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We look at how people, are working on ways to significantly reduce emissions and reduce the amount of carbon that's been building up in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution.
Episode one
Curtis
Welcome to the first Climate Repair Café Session, where we share some of the realities and possibilities around addressing a rapidly changing climate.
I'm Kelsi Umeko - and I'm Curtis McGann.
Kelsi
Now you’ve seen videos of climate catastrophes on the news just about every night (just before the sports) – so you get the picture…
But the Climate Repair Café isn’t about spreading doom and it’s not about spreading ungrounded hopium (more about that word later).
It’s about ideas and the people behind them, that stand a chance to shift the climate away from its current collision course.
Coming up
We visit the Great Barrier Reef in Australia where scientists are researching 'cloud brightening,' a process that makes clouds more reflective. We visit an aircraft carrier in San Francisco Bay where we find out why the same research was shut down. Then it's off to Le Havre, France to hop aboard a sail-powered container ship. Then author Herb Simmens talks about his book 'A Climate Vocabulary of the Future,' with a number of pithy and funny terms we might all use. We round off with artist and photographer Nikki Baxendale, who shares some of her breathtaking work on a vanishing Arctic world.
There's nothing more annoying than having an open discussion about climate change and you're sharing proven scientific facts and somebody interjects with "Oh yeah? Well, I've heard that's not the case"... and they blurt out something that's not true - or may be partly true but used out of context.
This story is about short-term losses - that lead to long-term gains. And that's a good example of how complex our climate is. The science is complex, but the principles are simple. If you understand the principles of something, you can calmly and confidently set detractors on the right road.
So - here we go...
MARINE CLOUD BRIGHTENING
Making clouds more reflective
Transcript of Prof. Shaun Fitzgerald interview
So cloud brightening is an interesting and potentially very helpful thing to consider for shielding more of the Earth from incoming solar radiation. So when clouds form over the ocean, they do so, let's say, in the first 1,000 metres above the sea. And those clouds provide two effects. The first is that then any sun that's shining on top of those clouds, more of it is reflected back to space rather than impacting the ocean. So they can actually protect the Earth in terms of a reflective property. The other property is that clouds also act as an insulator. So clouds provide these two fundamental processes. Cloud brightening is an idea whereby if you can create those clouds that were going to form anyway, but have them comprised of more smaller droplets rather than fewer larger ones, the ones that are comprised of more smaller droplets are optically whiter. If they are whiter, they will reflect more of the sun's radiation.
So the big question is, how might you be able to get clouds that are going to be formed of more smaller droplets? And the way to do that, potentially, is to create more sea spray. And when the sea spray evaporates, you're left behind with crystals of sodium chloride that get convected up naturally by convection currents. And those crystals of sodium chloride will act as cloud condensation nuclei.
And in fact, that's how clouds form over the ocean anyway. But the game afoot, therefore, is can you create more of those cloud condensation nuclei by using sprayers in order to make the clouds ultimately whiter?
Could marine cloud brightening help stabilize the ocean temperature?
The Great Barrier Reef in Australia is the largest living structure on the planet - and it's under
enormous pressure due to warming ocean temperatures. And coastal clouds along Western Australia have been getting sparser and less reflective, allowing more of the sun's heat through - adding to the problem. So what if it's possible to make these coastal clouds more reflective to slow down - or even reverse the warming?
Southern Cross University, Australia
Transcript of Prof. Daniel Harrison interview
We first started working on the concept of marine cloud brightening for the Great Barrier Reef after the mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017 devastated large parts of the Great Barrier Reef and some estimates at the time were that up to half the coral had been wiped out in these two events. So we started looking at different ideas how we might be able to cool the ocean down and relieve some of the heat stress on the corals and when we did the calculations looking at lots of different ideas marine cloud brightening kept sort of floating to the top of the pile because the energetic leverage is so high.
So over the last five years we've been conducting field work over the Great Barrier Reef experimenting whether the 30 years of theory behind marine cloud brightening actually works the same way in practice as scientists have thought and we're up to the point of we've been gradually escalating the field experiments in conjunction with the federal regulator the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority and developing the technology at the same time to make a bigger and bigger atomization of seawater and we're up to the point now where we can start to look at the effects on clouds in real time of these extra seawater droplets that we're putting into the atmosphere.
Short-term losses for long-term gains...
A short-term setback from a process that provides a long-term gain. Short-term warming due to cleaner skies, supporting the longer term goal of reducing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Over 80% of global cargo is transported by ships
Globally we've been inadvertently conducting marine cloud brightening for decades. At the same time that we've been releasing greenhouse gases and warming up the atmosphere, ships traversing the remote oceans have been burning fuels and releasing sulfur compounds which also form cloud condensation nuclei. And so for decades we've been adding these extra cloud condensation nuclei into the atmosphere which has been brightening clouds and masking some of the effects of global warming. However in 2020 the International Maritime Organization brought in new rules limiting the amount of sulfur in ship fuels and so this was an effort to clean up air pollution in port cities where many ships congregate and the exhaust is concentrated and creates an air pollution problem. But an unintended side effect of these new rules is that now we're brightening clouds over the remote oceans much less and so this is amplifying the effects of global warming and some estimates are that this decade we will have doubled the rate of warming because of this dimming of the clouds.
It's great that the International Maritime Organization set policy to reduce emissions - but there are companies out there that recognize that isn't nearly enough - and they're working on using an energy that creates ZERO emissions - and is free. WIND!
Welcome to the world's largest sail-powered cargo ship
Are there really alternatives to the enormous container ships used to transport 80% of the world's cargo, which amounts to about 3% of fossil fuel emissions?
The short answer is yes. But are these alternatives scalable, and are they financially viable?
The short answer is probably no - in terms of today, rolling out thousands of sail-powered ships in the next year. But we have to start somewhere, and Guillaume Le Grand has made a major start with a fleet of 20 transatlantic container ships.
We said from the start what we wanted to do, and it just took us a little longer than expected… Back in 2011, we announced our intention to develop trade routes and charter sailing ships to transport goods in a carbon-neutral way. This initial goal has been achieved, as our fleet of around twenty cargo ships has transported thousands of tons of goods under sail.
A climate vocabulary of the future
Without getting too deep, we know that language plays a big role in shaping our reality. And in the climate era, the words we use carry a lot of power: power to inform, to divide, to inspire action, or to shut conversation down.
Herb Simmens' new book 'A Climate Vocabulary of the Future' arms you with the most complete lexicon of climate terminology - witty, wry and incredibly useful.
Kelsi
It's one thing to talk about the science of climate change with statistics and data, but is that enough to move people into action? Unfortunately, I don't think so!
In South Africa, one of the biggest factors that helped bring down apartheid was all the arts and music events that drew world attention to the terrible injustices on an emotional level.
I think there's a big difference between knowing something and feeling something. You need both.
So our next story features Nikki Baxendale and her amazing art and photography.
Here's NIKKI!.
Transcript of Nikki Baxendale interview
I've always been interested in the ocean and water - in fact I grew up in a chemistry lab, my father was a chemistry professor and so I spent a lot of time underneath the electron microscope and so macro patterns have always been a fascination to me and I love the way light changes an object by going through the water.
So this painting is called Stealth and it's about an orca gliding underneath the ocean and it's the light refracting through the surface and it displaces the imagery and the colour palette as it goes through the water. This is taken from a series that was shot in the high Arctic around Svalbard on an expedition I did with a small group of photographers and we were looking at the carving glaciers, the polar bear lifestyle and the whales in the Arctic.
Similar research was started in San Francisco, USA, on the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. Harmlessly spraying salt water up into the air. But in this case, there was no interaction with the local community, so when the community found out about the research, they had it shut down.
It was a tough setback for important research that could have easily been avoided - and the lesson is so simple…
Curtis
We mentioned that science alone isn’t enough to effect change and we’ve just seen how important it is for people to have an emotional connection with our planet and climate - but it’s also important - essential, in fact - to be inclusive, by involving communities with the research or work you’re doing - because we can all be affected by the outcomes - for better or worse…
The climate work of Prof. Daniel Harrison in Australia was built on a relationship with the local community and stakeholders.
Inclusion has to be at the foundation of any research that has a bearing on any scale of life outside of a closed system - and the climate affects all life.
