“People hear chemistry and they don’t like that,” says David Ho, a geochemist and professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

“Just remember these are not just companies pushing this forward, these are not just policy objectives – these are entire groups and disciplines of scientists who are coming along on this journey of helping us understand what it means to do these types of interventions in the natural world.”

“The verification step has to be non-profit, and it has to be separate from your money-making scheme,” says Ho, who co-founded [C]Worthy, a nonprofit that makes open-source software to quantify the efficacy and side effects of marine carbon removal. “As ocean biogeochemists, if we have the inclination and we have the skills, then it behooves us to work on it.”

[C]Worthy staff scientist for data analytics, Tom Nicholas, Ph.D., leads a discussion with Pangeo about VirtualiZarr, his tool developed to overcome some limitations of the “kerchunk” idea in wrangling big datasets like those being used to build software at [C]Worthy.

AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles President and CEO Terry Tamminen leads a conversation with [C]Worthy Co-Founder and CTO Alicia Karspeck and others on Ocean Carbon Dioxide Removal.

MRV is the fulcrum of all things CDR so we're having an event centered on the growing MRV ecosystem and how everyone plays together. How does data flow, what are the needed inputs and outputs of each, where are the challenges, overlaps, and opportunities for optimization of the whole process?

“These projects are also challenging to do in an academic setting because they require a larger group of people than you have in a single academic lab…So, what they proposed was to create non-profit science startups.”

Experts discuss the importance of rigorous MRV, entities potentially responsible for funding and conducting MRV, existing ocean observing infrastructure and modeling capabilities, and implementation readiness.

‘CDR can be thought of like “a time machine,” David Ho, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, wrote last year in Nature. Stripping some of the CO2 out of the atmosphere would be like returning to an earlier time with lower concentrations.

"As the world hurtles toward dangerously warmer temperatures, international experts advise that carbon removal will be essential to avoiding the worst climate outcomes.”

[C]Worthy Chief Science Officer David Ho is interviewed by The Weather Network to answer questions about mCDR, carbon emissions reduction, and planting trees.

The third webinar in a series focused on current innovations in Monitoring, Reporting, and Verification (MRV) for marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR).

“It doesn’t make sense to use CCS to prolong our use of fossil fuels, especially to produce electricity,” said David Ho, professor at University of Hawaii and senior researcher at Columbia University. “The argument in favor of enhanced oil recovery is often that if they weren’t using this captured CO2, they’d be using some other CO2, but I don’t think you can call anything where you’re getting more oil out of the ground to burn a climate solution.”

Isometric is partnering with [C]Worthy—a non-profit “Focused Research Organization” that is building C-Star (Computational Systems for Tracking Ocean Carbon).

David Ho on the promise and challenges of scaled carbon removal in this article by NewScientist.

"Matt Long, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and director of [C]Worthy, a nonprofit aiming to help build tools to measure and verify ocean carbon removal, is working on a project that received about $3.9 million in ARPA-E’s announcement today.”

Our CEO, Matt Long, talks about [C]Worthy, ocean alkalinity enhancement, and MRV on this podcast with Solve for X.

"Carbon offsets are often touted as a solution to humanity’s bad habit of emitting an awful lot of CO₂. But how many of us actually know what things like carbon offsets and carbon dioxide removal are all about?”

"'This project represents the first time an alkalinity release will be conducted along with the dual tracer technique and allows us the opportunity to determine the movement of CO2 between the ocean and atmosphere and track the evolution of an ocean alkalinity enhancement…”

As we emit CO₂ into the atmosphere, a significant amount - around a third - is taken in by the oceans. With growing interest in carbon removal interventions, ocean scientist Dr David T. Ho tells Gaia about undertaking an exciting experiment.