No Comment(s)

The IPCC promises that

All written expert, and government review comments will be made available to reviewers on request during the review process and will be retained in an open archive in a location determined by the IPCC Secretariat on completion of the Report for a period of at least five years.

And sure enough, when I asked (many months ago) for the comments on the first drafts of the chapters I was interested in, they arrived not too long after. Rather oddly, they were sent via snail mail as a heap of dead tree which as well as being costly and environmentally-unfriendly, also made searching through them rather awkward. Of course, the comments had all been submitted electronically (this was the IPCC's requirement, in fact), and presumably collated and forwarded to the relevant IPCC authors themselves in that format, so it is hard to see any useful purpose for this printing out of the electronic document. A recent US climate science report made the comments freely available to all as a pdf (I can't remember exactly what it was, and I didn't wade through much of it). In the 21st century it seems reasonable to hope that other major scientific institutions would adopt similarly efficient procedures. But I suppose there was no real harm done except perhaps to my impression of the IPCC. And to a few trees.

Fast forward on to the present, and I wanted to look at the comments on the 2nd draft. As I mentioned here, there were some significant changes from 2nd draft to final version, and I wanted to see (inter alia) who other than myself had objected to the previous version. I also think that the authors provide answers to the comments (although I asked about this and received no reply), and I wanted to see how they answered (and in some cases, justified ignoring) mine.

The reply to my email from Melinda Tignor at the IPCC secretariat was:

These expert and government review comments and responses are archived at and available from the Environmental Science and Public Policy Archives at Harvard University.

and there followed a address (including email, I should be thankful for small mercies) for the Curator, George Clark

So I emailed him to ask for the comments.

This is his reply in full:

Dear Mr. Annan,

Thanks for contacting Harvard's Environmental Science and Public Policy Archives. I am the Archives' curator. I've shifted your email message over to my question tracking queue so that I may keep better track of your request. We are undergoing a move in stages over the summer, so please bear with us as we work out new procedures for materials access. Currently, these materials are available in person by appointment within the hours of 10am - 4:45pm weekdays at Littauer Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

At some point, service will switch to the nearby Phillips Reading Room at Widener Library, but in either case, please let me know your desired time to visit (no later than one week prior) so that I can make sure the materials will be ready for you.

I will be away from the office June 21-July 5, so the materials will not be available during that date range.

Please note that I have the material only in print form. If it is impossible for you to visit the archives, I can provide a photocopy of up to 100 pages for research purposes only (not republication) for a fee of $34 plus 40 cents per page. Copyright of the material resides with its authors.

It may be possible for you to hire a research assistant locally to look over the materials if that would be helpful in selecting materials of most interest. I can recommend someone if you like.

Please let me know of any questions you may have.

So I can either make an appointment and turn up in person - on the other side of the world, remember - or can try to pay someone to search through the paper archive to find the particular pages I might be interested in (up to a maximum of 100) and pay again for them to copy them and post them over.

You really couldn't make it up.

Full dislosure - I've seen this, which is what prompted me to get round to it right now.

One comment in particular is worth stealing from, for those who dare not follow the link:

From the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

PROSSER: But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months!

ARTHUR: Yes, well, as soon as I heard, I went straight round to see them. You hadn’t gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody.

PROSSER: The plans were on display—

ARTHUR: On display? I had to go down to the cellar to find them!

PROSSER: That’s the display department!

ARTHUR: With a flashlight.

PROSSER: The lights had probably gone out.

ARTHUR: So had the stairs.

PROSSER: But you found the notice, didn’t you?

ARTHUR: Yes, I did. It was "on display" in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying, "Beware of the Leopard."

I should perhaps point out, before others start to argue that at least the IPCC aren't quite that bad, that H2G2 was intended as a comedy. The IPCC isn't.

I hope that other responsible climate scientists will also object to this obstructive bureaucratic pettifogging, which in my opinion shows the IPCC in a very poor light.

McJobs

So McDonald's is trying to get the OED to change its definition of a McJob.

Apparently, the existing OED definition is

"an unstimulating low-paid job with few prospects".

Mirriam-Webster had

"low-paying and dead-end work"

I'm not a huge fan of their food, but agree with McDonald's - it's an unreasonable slur to link their name with overworked underpaid slave labour with no prospects.

After all, we already have a perfectly good word for this: a post-doc.

High-Tech Japanese Super Door�

Via Japan Probe, I found this video of a high-tech door which only opens to the width and height of those passing through it.




As the proud owner of multiple scars and bruises on my scalp, I'd settle for a normal door that opens to the height of those passing through it :-)

Weekend in Tokyo

Well, Tokyo is stretching things a bit - we actually started our walk in neighbouring Yamanashi-ken, and slept with our heads in Saitama-ken. But most of the weekend was spent inside the city boundaries.

We've been up Kumotoriyama before - at 2017m high, Tokyo's highest point - but last time it was cloudy and even raining for most of the second day which made the long ridge walk down to Okutama a bit tedious. This time we had a glorious Sunday with fabulous views across the countryside.



Of course Fuji-san was the most striking landmark, but at this time of year there are also some flowers to enjoy (wild azaleas here).



The trees were also looking bright with their new foliage just emerging.



There were a lot of walkers about, and at one open space they all pulled out plastic bags and fell upon the wild flora with glee. They were picking young shoots of bracken leaves, which are commonly eaten as "sansai" (mountain vegetables), eg sansai soba. It's a national park area and there are notices telling people not to pick the plants but I suppose one can't complain about such a weed being harvested (it's far from endangered). Anyway, it will have its revenge in giving them all stomach cancer. Come to think of it, the yamagoya was selling books on edible mushrooms too.

Due to the stupidly early breakfast (raw egg at 5am anyone?) we got down to Okutama in plenty of time for a soak in the local onsen before getting the train home.

RIP Prometheus

No doubt Eli and the mice will be celebrating at the news. It had appeared for some time that RPJr's his blog was on the wane, attracting little more than a handful of denialist ditto-heads, and now he's decided to knock it on the head. Personally, I found much of Roger's blogging to be interesting and thought-provoking, although I'm a bit baffled by some of the clangers he dropped (eg his bizarre cheerleading of air capture of CO2, and his lame attempt to discredit Hansen's 1988 forecast). Many of his comments on the politicisation of climate science in general, and the hurricane wars in particular, were well worth reading. He bowed out in some style with a spectacular brain-fart that (along with a poorly-judged article on the hockey stick written by von Storch and Zorita) effectively ensured the Nature "climate feedback" blog was still-born (hopefully it will recover once they get their act together).

Guilt Trip

Some attendees at the recent EGU meeting spent an evening getting worked up over the environmental cost of the event. Here's a report of the debate. I don't pretend to have any really good answers - large meetings are probably relatively efficient, in the sense that an attendee gets to meet a whole lot of people in a single trip (potential interactions increase as n²), although it does end up being a bit superficial at times. Jules and I also try to combine some sort of holiday with any trip we take to Europe - this time, her Dad also attended the meeting, and last time I went (2 years ago), my parents joined us in Vienna. So at least we rarely fly outside of work, despite being temporarily the far side of the world from all of our relatives.

I won't deny that travel is a bit of a perk of the job (although too much is a pain). If we didn't get to leave our cubicles every so often, probably even fewer people would be prepared to do the job. (Not sure if that would be a good or a bad thing.) As I said previously, if the price of travel was higher, we would probably adjust our methods somewhat, but we have to use our limited budgets efficiently. It's worse than that, actually - Japanese rules mandate that the salary bill of research institutes are capped, so currently any spare funding has to be spent on things like foreign travel and umbrella dryers, rather than paying a real human to do some real work. I'm not joking about umbrella dryers, either.

I'm off to Belgium in a couple of weeks. Oops.

"Wherever possible"

First the executive summary, since time is short:

If you are a UK voter and have any interest in the future of cycling in the UK, go here, print out and sign the petition and send it off urgently to arrive by Thursday. Despite what the page says, you don't have to be a Cambridge resident (and I'm sure that Stoat will have already done it).

Now the longer version:

Many UK-based cyclists are extremely unhappy about the proposed revision to the Highway Code - for non-UK residents, this is an official booklet which, while not legally binding, is generally considered an authoritative guide to proper behaviour on the roads. In particular, failure to follow the Code can be used as evidence in court to establish liability.

The really problematic bit in the new proposal is the advice with respect to cycle facilities (or farcilities as they are popularly known). Every experienced and competent cyclist will realise that these are generally shoddily designed and built, inadequately maintained, inconvenient and often downright dangerous. A selection of the Best of British can be found here and also here. The proposed highway code says that cyclists should use these farcilities "wherever possible". That is, any failure to use them can be used as evidence against cyclists in establishing liability if they are involved in a crash. Previously, the advice was to use the facilities where practicable - a clearly weaker level of instruction that would be much easier to defend agains in the general case where the cycle lane was inconvenient, circuitous, slow and dangerous. But if the proposal goes through, the only defence would be that it is actually impossible to use the facility. That might be possible in some of the most extreme cases, but isn't generally the case.

This proposal would effectively strip every cyclist of legal protection on many of Britain's roads.

There is more information here, and an on-line petition here.

Patrick Moore blames women for 'banal' TV

As reported on the news (and he was on the radio saying much the same things). Personally, I'm sure that men are fully capable of making banal TV without a woman's touch. And if it wasn't banal, no-one would watch it anyway.

Jules had the pleasure of meeting Sir Patrick, when she was doing her PhD at the IOA. Moore was there one day to interview some scientist or other, along with camera crew. She wasn't involved, but happened to be in the kitchen area with a (female) friend making themselves a cup of tea just as he was leaving. He passed them with a cheery "Thanks for the lunch, girls". For what else could a 20-something female in an astronomy institute be, other than a waitress/cook/etc?

I shouldn't be too hard on someone who was born in the 1920s. But unless we want to return to them, there seems little reason to give much weight to his pronouncements on social change!

A better class of busker

As spotted on the streets of Shibuya yesterday:

Global Warming index to be launched?

Via Stoat, I find this interesting article:

The first Global Warming index is to be launched this week by UBS, allowing businesses most affected by the uncertainty of climate change – from ice-cream salesmen to makers of winter coats – to hedge their profits against it in a simple and transparent fashion.

Retail and institutional investors will also be able to buy exposure to, or short sell, the index in much the same way they would with the FTSE or Dow Jones stock indices. If temperatures rise, so will the value of the index.

So far so good. However, it seems that the index is some composite of existing localised degree-day indices that they already trade in - these are relevant indicators of temperature (probably more useful to farmers and energy traders than mean temperature) but not directly a measure of mean temperature (or max, or min). The index will also be entirely based on US data, initially at least. So it will take a little work to relate this to the descriptions of temperature change that most climate research is couched in (arguably we should be talking about degree-days if that is what the users want...). Despite these limitations, I'd be very interested to see more details of exactly how the index is defined, over what time scale the options are tradable and what prices they fetch.

There's also some unfortunate fluff in the article, such as:

“Global warming has created much more volatility in temperatures and weather conditions, which has led to increased liquidity in the weather derivatives market,” Mr Murisic said.

I don't know if there is any scientific basis for the first half of that sentence, and I bet increased liquidity has much more to do with economics etc (general growth, awareness of the products, changes in business practice) than climate change.

The article finishes with:

UBS hopes the index will turn the complex business of investing in the world’s weather into a popular asset class, one that is entirely uncorrelated with returns in other assets such as stocks or bonds.

but of course we all know that global warming is going to cause a catastrophic global recession so the correlation may not be as weak as they hope :-) (why am I not surprised that the Indescribablyoverhyped was the top google hit on my search terms?)

The punter's verdict: worth a look.