Crazy laws

OK, by now we all know that in Sudan it is illegal to allow a child to name a teddy bear after himself. But I'm sure that every country has its own crazy laws. In Japan, for example, it is illegal to ride one of these:


which has led to some curiously circular conversations along these lines:

Do you know why riding a tandem is illegal?
I think it's probably because they are dangerous.
Why do you think they are dangerous?
They must be, because if they weren't, they wouldn't be illegal.

What a blessing it must be to have such blind faith in the infallibility of the legislative process.

Another rather odd law is the one against home brewing beer (kits are widely sold, but using them is criminal). That's because the major brewers don't want their cash cow milked. of course. And there is plenty of outrageous and discriminatory legislation, like the Basic Education Law that guarantees an education to all children in Japan...so long as they are Japanese. But that is just evil and racist, not completely hatstand in the way that the anti-tandem law is.

Most of the crazy UK legislation turns out on further investigation to be an urban legend (like the one about being able to kill Welshmen after dark in Chester, so long as you use a bow and arrow). But I'm sure there are some genuine oddities both there and elsewhere in the world. Contributions please!

Richard Black (BBC) on scepticism

Many of you have presumably noticed that BBC environment correspondent Richard Black has written a bit about climate change "scepticism" recently. I think the first article was this one, which described his attempts to get some sense out of the sceptics, and then there was this "top ten" of sceptic arguments. As Gavin (who helped him on that article) says, that top ten was a pretty lame affair. That's not a criticism of Richard Black, but rather an indication of how completely irrelevant the "climate sceptics" are. They simply aren't part of the scientific debate - "is it happening, and is it caused by us" is just not an interesting question these days, and hasn't been for some time now. That's not to say there aren't plenty of interesting questions to ask, but in terms of policy decision these are things like: how bad the effects of climate change are going to be, what sort of policy decisions will be effective in reducing emissions, and how we should trade off the welfare of future generations against the current population. I suppose the very last sentence of Black's 10th talking point hints at some of this ("And some economists believe that a warmer climate would, on balance, improve lives"), but up to that point the whole page was just red herrings.

Incidentally, I was amused to read that Steve "Junk Scientist" Milloy wasn't able to find a single Climate Sceptic in the whole state of Texas. Of course it's long been clear that they were a dwindling band of "gone emeritus" types shouting well above their weight, but this is a rather nice demonstration of that fact. The resounding defeat of the Australian Govt could be (and in some quarters, is) seen in a similar light. Whether or not the successor there will actually do anything, or just talk a good talk and then continue business as usual (eg) is another matter. But I'm digressing.

Anyway, another of Richard Black's articles was an investigation into "censorship". Some time ago, he asked for any evidence to back up the occasional claims that the reason why there is no sceptical science is because it is censored by the gatekeepers of the peer-review system. Apparently someone (several people?) had pointed him towards my multiply-rejected paper "Can we believe in high climate sensitivity", so he phoned me up for a chat about it. As is clear from his article, I don't really see this as "censorship of scepticism" so much as gatekeepers doing their usual thing of defending the status quo. In fact as I blogged at the time, a fair proportion of the reviewers actually supported publication, it was the journal editors who seemed to be the main obstacle (and to those who claimed at the time it was "unethical" to discuss reviews, Hansen doesn't seem to think so). I do think that the need to create and support a "consensus" on climate science has acted to stifle debate on the issues we have tried to raise. I expect that had we found an "exciting" result, the publishing world would have been more receptive, but (as that last link shows) even Hansen has trouble when he tries to push the Overton window too far. Ultimately the story probably has more to do with personal politics than some global conspiracy.

There's another lengthy article on the same topic here on the BBC editors' blog. It summarises some results from a poll I was involved in:

In a recent survey of 140 climate scientists, 18 percent found the IPCC too alarming but 82 percent either thought the IPCC represented a reasonable consensus – or said it was not alarming enough. No one agreed with the statement that global warming is a fabrication and that human activity is not having a significant effect.

Amusingly (but frustratingly), this research also seems to be too hot to handle, with the editor of EOS reluctant to publish it...

Antarctic cruise ship holed by unidentified floater

I blame the Port Lockroy porridge.

(Antarctic cruise ship evacuated)

Yokohama school to cancel lunch for 2 days due to oil price hike

Yokohama school to cancel lunch for 2 days due to oil price hike

Let them eat whale - there's plenty of it stockpiled up.

Open access publishing

Jim Giles had an article in NewScientist on open access publishing recently, along somewhat similar lines to his article in Nature earlier this year. However, this time it's a comment article rather than mere news, so he's prepared (allowed? Nature's hostility to open-access is hardly a secret) to present his point of view, which is that open access is the way forward. I agree with what he says, although think he misses a detail in his presentation of the matter as one of paper charges versus subscription fees. Many journals charge both! So in fact we are already paying the journals $1000-$2000 to take our work, hide it behind a paywall, and sell it for their own profit.

Since I had it handy, I just checked that the 4-page Comment on Schwartz will cost about $2000 for standard publication (in JGR) assuming some use of colour. In fact I see the AGU has just instigated a new experimental system whereby we can pay the same again (roughly) as an additional charge to have the article made freely available to all readers. So that would make it $4000, just for a short comment. Think I'll pass on that second option, as the AGU (in common with essentially all publishers) do not prevent authors putting papers on their own web sites anyway. Google will usually find the full text for recent and even forthcoming papers these days (old pre-web ones are harder to track down).

The EGU open access journals somehow manage the whole process far cheaper - and I don't think they are heavily subsidised by the EGU itself, at least not in the long term. Their page charges are about €20 per page. Even with their small pages this is lot less less than the AGU ask for (an order of magnitude cheaper than the AGU's free-to-view version), and right at, or even below, the bottom of the range of cost that Jim Giles suggests. I also like their open reviewing system. Now that several of their journals are well-established, it looks like an obvious place to send manuscripts on a wide range of topics. The only thing I really don't much like about their system is that the papers are only available as (awkwardly-formatted IMO) pdfs and not directly as html. But this is a bit of a detail. Sadly, they don't yet have a journal for what I would think of as the bulk of climate science itself (there's clearly a demand for it, as I've seen the occasional paper that I would class as mainstream "Climate Dynamics" material in rather tangentially-related journals like ACP and CP).

Will speak English for food

Japan's largest language school - I use the term loosely - folded recently, leaving many foreigners stranded here with no means of support. I can't be bothered blogging about that but it's quite an interesting story in its own right.

Anyway, some of the teachers have started offering lessons in exchange for food, presumably as a publicity stunt cos no sane person who was desperately short of cash would ask for a restaurant meal rather than the equivalent money.

"How demeaning that must be", I said to the person standing beside me, as I helped myself to the plate of canapes in the British Embassy, at last night's reception for a visiting dignitary. "What sort of person would go and talk English to random acquaintances for a couple of hours just for the sake of a free feed?"

Children to read by sixteen - Tories

"The Conservatives have set out plans which they say will ensure children can read by the age of sixteen."

Actually they said six, not sixteen. I wonder how that would go down in Japan, where the curriculum covers the most basic 2000 kanji (not enough for true reading fluency by any means) by the age of about 16. Jules's boss (who has several children) mixed disbelief and astonishment when Jules mentioned some time ago that she could read before she went to school - "that's not normal, is it?"

Of course there are different interpretations of what it means to be able to read. I wouldn't expect a British 6 year old to be able to handle the more sophisticated newspapers or novels. But I find it hard to understand a world in which secondary school pupils also cannot read these things!

Kooks' corner

Those of you who care about the reputation of the AGU may be concerned at what they have allowed to happen to JGR-Atmospheres:

Global Warming and the Next Ice Age
Journal of Geophysical Research, VOL. 112, NO. D24, 2007
Guest Editor(s): P. Chylek

So that explains how Schwartz got published in the first place. Actually I had the dubious pleasure of reviewing another article out of this collection. It took me all of 5 minutes to spot the mistake, and little longer to write the review which explained it in simple terms. I declined the offer to look at a revised version, so it is not impossible that the published paper will be better, but I am not holding my breath.

Who needs Energy and Environment when JGR will publish this stuff anyway?

Of course I shouldn't tar everyone with the same brush: there are probably some good papers in this issue, maybe even most of them. But Chylek, Essex, Scafetta and West at least all have previous form, and we've shown that the Schwartz paper was wrong. I wonder how many more comments this Special Issue of JGR will provoke?

That new Japanese tourism promotion in full

Japan Today - News - British families urged to take their holidays in Japan

And what better way to encourage them than to fingerprint and photograph them the minute they get off the plane. For their own safety, of course (don't laugh, the Govt has actually said that). Anyway, here is the promotional video for the new advertising campaign (via Debito):

Of course this doesn't just apply to tourists, but also to non-Japanese long-term (even permanent) residents, every single time we cross the border. It's dressed up as disease and terrorism control (because of course Japanese don't catch diseases or commit terrorist acts, oh no) but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it is is really just a bit of rather childish xenophobia designed to pander to the right wing. There was even some local nonentity baseball ex-player promoting it by saying it would be great to cut down on all this foreign crime...

Welcome to Japan indeed.

Fresh from the department of tasteless metaphors

"the government recognized suicide as a death of a person... who is at the end of their rope"

The govt has released a white paper on the suicide issue (Japan is 9th in the world). With a characteristic lack of attention to punctuation and clarity, Japantoday reported that the government "stressed the need to tackle the issue of suicide by society as a whole".

In unrelated news, an international survey of gender inequality by the World Economic Forum placed Japan an embarrassing 91st out of 128 countries - just below Zimbabwe, Malawi and Nicaragua (well, I think they should be embarrassed, in my culturally-imperialistic way, but I see no signs of them actually being embarrassed).

Hmm, maybe there's something in that "suicide by society as a whole" thing after all.