Tuesday, April 19, 2011

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.


Viennese coffee

13 comments:

Steve Bloom said...

More detail on what was said about the Eemian, please. I find myself mesmerized by it after reading Hansen's most recent. Re the melt being in some way hoped for, are we referring to a little anticipatory schadenfreude?

jules said...

Eemian: ooo wet feet, high sea level, warm toasty warm. Model model model, data data data.. squeal. squiggle. More Research Required!

jules said...

ie... they are in the "wild enthusiasm" (http://corry.ws/CorryBook-61.htm) stage of the project, which is called Past4Future, and their website is available on Google.

Steve Bloom said...

Thanks, Jules. I looked through the deliverables and it's quite the ambitious project. This topic at EGU had the most interest for me, riveting-wise: "Rapid Reductions of North Atlantic Deep Water During the Peak of the Last Interglacial Period." Anything on that?

BTW, FWIW and IMHO, from a distant POV a big drawback of the EGU meeting is that the on-line material seems a lot less informative (not to say that the AGU info crosses over into out-and-out informative).

Steve Bloom said...

Also, thanks so much for putting up that poster. (If only more would do that.) I'm sure AW and RP Sr. will be thrilled at the assist! :)

jules said...

"anticipatory schadenfreude?"
No - merely wild enthusiasm for Nature papers.

"Rapid Reductions of North Atlantic Deep Water During the Peak of the Last Interglacial Period."
My notes were, "data - ocean ventilation highly variable at LIG". Problem with the data talks is it is very difficult to comprehend the results without your magic eye..

What would you want to see in the on-line material?

I know who RP Sr. is as I saw him on the Skype, but who is "AW"? Not sure why they would be thrilled...?

Steve Bloom said...

Aha, has some sort of deal been cut with Nature?

AW (see how WMC-like my usage has become?) is the execrable fabulist Anthony Watts, cat's-paw of RP Sr. Of course they would only be thrilled if your work were to be promoted as some sort of scandal. But good for you for (apparently) having missed so much of that garbage.

Re A/EGU material, if they would at least provide a template for abstracts that includes discussion of results, links to posters and/or any supplemental material, it would be a help. Occasionally people volunteer to put all of that in AGU presentations, but not often. EGU seems entirely bereft.

Some organizations, off the top of my head AMS but perhaps others, don't seem to have a problem getting presenters to cough it up. Here are the author instructions for a current AMS conference. Note that they don't require the detailed information until afterwards, and also that the talks are recorded and subsequently posted (if presenters are willing).

James Annan said...

Well, for better or worse the EGU is basically a "closed" meeting, in that talks and posters are not regarded as published (eg photography is banned, although this rule is widely flouted). There is some web streaming, and I'd like to see more, but if you tell people that posters will be openly published, you risk finding that they won't put in new results. I don't think it is far out of line with other meetings I attend.

Steve Bloom said...

Well, nothing beyond the abstract is mandatory at the AMS, but since they ask for more they do get quite a bit of it. How would it hurt the AGU or EGU to ask?

Steve Bloom said...

Just to add that since they don't ask, even though there's nothing prohibiting people from dropping a link to their poster or other material into their abstract, hardly anyone does.

James Annan said...

The abstracts are often rather speculative place-holders put up in advance of any results being available, and there is little motivation to update them. Actually I suspect hardly anyone reads them except the session convenors who have to pick the speakers.

Steve Bloom said...

And yet, at these AMS conferences presenters frequently put a lot of material on-line. I'll dig up an example from a past conference.

James Annan said...

Well, you will be pleased to hear (as am I) that the EGU is now inviting presenters to upload their posters and presentations for public viewing (creative commons license). This seems to be a new development. It remains to be seen how many people bother, of course...