.
Klaus : I am very optimistic that a solution to global warming can be found. I believe that synthetic trees will play a role in that and that they will play a role in how the energy landscape of the future will look.
Ian: While all the scientists and engineers have faith in the feasibility of their projects in truth most are reluctant advocates. With the international scientific community now convinced that it's very likely man's behaviour is causing climate change, they hope we can find the will to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions without the need for such dramatic technological interventions, but if we don't, they are ready with their ambitious plans, with five ways to save the world.
IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:While every attempt has been made to ensure this transcript or summary is accurate, Carte Blanche or its agents cannot be held liable for any claims arising out of inaccuracies caused by human error or electronic fault. This transcript was typed from a transcription recording unit and not from an original script, so due to the possibility of mishearing and the difficulty, in some cases, of identifying individual speakers, errors cannot be ruled out.
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