[jules' pics] AGU review, the ADD version.

Drink Bluebottles. Eat chockie. Don't forget your hearts. Dangerously multitask coffee and phone. If brain overloads with exciting science, cease multi-tasking immediately and prop self against wall, where it is safe to engage in deep thought. It is of the utmost importance that men spend much more time proclaiming codswallop to bemused women than the reverse. Help. Help. Geeekkks! Geeekks! As far as the eye can see! Recuperate by sampling best pizza in San Francisco (Noisy and not as good as Kamakura's finest, let alone Tokyo's.)

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/17/2012 09:34:00 PM

Japanese elections: Govt wins

From the department of complete lack of surprises: the LDP has apparently won the Japanese election. It seems that 3 years of DPJ rule was more than enough, and the people want the real Govt back again. The new PM is one of the dismal failures who briefly led the country about 6 years ago, back for another bite at the cherry. But don't worry, if you don't like this leader, there'll be another one along soon enough.

Main manifesto promises are: even more concreting over the countryside, and increased patriotism. Let's beautiful Japan!

The AGU review 2012

Sorry for the delay, but I was too busy having fun at the AGU to blog about it. For some reason, we had no real jet lag at all on our trip, either while over there or following our return to Japan. I don't really have much of a clue why it sometimes works out like that, but it's nice when it does. Also, we've really sorted out the food situation in SF. There are lots of good sandwich shops for lunch, which is a much better option than trying to fight your way in and out of the overcrowded restaurants during the lunch break. Of course the huge range of restaurants is good for dinner, even though one unexpected side-effect of discovering possibly the best pizza in Tokyo is that the best pizza in SF is not so special any more. San Francisco is a good city for a huge conference like the AGU. The weather was mostly nice this year, apart from the fun run which happened to be scheduled just perfectly for the few hours in the week when it absolutely tipped down.

The scientific program seemed better than usual, too. First day, I started off with some last millennium stuff. The convenors had generously invited me to talk about this work, but I thought it would be appropriate to decline on the grounds that I hadn't done anything new since I talked about it at a very similar session (albeit with different convenors) the previous year! There was actually someone doing rather similar data-assimilation-y things, which was interesting. I'm not sure if and when I'll have time to work on this again. I think jules was learning about ice sheets at the same time.

I had a walk round the posters after lunch. This is still a bit of a disaster area as far as I'm concerned. The "author in attendance" period is supposed to be a self-selected hour within a 4h:20 time window, so it's almost impossible to meet anyone without prior arrangement. At the similarly vast (well, half as big) annual EGU meeting, there is a 90 minute early evening slot where - at least within the Climate division - there are no oral presentations scheduled at all, so all the poster authors are present together and it's an excellent opportunity for (wine-enhanced) discussion and mixing.

Last session on Monday was on atmospheric feedbacks, which in practice included climate sensitivity stuff. There was a rather silly presentation on "changing climate sensitivity" which IMO just pointed to the inappropriateness of trying to analyse all historical climate changes as if they were a response to an imposed CO2 forcing, which of course they were not. The atmos feedbacks continued into the following morning, after which I went to the "communicating climate science" session. That was the expected knockabout stuff, though unfortunately Dan Kahan (who would probably have had the most scholarly perspective) withdrew. Naomi Oreskes talked about her theory of "erring on the side of least drama" which I didn't find completely convincing. Now I've seen the paper, her analyses of scientific underestimation seem rather less compelling than she made it sound in the talk. I should come back to this in a later post. Jules tried to get into the Charney Lecture, but the room was too full. However, it is available on-line. I left a bit early in the afternoon, as we had an important dinner date with some lobster, quail, lamb, steak and cheese. There may be Tokyo restaurants to match Gary Danko, but not at that price.

Wednesday morning was the not-so-much-fun run. Actually, it wasn't that bad running in the rain for once - but I suspect the novelty would quickly wear off - and least it wasn't all that cold. Drying off back at the hotel caused us to miss the start of the two morning Uncertainty Quantification sessions, which was a bit of a shame as this had several interesting-looking talks and is not available on video. After lunch I went to Stephan Lewandowsky's "Construing Uncertainty" which was more social than hard science, including Oreskes again. Then jules was talking in the last UQ session, on the use of paleoclimate simulations for testing and validating models. Lenny Smith also gave a very good and thought-provoking talk as always. This meant I missed the Lorenz lecture, given by Eugenia Kalnay, but I knew it was being videoed, and have watched it subsequently. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the theory and practice of how prediction is done in highly complex and nonlinear systems such as weather forecasting. (The preceding lecture included in the same video may not be so widely interesting.)

Charles Jackson also talked in one of the UQ sessions, and that night we went out to dinner with him (and two Japanese colleagues) afterwards at the Thirsty Bear. Once the shouty early-evening crowd have moved on, it's a surprisingly civilised place for good pub grub.

Thursday morning was a bit thin in the program, and I believe we might have had a bit of a lie-in after the night before :-) The afternoon had a big paleoclimate session, with several people each talking about their own latest core and its interpretation (or so it seemed to me), and some broader syntheses including my presentation on the Last Glacial Maximum. I will also blog about this in more detail, after doing what I hope will be some final revision to the paper.

After a fairly packed week, (and contrary to the previous year) Friday was almost a complete blank. Or at least it would have been, had Lewandowsky et al not conveniently arranged an off-site discussion meeting which followed up on their "construing uncertainty" session. I'm always a bit dubious of these talking shops, and I'm not sure exactly how much real progress was made, but it was surprisingly fun and interesting, and it was good to have the chance to discuss and expand on ideas in a much more flexible and informal format than the tightly scheduled AGU sessions. Attendees included a large number of the usual blogging suspects (Rabett, Nielsen-Gammon, Sceptical Science, Easterbrook, Baer, and probably one or two more I've forgotten), though Michael Tobis was a surprising absentee. One point of interest was the broad consensus among the climate scientists present that things like Hurricane Sandy and other extreme events were not the most sound basis for convincing people about the reality and/or impact of climate change. Although it's plausible that many extremes will get more extreme, the evidence (both theoretical and observational) for many specific examples (such as, changes in the frequency and size of storms hitting NY) is not really that solid yet.

It was noticeable how much quieter the main conference centre was by the time we returned to it after lunch. Not many of the participants stay to the bitter end. We spent the afternoon in a cryosphere session. I suppose it is well-known within the field, but it was interesting to see to what extent the ice sheets vary even within the supposedly "quasi-equilibrium" state of the Last Glacial Maximum. I doubt it has major effects on broad scales, but certainly helps explain how some people can find historical evidence of vegetation in locations where the models have big fat ice sheets :-) (This issue only arises close to the the edge of the big fat ice sheets, to be fair.)

And this year, after the weekend of travel back home, we did make it back in time for the carols in Yokohama, followed with some mince pies that I made earlier.

There's a lot of good stuff available as video on demand. We are slowly working through it in idle moments. Maybe it's not quite as good as being there, but it's a lot cheaper and involves a lot fewer air miles. Jules' plan of world domination through the VGU (Virtual...) is getting closer year by year.

The IPCC report in full, in brief

Andy Revkin seems to be excitedly pointing to a Leak of IPCC Drafts.

Frankly, I'm surprised it took so long. And since the review period is over and the next round of revision is probably already underway, it doesn't seem particularly useful or important. For that matter, the drafts were freely available to anyone who wanted to sign up to review them anyway. Revkin think this leak means some "new process" is needed, but I don't see any real arguments presented.

FWIW, I thought the second order draft (at least, the bits I looked at) was mostly pretty reasonable, certainly improved a lot on the first draft.  One thing I do find a bit unsatisfactory and unecessarily obstructive about the process is that there is no way of seeing replies to the first set of review comments, so the system is rather crippled compared to a normal peer-review process where reviewers and authors can have a proper exchange of views. This has a real impact when comments appear to be ignored - the reviewer has no way of knowing if the authors' counter-argument is strong, weak, or whether the lack of action was simply an accident. The latter happened this time, in fact, but it took a private email to a relevant IPCC author to find that out. They assured me that the small oversight would be fixed for the final version.

[jules' pics] Tour de San Francisco #2 - Let's Art!

San Francisco has a modern art museum. It is important not to view modern art on an empty stomach. Luckily, art-priced luncheon is available on the top floor. Note the brilliant Mondrian cake. Like a multi-floored Japanese department store, starting at the top and working down is a good tactic, as the whole experience is then a slow run for the door. But after a while one may start to confuse up and down... Apparently this one is about uncertainty, and since this is wot we work on, I had to take a picture. Some staved off madness by retreating into familiar worlds. James' trousers were admired several times!

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/13/2012 06:22:00 PM

[jules' pics] Tour de San Francisco #1

Unfortunately I did not remain at the chocolate sundae shop all week, while James went to hang out with the spods at the AGU. Although... perhaps I could become one of those ladies who lunch eat chocolate... Instead we left Ghiradelli behind... and visited some old boats from the motherland... Artistic misty golden gate bridge with posing gull was the reward for making it to the end of the pier... The walk back to our hotel was quite interesting. Really ought to have taken more pictures. We did, however, have the honour of being flashed by a street photographer. Is this really an advert for Dropbox? Dinner was in Chinatown. I didn't previoulsy know that the temples are built in the upper stories. Sorry if these pictures are awful. Work has given me a new MacBookPro and it makes all my photos look phenomenal. Hopefully some discernment will return with practice.

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/11/2012 03:47:00 PM

How to have fun in San Francisco

I've been remiss in blogging, the AGU has been lots of fun so far but I've not had spare time or energy to write about it. It seems to improve the more we attend, as we get better accustomed to the sessions and the city. Still not convinced it is quite as fun as the EGU, but it's well worth attending. Especially assuming Ben Sanderson's calculations are correct, the energy cost of the flights over here is only equivalent to a handful of model runs, so by coming here instead of working we are helping to save the planet :-)

Unfortunately it was too wet this morning to take cameras, so you'lll have to take our word for it, but we did the AGU 5k fun run this morning. The weather was not exactly monsoon quality, but still quite wet enough. My garmin had trouble seeing the satellites and recorded an extra 140m on the 5k course - I don't know if that is correct or not, but my time (and also jules') was certainly slow enough, at least a minute outside our rough goals though jules was still second in her age group. Mind you, we were carrying a few extra pounds of rainwater in our shoes. And delicious though it was, the previous night's dinner in Restaurant Gary Danko might not have been the ideal preparation for a dawn race. Hopefully I'll find time in the next couple of days to enjoy a sunnier morning jog along the Embarcadero. (Ah, based on a quick glance at the previous year's results, it seems that several people who did both events were about a minute slower this time too, so we needn't be too disappointed.)

Rumour has it there's an exciting talk at 4pm tomorrow in one of the paleoclimate sessions. I'll try to be there...

Living on the edge

Following the spate of falling-off-the-seat incidents and associated legal action which has tied up the San Francisco court system for months, all dangerous restaurant seating now comes equipped with safety gear and warning signs. Fortunately, I got through the meal unscathed without so much as a wobble let alone a full-scale tumble.

(This post was brought to you by the Anchor Steam brewery.)

Typical San Francisco restaurant

Not as loud as cicada, but much louder than the same number of Japanese people in the same space. Of course being able to hear others is unimportant to Americans psyche as they only need hear their own voices in order to feel normal - hearing yourself shout is just about still possible with 90 decibels background.

Location:4th St,San Francisco,United States

[jules' pics] Choclit

How much fossil fuel would you burn for a chocolate sundae?

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Posted By Blogger to jules' pics at 12/03/2012 04:36:00 AM