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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

Yikes!

Could be painful... This has been updated!

Maybe not important enough for a skin graft ... yet ... but one can't help but look forward with some trepidation as to how pre-150ka may change!

cf

Lisiecki, L. E., and M. E. Raymo (2005), A Pliocene-Pleistocene stack of 57 globally distributed benthic d¹⁸O records, Paleoceanography, 20, PA1003, doi:10.1029/2004PA001071.

cf

 Lisiecki, L. E., and J. V. Stern (2016), Regional and global benthic δ18O stacks for the last glacial cycle, Paleoceanography, 31, doi:10.1002/2016PA003002. 

[jules' pics] Three Peaks Cyclocross

The Three Peaks Cyclocross - the bizarre sport of riding an unsuitable bicycle in an unsuitable place in unsuitable conditions - was this morning. James and I (and two other members of the Settle Wheelers) were marshalling at "Little Ingleborough", an important junction in the paths, at 630m. It wasn't cold. At least not until one had been stood in the howling wind on "Little Ingleborough" for an hour. We must have had it easier than some of the other marshals however, as Ingleborough is the first peak of the three so the field would be much more spread out later on. There were about 550 competitors with finish times ranging from 2h 58m to 6h 24m. 31 retired, mostly because their unsuitable bicycles were not suitable for the unsuitable conditions. At our relatively early stage in the race, we saw just one with what looked like a broken collar bone although a quite a few others that were still riding were bleeding from their shins.

The first two through finished the other way round. Not sure what happened as Rob Jebb was more than 2 minutes in the lead at this stage.
Rob Jebb


Paul Oldham






239 - that's a Settle Harrier (i.e. member of the Settle fell running club), Paul Lambert. Finished 122nd in 3h 56m.







woof!






606 - Joanne Jebb finished 502nd in 5h31mins

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 9/25/2016 06:09:00 PM

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: Fame at last

This is…..big:

And impeccably sourced

It’s not beyond criticism, actually – the timeline doesn’t resolve possible rapid changes in temperature, so the comparison of smoothed paleo reconstruction with modern observations could be considered a bit misleading (see tweets here for example). But this is a relatively minor quibble on what is really a very nice graphical representation.

BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: Assessing Paleoclimate Uncertainty

This was the title of a recent workshop held by the Past Earth Network (PEN) in Cambridge. PEN is one of 4 EPSRC-funded networks aiming to bring together mathematicians/statisticians and environmental scientists to help address problems in environmental change. While I wasn’t part of the PEN bid, I am acting as one of the co-leaders of one of the working groups (primarily interested in translating paleoclimate research to forecasting climate change). The workshop was organised by another two of the working groups but they were kind enough to invite me as one of the speakers. But before it kicked off on Wednesday morning, I had the chance to go for a row on Tuesday night as a sub in William’s boat, which was fun. Haven’t done a whole lot of rowing in the past 20 years but it’s apparently not something you forget too easily, at least not after doing it in my sleep at 7am for several years… The sessions were arranged with two speakers (nominally one climate scientist and one statistician) talking around a specific theme, such as parameter estimation/model tuning, spatio-temporal modelling, and time series analysis/tipping points. Some of these worked particularly well when both speakers were able to approach the same topic from different angles. There was quite a lot of overlap in scope between sessions with similar issues coming up in discussion throughout the meeting. For example, almost everyone was doing some sort of model-data comparison or synthesis, and it’s not always easy to decide how to do this. The first session on parameter estimation and uncertainty quantification was particularly good – it highlighted some practical and theoretical considerations that weren’t immediately obvious and which could materially affect research outputs. The session I was talking in was about data assimilation, which is of course very much focussed on methods for model-data synthesis. Perhaps a limitation from the statistics point of view is that it tends to take a very model-centric view of the world, in that we are fundamentally trying to construct a model-like state that resembles reality (born out of its basis in model initialisation and weather forecasting), rather than just using models as one tool in reconstructing reality. Some state of the art particle filtering ideas discussed by the other speaker are likely to be useful to me, so I found that a particularly interesting part. Cambridge was in the middle of a heatwave so it wasn’t ideal weather for sitting in a lecture room but as well as the rowing we had an afternoon of punting so it wasn’t all work and no play. Corpus Christi, where we didn’t stay, looking resplendent in the sunshine.