THREE ITEMS:
1. Friday July 7: News and Evaluation of a Very Important Climate Conference at Science France (Embassy f France in US)
2. FOLLOW-UP ON WHERE IS HOPE, TANGIBLY
3. MORE TECHNICAL Details of new science/tech/microeconomics options
1. ============================================================
Sent to Science France and two key US partners:
Thank you again for organizing that hugely important climate conference yesterday.
Earlier today, I voiced the hope that you and NSF could build a new partnership, which in my view could literally save the human species from extinction within this century, due to aspects of climate change which some of us now understand much better than we did in the past. But because you probably KNOW you want to build stronger bridges to NSF, before you have a chance to read and evaluate what Ward, Wadhams and I have learned about the extinction threat
(https://build-a-world.org/
Fahmida and Kumar would probably prefer that they get to define themselves directly to you. However, to raise your initial interest, in her, she probably will not mind if I pick randomly from what I see when I search on "NSF Fahmida climate:"
https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2022/
Kumar I have had more contact with... Beyond that, I do not know. If ... you and Fahmida and Kumar may indeed become a very serious official triangle. Let us all pray that it be so.
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But now -- as my wife and I and Frederica mentioned to Ligia yesterday ... neither my wife nor I are great communicators at the public, professional level which this effort badly needs. We are both scientists and science managers, and can be helpful in getting you very essential information, but now you will see why I apologize when I try my best to translate from my real language (mathematics and images) into English words. I was very useful to Senator Specter in 2009 (the year of climate legislation) in getting him the information HE needed on climate issues (my first responsibility in his office that year), but it was crucial that there were others to hold the lead.
My impression from the COMBINATION of yesterday and from the information on climate which I collected under Kumar for an IEEE effort (see the climate block at build-a-world.org, run by Gary Barnhard) is that:
1. The SDG to improve conditions underwater in the ocean is receiving far less money than other SDGs, BECAUSE
the folks managing most of the money IMAGINE that the main costs/risks are costs due to the direct effects on industries like fishing and beach pollution. THERE IS STILL A HUGE COMMUNICATION GAP IN MAKING THE WORLD TRULY AWARE THAT THE LIVES OF ALL US HIGHER MAMMALS ARE REALLY AT STAKE IN THIS CENTURY. For that, I urge you all to help disseminate the brief but well documented paper by Ward, Werbos and Wadhams.
2. I ask myself -- how could humanity get orders of magnitude greater benefit on the metric of reducing the probability of human extinction in this century versus billions of dollars spent focused on that goal?
I wanted to cc Alexander Turra of university of Sao Paolo, but do not see his email address. However, since he received his PhD from Campinas, I can cc my old deeply respected from Prof. Arnoldo de Hoyos there, whom Alexander should be in contact with in any case, along with Steenbock, who is crucial to point 3 of the climate strategy **I** have tried to support.
( http://www.werbos.com/
I pray/beg that the new coming global ocean climate conferences UNOC in 2024 and 2025 include highly visible focused sessions exactly on the extinction threat, the science behind it, new R&D needs to understand it better, AND NEW DATA COLLECTION AND MODELING TO BETTER SUPPORT THE TWO KEY METRICS implied by Ward, Wadhams and Werbos:
[(1)] Measures of ocean stratification, especially focusing on the flow of oxygen to the surface from the Humboldt and Gulf Stream Currents;
[(2)]] Measures of ocean fertilization, especially where those currents now upwell oxygen, focusing as much as possible on the specific nutrients which cause net growth of the archaea which produced H2S in 5 to 12of the previous mass extinctions of life on earth.
**IF** I had not retired from NSF in 2015, I would have long ago pushed for a new thrust (perhaps in the EFRI area of NSF Engineering?) to better UNDERSTAND and MEASURE the risks, starting from miniworkshops by video to include at least Peter Ward, Peter Wadhams, Kirschvink and Hazen, with me and Metta Spencer included in the group asking questions and seeking to map out what are the questions which reasonable scientists can disagree on and research approaches to answering them.
In the science panel yesterday, I was deeply worried that the new efforts would be ... basically useless... in saving our species, because of focus on metrics which are worthwhile but well within the scope of other existing efforts, like what the present SDG funding can cover. But Prof. Collado-Vides and Melania Guerra substantially raised my hopes and my spirits.
(Some would ask: how could a mentally balanced person feel such extreme ups and downs, directly and personally?
As it happens, I have published on the deep neuroscience underlying the insights of Freud and Jung, and even collaborated with people like Karl Pribram. It is a major, scary mental health problem in the world today when so many key people are so devoid of affect that they do NOT react emotionally to real, serious threats to the survival of everyone we love.. and of all humans, and other higher mammals... or that they avoid problems they could help us solve as they bury their heads in denial, like an ostrich.)
Thank you again so much, Ligia and Melania!
But as you now handle complex jobs, under complicated funding systems, you can only devote PART of your time to the all-important work you highlighted on Saturday:
Ligia -- on the modeling of key ocean chemistry variables, at depth and over time, important to BOTH key metrics (1) and (2),
and Madelina -- on the ocean stratification issues, especially as ... maybe she and Peter Wadhams should be funded to work together.
(The Gulf Stream issues could cause mass damage, far beyond any climate damage we see yet, much sooner than the larger Humboldt current will. Small things on a global scale -- like Paris and Britain freezing over. Really. Fimbulwinter. Like Peter Wadhams, my wife and I have seen those waters first hand, as well as the Eddas archives, and plan to do so again this month.)
I was deeply shocked last year when I overlaid the two key data sources (NOAA on ocean chemistry, and earlier sources on stratification) and saw how accurately (terribly!) the locations matched. Fertilizer concentration is now in exactly the worst possible locations. Yes, we need to learn more, but we also should not just breathe easy at this time. I would guess the problem is that archaea food floating through the ocean usually gets eaten up quickly in zones of normal high oxygen, but builds up to scary levels in zones of high oxygen.
As Ligia was talking, I also thought of smaller models of euxinia in Black Sea, Chesapeake and even parts of Florida, which should feed into this effort.
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But... when I agreed to try to collect the information which Kumar asked for... I ONLY got crucial new integrated breakthrough information on THREE of the five points at http://www.werbos.com/
(as in Ward, Wadhams and Werbos, but still in need of a larger full chapter), the EFFICIENT NET GHG reduction which we could get from new ways of making electricity and from transportation (two areas where our IEEE Power and Energy Society can claim to represent the very best engineering science information available from all over the earth). Even worse, my unique personal duties to the internet/AGI/IOT challenge have grown, because of a new technology I have pioneered. (See the one page abstract from my plenary talk at WCCI2022, the main IEEE conference connecting those technologies and more.)
Your conference yesterday helped me appreciate... my five points, and the IEEE technology and market design supporting them, are mainly focused on metric [(1)] (and the great spinoffs possible like greater energy security and peace). But Ligia reminded me that modeling and data to support OTHER aspects of her work, related to metric [(2)], are also important.
There are again a case where ACTION ON LAND TO PREVENT DISASTER IN THE OCEAN (As Luis Almagro
https://www.oas.org/en/about/
AND -- I did the best I could to get a good overview of point 3, even though I never found anyone to take over a section of a book to handle that. (In truth, I probably would have invited Alexander Turra to take the lead, if he and Arnoldo and Walter Steenbock can agree and take over. IF Kumar ever gets support for a revitalization of the book project, I would propose that he explore that option, after we check some.)
BUT THE KEY IS THAT ACTION ON LAND is what we need most, aside from rather modest traditional efforts to prevent excess fertilizer runoff from the land. Agricultural practices on land are the key target. MOST money being spent that way today has little benefit, but huge benefits are possible. Arnoldo and I did write a joint draft section 5, on the web, which was part of a start.
IN SUM -- there are crucial life or death scientific and technical and economic details. I deeply hope that a new network led by you three can create the networks needed to effectively address these details. And I hope that you will not hesitate to draw on all of us for the essential help you will need.
Best regards,
Paul
P. I am also very grateful to anyone who cares enough to have read THIS far.
For more complete technical information on what I found last year see:
Since many of us may be in DC area very soon, I would be delighted to get together in person again, either at your local location or (best for me) near one of the DC area Metro stations in Virginia.
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2. Follow up sent that day, on the "hope" side:
Please forgive me for conveying a negative picture, in the details, because I wanted to be brief. I was too brief.
The conference yesterday fits very well with the new research needed to understand and quantify the RISKS of human extinction.
I mentioned, but did not even summarize, what a huge difference the IEEE information can give us on the POSITIVE side,
IF people pay more attention to the ocean risks and to new international partnerships.
A very brief summary --
When I look at the depressing menu of choices which Von CDer Leyen keeps offering us... the good news is that new technologies have been proven in the OAS area -- Chile, US and Brazil especially -- which could basically cut the costs to people in the EU by a factor of more than two.
In truth, we discussed these in a more direct current way in recent discussions with India and Africa, but if you are interested I would be happy to share the details with anyone on these lists.
In essence, people in EU have been told that electricity consumers would have to double what they pay for an all-renewable new system, because of costs like backup, storage, and importing PVs from China (or wires under the Mediterranean or North Sea). There are new proven technologies which make that unnecessary, using new control technologies, new solid breakthroughs in heat-to-electricity conversion for use in solar power towers, and thermal storage.
If you want the electricity bills of people living in the EU to be cut in half, we have probed very deeply how to move that way.
Those are technical discussions for the future, but I really should have noted that there is huge upside potential worth exploring, available in this decade.
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3 SOME OF THE DETAILS, discussed before with links to India and Africa,
both of which have very important underutilized technical potential. Here is what I sent in November 2022 to an IEEE group:
AVOIDING CLIMATE EXTINCTION really should be a major block (maybe even 50%!) of a new NEPR.
I have a weird belief that staying alive trumps everything. If we are fully sane humans, the sight of the gallows really should drive us to be FULLY awake.
DID I cc you on the short but focused and blunt review of COP27 which I sent to the internet discussion groups I participate in (like Mei-Lin Fung's https://peoplecentered.
The key message was that the news from COP27 made me fear for our lives, but AT THE SAME TIME an IEEE international conference based in Nanjing (see attached) made me much more hopeful than COP27 did. Thanks to the book project which Kumar asked me to start up (still in process, with LOTS of backup material beyond what is at build-a-world.org), we have an organized collection of exciting new options for energy and climate policy, which would be of huge value to the world economy and to national security within ten years, which neither EU nor Biden nor Biden's advisors know about.
The exciting message from Nanjing was that new pathways are opening up to connect us, and IEEE in general, to the highest levels of decision-making. The high leader behind that ICCSI conference now has a new position, right in Tian an Men square, and may be willing to create a pathway to implement John Kerry's proposal for a climate survival division (specializing in the extinction threat, which is far more real and close than most people even imagine) in the Security Council. That is what I have given priority to this week.
And yes, the name "Xi" has often come up. I have often wondered how you might feel about those discussions.
But -- at a minimum, IEEE could endorse what John Kerry and Guterres (UN SEc Gen) proposed very publicly just a few years ago. That proposal mainly died because bureaucrats in New York redirected Guterres and Kerry, but the redirections did not work as well as they hoped. Interest from Xi could radically reverse the situation.
IEEE could even ask for a better pathway of climate information, real science and real IEEE-connected technologies, to support the new climate division.
Does IEEEUSA have a special role in bridging the all-important gap between what the most advanced and relevant IEEE societies know, and the policy level (AND investors)?
Truly efficient and intelligent power grids are PART of the "making electricity" priority in the draft book, one of the two parts for which we have the most information and new but proven options (ranging from important tools ready to go now, to areas where RD&D could be much more transformative than anything I see now, including the best proposals to NSF which I have had some occasion to review this past year ). But the transportation part is also strong. China is doing much more for world climate already than all of the COP actions taken together, because of its actions to support electric cars, but China and the US could do much better yet if we learn the right ways to cooperate (with mutual protections of course).
In truth, my ability to wordsmith in THIS political environment ... should I even try?
BEFORE any of us try... is a 50% climate section on the table as a possibility?
CONCRETELY...
This would mean, ROUGHLY...
1. More rapid support, development, RD&D, deployment of what Kumar has championed, DSOPF, dynamic stochastic optimal power flow, AND market redesign to better support its use and its benefits, as in the draft chapter by Momoh and proposals by O'Neill and Ilic.
2. Liberating DOE from the entrails of the oil company hydrogen barriers, and returning more support advanced Brayton for use both in space and in power tower solar farms (not requiring chips from China). That should include a major new US export push to support Heliogen and GE in that specific area, and ALSO accelerated RD&D for the more advanced (efficient, lower $/kwh) next generation of Brayton.
3. Strengthened partnership with Chile to push and enhance thermal storage, to be integrated into advanced power tower solar farms and DSOPF to control them all.
4. OK, New focused (and well-informed, well-grounded) R&D on quantum RLADP (the key to quantum DSOPF), which allows efficiency and protection from unexpected disturbances in a more comprehensive DSOPF ranging all the way from markets to semiconductors in the power electronics. his is a new technology which I presented in my plenary award talk at WCCI2022 (abstract attached).
5. Similar opportunities for cars, consistent with the old IEEEUSA position (which I posted at werbos.com/oil.htm), accelerating BOTH rechargeable lithium-air batteries USING THE ORIGINAL DEVELOPER, and alternate net-zero liquids, and markets designed to better advance both where they benefit consumers. DSOPF can play a crucial role in the recharge aspect. [No, it is not abut cobalt. Even for rare earths, it is intelligent control, not resources, which gave China an edge.]
In truth, Sadoway may also know of other big breakthrough options, but the present system is shutting out all of them.
...
Best regards,
Paul
P.S. Between now and December 15, I also have to further deadlines, one for USGOV and one for INdia,
as well as the ICCSI follow-ons which I hope for.
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.
I have tracked EU climate policy very closely for a few years now, watching mainly France24 and Deutsche Welle some, almost never CNN. Greens (most powerful party in Germany) convinced Von Der Leyen EU must go all renewable ASAP, not only for climate but in face of serious energy security issues there. But then industry -- both electric and fossil -- convinced her that the REAL cost of renewables is many times higher than the generating costs the advocates have old her about, because of backups, intermittency, time of day issues. They plan a huge expansion in expensive LNG now because the renewables people are working hard to sell her DO have more than double cost growth, past generation, because of the time of day and intermittency (and raw transmission investment rules)
issues.
The new technologies and market designs I mentioned get rid of at least half the cost to the user!
Time of day is no problem when the specific new type of storage, thermal storage hooked up to Brayton and intelligent control, is BETTER than baseload 24/7 for load following!
