BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: Blueskies tour of the USA

The possibility of visiting NCAR has been at the back of our minds for some time, so when the rare honour of invitations to speak at the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco plopped into both of our inboxes around June, we swung into action. A couple of months at NCAR rounded off with an easy hop to SF seemed too good an opportunity to miss, so jules sent an email to Bette who leads the paleo group at NCAR to ask if she could host us. There was a bona-fide research reason for the visit, in that we are hoping to extend/supersede this work (and simultaneously improve on this reconstruction!) by blending together model simulations with proxy data records to create a complete reanalysis of the last deglaciation, 21ka to the present. There’s a forthcoming PMIP-supported plan for GCMs to simulate this entire period (the main instigators being next door in Leeds is a happy coincidence), but this may take a couple of years to actually happen, as 21 thousand years of simulation is a huge task for complex models. However, Bette is ahead of the pack having done this a few years ago with a slightly lower resolution model, so our plan was to use her model output (among other things) to work out how to do it in the meantime. The view from (near) NCAR Having started to arrange the visit, we then started fishing around for support and found out that NCAR (subsistence) and PEN (travel including AGU costs) were prepared to help us pay for the trip, for which we were and are very grateful. Then to top it off, another invitation arrived, for a workshop on "model dependence and sampling strategies in climate model ensemble prediction"…to be held at NCAR in early December, immediately prior to the AGU! I expect that the organiser Gab Abramowitz was really only inviting me out of politeness with no expectation that I’d fly there for a two day meeting at my own expense (they had no money for this) but of course we were now planning to be there so I was delighted to be able to accept. It then turned out that Reto Knutti was already at NCAR on a year’s sabbatical, and a couple of his ex/current students who were working in this area and are now also supervised by Gab visited briefly en route to the AGU along with Gab. We arrived in mid-October, though our luggage did not. Our departure from Leeds had been a bit disorganised, as the computer system there was down and all check-in/luggage drop had to be by done by hand. The resulting delay gave us a tighter than planned connection at Heathrow (including a terminal change) and therefore it wasn’t a great surprise that our checked baggage with hand-written tags didn’t turn up in Denver. So our first couple of days in Boulder were filled with emergency shopping (along with scrounging some free googlewear off our friend Rob who works there). Fortunately all our stuff turned up over the following week, albeit in 3 separate deliveries all in the middle of the night which did nothing for the jet lag. Most of the luggage consisted of two travelling bicycles (S&S couplers) which we had used some 19 years previously on my first visit to Boulder. That didn’t end so well – for us or the bikes (evidence) – when we met a Harley-Davidson on the wrong side of one of the twisty canyon roads, but fortunately there were no similar incidents this time around. Boulder is great for cycling around, being pretty much flat with a sunny dry climate and a wonderful network of bike/pedestrian paths many of which follow various creeks though and across town. Boulder creek and its path Our apartment was an easy distance for cycling (and sometimes running) to work, 6km direct (though with a 250m climb) with a range of longer options for more energetic days. NCAR also runs their own regular shuttle up to the lab and there’s good public transport in Boulder, so we didn’t plan to hire a car for our stay though thought we might do so for one or two weekend trips to the surrounding countryside and national parks. In fact in the end we forgot to pack our driving licenses so couldn’t do this, which didn’t turn out to be much of a hardship as there was enough to keep us busy in the vicinity of the town. Just outside the town, there are some huge hills to climb and some decent mountain biking. The indirect way to work… …and the really long way home! NCAR is really well set up for visiting, there were several offices set aside for the use of visitors and we were up and running with ID cards and computers and internet access etc in a couple of hours on our first day, which would not likely have happened at JAMSTEC, or anywhere else we’ve been before. There’s also a very good canteen which we made the most of, even including some breakfasts. NCAR seems to be on everyone’s itinerary – there were many seminars from short-term visitors, and it was quite a surprise to bump into someone we knew from Bristol who was also passing through. So just being there was a good opportunity to meet with a range of people, though in fact our main work on the deglaciation turned out to be largely self-contained. Snow usually appears around the middle of October in Boulder, but we were lucky to arrive during a particularly dry autumn and had a full month of warm sunny weather during which we made full use of Boulder’s various leisure opportunities. We quickly bought some cheap old MTB tyres from Community Cycles and enjoyed visits to Dowdy Draw, the West Magnolia Drive trail area, and Marshall Mesa. Somewhere on the trails We also climbed up most of the mountain roads – Magnolia Drive to Nederland, Flagstaff, through Jamestown to Rob’s place and finally up and down Lee Hill Drive. West Magnolia trails I also found a few of the local running groups and went out for a couple of rather gentle Sunday morning runs with the Boulder Roadrunners and more challenging runs with the Boulder Track Club who seemed to consist of quick to super-fast runners. Luckily the runs were basically out and back routes so I could watch them all zoom off into the distance and after turning round a bit early they would all zoom past me on the way back too. jules and I together joined the Trailrunners for the first hour of one of their monster mountain marathon days. We just went up Flagstaff but most of the rest went all the way to Bear Peak and back, about 24 miles with a lot of climbing. The work went well, though it’s far from finished and so we don’t have a lot to report yet. We  presented this poster at the AGU which summarised our research so far: In short, it looks like at a minimum the basic idea should succeed fine but it’s a bit early to say anything about what the overall result will look like, and there are plenty of opportunities for improving on the very simple method we used. It will also be very helpful to get some more PMIP simulations but we may have to wait some time for these, so there’s no great rush for the methodology but we will keep working on it as time allows. Towards the end of our visit, just about when we were starting to get a bit bored with sitting in an office and working on the deglaciation, we had to shift gears to prepare not only for the AGU meeting but also for the workshop on climate model ensembles. In all we had 4 presentations to give on entirely unrelated topics in a bare week (me talking twice, jules once, and a joint poster). I don’t think anything from the workshop is available on the web (it was a rather small and informal affair) but there are plans to write some sort of review paper. There was no real breakthrough but there was hopefully some shared understanding of the different ideas that people have come up with. I’ve also got a month to revise this manuscript, and now have a significant improvement to put in to it. Although the new idea didn’t arise directly at the meeting, having to give a presentation about it and field questions afterwards did provoke the inspiration. By this time the snow had arrived, giving a very different feel to the daily commute. We didn’t really have enough winter clothing and temperatures down to -20C (with a daily max of -10C) were a bit of a struggle, though it looked pretty when not actually snowing: A snowy ride Straight after the workshop we flew over to San Francisco for the AGU meeting, about which I’ll write separately. For now you can make do with the view from our hotel window (on the one sunny morning we had). We came back and had a couple of days in Boulder, just enough to empty our office and tidy up the apartment and pack all our stuff for the long haul back to the UK. No drama on that trip, and a bizarre lack of jet lag following our return, perhaps because it’s so peaceful and dark at night here in Settle that there’s really no excuse to stay awake. While we were in the USA, it seemed like there was some sort of election going on. The result didn’t go down well with most (perhaps all!) of the staff at NCAR. I hope the institute survives for other people to have as enjoyable and useful visits as we did!

It's colder in Boulder

Presently hunkered down at home awaiting the forthcoming -17C minimum temperature overnight, which is something I don't think I have experienced before. Possibly came close to it up a Japanese mountain once or twice. We've been very lucky with the weather for most of our trip, but it's certainly winter now!

At the start of December there is the annual “Colder Boulder” race, a counterpart to the “Bolder Boulder” in May that we've run a couple of times before. The December one is only 5k and has many fewer participants, allowing the event centre and finishing area to fit into an indoor arena which is probably a good idea given the season. In the event it was pretty comfortable, a bit chilly but bright and still. Biggest problem was the altitude, but the modest hills and numerous corners on the course also contributed to a slow run. Oh, and it was a good 100m too long too. 

Taking account of these factors, I was reasonably satisfied to duck under 20 mins (by a whole second) and jules was also relatively fast at 26:05. In fact we were both the fastest in our respective age categories, thanks mainly to the organisers' decision to classify by year rather than the more usual decade (meaning there were only about 10 runners in each category). We are hoping to reap the benefits of the altitude training when we return to sea level shortly!

“stop this ridiculous Brexit nonsense ever from happening”

How times have changed. It's hard to imagine anyone saying this on Any Questions 5 months ago and being met with strong applause. Is there finally some light at the end of the tunnel?

[jules' pics] Winter Wonderland

Yesterday it was cold, grey and snowing so we stayed at home a fought bitterly about climate sensitivity all day and then enjoyed the cultural experience of attending our Condominium Management Meeting. That was fun. Today it's back to business as usual, only the landscape has changed colour, and it is freezing cold outside instead of boiling hot.

NCAR




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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/18/2016 06:08:00 PM

[jules' pics] The probably actually last day of summer

If the forecasts are correct then summer ends today. So, we took the morning off and did an MTB trail near Boulder, called Dirty Bismark.  

It was a lovely ride and we finished it off by riding to the nearest pretentious cafe to NCAR where we enjoyed coffee and pastries. The only problem was that then we had to ride up the hill to NCAR, in the hot sun after already having done 2:30h of bone shaking cycling. 

 Strava trace here.

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/16/2016 10:08:00 PM

[jules' pics] Last days of summer

Summer isn't supposed to last this long in Boulder. Snow usually falls in October, but the first snow is expected tomorrow. Am very excited, as the temperature is max 26C today and expected to reach only 6C tomorrow. Anyway, forecasts seem to be easier in this part of the world, with tomorrow's precipitation already being predicted this time last week! So, to make the most of the dry weather, last Friday we cycled via Magnolia Drive to Nederland, stayed overnight in a luxury hotel, did a bit of mountain biking and then freewheeled down the hill home.

Naturally the adventure started at a pretentious Boulder cafe.

Packed lunch stop was near the top of the road section of Magnolia Drive

After which the views opened out


And the sky was very blue

Luxury hotel was the Boulder Creek Lodge, 1st of 1 hotel in Nederland!

Ate own weight in pizza

Mountain biking the next morning was tough on our rigid all-rounder bikes, while carrying overnight gear at even higher altitude than Boulder (2600m). But we made it round the West Magnolia loop and then had brunch at the conveniently located Sundance Cafe.

And then it was back down Magnolia Road (including just a couple of easy MTB trails).
The reason I am looking so happy in this pic is that the Magnolia Drive ride has been a long time coming. Nineteen years ago we came to Boulder for a couple of weeks on the way back from a conference in San Francisco with the idea of doing some cycling. One ride that James had planned was the Magnolia Drive dirt road. But, unfortunately, we got knocked off our bicycles by a motorbike on one of our first rides, on our way back from Ward, and that was the end of the cycling for that trip, although we got to experience lots of other interesting Boulder things, like ambulances, dentists, surgeons, hospitals, state troopers and lawyers.

No problems with traffic on this ride...

Strava traces here and here.

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/16/2016 09:39:00 PM

SuperMoon

For all the reader of this blog who was in cloud when the supermoon appeared.

It was super. Could see all the men, women and bunnies!

Apocalypse now?

Lots of people have asked about this paper (which I think is open access).

To cut a long story short, it's not silly - the authors are entirely respectable and the work is interesting - but I don't think it is really that credible in terms of overturning established consensus. In fact it looks to me like they've gone astray in a few ways which add up to provide plenty of reasons for doubting the result.

The underlying idea is interesting enough and I have no problem with it in principle. They looked at climate change over multiple glacial cycles, to estimate not only the climate sensitivity, but also tease out how much this varies with temperature. Their observed temperature record comes from a handful of long-term proxy records of sea surface temperature, just 14 in total, which do not give very good global coverage. So they start by calibrating these records to a global mean temperature by comparing the local (proxy location) to global temperature at the last glacial maximum as simulated by models. The LGM temperature change arising from their 14 proxy records scaled to global temperature is about 5C colder than pre-industrial. This is a fair bit colder than the 4C we got with 400 data points over both ocean and land. But not content with this, they then average it with the mean of the PMIP model simulations, which is 6.5C colder than PI, thus getting a cooling of almost 6C.

Edit: Thanks to an email from Axel, I've had a more careful read and the above is wrong. One estimate is the PMIP models scaled to match data ("proxy-based"), another is their LOVECLIM simulation scaled to match a different data set ("model-based").
 
It is probably defensible to use the PMIP models in this way as some sort of independent estimate of the LGM state, but surely it is inconsistent to not then also use the PMIP models to estimate the cimate sensitivity and/or its nonlinearity. Anyway, this cold LGM state feeds through into a high sensitivity. An important additional factor here is the nonlinearity which they diagnose by comparing temperature to net forcing throughout the time series. I think a fair bit of this nonlinearity relates to the very high interglacials which are at best poorly calibrated since they only calibrated the proxy records to a fully glacial state. Interglacials have much smaller global temperature signal compared to the present, with the regional differences being much more important, and it seems doubtful whether a single scaling applied to these 14 proxy records could represent the true relationship with adequate precision for their purposes.  In support of this, the last interglacial appears to have extremely high warmth in their calibrated proxy record of some 3C above pre-industrial, which I don't think is widely accepted. On the other hand, some nonlinearity is probably quite plausible, so let's press on. Using the "warm" sensitivity of 4.9C/doubling, they then generate a transient prediction, using a simple energy balance with the ocean heat uptake factor again taken directly from the CMIP models.

Disappointingly, their plot of the transient warming from 1880-2100 doesn't show the actual observations up to the present. It is hard to be precise from eyeballing a computer screen, but it looks to me that their new improved prediction is already way ahead of observations. It suggests a warming that first reaches 1C (relative to 1880) back in the early 1990s before Pinatubo, rebounding from that brief dip to reach about 1.5C by the present. HadCRUT4 shows rather less warming that this, with even the current extraordinary hot year (boosted by a strong El Nino) not reaching 1.2C on that anomaly scale. In my view failing to show, or discuss, this discrepancy is a major failing of the paper. If they think it can be explained by internal variability then they should have presented that discussion and I'm surprised the reviewers let them get away without it.

Edit: ok, here is a very quick and dirty attempt to show what their pic would have looked like with real temperatures on it:

Not a great graphic, I just scaled the hadcrut pic off here and tried to line it up with the authors' own axes, matching the baseline temps around the end of the 19th century.  As anticipated, recent years are well below their prediction, with 2016 just about reaching the CMIP mean.

Edit: Axel claims that internal variability can explain this discrepancy, but I don't believe it. The magnitude of decadal-scale internal variability is about 0.1C (Watanabe et al 2014 and Dai et al 2015) and this new forecast would be even hotter if it wasn't also hugely overestimating the response to volcanoes.

So, in summary, nice try, but I don't believe it, and I don't really think the authors do either.

[Blog post title inspired by the Mark Lynas quote which is not the authors' fault. Incidentally, it is disappointing to see journalists falling for the parasitic publishing scam in which "one of the most respected academic journals" cashes in on its name by setting up numerous sister journals which share some elements of the name but neither the editorial policy nor barriers to entry. "Science advances" is not Science and it's only been around for a year or so, nowhere near long enough to have any sort of reputation. But if journalists don't know the difference, scientists will happily pay the steep publication charge and reap the publicity benefits. Nature have been doing this for a few years now (eg Nature Communications) so it's hardly surprising Science have followed suit.]

Bigly and Brexit

I am Jack's complete lack of surprise, but at least we're trying to hit bottom. Late August 2015 I remarked to an American friend that if the US could elect Reagan in the 1980s then Trump could be elected in the 2010s. Unfortunately he laughed. But really it only hit home yesterday afternoon when I wrote to my Dad, "Let's hope that this time the Americans are less stupid than the British." I felt a deep sinking feeling that, for sure, Trump was going to win. Why? The Americans' one remaining small act of deference to the British, is to act just that little bit more stupid.

I wrote to someone a little while ago that if Brexit is the Apocalypse then Trump will be Armageddon. But I'm not so sure about that now. I'm hoping that this is the Dead Cat Bounce of the angry white man and that when such evil is exposed to the light of truth it will wither and die. Of course it is up to us to do the exposing to make sure that happens.

Some people are wittering about the death of democracy, but it is much worse than that - it is the death of reason (as in the Enlightenment) that actually matters. 

Very amused by Trump's speech in which he promised to follow Japan's lead and use concrete to solve all the problems. What you do is borrow and print a lot of money, and use it to buy concrete and employ companies controlled by the yakuza to build things that you do not need. The results are ugly and bad for the environment, but jolly good for employment. And the US has so much more space than Japan, it could keep this up for practically ever! The less amusing part was Trump's "reaching out" to everyone and promising to be nice to everyone who is nice to him. In my experience, people who claim to be "reaching out" will consider any form of constructive criticism as a direct attack. 

The internet suggests that pictures of cute cats are the answer, but I tried that for Brexit, and it didn't work. So, instead, here's some construction, which, curiously is occurring in extremely Democrat Boulder within currently Democrat Colorado... and of course it is happening for reasons of prosperity rather than politics. Not that this is necessarily the best thing either - I tend to think that if there is great growth somewhere, then somewhere else someone is being enslaved.

And is Bigly also going to become an actual word now that Brexit has become one?

[jules' pics] Autumn in Boulder County

Normally when in foreign, one can send emails to other continents and not expect a reply for a day. Not so today - all the Britishes are still awake, but not just to send me emails. They are waiting to see if the USA takes our crown of most idiot electorate evs. 

Had better supply some soothing pix.

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 11/08/2016 10:12:00 PM

BrexitShambles?

Did someone say BreakfastScrambles?

This is a Boulder Scramble. It contains Tofu!

And that is James with some eggs, potatoes and pancakes.

This is reason he is not getting fat: https://www.strava.com/activities/768025300 (for those who can't/won't click, that's 31km of running in the dust kicked up by some actually fast runners).

Brexishambles

So on Tuesday we will learn whether the USA is going to take the UK's crown as having the World's Most Stupid Electorate. Predictions are apparently quite close, with fivethirtyeight.com putting the odds around 2:1 at the time of writing. Colorado is a particularly close state, not that you'd know it from Boulder of course. I ran past a Trump poster on Sunday, and someone in the group I was with mentioned it was only the second one they had seen.

I've written about brexit before, and it's shocking to see how little progress has been made in the intervening 4+ months. Perhaps the most significant change is that brexit is now an official word in the Collins English dictionary, so I can use it without embarassment (I mean, without embarassment about the word - embarassment about the shambles itself is less easily cast aside).

Apart from that, we've got the unedifying and dangerous spectacle of those who called for the sovereignty of British Parliament, now denouncing this sovereignty as anti-democratic - and worse, labelling judges who upheld it with the chilling Nazi-era “Enemies of the people” slogan.

Great to see the Telegraph get in on the act too, patriotic poppy and all. And rather than supporting the independence of the judiciary, the govt response was to issue mealy-mouthed evasions about the importance of  a free press. So much for the so-called Party of Law and Order.

It's blatantly obvious that the reason May doesn't want to reveal her cunning plan to parliament is that there is no plan. What is more puzzling is how those who are supposed to be among the brightest and best minds in the country haven't yet worked out the problem, which is quite simply that there is no “good brexit”; there is no sensible way though the process of cutting ourselves off from our largest trading partners and source of much-needed labour. Yet the Three Brexiteers are still blethering on with their idiot fantasies about how we can pick and choose exactly what we want from the EU27, and they will just roll over and accept it. Economics isn't everything and no doubt there are quite a number of xenophobes who would think a recession is a price well worth paying to reduce the number of young europeans coming here, studying in our universities and/or working and paying taxes. What's more troublesome from my own point of view is the growth of anti-rational populism fed by deliberately malicious and dishonest politicians and the media.

Of course the question is not even whether brexit is a good idea or not. Brexit isn't an idea at all, it's an incoherent mishmash of contradictory ideas, connected only in that they involve some change from the status quo. The vote for brexit is the logical equivalent of voting to go out for dinner - we might all agree that my cooking isn't great but if one person thinks they've been promised a curry, another is wanting to go to a French restaurant and a third is expecting fish and chips - and all have been promised that it will be completely free, in fact they'll be paid to eat it - then there is likely to be disappointment and disagreement as a result. As the chant goes: “What do we want? Well if you didn't know why did you vote leave?” At least, that's how it should go.

Jules says (quite rightly) that I shouldn't just criticise without coming up with a solution. What would I do? Well, nothing has change my previous opinion that the only reasonable solution is to abandon the process. This will take a lot of backtracking now that May has backed herself into a corner so firmly, but the reality of the situation is that there is no plausible brexit that will actually satisfy the British public, and all options for change are substantially worse than the status quo in basically all aspects. Will this actually happen? I don't know, the betting odds give about 70% probability to article 50 being invoked next year, 30% probability to 2018 or later or not at all.

Still, at least we can all rely on the BBC to do its patriotic duty and bend over backwards when some reactionary bigot demands that they play the national anthem at every opportunity:

More Breakfast Success

As I've said before, although maybe not on this blog, the only actual difference between peoples the world over is what they eat for breakfast. In the USA a lot of different things are available for breakfast, because the population of the USA is almost entirely immigrant, and from all different parts of the world. On Sunday, James had something with beans in and I had something called "Dill eggs". Still don't really know what that was,. But it was delicious. 

Sampled the NCAR cafeteria breakfast this morning. Although most of the elements seemed familiar, it was a cultural minefield. I thought an egg on toast might be nice. It turned out that the scrambled eggs were an omelette, the fried eggs came in 3 choices none of which I understood, there were about six varieties of toast to choose from rattled off to quickly for me to catch them all, and also something called biscuits that looked like a scone to me. But of course being well versed in inter-cultural quick thinking of a gastronomic nature, I made a success of breakfast and ended up with an egg "over-easy" (don't know what that means but it was cooked freshly to order!) with sour dough toast and butter. yum yum. I ate it too fast to take a picture.

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"On Saturday 8th October Cartmel Quakers held a silent prayer vigil in Grange-over-Sands as part of the national Climate Coalition ‘Speak Up’ Week of Action"

Making a success of BREakfast

There are of course many opinions as to what constitutes a successful BREXIT breakfast, but the USA has really found the key factor, which is to make it available until 3pm. Some might say it really isn't breakfast at all...

[jules' pics] BlueSkies, GreenTrees, YellowGrass

The BlueSkiesResearch is going awfully well.


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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 10/26/2016 06:05:00 PM

Where in Google Map?

Think I've done this before a few times. The pic is perhaps a bit less obvious than it might have been, but still there are no prizes for guessing where we are (again), preparing to do a bit of Blue Skies Research:

The more important question, for which a prize is definitely appropriate is...where is our luggage? At Leeds Airport the sheep powering the treadmill had gone on strike so all computers were down and our baggage tags were written down by hand. That added to the delay on the flight down to Heathrow topped off with terminal change there left us not too surprised when nothing came off the carousel at Denver. Of course this had to be the one trip where we didn't get round to putting a bit of emergency clothing in our carry-on bags...but luckily our friend Rob managed to score some free Googlewear for us. One bag containing most of a bicycle has appeared so far (via a disgruntled courier hammering on our door at 4:30 am) but no signs of the other two bags with another bicycle and all our clothes...

[jules' pics] via Dent

Ever since we moved to Settle 2 years ago we have been meaning to cycle to somewhere, via Dent. Last time we visited Dent by bicycle was probably the mid 1990s, and all I really remember is a heron flying alongside us down the narrow valley in the cloud and rain. These days we like to think we don't have to do the ride in the rain, which is probably why it has taken to long to get around to it. Here's the trace on Strava.

First Ribblesdale to Ribblehead viaduct.

Then up and down to Dent viaduct.

All the tea shops shut in Dent so brushed the dust off our feet and carried on to Kirkby Lonsdale via Barbondale

After a delicious luncheon, back to Settle via nowhere in particular.


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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 9/30/2016 03:06:00 PM

[jules' pics] Via Berkshire

Uncle In Law expects to see pictures of our recent visit down south. Problem is I was really in transit from the Holiday Inn Express at Munich Airport where I'd attended an exciting and somewhat sleepless (aeroplanes are noisy!) meeting so wasn't really concentrating on picture taking.

The inside of one of the many churches in Wallingford was atmospheric.



But apart from that all I really have are some portraits of the locals




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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 9/30/2016 02:53:00 PM