Scholar inventor Bowie Keefer’s vision includes diverting warm currents from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to combat rising sea levels.
.
The near-wilderness of Galiano Island is a logical place to end when you and your wife have sat on Point Gray and gazed across the water at the Gulf Islands, says Bowie Keefer.
Announcement 2
.
“It has the advantage that it doesn’t have traffic lights or parking meters, and the stop signs are purely for warning,” he said from his home on the island.
A perfect place, in other words, to look for practical solutions to global problems like how to stop sea level rise.
Keefer is a physicist, engineer, inventor and trail builder – many of the trails in Pacific Spirit Park are thanks to Keefer from his days at UBC to earn his Ph.D. in physics
Among his professional duties, Keefer is Scientific Advisor on Advanced Adsorption Technology at the Burnaby-based company. Svante, a carbon capture engineering company. Steven Chu, President Obama’s energy secretary and Nobel laureate, is a member of the board.
Svante is an offshoot of QuestAir Technologies, which Keefer founded in 1998 (Jonathan Wilkinson, MP for North Vancouver and minister of natural resources, was chief executive for a time) and which designed clean energy technology such as hydrogen purification, improvement of biogas and natural energy. gas dehydration.
Announcement 3
.
The son of an English war bride and a Canadian military man, Keefer grew up in the wilderness of northern Ontario, where his father was a mining engineer.
He entered the Royal Military College of Canada, received a bachelor’s degree in engineering, and was deployed throughout Canada and as far away as Gaza.
“After seeing the whole country, as soon as I got out of the military I came straight to Vancouver,” he said.
Keefer and his wife Anna’s Galiano home is a beautiful cedar-beamed work of art that their son Sam built on top of cellar ridgea resort that another son, Jesse, built and runs with his wife.
The Keefers’ third son, Mike, is the visionary leader in Keefer Ecological Servicesrestoring land that has been damaged by industry.
If the “COVID disaster” had any benefit, Keefer said, it was to show that remote work in almost any field that didn’t require hands-on manipulation was possible from almost anywhere, even a Gulf island with traffic tips instead of laws.
Announcement 4
.
It has an agreement with UBC to electronically access the school library and download anything.
“All scientific material is at my fingertips, and I am working with people in Finland and Germany, sometimes in China, on scientific projects and I can do it right here… practically as efficiently and more happily, without traffic jams, and you can get in touch with people immediately.”
His interest in climate change and sea level rise led him to contact John Moore, a British glaciologist who, in an article in the scientific journal Nature, Proposed damming warm water streams Greenland and Antarctica to prevent ice erosion. Moore wondered what the engineers would think of the idea.
Well, Keefer had thought about it 13 years ago. He had been an independent researcher founding small businesses until then, but at age 65 he decided to shift his focus to global problems.
ad 5
.
Keefer took a year off to study oceanology, glaciology and climatology to try to understand where we stand on climate change and sea level rise.
Paddling his kayak through a bed of kelp off Galiano in 2009, he came up with the idea of a water curtain anchored to the sea floor that would divert deep warm water and allow shallower cold water, marine animals and even glaciers will slide over it. .
Moore loved the idea, narration Canadian freelance journalist Gwyn Dyer, “The engineers laughed at us…they said ‘Don’t be so stupid. You don’t want to have bulldozers or something on the bottom of the sea.’”
The British glaciologist estimates that Keefer’s plan would cost $5 billion a year for 10 years to put up the curtain and then $2 billion a year thereafter for maintenance, 5 to 10 percent of what it would cost to build. levees to protect every coastal city on the planet. .
ad 6
.
“That includes a fleet of five icebreakers, 10 ice-reinforced ships, the fabrication of the curtain in southern Chile, everything.”
According to the Paris Agreement 2015, a legally binding international treaty on climate change, world governments must limit global warming to less than 2°C, and preferably 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.
“We’re halfway through those two degrees,” Keefer said. “The melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica has already passed the tipping point, so even if we behave with fossil fuels, we still have the problem of rising sea levels.”
Even removing CO2 emissions, then, will mean a slower rise in sea levels, but a continued rise nonetheless.
That got Keefer thinking about how to stabilize the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets.
ad 7
.
“The idea is basically to put a giant tarp attached to the seabed that stops the flow of warm water,” he said.
He sent some letters with mathematical calculations to various authorities, but got no reaction until he responded to Moore’s article in Nature two years ago proposing concrete dams.
Keefer has lost count of how many patents he owns: more than 50, at any rate.
A stimulating hour-long phone conversation meandered nicely through the topics of Ukraine, Russia, China, and NATO; the Gulf Islands Trust; permafrost melting; rapid transit and bike lanes; the Marshall Plan; take carbon taxes seriously; serious mismanagement of forests; a video tour of the craftsmanship that went into the construction of the Keefer home; science fiction novels…
ad 8
.
Keefer will join Moore, the British glaciologist, and others, including Christian Schoof, a glaciologist at UBC, in Greenland in October.
“We will be looking at these glaciers and looking at one of the sites that is quite critical; It’s probably the glacier that released the iceberg that sank the Titanic and has been receding at a very rapid rate for the last 50 years.”
That visit will be followed by a conference in Iceland.
“What we’re hoping to do is actually mobilize some serious studies because we need to engage the leading experts in ocean engineering, people who build subsea platforms and pipelines, and they do so in harsh ocean conditions… 2,500 kilometers south of Cape Horn.”
And, in the case of Greenland’s most vulnerable ice sheets, some 4,000 kilometers across an iceberg-ridden sea from a hypothetical construction base in Newfoundland.
ad 9
.
“We want to engage global experts to tackle this problem and what we’ve done so far is a preliminary feasibility assessment, asking ourselves if this could work, if there are any impediments that mean it won’t work.
“We’ve found quite a few reasons why it’s difficult, there are risks working near or under icebergs… but we haven’t found any reason why it doesn’t work.”
Keefer prefers the term management to geoengineering. At 78, he remains hopeful.
“I’m optimistic, I’ll tell you,” he said. “But we cannot be complacent.
“There is a whole package of tasks that humanity has to take on. We just have to do it, we have to get serious, that’s all.”
More news, less ads: Our in-depth journalism is possible thanks to the support of our subscribers. For just $3.50 a week, you can get unlimited, ad-lite access to The Vancouver Sun, The Province, National Post, and 13 other Canadian news sites. Support us by subscribing today: The Vancouver Sun | The province.
