go beyond. all of the stories that matter to. us. whatever it takes. running down cut cut cut cut cut. made for mines.

everything. this is your attitude it. can all go south to work for the thieves or not but. i thank you. december 25th the 196 countries signing the paris climate agreement agreed to get global warming under control well below 2 degrees celsius by 2100 the effect that he has on the system is something that's happening more rapidly than some of the changes we would like to make. is the only fast stacked in the approach to reduce heat directly in the climate. whether they're harnessing the excess c o 2 in the atmosphere. officially the common goal of geo engineering technologies is to slow down or even reverse the effects of global war. by deliberately

intervening in the climate what it's meant to do is give us to be able to go to the energy. in time to limit the damage. to. our. coal oil gas the global economy is addicted to fossil fuel energy far from slowing down global emissions of carbon dioxide continue to increase to curb the effects of global warming scientists are now looking for ways to remove the excess c o 2 present in the air. yes it ridiculous the carbon cycle which is very active on earth with several reservoirs

a huge reservoir in the oceans with the carbon dissolved within the water there's another reservoir on land in vegetation and in saw oil deals and then there's atmospheric c o 2 ever since we started using fossil fuels we've been sending carbon into the atmosphere going to. the oceans biomass and soil do not have the capacity to absorb the excess carbon that has built up in the air since the beginning of the industrial revolution. since $850.00 the c o 2 concentration in the atmosphere has increased from $280.00 parts per 1000000 to more than $400.00. dioxide piles up in the atmosphere is cumulative it doesn't go away roughly half of the c o 2 we put out will be there for hundreds of years and together really out of the atmosphere ocean. biosphere system will take tens of thousands if not 100 thousands

of years so we need some ways of taking carbon dioxide that already entered the environment back out and broadly speaking that is a negative emission. forecast by the intergovernmental panel on climate change or i.p.c.c. suggest the concentration of atmospheric c o 2 could triple by 2100 if no action is taken to reduce emissions that would result in a temperature rise of over 4 degrees celsius. every scenario that keeps global warming below 1.5 to 2 degrees involves a number of ways of carbon dioxide removal in order to reduce and emissions should they increase to munch over the course of the 21st century. or more than to put the most commonly used method in these integrated climate carbon models which simulate different scenarios is to use biomass via reforestation and asked for a station to generate negative emissions through what's known as beck's.

stands for bio energy with carbon capture and storage plants are grown to absorb c o 2 through photosynthesis then they have burned in thermal power plants to produce energy the c o 2 emitted via their combustion is captured and stored away the carbon footprint of this process is negative. growing trees is generally a good idea and you're not going to find too many people arguing against you but this is can you do it at a scale which is actually going to have a material impact the problem is that you have to grow such a huge area of these plants that it's going to have impacts on other systems in terms of biodiversity and in terms of land tenure so that land belongs to someone at the moment and the issue is well how is it going to be affected by people using that land to take carbon away did a small. it probably doesn't have much of an effect but try to do it on

a scale that has and to an impact on the climate which is what this is about and it would have a material impact on those offices. to remove $10000000000.00 tons of c o 2 per year or one quarter of all current c o 2 emissions we would need to set aside $500000000.00 hectares of land equal to a 3rd of all current farming land or an 8th of the world's forests add to that the intensive use of fertilizers and tensions over water resources. another method involves capturing c o 2 from using chemical processes a researcher at arizona state university klaus lackner has developed a prototype that can replicate the c o 2 absorption capacities of a tree leaf but far more effectively. directly active is a sailor technology to literally pull thier true directly out of the ambient air by

technical means you can always he was and this is an alternative photo photosynthesis you could grow by on my house you can grow plants and bake collect c o 2 from there just as well so we are calling our direct capture artificial trees because just like a tree we take syria too out of the air as the wind blows over our artificially thereby c o 2. in the mid 1990 s. the physicist discovered the specific properties of a polymer that could absorb carbon dioxide when it's dry it absorbs the c o 2 held in the air when it's when it it releases it again. this is a very tiny capture device grams per day. and now i'm driving it into its parking spot where we can where we can now we generated and in order to do that we have. to make it way.

so now they reach the top i simply let go from the pump and now gravity drains it back you see the water coming back and going down there and we're simply watching this building up the c o 2 level inside and right now it has reached 1.9 percent so it's going to breach 2 percent so we are about 50 times higher than we are in the ambient air inside this little box and the only thing we did is we made the resin material which. unlike other methods of managing the climate this one is simply walking us back from where we shouldn't be in other words we dumped soo much c o 2 in the atmosphere and now we're taking it back out and i think sort of from a. conceptual point of view this is the least invasive method to solving the problem to test out these take nique which has proved successful in the burn tree tests engineers have developed

a prototype and set it up in the desert unlike other techniques this device will be able to absorb c o 2 without consuming too much energy. the energy required to capture the carbon dioxide is provided by the normal. movement of the wind other words the wind evaporates the water off of the resin surface leaves behind the carbon dioxide that it can carry down and the energy of the gap aeration is the energy that causes that kind of loop if you will so we let the wind do that for us we harvest the wind . how effective could these machines really be engineers hope to get them into mass production is quickly as possible to remove c o 2 from the n. what scale it up so that it was something that would fit inside of a 40 foot shipping container a machine that size would capture roughly a ton of c o 2 a day so one of those machines would cover. in 6 days it would cover

the output of an automobile for an entire year. inspired by this discovery architects of now designed tree poets artificial trees planted in the cities of the future a project that for now remains a vision to the future. become a problem is a waste management problem and i'm all for minimizing the waste we are making moving away from fossil fuels as fast as we can but between the time we succeeded with the transition and now we will emit so much more c o 2 that we have to in the meantime clean up all the litter you generated in the past you have to take back because we can't leave it where it is and that means we have to do but we have to go to sustainable solutions and at the same time clean up after ourselves invisible air capture comes in a shorter. what do we do with the c o 2 once it's been absorbed by these machines 3 private companies have become

involved in direct capture in 2010 graziella. founded the company global thermostat whose aim is to suck up c o 2 and sell it on it's a 1st step towards a carbon neutral economy if you remove this you. can you use it commercially for drinks very juice or corner for food very i don't know how but of course good use dry ice that the c o 2 for the 78 being want there we should change one for humans for production 40 murders for plastics we chat about you to get 8 or more 4 by your fertilizers are being treated increased differently if you're fish or you do produce clean fewer bugs right mixing this year do we try to show you we're removing the c o 2 and you're making profits. this directing air capture

technology uses ammonia based chemical processes global thermostat has already filed 35 peyton's and amassed 51000000 euros to develop its technology. this is a way that the doctrine of evolution leads to the usual door you know i say feedstock. for the holy corner me to good use sanitation and idea of the answer to that at the center of using pictorial you're going to use your therefore you're going to have a word that cornell means that this power play this year that we think for a mere. increase economic growth enormously white cleaning their most fear and that is that they were lucian are discovering that the revolution we want to be part of. according to a 2011 report by the american physical society the cost of direct capture would be around $400.00 u.s. dollars per ton. the expectation is that direct capture will be very expensive the

kids' series no one is prepared to pay for removing c o $2.00 from the atmosphere there's no incentive it's as if you've got lots of different machines for cleaning the streets of rubbish but nobody is prepared to pay for picking up the rubbish and ultimately you need to have some sort of mechanism that recognizes that syria too in the atmosphere is a waste and that we need to remove some of that waste for the benefit of society. recent reports written by industry itself suggest that it may be possible to reduce the costs of direct capture to around $100.00 or even $50.00 per tonne thus making the technology viable. in order to shift towards negative emissions and have an impact on the climate direct capture must be accompanied by a long term storage system. the helis haiti geothermal power station supplies

a 3rd of iceland's electricity. as part of the card fix research program icelandic engineers in partnership with the european union have developed a technology to inject the plants emissions directly into underground wrong. the swiss company clime works has set up a system that captures c o 2 in the air and buries it. here 50 tons of c o 2 per year. maybe offsets. the costs with this you can capture. or whatever. in the. store it's going to. have it using a filter and the power plants energy the c o 2 we've captured and injected into subterranean layers of salt more than 400

meters below ground. from the plants. this year too is mixed with what there it goes into a steel pipe into the bathroom the c o 2 in this fluid if it is see it what it creates. and this assett this solves the rocks and then rocks the lever to cut them into this one and they bind immediately with a c o 2 to form another rocks. you can see here you have these small purples this is going to be have space for the c o 2 from the air to press it it and you can see these white spots this is color sets a sense in this come see him cut open it so it has calcium from the rock that it is salt and then c o 2 is converted to solid rock it stays there forever it's not going to leak to the surface and come back so we have to cut it again and we injected we just captured

it injected mineralize it and it's gone. climb works believes this research project is a 1st step towards a world of negative emissions the company has set itself the objective of capturing one percent of global c o 2 emissions but reversing the effects of 200 years worth of burning fossil fuels will take time and a lot of money. this is why others are looking for solutions elsewhere in the oceans for example. the way the ocean works ringback because there's a lot of nutrients in the deep ocean but nothing can do for the synthesis there because there's no light at the surface of the ocean there's a lot of life but there's not much in the way of nutrients if we put some additional nutrients in the surface that could allow organisms to photosynthesize take the c o 2 turn it into organic matter and then that would sink into the deep ocean.

pulling that carbon out of the atmosphere. in british columbia in western canada the private organization. is developing official insulation technique that would allow oceans to absorb a large amount of carbon we have been working for the last 2 years on specific ocean seeding compounds that. provides ire and not in the form of rust but in a bio to bio available for. coal aren't to arran is is heavy and i are in. sinks quickly so what we did was we found a process that we can buy in this r. and with organic material or like root built for instance that floats and or it sinks slower basically and it keeps that bioavailable iron available for a longer period of time instead of hours that keeps it available for you know for for several days. will the supply of ion enable the fine so plankton to grow

faster and absorb c o 2 before drifting to the bottom of the oceans in theory each ton of ion added to the oceans could remove between 30110000 tons of c o 2 from the atmosphere. ocean for as a ship is probably the only carbon capture technology that's able to sequester a mess if the amount of c o 2 at a very low cost and as a by effect probably improving the very eco system as well we've developed a methodology where we can tag and measure if a fish grew as a result of our claim to bloom and in the process of growing that that claim to in its consume c o 2 and eventually these diatoms these days he's playing to those who will die and able a portion of that will sink to the bottom of the ocean sequester the carbon therefore you know long periods of time. to date a dozen experiments have taken place to test the impact of ocean fertilization on

marine ecosystems in. 2009 the indo german program loha fix gathered new data researchers poured more than 6 tons of iron into a 300 square kilometer stretch of ocean this led to a doubling of phytoplankton in just 2 weeks but the results of the experiment demonstrated that only a tiny amount of carbon actually reached the ocean floor. so i don't know yet how effective this ocean fertilization technique really years and it no doubt comes with a lot of serious disadvantage is because it involves up setting aqua librium within our oceans ecosystems it will favor invasive species and shift the balance between certain species. hopes to carry out several ocean fertilization experiments in the years to come but using human intervention to restore ecosystems and remove c

o 2 has raised concerns among environmental groups one of the things that a lot of people don't understand is that we already are going to buy one cup of irish to about the size of a soccer field. and i think that's why idea of ocean from his issue that we're pumping like massive amounts of chemicals and it was really not correct and that's a misconception that the public has. the oceans have absorbed a large proportion of global carbon emissions over the last few decades according to recent studies they show signs of reaching their saturation point in c o 2 which is one of the leading causes of ocean acidification. we can't be sure that this fertilization will be enough to recover this process. meanwhile and other researches are already coming up with ways of lowering the earth's temperature. so we have

a problem. gases that are trapping heat and would like to take those gases out of the atmosphere and restore the balance healthy. but taking the gases out of the atmosphere takes a long time nature takes a long time to bring them out and artificial methods have to be created and distributed if we can bring them out so if if we need to address he then we may have to move more quickly than those options for bringing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere solar geoengineering reflecting sunlight from the atmosphere is today the only known way to reduce within a decade or 2. the solar radiation that reaches our planet is not completely absorbed by the earth's surface some of the sun's rays are reflected back into space by the atmosphere and land surfaces a phenomenon commonly known as the i'll be doa effect. in 1965

a scientific report sent to us president lyndon b. johnson was already warning of the dramatic consequences of rising c o 2 levels in the atmosphere it suggested for the 1st time increasing reflectivity by one percent in order to cool down the planet in 1998 we were in aspen and we had a meeting about how to. solve the climate problem and most of the talks were about transforming the energy system or not cutting down far but there was one talk somebody proposed putting some kind of shield to deflect sunlight away from the earth. astrophysicist would propose the idea of parking a space sunshade at the point where the gravity of the earth and the sun cancel each other out lagrangian point one. so i got back to my office and we didn't have any money to work on this or anything and but the guy who had the next office over

to me he was running climate models and. we were really surprised at the outcome because it worked much better than we ever thought. in caldera is one of the founding fathers of geo engineering shortly after the new millennium began he carried out the 1st simulations of solar geo engineering he demonstrated that it was possible to limit global warming simply by diffusing the sunlight some parts of the earth's system like the coral reefs. are facing. potential collapse within 20 or 30 years maybe we want to have emergency options then these kinds of options are the only thing that are known to work that quickly and in marine corps breaking you could break in clouds over 20 percent of the clouds of the ocean maybe 3 or 4 percent of the ocean's surface and possibly

cool the entire planet by 2 degrees. influencing the reflectivity of marine clouds to make them brighter was one of the 6 solutions chosen by the australian government in 2018 to save the great barrier reef already showing the effects of global warming. in the u.s. researchers for the marine cloud brightening project have developed a floating offshore device to enhance the reflectivity of ocean clouds. clouds cover about 2 thirds of the earth's surface so anything you can do to change the brightness of those clouds can change the amount of sunlight being reflected back to space they already reflect a lot of sunlight back to space so they act to cool the planet actually cool so brightening is the idea that if we change the number of particles in those clouds

the number of droplets. the concentration of droplets we can actually make those clouds brighter. each one of these little trucks is the effect of one single large container ship over the ocean. you can see that the the brightness is increased where there are tracks showing that particles have been emitted by ships and going into these clouds and making them brighter. but what we want to do is to take salt from the ocean which is already a natural source of these cloud forming particles and we want to increase the number of us and by doing that deliberately increase the brightness of those clouds and if we increase the brightness by a small amount we could offset some of the warming due to the common side so we might go from reflecting let's say 25 percent of the solar radiation to 50 percent of the solar radiation that's a lot in terms of energy but it's still allowing solar radiation through to the

ocean. convinced by the potential of this method a team of retired engineers from silicon valley have joined the project to help develop a system for diffusing particles if you go to the coast of california. and this is the clothes that we preferably would like to work with so these clouds charge not very effective so they look great they don't look quite so if you get more droplets and smaller droplets of the recall wife. this is our knowledge in the hood here it has 2 connections one providing compressed air vigor 2 from the smaller 2 providing salt water and they mix in oslo and come out as a spray so to get it to work jack will turn off that impressed air 1st. using this invention the engineers say they are able to spray nano particles 15000

to the millimeter wide small enough to rise and remain suspended in the end. the team hope to carry out a full scale experiment within the next few years to act upon cloud reflectivity. ultimately the engineers are hoping to develop a system capable of spraying more than one trillion seawater particles per 2nd. it would be some time before we do it's house that's big enough to measure whether we're brightening clouds and in order to do that you need a big pots of cloud and sky 100 kilometers by under kilometers which is big for humans but is small for the earth and you would go out in the remote ocean where the clouds are very clean and pristine and you generate spray from the ocean seawater with 4 or 5 ships and you traverse this area for several months.

i personally think that it would be somewhat irresponsible for us to think about doing the solar climate engineering if we are not at the same time rapidly moving towards the idea of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere so if you imagine you are trying to compensate for the warming due to c o 2 by doing braking every year there's more c o 2 in the atmosphere so every year we would have to make brighter brighter clouds eventually going to run out of clouds to bright and this is not going to work. in 2006 nobel prize winning. just called crewdson known for his work on the ozone layer raise the possibility of spraying aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect a portion of solar radiation and cool down the. particles suspended in the air in the lower part of the atmosphere the troposphere or the upper part of the stratosphere would that atmosphere in the stratosphere

which begins around 10 kilometers above the earth particles move around horizontally rather than falling straight back down to earth. ringback and one pickguard that we do you know steve all the climate models. and this way we can simulate for example in the present climate that we can also simulate the future but. we tend not to really test. in the way that it would be. because that would mean we would have to inject a large amount of gus's or air assault and stratosphere but we don't know what it does and we don't know what the impacts are so best to us really right now and use climate laws or large amounts to simulate the effect of. this example shows the spread of a cloud of aerosols from a single source over a 2 year period the particles move around horizontally within the stratosphere and

end up covering a large part of the earth's surface. we explored how you can inject gases at a certain location to then change their all sorts or you would actually control the movement and get the cooling you want to. controlling the injection and spread of aerosols within the stratosphere to reach optimal coverage is one of the challenges currently faced by geo engineering. inject the air assaults here right then 15 north and you can nicely see there is don't just cover this one latitude while the engine acting very close to the tropics but and then if we continue in the next year to inject in the other hemisphere in 15 north you can see also how quickly those 0 salts move around the globe and then slowly also cover the other part of the hemisphere and in this way we eventually can reach

a global coverage with the 0 salts and reach global dimming. injecting sulfur dioxide count seem carbonate or even diamonds many different types of particles of being looked into engineers believe this can be done using airplanes or pipes elevated by balloons. why wouldn't you want to just do it tomorrow if it's so wonderful we're not really sure what the side effects will be in the earth system is an incredibly complicated system in our models of very complicated but our models are just a very crude representation of all the rich detail of reality and so we can be sure any time you interfere in a complicated system that something's going to happen that you don't expect and so from an environmental point of view the thing that i'm most concerned about are unintended consequences there could be long term effects on ecosystems that we

don't know about. if they were to be deployed in the near future so fleet era souls could. alter the chemical structure of the stratosphere and therefore slow down the progress made in rebuilding the ozone layer. depending on the size of particles used the brightness and color of the sky could also change we also know very little about the toxicity of these aerosols once they fall back down to worth . several 1000000 tons of particles could maintain or even lower land temperatures even if greenhouse gas emissions were to double. the riskiest along plights year engineering the more we inject the more dependent we are on to your engine and doing this and the most important part c of flying to engineering to me is that we at the same time reduce greenhouse gases that eventually get stopped. the terminations effect if after 50 years of solar

geo engineering we stop releasing aerosols into the stratosphere the temperature will rise by more than 2 degrees in under 10 years. within say 10 to 15 years all the warming we suppressed and trying to avoid by injecting aerosols into the stratosphere will eventually catch up with us. but this rapid warming also means it's much more difficult to adapt to global warming difficult for society and for natural ecosystems this is a. little by little geo engineering is now establishing its place in the global warming debate a small group of researchers mainly in north america europe and china are starting to take it seriously research into geo engineering has arrived at a turning point where experimentation appears to be essential should we prevent

these experiments all regulate them. going out in the open during doing outdoor field trials is a red line it's a political red line that will sort of normalize the idea of doing interventions and you know the bigger these experimentations get the more you know the more that ability that is being lent to that all out experimentation should not go ahead. you know before we've had an international conversation about this topic . controlling the climatic thermostat will require new legal provisions international agreements and treaties thus providing a framework for future experimentation. if you asked me today to vote whether to start solar nearing tomorrow or next year what would never ever do it frankly i would vote for never ever doing it because we

simply don't know what solar geoengineering reverses most of the problems. we know about most of the characteristics of climate change on the one hand or climate policy on the other right that it is slow it is expensive it's the low ball it takes i to incentives to put people together that perry's agreement was all about getting countries to agree to do more than the otherwise word while all these properties reverse when it comes to solar g. and. it's quick it's cheap the quantities involved of aerosols that need to be lofted into the stratosphere are relatively small you know less than 10 planes flying it's year around the world a living material into the stratosphere and it is imperfect is not a solution to climate change the real problem is stopping people stopping countries stopping over all action that might be too quick too fast.

and not done in an appropriate way. costing much less than current policy on reducing c o 2 emissions. engineering and particularly the technique of stratospheric aerosol injection would be accessible to any country. 'd point can this get out of hand how can we prevent other actors powerful states military actors or corporate actors to use the technology in their interests at and have already been very uncertain. on the various technologies uncertain you know types types of the hardware or certain processing certain aspects of that technology. geo engineering is for the most part funded by private donors

microsoft co-founder bill gates has invested millions of dollars into funding this research a study in 2014 identified $143.00 patents relating to geo engineering technologies primarily in the field of carbon dioxide removal. and silicon valley the company ice 911 has developed a controversial geo engineering technique. i started when 123. 1006 when i saw the al gore inconvenient truth movie one of the things in the film that really stood out for me was the ice l.b.o. feedback effect when the summer sun is shining on this now darker ice and ocean more solar energy is being used or rather than reflective ringback the nonprofit is developing a protective material that can be scattered across sheets of ice in order to restore its reflective properties ringback. so these are material that are

fundamentally like sand but it has an inert gas bubble in the middle of it and a thin shell of silica around it and when we put it in water it will float can then make a profound protection of ice and snow underneath because it makes it reflective bright enough they are reflecting off the sun like. off to several tests in alaska the company funded by private donors is waiting for permission to test its geo engineering process on a greater scale. this time in the giant in the middle of the arctic ocean. we just got news this winter that the arctic formed virtually no new ice and the amount of ice that is in the arctic in the summer determines how stable our climate is how much cooling we have how much solar radiation is reflected back to space so you want as much ice there as possible in the summer and in order to do that you

need to form the most in the winter and what's one of the ways you can aid that process you put this material on top so you call that surface layer and more build from underneath. look how much brighter the material is in the surrounding area. and the size of deployment we're thinking of are things on the order of half a percent of the area of the arctic you know in strategic areas that could make a very large impact and we're showing in the climate modeling the ability to rebuild not just ice area which. happens in some sense every winter you rebuilt the nice all over the arctic but very importantly ice volume and set ice thickness that allows you to build back to having a high reflectivity a 2nd high i'll be delays is what the experts call it that's what we're after trying to rebook that process. all lice 911 hopes to ultimately acquire between 3 to 6 container ships to help scans of these glass micro beads and in its own words

save the arctic. the idea that we may be confronted with a climate emergency in the next few years is spreading and the public debate on geo engineering has only just begun. thank you. but i was to ask you how much would it cost to build a large power nuclear power plant in germany the answer is well you can't and the reason you can't is not because the germans don't have the technical ability and not because they don't have the money it's because they don't have the political will they've made a decision they don't want to do it so for a technology to work it's not about kind of work just physically it's also about whether it can work socially and politically as well the question is can it be done in a way that would be socially acceptable politically acceptable would it how how would it actually happen would you have one country deploying it in other countries just

going along with it or would you have an international agreement and how would it be structured lots of questions about well how do you maintain the system. if you're going to have such a system what rate do you you set it up to say you want half a degree of warming one degree one and a half degrees who decides no it's yet though this step robot is menounos reason to believe that we won't be able to use it or implement alternatives. and by nailing that woman them and the like and the problem is that the i.p.c.c. has considered. various carbon geo engineering options but isn't studying other alternatives no less included come aboard himself for example extensively supporting agro ecology and non industrial farming. or taking measures to salvage damaged ecosystems such as wetlands and forests. that there are more but i have no wouldn't. want snow that would create jobs and enhance the

wellbeing of communities that live in these areas that it's not just a question of absorbing c o 2 i think hardly any of these options have been studied. i understand that there are researchers who may be well intentioned in their line of thinking but only want to understand how the technology works. better but the impact that has on the real world is terrible once again there's an injustice between the victims of global warming in the south and those who have the resources to research it and the new management not. the inertia and inability of societies to act on the causes of global warming or pushing others toward climate control but is geo engineering humankind's final step towards controlling nature really a desirable solution. is it too late for a global energy transition while the window for keeping global warming below 2

degrees is rapidly closing the time to act is now or never. reducing. the risk of flooding and erosion by creating hillside terrace is. a land where farmers fear losing their harvests and initiative use its own techniques to create a solution. that is successful. global 3000. and 30 minutes w. how to. discover

your concept discovered with a ballot. allegedly up to 100 lives the ideals of the font house are more relevant today than they were a. 100 ago visionaries reshaped things to come. people understood design is with shaping society. a powerhouse and that's crossed our car with ideas that are part of our future. what makes them about. firing to this very exciting power card to all of our. world are documentary stories made d.w. .

place. blame . blame this is you don't lie from searching for solidarity in your job and if there's pressure to help the countries hardest hit. we'll have.