alt.EGUreview

James may have posted The EGU Review, but with 10 bazillion parallel sessions, each of the merely 10,000 attendees may enjoy a unique experience.

I started the week learning about the Urban Climate. We had a poster in the session, which I defended, as Lalu Das, the first author, is now back in India. The concept of our work is quite straight forward, assessing whether any of the long term Met stations in Japan may be uncontaminated by the Urban Heat Island Effect, and the poster is available here (link to pdf of Lalu's poster). For those who don't want to download the pdf, the answer is that, amazingly, there could still be some relatively uncontaminated "rural" stations. We merely considered "rural", "suburban" and "urban" climates, limited as we are to the historical measurements. It was made clear in the session, however, that there are many different urban environments, and there is no unique definition of "rural" (ie forests may be quite different from deserts). In fact the people at the session were much more microscopically minded, and were doing amazing things with complex models and fiddly measurements, in local environments. Now feeling truly urbane, I next attended four talks in different rooms, on tipping punts, Australian drought, costs of mitigation, and total carbon emissions, all before lunch. Some quite dull talks on how doomed the planet is followed - dull because they were mostly reviews rather than new stuff. After tea I naturally went and cheered at Probability Reborn, convened by Thomas SvD, James and Reto Knutti. They did a much better job of it than we did 2 years ago, so I hope they will carry on next year with a similar session.

Tuesday was almost all paleo, and on Wednesday morning I attended the Last Millennium session with James. After lunch I was lucky enough to get a seat in Icesheet-Climate Interactions. They had guards turning people away at the door. Obviously it was popular, but it was not _that_ hot a session, but rather it was held in a small room with almost no standing room. It was mostly all new to me, so good value, although the warm room and after-lunch jet-lag induced tiredness did make it a personal challenge. Later I attended a medal lecture on ocean acidification by man with a ridiculous name who actually gets his hands wet, which was also educational and good context for our collaboration with Andy. Thursday was the Talagrand Backwards-Maths session, which is always very exciting. Unless, like James, you actually understand these things, the trick is to not obsess on any of the details and just let it wash over you. Then it is possible to spot the patterns, and maintain a pretty good idea of roughly what they are talking about.  After coffee, at last, it was time for the Let's Interglacial session. To be honest, there had been an awful lot of last-interglacial ever since Tuesday. It is obviously hot. And that's the question - why was it hot - and are we going the same way? While no one actually said it, they are all hoping that the answer will be that yes we could be going the same way and, if so the WAIS (Western Antarctic Ice Sheet) is history. This, of course, would be a big problem for those countries whose low lying areas have not already been handily swept away by a massive tsunami. On Friday I enjoyed the EarthquakeTsunamiNuclearApocalypse  session with James, and then we went to eat cake and drink silly Viennese coffees: Melange left; Latte right.