Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food
333 Jesús Areso Salinas - Building towers to trigger rain, to help nature sweat and cool
A conversation with Jesús Areso Salinas, retired from work as patent examiner at the European Patent Office and now active with his project to fight climate change combining water, katabatic tower and mosture. Another record-breaking summer in the global north, where temperature records were shattered repeatedly, prompts us to ask: is there a sustainable future for places like the Mediterranean? Jesús wondered how does nature cool? and, crucially, could we help nature kickstart the cooling of ambient air?”
Imagine cooling our surroundings during a heatwave—cooling town squares, vegetable gardens, or farms on a small scale. What if, over time, this approach spreads, with more people cooling their surroundings, allowing plants and trees to continue growing through the summer and helping to cool the air? Could this restoration of local cooling contribute to rebalancing water cycles, bringing back summer rains, and even creating a lasting cooling effect?
Sure, we could retreat to air-conditioned spaces, but air conditioners only worsen the problem by using energy to move heat from inside to outside without solving anything at its core. And what about plants, trees, and animals? They need a humid, comfortable environment to thrive, yet during hot, dry summers, they’re focused on survival rather than growth—or the cooling process essential to their function. Mediterranean farmers, in particular, take note: during the peak of summer, your plants and trees often stop growing because it’s too hot and dry.
So, how does nature cool itself? Through transpiration, plants and trees release moisture, which cools the surrounding air. However, as heatwaves become stronger, it’s often too hot for them to function, meaning they can neither grow nor cool the air. This lack of cooling is a problem farmers and investors need to understand—especially those in warmer climates, where plants and trees may be unable to photosynthesize or grow for weeks on end. Cooling ambient air is essential, and air conditioning isn’t the answer.
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We recorded this interview after another record-breaking summer in the global north. Temperature. Record after record was broken and it makes you wonder, for instance, around the Mediterranean, is there a future possible? Yes, we could all gather in our air-conditioned houses, cars and offices, which, apart from the fact that it makes the problem actually worse, you're using fossil energy dinosaur bones to move some warmth from the inside of a building to the outside. It isn't really fixing anything else either. What about our friends plants, trees and animals? They need a humid, comfortable temperature to thrive and most of the summers they are trying not to die, let alone grow and, importantly, sweat and cool.
Speaker 1:Any farmer in the Mediterranean climates which are around the world should pay attention. Your plants and trees are not growing most of the summer because it's too hot and dry. So what do we do? Do we just give up and move north or south? That gets us to the guest of today who wondered how does nature cool and could we help her to kickstart cooling of ambient air again? First, at a small scale during a heat wave a town square, vegetable garden, a farm. But what if this takes off and many people are cooling their surroundings and thus enabling plants and trees to keep growing during the summer and also cool the air? Can this restore water cycles, bring back summer rains and permanently cool? All massive, crazy and almost magical questions. And that's exactly why we tackle them with an engineer who did a permaculture deep dive and is now building towers to help nature sweat and cool.
Speaker 1:Building towers to help nature sweat and cool this is the Investing in Regenerative Agriculture and Food podcast. Investing as if the planet mattered, where we talk to the pioneers in the regenerative food and agriculture space to learn more on how to put our money to work to regenerate soil, people, local communities and ecosystems, while making an appropriate and fair return. Why my focus on soil and regeneration? Because so many of the pressing issues we face today have their roots in how we treat our land and our sea, grow our food, what we eat, wear and consume, and it's time that we as investors big and small and consumers, start paying much more attention to the dirt slash soil underneath our feet. To make it easy for fans to support our work, we launched our membership community and so many of you have joined us as a member. Thank you, if our work created value for you and if you have the means, and only if you have the means. Consider joining us. Find out more on gumroadcom slash investing in RegenAg. That is, gumroadcom slash investing in RegeneG or find the link below.
Speaker 1:Welcome to another episode today with the donkey shot of water cycle restoration. Welcome, jesus. Thank you, koen. Thank you I'm laughing because we're back in water cycles, which is a topic I've missed. I think we covered it extensively in a series we've done last year mostly, and also before, actually on landscape scale regeneration, and a lot has been happening and a lot has been happening on linkedin and a lot has been happening in the scene. I'm not sure if we can call it that, but we're definitely gonna um pay more attention to this topic. It's one of the big neglected ones and even though we're not doing a full-on series at the moment, we're gonna weave it into many of our episodes because it's such an important topic and I I'm very happy to have you here with us.
Speaker 1:You have a fascinating story. You're very active on LinkedIn. I will put it all in the show notes and urge people to follow. But let's start with your story. How come you spend most of your awake hours, or a lot of your awake hours at the moment, thinking about water cycle restoration about towers we're going to go deeper into soon. And all of that. How did your journey lead to where you are now and spend so much time on water cycle restoration?
Speaker 2:Well, I started, like many, from the perspective of the problem of climate change and global warming. Actually, I got very acquainted with this problem about 20 or 30 years ago. The film of Al Gore, for me, was a wake-up call and since then, since those old days my kids were then small, like years two or four or five years. Now they are 30, so it's about 30 years that I'm following this. I've been following the decline of the ice in the Arctic. I have seen the temperatures rising. I remember in those days there was a slogan saying we should never reach 350 parts per million of CO2. That was the turtle figure. Today, as we talk, the figure is beyond 420. I remember that somebody said that if we went beyond 400, it's going to be the catastrophe. So here we are and this is all very depressing and you could get a little bit tired of it. But we cannot. We don't have the luxus to get depressed because we need to fight. You, kun, you told me you have two daughters, two and four. I've become grandparent one month ago, so I have a granddaughter. She's beautiful, yes, but this has reminded me that we need to keep trying to solve these problems.
Speaker 2:Now, going to your question, the water cycle. I only discovered the water cycle issue and Professor Millán Millán, the second leg of climate change, some three or four years ago and I realized that it was it was for me a big eye opener. So there is good news and bad news about it. I will start with the bad news. The bad news is that we have the problem of the greenhouse gases skyrocketing and the temperatures now we are at 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels, etc. I don't want to go into all of this, but now we discover there is another problem we have destroyed or disrupted the water cycles and actually I have learned that we, the destruction of the water cycles, started before the current rise in temperatures. So if we want to fix the problem of the climate for ourselves and for our kids and for everybody for the future, we will need to fix both.
Speaker 2:So the bad news is that with the greenhouse gases, it seems that we are not going to be able to do it. When you look at all the statements, the United Nations COP meetings since Paris, copenhagen, edinburgh, tokyo, kyoto all of them a lot of political commitment maybe, but nothing in reality, when you look at the situation of gases in the atmosphere, this has no impact, zero. So I think we humans, as a civilization, we are not able to reduce our dependence from these fossil fuels. We are not going to be able to do it fast enough. If we are able to do it, we will not be able to do it on time. So that is not too late.
Speaker 2:That's why I focus my attention on the other part, the other problem, the water cycle. And what I have discovered gave me a lot of hope, because I have realized that if we solve the water cycle, we might be able to recover so many arid and desertic lands all over the world. I am a bit focused on the Mediterranean basin, but I always think if it works in Granada or in Andalusia, it could work in California or certainly in Marruecos, so in the Sahara. And if we're able to re-green all these arid and desertic places green all these arid and desertic places we could be able to capture millions of tons of carbon that are in the atmosphere. And we will be doing several things at the same time. First of all, we will be creating a cooling, an immediate cooling of the ambient that can create some protection for the plants and for the people, and then, with the rain, we will be regreening the land and with this regreening we could be capturing this carbon that we are going to continue to to put in the atmosphere.
Speaker 1:Um, sadly, but we are going to continue for some days and decades, maybe more, hopefully not long, but and do you remember because I I think your story resonates with many people at least let's talk for myself of, like the journey of the depressing phase of climate change, which definitely is not gone, like whenever, like it's always there, lingering in the back, but going to a hopeful switch or a hopeful part. You mentioned Dr Mian Mian, which we've had had, who sadly passed away the beginning of this year we're recording this in 2024 but definitely left a legacy that that seems to be extremely um impactful, and we've had him on the show I'll put the the link in the show notes below and also a great intro, or actually great deep dive, of rob lewis on the second leg of climate change. Do you remember was it a paper of me on me? And do you remember, like three, four years ago, you mentioned when you stumbled upon or read about or saw the potential of, let's say, the land side and the seaside, let's say the restoration side of things, of land use.
Speaker 1:Was that one moment? Was that like what happened when you um, when you read that? I remember when I first discovered walter jenna and dr walter jenna, for example, um, I don't remember exactly, probably on the podcast of john kemp um, and, and there was a light bulb moment like the. The I've always followed like regeneration soil, really interested in the farming side of things, but then the larger ecosystem restoration could actually influence local weather patterns and things like that. That was sort of felt like a next step. Do you remember when that and how that happened?
Speaker 2:um, I think for me it was this uh, two great professors. You have just mentioned these two great professors. You have just mentioned Walter Jenne and Professor Mian Mian. For me they were kind of reconfirming something that I had already. I was already working on something similar, because maybe we will come to that, but we will talk a bit about the Katawatic Tower.
Speaker 2:I have always thought that it is not enough to cool ourselves and to keep cool inside our houses waiting that the heat wave passes. When we get out of our house, everything is destroyed all animals, all the plants that our garden is drying or maybe dead. And since the heat waves are going to get stronger and last longer, I always thought we need to find something to protect our not ourselves, but also the ambient air. So I know the power of evaporation and it's a couple of words saying like that, but you can put figures on that and we are talking about gigawatts of power, meaning power to cool the ambient, and actually this is the way that the trees and the forests do it. They are able to cool the ambient and they cool gigawatts of power by evaporating water. So I was already working in these ideas and I came to this concept that I call the catabatic tower, but basically it's a way of a very efficient way of evaporating water in order to support, for example, a garden or the plants or the people, or a square in a town, for example, or a park in a city. But maybe because I was working in all these things, I was also searching for or digging in the same bubble of these masters that you have mentioned, and I think it was. I discovered about them both and also about Professor Liu.
Speaker 2:I did a training on permaculture in the south of Spain, in Cadix, and I met a group of very interesting people, very motivated, much younger than me certainly, which were worried for the life around them, for the planet, but they were taking care of the trees, for the life around them, for the planet, but they were, you know, taking care for the trees, for the plants. And then I learned the importance of the soil and how. I learned something there that I didn't know, because I was, because of my engineering background. I was focused on finding a technical solution to a technical problem.
Speaker 2:Gas in the atmosphere is a technical problem. How do you make that? You are cool in the presence of these gases? And I forgot about something more very, very important and also it's the reason why I am doing that is the community, all of us. First of all, we do things for the community, but also the community has much more power than the individual to do things, and if you see a community of people taking care of a big plot of land in a regenerative manner, this is much more impacted if only one person is doing it, and it was in that training. It lasted for about one week. How did you end up at the training.
Speaker 1:What made you sign up for permaculture training?
Speaker 2:What made you sign up for permaculture training? I think it was. Yeah, I was working on the importance of preserving the plants in a fresh and lush ambient for them to grow better. And permaculture is a lot also about what it's about retain and hold the water and preserve the water for the plants, at least in the southern Spain, where there is not very much rain. Retain the water when it rains, for the long periods when it's going to be dry, and then you learn that if the vegetation grows, then your chances of having rain are bigger. So you are going to enter in a positive cycle where bigger plants will bring more rain and more rain will bring more plants. And you enter in this positive cycle of life and you get out of this the other one, the destructive one, in which we are now. We have more hot atmosphere, less rain and therefore less plants, and because there are less plants, there is less rain. We need to move from the destructive cycle into the constructive cycle. Sorry, kun, I am moving from one place to the other one.
Speaker 1:I'm fascinated how an engineer chooses to go to a permaculture course, but I'm very happy because it gave you another perspective on an engineering problem you say you were working on. So let's get to that catabatic and there's another one I want to stress.
Speaker 2:I don't know if it's important. I am now 63. I'm becoming 63 next week, but it's important to always be curious and never believe that you know everything, Because if you do, you are not open to learn. And if you think well, there's a lot of things that I can still learn. As I did when I went into this training on permaculture, a whole world opened to me. The soil is not just the place where we put our feet. It's full of animals and life there, and they are helping us and helping the trees and therefore helping everyone else to live.
Speaker 1:So yeah, it's just fascinating and a good reminder, I think, for anyone um, on any age, to to keep keep learning and discovering. And specifically, I think in regeneration there's so much to to learn. We really, at the beginning, we know quite a bit um, and at the same time we we know how little we know um, which is which should be a very humbling position to be in. And let's because you mentioned it a few times the katabatic tower, which really started from a notion on a smaller scale, let's cool the ambient air, so literally the outside air, like we have aircos for air conditioning for our houses and our offices and our cars and we're in this little bubble of fresh air and we're fine. But, like you, you said what happens? Like?
Speaker 1:What use is it if we get out of that after the heat wave passes and anything around us is dead or is barely hanging in there, because plants and trees and animals have a certain temperature that they, when you go above that, they switch off photosynthesis, they switch off evaporation, as you mentioned in one of your blog posts, and they basically try to survive. Maybe they actually make it, but at least they don't thrive or they don't participate in life at that moment, and they might do afterwards. Of course, animals die if it's too hot. So you started with this notion of how do we cool outside air? You can obviously not put a big echo, so how would nature do that and how do we replicate that at scale?
Speaker 2:Yes, certainly, because we need to always look at nature and try to do as they do. A little bit on aircos. First, because aircos are good machines for us. But if you look at the whole system from the outside, aircos are part of the problem, because what an airco does is it takes heat from your cool house, removes the heat and puts it outside where it is very hot. How they do it is, you know, a clever way of engineering, but to do it you need to add energy into it. In other words, if I'm taking five units of energy from my house and put it what is maybe at 20 degrees and put it outside where it's 40 degrees, I need to add one unit of energy. So if you look at the whole system, you have added energy to the, to the, global system, which makes the outside temperature even higher.
Speaker 1:Basically, yeah, it's not a yeah, we can keep adding air costs to our systems, but obviously that's just making the problem even bigger.
Speaker 2:Yes, plus, I don't know if they see, you know there will be we will have the possibility to have air costs for everyone. I don't think so. The electrical net is going to explode. So the other way of cooling, the way nature does it. How do they do it? Simply, they use water and they evaporate it. It's not very far away from us because we do it as human beings.
Speaker 2:When we transpire, we cool ourselves. This has been a success of the human evolution, this sweating and you know, I don't know how we say it in English, but in Spanish it's almost a dirty word sudar, to sweat. You try to avoid it and say you transpire it. Okay, it's not a dirty word. This is the thing that has helped us to survive and evolve. And if you think it's like a miracle, with a couple of milligrams of water we are able to refrigerate the whole human body. And a big tree can evapotranspirate maybe 100 liters of water a day and with that it can cool all under it and the air is moving afterwards with the breeze or with the wind, so it can cool the ambient air.
Speaker 1:So it's not just a shadow, just for people to remember. It's not only the shadow, of course you know you're not in the sun, but actually the tree above you cools you, or the ambient air around you, with all the water it evaporates.
Speaker 2:I will give a figure for the listeners who have a feeling for it. But if you evaporate one liter of water in a second, you are evacuating 2.4 megawatts of energy. It's like the energy of about 1,000 homes in Spain Wow.
Speaker 1:So one liter requires a dead amount of energy to evaporate, because you know it. I mean we talked about it pre-recording. If you put it on the fire on electricity to boil, it takes a while before a liter disappears and it takes a lot of energy. So imagine one tree with 100 liters in a day. That's a massive amount of energy.
Speaker 2:Exactly what the tree is doing is taking these three liters we're talking and it's getting the energy from there in order to evaporate this water and the air becomes cool and the temperatures can go down from, depending on the conditions. But in one of the experiments we did with one of our prototypes, sancho Panther, it went down from 40. Don't be short reference for people who didn't get 41 degrees we it was in a during a heat wave. Wow madrid.
Speaker 1:It went from 41 degrees centigrade to 19.5 so less than half goes down just in in in a 10, and that's where does that energy? Like? Sorry for asking a very basic question where does that energy go, or where does it? It it comes out of the air, you're saying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, look it is. It is there, but it's called. It's there in a. It's called in a latent form. Before it was sensible heat and now it's latent heat. These are Latin words, and what do they mean? Sensible heat means you can feel it, you can sense it. This is sensible heat. This is the temperature that you measure with your thermometer 40 degrees, 30, whatever your fever. And when you are able to put this energy to transform the water from liquid into gas, this energy becomes latent. Latent is like your heart, which is latent it is there but you cannot feel it. This is the original word of it. Somehow, this energy is used to transform the state. In the liquid state, the water molecules are attached to each other, so in order to transform it into gas, you need to give them all this energy. So they jump from this liquid phase into the gas phase. And this energy is there, but it's not any more measurable with a thermometer.
Speaker 1:And it's interesting, starting from that, starting from that evaporation point of view, looking at how does nature cool? We know it sweats, or we sweat. What is it? What was your next step? Because it's not that you're going to put a big, shallow swimming pool and try to evaporate as many liters of water as possible, because that's, that's just not efficient or doesn't work. Like how do you cool? What's? What's your next thinking step when? When you realize, okay, aircoast is not a solution outside, obviously, or in general probably, but we need to cool. How does nature cool? Ah, it sweats. Okay, what's next?
Speaker 2:before that I go into that. The clever thing that nature does is once the that I go into that. The clever thing that nature does is, once the heat has been transformed from sensible into latent, then it can move with the air and it moves. For example, brings the air up to a mountain, or, by the wind, takes this air up to 5,000 meters and then to 5,000 meters, and then the reverse transformation occurs the gas becomes liquid again. So it's going to form a cloud or maybe it rains. But in this process of transforming from gas to liquid, it's going to give all the energy that it took from the surface. It's going to give it back at 5,000 meters height and from there it's much easier to escape to the space. So it's it's a vacuum cleaner of energy from the surface to the top and up.
Speaker 1:So actually we can get rid of between brackets some of this heat that we've been basically blocking in our greenhouse effect for that we've all learned in school and some of of this heat, when it's up there at 5,000 meters, when it becomes a cloud again, some of this heat can basically radiate into space.
Speaker 2:Yes, because the greenhouse gases are in the lower. You have already removed all this coat of greenhouse gases. You are already outside the coat, so the energy can easily radiate to the space. So this mechanism, which is one of the mechanisms of cooling of our planet, is very super interesting and I was focusing on it and I was always thinking how can we enhance it? So I come to your question how do we go from looking at nature and see how do they do it? What could we do to do something similar? Maybe? I don't know if this is going to be interesting.
Speaker 1:I love steps of people Like where do you get to and how? That's why I'm asking like do you remember when? And like one pathway could be we need to plant a lot of really big trees? Or like and and you took another pathway. I mean not saying that we shouldn't, but your pathway came to you as an engineer thinking like I'm curious then, how did you get to um, building your first prototype, to even consider building a tower like that?
Speaker 2:Look, when I was a kid, my mother and my grandmother they were hanging the clothes to dry the sheets. Okay, and imagine when you do that in the middle of the summer, the place around there where the kids play was very fresh. I remember this feeling of how fresh, you know, imagine nice clean sheets hanging Wet, wet, and everywhere else was very warm and very hot, but there was a fresh place to play. I remember that. Then, when I was, you know, thinking why is that? I have written a post about that. Why did our grandmothers well, maybe it was like mothers and grandmothers taught us to hang the clothes vertically Because this is the most efficient way to dry a cloth.
Speaker 2:It's an efficient way to produce evaporation. And starting from there, I thought what is going on here? What happens when you have a vertical geometry, which is like a wet sheet hanging, compared to a horizontal geometry for evaporation, for example, the surface of the sea? The surface of the sea is horizontal. It is not a very efficient way of evaporating. Let me tell you, I love the sea, but vertical is much more efficient and that's why we learned it from our grandmothers. I am going to make a word for our audience. It's true that I learned it from my grandmother, but I think men and women should do the laundry.
Speaker 1:Definitely hang outside, if you're allowed. I know there's some weird things in the US you're not allowed. Anyway, hang your clothes outside. You're restoring a water cycle with that and it's cooler. Yes.
Speaker 2:So look, I did this experiment when my kids were small. We live in Holland and you do the laundry, so in the winter you have to do it inside the house. So we had a nice house where we hang a big piece of sheet, imagine two or two and a half meters long, and it was hanging to dry, and I asked my kids imagine the piece was there.
Speaker 2:I asked my kids to close their eyes and pass their hand below the space and I say, at a certain point you are going to feel a current of cold air and when you feel it, open your eyes and you will be precisely under the sheet. And indeed we did that. We went like that, with closed eyes and, yes, here it's colder. You open your eyes and there is a sheet.
Speaker 1:So basically inside your living room bedroom, where we were hanging, in a few meter space, you could already create this flow of air. We'll get to that like cool air coming from, or air coming from higher to low, cooling down and basically creating this effect within a meter or two. So what was happening?
Speaker 2:What is happening Within a meter or two. So what was happening? What is happening when the wet cloth is in contact, you know, in a microscopic contact with a coat of air. The air does this process I told you earlier. It takes some molecules of water, jump into the air, cooling it immediately, and therefore the cloth becomes a little bit drier. But the air in close contact with it is wetter, is colder, is much colder, and because it is colder and gases, when they are cold, they compact and they compress, it becomes more heavy, becomes heavier, so it glides down along the wet and it creates a current of air moving downwards. And this movement of the air is also very good for the renovation, because in order to dry, you need new air, you need to renovate constantly. So that's why the clothes dry much better when it is windy.
Speaker 2:But if there is no wind and your clothes are vertical, they create their own wind downwards. And if you put your hand below, even if you are inside your house, you are going to feel it. Yeah. So I thought well, what? Even if you are inside your house, you are going to feel it. Yeah. So I thought well, what happens if we are able to? There is obviously an energy. This air moving downwards has some energy. What if we were able to collect better this energy and to use it to actually create a siphon of air, which is much more efficient?
Speaker 2:And then I came with the idea of the katabatic tower, which is well, for respect for the audience. Katabatic comes from a Greek word. Actually, I took it because there is the so-called katabatic winds, winds that flow downwards Okay, downwards, so what we imagine? The idea was simple Take the hanging piece of cloth and close it, forming a cylinder. Then you will have inside the cylinder a mass of cold air which falls down. And when it falls, falls down, it's going to fall down more, much more effective than it was uh, uh surface, because it's going to make a siphon, it's going to to to take air from the top and push it downwards, and it will use this energy to create a little wind.
Speaker 2:And in this manner I made, I made, my first little experiences. The first one was very small and it was so I realized immediately that the size of the object was important. And then you went bigger Because the first one was small, but then you went slightly. I went bigger Because I made a very small one, I thought it was not even working. I bought an anemometer to measure the wind, the wind speed, and I was almost not able to measure it. How small was small? But I think you're. When you say small, um, it was like, uh, it was a pipe, uh, or 30 centimeters of diameter by two meters, basically a 30 a 30 centimeter pipe, two meters up, yes.
Speaker 1:And then because you do something very special, obviously on top we'll get to that, but you didn't give up at that point. Why?
Speaker 2:No, I didn't give up. I actually said well, it's not working, but maybe I need to evaluate better. What are the parameters that are fundamental for this system to work? And I immediately realized and made some equations.
Speaker 1:I have studied aerospace engineering, so I know a bit of fluid dynamics and thermodynamics.
Speaker 2:It helps us and I immediately realized that the variables which are fundamental is that the external temperature has to be hot and dry, the ambient has to be dry, because it's in that air, which is hot and dry, that can take a lot of water and evaporate it, and when doing it, it cools a lot. So the more the air cools, the bigger the difference in density between warm and cold air and Sorry, I received somebody was phoning. So this big difference of density is the driver for the movement. You need a hot dry place.
Speaker 2:Exactly, but that was prerequisite, but also precisely that is what you want.
Speaker 2:A system to work, because our problem is this horrible heat that is coming, these heat waves that are more recurrent, bigger, and you want to have something precisely there. And I realized that actually, this energy which is so destructive, it's thermic energy that is making hell in our cities and in our forests, this energy is actually the driver of our engine. So I'm using our problem as the source of energy for our solution, like a judo master. Yes, thank you. Yeah, but that's that's a bit the point. And so, uh, I made my first serious prototype together with my brother, mikkel. I want to thank him now Shout out to him yeah, who got us in touch as well.
Speaker 2:Yes, and we built it in his house in Madrid during a heat wave. It was about 41 degrees. I made a whole experiment report. It was 41 degrees centigrade, which is rather common in Madrid. I think. We had 15% relative humidity, so very dry. We built. We call it Katawatic Tower. It's a pompous name. Actually it was a piece of cloth. I will tell you why we built we call it Katawatic Tower. It's a pompous name. Actually it was a piece of cloth. I will tell you why.
Speaker 1:You only need to separate the external ambient air from your internal cooled air, Because the first time you used a pipe like some kind of plastic or something, and then you decided to go for fabric.
Speaker 2:It was made of cloth. It was made of, actually very it was a yuta. You know, it's a tissue, vegetal tissue, and we hung it from a very, very high tree and imagine a pipe of two meter by ten.
Speaker 1:So ten meters high, two meters diameter, so quite a you could stand in it, yeah, for a few. A few people on top of each other yes, you can.
Speaker 2:You could, you could stand below and enjoy the cool air which was coming because it wasn't.
Speaker 1:It's not touching the ground like it's.
Speaker 2:It's a few meters above the ground no, it has to be hanging above the ground because he has to have a way out, the air comes down and has to. That's the cold, yeah the cold, wet air has to have a place to, to leave, and the nice thing is that because it's it's cold, it's denser. This cold air wants to stick close to the ground. You want to put your terrace there. I'm not going to fly about, so it's going to to cool everything on its path.
Speaker 1:So it's basically you should imagine, almost, and we'll get to the top like the, the cool air, wetter air, more humid comes down and starts spreading because it keeps being pushed down around you sort of you have these um I don't know movies on when, when gas things happen. Of course, this is always like a like a disaster movie, but it sticks around and in this case, you want to probably put your terrace or your seat there and have your vegetables around it, because that's the the coolest they're going to be in that day. Um, and how pleasant, how was it to to switch it on for the first time?
Speaker 2:look, when we, when we built it, it was, uh, one of one. Imagine one or two hours of work in the middle of a heat wave. So we were there, but when we put a machine in place, we immediately felt this cooler. It went to 19.5. It was cooler than being in the swimming pool, wow.
Speaker 1:And what you mean. You said switching on. We haven't talked about it yet. What happens on top of this tower?
Speaker 2:Exactly so, the idea for our audience. We have built a cylinder, a big one, hanging from a tree at a certain height from the ground. The next step is to make you have to nebulize water at the top. With a pump and some nozzles simple ones, and some nozzles, simple ones you create this nebula of water and, because it's very hot, this water evaporates and cools the air at the top.
Speaker 1:So there's like a circle of these nozzles that basically sprays tiny droplets of water and a pump down there to push it up. How much? Because there you add energy to the system, like we talked with the echo, like how much does it need or what what's needed to pump the water and through the nozzles the, the energy we were using.
Speaker 2:It was like um for for you make an idea we were using about a pump of 200 watts and we were cooling 140 kilowatts, so the return was 5,000. For every watt we were putting, we were cooling.
Speaker 1:That's an interesting lever. Yeah, that's leverage.
Speaker 2:Wow. Well, there are many things that are relevant, interesting. One of them is some people say, yeah, jesus, but you are using water to cool. That's nice, but what do you do in the place where there is no water or where the water is needed, for the plants, for example? Well, we could say we could do it also with seawater, because seawater and freshwater, they have basically the same latent heat, specific latent heat, so it's going to cool in the same manner.
Speaker 2:We only have to take care of the salt. It has to be controlled, and some salt can be not good for the soil, so you have to take care of the salt. It has to be controlled, and some salt can be not good for the soil, so you have to avoid losing this salt. We have ideas how to do it and we are planning how to do it. There is another thing which is interesting and that's maybe to do with my publication recently. Plants Grow at Night, and that also has to do with something that we have, because afterwards I said, well, this is obviously working and it's working well. The question is, what is the impact of such a tower in a garden when you put it a long time?
Speaker 1:What was the impact on the garden of your brother? How far could you feel the freshness of this? Just to give us an idea.
Speaker 2:Well, we, unfortunately we only did it for we put it in March for about two hours. What we wanted to do in these two hours is to sit around the tower and stay cool and you know it was like being what a nice place to be when, everywhere else you are, you see 41 degrees and you are sitting like in front of the, you know, in a really cool, you know blue sky, but you are still cool and fresh.
Speaker 1:Must be a weird feeling.
Speaker 2:It was a very nice pleasant thing, and there was somebody which was standing on the house some 10 or 15 meters away and she went out and said what have you done? Suddenly it's much cooler here. Because this is a good question how far are you going to fill the fresh ambient? And when I say our aim is to cool the ambient, I know this is one could say this guy is called a donkey shot for some reason, because when you put you know one of the things that air dosage immediately mixes, and if the ambient, the whole ambient, is at 41, it's going to be very difficult to transform this into a fresh ambient. But at least maybe you can refresh your garden or your square, or your square or your plantation. There's a couple of interesting things with that. Well, first of all is that you can use salt water or even gray water, as long as it's not. Actually, this would be a very good idea for gray water, because it would be a perfect way to purify.
Speaker 2:You get rid of all the. The air takes only the water. All the contaminants remain. It could stick to your clothes or become solid and it is now pure water in the air, with the potential to become pure water when it rains.
Speaker 2:The other thing which is interesting is that I told you about the size. I have told you that with this Sancho Panza model, which was 2 by 10 meters, I could cool roughly 140 kilowatts in those conditions, 140 kilobats. In those conditions. I made the calculations that if I made a structure which is two times bigger, a number of times bigger, the cooling power is going to be growing, not exponentially, but it's going to be like the factor to the power of 2.5. So more than quadratic growth to give a better example, quadratic growth.
Speaker 1:I don't know of many people, including me, understand what we're talking about.
Speaker 2:Let's put it, let's give some. If I made something which is four times, bigger.
Speaker 1:So we were up to 10 meters now I think two meters in diameter it's going to be 40 meters higher.
Speaker 2:So now we're talking a bigger structure, but it's going to cool 32 times. Wow. That's massive. And when I was thinking about that, maybe you I don't know if you have read one of my posts, because I explained it when I was thinking about that I said how come nobody thought about that before?
Speaker 1:And they did right. Actually, someone did yes yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 2:This was conceived as an idea to produce energy in the 60s, because this wind can be used with a turbine.
Speaker 1:I remember those 20 years ago, probably in like some you remember.
Speaker 2:I've never seen these things before.
Speaker 1:I've seen some stuff, I think probably.
Speaker 2:Australia. It was developed in some universities. When I saw that it was developed in some universities in Israel, in India and in the US, I thought, well, the good news is that you are not crazy, but these were massive like concrete steel towers, I remember.
Speaker 1:I don't think anybody built them, but from the structure or the designs I remember like, because if you pull this down, of course, there's a lot of moving air which could be a turbine, and that's where a lot of the thing came this downdraft.
Speaker 2:Air is much faster when your tower is bigger and it actually grows like the square root of the dimension.
Speaker 1:When does it get dangerous, like in terms of speed of air?
Speaker 2:You don't want to blow up trees, the one we built, with 2 meters by 10, the wind inside was about 2.4 meters per second, about eight kilometers an hour, like when you are on your bicycle. No no, no Okay.
Speaker 1:Like, you don't want to like you don't want to build tomatoes over plants.
Speaker 2:when you build something like this, yeah, but but you receive a nice breeze and you, when you are in a, in a bicycle, you, you, you feel this fresh air. This was the speed that you get with two, but if I made a tower four times bigger, the speed is going to be doubled.
Speaker 2:So there's an interesting function and negative non-linear growth there, which is very interesting because you don't want to create all kinds of weird wins and that's why they thought if we made it very big and you can reach speeds of 70 kilometers an hour and then you can put a turbine and produce energy. But they never built them. There were several reasons. One of them is the towers work. To work permanently, they have to be in a very dry place, like a desert, and then, once you produce your energy, you have to take the energy to the cities where people live, normally many hundreds of kilometers away, so you're going to lose a big part of this energy. So the whole thing was not viable. But when I studied these publications from the year 60s and 70s, I read if we made such a big tower, we will have the problem that a big area and they mentioned an area 100 kilometers of diameter would become wetter. It was considered a problem. It was considered a problem in those days and when I thought that, well, that could be actually the solution of our big problem of today and I've retaken some pictures of these towers and again when I show you, you think of that.
Speaker 2:Who is going to build such a mega big structure? Well, first of all, they can be built. They were considered. We have the. We are equipped as humanity to build these big structures. And secondly, if we have gone to the moon and we're planning to go to live in Mars, because some people think that that is the solution to the destruction of our planet. So this is definitely possible. Yeah, we can build a tower in order to, but for the moment we are not there yet. But I thought that maybe other ways and I come to your community. Maybe we're not going to be able to dig a tower of 80 meters tall, but maybe all the producers in our community can afford a little tower of 10 or 15 meters to cool their own garden. And once everybody cools their own garden, there is a multiplicative effect. Now we get to the water cycle?
Speaker 1:What happens if in a region?
Speaker 2:We got the community effect when everybody can Starts to cool.
Speaker 1:What you do in your garden is beneficial for your neighbors and vice versa, if your cool air that flows down starts hitting the cool air of your neighbor, neighbor that also has a similar system that might be relatively easy to put up not that expensive runs with a small pump and a solar panel. Um, like when, maybe from the beginning, when did you start thinking of what happens if this, this, gets implemented on on a relatively large scale, like what happens to the water cycle, et cetera? What are your thoughts there in terms of network effects, in terms of it's great if I cool my own garden? Of course my tomatoes are safe, amazing. But what happened? Like what's the thinking on the scale?
Speaker 2:Well, I am very ambitious because I yes, we have to be, because I don't know if you have mentioned Jan Jan, and he said that we have destroyed the water cycle and that 50 or 60 years ago there were rainstorms every second day during the summer in all the Mediterranean basin and this has disappeared. And the reason he explains it very clear is that the amount of water in the air is not reaching a magical value. He gave a number. He said 21 grams of water per kilogram of air. And why are not we reaching now this? It's because we have destroyed many forests and many marshes in the path of the marine breezes that come during the day. In the summer the sea breeze comes. I have measured that in by the beach. You go there and you can measure more or less. The speed is 10, 8 meters per second, six, eight meters per second, and it contains about 10, 11, 9, 12 grams of water per liter, not enough to trigger.
Speaker 2:But every day.
Speaker 1:Every day the ocean heats up or the Mediterranean and we see it even now worse, like this summer, last summer as well and we get to the floods, but the Mediterranean Sea has been boiling, let's say extremely warm, and so the breeze is there, which means more evaporation, more humidity in the air, but not enough to rain.
Speaker 2:Exactly, we are at 12. And we used to be at 12 60 years ago, maybe a little bit less, I don't know. Now, what we are missing is this second addition of water coming from the trees and the forest that they are not there anymore.
Speaker 2:But if we have a community of people using, for example, catabatic towers, or we have this other tool that we might mention later the rivers in the air and you are able to reach this level of 21, maybe even 22, the atmosphere. They don't want to know if the water comes from the sea or from the trees or from a catabatic tower. This is really. It's not a living being like a tree or a person. It only needs to know if it's 21 or not. If you were in 21 or 22, a cloud will form and a precipitation will follow. So I think we could reach the figure of 21 if there is a community of people using catalytic towers or the rivers in their system.
Speaker 1:This is a bit what I think we could achieve together and that's a very tantalizing, interesting, intriguing and optimistic point, like we've covered the water cycles, obviously with me on me on, and really I think people forget how recent um we've had these summer storms and how recent they've disappeared, mainly because of land use change. Let's say, near the coast and further up the mountains, like in many places around the Mediterranean, many places around the world, you have these sea breezes in the summer months, could be global north or global south, depending on when your summer is. They need to hit a certain amount of vegetation, healthy vegetation, and then a mountain range, and then it rains very predictably, or it used to, and we've cleared a lot of that, specifically in spain, in greece, in italy, france as well, for hotels and for other developments so sorry, so-called developments air quotes, um, and and basically switched off these summer rains, which then make it, of course, hotter, and then the whole thing just continues. There's a whole piece there why it's dangerous, actually for the rest of the world as well.
Speaker 1:Um, you in your latest post depends when this comes out. For sure there will be others, but your latest post, when we record this in the middle of september, you talk about connecting the devastating floods in the center of europe, which actually mian mian, I think, already mentioned floods and snow because of the boiling Mediterranean and because all this water didn't rain down in the last months Exactly, and now it's coming down in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, many other places, czech Republic and Slovakia, many other places it's been raining. I've seen numbers like 300 mil and it's devastating. This water comes from the Mediterranean and should have stayed here.
Speaker 2:Exactly we have mentioned about this, water is every day. During the two or three months of the summer we have had every day a breeze during eight or ten hours, bringing humidity 12 grams per kilogram of air. I will try to put it in other terms it's about maybe 15 grams per cubic meter of air. I will try to put it in other terms it's about maybe 15 grams per cubic meter of air coming. So if you have a, you know I've made some calculations. I don't have, I'm going to bore you with figures here. But if you take a piece, a small piece of coast of 10 kilometers by 250 meters, this is the height of the breezes 250. At a speed of six meters per second, this is a huge volume of air coming charged with water every day during three months, so 90 or 100 days. This water moves towards the interior, goes up in the mountains. It doesn't disappear. It's like energy Water it doesn't disappear. It changes from one state to the other, but it doesn't disappear. It stays there and it's going to be accumulated in the atmosphere. Doesn't disappear. It stays there and it's going to be accumulated in the atmosphere. But then, when the conditions change, the winds can carry these winds, these masses of air charged with water to different places.
Speaker 2:According to Mian Mian, he has measured that. So it's not only a thought, it's an experiment. He has measured this, he has followed, he has traced these masses of air. They move to Central Europe towards the end of the summer and when a cold front comes, they all discharge at once, like we have seen these days. So if we were able to reinvigorate the water cycle, we would have our storms during the summer that will bring water to our thirsty land and will make our trees grow again. We have the problem of the olives, the oil I've mentioned to you, the droughts that there is, the terrible droughts in the Mediterranean. These problems would be solved. But you will also solve the problem of the mega floods coming in Central Europe. We can also have them in the Mediterranean because this air supercharged with moisture that has not been able to develop into a storm is going to come as a cyclogenesis phenomenon during the autumn, maybe sometimes in the Mediterranean coast, but sometimes in the Central Europe environment.
Speaker 1:Which brings up a fascinating point that I think many miss environment, which brings up a fascinating point that I think many miss, like we're talking about europe and mediterranean.
Speaker 1:This is is um, obviously also applicable many other places, um, but the people in central europe and the people in northern europe and should really care what happens in the mediterranean, not only because they go there on holiday and they get their olive oil from there and tomato sauce and all of that, but but also simply that when the Mediterranean sneezes, the North has a cold or worse, a lot of rain, a lot of snow, a lot of other disruptions, and I don't think that notion apart from the notion of water cycle restoration, that it's possible that we're missing things that used to be there, et cetera.
Speaker 1:I think that's a big piece. But also that notion of being in this boat, literally together, if we like it or not, I don't think has really landed yet to the great work of me and me on, but he didn't manage like somehow he was. Actually he authored a lot of papers for the european commission, did a lot of work for that, but somehow this notion of we're in this together with all the countries around the mediterranean plus all the countries to the north and actually to the south of that has. Somehow. That's why I find the region so interesting, because this is where we're going to figure out a lot of things or we don't around agriculture and more, but somehow that notion hasn't really landed at all.
Speaker 2:I think no, I agree with you, and we have only seen a. We are only grasping a part of the problem that everything is going to become. We have now the problem of the refugees that we need to address. This is only going to multiply by a big number. This is why we need to act Now.
Speaker 2:This is why I left my job to put myself busy in this project whilst I have energy, because when our kids will have our age, your age, the world is going to be a much serious place with the problems, with any problem the drought, the heat waves. I don't have any doubt that they are going to be even more intense. Now we are worried because we have reached, somewhere in the world, 52. Sometime we will reach 55, maybe 58. What now we call a heat wave is going to be the normal summer then, and when they will have a heat wave, this will probably mean that if you are outside, you die.
Speaker 2:So if you're in a country or in a place that, under these conditions, if you are outside, you die, you need to move from that place quickly, no matter where. The borders are important, but life is much more important. Your life and the life of your family are going to push you to go north or south. Everybody will do that for themselves and for the family. And actually, in this roulette, we don't know who is going to be winning or losing, because I'm here in the Netherlands and when the level of the sea rises a little bit more, even if we raise our dikes accordingly, maybe the port of Rotterdam is not viable anymore. So where is going to Europe? Going to be Well, rotterdam, hamburg, whichever port, is not going to be viable. So the nature of the problems we're going to see, they are going to see such that I think we need to look at it today and try to solve it. I think, as I said earlier, through the problem of solving the water cycle, we can fix both. We can fix the water cycle and the greenhouse gases.
Speaker 1:And so what's next for the towers and the rivers of air? We'll get to that. What are the next steps? How do you envision from quite a large prototype but still relatively small, and what are next steps in your plan?
Speaker 2:Well, I think we want to make a prototype which is stable. I mean we want to make a prototype which is stable and I mean we need to have more than two hours? Yes, we need to. I told you that the size is important, but the size is also problematic, because you make a big structure, you need to fix all the tensions and the moments and the fundamental.
Speaker 2:Either you put it in place only occasionally, when it's very hot and very dry, or, if it is a permanent structure, you need to fix it, and I need to get in contact with a building company or an architectural company. It should preferably also be nice, aesthetically nice and renewable, made with materials that do not, for example, tissue. But it could be made in many manners. At the end, it's only a cylinder. I said it has to be nice because maybe we want to install it in the middle of a park in a city to cool the ambient for the people who live there or the kids who play or the elderly people, particularly during a heat wave, but it could also be used to cool a greenhouse when it gets too hot, so you can keep your production also, which is sort of interesting from a meta perspective.
Speaker 1:If you're cooling a greenhouse in a greenhouse effect, it makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2:So basically, our next step is to make to make the structure working in a kind of permanent basis to observe what is the impact on the fauna and the flora because they suddenly are no longer in the heat wave.
Speaker 1:Like they can avoid those peaks exactly which is not to be underestimated for the growth of plants and trees, and I understand why greenhouse owners are interested, because as soon as you cross a certain threshold I don't remember, it depends on the plants you stop photosynthesis, which means you stop energy flow, which means you stop energy flow, which means you stop growing, which means it's an issue, and most plants and trees in the Mediterranean are in that state for most of the day, for most of the summer, which means you lose an enormous amount of photosynthesis. That didn't happen.
Speaker 2:Exactly, they lose. Well for all the audience. When we refer to the Mediterranean, I think we can say most of the south of the US California, texas, all the parts because it's very south, so the sun hits very strongly there. So those areas do not produce during the summer because as soon as you are beyond 35 degrees the plants stop working and that can be the whole summer. So, as you say, the summer is the moment where your sun is more, more strong, is actually the moment where the plants could grow to maximum speed, but they can't. And there is a second threshold I refer to it in my posts which is also very interesting, and it's even a more stringent strict than the yes, you have a tendency to pick really nice titles as well.
Speaker 1:Trees grow at night. What do you mean? But go ahead. What's the second threshold?
Speaker 2:Well, exactly the when the trees are, as when the ambient is very, very dry, the leaves close the stomata and they don't produce, so they don't breathe and therefore photosynthesis is stopped until a certain threshold of humidity is reached. So imagine, let's say it depends on the type of plant, but for a plant it could be, for example, 60% of relative humidity. So now the ambient becomes a bit more humid and you are reached 65%. Then the stomata are open and the leaves start to breathe and the photosynthesis magic starts to work. So with that the plant is able to well, first of all evaporate. So cool the ambient, and we can talk a bit about that later.
Speaker 1:But also to produce this. Which means if you trigger it to that certain level, the plant, then it starts to cool it even more. It starts to take over part of what the tower is doing. To take over part of what the tower is doing Like, it starts to like when a plant gets to a certain threshold and starts to usually at night, is what you wrote it starts to cool even more like it starts to reinforce that cycle.
Speaker 2:There is this truth. The first threshold is for which is very, very dry. Before this threshold the plant is what we call hydric stress. So it closes the stomata, it doesn't breathe. So it's like you and I when it's at 45 degrees we can't do anything. You can drink water, but you cannot work. Then, if the humidity raises a little bit, you go beyond this first threshold.
Speaker 2:Then the plant can produce photosynthesis and with that it is able to transform CO2 from the air into very complex molecules which are charged with energy. These molecules are, let's say, what we can eat Sucrose, for example, sacarose and other molecules. But then in the second step, the plant needs to eat these molecules in order to grow. And when we say grow, we refer to cellular growth. The cells of the plants grow either because they increase the volume and the mass or because they divide into two molecules and the mother cell becomes two or more daughter cells that grow in order to do this growth. They eat this. They need these molecules. They use this energy that they have produced in photosynthesis. But they can only do it if there is a certain hydrostatic pressure inside of the cell. If there is not this pressure, the cell is somehow flaccid and it cannot grow, even though the food is around. The molecules charged with energy are around, but it cannot use it and it cannot divide, neither. It has to wait until there is the second threshold is overcome, and this second threshold because temperature and relative humidity are very, very interlinked normally is only reached late at night, where at night, when the temperature goes to very minimum, then the relative humidity goes to its maximum and the second trial is overcome, and then the plant finally can use this food that has been produced during photosynthesis and grow, and this has been measured by this professor in Switzerland and by others and has been demonstrated.
Speaker 2:There are two exceptions to that. One is when it rains, because when it rains, then relative humidity goes to 100%. Boom, a plant starts to grow, boom, and exactly we probably you have observed your plants when it rains. My mother used to tell me Jesus, because we used to water the plants. But my mother used to tell me I don't know what the water rain has, but it's the better kind of water for the plants. And I always ask myself she's right, what is in the rainwater that is not in the canned water? And I thought well, nothing, because rainwater is only pure water. In canned water there's some, maybe some fertilizers or some salts that could be.
Speaker 2:But then I came to the conclusion it's not the water, it's the humidity. The plant loves to be in a very humid ambient and in that ambient it grows during the day, if it rains, because then it has the photosynthesis and the turgor, this pressure that allows it to grow, and the contrary. If it is very dry and warm during a headwave, even during the night, this threshold is not reached. So the plant, even if it has been producing photosynthesis during the day, maybe it didn't, but it cannot grow. So that's why those periods are very bad for plants, because they can be maybe weeks without any growth. If you don't have the food to grow, to produce fruits, to produce flowers, then they can also decay. So this is the interesting thing, that I was a bit obsessed with this idea. To you know, when we look at plants, you are now drinking water. I am going to drink water too, and I will come to this.
Speaker 2:I ask you a question, kun. I ask you a question, kun. What do you prefer To have? You know, five litres of water through dink and be put in an ambient at 45 or 50 degrees and say, kun, don't worry, you have your five litres. Keep drinking, or I can tell you look, you are going to have only two litres of water and I will put you in an ambient at 25 degrees Obvious number two. It's degrees Obvious number two. It's clear. Obvious number two. The same is for the plants. The plants they don't need so much water in the roots if they are put in a fresh ambient because they don't lose so much water with evapotranspiration, and also they can grow all the time. And this is also the idea I am always trying to have with the Katabatic Tower. I am trying to use the water, not to put all of it in the roots, only a part, but use a part of the water to keep the plant in a fresh ambient so it can grow all the time.
Speaker 1:Absolutely amazing. Thank you for that. And the rivers in the air. Just to make sure we get to that before people start wondering if we forgot yes, Well, yes, it's always thinking and rethinking about the evaporation process.
Speaker 2:What makes it efficient? How could we make it even more efficient? And I have seen that now that we see more and more heat waves all over the world. In India, in Mecca, this year was terrible. There was more than 1,000 people dying in one day. But those are rich countries and what they do? They put these sprinklers with evaporation.
Speaker 1:Some people might have seen it on terraces, like this sort of a ventilator with some sprinkler in front of it. You see that also on terraces.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, because actually this is the only tool. As we said it earlier, you have the air conditioners, which are not real coolers because, if you look globally, they are already warming the ambient, and otherwise, to cool the ambient, you have evaporation or evapotranspiration. So I was looking how to make it more efficient. But in order to make it more efficient, you need to have a big surface of contact, because evaporation takes place in the interface between the air and water, like the sheet that we were discussing before, like a sheet, exactly perfectly. A very efficient way to have a big surface is to have a very small droplet. Maybe not for our audience, but if I have the same volume, I've made a very nice paper about that. If I have a cubic meter of water and I make a small little droplet of one millimeter, how many droplets will I have? Kun, no idea.
Speaker 1:Abirian how many droplets?
Speaker 2:will?
Speaker 1:I have no, no idea, but I'm imagining the surface area explodes compared to so if it's, going to be very big, exactly exactly.
Speaker 2:I'll have about 250 million droplets, so I could have given a droplet to every inhabitant of Italy, germany, holland, spain and France from my one cubic meter. But if I could take every one of these droplets, I could divide it again in 10 millions and with doing that every time, I would be increasing the surface of contact between the air and the water, and that's why very small droplets are very good for evaporation, because you you create this big surface of contact. However, there are other problems. In order to make very small droplets, you need a lot of energy pressure, because just like we when you were a child.
Speaker 1:I don't know that, I don't know if it's in other countries, but trying to push the dough through the fake dough sort of spaghetti machine, you needed a lot of pressure for the smaller size spaghetti.
Speaker 2:Yes, exactly so? Um, actually, if you want to reduce the, the radius of the droplet by 10, you have to multiply the power by 10. It is more or less so. At a certain point you have a problem the power by 10. At a certain point, you have a problem of power. You need to put a lot of power into that. This is the first problem. The second problem and this is something that is not very well known is that you need, in order to evaporate, actually water is one of your issues, but the big problem is actually air and warmer and drier. You know how much air you need to evaporate one liter of water. Have a guess.
Speaker 1:One liter of water. We discussed before how much energy it takes, how much air.
Speaker 2:Energy, I have told you, but air which?
Speaker 1:means it's a lot like 100 cubic. I told you. No, you didn't tell me. I'm guessing, Because that's one of the reasons I remember you telling in a pre-interview why these terrors like terrors, ones with the knee doesn't really work, because you don't have enough air passing by to actually cool it down. Exactly, exactly, that is the work because you don't have enough air passing by to actually cool it down.
Speaker 2:Exactly, exactly. That is the problem you don't have enough air because for every unit of volume of water, for every liter of water, you need between 100 000 and 200 000 liters.
Speaker 1:Okay, I wasn't going to get to the thousand, but it's a lot. Yeah, okay, that liters. So, in order to put our listeners.
Speaker 2:for one liter of water you need about 150 cubic meters of air, so it dissolves in a lot of air, which is what we want, but it also creates an issue. Exactly so. If you don't have all this air, if you have much less air, which is typically what you do in a terrace, or you have a certain volume of air, is the volume of it you know from your sprinkler and so they put in little ventilators, but that's not going to be enough.
Speaker 2:Of course, yeah, you can put a ventilator, but then you have the problem that you you call the moves away. It's not enough. What happens is that the droplets fall to the ground in liquid state. They don't evaporate completely. You have a certain effect, but only very partial. Or, for example, they also do maybe you have seen it they work intermittently. They work for two seconds and they stop, and then later again because they don't have enough air.
Speaker 2:So I thought how can we solve this problem? Because basically all these systems do the same they create a small droplet and the droplet falls slowly because of its small size. There is a relation between the speed at which a droplet falls and its size. But you have always this problem you are going to have a droplet which is going to be suspended in there by about two or three seconds, and in this two or three seconds it's not going to evaporate completely. What you could do is then to make much smaller droplets that fall a bit slower, but still you're not solving the problem.
Speaker 2:So I thought could we change completely this idea? Of course, the droplets are going to be essential, because it's the way to have a big surface of contact between there and the water. But what if we could put the droplets in a situation where, instead of falling down, they're going to move upwards, and then you don't have the problem of the time, because they will have all the time to evaporate, but also they will, when they move upwards, they're going to always find new air to dissolve in it. So we could solve these two problems at once. And then I came to this idea I would recommend to the listeners to watch, to go to Google and find a video about reverse waterfalls. The BBC had something.
Speaker 1:They are mesmerizing.
Speaker 2:It's crazy. I have put some in my post so you can see them. But what you see, there is in some places, very special places actually you have a river that instead of going, is going to fall in a cascade, but instead of going down, it moves upwards and flies into the air, and this is beautiful. You see the power of nature and you know this is the kind of things that you want to see. Some of them have nice music, so they are very inspiring.
Speaker 2:But then I thought well, what would happen if this river was in a place like the one I tried to fix, a place which is dry and arid and the air is hot and very dry, and the air is hot and very dry. All this air suspended in very hot, dry air would immediately dissolve this water. The water would evaporate and the air would cool at the proportion I have told you earlier. So I thought where do these things happen? So I thought where do these things happen? They always happen in a cliff, where a river is ending in a cliff and you are going to have a cascade. And sometimes, if at the top of the cliff you have a strong wind opposed to the cliff, the form of the mountain is going to deform the orientation of the wind and is going to push it upwards, so you're going to have a wind moving upwards that can carry the water. This is not easy to have because in these arid places, first of all you don't have rivers.
Speaker 2:Let alone yeah, second, where you have rivers, let alone, yeah, second, where you have rivers in a cliff. Sometimes you have these impressive storms with these winds of about 70 kilometers an hour. That's the power you need 75 or 80, to move upwards a river completely. So, no, but I didn't despair. I think maybe we can still do something. What do we really need? Let's go to the essentials. We need let's go to the essentials, we need air moving upwards, and we preferably in a place that we are going to always find it.
Speaker 2:And I went to my situation and said what do we have in the Mediterranean? And when I say Mediterranean, I mean it could be California, it could be India, it could be anywhere where you have sea breezes. You have the sea breezes every day, from 10 o'clock until 7 in the morning and then at night. The contrary, they reversed sense and it comes from the mountains towards the sea. So they are regular. That is good.
Speaker 2:Second, they are there, but they are not very strong. They never reach 70 kilometers an hour. You are lucky if they reach about 20. Normally, the ones I have measured are about 6 or 7 meters per second, which is about 15 kilometers an hour. Yeah, okay, what can we do with 15 kilometers an hour. First of all, we need to find a place where they are going to change direction. But the breezes, they follow the orography of the mountains. So if you go to a cliff or to a mountain in the interior with a vertical wall or to a dam for that matter, because a big dam has a vertical wall, and I went to the dam and made the measures and there what you have? Exactly this phenomenon you have the breeze turning, changing orientation and moving forward upwards and actually, for something which has to do with aerodynamics, it starts to speed up, close to no. No, it doesn't speed up.
Speaker 1:Does it go up then? Because that's what you need. It speeds up.
Speaker 2:Close to the corner. It speeds up in some areas, but you don't need you. Actually I'm happy with a wind of 506, because I went to my table of the freefall speed of droplets and I said, well, I did this experiment. I said I went to a place in Granada where I found in this dam, but also in the high Alpujarras mountains, and I measured vertical winds of a speed of six, seven meters per second, five, eight, seven.
Speaker 2:I went to the table and I said which kind of water could I put here so that when I put it in this vertical wind, it's going to be moving upwards and not downwards? Vertical wing is going to be moving upwards and not downwards. And the good news is that a simple droplet of about 1mm of diameter will move upwards in such a wing and you can create these droplets without a big pressure, because it's actually very simple. You can even do it manually, edit it manually. You can see that in my videos. And then I also did something bigger. I used one of these machines we call them Kärcher here in Europe.
Speaker 2:I took a pressure hose of those and I launched it and all the nebulation of water was flowing up. I made with my hands a little tool where I could see how high the wind was taking this water and you lose it and you don't see it anymore. The ribbon I placed a red ribbon at the end of a cane. It went up 30 or 40 meters high.
Speaker 1:Wow, you can see it on the picture. You can see the rivers in the sky. What would that mean? What could that open up in terms of cooling, in terms of?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, look, I call it rivers in the sky is a bit ambitious. I didn't call it atmospheric rivers, that's another thing.
Speaker 2:But it's. I thought, why do I call it a river? Because it could carry an amount of water, because it could carry an amount of water of the order of one cubic meter of water per second. One cubic meter of water per second is like a small river in a dry, small basin. And this you could actually nebulize it, because I did it with one of these Kercher. But you could imagine putting maybe 100 or 200 of those cannons and nebulize in every one of them I don't know five, I don't know certain amount of water, and then let this water be carried by the wind upwards. In this process, all this big amount of air will cool, the water will evaporate and because it cools, it will cool a lot, as I told you, depending on the temperature, but it can cool from 40 to 20,. It's going to be a big mass of air, because one cubic meter of water will need 150,000 cubic meters of air. So we are talking about a volume of air which could create a cloud.
Speaker 1:And then maybe rain.
Speaker 2:But this big mass of air, which is cool, is moving upwards initially and it goes down. But it will go down because it's heavier than its ambient air, so it's going to be sticking to the ground, moving towards the mountain, but close to the ground. In its path it will cool all the trees, all the forests, all the people, all the villages.
Speaker 1:It's almost like a horizontal version of the tower. Is that fair?
Speaker 2:It's a fair idea because at the end everything is about evaporation. But this method you can really scale up the process.
Speaker 1:You can do? What are the risks? Like if, if you do this at a mat, like, do you? This sounds, I'm not saying cloud seeding, you have it somewhere in your blog post as well, but it's. We go to the, the geoengineering world here like what are playing the devil's advocate? What are risks?
Speaker 2:that's uh that's something we need to to to deal, and, of course, I will not be able to do that on my own.
Speaker 2:Probably there will be the authorities, the permissions In Europe. We have all this, probably all of the world, and it's also fair that it is like that. You cannot touch things that are common to everybody. But the good thing about it is that this is not a world scale experiment. You are trying to do this in a small watershed to see if it works, to see if you are really cooling at a relatively good sound level, certain watershed to see if you are able to provoke rain. If you find that for any reason this is dangerous maybe your storm is too violent or whatever then the next day you stop. But if it doesn't be if it, you know, maybe provokes a gentle rain or uh, or a cooling in the middle of a heat wave you could implement it in another watershed.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the downside risk is very limited and the potential upside to speak in Asim Taleb terms is extremely high. Like in case, this works at scale. Even at smaller scale, the upsides are almost limitless and the downsides are relatively manageable, which is the right type of risk you want to take.
Speaker 2:And the thing is that if you invest this water, you do take and you evaporate it and, as I said, the teachings of Miyami-Yan said you are using this air to increase the humidity of the air, which already came with some water from the sea. So, at the end, if you are able to provoke rain, you are going to collect the water you put first, but some of the water that was coming from the sea you will have a multiplying effect. So it could be like an investment. It's a water cycle.
Speaker 1:It's a perfect bridge to some questions. I want to be conscious of your time. We're going in for a deep dive and definitely want to ask these, as we always ask them, and then wrap up to make sure we don't go too late. But actually, the investment piece is a fundamental piece, obviously, of the podcast, and I like to ask this question. Let's say, we do this in a theater in Madrid or Barcelona or in Amsterdam, in the financial heart of wherever we are, and we have an audience full of financially minded people that are dealing with money, either their own or other people's money. Of course, we showed a lot of pictures, interesting examples, etc. But if there's one thing you want them to remember the next day and one thing they probably should do because they might forget other things, because we are a forgetful type as the human species what is that one thing you want them to remember from this evening? If we would do this in a live audience?
Speaker 2:Maybe that in order to solve the problems, we need to look at nature. We don't need to find the strange things. More or less do the same things as nature does. Nature uses evaporation to cool and to reinvigorate the water cycle. This is always there. We can enhance and make the process of evaporation more efficient. We know, you know when you study the physics of it, we can do it.
Speaker 2:There are things. I have come with these two tools. Maybe there are others, maybe better ones, but I would like to tell them that we need, there is a certain degree of urgency to find some solutions. There are countries which will not be viable soon. Some of these countries are extremely rich. I know these countries because when you are talking to me about a bunch of investors, some of them probably come from Saudi Arabia or the Emirates or India. Those countries are becoming, or are very rich, or the Emirates or India. Those countries are becoming or are very rich and they are interested to have a tool to make themselves viable for the future and seeing the interest of all. I'm not sure that I'm answering very well your question.
Speaker 1:No, no, I think listening we've heard that before like listening to nature, but in this case, like how does nature cool? I think we've discussed that. How does nature cool itself and how do we enhance that? Like to say, okay, let's plant a lot of trees, which we should absolutely do, but then if the ambient temp, like before, they grow to a size that they can actually start cooling the area around them, it's too late. Like, what are the things we can do to, um, to enhance that and and to to make sure they can actually grow.
Speaker 2:Yes, and and, and there's some other thing that maybe it passed not exactly to your question, but when, uh, we have talked about the thresholds of working on the trees, and the trees are great to cool us and to cool the ambient, but they are our friends, our partners in the evolution, and we have to take care of our friends, of our partners too.
Speaker 2:It's not always what can the trees do for us, what can we do for the trees? That's what we should remember, because when the heat wave, the big one can come, when the heat wave which goes beyond 45 degrees is there for a long time, is the moment where you more need the evapotranspiration of the trees to cool the ambient. But it's exactly there where they cannot work. There is tomato close and they do not evapotranspirate, they don't cool anymore, they may die. So it is in that moment where you could come with a tool to refresh the ambient for yourself and for the trees, because they will not be able to cool us at any temperature or at any level of heat wave, and that was going to become a serious issue.
Speaker 1:Trees can only get us so far, apart from the ones that are not there yet At a certain moment they stop working.
Speaker 2:They cannot work when it is too hot, they close, they stop evapotranspirating. That's why the wildfires are a big risk after a certain long period of heatwave, because the trees have not evapotranspirated for long and they are rather dry and vulnerable, so they are more vulnerable, so we need to take care of them better.
Speaker 1:What if we switch the conversation in that sense and you would be in charge of a significant investment fund? I usually use the example of 1 billion euros or dollars, etc. Not because I want to know the exact amounts, but I want to hear what you would focus on If you had that kind of crazy amount of money, which we should also discuss if it should be concentrated in one person. But let's say it is Tomorrow morning, you wake up and Jesus has control over this money. It could be long-term investments, shorter term, whatever you feel. What would you focus on?
Speaker 2:I would do two things. First of all, I would try to solve the problem of the structure of the Katawatic Tower. I would simply contact a good engineering company which will help me to build it a bit bigger in the right place. Probably Granada is a good place. This is not going to cost 1 billion. This is going to be a matter of I think we are below 100,000. Then, secondly, I think it would be good to open offices or to work in places where the climate change is becoming an existential question.
Speaker 2:I'm talking about I don't know Pakistan, iraq, kuwait, these places where they are becoming unlivable for a period of time. And if they are not able to do we don't find something, people will be leaving the place or dying there. So I think those countries have an interest and I know there is a lot of search and money is put in places, particularly countries which do have a lot of money, like Saudi Arabia or Dubai or the Emirates. These countries are trying to find a future, also because they will not be selling oil for very long, so they need to reinvent themselves a bit. So I think I would put an office there, or it can be a virtual office. So start to establish partnerships there. Another way of making a virtual office. So start to establish partnerships there Another way of making a good business.
Speaker 2:I know that in the US some areas are having a problem with insurances because the insurances are leaving, particularly in California for fire insurance, but also in Florida for flooding or hurricane prevention, and the insurance don't see the business anymore. A catabatic tower or a river could be a tool to reduce the risk of a wildfire, and they are expert in managing risks. So I think we could maybe make good deals with insurance companies. And finally, I will certainly leave a bit of the billion that you gave me to develop better the rivers in the air, because I think this is a very powerful concept that needs further development and for that it would be good to have some concept that needs further development, and for that it would be good to have some authority I mean the regional or national authority granting you permission and allowing to do some experimentation.
Speaker 1:And then, as a final question, which usually leads to other questions, but let's see if we stick to the final question If you had a magic wand, so you no longer have your investment fund, but if you had a magic wand and you could change one thing overnight, what would that be? It could be anything from better permits to having back saltwater marshes, to global consciousness We've heard them all. What would be the one thing you would change overnight if you had that magic power?
Speaker 2:I think I would. If I could make that all of us are able to see better the truth and not be misguided and cheated and fooled around so easily. This would be the thing. So when somebody is deceiving you, everyone could see it. This is, I think this would be a powerful tool to move on.
Speaker 1:I want to thank you so much, jesus, for the work you do, first of all, and for sharing that and coming on here, obviously, to to talk about it. Thank you so much for the deep dive into evapotransportation, into how does nature cool and how can we enhance that, and let's see where where this leads to. I think it seems to be bubbling around this space, at least on your LinkedIn page and others as well, and there seems to be energy, which, in this case, is good. Not too much energy in the air, but there seems to be energy around the topic. It might not be too late in that sense, so let's keep following, developing hopefully bigger and and more powerful prototypes. That's going to teach us a lot, and let's see how far this movement of water cycle restoration can get in the next years.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much. Cool. I think we ought owe it to our kids, to your daughters and to my big daughter.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for listening all the way to the end. For the show notes and links we discussed in this episode, check out our website investinginregenerativeagriculturecom. Forward slash posts. If you liked this episode, why not share it with a friend or give us a rating on Apple Podcasts? That really helps. Thanks again and see you next time.
