 Hello everybody. Welcome to another deep adaptation Q&A with me, your host, Professor Jim Bendell. And today, our guest is Dr. Ye Tao, who's the founder and head of the MIR Reflection Project. So in 2018, he was a Harvard engineer working on nanoscale magnetic resonance imaging, and he read the deep adaptation paper on climate disaster, and he started cross-checking it with other climate science and concluded that climate change really is an existential risk to modern civilization, including everything he was working on at the time. So obviously, then he decided, like many of us should do, to stop what he was doing and rethink everything, and he decided to use his expertise to try and give humanity a better chance of reducing the catastrophe ahead. So Dr. Tao has since been developing and promoting what he argues is a cheap, safe, green and flexible form of climate engineering. So it uses mirrors to reflect the sun. So unlike many other geoengineering ideas many of us would have heard of, it doesn't seem very far-fetched or scary. And he arrived at that idea after analyzing and debunking the science or the economics behind many other approaches in this geoengineering field, which is also known today as climate repair and climate restoration. So we're going to hear about the MIR Reflection Project and its proposals and how it's evolved today. I'm interested because when the topic of geoengineering comes up, people often relate to it in perhaps not very diligent ways. They see it as one thing rather than many ideas, and they either like it or dismiss it because of their general attitude towards technology, seeing technology as either a sinner or savior. In addition, I think far too many people relate to it in terms of their own professional, commercial interests, and therefore promoting the ideas which offer the best potential return to venture capitalists, the people who are funding them. Now I think corporations undermined the effectiveness of the decades of climate concern, and we risked them undermining this new era of climate emergency. So I think we really need to look at ideas that are not driven by those interests. Dr. Ye Tao is promoting a plan that is not corporate. It's not going to make billionaires more money. I think the absence of well-paid PR companies is probably why you haven't heard much about it before now. So I'm really pleased to host Dr. Tao to talk about the challenge we face, talk about how it's inescapable, and to hear about his proposals for lessening the impacts, and that's called mere reflection. Ye Tao, thank you for joining us this Sunday. How about that joining on a Sunday? I think that's proof, isn't it, that this isn't just a day job? Well, I guess that's quite normal for us academics. I haven't known a weekend since entering college, let's say, so it's just another normal day, just used for a different purpose, hopefully a more meaningful one. Yeah, so no chance of burnout then. This is just how you rock and roll. So why is that? What is motivating you to work so hard on this rather than another way of like so many people are now working on geoengineering or climate restoration in some way, but in ways that have quite a clear route to big bucks to profit. You're really working on something which is non-profit, which is super flexible, grassroots, deployable. Why are you working on something that's not going to make you rich? What's wrong with you? Well, I think if one is genuinely interested in trying to solve this problem, one would have realized that continuing the current paradigm, Catholic exploitation of resources of humans will just lead to nowhere. And we are basically on the cusp of societal decay due to overuse of resources and the environmental conditions that support life. So concurrent to any technical intervention, we have to undertake social and engineering social changes, let's say, and the transformation of the society to one that values life, values human life equally, and the values of nature, values, you know, and it really gets rid of this focus on just money and profits in the next quarter. And the time scale of climate change, as we know it, is on the multi-year to the cattle time scales. And that's really a mismatch compared to the quarterly reports or even the four-year election cycles. So what we can provide as an engineer scientist is only, you know, technical advice on what's required to maintain the fundamental basic conditions to enable life and to enable human society to persist. But we can't really use the technical knowledge alone to inform people about how to restructure our civilization, which is necessary for it to survive past the next decade. What we can do is to help us navigate the coming decades, which will be very difficult from a climate change and natural disaster and extreme weather point of view. But with that vision in mind, we try to design elements that are compatible for such societal transformation in our strategy in the mirror framework. And that's why I think there is a lot of synergy between different groups like Extinction Rebellion and the gym on the group of gym and many others working on fighting racism, structural inequality, et cetera, and our more technical perspective. Yeah, I want to hear more about the specifics of your project. But I think we really need to locate it in a sense of where we're at because what I like about how you approach this is you say it as you see it, whereas so many people who work on climate as scientists, as scholars, sort of hedge things, and they're very keen to make sure that it doesn't instigate despair or panic or whatever. But when I've heard you talk and when I've read your writings, you're really clear about we have to see things as bad as they truly are in order to then look at what will work, as you say, within the time scales that we're dealing with. So straight off, do you think there is any truth perhaps to a truth in the climate orthodoxy that humanity can stay below two degrees of global ambient warming this century if we have the boldest of emission cuts and natural drawdown efforts? And if you don't, then why are you different to that orthodoxy? Yeah, so I would just be brief here, but say I actually prepared a presentation with fresh data enabled by the COVID-19 lockdown measures that gives a hint as to whether such a measure immediate stop to all emissions could be a way to escape the two degree. And the short answer is it's very unlikely. It's very unlikely, extremely improbable in scientific terms for that to happen regardless of emission scenarios. And the reason I think many fellow colleagues in the climate fight are trying to take a more reserved approach when they're giving future prognosis is perhaps they truly believe that's the best way to help decarbonize, which is in itself a very difficult task. So we shouldn't hold it against another person for doing that. I think they are sincere in their beliefs, but I personally don't think that's a productive approach because we would be like insulting people and they're intellect by trying to dumb things down and try to present a filtered version of our best understanding of reality. So that's why I'm more forthcoming in giving my best personal interpretation of available evidence. Yes. So what do you think of the science that some people cite to say that it's not too late to stay below two degrees? Maybe you said you've pulled together some data. Do you want to, on that topic, do you want to share that with us? Yeah, I can maybe just now give this presentation, which is something really fresh. Nobody has seen it before this presentation. All right, so let's just remind us of the central question, which might be useful in this debate is whether humans can survive in the case of a complete shutdown to the economy and hence all emissions. I think the major question is whether ecosystems and human systems can survive a temperature past two degrees because as we will see, all indication seems to be that we're basically already past two degrees. So I made this chart a few years ago now to look at where the ecosystem of Earth is happy in this CO2 concentration and average global temperature diagram and plotting empirical data. Basically, that's what the Earth has been doing in practice. We can very easily use linear projection to predict where the average temperature will be in a few years in decadal time scales because such huge systems, they have a certain inertia and including the human system. Such linear projection generally work very well. And this was made in 2018-2019. And if you look at the most recent projections using the most complicated climate models, you basically get the same thing. And what I added in addition to just the physical parameters are what the biologists have found to be limiting temperatures for a different individual species and ecosystems. And there hasn't been any ecosystem that doesn't really suffer greatly, sometimes often going to local extinction when you ramp the average temperature up by two degrees or so. Of course, we know a global average temperature of two degrees doesn't mean that it's a very gentle two-degree rise. It's a repeat with extreme weather events, sometimes several days over 50 or 60 degrees that basically wipes out entire regions, as we have seen starting to see in Western Canada last year. So since making this figure, there's been several publications coming out confirming essentially the trajectory we're on would be more or less independent of emission scenario. And we will see data from COVID-19 that confirms or gives credence to this model prediction. So first thing first, some people were very happy that COVID-19 led to a 7% reduction in CO2 emissions during that year. So a bunch of scientists asked the question, would such a signal be detectable in the long-term climate trend, for example in the Keeling curve? And the answer is no. You need something like four times the COVID lockdown emission reduction for the signal to be barely emerging out of background variability. And on the other hand, 2020 was a year with a lot of natural disasters. And actually many records were set, including a record number of named storms in the Atlantic and also the wettest August in India and Pakistan and the wettest rainy season in China since about 60 years, just to name a few. So many scientists started to ask the question whether there could be any link, causal mechanistic link between lockdown measures and extreme weather events. So before answering that question, I want to very briefly review how energy flows in the system and why such interactions can lead to extreme weather events. Everything on Earth's surface and biosphere were driven by sunlight. That's the ultimate source of energy and hopefully also of renewable energy for human civilization. At the surface, most of this light is converted into heat. And heat exists in different forms, two of which include an increase in surface temperature, whether it's ocean, heat content, water temperature, or it's soil temperature. The other way in which heat can manifest itself is through the evaporation of water. When water evaporates, it undergoes a phase transition which can take away some of the heat. And this in general has a cooling effect, so making the sensible heat less. And imagine that you have some hot air above some land. This air would be less dense, just like the hot air balloon, so it tends to rise. And when it rises, it also induces circulation in the atmosphere, i.e. air movement. Now, when you have the movement of wet air, that's how water gets transported from the oceans to land and eventually becomes a ring and a flood. So here is basically the causal chain that we need to keep in the back of our mind as we try to understand the data that emerged from COVID. At the very beginning of the pandemic, a group of scientists, interdisciplinary, got together and wrote this paper in one of the first editions of Nature Review Earth Environment. And they foresaw that this event of lockdown would enable us to probe many interconnected systems on Earth. And today, of course, due to time constraints, we will not go into how agriculture and wildlife are affected, but instead we'll just look at the very core over here how emissions of both greenhouse gases and of pollution impact temperature, which would then be a primary driver for weather events, production of crops, etc., etc. So we're looking at this more upstream part of the equation. And many people may not have heard that when you burn fossil fuel, you emit not only CO2, which is warming, but also air organic carbon and other nitrogen oxide that participate in making particles that cool the earth, that has a cooling impact. So here we're just calling it pollution according to what those people did in this review. And the direction of these arrows represents either a heating impact or a cooling impact. A very important difference between these two components is that the heating impact or heating components like CO2 or nitrous oxide especially are very long lived. So their lifetimes are above one century, sometimes up to 10,000 years in the case of CO2. The cooling emissions like air pollution, they are washed away in any weather events, so they live for days. So when society is operating normally, you have both components present. This slow component grows very slowly, whereas this cooling component is more or less held constant. So when you add these two vectors or these numbers together, one positive, one negative, you get a net forcing or net heating, which is less than what would have been when there's no more air pollution. So in the hypothetical case of 100% renewables, you would end up with a power driving global warming, which is larger than what we would be experiencing right now. So COVID-19 didn't go to this extreme. What happened was that the arrow pointing down got smaller by anywhere between a quarter to half depending on location for a duration from a couple of months to sometimes a half a year. So we have on the order of, let's say, back of envelope estimate a third of the emission that's reduced over the period of a few months. So this provides a controlled experiment to probe how the climate system responds to this sudden change. Before we go assess the key number, which is you know, the cause for a lot of debate, it's basically the magnitude of this cooling impact. And after COVID, the newest, the most recent assessment points to a power cooling power of 1.2 watts per meter squared for the some uncertainty from different types of estimates. So remember that number. These are very simple numbers. They're basically one. So our best estimate is one watt per meter squared. So the other piece of the puzzle to understand how much warming is in the pipeline is a factor that allows you to convert this weird quantity or this weird unit of power per meter squared to a degree simple. So this number is called climate sensitivity and it has a unit of degree per watt per meter squared. The reason of, for example, if we're doing dimensional analysis, it's clear that when you multiply these two numbers together, the watt per meter squared cancel and you're left with a degree that's basically how much heating would be hidden based on our best estimate. Now let's look at data enabled by COVID-19. First question. Did we experience more sunlight coming down to the ground? So these are measurements taken in India, a place that's really polluted. And lockdown occurred sometimes during March. And we see that compared to the previous three years in February, the data from 2020 was more or less on top of the average. But after the onset of lockdowns, there was a clear increase in the amount of sunlight reaching the ground in Delhi. In terms of percentage, during the month of March, the engineers measured almost on the order of 10% increase in the amount of sunlight. And in power terms that translates into on the order of 20 watt per meter squared, which is quite substantial compared to the order one watt per meter squared averaged globally hidden heating power that we mentioned before. Two other locations. One is IIT in Kampur. They measured a dramatic reduction in pollution, PM 2.5 over the lockdown period compared to outside of that window. And this reduced pollution also translated into less cooling by the aerosols. And averaged over the period over this site, it gave on the order of again, 10 watt per meter squared of increasing how much sunlight gets converted into or is impinging on the soil during the lockdown period. Similar results in East China Sea, including some on land. But this is measured at the top of the atmosphere 1.3. So at the bottom of atmosphere, it would be roughly twice that. So a single digit watt per meter squared increase in how much sunlight is reaching the earth. So in interest of time, I will skip through but the result is basically replicated also in Europe. For example, Netherlands recorded a very huge and record increase in solar radiation reaching earth compared to the past century. So basically, experimental evidence suggests that we have anywhere between one to 10 watt per meter squared increase in short wave forcing. Of course, that's not the energy balance because as land gets warmer, it also radiates more infrared. So the actual total forcing is somewhere less. But it's certainly within the same order of magnitude as estimates of one watt per meter squared of heat, a hidden warming power. Now let's look at whether the land responded to this increased heating power, whether there's any temperature change. The top panel are experimental data or observational data comparing 2020 results to the past 20 years of climate record. So one thing to note is that in these experimental observations, there is an effect in addition to the effect you are trying to isolate. There's also climate variability. For example, there's a gigantic heating anomaly in April. But comparing the pattern that emerged from the actual observational data analysis with the model analysis, we see that regions centered around Beijing and Wuhan seems to be showing consistent anomaly in both model and data. And the magnitude is on the order of half a degree Celsius. And that happened basically instantaneously within days to weeks of lockdown measures. More recent measurements confirm that this one found slightly less but same order of magnitude. And another even more recent study suggests that there's up to one degree Celsius warming. In this case, I want to explain these two figures. Over here is how much sunlight is reaching, how much more sunlight is reaching Earth. And as we will see, the largest warming in this case didn't happen where there was the most sunlight for multiple reasons. One of which the authors suggest is due to the movement of wind and air. So the warming drove atmospheric circulations bringing a lot of the hot air parallel up north from where they were warmed up to where they were sensed, let's say. So you already can appreciate that it's a quite challenging task to really have precise warming numbers due to very large climatic variability from year to year from day to day. And different models, different groups get different numbers based on different computational models and the measurement data sets they use. So the best that we can glean from climate science at this point is more or less an order of magnitude, maybe a factor plus minus two factor, a fudge factor. But overall, we have more or less agreements that regionally at least where lockdown was most instantly implemented and gave a very sharp driving signal. We have on the order of half a degree increase in surface temperature. And also that if we had time to look through all the data and all the papers you would notice that observational perturbations generally is larger than what the models predict by roughly two to the factor of two to four. And that's something to take into account when you read IPCC papers, projections which are mostly based on models. And since many of the fundamental underlying factors are not clear and they're not yet known because there hasn't been enough COVID-19 experiments to pin down these numbers. That's why it's still possible for people with a certain policy objective to really stay on the lower end of these projections. Yeah, that's really, really helpful. Is there anything else you wanted to say about this data? Because otherwise I've got a couple of questions. I think we are halfway through the review of the COVID-19 data and it's a good point for questions. The next segment, if we have time, would be about examples of extreme weather events driven by this initial temperature raise. So I think, well, yeah, you've talked about those extreme weather events at the start. And so you'll be looking at the data that suggests there's connection. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Tao. So what I've got from that is a reminder using observational data, data right now of what's called global dimming and therefore the horrible conundrum we have as we get off fossil fuels, as we electrify and decarbonize, where we'll actually see this short-term heating pulse. And therefore, it's kind of like the whole agenda of emission cuts, of eco-modernity, of a Green New Deal. It's based on such a blind spot, such an ignoring of this reality that you've just talked about, that it's not credible. It's not serious. It's quite amazing really. Also, I mean, you mentioned also about how, yeah, because models have many limitations, computer models of climate. And that if we actually look either at observational data or if we look at the paleo record, it tells us that, hey, we are set for a certain amount of heating. And therefore, you're right. It does seem that the people who want to say that we can avoid catastrophic damage to societies, we can reform, we can transition, they want to stick with all the models, because then you can just be debating forever about models, what they say and what the limitations are. So yeah, thank you for that. For me, I've got enough from what you've presented, yay, to then say, wow, we have to have immediate action now on solar radiation management. We have to do something as we lose the global dimming effects of dirty fossil fuels being burned. That is the stark message from the observational data you presented from what's happened since the lockdowns since early 2020. That's a huge message. It should be huge global news. I can't understand why any credible climate scientists wouldn't have this front and center, let alone a policymaker. So for me, I feel like it's also if you were saying that there's a lot of data to show this led to disasters and people dying and people's lives being ruined and economies being trashed, you can't be serious about climate justice without getting serious about immediate measures for solar radiation management. The question then becomes, what's doable, what's practical, what's not risky, what's accountable to the people affected and so on. So for me, I think it's a perfect time to hear what is your proposal for solar radiation management. I would like to hear about the mere project and why it makes sense if we go straight into that. Okay. So before that, I'd like to show one more slide of the essence, sort of actually very relevant to your comment and your question. So a group in Germany asked the question of, okay, let's say, imagine COVID-19 provides this opportunity to start finally the decarbonization project. Let's say we moderately decarbonized by 2050 in some sort of moderate green recovery. What would happen to the heating pattern on Earth? Actually, the main result is that there seems to be huge spatial heterogeneity of which countries will be receiving this extra heating power. And it just turns out again, it's, well, we shouldn't be surprised. It's the global south. And perhaps it's not being talked about because the people most impacted are not likely to be from these regions. So that just adds another dimension to the process of decarbonizing. And it makes it even more important to really have methods to shield these populations from the impact of the decarbonization process itself. Yes. Thank you for that. And is that something you've talked about before? Or is that that's just really become stark because of the lockdown data? Well, that particular figure, that that's a paper from last year. So I haven't really talked about that or shared that with other people. It's not our work. I just want to make sure I mean, so yeah, I mean, equitable responses to the climate disaster and emergency, including recognizing who created the problem and who didn't, and who's already living in the on the margins and vulnerable is incredibly important, the climate justice agenda. So yeah, it's thank you for making that so clear for us. And I'm going to be trying to make that known by various people who work in climate activism and climate science and climate policy through the scholars warning and other methods. So basically, let's talk about our project. Yeah, tell us what can be done that makes sense rather than millions of pounds and dollars. Okay, so the basic idea is to intervene at the very first box of that flow diagram that you saw, basically how much heat gets absorbed by the earth, then, which then drives downstream consequences that include extreme heat events and extreme weather circulations. So we think the safest way is to do that at the ground level, because then you're not introducing unknown nanoparticles or particles into the atmosphere, the atmospheric chemistry of which is far from being fully understood, unlike what people working on such methods are claiming. And I'm happy to point people to references of why there are many open questions and how ozone problem, for example, could be made worse if it were to go by the atmospheric intervention route. So we believe that it's safest to do it at surface. It's also cheap, for example, compared to launching mirrors into space because launching costs and fuel emissions would be more than offset some of a lot of the benefits. And when they're simple close to the ground, humans, individual people and permaculture communities also can maintain and move the mirrors and modify them as they need for local applications. So if somehow ground based solar radiation management could be put into the hands of people and to provide a very strong local benefit, then it provides a natural democratic way for a potential scale at the global scale. And it also provides a way to more or less very evenly distribute out the replacement of the pollution because people basically occupy every corner of the globe and if everybody is contributing to this to bring out some local benefit utility, then it's one way to make sure that the cooling is uniform. So we think there are several strategies to towards testing their local benefits and achieving scalability. One is, as you saw in the figure that I just showed, impact of extreme heat will be most severe in parts of India, the Middle East and also Southeast Asia. So our team were currently working with several newly instituted heat officers in Africa and also in India to help communities that are already suffering from extreme heat events right now to have a better quality of life. If we could just replace the roof with combinations of mirror details or flexible mirror sheeting or even just in some cases white paint, we can really have immediate local impact for many people, not to mention the global cooling impact such humanitarian efforts would also bring. So that's one low-paying fruit that we believe should be done regardless of whether the mirror frame eventually scales globally. The other location that we think could be useful is to couple mirrors to agriculture, especially regions that are becoming too dry and too hot to sustain crop growth. As we mentioned before, when the heat gets generated on the ground it leads to temperature increase and also evaporation. So if we can come back both consequences by covering up say only 10-20% of the crop plant in many locations you can actually boost yield and save water and perhaps even create new arable land in regions that were previously just too hot and too dry. And we calculated that's between roughly like 10 to 15% of global crop lands protected slowly, linearly by the end of the century with more or less enable us to maintain current 2020 climate. So I'd like to pause there for some questions about the initial. Yeah I just want to comment on what you said because what was really frightening to me from the IPC's most recent report from Working Group 2 was that no matter which emissions scenario happens by 2050 hundreds of millions of people around the world are going to be living in places where they risk so-called wet bulb temperature events where heat and humidity means that we simply can't cope, we die within about six hours unless we manage to fight air con. What are any emissions scenario? So absolutely this raises questions that the mean we have to have serious attention to what you're talking about, what you're doing. And rather than just look at big global efforts or actually specifically what can be done in the areas that are going to be most effective. So it's an interesting one because for me it kind of challenges this division between mitigation and adaptation. It seems to be both. I do want to ask though always the problem with any great idea is when you look at the detail the life cycle analysis so I have to ask you about that and not just the production process but the distribution of it and the maintenance of it and so on because so many clever ideas when you actually look at it you look at the energetics as you did for all the other various different ideas and you thought oh dear these don't actually work out very well. Could you say something about the various different ways of reflecting solar radiation that you've looked into and whether it does make sense to say for example produce mirrors and distribute them at such massive scale? That's basically the first question that I looked at when this idea came to mind is basically how much energy, how much equivalent CO2 emissions you would actually incur by making these things. So the answer to that question depends on what technology we use for making the mirrors. Let's just say we just go out there today and pump them out from factories using powered by fossil fuels and natural gas. So calculations show that the amount of CO2 warming that's offset is 10 times the amount of CO2 emitted during a fabrication distribution and implementation of the mirrors. So it has a 10 time amplification effect in terms of cancellation. Have you been able to get anyone to sort of peer review that and back that up? It's been reviewed in email exchanges with fellow engineers and people working on similar reflectors. We really need to get your stuff so well known that we then it's the subject of journals and so people are really really putting their efforts to it to reassure and this is the problem isn't it? It's to get this idea known. As I said at the start we don't have PR agencies working for billionaires and venture capitalists trying to promote what you're doing in the same way that they are to say trying to promote direct air capture of carbon and various other schemes which offer potential for returns to investors. How are you going to get this known? How are you going to get it funded? How are you going to get it validated? That was my question. I mean in the in the sense it needs to be known and there needs to be resources for people to validate it and therefore to take it to the next level to get it really then embedded into policies and to release budgets from governments and big foundations. There's even a role for billionaires. If any billionaires are watching can you just put your ego aside please and put your designs to try and get richer aside please and give half a bill to Dr. Tao right now. Okay back to you Dr. Tao. How are you funding all this? How are we going to get this to happen? Yeah so right now we haven't been really focused on fundraising because we're sort of still lucky that we have enough initial funding from previous sources to continue a major field experiments plan. Wrong answer you needed to say we desperately need money right tomorrow. Now what I'm glad to hear you're doing the research phase and did you say field trials? Yeah so I actually can show some initial data from last year but those were very small field experiments that are already very very encouraging showing soil cooling at the surface up up to 10 degrees celsius even in New Hampshire which doesn't get too much sunlight. But anyway if you would only show a slide for three minutes max then yes please but I still want to be able to go to get questions from people. If you say you want to share that data okay yeah so it's probably better you guys see it. There we go so we did a very many experiments last year using just two mirrors in the field and it was carried out at a preliminary state led by PIs that you see here. And we also had another experiment looking at how mirrors floating on water can be used to both decrease evaporation loss for example in reservoirs and streams and also reduce the temperature of the water so these are will just take a couple minutes to show. Here are the impact on soil temperature this time measured at 10 centimeter depth rather than at surface and even at this depth where the roots are you can measure significant cooling in some cases reaching up to five degree celsius and that's very substantial especially when you're above like 35 degrees then every fraction of a degree count towards your harvest. In the case of water you get very similar results this case the anomalies basically cooling are more sinusoidal which reflects the fact that water has a higher heat capacity so it doesn't respond as quickly as soil does to solar drive which can be more instantaneous. So I will stop there and because I think for yeah this is great this is great you're reminding me of my favorite science teachers. Like everything's testable and we can go ahead and do experiments and it's like it makes life seem magical. It's horrible how science has sort of desacralized and made life less magic when actually actually it can make it more magic. It's like wow look at how the world works. So I want to go to Terry Wenking who's got a question for you and it's a fascinating question because it's stepping back and looking at the broader environmental crisis of which climate is part. Terry can you switch on your video and ask a question. My question comes to this however Richard Heingberg William Reese and others note that quote climate change is not our biggest problem overshoot is global warming is but a symptom of ecological overshoot. So the question becomes how does the mere reflection framework not exacerbate and extend overshoot. In other words how does it ultimately make things worse how does it not sorry ultimately make things worse for the larger body of life in the not too distant future. And if I may put that differently it seems your data confirmed the paradox of the greenhouse gas blanket effect versus the umbrella effect of aerosol masking. How does the mere framework bring about what might be thought of as the Goldilocks zone balance that will resolve that paradox. Excellent question so the second question is how we would try to balance that. I think that really depends on the scale of the implementation. If it's really at global scale then there is a hope to really rebalance at the planetary scale but even locally it's an open question whether whether it's possible to create local habitats using high density of mirrors while the larger global ecological system goes down the drain. It's an open scientific question not one that we want to really you know see happen so that's to answer the energy balancing or replacing the umbrella part. The first question about whether it will actually exacerbate you know just prolong or delay this this collapse let's say by using mirrors. I think at this point it's quite clear that society is already collapsing if we look around and where it's more and more difficult to move around and we're building barriers. I think I don't know the latest statistics but countries in Europe and the Americas are investing maybe twice or many more times more money into building walls and border patrols and weaponries rather than to you know help the global self so it's already on a downward trajectory there's no doubt about that but then let's step back a second. All civilizations eventually collapse and if you look at as a scientific question the most optimal duration or lifetime for civilizations is 230 years on a log normal distribution and there's basically no civilization that has survived past a few thousand years so why would this one be different? So let's just assume that all civilizations end and this one is coming to an end. Then what's the meaning of life or with meaning of humanity? Well anybody people have different answers at the mirror I think at least my personal opinion is that there's a value in making the life of people better every individual person counts. In the end it's the integration of our collective experience as sentient beings on this planet not only humans maybe also animals so in that from that perspective there's no loss every family you help in India every kid that you provide food to as the society you know declines inevitably is a win. So it's a huge opportunity we see this as an opportunity rather than yeah I just want to come in there because you've you've said something which is really important because many people seem to think that we only do stuff because we think it will make things better forever the ideology of progress and also many people assume that anyone who's excited by science and technology somehow is wedded to that paradigm of progress and therefore you do what you do because you think it goes on forever. What you have just shown is that actually you can bring all your talents all your passion for science and technology without being wedded to the ideology of perpetual progress forever it's about how do we make the best and make life as beautiful and as free of suffering as possible for as long as possible for humans and also then try and reduce the nastiness that we've what we've done to the rest of life on earth. It's actually said that way does pretty straightforward and obvious but it's almost like we have these ideological blinkers in a in a progress obsessed culture so thank you very much for making that point thank you for the question Terry. We've got a question from Patrick from XR which I will ask for her first before going to Arthur so the question is is it possible are we going to be able to see solar powered furnaces to produce mirrors one day and just just try because a lot of the people who sort of are the maximum do-mists shall we say say no none of this is going to work without fossil fuels in the end we just it just doesn't work and so if you could if you could address that question before we then move to Arthur. Thank you for the question that's an excellent one and actually one that I wanted to address before so actually it's already been demonstrated at the Paul Scherer Institute in Switzerland that it it's indeed possible to melt glass using solar energy but unfortunately that's for some reason unknown reason that group's funding got pulled back in I think 2017 or 2018 so that research has just been stopped. You conspiracy theorists do ban this man from YouTube sorry yeah we move down we need to let's find that institute and that project online and I'll put it in the YouTube notes yeah okay so it's the PSI it's very famous I actually was there during my PhD for for some random experiments okay so can we go to Arthur for your question? I actually have two questions the first is have you looked at the potential impacts of the reflected radiation for instance on birds and flying insects or aircraft or something like that because sometimes you're sort of you're disturbing other things than than just the movement of energy the second question because I'm basically a coral reef ecologist and corals not only absorb sunlight for the they also reflected back again from underneath could be design solar panels that would both generate electricity but also have a mirror backing that would be even more efficient because they'd be using something both directions and reflect the sunlight back into space and that would give a double incentive to be installing both you know renewable energy generation and reducing solar energy at the surface thank you. Thank you Arthur. Excellent questions again I love this audience so the first part about impact to birds etc I think the major reason why people are afraid of such things is because of reports of concentrating solar power plants killing birds because they purposefully focus the light to a very small volume and that volume is sometimes invisible to the bird so they fly through and get burned without knowing it when you just randomly place mirrors in the more or less random you're pointing in a general direction there's essentially zero probability for any focal spot to come into beam and when you do not have such high concentration of solar flux then it's not really possible to really make any damage to birds some people are worried about the visual distraction but in actual implementations we're looking at on the order of only maybe five to ten percent aerial coverage which basically means you boost the local albedo by you know roughly 0.1 which from a distance wouldn't really make that much of a difference especially when birds and planes are moving at high speeds compared to the size of a single mirror device so they wouldn't even see a glaring sun it's just like tiny flips of photon that merge together to give an overall you know appearance and the fact that it has no impact on airplanes is demonstrating the fact that our field experiments has been approved to take place right beside an airport. I am dismayed when I look at this broader field of used to be called geoengineering now it's called climate repair and or climate restoration some nice rebranding there I see the biggest news the biggest thing is direct air capture of carbon and I wondered if you could mention something on that because people who then get desperate understandably and despairing about the situation and who believe in technology and we've seen how exciting it can be in this past hour they then hear that we're hey these these machines will save us could you say something on that because I want to as we draw to a close I think it's important that we yeah that we we clarify what our message is for the people who want to work in this field of climate restoration where should they really put their money and attention and their skills including young people with with all their skills I shouldn't have a good career and yeah I think I will give a very useful rule of thumb for the audience so in this society energy and money can sometimes be synonymous so is GDP so there's a very simple conversion between more or less CO2 emissions and dollar amounts so you just need to remember that for every ton of CO2 you emit the fossil fuel energy costed 50 dollars roughly so for every ton of CO2 so basically if you want to have an efficient process of capturing back CO2 or offsetting CO2 the dollar amount per ton offset needs to be substantially less than 50 so let's say something like you know under 10 then we're talking if something costs for example a thousand or 500 as it's currently the case for direct air capture you know that these firms are investing more resources more energy and more inducing more equivalent CO2 emissions than the amount the meager amount that are capturing back so that's a very easy rule of thumb but the underlying physical limitation hard physics limitation which makes direct air capture infeasible there are two one is they're trying to demix an air which is you know very dilute and the demixing things is fighting against nature's tendencies to become disordered and mixed up and there are some minimal energy required and that energy amount is roughly the same as what humanity uses in a single year that doesn't sound too bad except when you're you realize that say the airline industry is only like 1% roughly of the global economy so that's one thing and efficiency is never you know 100% maybe it's 5% 10% which means we need to spend in the most ideal case a few decades of all of our energy into performing direct air capture to make a difference but of course in the engineering case you can safely you know multiply that by another factor of 5 to 10 so we're talking about century scale just from the energy limitation point of view the other aspect is kinetics basically the speed at which you can capture so we have you know done a pretty thorough analysis of every single carbon capture method that's publicly out there including nature-based solutions on land and in the ocean another general good rule of thumb is none of these can be scaled to more than or the 1 gigaton carbon dioxide per year and we are emitting equivalents of 50 gigaton carbon per year just from the current economy so unless we had you know 50 of such solutions each of which get total global attention and gets scaling to all over the world over the whole surface we wouldn't even be able to offset our concurrent contemporary emissions so the speed is another major limitation yeah so direct air capture machines are a fertile fallacy if you're an entrepreneur and they're not going to deliver what we need and what a shame we do not have any time to waste you know corporates mustn't distract us billionaires mustn't distract us from what we really need to do and where the money and resources and the policies need to be to use technology to try and make things less bad so um so yeah I would say that surely is the message to anyone who's working in climate restoration quit the bullshit even if you're paid to put it out into the world and start working with people who really really are trying to do something to reduce the difficult terrible horrible situation that modern humans and our capitalist system has got us into thank you for what you're doing yay do try and take a sunday off sometimes what have you said you haven't had a weekend ever or for years do go and that's a bit of a exaggeration but the general idea is that I don't take it very seriously yeah okay well um you've you've done some great work today I'm looking forward to getting this video out into the world and um is there one thing that you can tell us to do um either those of us on the call now or who watched this on youtube what can we do to help this how can we be your own you know pretend we were your marketing agency what can we do to help bring attention to what you're doing um I guess just uh really to learn the science and become proficient at explaining it in simple terms and we're always looking for uh people who can help us spread the message and just uh essentially it's open the information out there it's just we need people to be able to translate into a language that people can understand that's one thing but the more important aspect I think is working on the psychological and the spiritual component as Jim and many others including professor Guy McPherson whom I respect a lot have been teaching I think it in the end it's a spiritual journey and we cannot you know really be optimal unless we have gone through the that process so I guess it's back to to your work Jim yeah thank you for mentioning the whole deep adaptation idea turning into the really the turning towards just how bad it is and letting that um letting that hurt letting that um challenge everything we told ourselves about the future and and then our own place in the world and then trusting what trusting something useful will emerge you know I mean unless you allow the despair and the pain you don't don't know what's after that and um we've been all quite upbeat today and that might give the impression that there hasn't been all that all that pain and shock and oh my god what are we going to do but um but it's also showing that there's a that's almost like a post doom post despair way of being which is like okay it's shit now what do we do so thank you for embodying that wonderfully for us today thanks for everyone for joining and um I hope to see you at the next deep adaptation q and a