BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: The EGU review

Well.. that was a very different EGU!

We were supposed to be in Vienna, but that was all cancelled a while back of course. I might have felt sorry for my AirBnB host but despite Austria banning everything they didn’t reply to my communication and refused a refund so when AirBnB eventually (after a lot of ducking and weaving) stepped in and over-ruled them and gave me my money back I didn’t have much sympathy. They weren’t our usual host, who was already full when I booked a bit late this year.

Rather than the easy option of just cancelling the meeting, the EGU decided to put everything on-line. They didn’t arrange videoconferencing sessions – I think this was probably partly due to the short notice, and also to make everything as simple and accessible as possible to people who might not have had great home broadband or the ability to use streaming software – but instead we had on-line chat (typing) sessions with presentation material previously uploaded by authors, that we could refer to as we liked. There was no formal division into posters and oral presentations. Authors could put up whatever they wanted (50MB max) onto the website beforehand and people were free to download and browse through at will. It is all still up there and available to all permanently, and you can comment on individual presentations up to the end of the month (assuming the authors have allowed this, which most seem to). The EGU has posted this blog with statistics of attendance which shows it to have been an impressive success.

Some people put up huge presentations, far more than they would have managed in a 15 minute slot, but most were more reasonable and presented a short summary. We did poster format for ours as we felt that this allowed more space for text explanation and an easier browsing experience than a sequence of slides with bullet points. Unfortunately my personal program of sessions I had decided to attend has been deleted from the system so I can’t review what I saw in much detail. I usually take notes but this time was too busy with computer screens.

Of course, being in Vienna in spirit, I had to have a schnitzel. I might have to have some more in the future, they were rather good and quite easy to make. Pork fillet, not veal.

The 2nd portion at the end of the week was better as I made my own breadcrumbs rather than using up some ancient panko that was skulking in the back of the cupboard. But we ate them too quickly to take pictures! Figlmüller eat your heart out!

The chat sessions were a bit frenetic. Mostly, the convenors invited each author in turn to post a few sentences in summary, following which there was a short Q-and-A free-for all. This only allowed for about 5 mins per presentation, which meant maybe 2 or 3 questions. But this wasn’t quite as bad as it seems since it was easy to scroll through the uploaded material ahead of time and pick out the interesting ones. Questioning could also run over subsequent presentations, it wasn’t too hard to keep track of who was asking what if you made the effort. As usual, there were only handful of interesting presentations per session for me (at most) so it was easy enough to focus on these. It was also possible to be in several different chat sessions at once, which you can’t do so easily with physical presentations! The structure made it more feasible to focus on whatever piqued our interest, and jules in particular spent more time at those sessions she does not usually get around to attending because they are outside of her main focus. Some convenors grouped presentations into themes and discussed 3-5 of them at a time, for longer. Some naughty convenors thought they would be clever and organise videoconferencing sessions outside of the EGU system, which actually worked pretty well in practice for those (probably a large majority to be honest) who could access it, but not so good for those who had access blocked for a number of reasons. Which is probably why the EGU didn’t organise this themselves. Whether it is actually preferable to the on-line chat is a matter of taste.

Jules was co-convening a couple of sessions and the convenors set up a small zoom session on the side to help coordinate, which added to the fun. A bit of personal chat with colleagues is an important aspect of these conferences. Her presentation is here and outlines some early steps in some work we are currently doing – an update to our previous estimate of the LGM climate, which is now getting on for 10 years (and two PMIP/CMIP cycles) old. I think we should probably find it encouraging that the new models don’t seem very different, though it may just mean that they share the same faults! There is some new data, perhaps not as much as we had hoped. And the method itself could do with a little bit of improvement.

I had actually found it a bit difficult to find the right session for my work when originally submitting it. It didn’t seem to quite fit anywhere, but in the end it turned out fine where I put it. The data assimilation stuff was a little less interesting methodologically speaking, perhaps because it’s a sufficiently mature field that everyone is just getting on with the nuts and bolts of doing it rather than inventing new approaches. I did get one idea out of it that I may end up using though, and this from the Japanese looks absolutely incredible from a technological point of view – nowcasting cloudbursts over Tokyo with a 30 second update cycle! With the extra year they’ve now got, it will probably be operational for the Olympics.

Jules and I also co-authored Martin’s work with us on emergent paleoconstraints which we were originally going to present for him as he wasn’t planning to attend. But, with the remote attendance he ended up able to do it himself which was a small bonus.

Best of all – no coffee queues! Well that and not needing to schlep out at 8pm looking for dinner each night…which is fun but gets pretty tiring by the end of the week. On the downside, we had to buy our own lunches rather than gatecrashing freebies all week like we usually (try to) do.

As for the future…well it seems pretty embarrassing that it took current events into forcing the EGU into moving on-line. Some of us have been pushing them on this for years and it’s always been met with “it’s too complicated” by the powers that be. I suspect they mostly like the idea of being in charge of a huge event and enjoy hobnobbing at all the free dinners (don’t we all!) but that doesn’t justify forcing everyone to fly over there and spend at least €2k minimum – probably rather more for most – to take part. It’s a huge amount of time, money, and carbon and we really ought to do better. If one good thing is to come out of the current mess, it might be that people finally wake up to the idea that working remotely really is fully feasible these days with the level of communication technology that is available. Blue Skies Research has been living your future life for more than 5 years now, and it’s great! Roll on next year. I know that turning up has added benefits, and don’t expect all travel to stop. But with remote access, people can easily “go” to both of the AGU and EGU each year, drop in to the bits that interest them, without having to devote a full week and more to each, with huge costs, jet-lag, the carbon budget of a small country, etc.

I expect that the AGU will want to put on a better show this December. Even if travel is opened up by then (which I wouldn’t be confident about at this point) I doubt this will happen quickly enough for the event to be organised in the usual manner. It will be good to have a bit of friendly rivalry to spur things on. In recent years, the AGU has generally been ahead of the EGU in terms of streaming and remote access – last December we watched a couple of live sessions and even asked a question (via text chat) though we were lucky that the small selection of streamed sessions included stuff of interest to us. The EGU has tended to put up streams of just a few of the public debate sessions rather than the science, and this only after the event with no opportunity for direct interaction. Bandwidth is a problem for streaming multiple sessions from the same location, but maybe even an audio stream with downloadable material would work? One thing is for sure, back to “business as usual” is not going to be acceptable now that they’ve shown it can be done differently.

Here’s Karlskirche which I hope to see again in the flesh some time.

Coincidentally, just a few days after the EGU I took part in this one-day webinar. It had a bit of the same sort of stuff – I presented the same work again, anyway! This was a zoom session which worked pretty well, there were one or two technical problems but you usually get in a real conference anyway with people plugging their laptops into the projector. It was great to have people from a range of countries attend and present at what would normally have been a local UK meeting of climathnet people. I have never quite managed to attend any of these before because they always seemed like a long way to travel for a short meeting that mostly isn’t directly relevant to our research. I expect to see a rapid expansion of remote meetings of various types in the future.

The real EGU

No doubt you've read Stoat's daily accounts from the EGU (eg). Here is jules's trip report:

Saturday:
Arrived early in Vienna, with a view to getting a head-start on the cakes. Visited Demel, which is a famous cake shop. The problem with famous things in Vienna is that they are usually rubbish. Had some famous cake and some mediocre tea, but at least I seemed to be in a no-smoking part of the cafe - and the building was very nice. Coming from Japan, being in a elegant old European building is a real pleasure.

Stayed at the Capricorno hotel which is extremely convenient for town and conference, and had the added bonus for me, a lonely lonesome traveller, of a lively ant colony in my bedroom.

Sunday:
Touristing until 3pm. The Albertina art museum had a Mozart special showing, which was a bit disappointing. I'd rather have seen something I didn't know about already. Visited the Kaisergruft which contains the huge and fantastically Roccoco-ly decorated coffins of lots of Habsburgs. Then went to the Haus der Musik, which is the museum for the Vienna Phil., but upstairs has all sorts of interactive sound things, including a womb room where you get to experience being an embryo again. After all this fun I headed up to the EGU to register and spent a happy hour logged on to the wifi which I was assured wouldn't be operational until the following day.

Monday:
EGU days end late and it was about 7pm when I met up with a group of what was basically Paul Valdes' expanding empire plus hangers on. Someone (no doubt a future world leader) convinced us to go "authentic" and led us half the way to the Czech Republic in order to sup wine with fizzy water, dumplings and lumps of meat. The vegetarians complained that they only had fried vegetables and dumplings. I tried to point out that the meat eaters were actually worse off because they had to have either fried or boiled meat and dumplings. By the time the alkies were ordering second flagons of wine I was also starting to flag, and ran away soon afterwards since I wanted to be fresh as a daisy for the all important Climate-stuff session the next day.

Tuesday:
I once posted on William Connolley's blog because he offered a free bier at the EGU to anyone who did so. This foolish man was at the important Climate-stuff session so I nabbed him in the coffee break, and was rewarded with not only bier but the honour of dinner in a nice restaurant accompanied by a man wearing very long bushy hair, shorts and sandals. The waiters were not impressed with my choice of companion, until after it was too late, when they saw the "Dr" on his credit card.

At 5pm, aware of having to spend several hours dressing before my exciting date with William I went down to the poster hall to remove my even more exciting poster about important Climate-stuff. To my horror there was a little man standing in front of it, apparently engrossed. Feeling I had already done my bit with the very busy 2 hour poster session earlier in the day, I sneaked quietly away to peruse some posters until it was safe to return. But, a few minutes later, there was the little man at my shoulder asking me if I could answer some poster-related questions. So, back to the poster I went. A few seconds later Dave Frame, who turned out to be the little man's buddy, appeared from behind a pillar! Had he been lying in wait? I thought they were all supposed to be too busy drinking beer to be interesting in our little poster, yet here they were at well past 5pm still staring at it. Perhaps they'd already been enjoying the beers from the bar in the poster hall. That would explain their rather lethargic manner, which at the time I put down to them having stood in front of my poster for the intervening 4 hours since the poster session.

Wednesday:
At lunchtime my friend Yoko took me to a GOOD cafe in Vienna. I'm not going to tell you its name or where it is - because it was actually good! Turns out Yoko (who is one of my best buddies in Japan) is a top international traveller and had the inside information on many things, like how to get good opera tickets for not much money!

This was the day that Tim Lenton won a prize for, after all this time, still being surprisingly young for someone so brilliant. He gave a talk which was actually educational and interesting, rather than the usual soporific medal talk, "my 50 years doing such extraordinary dull science that I really can't believe I've won a prize". Its such a shame when a top boffin turns up to give a really dull speech. After the talk we (me and my boss Ayako) managed to get Tim to buy us a bier down by the posters. This was because I was wearing a very brightly coloured frock, so he couldn't pretend he hadn't seen us. Got to meet Tim's extremely nice girlfriend who is from NZ and is called Tee.

Thursday:
The session that I convened with Nanne and Masa occurred today. Nanne and I played "nice and nasty chairpersons" which is the same as "good cop bad cop". I went first so the participants were very well behaved by the time Nanne took over, and we managed to get out of the room before the next session arrived. In the evening I went out with the other conveners and also a few Japanese people, to a Serbian restaurant, which was actually quite good.

Friday:
By this time it is getting hard to concentrate. Friday night was the free food and drink for all conveners. There must be about 500 EGU conveners, but there were probably only a couple of hundred at the party. The food was quite good, the only problem with that being that after another long EGU day, the party was so late (7.30pm) that I had to eat beforehand.

Saturday:
I went to see some wonky architecture before flying to Heathrow, staying at the Sheraton Skyline, which was an OK hotel except for the lack of oxygen in the rooms plus an unopenable window, which I had a very strong urge to kick a hole in.

Sunday:
If you ever fly to Tokyo, make sure you fly with Virgin Atlantic. It has a multitude of movies and TV programs to watch, on a self-controlled system. This is really worthwhile for a 12 hour flight.

Advice to the AGU regarding their journals

I intend to write a proper letter (well email) based on the following thoughts. Before I send it, I'd be grateful for any suggestions.

Dear AGU,

Your previously-respected journals are starting to build a reputation for publishing rubbish papers. Here are a few suggestions for how to remedy the situation.

1. Please advise your journal editors to get off their backsides and try to find at least one reviewer outside of the list of suggestions that you insist all authors provide. I'm sure some conscientious editors already do this, but not all. Under the current system all one has to do in order to publish complete crap is nominate a couple of friends who will wave things through the review process.

2. Please fix your Comment and Reply system. You already have a published policy, please ask your editors to adhere to it. Currently, it seems common for editors to impose an additional "pre-review" stage before even starting the process of asking for a Reply. This means that while any old crap can get published in a few weeks on the say-so of a couple of friends (see 1), even in the best case scenario it takes up to a year, and about 6 reviews (including those nominated by the authors of the original work), for anyone to have any chance of pointing out the problems however glaring they are. Comments are generally relatively urgent in nature and are required to be short by your policies, so a time scale rather closer to that of GRL would seem more appropriate. From what I have experienced and heard from others, editors not infrequently decide that they simply can't be bothered with dealing with comments regardless of their content or validity. If you don't want to deal with comments pointing out errors in misleading and shoddy work, you should work harder to prevent the publication of the erroneous work in the first place rather than blocking any criticism!

3. Please let us know which editor is responsible for each paper. There is no reason for this information to be secret, and EGU journals routinely publish it. I'm sure many hard-working and conscientious editors are upset that the reputation of the journals is being tarred by the actions of a few. Being held to account even in this small way may encourage people to be a little more careful.

4. Please consider introducing a meaningful open review system, like the one in place at many EGU journals. I'm aware of your plans to take baby steps in this direction, but it seems that you are trying to make it as ineffective as possible. Rather than creating some half-hearted process, why not just simply copy one that already works pretty well? (If you feel the need to differentiate yourselves from the EGU, an obvious improvement on their process would be to post all the invited reviews together, rather than letting the later reviewers read the earliest ones.) I'm not aware of any obviously crap papers being published in the EGU journals that practice open review, and their reputation and status is rising as rapidly as yours is falling. Although I'm personally a fan of the EGU open publication system, I would much rather see the AGU journals as a credible and authoritative alternative, rather than sinking into oblivion.

EGU - Awards & Medals - Arthur Holmes Medal & Honorary Membership - Vincent Courtillot

One of the less glorious aspects of the EGU's politicking over recent years is the awarding of medals over the years to various anti-science emeriti. The latest of these is Vincent Courtillot whose name may be familiar to some (eg). As well as the climate science denialism, there is the arguably more serious episode of his acting as editor for vast numbers of papers from his institute at a journal, which is hard to square with the medal's reservation "for scientists who have achieved exceptional international standing in Solid Earth Geosciences, defined in their widest senses, for their merit and their scientific achievements" (my italics). 

Eli had the story back in January.

It seems that there has been a faction pushing for him to get the award for some time, apparently as a quid pro quo for some past deeds. Until now, his history has been sufficient for his nomination to be blocked, so this time they pushed the nomination through on the quiet. Gerald Ganssen has temporarily stepped down from any EGU-related activities in protest, and there has been talk of the break-up of the EGU. If any EGU participants feel like attending the plenary (there's a free lunch!) or the medal lecture itself, I'm sure some pointed questions could be asked...

Exxon Geosciences Union?

There's an interesting rumour floating around in EGU circles: apparently some people are considering the possibility of sponsorship from an oil company, specifically Exxon. The EGU is a broad church and some people (eg the solid earth types) see no problem with this, but of course many climate scientists find it problematic, to put it mildly.

It's not clear to me what is really in it for the EGU. Maybe they would like to have more money to spend on "good causes" but (AIUI) they are not actually in any financial difficulties. Surely they could raise money for specific goals without branding either the whole organisation or the EGU General Assembly, which is a fabulous interdisciplinary meeting. I can just imagine "The Exxon Climate Lecture", in which they fly over someone like Lindzen (or worse, jokers like Monckton or The Execrable Crichton [did I really coin that epithet?]) to feed soundbites to waiting Faux News reporters. Thanks, but no thanks.

If the idea goes ahead, I predict a bloodbath - but for that reason, I don't think there is any serious prospect that it will happen. As a mildly interested outsider, the EGU seems to work very well as it is. Why fix what isn't broken?

EGU Open discussions

The Hansen paper (submitted manuscript!) has provoked me into mentioning that the EGU are in the process of revamping the discussion phase of their on-line open access publications. There have been a number of complaints over the years that the open publication of the pre-review manuscript can be confusing, as it may lead people to think that these are peer-reviewed publications (which they are not). I've never been particularly convinced by this, and you only have to look at the process to see what is going on, but then again, if people are going to be confused, maybe it is reasonable to wonder if the process could be clarified. A “watermark” on the title page was already added a few years ago, and they have also recently improved the way that the website links and indexes the manuscripts - pointing more clearly to the final paper when available, so people do not read and cite the original version unless they specifically want to.

I'm not sure quite how finalised the new plans are, but at the time of the last EGU meeting one of the proposals was that the authors' own typset manuscript (eg a fairly plain LaTeX template) would be posted up as-is rather than being formatted into the in-house EGU online style. I don't really like the EGU style so that's already an improvement from my perspective. Another potential benefit is that this would eliminate one source of up-front cost which may pave the way for normalising the publiction fee model to a pay-on-(peer-reviewed)-publication model rather than pay-on-submission. There are arguments on both sides of this - pay on submission may reduce the number of poor submissions, but it can be administratively difficult and may lead to both a presumption of acceptance and hard feelings when a paper is rejected.

Ultimately, I don't think these changes will have much effect on the rare cases where people deliberately publicise their submitted manuscrips, as Hansen appears to have done. Most journalists won't understand, or care about, the details of the peer-review process. Nevertheless, I don't have much sympathy for Ken Caldeira's claim that publishing the review process is a form of “pollution” of the peer reviewed literature. No-one sane would routinely read the discussion phase of the journal, and the point behind the publication of these manuscripts is not to double the amount of material that scientists are supposed to read, but to give people the chance both to look at how a particular paper passed through the peer-review process, or to comment on a manuscript that is particularly noteworthy. To that end, I'm happy to see that the Hansen manuscript is well on its way to being the most heavily-commented paper on ACPD, though predictably most of the comments seem to be from crazies. At least they are thereby distracted from commenting on my blog :-)

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: The EGU review 2015

If it’s April, it must be Austria. So far, our plan to travel less now we are back in the UK seems to be being mostly honoured in the breach. To be fair, we are travelling fewer miles and suffering less jet lag, and both these factors probably help to explain why we are still spending quite a lot time away from home. As you may have seen, we entered the Vienna Marathon (and half), and the subsequent need for recovery gave us a good excuse for week of lazily sitting around, eating and drinking. It didn’t turn out quite as lazy as we’d expected…

Somehow we managed to get in for 8:30 on Monday morning, where I started off in a hydrology session about data, models, model building and prediction. I had put my poster into this, not because it was really that great a fit but because hydrologists have been thinking about these issues for a lot longer than most climate scientists and have a range of interesting ideas. Keith Beven is one of the famous names in the field and he gave an good general talk about determining when and whether models might be fit for purpose. The session was a good choice for me, I picked up a couple of new (to me at least) ideas that might well come in handy. There was an unfortunate clash with an NP session on building models from data, so jules attended that one. In the afternoon there was nonlinear time series analysis, wavelets and the like, including Bo Christiansen explaining his 2014 paper on regression, which I found much more digestible as a presentation than I had when reading the paper.

Tuesday started with the data assimilation session, including some steady progress towards the practical use of particle filters. To be honest, I’m surprised how long this has been in the pipeline, as some bold claims were being made for it several years ago. Another interesting talk was Alexis Hannart on the use of data assimilation in detection and attribution. Two relevant papers are here and here. I’m not sure exactly what it all means yet but it’s a promising idea at least. jules went to the seasonal/decadal prediction session and reported that it was the same as usual…some spots of skill but at longer time scales this is essentially due to the forced response rather than the precise initialisation.

Wednesday was the big paleoclimate day, with jules’ co-organised session including the Milankovitch Medal lecture, all the latest paleo research and some work specifically linking past and future climate change. However, before that, we both managed to see Bjorn Stevens’ talk on why aerosol forcing is lower than most people had previously thought. This was a longer and more detailed version of what he had said at Ringberg, and seemed fairly convincing to me. Then on to the paleo, which started with Paul Valdes giving a great medal lecture covering several new pieces of work from his group covering multiple time scales over the last 500 million years. We were amused by one of the questioners afterwards managing to drop in the line “As I said in my medal lecture a few years ago…”. In the rest of the session, there was interesting stuff on re-interpreting some ocean proxies which brought them more into line with other evidence from data and models, and some analysis of model simulations.

By Thursday i was flagging a bit, and the program was a bit less busy. I went to the sesssion on the Last Millennium, where someone had discovered a new volcanic eruption, someone else was debating about the significance and cause of various wiggles, and several others were considering the question of what we can really expect to learn from the proxy data anyway. Rob Wilson had a potentially provocative title along the lines of “Are the tree rings fit for purpose?” and I was hoping for a bit of a bunfight but he pulled his punches a bit. After a long, large and loud dinner on Thursday evening with the Bristol crowd, Friday was fortunately very quiet. The highlight was the EGU Great Debate on open access publishing, which can be streamed from the EGU web site. A couple of commercial publishers on the panel tried their best to justify the continuation of closed journals with the rather bizarre justification that scientists wanted them (only because they can’t/won’t pay the extortionate open access fee!), but even they acknowledged the inevitable growth of the open access movement. Uli Poschl was fairly direct without being too aggressive, saying that we (scientists) were going to do it anyway, so commercial publishers could either adapt or fail. There were a few red herrings raised in the discussion, but overall it was an interesting event. After 4 consecutive evenings of dining out with various people, we gave the convenors’ party a miss and had an early night instead.

Throughout the week, we gained the impression that a lot of younger scientists had not attended and their work was instead being presented by their supervisors. This rather undermines the EGU goal of trying to allow younger scientists to gain some visibility. No good picking a couple of early career scientists for your oral session if they don’t have the funding to turn up! But of course there have always been absentees and I don’t know if this is really a trend or just chance in what we happened to see. The conference attendance was marginally down on previous years, but there’s no sign of a trend there either.

Throughout the week the poster sessions were enjoyable and well-attended, though I wish all divisions would adopt the CL convention of using the evening session for posters only, and not scheduling talks. It would have been more convenient to be able to talk to all the poster presenters at the same time.

Viennese food was fun as always, perhaps a bit less exciting now we are not in Japan and can get big hunks of meat and good beer any time we like. What with no longer being bound by Japanese rules, we decided to stay an extra day in Vienna at the end. As it happened, it was a cold and windy day, we didn’t really have the energy for much sightseeing but did walk most of the way round the town. In the evening, we found a concert in Karlskirche – Mozart’s Requiem with an orchestra on traditional instruments. The singers were very good but the pews were very hard and the accoustics were rather odd. It was an interesting experience that I wouldn’t rush to repeat. Next year the Vienna marathon is a week earlier than the EGU, so we certainly won’t be doing both of them, and quite possibly neither.

More EGU

Those who are desperate for more info about all the exciting things that happened at the EGU can have a look at the various web streams, mostly the press conferences with a few medal lectures thrown in for good measure. It's some lame Windows Media nonsense but I'm sure Mac users will be able to work out how to deal with it (if not, you can just do what I did and download flip4mac, install it, and work out the URL of the relevant video stream (eg here) to open directly in Quicktime).

Most excitingly, you can now find out everything you wanted to know about palsa mires but were afraid to ask by listening to the joint press conference from the uncertainty sessions. Best not all pile in together or you might crash the EGU servers.

While I'm writing, EGU attendees will also have recently received an invitation to participate in a questionnaire. While it doesn't directly address the Exxon issue, there are questions about sponsorship and also opportunity for free-form commentary on anything that you want to say. Don't hold back...

EGU Autumn 2011 election now open

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.

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: EGU2018 Day 5

One final push…we were back on paleoclimate again first thing, more data than models though a bit of a mix of both. Just as the session ended and I started to think about going in search of lunch, lunch arrived in the form of sandwiches for the Atmospheric Sciences Division meeting. I usually attend the Climate Division meeting so thought it might be interesting to see if AS would have a different style. It didn’t really (even the sandwich was the same), and the most interesting points of discussion were rather similar – mostly, how to cope with the meeting outgrowing the available space. There’s no great solution and I am coming round to the idea that a slight discouragement towards throwing in too many abstracts might be the least-worst approach. There are of course ways round the one-abstract-per-first-author for anyone sufficiently motivated (like jules and I might be) but people who chuck in virtual duplicates to several sessions might be dissuaded which would be a good thing in terms of conference quality as well as freeing up space. I’m not sure it will make much difference overall though as surely there can’t be all that many of these cases. Some audience members also made the case for more remote participation and I don’t think the EGU can continue to resist this indefinitely. Attending in person brings greater benefits, but also costs, and allowing people to participate without the massive investment of time and money involved in travel could surely only be a good thing.

The afternoon sessions contained some advanced and high resolution modelling – a mix of future plans and existing results. Bjorn Stevens gave a well-received talk extolling the benefits of 1km resolution modelling. Mind you a bunch of high-resolution modellers is perhaps not the toughest crowd for that topic! There were some very truthy images of modelled clouds looking like reality. A particular goal of the highest resolution modelling is to resolve tropical storms and some of our past Japanese colleagues had some impressive results here too.

Previously the Friday afternoon slot has usually been a bit of a graveyard with lots of conference-goers leaving early for flights home, but now the schedule is so full there was even a busy poster session in the evening, including more of both the paleo and advanced numerical modelling. We hung around for the start of the convenors’ party but left quite early.

And now for the final score: jules says she had 9 free meals during the week, which were much higher quality than previously (so that’s where the EGU budget disappears to). As for myself, I attended 7 of the 3 meals to which I was actually invited. It seemed a particularly good week this time, perhaps partly due to our long absence. We last came 2 years ago when we were so ill and tired we only attended a fraction of the week, so this time there was rather a lot of new stuff. Jules was also involved in three sessions and we had a total of 4 presentations between us, which kept us busy across a wide range of topics. There was also an element of escapism for us in getting away from home for a bit, which we can now return to feeling (I hope) somewhat rejuvenated.

As for Day 6, we started off with a lovely sunny jog along the Donau Insel, and I’m pleased to report that my legs are now just about working properly after the marathon.

Some gentle sightseeing in town (see Belvedere above) was rounded off by a fabulous concert from the Vienna Philharmonic. I always check their schedule when we are at the EGU – more often than not they are either absent or sold out but this time we got prime seats for a concert including Elgar’s Cello Concerto by Sol Gabetta. We were so worn out by this stage that we forgot to check the venue and went to the wrong place, but fortunately the right place is only a short walk away. jules and I were amused to see a prominent EGU committee member taking photos in the concert hall just after the announcer had clearly forbidden such behaviour It looked rather like this:

We-who-must-not-be-named

Let's face it: pay-to-view scientific publishing is dead, even though its zombie corpse is still staggering around, thrashing around aimlessly.

There's another article in Nature about open access (and at least this one isn't hidden behind a paywall). Actually, it's not that bad, and certainly doesn't seem to be agitating shamelessly in the way that some past articles appeared to be. Among the open access publishers they discuss, there is however one notable absentee: the entire EGU family of journals is conspicuous by its absence. Of course this is only one publishing house operating in a particular field of research, but it's a very big one, and within that area, certainly ACP, BG, CP and probably TC (I don't really know the latter) are important within their fields. It may be worth emphasising that as well as being economically viable (indeed comfortably profitable), the costs of the EGU journals are extremely low, often lower than the publication charges imposed by paywalled journals even before you consider what they are raking in through subscription fees. That makes the excuses of for-profit publishers hard to take seriously. What are they actually adding for their fees?

Although I recently pointed to some dodgy papers in EGU journals, I don't think they are any worse than the AGU or other publishers who use a paywall paradigm - rather, my concern is that I expect them to be better, given the open review and opportunity for additional unsolicited comments. But even Nature, with it's $30-40,000 of investment in every paper, manages to come up with its share of stuff that is known to be wrong before the ink is dry. One nice feature of the EGU system is that you can see the reviews, and in the cases I mentioned, it seems that the problem (if there is one) is that the eds are bending over backwards to be generous towards papers that have been roundly rubbished in review. It is important to maintain some sort of standards, if reviewers are going to be expected to donate their time and energy. It might be useful to see the second and subsequent rounds of reviews, and I'm not sure why this bit is kept secret.

Incidentally, something I have been agitating for over recent years has recently come to pass: there is now a "subscribe to comments" button on each discussion page! So if you spot an interesting manuscript under review, you can easily keep an eye on what the reviewers are saying. I hope this will lead to an increase in non-invited comments. There are also RSS feeds for both the discussion and final publication phases of the journals.

Of course, Nature aren't stupid, and while trying to defend their cash cow for as long as possible, are also increasingly buying in to the open access model. It's just a matter of time. If they can persuade either authors, or funding bodies, that they add up to $40,000 of value to every paper they publish, then maybe they get their money in other ways, and good luck to them. It's time to stop gouging readers who have already paid for the research with their taxes.

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: Oh Vienna redux

It’s April, so it must be EGU time again! No Vienna marathon this time – the race was the same date as Manchester this year, a week too early for our trip – so we went purely for the science. Well, the science and the schnitzel. The plan was to go over on the Friday before the conference started, with the intention of enjoying a weekend of sightseeing and relaxing in the sun, but both jules and I contrived to come down with flu again after the Manchester outing, so instead we spent the weekend mostly lying in bed and coughing our lungs up, failing even to attend the Vienna Phil for which we had (cheap standing room) tickets on Sunday morning. Monday morning started with jules’ paleo modelling-and-data session, including talks on the effects of changing ocean tides, the green Sahara problem, state dependence of climate sensitivity and other things. After a lunch meeting we were both pretty much wiped out for the day and sidled off home without staying for the evening posters. Tuesday had a session on some minor revisions to the the 19th/20th century record, and then climate prediction including my talk on model independence. As jules keeps telling me, it’s time that was written up. In the afternoon we went to one of these funny debate things (nominally about resource depletion), where a bunch of people said how awful everything was, and one token panellist played Devil’s Advocate and argued that we could technologise our way out of it all. He almost managed some decent points, but unfortunately was more of a journalist/writer than scientist so didn’t really have anything much to back up his rhetoric. As expected, he was ritually disembowelled both by the other participants and the questioners from the floor, so all went away happy that indeed we really are all going to die. Can’t help thinking it was a bit of a missed opportunity for a real debate though. A further session that afternoon on open access publishing was cancelled, so I didn’t hang around for the medal lecture later on that evening. Unfortunately this is also not one of the handful of streamed talks – I think the EGU could do better with this. Wednesday was data assimilation day, as usual a mix of highly technical and irrelevant stuff, interspersed with a handful of interesting and useful details. Sadly the medal lecture this year was all about turbulence which isn’t really my thing, but overall the session was worthwhile. Finally managed to stay long enough for a beer in the posters, though there were not many relevant ones to look at. On Thursday I decided to expend my horizons with sessions on renewable energy (good idea, but some limitations) and tsunami,  which was interesting. Somehow missed the debate on open access publishing, which I have now played on the webstream, and it wasn’t really that exciting. Lots of standard comments (including the usual crop of irrelevancies) and fairly smug “but it works” replies. The Hansen paper got a lot of discussion, but whatever you think about how that was handled, one example out of thousands of papers does not amount to much really. I’m sure we can all point to stuff that shouldn’t have happened in any journal we care to mention (though of course in many cases it’s hidden away). There was another publishing party in the evening, it seems that they manage an excuse for a celebration just about every year! By Friday people were starting to drift off home as always. However jules had been roped into talking about models in the geosciences, (this was also streamed) so I thought I ought to turn up and show support. Probably the most interesting talk for me was the last one by Charlotte Werndl, on “double-counting” data for both tuning and validation. It is rare to find a philosopher with enough of a mathematical background to be able to back up their rhetoric. By the afternoon I was pretty much wiped out, we did manage to attend the convenors’ party but didn’t stay long. Overall, I didn’t find the EGU quite as exciting as usual, though can probably put that down to being ill for most of it, as I definitely picked up some useful bits and pieces. The days are really long when you are not feeling 100%, running from 8:30am potentially to 8pm then with dinner to follow. Needless to say, we didn’t do many full days this time. In fact we barely went out in the evenings and my first and only schnitzel was on the last Saturday night just before flying home. Next year, the Vienna Marathon is scheduled for the Sunday immediately prior to the EGU again. Watch this space…

EGU review part 1

As jules has already mentioned, it is EGU time again. It's been a bit hectic for the first three days but should calm down a bit now.

We didn't go last year so were anticipating it more than usual. Somehow despite being about half the size of the AGU meeting, the program manages to be packed with interesting things to see. The EGU app is also far better than the AGU equivalent, good enough for me to plan my program without reference to the web site.

As usual, we turned up a day early to get over jet-lag. I think this is still officially allowed by JAMSTEC rules, but anyway we can claim the meeting starts on Sunday with the registration and reception. We got to our favourite hotel (which has the best breakfast buffet imaginable) in good time and thanks to tripadvisor's recommendation, had possibly the best beer and ribs in Vienna. To be honest it was probably not quite as good as the Yokohama equivalent, but about half the price so we're not complaining. On Sunday, I'd planned to go on a guided tour of the Opera House, being one of the few attractions we've not yet visited, but the tours were off due to a ballet. So we spent the morning in the Albertina and then went to the ballet, as they had some v cheap tickets. Not really my cup of tea but it made for a relaxing day off. Then it was time for registration and a square foot of schnitzel (well it was round) to build up our strength for the week ahead.

Monday morning started with nonlinear time series analysis and probabilistic forecasting, which introduced some new (to me at least) methods which may be useful. I was talking after lunch on climate sensitivity, which seemed quite well attended. It seemed to go ok, there was a certain amount of scepticism but that was only to be expected. I find it amusing that on the one hand, people will argue that based on observational analyses, the GCMs have a worrying probability of excluding the truth (not just for sensitivity, although that's the poster child) but then when confronted with more observational data at the fringe of the ensemble, they insist that this doesn't really mean anything and the models aren't that bad after all! Anyway, it made for a lively afternoon. I'll probably post more about my talk later. My poster in this session was not until Wednesday. The Climate division organises things much better with posters on the same day as talks, which helps in facilitating discussion.

Tuesday morning was jules' newly invented "Past2Future" session, not to be confused with the EGU project Past4Future. Unfortunately due to a failure of scheduling it suffered from a clash with another paleo session, which must have hurt the attendance. But there were still quite a lot of people and there now seems to be much more interest in really using paleo modelling and data to improve and constrain future predictions - rather than just vaguely hinting at it, which has sometimes been the case. Then there was a big session on the response to orbital forcing, including a good medal lecture by Paillard. Jules' poster session (including our LGM reconstruction and related sensitivity estimate) was that evening. The poster sessions have been improved since we last attended, with much better lighting and the addition of moderate quantities of beer to add to the nasty wine, but we had to rush off a bit early to a concert I'd booked earlier.

Wed morning jules was speaking in a paleo modelling session, I was mostly sitting in the decadal prediction session. It still seems like there is very little skill in these methods, and in fact someone has just presented a simple statistical method that seems to generally outperform the initialised GCM systems. There is a "new" DePreSys system from the UKMO based on the newish model HadGEM2, but the presenter didn't mention that, let alone explain why, the forecast from the last one had fared so badly. Ed Hawkins showed that recent data lie outside the Smith et al forecast from 2007, which is a picture I was about to plot myself. He said he thought it might just be luck, but I need some convincing of that.

Later on Wednesday we had the data assimilation session. It's usually rather technical and I enjoy hearing about all the newest methods being devloped. Someone was talking about parameter estimation in a GCM, and came out with "and of course Annan did this ten years ago" citing a 2004 paper. Yes, that really is about as good as it gets for a minor scientist like me.

In the evening poster session we had two posters in different rooms, so jules and I took care of one each. Actually the sensitivity-related posters were only thinly attended (probably would have been better on Monday), so I also spent a fair bit of time upstairs in the paleo session. For some reason I'd not actually submitted my poster on the LGM temperature to any session. but we made the poster last week before realising this omission! However there were as always spaces due to withdrawal so it ended up being displayed on both Tuesday and Wednesday and attracted a surprising amount of attention. Then out the back of the conference centre and across the park for a huge Chinese banquet to celebrate the end of our official duties.

The EGU review

I've just spent a week in Vienna at the EGU. I enjoyed Vienna more than on my previous visit two years ago, partly due to jules finding a slightly better hotel and also some good restaurants.

Austria was its usual efficient and clean self. Since many of my foreign trips are to the UK, it's good to see that some parts of Europe can put on a show to rival Japan. On arrival, the first thing we did was find jules' Dad (who was also attending the meeting and who arrived at about the same time) and wander in to town for a look around and a massive Wiener schnitzel at the famous Figlmuller restaurant. In Japan, I'm usually one of the broader customers but here I felt positively skinny. However, after a few days of Viennese meals, I was well on my way to fitting in... I doubt many of the Japanese tourists coming here develop "Vienna syndrome", but rapid-onset diabetic syndrome must be a distinct possibility.

Unlike that slacker Connolley, I didn't have time to blog during the week, so here follows some highlights from my notes. For those who are interested in more details, abstracts can easily be found by searching the authors on the EGU site.

I started off on Monday morning in the CL40 session on model intercomparison (mostly technical stuff with no major insights), before moving on to CL12: monthly to decadal prediction. The most notable presentation here was Mojib Latif explaining that the recent unexpectedly strong warming in western Europe was due to a strengthening of the MOC, which he expected to decline and therefore somewhat ameliorate coming climate change in that region on the decadal time scale. After lunch, there was the session of most direct interest to me, CL20 (probabilistic climate prediction). There were a couple of interesting talks on principles and generalities. However, I was disappointed by some of the the specific applications. Were I in a more optimistic mood I'd probably portray it as a vigrous "zoo" of ideas but from where I was sitting it looked in one or two cases more like people floundering around not really knowing what to do, and as a result just doing "something". Of course my conclusion from this is that I should pursue _my_ ideas because they are clearly the most interesting and valuable ones around :-) Hey, I can dream.

I then went off to drown my sorrows in the free wine at the poster session. This year the CL (climate) division had decided to have all poster sessions in the early evening, with no talks scheduled to compete with them. This scheduling, combined with the wine, made the posters very well attended and the policy must be considered a success. However it also made it difficult for those presenting the posters to go and see other ones, especially as jules also had her poster some distance away at the same time so could not cover for me. Anyway, plenty of people had a look, a large poportion seemed to understand it and no-one tried to argue seriously for uniform priors. Unfortunately the main protagonists were not there so it's possible they will continue with their fingers-in-ears "la-la-la I can't hear you and anyway everyone else agrees with us" approach. Time will tell.

Tuesday morning started off with CL23 (solar and aerosols). There wasn't any "it's the sun wot dun it" stuff, fortunately. Palle said that planetary albedo had changed a lot (in both directions), but all the data seem pretty inconsistent and inconclusive. Someone (Philipona I think) gave another competing (or perhaps complementary) explanation for European warming, that the decline in aerosols had had a significant effect in this area. This "brightening" effect is now running out so the end result (less future warming) might be hard to discriminate fom Latif's theory.

CL28 was hockey stick stuff, in fact one made an appearance in Ray Bradley's excellent Hans Oeschger Medal Lecture. He talked about the various problems of proxy data and reconstructions pretty bluntly, I thought - including the divergence problem and dependence on a very few proxies with limited spatial coverage - and also pointed to some new data sources that might help in the future.

The SSP paleo session on Wed am was very interesting, with some people looking more at model simulations, and others analysing data. Didier Roche thinks that the oceanic dO18 distribution in warm paleoclimates might explain a significant part of the "gradient problem" - that (according to conventional analyses) the data suggest a strong polar warming but little or nothing in the tropics, whereas models give a much more uniform warming. Correcting for his model's estimated dO18 distibution made for a more even warming, more in line with what the models (and perhaps common sense) would suggest. There's plenty more work to be done in bringing models and data closer together in this field.

There was a CL division business meeting at lunchtime, so I rolled up for the promised free rolls (which were better than the stuff on sale, not that I have any complaints about the on-site catering). In amongst the minutiae that my reader won't be interested in, the subject of corporate sponsorship was raised. I didn't comment (others got there first) but think it would be hard to convince everyone that the benefits would outweigh the potential loss of independence.

In NL4.01 (nonlinear time series analysis) Anastasios Tsonis gave a fascinating talk about synchronicity and coupling in networks. He suggested that the sharp changes in global temperature trend were coincident with changes in behaviour of the climate system. He found this behaviour both in 20th century data, and also in a 21st century (A1B?) run of the NCAR model. However, before any sceptics get too excited, this latter result only explains changes in the small drift (perhaps 0.05C/decade) above and below the linear forced trend, not the entire warming itself, so it would be hard to claim that it explains the entire historical record. Nevertheless, it might help to explain the oddly sharp piecewise-linear behaviour observed over the 20th century. It's certainly always looked to me like natural variability probably played a bit of a role here (not that the IPCC have ever denied this, of course).

Overall, the NP (nonlinear processes) stuff seemed a little disappointing this year, with a higher proportion of fluff than usual. It's a bit sad when someone presents "novel method Y", a member of the audience asks "how does novel method Y compare to (well-known and widely used) method X", and the answer is "I don't know about X, so I can't answer that". There were also some boilerplate applications of routine ideas that had probably already been done to death a decade ago. Fortunately there were also some interesting ideas, but perhaps fewer than I've come to expect from these sessions. On the other hand it's important to balance the established and excellent speakers with opportunities for newcomers and the less eminent, and IMO the EGU generally does a pretty good job at that.

The relatively new ERE (Energy, Resources and the Environment) division had some interesting work. Faust from Munich Re was trying to tease out any relationship between SST and hurricanes, and seemed to think he had managed. I was just leaving to dive into to a parallel NP session as someone in the audience started ranting about insurance companies making too much money. Later I returned to hear about some attempts to calculate optimal or tolerable emissions pathways using simple coupled climate/economic models (Bruckner, Held). It turns out that "tolerable" is very much dependent on a large number of rather subjective decisions.

Thursday: CL18 Detection, modelling, impact. There wasn't much here that engaged me other than Douville saying that we still didn't know much about how the hydrological cycle would change, other than on the global scale. He seemed to say that the models don't really agree better than for the TAR, despite the AR4 wording. Right at the end of his talk he slipped in the comment that because demand is forecast to rise sharply, "reliable projections are urgently needed". I would have thought that a strong increase in demand implies that the need to to manage supply and demand more effectively can be confidently predicted (the real question is to what extent it should be centrally planned response versus left up to the magic of the market) irrespective of whether accurate projections of rainfall can ever be made. Indeed some people have been known to argue that the science is adequately settled inasmuch as its relevance to policy decisions is concerned, but I don't expect many climate scientists say that on their grant applications :-)

I didn't stay to hear Fred Singer waste 15 minutes of everyone else's time, but by all accounts he only made himself look like a fraud, so perhaps it was worth letting him have some rope. I also missed the Gregory-Rahmstorf cage fight, so rather than make it up I'll just refer to you Stoat.

At some point Geert Jan van Oldenborg gave his view on the European warmth, which I missed, but I found him in a poster session and asked him about it. His view is that the models are all wrong in having too thick a mixed layer in this region, and therefore in contrast to Latif and Philipona the strong warming will continue. The disagreement between them may not be quite as strong as I've made it sound, as the areas and time scales they considered are not all identical, but it still sounds like there could be the opportunity for a bet here!

Friday's program was pretty thin and so I'd arranged to spend much of it chatting to various people about some admin and science-related ideas. The poor Friday afternoon speakers drew the short straw (although perhaps not quite as short at those who didn't get to talk at all). In any case, the convenor's party was amazing and well worth staying for...

The EGU is back in Vienna again next year, at the same time. I wouldn't mind a change of venue but OTOH I can see why they keep going back.

At the airport, jules was a little ahead of me getting to the gate and asked if the exit seats were available. No, they were already full, she was told. As I approached, looming over the crowd of Japanese midgets and average-height Austrians she cheekily added "are they already full for him too?" 5 minutes later we had our new seat numbers :-) I'll fly Austrian Airlines again.

AGU: the science

OK, enough joking around. I was actually there for work, having received a generous invitation to present at the session on "Climate Sensitivity From Modeling, Current Observations, and Paleoclimate Data."

We've often thought about going to the AGU Fall Meeting, since while we are in Japan it's actually more convenient than the EGU, but never previously got round to it. The organisation is rather different to the EGU, and took a bit of getting used to. For some reason, the poster sessions are not clearly linked to their corresponding oral sessions (the code numbers indicate the section and the time, but eg there is no obvious link between U43A and U51B, despite them being posters and oral session on the same topic). They don't even arrange things in alphabetical order in the book. There is also no Climate section and very little Nonlinear Geophysics (the two most interesting sections in the EGU), but a whole lot of Paleoclimate.

Here are some highlights from my notes. Errors and omissions all mine, of course.

After a couple of paleoclimate talks first thing on Monday morning I ducked into a rather bizarre session entitled "Navigating a Career in the Geosciences: Strategies for Success." It started off with some important successful guy telling us how the rewards would come if we just put in enough hard work and perseverance and were prepared to take our chances. He told us his own life story of how there were not enough jobs in his PhD speciality, so he changed topics. Then he found funding hard to come by in his next field...so he changed again, becoming Director of NCAR. Why didn't we all think of that? The next presentation was a similar pep-talk from another senior professor about how great life was if only one persevered, but the last talk actually did have some useful content based on real research about what distinguishes the more successful from the less. But I'm hardly going to give away the secrets to you lot :-) One of the most important factors seemed to be the Y chromosome, which reliably distinguishes the "outstanding" from the merely "hard working" (Trix and Psenka, 2003). Later on that day, a session on extremes had Tom Knutson sounding rather sceptical about whether or not hurricanes were likely to increase much (and he thought it would take some time to see a signal in the data).

Tuesday morning started with a session on aerosols, not really my thing but I'd spotted both Schwartz and Chylek were presenting, so I turned up to listen. Steve Schwartz presented his sensitivity analysis, but admitted it had received a lot of criticism and he would not "bet the ranch" on it, which probably defused some potential criticisms (in the questions after someone did say that they thought his detrending was a dodgy step). Later on in the week I spoke to him in person, he said he'd just got our comment and hadn't yet planned his reply. Petr Chylek presented a somewhat similar paper from in the same special issue of JGR (guest editor: P Chylek) which I'll probably blog about in more detail later. I got the impression of a bit of a clique separate from mainstream climate science here. Someone in the audience actually asked where they might get the opposing point of view. It wasn't 100% clear what they meant by "opposing", but one good answer might be chapters 9 and 10 of the IPCC AR4 WG1, or indeed the whole book. There was also a session concerning use of the multimodel ensemble (ie the AR4 runs), which I am getting interested in. In fact there were a few sessions with this sort of flavour that during the week.

After 2 consecutive 10h days and fairly late nights, Wednesday morning had nothing much of interest so we had a lie-in (and tested the crappy hotel gym). The afternoon had some stuff on ocean tracers, including some adjustments to the ocean heat content data, and also estimates of ocean mixing based on various other tracers (tritium from bombs, helium from the mantle). This is something I've tried to point out to some climate sensitivity estimation people who claim that we can't say much about the ocean mixing rate (and thus heat uptake, which affects climate sensitivity estimates) because the temperature data are so uncertain. Even if the direct measurements of temperature are uncertain, we have other evidence about the mixing rate, which they studiously choose to ignore!

Thursday morning had some fun stuff on carbon sequestration, including various air capture schemes. I'm not really convinced that these make sense, but I've nothing against their consideration. Rather than harvesting and burying biomass, it might be simpler to just use it for energy in place of the fossil fuels. In the afternoon we had the exciting session on "Tipping points", which started off with a well-attended talk by Jim Hansen. He didn't actually talk about tipping points in much detail but argued for a rapid halt to coal use (unless sequestration-enabled).

Friday morning was our big thrill of the week, with presentations in the session on climate sensitivity. I was due to talk 2nd up, immediately after Jim Hansen, which (as is generally the case in these situations) I presumed would mean a mass exodus throughout my talk. I consoled myself with the thought that at least most would hear the start of it. Anyway, we arrived bright and early, checked that our presentations were set up and bagged good seats. At about 8:02 the convenor stood up, and said that she was very very sorry, but unfortunately Jim Hansen's presentation wasn't ready yet, so we would have to start with the 2nd presentation! Well at least that saved me another 15 minutes of nerves, and since Hansen's presentation was "in the pipeline" people didn't have time to run out for a coffee so I had a packed house. When initially invited, I'd really planned to steal jules' paleo work and talk about that, but then she also got a talking slot in the same session so I had to leave that in her hands and revamped the "Can we believe in high climate sensitivity" stuff instead. I had some fun reading a bit of Steven Goodman's Nature letter ("This technique would be a wonderful contribution to science were it not based on a patently fallacious argument, almost as old as probability itself") against a back-drop of quotes from the recent climate science literature all claiming that uniform priors represent a state of pure ignorance (this of course being the patently fallacious argument Goodman was ridiculing). Lest anyone think I was picking on anyone in particular, I quoted from 3 papers from largely different groups, plus an extract from the Nobel-winning consensus of 2500 climate scientists otherwise known as the IPCC AR4. However I had noticed that Myles Allen was supposed to be talking straight after me, and I was disappointed that he did not attend and defend his beliefs. I guess if I keep on turning up to the major conferences we can't continue to miss each other indefinitely. The rest of the session had a mix of old and new stuff, nothing too revolutionary. We wound down with a session on geoengineering which was fun.

Nameable names that I met for the first time (mostly very briefly) included, in no particular order: Steve Schwartz, Ray Pierrehumbert, Michael Tobis, Michael Mann and of course there were numerous others I've met before. The weather was great and SF is easily the nicest city I've visited in the USA (not that I'm very well travelled over there) so we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. On scientific grounds, I think I prefer the EGU, but maybe that is partly a matter of familiarity.

Nature goes open access

Not really, of course. But in what seems like an abrupt u-turn, they have started up a new open-access cash cow dumping ground for all those papers that can't get published in a "proper" journal. OK, of course I'm being a bit cynical here. Their paper charges seem comparable to PLoS One, which is the obvious (existing) competitor for their new venture. My cynicism is mostly based on Nature's previous well-documented hostility to such publishing models. It remains to be seen how many people are prepared to pay for the Nature name, and/or how this may affect the reputation of their existing journals.

The editorial policy of the new journal seems a bit confused. Up front, they say that the only criterion is that the paper should be "technically sound". However, in the more detailed guide for referees they also seem to use this phrase to refer to a pre-review check that the editor performs before sending out the paper to review (to a single reviewer). Anyway, the critical point is that they aren't making any judgment about the value of the paper, hoping instead that "Judgments about the importance of a paper will be made by the scientific community after publication."

It is interesting to compare and contrast with the EGU journals. These days, these are generally open access with the peer-review process also open (at least, the new journals seem to follow this system - there are some older journals which have not switched). The paper charges are rather lower, with a charge of only €24 per (small) page compared to $1350 per paper for PLoS and the same for the new Nature journal. Few papers are long enough for the former to exceed the latter. One slightly controversial (IMO) point with the EGU system is that this fee is charged at submission, not publication. This is logical enough from some respects but I would guess may cause some ill-feeling for those who feel their papers have been unfairly rejected. It certainly causes awkwardness with the admin in our institute justifying why we should pay a fee for the publication of what is a non-peer-reviewed document. Anyway, these EGU journals are designed as proper journals where papers are supposed to be interesting and significant, not merely technically sound. Several of them are relatively high impact within their fields.

The fat fee for the Nature papers is explicitly described as including "all expenses, including peer review". I wonder how they will respond to bills received from scientific peer-reviewers who may be increasingly tempted to claim their fair share of the fat profits that Nature expects to make on the back of their (currently) free labour. Of course that applies to all commercial publishing houses.

Another journal editor resigns!

Regular readers will have noticed that I follow the goings-on at EGU journals with some interest. So in that vein I'd like to point out there have been some recent changes at GMD. Perhaps most notably, our Dear Leader Dan Lunt has stepped down from the position of Chief Executive Editor, which he has held since the journal's inception about 6 years ago. Jules is the incoming chief. (Chief doesn't actually have any extra powers that I'm aware of, but is expected and trusted to take the lead on many decisions with or without discussion.) Bob Marsh has been added to the list of execs - this happened last year actually - having been a topical editor for some time. And...drum roll...I am no longer on the list of execs, though I'll remain a topical editor. All the execs feel that the journal (indeed all EGU journals) should be regarded as community assets rather than personal fiefdoms. So although it made sense to stick with a core team who shared a clear vision though the early years, we realised some time ago that it was time to bring in new ideas and let things evolve a bit. This feeling has been informally formalised though a rough plan to swap execs off the board on a biannual biennial every two year basis - Bob's induction was the start of this, staggered with my resignation to allow a bit of settling in time - and also rotate the chief exec position among the board members. I'm happy to leave the journal in the capable hands of the new board.

Incidentally, it is rumoured that the new Impact Factor for the journal will be approaching 6, up from 5 last year. That should put us even closer to the top of the list for journals in the geosciences! I'm sure that GMD, and all the other EGU journals, will continue to go from strength to strength as the open access movement continues to gain momentum.

EGU

In case anyone hadn't realised, I'm at the EGU. I doubt I'll be liveblogging, partly because there's no time and partly because the internet connection is overwhelmed by the number of attendees. There are brief reports on the Nature Climate Feedback which seem to be capturing the most newsworthy sciency bits. However there is no sign there of the biggest story which may be the apparent lurch towards scepticism in the higher echeons of the EGU council (I blogged earlier, but it now seems a little worse than I thought).

[jules' pics] smoking

At last the impossible has happened and the smoking situation in Vienna has improved. At restaurants and cafes it seems to be under control, and although many people smoke outside at restaurants we were not so troubled by the disgusting habit of people smoking walking around in the streets, that was so prevalent last year in San Francisco and Cambridge. The Viennese do however seem like hardened smokers in attitude. When I asked if the EGU cafe, which was an impenetrable smokey haze two years ago, was non-smoking, the waitress replied that unfortunately it was! Inside the EGU, the one disappointment was the EGU conveners' party.

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Posted By jules to jules' pics at 4/11/2011 10:05:00 PM

Multi-Stage Open Peer Review

You might have realised from jules' posts, though not from (the absence of) mine, but I'm back.

Here's a well-written account of the strengths of the EGU's open peer review system, from one of its strongest advocates (and Chair of the Publications Committee). The journals continue to grow steadily and (moderately) profitably, and their success can only be helped by policies such as this. It is worth noting (again) that the publication charges of the EGU journals, which make their papers freely available, are only comparable to those of for-profit journals which then sell on the papers at a huge additional profit. Many paywalled journals do offer open access, but only for a fat additional fee. It is hard to see how they add value to the publication process. Both approaches rely on unpaid reviewers to do the bulk of the (post-authoring) work.

The issue of open review is additional to the open publication, of course. Uli makes strong arguments for the EGU system, including that although the number of unsolicited comments seems low, it is far higher than you get in the traditional journals. However, writing "Comments on" is hardly the same thing as suggesting changes to the design of the figures or even asking the author to cite one's own papers more :-) I do like that he doesn't pull any punches in slagging off the silly Nature designed-to-fail "experiment".