James' Empty Blog

[jules' pics] not so yum yum

2012-02-01T14:03:00.002+09:00

Bowls is popular so should you fail to get in before noon you may have to settle for one of the stalls in the grounds at Hachimangu. You can usually find a toffee grape (I must photograph one of these wonderous delicacies for you some time), but on major festivals there are many alternatives, none of which are at all appetising.

Roll over Scotland, these are battered deep fried whole potatoes:
Hiroshima style okonomiyaki: Okonomiyaki is batter with various tasteless stuff on. The Hiroshima style being because of the particular stuff. Usually served with a mildly unpleasant tasting sauce.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 2/01/2012 02:03:00 PM

RSS feed for comments

2012-02-01T13:25:00.003+09:00

One limitation of blogger as a host is that it does not seem to provide an RSS feed for comments. Some other blog hosts do this, and sometimes the comments are more interesting than the posts. The closest thing a reader can usually do on blogger is get emailed new comments for a particular post, but only after commenting themselves.

I suddenly realised that it must be straightforward to set up an RSS feed for all comments, simply by arranging for them to be forwarded to a free email-to-rss service. So here it is.

[jules' pics] yum yum raw fishy

2012-01-30T17:09:00.001+09:00

All week we eay the inventions of the canteen at work, and, healthy though it may be, by the weekend we are bored of cold bland food and soggy rice, so we eat foreign-style. There is, however, one Japanese restaurant in Kamakura which we are allowed to frequent on ocassion. Called Bowls, it serves bowls of rice with stuff on. The stuff is somewhat novel, sometimes with a Korean or maybe Californian twist. Here's their raw tuna with exotic sesame seed dressing and peculiar foreign-style lettuce-stuff! Doesn't it look delicious!?

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 1/30/2012 05:09:00 PM

[jules' pics] I saw three ships

2012-01-26T13:19:00.000+09:00

It seems that every New Year's Day, just after dawn, three yachts launch and go sailing by at Kamakura beach. It is a curious thing. Not a very up to the minute picktur, but I tend to build up a backlog of pictures I like that I haven't got around to blogging. Meanwhile, last weekend was the Wimmin's Conference. I took lots of photos, and they'll go online, but visible only to the other Wimmin. What happens at Wimmin's Conference stays at Wimmin's Conference... ;-)

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 1/26/2012 01:19:00 PM

The "Gaijin Gulag" at Narita

2012-01-24T22:00:00.000+09:00

A bit of a bizarre story has been doing the rounds. Initially on Debito, I assumed it would soon fade, but it was picked up by an Economist-hosted blog, which apparently means it is important and worthy of discussion just about everywhere. What happened is that some "Tokyo-based" freelance Canadian journalist was barred from (re-)entry into Japan late last year - he insinuates it was on the strength of some critical Fukushima-related articles - then bullied and threatened by some shady security forces in the bowels of Narita Airport, and finally forced at gunpoint (his words) into buying an overpriced one-way ticked to Canada, leaving home, girlfriend and pet dog in Tokyo. This was all described in extraordinary hyperbole on his own blog (which incidentally has been repeatedly altered in various materially important ways), then highlighted on Debito, and it went downhill from there.

It all sounded a bit odd, and people started asking of the author...so what was your actual visa status? This was met with volleys of vitriolic abuse and evasion. "I first had a work visa for Japan in 1989, and my last renewal began in 2008", he claimed, "I have never overstayed". But work visas only last three years (at most). Eventually, he wrote on his blog that it was in the process of renewal, but then he deleted that bit again. If (and it seems like a big if at this point) he actually did have a viable renewal application underway (not a trivial matter for a freelance journalist, work visas typically require a Japanese sponsor, and are rather specific as to the nature of the work), and had also been told it would be ok to travel with this status, then he would seem to have a leg to stand on, but his repeated evasion and misleading statements make it hard to take his story at face value. At any rate, his subsequent treatment is the responsibility of the (Korean) airline he flew in on, not Japanese immigration. Not that this would justify the treatment, but it does suggest that it may not be such an imminent threat to those of us who are actually living here with proper visas which authorise us to work in our jobs. That's not to say everything is great in Japanese immigration. It's pretty horrible everywhere, though.

His various blogging and commenting on Twitter, Debito and elsewhere gives the impression that he's a bit of a Walter Mitty fantasist, full of stories of his war experience and name-dropping his more famous "colleagues". He boasted about what a great contribution he made to Japan after the Fukushima accident (er, though it was also apparently this coverage that marked him out for expulsion): "But I didn’t flee Japan like thousands of foreigners after the March 11 disasters. I made personal sacrifices to tell the world about the plight of disaster victims, to generate sympathy for Japan. I earned income from sources outside Japan, and spent it inside Japan."

Google tells a different story, that he bravely filed his first-hand reports from Shizuoka, stoking the foreign media hype that many of us were so critical of at the time:

"I'm one of the last people I know to leave Tokyo," Johnson told CTV's Canada AM. Well, it seems like he has gone for good now.

Oh noes we're all going to die

2012-01-23T22:36:00.002+09:00

Well, about 5,600 of us, in the next 4 years - or maybe 30. And considering that is a few thousand of of a population of about 30 million (depends how far out from central Tokyo you count) perhaps it's not actually that likely to hit me (or indeed any individual) personally. After all, close to half a million of us are going to die of something or other every year anyway, so an additional risk of well under 1% doesn't seem too much to get worked up over. But it would perhaps be a slightly less irrational reason to leave than the radiation paranoia...

Of course, if the earthquake hits the famous "Shibuya Eggman" nuclear power station, we might get another meltdown too!

Rainy run

2012-01-22T15:43:00.004+09:00

Jules is away this weekend so I thought I should find something fun to do. However, I entered the 10k race at the Chiba Marine Marathon instead. "Marathon" in Japanese just means a long run, and as well as the 10k there was a half marathon, but there was actually not a full-length one at all. After what seems like weeks of wall-to-wall sunshine, the weekend turned drizzly and cold, so it wasn't quite as much fun as I'd hoped.

The facilities were pretty rubbish - in contrast to the Shonan event where they had set up tents, we were randomly packed into in the grimy alleys and stairways of a baseball stadium, and there was nowhere remotely secure to leave baggage. Not that this really matters in Japan. They had also not bothered to rent any portaloos and the existing toilets were inadequate for the numbers. Then there was a nasty and potentially rather dangerous crush at a pinch-point with thousands of people all trying to get out at the same time. It all made me realise just how well organised the Bolder Boulder and Shonan marathon had been in contrast. With the 10km race starting 10 minutes before the half-marathon, and from some distance away, I was wondering if I would get out in time - or indeed, at all - but in the end I had a quick 5 minute jog down the road as warm-up and then only 2 mins to wait at the start line, which in the cold and drizzly conditions was perhaps not that bad an option.

I was a few seconds faster than last time at 42:27 (206th out of ~5000), but had been hoping for rather more of an improvement. The crowd at the start probably cost me a bit of time - it was a rather bigger even than the Shonan and I was in the 2nd block with over 500 people ahead. Also, it was a bit breezy and of course wet under foot, which probably isn't conducive to that good a time. Maybe the biggest problem is I just wasn't trying hard enough though - everyone around me seemed to be panting away desperately from quite early on and I wasn't really that tired at the end.

[jules' pics] pink and concrete

2012-01-20T10:00:00.001+09:00

Where there is so much concrete that the camellia can't take root, pink bicycles are grown instead.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 1/20/2012 10:00:00 AM

[jules' pics] Monday morning in Kamakura

2012-01-19T10:00:00.001+09:00

At Kosokuji. Greens and browns replace the reds and blues of Yokohama.

But the camellia are still pink! In the interests of balance, I should point out that while there is the occasional bit of stone and wood, there is still an awful lot of concrete in Kamakura. For some reason the Japanese like to coat every possible surface with the stuff.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 1/19/2012 10:00:00 AM

[jules' pics] Sunday morning in Yokohama

2012-01-17T21:29:00.001+09:00

The posh shops aren't open yet so the streets are rather quiet, which allows a crow to enjoy its breakfast in peace. Meanwhile, some dodgy manual handling is going on down a narrow staircase at the back of a building. Secure behind blue bars, the cat glares out territorialy. The camellia continue to flower pinkly.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 1/17/2012 09:29:00 PM

[jules' pics] Trees

2012-01-15T16:46:00.000+09:00

Earlier this month we climbed a small mountain called Hinode (which means sunrise). As it is a small mountain, most of the views are of, or through, trees. The tall straight trees are the Japanese cedars which will make people in Tokyo sneeze when they release their pollen in a couple of months time. But this huge leaf is not from a Japanese cedar... And some sides of the hill host a more natural forest. It was a clear day and Tokyo could clearly be seen from the top. Can you see the new tallest structure in Tokyo - The Sky Tree? It is actually more similar in height to Hinode itself than to a real tree! Some of the real trees were horizontal. And here is the ever faithful pack pony.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 1/15/2012 04:46:00 PM

Ouch

2012-01-15T13:03:00.002+09:00

Via Andrew Parnell's tweet, this article has to be one of the worst explanations of p-values I have ever read. It's not just that the basic interpretation of a p-value is wrong (no it is not the probability that the null hypothesis is true), but it's also drowned in waffle and bafflegab.

Interestingly, it seems to be the one article on that site by author "Statistician Nathan Green" that does not have comments attached. I've retweeted AP's comment to the author just for fun...

Not so fast!

2012-01-14T19:54:00.006+09:00

It seems that reports of the death of global warming have been somewhat exaggerated. Thanks to commenter doskonaleszare on the previous post, a graph of the forthcoming updated HadCRUT4 data set has been located here, and here it is reproduced for your convenience:

Blowing up the right hand end, with a horizontal line to guide the eye:

Red is the new HadCRUT4 blue is HadCRUT3. It is quite clear that in the new data set, the 2010 value exceeds the 1998 value (as indeed does 2005), in line with the NCDC and GISS analyses. This seems to be attributed to the use of a larger set of high-latitude observations, which was long recognised to be a weakness with HadCRUT3.

The Whitehouse bet

2012-01-14T15:28:00.007+09:00

I hear that David Whitehouse is crowing about winning the bet we had over global temperatures. I can't say I blame him - but he had better make the most of it, as the nature of the ongoing warming trend is such that it will not be long before the 1998 temperature estimate is unambiguously beaten in all three of the major temperature analyses. It already has been in two of the data sets, of course, but we did agree to use the Hadley centre analysis. (UPDATE but thanks to commenter doskonaleszare have a look at this!)

More or Less covered this yesterday (you can listen on line, or get the podcast), as they did with the original bet. Tellingly, you can hear that David Whitehouse was not prepared to bet against a record over the next 4 years on the same basis. So even though he continues to bluster about a standstill in temperature, he obviously doesn't really really believe it. Here are the three data sets (offset for clarity), with the simple linear trend (dotted lines with associated decadal trend value) over the last 20 years. I estimated observational values for 2011, as they are not actually published yet. It is is quite clear that even with the supposed halt in warming, the trend continues to be positive, and the 1998 value (dashed line) will be regularly exceeded in a few years by all measures.

That said, there is little sign of the acceleration in warming that most models had predicted, and it increasingly seems that the Smith et al forecast (for example) was a bit excessive. This new paper also suggests that the transient response of a modern model (albeit a particularly sensitive one) has to be significantly downscaled to match observations. Mind you, that paper also has a worrying discrepancy between the results obtained with 1900-2000, versus 1850-2010 data. Normally one would expect the latter to be broadly a subset of the former - more data means closer convergence to the true value - but the two sets of results are virtually disjoint, which suggests something a bit strange may be going on in the analysis (cf Schmitter et al with the land-only versus land+ocean results). But just a glance at the first figure shows a striking divergence between model and data over the first decade of the 21st century (compared to the close agreement prior to then). Something isn't quite right there.

[jules' pics] Dragons

2012-01-09T19:24:00.001+09:00

While last year was year of scary monster bunnies, we are now safely in the year of the cuddly dragon. The timber merchant celebrates in the usual fashion. All the other years have non-imaginary animals, which seems a bit odd to me.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 1/09/2012 07:24:00 PM

[jules' pics] BIF

2012-01-06T17:02:00.001+09:00

Having practically nailed a "BIF", which is internet photography speak for "Bird In Flight" (here on flickr and third photo down on Chrstmas Day post), I was emboldened to attempt the other sort of BIF - Boy In Flight.

The bigger boys went first, As the boys got smaller and smaller I was sure one was going to get wet, but even the tiniest one flew all the way across.
And here is a group of young adults gazing up at the flying boys, perhaps remembering the days when they too could fly...
BTW the "trick" for either kind of BIF, if you are as bad a photographer as me, is to get them flying roughly towards you, and use a camera with fast autofocus to do the rest.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 1/06/2012 05:02:00 PM

[jules' pics] 2011

2012-01-05T14:07:00.001+09:00

2011, a set on Flickr.

That's it. I'm stuck. 24 photos for 2011.

The idea was to get down to 12, but the 24 seem to me to better tell the story of the remarkable year that was 2011. It certainly was the most interesting year of my life so far. The photos are presented in chronological order and weirdly there are none in the 24 that predate the apocalypse in March, the first being taken 2 days later.

Comments welcome!

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 1/05/2012 02:07:00 PM

Huh?

2012-01-04T22:25:00.002+09:00

This looks like it is mostly well-designed for the purpose of cycling to the South Pole, but then they put derailleurs on it?! I wonder if the Los Angeles-based designers know what snow is.

[jules' pics] New Year sunrise

2012-01-02T19:27:00.001+09:00

What everyone at the beach was waiting for. Due to some cloud, the sun did not appear until a good 15 minutes after sunrise, but people didn't start celebrating until they saw the sun. So I wonder what happens on a fully cloudy morning. Perhaps it has never happened in living memory! Pondering living memory, we had a large (magnitude 7) earthquake yesterday, off the south coast from us. The big ones last year were north and east of here. Hmmmm... On our road the shaking was not sufficient to knock James off his unicycle, but it did go on for quite a while. I will be looking out to see how it is explained in GRL. I suppose the advantage of apocalypses is an in increase in the number of Japanese authors getting published in high impact publications, which must surely improve the national papers-per-Yen factor.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 1/02/2012 07:27:00 PM

[jules' pics] 1/01/2012 05:05:00 PM

2012-01-01T17:05:00.001+09:00

[First sunrise of 2012, Kamakura Beach]

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 1/01/2012 05:05:00 PM

[jules' pics] 12/31/2011 07:52:00 PM

2011-12-31T19:52:00.001+09:00

Historic Kamakura dates from the 12th and 13th centuries, so most tourists probably don't realise quite how much things change. Here's a shiny new copper roof on one of the buildings in Hachimangu. In just a few months it will start to become dull, brown and then in a few years it will turn dusty green.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/31/2011 07:52:00 PM

[jules' pics] Happy 42nd Birthday to me!

2011-12-29T18:56:00.001+09:00

It seems to me there is a place in the world for "trick(s) to hide the decline"... especially when it comes to the ravages of age: [Photo taken by James on 27th December 2011, in Kamakura St.Arbucks]

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/29/2011 06:56:00 PM

[jules' pics] 12/28/2011 11:40:00 AM

2011-12-28T11:40:00.001+09:00

I took 4 photos in Kaizoji which I thought were OK. I asked James which one was the worst, and he picked the one that I thought was the best. Then he said which one he thought was best, and it was the one I thought was worst. So here are both of them.

As for Christmas, and my birthday, which was yesterday, on which Steve Bloom wanted an update there were no gold Nikon boxes at all under the tree! Instead, yesterday I got to go to fabric town in Tokyo to buy yardage for making clothes for James!! Why has James has come over all austerity measures? You'd think he'd be feeling happy and generous what with having the most downloaded paper in GRL this week. It is a bit odd though. I wouldn't have thought that "On the observational assessment of climate model performance", was an obvious Christmas number one title. I see he has already written a post to brag about it! Tsk - and to think he's the one who teases people for checking their H-index on a weekly basis.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/28/2011 11:40:00 AM

On the observational assessment of climate model performance

2011-12-28T11:07:00.003+09:00

I already blogged about this some time ago, but here is the final published version, with a free download for the first 50 who want it, by using "46672759" as both the userid and password. The title seems to have enticed an unusually large number of people to read it - it is currently GRL's most downloaded paper (at time of writing). I hope they were not all disappointed.

Incidentally, the first draft IPCC report is open for review, but presumably all who are interested already knew that. As per their request, I'll not be discussing it here.

[jules' pics] 12/26/2011 10:30:00 PM

2011-12-26T22:30:00.001+09:00

Entrance to Hachimangu. In a week's time it will be a sea of people. I wonder how the pigeons feel about it.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/26/2011 10:30:00 PM

[jules' pics] Merry Berry Christmas

2011-12-25T12:05:00.001+09:00

The leaves were all injured by a big typhoon this year, but I gave it my best shot.
And for those who prefer red and green... There seems to be something being cooked in the oven. The pigeons got away... ...but the ducks are looking plump.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/25/2011 12:05:00 PM

Happy Christmas to us

2011-12-25T11:49:00.002+09:00

Possibly the last hurdle that was standing between us and next year's budget has now been jumped:

Cabinet crafts record ¥96 trillion budget

We still have to actually apply for our jobs in the next few weeks, but at least it seems there will be jobs to apply for.

Not that the budget actually makes any sense, but Japanese economics never has, at least not since we got here. The basic budget would stretch credulity by itself, but on top of that there's a chunk of "extra budget" to plug the gaping holes that the tsunami punched in the nation's infrastructure. When the borrowing requirements come home to roost we can leave easily enough. The natives, on the other hand...

[jules' pics] 12/22/2011 04:50:00 PM

2011-12-22T16:50:00.001+09:00

[Kenchoji, Kamakura]

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/22/2011 04:50:00 PM

[jules' pics] Which continent?

2011-12-21T10:00:00.001+09:00

Another of jules' brain teasers. One of these cappuccinos was made in Kamakura and the other in San Francisco. Which is which? And which one tasted the best?

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/21/2011 10:00:00 AM

[jules' pics] Gary Dankos

2011-12-20T14:07:00.001+09:00

After yesterday's brief diversion to the present, I'm diving back to San Francisco to share 3 silly pictures from San Francisco's best restaurant (says the internets).

Weird plates...

Poor Pigeon...

Poor Lobster... I thought in such a posh restaurant it wouldn't do to carry the SLR, so only took my tiny Sony. Shouldn't have worried - the woman on the table next to us had a huge Canon that fired sparks into the air. She was even worse than me, and photographed every little bit of food served, as well as taking romantic pictures of the couple she was with. Mind you, I think it was also her living...

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/20/2011 02:07:00 PM

Shock as Indescribablyoverhyped overhypes something

2011-12-19T21:59:00.000+09:00

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and that's obviously the readership they are chasing:

Shock as retreat of Arctic sea ice releases deadly greenhouse gas

Portrayed as some new shock result presented at the AGU, it seems to have been a relatively mundane poster. It's only an Indie "exclusive" because no-one else was prepared to touch it with a bargepole. After a few years of stagnation, the methane concentration has been climbing again (oddly, the Wikipedia page is several years out of date). But it's a long way off being a threat anywhere close to the scale of, say, CO2.

Yes, I know I'm late on this - when I first saw it, I tried to check the AGU site to see what had been presented, but it was down.

Meanwhile, the Indie is on to the next looming catastrophe - and in these days of on-line access, it doesn't even serve as a decent chip wrapper.

[jules' pics] 12/19/2011 05:00:00 AM

2011-12-19T05:00:00.001+09:00

James' birthday present must be just about the cutest mid-life crises purchase ever. Luckily with the seat right down it fits me too. It is brilliant fun!

[Top photo taken in Kamakura on Sunday. The momiji (maple leaves) may be rubbish this year but the camellia are startlingly good. Although they flower all winter and so provide some welcome colour, usually they are sparse and boring. This year they are incredibly vibrant and abundant.]

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/19/2011 05:00:00 AM

[jules' pics] San Franciscan kohi

2011-12-16T16:41:00.001+09:00

Kohi is Japanese for coffee. It's always a surprise that coffee in the USA is such appalling hogwash. Afterall, wasn't it the USA that invented Starbucks? Now obviously, a Starbucks capuccino isn't the same drink as an Italian capuccino, but they aren't so bad. In fact they are quite nice. At least in Japan. But in the USA even Starbucks seem a bit like...hogwash.

So we went to some effort to find a renowned cafe in which to drink coffee in San Francisco. There is one such place near the Moscone Center, called Blue Bottle. You have to queue for 30 minutes in the cold while the inefficient staff bumble around. Two Japanese could do the job of the six or so staff in a fraction of the time. Then you have to wait for some time while they create your coffee. And then you have to drink it quite fast, before it gets cold in the draughty cafe. But I suppose its as reasonable a ritual as tea ceremony...

The odd thing was that the Blue Bottle's 2 speciality coffees were imported from Japan. Not the beans, of course, but the coffee processes. This is surprising because Japan hasn't really had coffee for very long. And I assume they got it from America. Now it seems they've reinvented it and are selling it back.

We now realise that the rather mild but expensive coffee we get in a little cafe in Kita Kamakura is probably siphon coffee.

This is how you make siphon coffee in San Francisco:

In Kamakura you stick the flask over what looks like a Bunsen burner.
The other sort of coffee (which we haven't ever seen in Japan) is "Nel" coffee, which seems to be a long-winded extension of the convenience drip coffee. We didn't have time to try this one.

And here's the stupendous preparation - see the stopclock and weighing scales?

More importantly than any of that, here below you can clearly see the effects of siphon coffee on a jetlagged James.

1. Feeling quite sleepy before drinking
2. Enjoying the flavors (sic)
3. Post-kohi buzz
Hogwash does not have the same effect...because it is hogwash.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/16/2011 11:37:00 AM

More disappointment with Debito

2011-12-16T12:40:00.004+09:00

I mentioned he went into meltdown some time ago, and the picture hasn't got prettier since. Some recent rabble-rousing on his blog drew this comment, which I objected to. Or at least tried to, because Debito has been censoring my comments. After AJ and Debito posted explicitly asking me to back up my contention that the previous comment was nonsense (funny how he didn't ask them to show that it was remotely credible) he simply refused to let me post my reply, so here it is:

AJ, I agree that some of the temp workers are poorly treated and probably subject to a significant risk. That's a far cry from the general population being measurably affected. Even if you don't trust the Govt figures, there are lots of people looking for contamination across the country and basically finding very low levels - even when safety thresholds are met or exceeded, these are still set at very conservative levels. I'm happy that people are checking these things, but when I eat a Fukushima peach, the risk of choking on the stone vastly exceeds the risk of radiation-related harm. And don't get me started on mochi, especially in ozoni :-)

Listen guys (and girls), I agree that TEPCO and the Govt are culpable and have been incompetent in various ways. But that doesn't actually mean there is a significant risk to the general population from the situation. To those who say "one cancer is too many", I seriously doubt they make the same (unrealistic) demands of power from coal-fired stations (coal has substantial radioactivity), or their consumption of pickles and salt in their food - there's a good reason why Japanese stomach cancer rates are among the highest in the world (of course, the diet is extremely healthy in other ways, which just goes to show that there are always trade-offs and absolutist positions are rarely reasonable).

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
http://www.nature.com/bjc/press_releases/p_r_jan04_6601511.html
http://www.live-in-green.com/health_info/problematic_food/carcinogenic/pickled.html

It seems a strange sort of cowardliness to explicitly ask for a response (Debito is the bold writing following on the end of my comment), and then refuse to post it, but there you go. He seems determined to cultivate a clique of tinfoil-hatters, perhaps it's to make himself feel good about his apparent decision to leave Japan, but that is just a guess.

UPDATE: The comment has appeared, after apparently being stuck in the spam trap (see Debito's comment here).

I might have some more to say about Fukushima itself some time, but to be honest there isn't much of importance to report. TPTB have decided that it is now in a "cold shutdown" situation, though the only basis for this announcement seems to be that they said months ago that they would achieve cold shutdown by the end of the year. It is still a mess, mostly contained, but with a growing waste water problem - they are trying to just pour some of the dirty water into the sea, but that is not entirely without objections...

[jules' pics] San Francisco buildings and transport

2011-12-15T15:58:00.001+09:00

The highlight of the week - hill running at dawn. This was the view from the top of Powell Street.

A pier off (of) the Embarcadero.

A not closed down bookshop. Having to queue for 10 minutes to pay while the person in front had credit cards rejected was a fun experience you don't get on Amazon.

A street with buildings and cars.

Market Street with buildings and cars and trams.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/15/2011 03:58:00 PM

[jules' pics] It's not the camera...

2011-12-12T21:05:00.001+09:00

...it's the lens.

Recently my victims have been complaining about the size of my camera. I thought this may be because cameras are shrinking, but whatever the reason, a frightened victim does not make for good pictures. At the AGU I tried an experiment and took 3 little prime lenses along with my "enormous" DSLR camera body. Not a single one of my victims flinched, most didn't notice they were being photographed, but some of them actually smiled!

Harry Elderfield being Keynotey. Harry has a calm soothing voice, the room was dark and it was Monday morning, but I read later on some blog that he gave a good talk. Actually I only slept through the review part of his talk, and woke up for the newer work part of his talk, which was interesting.

Americans "like comparing Apples and Oranges", but I find this phrase extremely irritating. At least Mark Boslough knows which he prefers.

Donald Lucas explains his poster to 2 interested people. This is atypical. AGU poster sessions are mostly crap.

A geologist...I suppose. They all have beards don't they? He reads his newspaper under the table like it was shameful, because he is the only person in the room without an electronic gizmo in front of him.

At beer o'clock on the 3rd floor of Moscone West, the light gets nice. I don't know any of these people, but it was apparent that most of them also prefer Apples.

She looks a bit dubious about his dodgy results.

Behind her is the queue for the beer!

She's got no beer so I suppose that's gin in her flask. At least it matches her Apple.

A real scientific discussion finishes with a smile.

Andy Ridgwell, the one person at the AGU worth photographing... but he can be quite elusive. Still, nice of him to pick a t-shirt to match his eyes. The T-shirt says "Are your cats old enough to learn about Jesus?"

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/12/2011 09:05:00 PM

AGU 2011 aftermath

2011-12-12T08:26:00.003+09:00

The previous post was actually written during the break before Gavin's session on the CMIP5 models, which turned out to be one of the better ones. Mind you, the analyses were substantially less thorough than most authors had promised/intended when they wrote their abstracts, due to limited data availability. For what it's worth, the executive summary is that the CMIP5 model projections seem to be broadly similar to CMIP3 so far. I would not be surprised if the IPCC deadlines slipped a bit, like they did last time. In fact they have already slipped compared to the timetable that was originally proposed, but for some time now the deadline for submitted manuscripts (to be citable in the report) has been July next year. To date there are very few paleo-related runs on the database (6 mid-Holocene, 1 LGM and 2 last millennium last time I checked) which makes it hard to see how this facet of the project can be included at all in the WCRP CMIP5 workshop in Hawaii in March - the deadline for abstract submission is this week, and: "To demonstrate that your analysis has already begun, you are encouraged to include a description of your preliminary analysis so far". Will be interesting to see how that pans out...

Anyway, Gavin's speakers made a good effort to be energetic and interesting, and jules said the parallel session on paleo modelling was also good. Friday afternoon last year was also one of the highlights. After, we went out to dinner with the Bristol bunch, and had 15 different types of meat grilled in Brazilian style. It was a fun but rather late night after a long week. Overall, we had a rather better time than last year, and my cold and sore throat waited until we had returned before coming on. I'm actually quite looking forward to white rice and miso, for a day or two at least.

Sadly our flight home was delayed, so we missed our annual Christmas carol service that we were expecting to get back for. It's the first time we have been significantly late at Narita for as long as we can remember.

[jules' pics] "unusual landing"

2011-12-11T19:15:00.001+09:00

"unusual landing", originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Actually it was an unusual takeoff too, which was, I suppose, the first tyre popping, and the second one was on landing. It's a pity - we had wanted to attend a fun event in Yokohama this evening - the aeroplanes normally land on time or early at Narita, and it takes 10mins to get through the airport (for a Japanese resident with no checked baggage). But today we missed our train as we had to sit on the runway for an hour (so that if we caught fire we wouldn't take the terminal with us?) and then the aeroplane was towed slowly to the gate.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/11/2011 07:15:00 PM

AGU day 4 and 5

2011-12-10T08:26:00.002+09:00

After a rather late return from Gary Danko we didn't have the enthusiasm for a morning run on a cloudy day, so just staggered in for some talks on data assimilation to hear about the latest new ideas. jules went to ocean acidification, which is perhaps of more general interest. Another working lunch followed - despite jules' cynicism, this year has been significantly enhanced by the number of people we've managed to meet. Last year we were a bit ill and knackered so it wasn't as productive. In the afternoon there was another session on the last millennium, in fact my talk might have fitted in a little better there than on Wednesday's session which was more generally covering paleo-for-future-predictions, but there was a strong overlap in terms of attendees and interests. Flagging a little after the previous splurge, we waddled off to the local Thai for a quick and early dinner - I'm not sure if it is really worth two meals there (and for the 2nd year running!) when SF has so much more to offer but it was just what we felt like.

This morning we managed a run and an 8am start - breakfast was the missing element, but eating is getting increasingly difficult. First session was interesting stuff on climate variability, with various wiggles in both models and data, some of which occasionally coincided to some extent. Lunch we managed to follow Eli's recommendation for Yank Sing which was definitely a cut above (jules said 3 cuts, in fact) the local place we have previously visited. As with last year, the organisers have kept some of the best till last, which may be a bit of a shame when so many leave early. There are sessions both on model-data comparisons, mostly modern data sets but also including jules's talk on paleo data, and also some more paleo modelling. Nothing outstanding, but it's useful to keep up with what is happening. I think the "new" obs4mips data sets are going to be particularly useful, as they are being designed to be readily usable even by numpties such as myself.

[jules' pics] Greenwash

2011-12-09T15:22:00.001+09:00

Fortunately, the recyclable beer cups entirely offset the carbon emissions of everyone's travel to the AGU making it a truly environmentally friendly conference. Sarcasm aside, I think they should allow people to pull a Pielke, and give their talks by Skype.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/09/2011 03:15:00 PM

AGU 2011 Days 2 and 3

2011-12-09T06:54:00.003+09:00

As we already hinted, Day 2 was a bit of a washout for us. I wonder if the low density of interesting sessions is something to do with the division split with "Global Environmental Change" being perhaps the closest approximation to EGU's "Climate, Past, Present and Future", but the latter includes paleo whereas the AGU has that split into another division. Anyway, the morning jog to the Chestnut bakery was fun. For dinner, we slummed it and just used the hotel cafe aka "Bourbon Steak", where we shared a $28 - 70oz T-bone. Last year I'm sure it was only 69oz, so I suppose that's inflation for you. However, the exchange rate has changed so much that on converting to metric, it was actually rather smaller than last year. Or something like that.

Wednesday had an interesting session in the morning on earth system sensitivity and paleoclimate. Various somewhat incompatible definitions were used which makes direct comparison different. Most people seem to agree that longer-term feedbacks will increase the overall effect when compared to the classical AOGCM-based definition. Some people were looking mostly at data, others at models. One person concluded that the models were all wrong based on a single tropical core that differed substantially from the major MARGO data set - I pointed out in the Qs after that singling out the models for criticism in this situation seemed a little unfair! The session finished off with Jim Hansen who of course got a good reception. I thought his jibe at Andreas Schmittner (about how he had included dust aerosols as a forcing rather than a feedback) was a bit ungallant. The main point there AIUI was that he included the effect at all, when most GCM-based simulations of the LGM did not. Andreas did have the opportunity to defend himself at the end though.

A group of ensembles-and-uncertainty people had a chat over lunch (arranged by Ben), and it was interesting to hear how they were all getting on in a rather more relaxed format than via rapid-fire 12 minute talks. I had to rush off rather for another session where I was first presenter. This is on some still-unfinished (but I'm getting there!) work on last millennium reconstructions. From the audience perspective, jules thought it was more relaxed and better than Monday's effort where I tried to summarise 5 papers in the same time frame. Maybe there is a lesson there... Other talks included Andreas Schmittner presenting his recent paper. He seemed to have taken on board at least some of the criticism that has been put forward and he sounded rather more in tune with Nathan Urban's interview here, than in the press coverage here, for example (especially regarding the "robustness" of the result).

As for dinner, Gary Danko really is worth the hype (and the hoops that have to be jumped though to get a table). Eating good restaurant food here does bring home just how good the seafood that my Dad sometimes searches out is, however.

I think I have forgotten what it feels like to be hungry. Again.

[jules' pics] AGU Day 3

2011-12-08T11:39:00.001+09:00

At 15:30 beer is served at the AGU, inhibitions are overcome and even us scientists become kind of chatty. After all, there would really be no point at all in gathering all those air miles if we never actually spoke to each other.

Quaffing with Ben Booth.

Kneeling humbly at the feet of Mike Mann.

Annan-Schmittner ~~face-off~~ sharing a joke about skeptics or some such frivolity.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/08/2011 11:23:00 AM

[jules' pics] AGU Day 2

2011-12-07T15:01:00.001+09:00

The day was as sunny as hoped. As James already mentioned, we sprinted round the Embarcadero for a morning pastry, and then got a bus back to the hotel. In the peace and quiet of lunchtime we toured Tuesday's posters, on regional climate, tsunamis, and bit of paleo. My favourite poster was one on using Twitter to chart climate change expressed in terms of the location of armadillos. Second favourite was a study which analysed whether the climate change people thought they had experienced was consistent with actually observed trends. The answer seemed to be on the whole yes, but sometimes no.

Meanwhile, I am getting quite concerned about the San Franciscans' want of taste. Who would paint their house a color (sic) that clashes with the sky?! And then there was this in the window of the supposedly top notch bakery... I read Hello Kitty Hell for a few years but gave up recently, finally overwhelmed by the horrors it reports.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/07/2011 02:45:00 PM

AGU 2011 Day 1

2011-12-07T07:47:00.003+09:00

SF is reputed to be drizzly and cloudy much of the time, but unlike last year the weather here has been fabulous so far and is set fair for the rest of the week. We arrived on Saturday morning after a good flight and had a great couple of days over the weekend, On Saturday we visited the TCHO chocolate factory on the Embarcadero (that was jules' special request, naturally) and returned home via an early Chinese dinner - the House of Nanking gets mixed reviews, I expect there is better/cheaper food for those with energy and knowledge but it certainly fit the bill for us at that time. Sunday morning started with a jog to the Embarcadero, along and back over the hills of Powell and Hyde. We then got a bus over to the Cliff House for brunch and a walk on the beach, before meeting Rob who took us to one of his old favourite spots for dinner.

Oh yes, and now we get to the ~~reason~~ excuse we had used to come here. Monday morning started with poster-viewing, so we had a late breakfast in the Blue Bottle cafe on the way. Then the posters themselves, including those associated with the afternoon talks we were planning to attend, which were quite fun, and I got to meet a few new people. Harry Elderfield's medal lecture was a reasonably interesting history lesson on the (mis)understanding of proxies, and then we had a useful working lunch with Dan talking about some collaboration. I was talking in the uncertainty session straight after lunch. I just about managed to rattle through a review of the work we have done with the CMIP3 ensemble, including the most recent GRL paper (now officially in press), without being able to go into much detail about any of it. The rest of the session was the usual sort of mixture, some old or incomplete stuff (promises to evaluate CMIP5 have mostly been honoured in the breach) but also some new. The philosophy session followed after ~~tea~~ beer. It is interesting and I think probably useful to hear people placing scientific work on model evaluation in some broader context, but these people seem to be mostly following rather than leading or inspiring the process, and doing so from a bit of a distance. For example, some of the audience pointed out that as well as the open CMIP3 archive, there is a huge amount of evaluation within the centres themselves that doesn't necessarily get reported in the literature. I also thought there was a bit of a logical failure regarding the vexed question of the "independence" of the models, but there didn't seem to be much point in picking a fight so I kept my mouth shut. [While considering the confirmatory effect of multiple models, several speakers stated confidently that the IPCC ensemble of models were not "independent", while openly admitting that they were utterly incapable of providing any operational or measurable definition of this property.] Apart from the wifi limitations, it was a good start to the week and the Thai restaurant that we discovered last year now seems deservedly more popular and perhaps even better food-wise than I had remembered. I'll note the "Angel Wings" starter for future reference.

Law of unintended consequences

2011-12-07T06:48:00.003+09:00

One nice side-effect of our recent running habit is the ability (or perhaps willingness) to jog along the Embarcadero on a sunny morning to the excellent Chestnut Street bakery for breakfast.

Today is a bit of a thin day for both of us content-wise, and we've learnt from bitter experience that attempting 5 full 10h days is not really sustainable, so we took the opportunity for a leisurely start to the day. Amazingly after the disaster that was Denver, we've not had any jetlag problems at all this time, just 3 good nights of sleep. Oh, and a lovely Chinese dinner, German-style pork chop, Thai dinner, and assorted snacks and breakfasts. We even found decent coffee for the first time in three trips (a recommendation from Rob who used to live here).

[jules' pics] AGU Day 1

2011-12-06T13:21:00.001+09:00

The day began with a chemistry experiment... on thin films and rainbows...

Apparently this is called siphon coffee. It was nice but the music was a bit dystopian, which probably wasn't good for the jet lag. The rest of the day was much as expected and involved science and stuff. The "stuff" being the highly entertaining late afternoon philosophy session.

Can't find any must-see talks to go to tomorrow, so hoping for another sunny morning... and a walk round the posters in the afternoon.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/06/2011 01:19:00 PM

[jules' pics] Political Correctness Gone Mad

2011-12-05T10:47:00.001+09:00

Many San Franciscans have a Portuguese water dog of just the right age. Bet they're feeling silly now it's not cool to like Obama anymore.
[beach - on the west side of San Francisco]

Sadly, for the rest of the week we must once again sit in windowless rooms and listen to geeks like us present interesting science badly.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/05/2011 10:39:00 AM

The Oxbridge Myth

2011-12-03T20:48:00.003+09:00

Methinks the lady doth protest a little too much...

In our collective cultural imagination, however, Oxbridge means the dreaming spires - a kind of massive Bullingdon Club where rich undergraduates still flaunt their boaters and blazers, and dotty dons get sozzled every night on the college port (while hoping to avoid the Inspector Morse-style murders in the quad). Of course, for most of us, this isn't remotely how it is (I've not tasted port for 30 years...

Not tasted port for 30 years? Well, it can only be because she doesn't actually like the stuff, there is hardly a shortage last time we checked.

As for the tradition of allowing despots to buy places for their offspring, I'm pleased to see that this is still going strong.

Another IPCC whitewash

2011-12-02T18:20:00.000+09:00

Typical, isn't it?

They set up a so-called "investigation" and having failed to even interview the relevant people, find "no evidence of a criminal offence". Well, there's a surprise for you. In tomorrow's news, maybe we will hear that turkeys did not vote in support of the celebration of Christmas (shh, but don't tell the ducks, cos I already ordered one of those).

Oh, and the report is being kept secret for now, under the IPCC's longstanding "openness" policy (to be fair, they do say they will publish it in 2012).

Yet more evidence (if any were needed after this) that a thorough reform is needed.

Further details here.

[jules' pics] Health and Safety

2011-12-01T20:28:00.000+09:00

Today we had health and safety origami with advanced knotting. Actually it was the most interesting and involving CPR/first aid/safety thingie I have attended. When we arrived in Japan a decade ago, I don't think the phrase health and safety had been invented yet, but there seems to be a bit of pressure towards it now, especially from the boat people of JAMSTEC (boats being such excellent places for losing body parts if you don't know what you are doing).

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/01/2011 08:28:00 PM

[jules' pics] Let's pink

2011-11-29T15:28:00.001+09:00

In case anyone was wondering who on earth buys those brightly coloured SLRs... young women are powerful consumers in Japan...

"The real world is the one on the back of my camera"

[Hachimangu, Kamakura, Japan]

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/29/2011 03:21:00 PM

[jules' pics] Vitamin C overdose

2011-11-28T13:04:00.001+09:00

I suppose it might be the same in all those exotic countries in which citrus grow easily, but I find it odd that Japanese people don't eat the fruits of their own trees. Instead, like in the photo, the fruits remain on the garden trees as decoration all winter long. A British person did once tell me that he walked the lanes and successfully gained access to his neighbours' trees in order to make marmalade. Japanese people do eat a lot of citrus at this time of year. There are many different varieties of delicious satsumary things available, and a family may have a big boxful to work on during the New Year holiday. I'm not sure if what my Japanese friend told me can really be true - that children sometimes turn orange from eating too many!? I also don't know why the Japanese do not grow grapefruit - they are available but imported from the USA. The grapefruity thing in the picture is probably a yuzu, which is generally smaller and sweeter and less juicy than grapefruit. The tree was growing in someone's garden in Kamakura, with the boughs overhanging the road. I could have picked it if I was James' height.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/28/2011 12:49:00 PM

More on Schmittner

2011-11-25T16:48:00.005+09:00

OK, so the Schmittner paper is out, along with a commentary in Science, and I've had a few days to digest it more thoroughly. What I said before about past v future asymmetry still holds true, but there is another point which may be more interesting.

The model results actually don't fit the land data very well, being generally too warm. A key plot is the sensitivity analysis where they compare results when land and ocean data were used separately, versus together. Clearly, the combined analysis looks almost identical to the ocean-only results, and the land-only results are radically different. In fact, they barely overlap with the ocean-only results.

Of course, there is no reason why these results should match exactly, or even closely - remember, they are not estimates of "the pdf of sensitivity" but rather, probabilistic estimates of the sensitivity - but they do need to overlap in order to be taken seriously (if they don't, at least one has to be wrong). The true value has to lie in their intersection, which is rather narrow in probabilistic terms - the 90% range of the land-only pdf is 2.2-4.6C, that of the ocean-only is 1.3-2.7C.

The explanation for this near-disjoint pair of distributions is that the model does not represent the land-ocean temperature contrast well (this is a characteristic behaviour of this sort of model, as the authors acknowledge), so can only fit one set of data at a time. When faced with both, it prefers the ocean, partly because these data are more plentiful, and partly because it is given the prior belief that the land data are less accurate (which they probably are, to be fair). The poor fit to land data then results in the statistical method assigning even less weight to these data through the spatial error term mentioned in the supplementary on-line material, and in the end result they are almost ignored. In the final analysis, the cooling over land (and perhaps also the polar amplification) seems to be significantly underestimated, leading to their rather warm LGM state which is only 3C cooler than the modern (pre-industrial) climate. One might reasonably expect that their future simulations also underestimate the temperature change over land, meaning the sensitivity estimate is on the low side, too.

Jules has also been looking at some of these data recently, particularly in comparison to the PMIP2 experiments - that is, simulations of the last glacial maximum by several state of the art climate models, most of which also mostly contributed to the CMIP3/IPCC AR4 database of modern/future projections. One telling point is that several of the PMIP2 models actually appear to fit the data better than Schmittner's best model, even though these were not specifically tuned to fit the data. Moreoever, these models are all clearly colder, in terms of global mean temperature anomaly, than the -3C value obtained in this latest paper. We haven't done a thorough analysis of this yet but I think it is safe to say that there is a significant bias in the Schmittner fit and that the LGM was really more than 3 degrees colder than the present. The implication of this for climate sensitivity is not immediate (since there are also well-known forcing biases in the PMIP2 simulations), but this line of argument also seems to suggest that it may be reasonable to nudge the Schmittner et al values up a bit.

It is still hard to reconcile a high sensitivity with the LGM results, though.

UPDATE: similar comments from RC.

New leak?

2011-11-23T18:32:00.003+09:00

Some people might be surprised to hear me say it, but I think this new leak provides damning evidence of shoddy behaviour. There is clearly inept leadership at the heart of the organisation, plenty of back-biting, and the way in which junior and more conscientious colleagues who refused to toe the party line were bullied and ridiculed is shameful. Many of these people who I had trusted to do their honest best are clearly motivated far more by money than the desire to do their jobs properly. There certainly isn't much evidence of the sort of ethos that we are entitled to expect from people in their position.

I find the whole thing truly shameful, and call upon all those involved to resign. It's time for a new broom.

More details can be found here.

Cancer survival: Macmillan hails major improvement

2011-11-22T20:22:00.002+09:00

The first thing I thought of when I saw this story was the talk given by Gerd Gigerenzer last year at this odd but interesting workshop. The gist of it was that "survival time" as a measure of performance in medical science could be very misleading, as it does not necessarily indicate any increase in lifespan or reduction in death rate. Increasingly aggressive and sophisticated screening and diagnosis procedures will automatically result in increased "survival time" even without any improvement in treatment, simply through spotting the cancer earlier in its progress. This isn't a purely theoretical point, he had plenty of statistics to back it up too. That's not to say there haven't been genuine advances too, but 5y survival rate doesn't necessarily measure them correctly.

[jules' pics] Spot the difference

2011-11-20T21:27:00.001+09:00

For those who found the last puzzle too difficult...

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/20/2011 09:21:00 PM

Parmesan cheese

2011-11-19T14:48:00.002+09:00

There's a lovely fusion of mad scientists and bonkers bureaucrats in the Torygraph today:

EU bans claim that water can prevent dehydration: A meeting of 21 scientists in Parma, Italy, concluded that reduced water content in the body was a symptom of dehydration and not something that drinking water could subsequently control.

I wonder if it's actually true?

[jules' pics] Spot the odd one out.

2011-11-18T13:48:00.001+09:00

Unless I have got my birds all mixed up, andrewt will get this in a trice.
Photos made posisble by Lan's lovely Nikon (now sadly returned to him). Great crow cam...

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/18/2011 01:48:00 PM

Through the Looking Glass

2011-11-17T12:36:00.001+09:00

Some explanation of these two posts is due.

There is a good book called "Japan Through the Looking Glass", which seems a particularly fitting title at present. Cognitive dissonance and things happening backwards in time don't seem to concern the locals, who just get on with whatever they are told to do.

It is a bit hard to explain what happened without Lewis Carroll's superior writing skills. On a Friday we were told, by a white knight, that one of us (as yet unspecified!) had agreed to lead a sub-theme of a new large five-year project, focussing on a topic which we didn't think credible or interesting. We had not, but we did know of the general existence of the large project (and in fact currently work on its predecessor). We had even arranged to be informed about this new project in a seminar next February. The White Queen told us to prepare carefully and think of some good ideas over the weekend, which of course, was impossible as we had no idea what we were preparing for. On Monday we met with the knight and Queen, were told what the project was about, voiced our strident disagreement with the underlying premise, developed a workable compromise, and then we had 48 hours to write a proposal for our sub-theme. That same day we all also managed to meet with the White King, in transit between meetings, for 20 minutes in a coffee shop in the middle of Tokyo. There are no other candidates for the funds, and it had already been decided that the proposal was to be successful, but in a rare act of temporal sense, it had been decided that this time it would be nice to plan in advance what each sub-theme was going to do, rather than to plan it afterwards, as usually happens. There was the trifling detail of one official form being required from our employer that takes two weeks to obtain but which had to be submitted within a week, but it turns out that time can in fact be warped when it really matters. Slightly more worrying is the fact that actually James and I do not yet have jobs for next year, because they depend on the other large project (organised by the shogi pieces) which does not yet have any budget at all, even provisionally. It is almost impossible to extract any useful information from the leaders of that project and we don't even understand the sort of moves they make. This makes doing any sort of planning something of a struggle. But we did it, and the knight very kindly did the translation as well as his own proposal. The most stressful part was done by a pawn, quite new on the chess board, who was given the task of calculating the budget, getting the form through JAMSTEC, and then submitting it on-line, on Monday afternoon. Right at the last minute, we suddenly discovered that our pre-ordained budget was 30% larger than we had catered for, which caused a bit of a panic until we arranged for someone else to take the excess off our hands.

On Tuesday we took the day off and enjoyed a lovely relaxing fun-filled day in Kamakura. Now everything seems so much better.

[jules' pics] Affording the new Nikon

2011-11-16T14:00:00.001+09:00

I have a plan! Having seen that these Rhine horizontals recently fetched more than 4 million USD (that's 4000 Nikons!) at auction... How about some Kamakura horizontals... Anyone like to buy a print? I'll do you a great deal.

Actually, after looking on Wikipedia I found out that the expensive picture may actually be quite different from how it appeared at that first link above. Looks like I need not only more horizontals but also brighter colours before I hit the big time for real... I suppose one would actually have to see the original for real to actually appreciate the true work of art uninterpreted by pixels.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/16/2011 02:00:00 PM

How not to compare models to data again

2011-11-15T14:27:00.003+09:00

It's been bugging me for some time, the way many people talk about the CMIP3/IPCC ensemble not spanning the "full/true" (both terms appear in the literature) range of uncertainty. For example, the IPCC AR4 says "the current AOGCMs may not cover the full range of uncertainty for climate sensitivity". The first error here is in the apparent belief that there even is such as thing as a "full" or "true" range of uncertainty that the models ought to represent. Within the Bayesian paradigm, uncertainty is an indication of the belief of the researcher(s) involved, and is not intrinsic to the system being considered. So, at best, it might be legitimate to say that the models do not represent my/our/the IPCC authors' uncertainty adequately. This could perhaps be dismissed as a pedantic quibble, were it not for the way that this category error concerning the nature of the uncertainty underpins the justification of the claim. I recently got around to writing this argument up, and it was recently accepted for publication. So here is the outline of the case.

The IPCC statement is actually a summary of a lot of probabilistic estimates, as presented in their Box 10.2 Fig 1:

The top left panel has a lot of pdfs for the equilibrium climate sensitivity, generated by various authors, with their 90% probability ranges presented as bars on the right. In the bottom right panel, we have the range of sensitivity values from the CMIP3 ensemble (pale blue dots). Clearly, the spread of the latter is narrower than most/all of the former, which is the basis for the IPCC statement. There are numerous examples of similar statements in the literature, too (not exclusively restricted to climate sensitivity).

Many of the pdfs are based on some sort of Bayesian inversion of the warming trend over the 20th century (often, both surface air temp and ocean heat uptake data are used). This calculation requires a prior pdf for the sensitivity and perhaps other parameters. And herein lies the root of the problem.

Consider the following trivial example: We have an ensemble of models, each of which provides an output "X" that we are interested in. Let's assume that this set of values is well approximated by the standard Gaussian N(0,1). Now, let's also assume we have a single observation which takes the value 1.5, and which has an associated observational uncertainty of 2. The IPCC-approved method for evaluating the ensemble is to perform a Bayesian inversion on the observation, which in this trivial case will (assuming a uniform prior) result in the "observationally-constrained pdf" for X of N(1.5,2).

It seems that the model ensemble is a bit biased, and substantially too narrow, and therefore does not cover the "full range of uncertainty" according to the observation, right?

No, actually, this inference is dead wrong. Perhaps the most striking and immediate way to convince yourself of this is to note that if this method was valid, then it would not matter what value was observed - so long as it had an observational uncertainty of 2, we would automatically conclude that the ensemble was too narrow and (with some non-negligible probability) did not include the truth. Therefore, we could write down this conclusion without even bothering to make this inaccurate observation at all, just by threatening to do so. And what's worse, the more inaccurate the (hypothetical) observation is, the worse our ensemble will appear to be! I hope it is obvious to all that this state of affairs is nonsensical. An observation cannot cause us to reject the models more strongly as it gets more inaccurate - rather, the limiting case of a worthless observation tells us absolutely nothing at all.

That's all very well as a theoretical point, but it needs a practical application. So we also performed a similar sort of calculation for a more realistic scenario, more directly comparable to the IPCC situation. Using a simple energy balance model (actually the two-box model discussed by Isaac Held here, which dates at least to Gregory if not before), we used surface air temperature rise and ocean heat uptake as constraints on sensitivity and the ocean heat uptake efficiency parameter. The following fig shows the results of this, along with an ensemble of models (blue dots) which are intended to roughly represent the CMIP3 ensemble (in that they have a similar range of equilibrium sensitivity, ocean heat uptake efficiency, and transient climate sensitivity).

The qualitative similarity of this figure to several outputs of the Forest, Sokolov et al group is not entirely coincidental, and it should be clear that if we integrate out the ocean heat uptake efficiency, the marginal distributions for sensitivity (of the Bayesian estimate, and "CMIP3" ensemble) will be qualitatively similar to those in the IPCC figure, with the Bayesian pdf of course having a greater spread than the "CMIP3" proxy ensemble. Just as in the trivial Gaussian case above, we can check that this will remain true irrespective of the actual value of the observations made. Thus, we have another case where it may seem intuitively reasonable to state that the ensemble "may not represent the full range of uncertainty", but in fact it is clear that this conclusion could, if valid, be stated without the need to trouble ourselves by actually making any observations. Therefore, it can hardly be claimed that this result was due to the observations actually indicating any problem with the ensemble.

So let's have another look at what is going on.

The belief that the posterior pdf correctly represents the researchers' views, depends on the prior also correctly representing their prior views. But in this case, the low confidence in the models is imposed at the outset, and is not something generated by the observations. In the trivial Gaussian case, the models represent the prior belief that X should (with 90% probability) lie in [-1.64,1.64], but a uniform prior on [-10,10] only assigns 16% probability to this range. The posterior probability of this range, once we update with the observation 1.5±2, has actually tripled to 47%. Similarly, in the energy balance example, the prior we used only assigns 28% probability to the 90% spread of the models, and this probability doubles to 56% in the posterior. So the correct interpretation of the results is not that the observations have shown up any limitation in the model ensemble, but rather, that if one starts out with a strong prior presumption that the models are unlikely to be right, then although the observations actually substantially increase our faith in the models, they are not sufficient to persuade us to be highly confident in them.

Fortunately, there is an alternative way of looking at things, which is to see how well the ensemble (or more generally, probabilistic prediction) actually predicted the observation. This is not new, of course - quite the reverse, it is surely how most people have always evaluated predictions. There is a minor detail which is important to be aware of, which is that if the observation is inaccurate, then we must generate a prediction of the observation, rather than the truth, in order for the evaluation to be fair. (Without this detail, a mismatch between prediction and observation may be due to observational error, and it would be incorrect to interpret this as a predictive failure). One important benefit of this "forward" procedure is that it takes place entirely in observation-space, so we don't need to presume any direct correspondence between the internal parameters of the model, and the real world. It also eliminates the need to perform any difficult inversions of observational procedures.

For the trivial numerical example, the predictive distribution for the observation is given by N(0,2.2) (with 2.2 being sqrt(1^2+2^2), since the predictive and observational uncertainties are independent and add in quadrature). That is the solid blue curve in the following figure:

The observed value of 1.5 obviously lies well inside the predictive interval. Therefore, it is hard to see how this observation can logically be interpreted as reducing our confidence in the models. We can also perform a Bayesian calculation, starting with a prior that is based on the ensemble, and updating with the observation. In this case, the posterior (magenta dotted curve above) is N(0.3,0.9) and this assigns a slightly increased probability of 92% to the prior 90% probability range of [-1.64,1.64]. Thus, the analysis shows that if we started out believing the models, the observation would slightly enhance our confidence in them.

For the more realistic climate example, the comparison is performed between the actual air temperature trends of the models, and their ocean heat gains. The red dot in the below is the pair of observed values:

This shows good agreement for the energy balance models (blue dots - the solid contours are the predictive distribution accounting for observational uncertainty), and also for the real CMIP3 models (purple crosses), so again the only conclusion we can reasonably draw from these comparisons is that these observations fail to show any weakness in the models.

The take-home point is that observations can only conflict with a probabilistic prediction (such as that arising from the simple "democratic" interpretation of the IPCC ensemble) through being both outside (in the extreme tail of) the model range, and also precise, such that they constrain the truth to lie outside the predictive range. While this may seem like a rather trivial point, I think it's an important one to present, in view of how the erroneous but intuitive interpretation of these Bayesian inversions has come to dominate the consensus viewpoint. It was a pleasant surprise (especially after this saga) that it sped through the review process with rather encouraging comments.

[jules' pics] Quackers

2011-11-12T19:33:00.001+09:00

After our quackers week b~~eing Alice Through The Looking Glass~~ at work, Lan was kind enough to lend me his lovely new camera for recovery and relaxation. I think it is amazing, but am having a hard time convincing James to support Nikon this Christmas.

[Northern Pintail and Mallard ducks at Hachimangu, Kamakura]

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/12/2011 07:29:00 PM

More WCRP OSC

2011-11-11T18:09:00.001+09:00

Presentations are available on-line, for those who are interested. They can be found via this page, though there is still no decent search function or index as far as I can tell. Here is the Kalnay talk, for example. And here is the Taylor talk I grumbled about (see p30). Some posters may be available too, but I haven't uploaded mine - one is all published work, one hopefully should be accepted shortly, at which point I'll blog it.

Happy Pocky Day

2011-11-11T11:11:00.004+09:00

For those of you who don't know what Pocky is, I bring you:

and also:

and just in case you still haven't worked it out:

(Well if climate scientists can go on about the need for a "Manhattan Project" for climate science, I can't really blame the Japanese for doing their own thing on Armistice day.)

EGU Autumn 2011 election now open

2011-11-10T22:26:00.001+09:00

The EGU election for President may be of a bit more importance than usual, given the somewhat disturbing behaviour of the EGU in recent years (eg here and here). One of the candidates, Denis-Didier Rousseau, has done a good job running the Climate Division over recent years (re-elected last year with an extremely high level of support, IIRC). He's done plenty of worthy things as detailed on his CV and statement, but of particular interest to me, he's also a strong supporter and promoter of the EGU journals which have brought a welcome breath of fresh air to scientific publication.

It's quite rare that I write a non-cynical and straightforward post, but in this case I'll make an exception as I think he's a good candidate and worth supporting.

Schwartz spanked again...

2011-11-09T18:21:00.000+09:00

...though of course he might not see it that way.

The original paper is here which I discussed here. Now there is a comment from Knutti and Plattner, and reply from the original authors. To be honest, I'm a little bit surprised they bothered, since (as I said originally) the paper wasn't, for the most part, actually wrong, just misleadingly presented ("Why has the earth warmed just as expected" might have been more accurate a title). Actually, Knutti and Plattner do find a genuine error, in the way that Schwartz et al extrapolate their results to consider the case of committed climate change (ie due to emissions to date), in that they ignore that the atmospheric CO2 level would actually fall significantly if emissions were to cease. I must admit I hadn't bothered to wade through the paper sufficiently carefully to see that. So maybe it was worth correcting.

Schmittner on sensitivity

2011-11-08T21:00:00.002+09:00

Yet another interesting paper, this time on climate sensitivity estimated from the Last Glacial Maximum. What makes this particularly novel and significant is that they have used two recently-developed and rather comprehensive spatially-resolved data sets, for ocean and land temperatures respectively, rather than relying on large spatial averages that most people (including myself twice) have relied on in the past. They conclude that sensitivity is "likely" to ~~lik~~ lie in the range 1.7-2.6K, very much towards the low end of most estimates and with very low uncertainty.

A weakness of the paper, however, is that the authors may not have adequately considered nonlinearity in the equilibrium response of the climate system to different combinations of negative and positive forcings. A number of papers (eg here, here and here) have shown that the degree of nonlinearity can vary significantly between different models, and although I have not used the energy-balance style model that Schmittner et al use, I suspect it will not represent this range of uncertainty well. What this means is, that even though they may be able to accurately estimate the "sensitivity" at the LGM, in terms of the ratio of temperature response to net radiative forcing, we cannot be sure how this will translate into "sensitivity" for 2xCO2. A possibly more statistically sophisticated and comprehensive attempt to account for uncertainties can be found here, for example.

That said, it's a useful antidote to the exaggerated uncertainty estimates that have been prevalent over recent years, and I certainly applaud the intentions and effort underlying this substantial piece of work. In any case, I expect the merchants of doubt to do their worst on it when they cite it in the IPCC report.

The null hypothesis in climate science

2011-11-07T19:46:00.000+09:00

Three papers have just appeared in WIREs Climate Change (here, here and here) discussing the role of the null hypothesis in climate science, especially detection and attribution.

Trenberth argues that, since the null (that we have not changed the climate) is not true, we should try to test some other null hypothesis. He sounds like someone who has just discovered that the frequentist approach is actually pretty useless in principle (as I've said many times before, it is fundamentally incapable of even addressing the questions that people want answers to), but although he seems to be grasping towards a Bayesian approach, he hasn't really got there, at least not in a coherent and clear manner. Curry is just nonsense as usual, and beside noting that she has (1) grossly misrepresented the IAC report and (2) abjectly failed to back up the claims that Curry and Webster made in a previous paper, there isn't really anything meaningful to discuss in what she said.

Myles Allen's commentary is by some distance the best of the bunch, in fact I broadly agree (shock horror) with what he has said. If one is going to take a frequentist approach, the null hypothesis of no effect is often an entirely reasonable starting point. It is important to understand that rejecting the null does not simply mean learning that there has been some effect, but it also indicates that we know (at least at some level of confidence) the direction of the effect! That is, it is not only an effect of zero which is rejected, but all possible negative (say) effects of any magnitude too - this generalisation may not be strictly correct in all possible applications of this sort of methodology, but I'm pretty sure it is true in practice for the D&A field. Especially when we are talking about the local incidence of extreme weather, there really are many cases when we have little reason for a prior belief in an anthropogenically-forced increase versus a decrease in these events, so a reasonable Bayesian approach would also start from a prior which was basically symmetric around zero. The correct interpretation of a non-rejection of the null here is not "there has been no effect" but rather "we don't know if AGW is making these events more or less likely/large". Much of Trenberth's complaint could be more productively aimed at the routine misinterpretation of D&A results, rather than the method of their generation. Trenberth also sometimes sounds like he is arguing that we should always assume that every bad thing was caused by (or at least exacerbated by) AGW, but this simply isn't tenable. Even if storminess increases in general, changes in storm tracks might lead to reduction in events in some areas, with Zahn and von Storch's work on polar lows an obvious example of this. On the other hand, there are also some types of event where we may have decent prior belief in the nature of the anthropogenically-forced change (such as temperature extremes) and in these cases it would be reasonable for a Bayesian to use a prior that reflects this belief.

I can find one thing to object to in Myles' commentary though, and that's the manner in which he tries to pre-judge the "consensus" response to Trenberth's argument. Noting that he (Allen) is in fact a major figure in forming the "consensus" in these private meetings where the handful of IPCC authors decide what to say, it sounds to me rather like a pre-emptive strike against anyone who might be tempted to take the opposing view. I would prefer it if he restricted himself to arguing on the basis of the issues rather than that he holds/forms the majority view. His behaviour here is reminiscent of the way he (and others) tried to reject our arguments about uniform priors, on the basis that everyone had already agreed that his approach was the correct solution. All that achieved was to slow the progress of knowledge by a few years.

[jules' pics] Let's bizarre

2011-11-07T18:58:00.001+09:00

The best thing about Japan is the way it keep surprising with its bizarreness, even after a decade of continuous study. Today was particularly bizarre. I won't explain - you wouldn't believe it anyway. But here is James, with his hippo, hoping that the internets will make it all better.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/07/2011 06:58:00 PM

You only lose once

2011-11-06T19:42:00.000+09:00

Prompted by RC's post on some oil development thingy...

I'm sure it's been said before, but it seems to me that there is an obvious inevitability about these things, which is basically structural and independent of the specific details at hand. The development will happen, the oil will get burnt, and the details of the local, national and even international politics don't matter much overall. The underlying reason for this is that in order to prevent development, the opponents have to keep on winning, for as long as anyone tries to develop the area. In contrast, the developers only have to win once, and then it is (as RC puts it) "game over".

The same dynamic plays out all over the place, for example when Tesco wants to build a new supermarket (or expand an existing one). They can keep trying for as long as it takes, and they only have to win once. This happened in our home town, where strong local opposition to an edge-of-town development was worn down, and the new supermarket was soon one of the most profitable in the country. Last I heard, they were hoping to expand it into an adjoining greenfield site, against more local opposition...in fact I'd be surprised if they haven't by now (there you go).

IMO the only way the Athabascan oil development won't happen is if it becomes uneconomic for some reason, and the most plausible reason for this would be the development of some alternative energy sources (of any type). So delay may be worth pushing for, to allow time for this to happen. But other than that, it's simply a case of when, not if.

Optimists may point to a few reserves such as Yellowstone, where development really has been (almost) prevented. But although it's very beautiful and interesting, it is also desolate and economically low-value land in a region that has an abundance of space. If someone found a Saudi-sized oil field under it, they'd be in with the drills before you could say "it's not a buffalo, it's a bison".

[jules' pics] Let's (not) Marathon

2011-11-05T16:16:00.001+09:00

While a walk in the park (i.e. a 10km) is harmless enough,
and can even be fun, the reasons not to run a full marathon are legion... Worse, these are the good (sub-3hr) guys, natural runners, who should have been having fun... There was a shuttle bus back to the station which followed the course, from where we saw the carnage of the 4 hour-plussers... stumbling zombies, bodies piled by the roadside, wheelchairs, ambulances etc. But here's jules, happy to have beaten 1500 (wow) men! And I had a cold.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/05/2011 04:16:00 PM

Curry on fuzzy logic

2011-11-04T18:20:00.000+09:00

Before I get on to the meat of some more new papers...

I noticed not so long ago Curry and Webster flying a kite about fuzzy logic being a better alternative to Bayesian probability, in the context of D&A:

The logic of the IPCC AR4 attribution statement is discussed by Curry (2011b). Curry argues that the attribution argument cannot be well formulated in the context of Boolean logic or Bayesian probability. Attribution (natural versus anthropogenic) is a shades-of-gray issue and not a black or white, 0 or 1 issue, or even an issue of probability. Towards taming the attribution uncertainty monster, Curry argues that fuzzy logic provides a better framework for considering attribution, whereby the relative degrees of truth for each attribution mechanism can range in degree between 0 and 1, thereby bypassing the problem of the excluded middle.

As you will recall, I've been waiting for a year now for Curry to explain her muddled and confused approach to probability, in particular her nonsensical "Italian Flag" analysis which she seems to be recasting as "fuzzy logic" (as an aside, I do agree that her logic is fuzzy, but perhaps not in the way she intended).

So I was eagerly awaiting "Curry (2011b)", which has just appeared. And what does it say about fuzzy logic?

[fx: tumbleweed]

Not one single mention, that's what. No mention of Bayesian probability, either. Or Boolean logic. These terms are completely absent from the paper, so this whole line of specious assertions has simply been abandoned without any support whatsoever.

Solution to the paradox of climate sensitivity

2011-11-04T10:13:00.004+09:00

A lot of bloggable papers have suddenly appeared, so I will work through them over the next few days.

First, a quick comment about this interesting paper: "Solution to the paradox of climate sensitivity" by Salvador Pueyo. In it, he argues that we should use a log-uniform prior for estimating climate sensitivity. This is fundamentally an "Objective Bayes" approach, that "non-informative" can be interpreted in a unique way. I don't much like this point of view, but if one is going to take it, then it should at least be done properly, and he seems to have provided decent arguments in that direction. Readers may recall that IPCC authors have in the past claimed that a uniform distribution was the unique correct representation of ignorance, which formed one of the planks of their assessment of the literature in the AR4.

As we showed here, all this talk of a long tail basically vanishes when anything other than a uniform prior is used, so in that sense this new paper is broadly compatible with our existing results which were based on a subjective paradigm. However, I'm not sure how it would work with a more complex multivariate approach, as has been common in this sort of work (eg simultaneously considering the three major uncertainties of ocean heat uptake, aerosol forcing and sensitivity).

What the new IPCC authors will make of it all is anyone's guess. Perhaps we will find out in December some time, when the first draft is scheduled to be opened for comments.

Shonan International Marathon

2011-11-03T18:04:00.007+09:00

It being Culture Day today, the high culture of road racing came to the Shonan Coast (that's where we live). We had spotted this event when we came back from Boulder earlier this year, and entered in an a rather out-of-character fit of enthusiasm. Only the 10km version of course, we aren't too enthusiastic. There was also a marathon (with a much larger entry of about 18,000 versus our 5,000) and an "elite" half-marathon.

So the day came along, and we went and did it. This time we cheated by "training" for the race, at least to the extent that one run a week counts as training (that's on top of our daily bike ride to work, of course). There's a nice pavement along the coast in Kamakura which is popular with weekend joggers, but even at 8am the summer heat often made it a bit of a trial, to say the least.

It has cooled down now, though in fact this morning was still close to 20C - any more could have been uncomfortable for me. As it was, conditions seemed near perfect, and I was pleased to go round in about 42:40 which is 8 mins quicker than I was in Boulder and narrowly achieved my target of beating my age. Jules was also significantly quicker and achieved her sub-55 mins goal.

(Results now up: 42:44 [42:34 net] time for me, 74th place! jules was 57:06 [54:49 net], 232nd - these both out of fields of over 2000!)

I think I must have got the pacing just about right - though it's hard to be sure, as the first few km markers were ridiculously poorly placed. I cruised through 2km in about 7 mins which was almost 2 mins ahead of my planned schedule - brief fantasies that a week at altitude in Denver had miraculously transformed my fitness were dispelled when a later "km" took about 6 minutes.

Worryingly, I rather enjoyed it...though jules says I shouldn't admit to this as we are officially retiring.

[jules' pics] Denver

2011-11-01T21:44:00.001+09:00

We started as we meant to carry on (elk 'n' Guinness)...

The next day we explored downtown,

with Rob and Amity.

Rob is, officially, even cleverer than James, and he's almost as tall, but here he struck a deliberately daft pose in order to try and crack my lens. The lens survived and thus he is blogged!

Denver is the capital of the state of Colorado. Here is the centre of power.

The day was amazingly clear, and, looking the other way, the Rocky Mountains could be easily seen 40 miles away.

The leaves were also looking very autumnal.

Unfortunately, this was the only cowboy we saw.

Denver generally shows signs of gentrification with sculpture,

and prettied up old buildings

like the massive brick REI cathedral (of which this is just one end).

Next day it was down to the basement to play with our phones,

and before long we were flying home on a chikinorbeef airline

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/01/2011 09:44:00 PM

Judith Curry, Detection and Attribution and the IAC report

2011-11-01T21:08:00.004+09:00

I was going to snark about the BEST (by which I mean funniest, there is clearly not much real science to speak of) climate science kerfuffle in a long time, but everyone else has beaten me to it, and I've nothing particularly witty to say about it (what do you mean, "no change there then"?) Have a look at Stoat for some links.

But while having a scan of the relevant blogs, I came across something else that struck me as worth mentioning.

It concerns La Curry's criticism of the IPCC, particularly the statement of WG1 that "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations". Curry (and Webster) apparently don't like this statement. If they left it at that, then fmdidgad might be the most natural response, but rather than leaving it at that, they double down on it by asserting here that the IAC supports their view.

The relevant section of the IAC report is here, and it can be readily checked that their criticism which C&W quote was in fact aimed at the far more vague statements frequently made in WG2, and was clearly not intended to be applied to the WG1 statement at all. In fact, the WG1 statement is not imprecise in this sense at all, it is simply a one-sided probability statement of the general form "The probability of x > y is p". In this case x is the warming caused by anthropogenic effects, y is ~0.3C (being half the observed trend of ~0.6C) and p is 90%. Another IPCC statement of logically equivalent form is that the equilibrium climate sensitivity is very likely to be greater than 1.5C. If the IAC had intended their criticism to apply to the huge number of similarly-structured probabilistic statements in WG1, it is surely inconceivable that they would not have mentioned this criticism anywhere in the section where they actually address the treatment of probability in WG1. Indeed, the only place in that chapter where the IAC mention this issue of "imprecise statements, made without reference to the time period under consideration or to a climate scenario under which the conclusions would be true" is in that one section and even page where they are quite explicitly and specifically addressing WG2. There is, of course, nothing significantly ambiguous about the time period under consideration or the scenario under consideration in the statement that C&W object to.

I invite either of Curry and Webster to explain why they believe that the IAC intended this criticism, so clearly aimed at WG2, to apply to that D&A-based statement in WG1. Or alternatively, they could abandon their patently untenable claim that the IAC "shares their concerns" over this statement. Of course, I've been looking forward to Curry explaining her "Italian flag" blether for a long time now, to no effect. So I'm not holding my breath.

[jules' pics] Let's Merry

2011-11-01T14:50:00.000+09:00

Let's Merry, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Clearly we're not in Denver any more...

You might hope this is the Christian response to Let's Zen, but actually "Let's Merry" appears to be the slogan for St. Arbucks Japan's winter campaign.

Oh it's so nice to be back to normality...

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/01/2011 02:50:00 PM

[jules' pics] Climate Science explained - by GooBalls

2011-10-31T13:23:00.001+09:00

On Friday we were fortunate and unfortunate enough to be invited to sit in on a committee meeting. The picktur explains what I learned during this 2 hour revelation.

The snapshot is taken from World of Goo, the best game ever until the next one, which I completed last week while not sleeping, due to jet lag. The idea is to build structures made of gooballs and have enough free gooballs roaming through the structure left at the end, that some are sucked up when you reach the spout. The arrow points the way to the spout.

I've labelled the structure with some of the acronyms from the meeting. I do not know what they all stand for, how they work, or how they are interrelated, but mostly these acronyms represent committees of people that may or may not have access to some limited funds. Mostly they are pretty powerless, except they can "endorse" science that they like, and enable scientific meetings. So the structure is really built upon mutual endorsement.

In the way of our goal lies the fly-wheel of death. I've written climate deniers on the flywheel, but I suppose it could also be any normal thing that gets in the way of climate science and funding - competing interests/ economic collapse etc. Touch your gooball structure against that and the whole thing is smashed to pieces. So we have to build a huge structure of endorsement all the way around the top of the fly-wheel and down the other side, absorbing innocent sleeping gooballs which we use to build an even bigger structure as we go along. The sleeping GooBalls are the free-thinking climate scientists, who do science and write papers, naively expecting them to be read and built upon. They mistakenly think that they are building a structure - one made of scientific knowledge. They are unaware of the real structure of endorsement hanging below. When the structure hits a sleeping gooball, they wake up and a "!" appears and then they roll up and join the structure.

By the time we get wherever we are going, will there be any free thinking scientists left to actually do the science?

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 10/31/2011 01:23:00 PM

WCRP OSC Day 4 and 5

2011-10-29T09:49:00.001+09:00

Day 4 seemed to be pretty much IPCC day and suddenly there was a little bit more climate science. The plenaries (with Thomas Stocker chairing) kicked off with Susan Solomon talking about the near-irreversibility of climate change, based largely on the long lifetime of CO2 even if emissions drop to zero. While it's quite an intuitive and appealing analysis - the tail of the subsequent transient temperature rise to equilibrium is largely cancelled by the slow decline of CO2 - I can't help but think that the presumed barrier at zero emissions is somewhat artificial, as even reaching zero will probably require some carbon capture technology anyway (since some people will still use fossil fuels). Konrad Steffen then talked about ice sheet loss and sea level, and it seems likely that the IPCC will significantly upgrade its predictions for sea level from its "let's ignore ice sheets" position next time around. Then Peter Stott gave a nice overview of the successes and challenges of attributing weather events to anthropogenic forcing. After the previous night's excitement I didn't have much energy for the posters. The afternoon was all about understanding climate change, and had several interesting talks. Jonathan Gregory explored the approximations underpinning the standard linear forcing/feedback analysis and showed some useful applications and limitations. The last speaker in the session, Eugenia Kalnay, mostly famous for her data assimilation and NWP work, gave a really fascinating and passionate talk about her "hobby" interest of integrating ecological-economics into earth system modelling. For me, that was one of the highlights of the week.

Friday morning had a few interesting plenary talks about policy relevance, talking about things such as meningitis in Africa (apparently there's a big climatic link, which I didn't know before) and the importance of ensuring that climate-related information is actually both useful and usable. Then there were supposed to be presentations about the upcoming IPCC report, but unfortunately the speaker on WG1 (Qin) decided to waffle about Chinese glaciers instead - which might have been interesting as a scientific presentation but was woefully off-topic at that time. The ideas behind the WG2/3 structure were better presented by Chris Field. Some questions about how they were going to avoid making mistakes this time around were basically batted back with "you're our reviewers". Then there were a succession of summaries from the plenary sessions, followed by a question and answer session which got pretty boring pretty quickly so jules and I eventually gave up and went for an early lunch, as we had another meeting to attend in the afternoon.

Finally, at 4:30pm, 12 hours before we have to get up for our flight home, we finally managed the long-overdue jog along the Cherry Creek Trail...

WCRP OSC Day 3

2011-10-28T07:16:00.001+09:00

Today was the busy day, with the schedule including two posters for me, a talk for jules, a business lunch and the conference gay-la (USAian pronunciation of Gala) party. Again, we didn't have the stomach for breakfast, especially after only having about 4h sleep.

Unfortunately, the plenaries were more posturing than science. Christian Jakob made the rather risible claim that physical climate modellers were an endangered species. I don't dispute that a significant emphasis has passed to the sexier chemistry/ecosystem/aerosol components of the climate system, and I don't have hard numbers to refute him with, but I find it very hard to believe that there are not still far more people now engaged in physical model development (he included numerics in this) than there were, say 30 years ago. Certainly our lab, which did not exist 15 years ago, boasts several groups of them, working on diverse aspects of climate modelling. He also promoted Tim Palmer's idea of a worldwide "Manhattan Project" to build one model to rule them all, and my only criticism of Gavin's rather unenthusiastic comment was that he was (predictably) rather too polite...

Adam Scaife of the Hadley Centre then did his best to cherry-pick some marginal successes out of the wreckage of their "decadal" prediction program, with such gems as the "likely to be globally hottest ever" forecast for 2010 (which wasn't actually hottest, by their preferred HadCRUT measure) and the "45% chance of cold" UK 2010 winter (ie 55% chance of warm or near-normal temperatures) which of course turned out to be remarkably cold. Interestingly, he didn't find time to mention the "most years past 2009 will be warmer than 1998" prediction of the Smith et al Science paper, which has failed to pan out for 2010, 2011 and most likely (based on ENSO forecasts) 2012 so far. Of course I must not be churlish about the improvements in the 3-10 day horizon and indeed ENSO forecasting which are notable in themselves, but perhaps they should stop pretending they can do much apart from that.

It was rather a relief when Sandrine Bony gave a nice review of what had (not) been learnt about climate sensitivity since the Charney Report, and why the model results had not converged since then (she didn't cover the probabilistic estimation approaches with the "long tail"). She made the point was that increased process understanding is a key component of reducing uncertainties in climate change predictions.

After coffee (and a remarkably heavy ham and cheese croissant), I had two posters to defend in different rooms, so focussed my attention on one of them. Having just received some encouraging reviews on a related manuscript, this will be the subject of another blog post in the near future. The one I abandoned was mostly a re-hash of the JClim paper which was finally published not long ago. A fair few people came by, though not necessarily the ones who really needed to read it...(but they might have seen it during the rest of the day).

The afternoon session was on reliability of climate models, which was supposed to be looking at CMIP5, but these results are only coming in around now so many people (including us) are still looking at CMIP3. Karl Taylor kicked things off with an unfortunate mis-statement regarding the interpretation of the multi-model ensemble (the stuff we have tried to correct in recent papers), but fortunately it wasn't a major part of the session, or even his talk. I found another virtually identical talk of his on the web here, the problem is on p32, I can rant in more detail if anyone cares...

Grant Branstator showed that the inherent predictability of the models on the decadal time scale varied substantially, which may help to explain the problems they are having. Sandy Harrison energetically and enthusiastically showcased what paleoclimate simulations (now part of CMIP5, for the first time) can offer in terms of model testing and validation, and Reto Knutti gave a nice overview of what (little) we know how to do in terms of evaluating and weighting climate models to improve their predictions. Both of these talks provided a fine background to jules' [brilliant -ed] talk on assessing model reliability and skill with paleoclimate simulations. She rattled though some of our recent work, and also some stuff that is yet to be written. So far our ideas have been developed and applied to the old CMIP3 models, so we look forward to seeing how the new crop of models measures up.

Conveniently, the aforementioned gala followed straight after, which was held in the local Denver art museum. To be honest, I was rather underwhelmed by the art, but that's probably just me.

[jules' pics] Art

2011-10-28T04:48:00.001+09:00

The conference gay-la (which, surprisingly, is how the funny Amercians pronounce gala) was last night, at the art museum. Snowy Denver seemed just as artistic as the actual exhibits in the museum. The gay-la itself was as gay as you could reasonably hope a party of 2000 dweebs could be(*), but we made the evening even gayer by going back to the bar with many beers after returning from the museum. We seem to have given up on attempting to sleep properly ... perhaps it is better to not to try to adjust to Denver time, since we are going home in a couple of days anyway.

(*The EGU conveners party is definitely gayer, but tends to be ruined by smokers.)

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 10/28/2011 04:48:00 AM

WCRP OSC Day 2

2011-10-27T09:04:00.003+09:00

Woke up in plenty of time this morning, but after several days here I have forgotten what it feels like to be hungry (or even slightly peckish) so we didn't even bother with breakfast.

The plenaries contained summaries of various observational data sets, specifically those relating to atmosphere, ocean and hydrology. Susan Wijffels seemed a little concerned that consensus had not yet been reached between several ocean data analysis efforts, but Peter Thorne made the counter-comment (with which I agree) that a diversity of approaches was a good thing to ensure robustness.

The poster session was before lunch, and I was defending the work I've been doing on last millennial temperature reconstructions - still unfinished, but after some interesting discussions I'm feeling sufficiently motivated to get it done soon. After lunch, there were updates on various reanalysis efforts, most of which seem to be (in contrast to the previous day's decadal prediction efforts) making great strides in both methods and data recovery. Peter Thorne tried his BEST to falsify my earlier prediction with a subtle reference to Muller :-) but nobody seemed to take the bait. The remainder of the session seemed a little technical and irrelevant so after a tea-time game of battleships with Gavin I gave up and went to the gym instead.

[jules' pics] Abrupt Climate Change

2011-10-26T23:26:00.001+09:00

It's all gone a bit Day After Tomorrow...

Yesterday, about 25C:

Today, about -1C:

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 10/26/2011 11:26:00 PM

[jules' pics] Facemail

2011-10-26T07:42:00.001+09:00

It is of the utmost importance that we climate scientists continue to fly around the world. Otherwise we would not be able to ~~sit surfing the internet below pictures of local scenery that we can't see because we are stuck in a windowless basement~~ have valuable face-to-face interactions.

[The short one with the big H-index is Gavin, and our James is the one on the right.]

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 10/26/2011 07:42:00 AM

WCRP OSC Day 1

2011-10-26T07:29:00.003+09:00

(You'll have to google your own links, due to computing/time/wifi limitations.)

Despite our best intentions ("Let's go for a dawn run along the Cherry Creek Trail!"), jetlag got the better of us and we only woke at 9am. Due to a prior appointment with a breakfast burrito, we missed most of the opening blurbs, but there was still plenty of acronym soup to go round. And I'm still not really much wiser about the actual purpose of it all...there's just enough politics mixed in with the science to be a little disconcerting, to me at least.

The plenaries have been mostly rather general, though there was an interesting (to me) talk on poorly-quantified aerosol effects. The parallel sessions were more detailed. Organisationally it has been a bit of a mixed bag - the setting seems very grand but there have been several presentation problems, and quite a few speakers are absent - including, to my amusement, someone who told one of their underlings on Friday that they were not attending, leaving said underling not only having to present, but even write, their 30 minute invited presentation over the next couple of days while at the conference.

I spent most of the day in the seasonal to decadal prediction session, which still remains rather a challenge. A few years ago, some meeting of the great and good decided that they were all going to do 30y forecasts, and unfortunately our institute took this suggestion rather more seriously than it deserved (in our opinion). Of course, skill beyond a couple of years (if that) has proved hard to find. The models do suggest a bit more potential predictability, but issues of model error and initialisation make this rather a challenge. Still, it's a good excuse for more funding.

Tim Palmer presented some good results from his stochastic parameterisation, but this work only extends to the seasonal time scale. Having started his talk with a complaint that all climate models were too similar, it was perhaps a little incongruous that he ended with an appeal for us all to club together to build a single climate model with stochastic parameterisations. I suppose you can't criticise one model for being too similar to itself :-) But it seems obvious to me that one model - even a stochastic one - cannot reasonably represent our uncertainties regarding the behaviour of the climate system over long time scales (and indeed if it did, then Jim Hansen would have got there 30 years ago.) There was a surprising amount of discussion throughout the session about the good performance of the multi-model mean, and I was relieved that another commenter saved me from having to suggest that an ensemble of (different) stochastically-parameterised models would outperform a single one.

Posters were enhanced by a reasonable quantity of free beer (that despite prior threats, was indeed "free as in beer"). But they weren't particularly on-topic for me, and I was flagging by then anyway.

WCRP OSC

2011-10-25T02:11:00.001+09:00

Coming through immigration on Saturday, an official asked jules what conference she was attending. "WCRP OSC", she replied. Well, ask a silly question...

Denver is pleasant and sunny and the hotel boasts 130 varieties of dra(f/ugh)t beer, so we have enjoyed the trip so far, but our experience of the conference is limited to sleeping through the introductory plenary. There is a fair bit of info on-line for this interested including a YouTube channel and twitter feed (google it).

I've not been to one of these before, it seems like part rallying the troops, part ipcc consensus forming, part assembly of position papers and priorities to be cited in future funding applications, and maybe some normal science as well. One thing I don't expect to be a major focus, is the earth-shattering news that some random semi-sceptic has recently decided to accept that the planet is actually warming after all...

--
James Annan

[jules' pics] Night-life

2011-10-21T20:33:00.001+09:00

Under the railway tracks in Yurakucho, Tokyo.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 10/21/2011 08:33:00 PM

[jules' pics] Tsukuba... again

2011-10-20T11:00:00.001+09:00

The last time we were in Tsukuba, the most boring town in Japan, was tsunami day. This week we had another downscaling workshop. We have the habit of attending such "international" workshops even if we have nothing to present on the topic, as it is very useful to hear about what our colleagues are doing in English and also to hear the wider context set by the honoured international visitors. Crashingly boring though Tsukuba is, we are gradually exploring.

Avoid the restaurants on-site at the conference centre. A light and tasty ramen lunch is just a few minutes walk away:

The first breakfast after our run the next morning was rotted soya beans, cold fried egg, rice and seaweed. Delicious, but a little small, and we had plenty of room for a second breakfast at a newly opened Tully's before heading back to the conference centre for day 2:

The Chinese restaurant on the top floor of Seibu isn't super-exotic but on the three times we have visited the food has always been hot, fresh and tasty:

James eschewed the Okura hotel - expensive, unexciting, attached to the Conference centre, and with the history of not being particularly welcoming on tsunami-night - in favour of the Hotel Matsushima, in the Tsukuba hinterland: cheap, dirty, but fully functional with lots of clean tanks full of exotic fish (pets not food). Woo Hoo - some character in Tsukuba!:

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 10/20/2011 11:00:00 AM

[jules' pics] Descending Yarigatake - Day 3

2011-10-19T11:22:00.001+09:00

Dawn dawned clear at the hut near the top of Yari.

It was interesting the way the sun apparently rose through the clouds behind Jounendake, and yet the mountain was clear. It is only one or two hundred metres lower than the hut on Yari.

The sky became startlingly blue so we visited the Tengu Ike again on the way down, adding an extra hour and a half to the trip.

A pause on the way down.

Although the autumn colours were less vivid than usual, the tatty leaves and muted colours were atmospheric.

Down from the mountain and only 8km of forest path to go... Feet washing in the icy Azusa river.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 10/19/2011 11:22:00 AM

[jules' pics] Climbing Yarigatake - Day 1 and 2

2011-10-18T17:05:00.001+09:00

Because of the apocalypse, which caused us to go volunteering, we haven't had our proper share of mountains this year. A holiday weekend lay between Lauren and Ruza's visit and out next trip. Unfortunately everyone else also decided to head for the hills and the huts were full. So we headed out on Monday, returning on Wednesday - time off we have no time for due to having to prepare stuff for our upcoming voyage.

The usual view from the kappabashibashi at Kamikochi. Only clearer and bluer than usual.

The lower hut 2 hours from Kamikochi was still full so was walked another hour and a half in pleasant evening light up the very pretty river to the next hut (Yarisawa hut - a first visit for us).

The next morning, we skipped up Yarigatake, but here is someone struggling to make it look tough.

If you are a keen photographer you have to visit this special pond (Tengu Ike) which God has arranged to reflect the peak. At least I think man doesn't "maintain" it. The autumn colours are rubbish this year due to the massive typhoon a few weeks ago that has burned the leaves over a large area of the country. Naturally the best shot was by James on his LX3. He is so good at getting things straight. Don't know why I bothered carrying my 2kg of camera...

The ptarmigan are changing colour - from brown to white from the feet up. I think this is the first time I have seen one showing any of its winter uniform. This is probably why I carried my 2kg of camera.

From the hut on the top of Yarigatake in the evening, we could see out to Jounendake (that we climbed last year), and also one of the huts a few hundred metres down from the peak.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 10/18/2011 05:05:00 PM

[jules' pics] Early Saturday morning at Kamakura beach

2011-10-17T16:46:00.001+09:00

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 10/17/2011 04:46:00 PM

I've been audited!

2011-10-16T19:32:00.003+09:00

All these pesky so-called "climate auditors" have got nothing on JAMSTEC, who really know how to do these sorts of things properly.

There have been allegations of some shady practice in the awarding of contracts, and fishy accounting - not within JAMSTEC itself, I hasten to add, but we are all part of the same compost heap that is the Japanese governmental and quasi-governmental bureaucracy, so tend to get trawled in the same nets. Therefore, JAMSTEC is undertaking an audit to check whether the problem extends to its staff.

This audit consists of a non-anonymised questionnaire that goes something like this:

===
Q1: Have you engaged in shady accounting, and do you have any illegal slush fund? Yes/No (tick as applicable)

Q2: If the answer to Q1 is "yes", where is this money kept?

I certify that the answers to Q1 and Q2 are correct. Name _____
===

There follows some blurb to the effect that if the questionnaire is not returned by the deadline, someone will come and talk to me to help me understand how important it is.

Jules is lucky enough to get to go to monthly management meetings. At the last one, there was substantial discussion about the questionnaire, and it was decided that we should all tick the "No" box.

We are lucky indeed to have such inspirational leadership.

(I took a punt and had already sent it back - fortunately, I managed to guess the correct answer.)

Sourdough revisited

2011-10-10T16:26:00.000+09:00

(This post more for my benefit than yours, really, to save my recipe.)

I'm back on the sourdough habit again. After a bit of a break, I tried to start it up over the summer, but it kept on falling over after a few days. This pineapple juice recipe seems reliable for kicking things off, but when I tried weaning onto water, it went flat and then mouldy shortly thereafter. Summer temps are pushing 30C in our house (though surely a bit lower downstairs), which may be a bit high.

After our typhoon trip, things had cooled down so I had another go and it worked much better:

My sourdough banana bread (above left) is probably closest to this recipe, in that I used oil rather than butter, and not too many fancy ingredients. I chose to make it on the plain and bready side, as it is intended for a trip to the mountains where I want a solid mouthful and nothing too friable or sickly-sweet. This is actually the second attempt, the first (made on Friday night) didn't make it through the weekend which must be a good sign. Since the interweb is full of ridiculous American-style instructions (who seriously measures things in cups?) I will note down what I did:

2 bananas, well mashed
1 egg, lightly beaten
about 1/2 cup sourdough starter (that's ok since it lives in a cup, but you could also use 4floz)
2floz oil
several drops vanilla essence
16floz flour (yes I know, but it's easy to roughly measure in a jug).
2-3floz sugar
1tsp baking powder

Mix dry and wet ingredients separately, then fold together and pour into greased loaf tin. Cook for 1h at 180C.

The bread (right) is following the no-knead recipe presented here. I haven't got this quite sorted yet, I think I made the dough too wet and it is rather damp and heavy. This one also sat in the fridge for 12h (out of a 30h first rise) because we were out all day, which might not have helped...

[jules' pics] Visitors

2011-10-09T20:45:00.001+09:00

Last week some less gnarled climate scientists came to visit. On the left is Lauren Gregoire and on the right, Ruza Ivanovic. They are both at the University of Bristol in the UK. The photo was taken on a day tour of Kamakura, which a mandatory event for all foolish enough to visit us for more than a day. They put up with it all cheerfully enough. We also got lots of work done!

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 10/09/2011 08:45:00 PM

[jules' pics] Higanbana

2011-10-05T17:23:00.001+09:00

The equinox lillies (spider lily/higanbana) were delayed by the typhoon but are now man kai (full bloom). Mostly they are red, but Zuisenji operates a white theme at this time of year. It was James that found this elegant group containing both kinds.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 10/05/2011 05:23:00 PM

[jules' pics] Haguro-san

2011-09-30T21:16:00.001+09:00

In Japan, shrines are Shinto and temples are Buddhist. While Zuigan-ji is thoroughly let's zen (rinzai sect - same as the much posted about Zuisenji in Kamakura) the templey shrine on Haguro-san was built at the time when someone influential decided that Shinto gods were cool for Buddhists too. Later on the templey shrines and shriny temples were re-segregated, so I suppose that the shrine on Haguro-san is now officially Shinto. It still has a flavour of Buddhism about it - most obviously in the Shojin-ryori-ish nature of the food served at the hostel.

Breakfast...

is followed by a walk round the shrine.

The main building...

...is quite grand

A side shrine...

Then off into the forest...

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 9/30/2011 09:16:00 PM

[jules' pics] Zuiganji

2011-09-29T13:26:00.001+09:00

A couple more photos taken in Zuigan-ji, Matsushima, where we went on almost our wettest summer holiday ever (It might even have been the wettest ever in terms of inches of preciptation, but the Outer Hebrides beats it handsomely in terms of cold rainy desolation).

The entrance in the rain

James in the rain. Please look only at the rain, steps, fence, James, and trees. There's a no photography sign on the fence, which surely cannot apply to those particular elements.

A witch and her broomstick. Perhaps it was a little less rainy under the trees, but by now I was learning to shade the lens with a finger to keep rain drops off.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 9/29/2011 01:26:00 PM

Peace Boat volunteer appeal

2011-09-25T16:22:00.004+09:00

Just got another email from Peace Boat: it sounds like they are struggling to find enough volunteers to keep their operation going. The general use campsite appears to be shutting down at the end of the month, so more ad-hoc operations (eg) might also find life difficult (PB has accommodation in a couple of disused buildings). So this might be more or less the last chance for anyone who has been thinking that they ought to get around to it. PB makes it very easy, they provide all transport (to and from Shinjuku), necessary equipment and even almost all food on payment of a nugatory ¥1000.

Over five months have passed since the earthquake and tsunami of March 11. Volunteers continue to be vital for the recovery process for the people of Tohoku. Their presence not only supports the physical recovery of the towns but also gives the local community the encouragement to rebuild. Peace Boat has been working hard to build a strong relationship with the people of Ishinomaki since March 17 to ensure that all volunteer work matches their needs and requests. We hope you will be able to take the time to show the people of Ishinomaki and Onagawa that they have not been forgotten.

PB's info about volunteering is here with details of the current planned trips. Actually conditions are rather less harsh than indicated - feel free to email or comment if more specifics are required.

[jules' pics] Our summer holiday in pictures

2011-09-24T16:04:00.001+09:00

Day 1

The reward for successfully taking a tandem on the Shinkansen was a succulent steak in ugly rainy Sendai.

View from our hotel room in famously beautiful Matsushima Bay.

Day 2

Zuigan-ji temple, Matsushima.

Then into the countryside, where the shrines are a little more rudimentary. It was still raining. Hard.

At Naruko Onsen there was no shortage of food, baths and towels for hungry wet cyclists.

Day 3

On the road in the rain to somewhere... Convenience stores appeared as shining havens. The normally inedible hot tinned coffee and snacks became delicious. And they had pristine dry toilets.

That night we stayed in the temple on top of Haguro-san

We had 2 rooms. A bedroom and a tearoom. The building rattled in the wind but the tired tandemmers slept soundly through the typhoon.

Day 4

Touring the temple (Actually the first shot below was taken on the way out on Day 5).

Main shrine

Pond

Bell

Stairs.

Pilgrims should climb the 2446 stairs to the shrine on the top of Haguro-san, but this was hardly practical with a loaded tandem so we had innocently headed up the toll road. Thus we climbed down and back up.

There were lots of trees and things, and it didn't rain all the time.

To prove we did it, here's a five-storied pagoda sits near the bottom of the stairs.

Day 5
As we headed home the sun came out briefly, and the rice fields started to glow.

The local railway station at Kiyokawa was unmanned and unmachined. We didn't pay a penny until we got off the Shinkansen in Tokyo.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 9/24/2011 04:04:00 PM

[jules' pics] Tearoom

2011-09-22T17:42:00.001+09:00

Tearoom, originally uploaded by julesberry2001.

Fortunately we had our own private wattle and daub tearoom from which to enjoy the typhoon. In fact it is practically our own private temple. It is so nice decided to stay a second night. Must remember this clever way of dodging the crowds and often go cycling when a typhoon is due. The only problem is that it is still raining, which is not supposed to happen - after weathering a typhoon one expects to be rewarded with bright clear skies.

--
Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 9/22/2011 05:41:00 PM