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Perhaps MCB can do the job in the Arctic anywaywithout need for SAI.Herb
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John
As you know, I got to know Stephen Salter well in his last years. This led me to take a strong interest in MCB. The result of this study was that I formed the view that if the technology problems can be solved so that the required submicron monodisperse salt particles can be produced at low cost, MCB has promise to be a superb technology for global weather modulation.
However, that technology problem has not been solved yet, and the current cost barriers from the Great Barrier Reef work are immense. Too much energy is now needed to generate MCB particles to make it cost effective as a global cooling technology. There is an excellent discussion in this COP30 MCB conversation between Hugh Hunt, Daniel Harrison and others.
Some other papers are https://acp.copernicus.org/articles/21/14507/2021/ by Robert Wood and https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2025/ea/d5ea00073d by Harrison
Hopefully intensive R&D will find a feasible way to solve the cost problem, but if not, MCB might become the triplane of the world cooling industry. We don’t know.
How I imagine the future is that a steady background of moderate level SAI will be required, and that a suite of other cooling methods will also be deployed, all optimised by AI to deliver the best possible all round weather outcomes. Meanwhile large scale ocean based algae production will develop to manage the carbon problem alongside ongoing fossil fuel use.
Global cooling is a project on the scale of the Manhattan Project, the Moon Shot and the Covid vaccine. In advance of the billions that will have to be invested to assess and develop the optimal technologies, there is limited value in speculating about which technologies will be better. OTEC, OIF, SAI, MCB and others could all have a useful place in the cooling ecosystem. Only when the funds are in place to properly try to commercialise these technologies based on cooling ROI will these questions be answered.
So the main focus now should be getting to that funding point, by working out the story that can convince the public that the climate cooling paradigm shift is needed.
Regards
Robert Tulip
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Dear Robert,
it is a very common mistake in scientific circles that something like global cooling could and will be decided by some world body, which then provides the billions needed etc. That’s a Top-Down approach, born from experts who know there is a certain demand, no doubt about that, but who know very little about product development and markets. I am afraid, that, since there is no precedence for a global Top-Down project - it simply won’t happen.
Climate cooling, like everything else, will be a bottom-up development. In this sense the MCB project at the Great Barrier Reef is a great example. Of course there is no guarantee that such bottom-up development works, but that’s really the only pathway to global cooling. If one fails another one will spring up etc. Global cooling is a systemic necessity, which means: It will happen.
I am not saying when it will happen nor if that will be too late or not. That depends on many future developments which I cannot foresee. But it certainly will happen, and we might even see it happen in our lifetime.
Regards
Oswald Petersen
Author of „GeoRestoration – Cool the Climate with Natural Energy“
Atmospheric Methane Removal AG
Lärchenstr. 5
CH-8280 Kreuzlingen
Tel: +41-71-6887514
Mob: +49-177-2734245
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Hi Oswald, you say there is “no precedence for a global Top-Down project”.
The Montreal Protocol is the ideal global top down precedent for an Albedo Accord. A second precedent is the United Nations and the Bretton Woods Institutions. There are numerous international bodies that regulate and govern commerce in fields such as mail, patents, banking, meteorology, standards, trade, agricultural research, health, tourism, food, aviation, labor, telecoms, etc. Then there is the Covid vaccine. And at the national level, as I mentioned, there are the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Project.
Here is some AI expansion on these points.
“Albedo governance” isn’t some weird one-off – it fits a long tradition of specialised global regimes that quietly make modern commerce possible. Over the last century and a half, states have repeatedly created narrow, technical international bodies whenever markets needed predictable rules across borders. We already live inside a dense web of such institutions.
None of these bodies “run the world”. They do something more modest but more important for business: they create a stable, rule-based environment for specific cross-border systems – mail, patents, weather data, standards, trade, agricultural research – where pure market forces and ad hoc bilateral deals would be chaotic and inefficient.
From this perspective, an Albedo Accord is not an exotic idea. It is the next logical step: a specialised international regime to manage a shared technical system – planetary reflectivity – that underpins all commerce just as surely as the postal network, the patent system, or the global standard for shipping containers.
Over and above these specialised international bodies, we also have recent and historic examples of concentrated, mission-driven efforts that changed the trajectory of risk in a remarkably short time.
The COVID-19 vaccines are the most obvious recent case. Faced with an acute global threat, governments, companies and researchers compressed what is normally a decade-long development and approval process into less than a year. Massive public funding, advance purchase agreements, regulatory fast-tracking and unprecedented data-sharing turned a scientific possibility into billions of doses delivered around the world in record time. No single company or country could have achieved that on its own; it required a deliberately organised, risk-sharing effort to create a public good.
At the national level, history offers other examples of this kind of focused mobilisation. The Manhattan Project brought together scientists, engineers and industry under a single, secret wartime program and delivered the first nuclear weapons in just a few years. The Apollo Program turned John F. Kennedy’s 1961 promise of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” into reality by 1969, through a sustained, well-funded effort that spanned government, contractors and academia.
All three cases are very different in purpose and ethics, but they show the same structural lesson:
An Albedo Accord would not look like the Manhattan Project or Apollo in its secrecy or nationalism, nor like the COVID response in its crisis-driven improvisation. But it belongs in the same family of undertakings: a decision to treat planetary brightness and climate stability as a shared strategic objective, and to organise research, governance and deployment accordingly, instead of hoping that a fragmented, under-funded status quo will somehow deliver a stable climate by accident.
Above the specialised agencies and standard-setting bodies, there is also a core group of heavyweight international institutions that already shape the rules of the global economy:
Together with other players – the IMF, regional development banks, export credit agencies, standards bodies – these institutions show that we already know how to build international regimes for specific systemic risks and opportunities:
An Albedo Accord would not be starting from scratch. It would plug into this existing scaffolding: negotiated under UN auspices, financed and de-risked by the World Bank/IFC and others, implemented in part through sectors like shipping under IMO rules, and overseen financially through BIS-linked standards for banks and insurers. That is how restoring planetary brightness can move from an abstract idea to a governed global public good backed by real institutions.
The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer is the best global precedent we have for an Albedo Accord. It shows that the world can:
A few specific features make Montreal an ideal top-down model:
The International Maritime Organization is a good illustration of both what we can do – and what we’re currently not doing – when it comes to the sky.
On the one hand, IMO has shown it can set global rules for a whole industry. Its sulphur rules (culminating in the 2020 global sulphur cap for ship fuel) were designed to cut air pollution and save lives. Technically, they’ve been a success: sulphur emissions from ships have fallen sharply, and coastal air quality has improved.
But from an albedo perspective, this is also a cautionary tale. The sulphate particles from dirty ship fuel helped to brighten marine clouds over the main shipping lanes, increasing reflection of sunlight over parts of the ocean. When IMO cleaned up the fuel, those particles vanished and the clouds dimmed. Several recent studies suggest that this change in shipping aerosols has contributed to the recent drop in planetary albedo and the sharp increase in heat uptake over the North Atlantic.
In other words, IMO made a correct decision for health and local air quality, but it did so without any framework for weighing the global albedo consequences. The result is that we have simultaneously:
This is not an argument for going back to filthy fuel. It is an argument for having an explicit, global albedo strategy. If you tighten sulphur rules (as we should), you must also think about other, better-governed ways of restoring the lost reflectivity. Right now, no international body has that job. The IMO regulates shipping. The UNFCCC negotiates emissions. No one is in charge of the planetary mirror itself.
An Albedo Accord is meant to fill exactly that gap: to give us a way to coordinate decisions like the sulphur cap with an overall plan for planetary brightness, instead of changing one part of the system and discovering later that we have made the world darker.
Regards
Robert Tulip
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“ In advance of the billions that will have to be invested to assess and develop the optimal technologies, there is limited value in speculating about which technologies will be better. OTEC, OIF, SAI, MCB and others could all have a useful place in the cooling ecosystem. Only when the funds are in place to properly try to commercialise these technologies based on cooling ROI will these questions be answered.
So the main focus now should be getting to that funding point, by working out the story that can convince the public that the climate cooling paradigm shift is needed.“
On Dec 15, 2025, at 7:05 AM, rob...@rtulip.net wrote:
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Dear Robert,
I am fully aware of these projects.
The Montreal Protocol is regulation only, no technology has been invented by the regulators. In case of SAI the matter is different, it requires inventing, development and operation of technology, something no bureaucracy has ever done.
Regards
Oswald
On Dec 15, 2025, at 8:07 am, oswald.petersen via Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC) <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
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Hi David,
the Montreal protocol is really regulation. It is good that technology has evolved since then.
I was referring to an email by Robert stipulating that SRM should now be started, since MCB does not work. It is really very common mistake by scientists to demand that something is introduced or created by the global community. I just want to make the point that the process which is called for is non-existent.
Regards
Oswald Petersen
Author of „GeoRestoration – Cool the Climate with Natural Energy“
Atmospheric Methane Removal AG
Lärchenstr. 5
CH-8280 Kreuzlingen
Tel: +41-71-6887514
Mob: +49-177-2734245
To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/healthy-planet-action-coalition/D9689D85-AB8A-486F-A10C-D40CCFC12800%40pricenet.ca.
On Dec 15, 2025, at 12:41 pm, oswald.petersen via Healthy Planet Action Coalition (HPAC) <healthy-planet-...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
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Hi Alan,
I agree that regulation is necessary. But it is not sufficient, regulation does not create anything. Regulation is always limiting, it stops people from doing the wrong thing. It does not create the right thing.
If regulation can only limit, you need something to be limited at first. This is where the error happens. Scientists, especially from natural science, stipulate a reversed order. The Top-Down approach says: Ok, lets regulate this, then technology follows. That’s not going to happen. At first, before all regulation, you need an industry, a technology, a living organism, call it as you like, which actually does something, and then you can regulate it.
In SAI we now have a first serious contender, Stardust. I do not know if they will succeed, but let’s assume so. Once they have done their first field-tests they will ask for regulation. This is the right order. Industry first, regulation second. The regulators will then say, ok, yes you can do this but only say 2 tons per day, and only on Mondays. This is, of course, a stupid rule, but it shows the case. Regulation follows industry, sometimes it comes 10 years after the first generation, sometimes it comes 1 day after that, but it is always second, and it is always limiting, non-creative.
I am aware of the fact that governmental bodies can not only regulate, they can also create things. But history shows that most initiatives, most technical development and most inventions stem from private bodies. In SAI there are many technical challenges to be solved before any regulation is needed. At this stage regulators will rightfully say: What do you need us for, there is nothing to do.
It is a subject I work on and I will talk about it in the next NOAC session on 22nd of December. Of course I will refer to AMR rather than SAI, but the organizational subject is identical for both methods.
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