Stormy weather ahead? at @ScienceLondon SciBar

I gave a little talk last night at the SciBar in London. It was a lot of fun and hope people enjoyed it! I’d recommend that you go along to one of their future events.

So I was talking about some of my current research on future storminess. This was kind of based on a post I wrote for the Nature Soapbox Science blog a few months ago (and then re-posted here).

One of the issues with looking at convective storms, or thunderstorms, in computer climate models is the resolution of the model i.e. the size of the boxes that the model splits the atmosphere up into. Ideally you’d have very small boxes so that you can “build” the storms in the model. But that isn’t possible given current computing power.

To demonstrate the importance of this at the SciBar I brought along some lego, duplo and a cube and asked people to make the best storm they could (see picture). I hope that this worked!

How different models might see a thunderstorm, like the one in the picture at the top. So, from left to right, the lego model is how a quite high resolution weather model would see the cloud, the duplo cloud in the middle is how a low resolution weather model would build the cloud and, on the right, is how a climate model would see the cloud i.e. it doesn’t. Just to clarify, the butterfly and pig would not be included in the climate model ;)

What do other people think about this method of explaining the effect of model resolution? I guess someone’s used it before but I quite liked it all the same.

(By the way, sorry I didn’t have any results to show at the talk! Keep an eye out here and I’ll post something when it’s ready to roll.)

Beddintolerance column for EGU Today

I wrote the following for the newsletter that is published daily for the EGU conference in Vienna. I thought I put it on my blog so that anyone could comment on it if they wished…

Sir John Beddington (Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government) stirred up some controversy during his recent address to a Government Science & Engineering conference:

“We are not […] grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method.”

He then urged his audience to “go out and be much more intolerant.”

I’ve been thinking about how this applies to my area of interest – climate change – where the lines between scientist, sceptic, contrarian and denier have become blurred. In this arena, engaging with true scepticism can reinforce research findings but debating with deniers is often pointless. Maybe Beddington is proposing that certain arguments can be brushed aside with a simple put down: Pseudoscience! If so, how do we determine which arguments?

And, of course, there are two sides to this story – how energetically should we also challenge those who extrapolate the scientific evidence to an alarming level in an effort to accelerate political action?

In short, how can intolerance of pseudoscience be employed whilst maintaining a professional appearance and the principles of the scientific method?

My text had to be very short to fit on the newsletter so here are a few more deeply considered opinions on Beddington’s comments:

Alice Bell

Follow up by Beddington in New Scientist

Fiona Fox

Frank Swain

Longer transcript of Beddington address and editorial from ResearchResearch

A visit to Atmosphere at the Science Museum

I took a trip to Atmosphere this week. It’s the new climate change exhibition at the Science Museum in London.

Full view of Atmosphere - it's not huge, tucked away on the second floor of the Wellcome wing. Given all the publicity, I was a bit surprised how difficult it was to find.

Heaps of info on touch screen displays.

My first impression was that it’s amazing to look at. It’s a really nice space and not very busy, which makes it quite a relaxing experience.

The museum describes it as “immersive and interactive” and maybe that’s a bit of a problem: a quick walk round won’t really tell you much. You have to get to grips with all the touch screen consoles and work out how the (sometimes slow) exhibits work. Once you get into a particular info stream, though, there’s definately a lot you can find out.

They seem to have gone down the “just present the facts” line of thinking.

Where is everybody?

It’s a very different approach to their previous, pre-Copenhagen exhibition – “Prove It! – All the evidence you need to believe in climate change” – which was a bit of a disaster as you could vote on whether you would support a strong government contribution to the negotiations online and without looking at the evidence, which was the point of the exhibition. It inevitably got polljacked. Actually, the only place I could now find the results of the Prove It! poll was a screen grab on WUWT, the results were:

• in the gallery – 3408 “count me ins” to 626 “count me outs”;
• and online – 2650 “count me ins” to 7612 “count me outs”.

I think that this new gallery starts with the assumption that you already know about (and probably accept) the scientific consensus on climate change. Then, the role of the gallery is to show how the science got to this position and what can be done about it.

The big picture, climate-wise, is only presented as you first enter the gallery and even then its only audible – there are relaxing and/or authoritative voices saying things like “science can show us that greenhouse gases are increasing and why that makes global temperatures rise” and “science can show us how Earth’s climate system works and what can cause it to change”.

I found nothing as explicit in the exhibits themselves. I’m not sure about this approach – if you missed the recordings on the way in you might leave the gallery without really knowing what the point of it all was.

Alice Bell discusses the design of museum galleries more intelligently than I can in her review of Atmosphere.

However, I do partially disagree with Alice on one of her points:

Museums have objects and space to play with, and I left wishing they had done more with this.
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Time spent quietly pondering the history of an object is an old-fashioned idea of a museum, but it still has power.

700 year old ice from Antarctica

I thought that there were a few things (only a few) that were well-chosen and inspiring in the exhibition that you could just look at and think about.

As an example, they have a section of an ice core that is around 700 years old. Antarctic ice has also been retrieved that is around 800,000 years old. These ice cores trap air and information about past temperatures that we can use to understand our climate system. How amazing is that? (Richard Alley wonderfully refers to a specific ice core a Two Mile Time Machine in the title of his book.)

This piece of ice predates almost everything else in the museum and it unknowingly kept a record of climate.

There’s also a little display on modern climate measurements. There’s an ARGO float that may have been deep (around 2 km) into the oceans to send us measurements. And a radiosonde (the little white plastic box that goes on the end of a weather balloon) that may have been 20 km up into the atmosphere to send back temperature, humidity, pressure and wind speed data.

Display on atmospheric measurements - I'm a big fan of the RS-80 radiosonde having launched quite a few of them in 2005.

So, overall, I enjoyed the exhibition and would recommend it. There’s a lot of information there and you’d probably need around an hour to start to do it justice. Like Alice, though, I do wish that there were more things there. I also wonder about the tone and who it is aimed at but, given their experience with Prove It!, I think that it’s a good comeback for the museum.

There’s only one Andy Russell…

…ok, so this is a lie.

Since starting at the University of Manchester I’ve been interested in other Andrew Russells.  The reason? There is a poilitics lecturer here also called Andrew Russell. We often forward each other wrongly addressed emails and letters.

I thought I’d do a quick tour of my favourite Andrew Russells. They are all academics but other Andrew Russells are available (see the Facebook group for us.)

Academics

This is Dr. Andrew Russell from the University of Manchester.  Sounds familiar, eh?  He’s a Senior Lecturer in Politics and is often on the news talking about the Lib Dems, so that has been a lot recently!
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One of the most succesful Dr. Andrew Russells next – this guy to the right is a Reader in Physical Geography.  I’ve heard him on the news as well.  He was on Radio 4 recently talking about the Icelandic volcano.  We should have got together to comment about the geology and meteorology from a holistic Andrew Russell point of view!
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This Dr. Andrew Russell looks like a bit of a character!  He’s a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield.  I’m guessing he researches meercats.
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Dr. Andrew Russell is also a Lecturer in Organic Chemistry at the University of Reading. I had a quick look at his profile and I didn’t really understand what he does.
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Another Dr. Andrew Russell, this time he’s a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Durham University. He works on public health; good for you Andrew!
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Here’s the last Dr. Andrew Russell I could find. He’s an American and is an Assistant Professor, College of Arts & Letters, Stevens Institute of Technology, whatever that means. He researches US history.
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So is there any point in this post other than amusing myself? Maybe.

I’ve recently given a few talks about the benefits of public engagement activities in raising your researcher profile. Having a look at all these other Andrew Russells highlighted how hard it is stand out.

Social media and academia

Social media applications – like blogs, twitter, wikis and other “web 2.0″ applications – are becoming very popular. But what sort of impact have they had in the academic context?

My university is keen to get postdocs using these tools to improve collaboration and their skills base. It has recently run a couple of courses to help people on this journey.

I went along as I’m a relative newcomer to these things and thought I’d blog the useful points in case anyone else could benefit from what I thought was interesting.

Both courses were run by Cristina Costa from the University of Salford, who really knew her stuff.

1. Developing a Researcher Profile through Social Media

This idea of an online researcher profile is becoming important.

For example, I recently had an interview for a lectureship and some of the feedback was specifically about my blog. The university was really keen to get their staff active online in the hope that potential students, particularly overseas students, will find the university via their staff’s web presence.

So, the first session looked at how you can develop a profile and how to keep on top of it. Cristina had prepared a useful image showing the tools that she had found most useful in developing her online profile.

This course was aimed at people with any level of experience. As I’d been a bit more active than most people there, I was asked to share the sort of things I’d been up to. So it seems worth quickly recounting this here as well…

I got into blogging via Twitter – seeing what other people were saying made me think that I could have something to contribute. This is especially so as blogging on climate is largely dominated by those from the “skeptic” side of things.

I had previously blogged on-and-off for NOISEmakers (a campaign trying to get people more interested in science and engineering) and when I started writing this post I remembered that I had a another blog where I used to reflect on training courses I’d attended. I suppose this post really belongs on that blog but it seems relevant here as well.  But neither of those have had the impact of this blog.

The high point of my blogging career to date came when The Guardian linked to a post of mine in an article relating to the Institute of Physics and an evidence submission that they made to a Science and Technology Committee investigation.

So Twitter was my inspiration and I really like it – I feel like I’m part of a community on there. However, I do have one problem with it: I don’t feel like I’m free to be me on Twitter. Now that I know it represents a part of my “researcher profile” I feel the need to be relatively professional on there. This is a bit of a shame as I’ve “met” some really interesting people on Twitter and I sometimes think that I come across as quite boring! I suppose I could go down the route of having a second, personal account but, as yet, I’ve not done that.

This session was most useful for me as time to reflect on what I’ve been doing but I also found out about a nice tool called Slideshare, which I might start using.

2. Social Media for Research: Collaboration, Resources & Dissemination

This session was really useful.

For example, the project I’ve been associated with for the last couple years have tried to use wikis to coordinate the research and keep everyone up to date. However, they’ve failed to achieve much, largely because no-one really knew what to do with them or even how to edit them. So now that I have a few ideas of how to get a wiki working, I’ll set one up for my new project, which starts soon.

I think the best way to summarise this session is with a list of the sort of tools we looked at, with an example of each type. I’ve also included my experience of each one following the link:

Co-writing: google docs [Ok for getting a document going but forget about formatting. Good for web surveys too.]

Collecting resources: diigo.com [I’ve never really got into web bookmarking although I do like igoogle for keeping track of blogs.]

Taking notes: evernote.com [Got this on my phone but not really started using it yet.]

Sharing files: dropbox.com [Love this! Great for backing up key documents, making shared folders for teams and getting a URL for a document to make it public.]

Organising references: mendeley.com [I have high hopes for Mendeley – here’s my profile. I always struggled with the discipline needed to keep EndNote up to date but having access on various platforms to a single database version like this makes a lot of sense.]

Collective intelligence: ning.com [I actually had no idea that I was already a member a ning network – ClimateSciNet – until I went to the page and looked at the URL. I guess they are professional networking sites but rely on gaining critical mass and having members that are willing to communicate and collaborate with new people.]

Joint projects: pbworks.com [I’m setting up new project wiki to keep remote partners up to date with developments and it seems quite user-friendly. I expect I’ll need to push people to keep it up to date and delegate specific elements to individuals.]

Its going to take me a while to get to grips with all these tools and I expect some of them will be a waste of time. I can, though, see that some of them will make processes more effective and make my work more visible to more people.

Do I “believe” in climate change?

The ClimateSafety blog recently published a post on public surveys about climate change. The title of the post (“Do you believe in climate change?”) got me thinking about the meaning of the question, in particular, the use of the word “believe”.

In my case, I work in weather and climate science so I have a good understanding of how the atmosphere works, how it has changed and where the current gaps in our knowledge are. I would not say that I “believe” in climate change because that implies an element of faith that I do not need – I am fully aware that the overwhelming majority of the evidence we have tells us that our planet’s climate is changing and that it is our actions that are causing it. I am convinced by the evidence behind our climate change theory. Similarly, I would not say that I “believe” in our theories of gravity or evolution as the weight of the evidence negates the need for faith.

The use of “belief” is particularly unhelpful when communicating climate science to the wider population because it implies this need for faith. For example, a recent Employment Tribunal in the UK gave climate change “belief” a similar standing to religious belief. However, religion, as far as I can tell, is based on faith in the face of little or no evidence whereas the climate change question has been investigated by thousands of scientists who have collected much evidence and written many papers that all point in the same direction: that the Earth’s climate is changing and that most of this recent change can be attributed to human activity.

So, where does this leave us? I suppose the problem here is that we can only do one experiment (knowingly or otherwise) with our climate at any one time. We are currently blindly performing the experiment where we ramp up greenhouse gas concentrations over long periods of time. All our evidence from the real world (and from computer models) tells us that this is a bad idea and, consequently, I suspect we would all like to believe that it isn’t happening. Under these circumstances, perhaps the prevalence of the term “belief”, even within the climate science community, comes from the hope – however unlikely – that we are wrong about climate change.

On the “impact” agenda

I’ve been quite interested in all the recent talk about the UK government’s so-called “Impact” agenda.  I watched the Blue Skies Ahead? debate, commented on a few blogs and had a few discussions on Twitter.  I found myself defending the Impact ideas so I thought I’d put my views together here on my blog.  [I left it until now as a project proposal I wrote last July (which included a very well reviewed Impact Plan) has just been funded – I hope that this gives me a little bit of authority on this subject!]

Plans vs. Assessment

A lot of the criticism I read from scientists seemed to confuse the two separate strands of what appears to be the overall Impact agenda.  Here’s a quick summary as far as I understand it:

1) The Research Councils (such as EPSRC and NERC) now require an “Impact Plan” to be written and submitted with grant applications.
2) HEFCE are planning to assess the impact of past research as part of the next systematic assessment of UK research (i.e. the REF, formerly the RAE).

In the case of NERC, to whom I have recently submitted a couple of proposals, their guidelines state that the funding decisions will still be taken on the quality of the science.  The NERC Impact Plan can, in fact, be re-written after the funding decisions have been made if scientifically excellent projects have included an inadequate Impact Plan.  However, my experience was that going through the process of thinking about who would be interested in the work and how I could involve them throughout the project improved the focus of the whole proposal.  This is the main reason why I have been supportive of the Impact agenda despite being initially sceptical.

Ok, so parts of my research are quite applicable to, say, the Met Office or the Environment Agency so the impact is relatively easy to predict/manage.  But researchers in more blue skies areas have objected to the impact plan on the grounds that the impact is not easy to predict.  A classic case of this is the development of the World Wide Web from CERN – who could’ve foreseen that?  Well, this sounds like a good argument but it is confusing the two strands – the plan is designed to maximise and manage the impact potential by involving the user community, it is not supposed to be a prediction of the project’s effect on national GDP…

…this later point is the justification behind the HEFCE half of the Impact agenda.  This is the retrospective part and would give credit to blue skies projects that, perhaps inadvertently, had a big impact.  How about this case though: after a period of decades of research, a certain field has had no quantifiable “impact”.  Then why should this field continue to receive public funding?  Similarly, if another field is found to be almost entirely beneficial for a certain industry, then why should that industry not fund that research?  We surely need to know these things. These hypothetical cases are obviously the two extremes and funding decisions will always be in grey areas but it seems silly not to do something because it’s not easy.  But the REF doesn’t only assess economic impact; it will also consider impacts on society, public policy, culture and quality of life.

A silly point

One of the other arguments against the impact agenda is that is has not been particularly well planned.  Well, as an argument against writing plans for an aspect of a project, this seems a bit naff: “we won’t write plans for our impact because your plans to assess our plans are not very well planned”.  Anyway, the Impact Plan seems to have been well implemented (obviously, I would say this as I got good feedback) – there is lots of guidance on the NERC website and there is a transition period where Impact Plans can be re-written.  As for the REF, well this will be a retrospective assessment of impact so it doesn’t matter how it is planned as long as it is consistent.  The next REF isn’t until 2013 anyway so there’s plenty of time to get the details straight.

My story

As for my experience of the Impact Plan, I now have extra funding from the proposal to visit users, to organise workshops for academics and the user community and to develop resources for public engagement activities!  I am happy.

Communicating climate change

I do the odd bit of science communication but I usually focus on my weather work as its more fun than climate change.  That said, climate is obviously a really important issue and things are not looking good – that applies to the scientific findings, the political reaction or public opinion of the science.  Here are a few thoughts on the later of these issues.

The problem – what’s going wrong with climate change communication?

The academic community is agreed (and justified in their view, despite the CRU emails theft) that our climate is changing and that the current change is almost certainly a result of the way our civilization developed.  Things are also very likely to get worse.

However, a quick look at the top five books in the “Global Warming” category on Amazon.co.uk (as on 15/12/2009) provides an insight into the popular perception of climate change:

1) “The real global warming disaster: is the obsession with ‘climate change’ turning out to be the most costly scientific blunder in history?” Christopher Booker.

2) “Heaven and earth: global warming – the missing science” Ian Plimer.

3) “An appeal to reason: a cool look at global warming” Nigel Lawson.

4) “Our choice: a plan to solve the climate crisis” Al Gore.

5) “Air con: the seriously inconvenient truth about global warming” Ian Wishart.

4 of these books question the mainstream scientific view on climate change with Al Gore’s book being the obvious exception.  But only one is written by a working scientist, Ian Pilmer, and he is a geologist, not a climate scientist.  The scientific arguments presented in these books are almost exclusively ones that have been around for years and have been proved wrong or not as important as claimed.  They are Zombie arguments – no matter how many times they are shot down they get right back up and used again despite being plain wrong.  Amazingly, Pilmer – the geologist – uses the “volcanoes produce more CO2 than humans” argument which should be easy for him to check.  In short, these books are not scientifically reliable but are still published and bought in large numbers.

One of the few credible books written about climate change from a sceptical point of view is by Bjorn Lomborg.  He is an academic, an economist, and his discipline recognises books as a valuable publication in an academic career.  Indeed, he has developed his media and academic profile via his books and conferences on global issues, not only looking at climate change.  His arguments are valuable and need addressing even if they are not what most environmentalists would like to hear – dismissing people off-hand as ‘deniers’ runs the risk of giving them a Galileo complex and developing more public support.  That said, though, another high profile economist, Sir Nicholas Stern, has also published an accessible book on climate change and takes quite a different view to Lomborg.

Where are all the credible climate science books?

There are several books that present the science well and try to glimpse into the future.  The most optimistic is perhaps ‘The Hot Topic’ by Sir David King (co-written by Gabrielle Walker, a journalist).  King is a scientist, a chemist, but was also Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government from 2000-2008 so knows a lot about climate science from that role.  His opinion is that technological advances will play a big role in allowing us to combat climate change without a massive amount of hardship to individuals.  This would be very nice but I’m not sure what the evidence behind this view is.

Most other books on this topic are written by journalists (George Monbiot and Mark Lynas, for example) and are often towards the ‘we’re doomed!’ end of the climate change literature spectrum.  This could, of course, be the way we are heading and it is certainly more likely than the ‘everything will be fine’ end.  This style of book probably turns people off; no-one wants to hear about bad things that are quite likely to happen in the future.

So where are the books by people working in this field? Well, Mike Hulme has written a book called “Why we disagree about climate change: understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity” – I’ve yet to read it but it sounds like an important contribution, if a little exclusive/academic.  It’s pretty rare though.  I’ve heard that Jim Hansen is working on a book too.

Maybe the science is a little too dry or dated to make good popular science?  The major breakthrough in climate science happened in the 1850s when John Tyndall discovered the warming effect of CO2 in the atmosphere.  The recent big advances have been in the field of climate modelling on high performance computers.  I think it would be quite difficult to write an engaging book aimed at a general audience on how important this subject is.

In my opinion, though, the main reason that the vacuum exists is because most climate scientists have no career motivation to write such books. There is very little professional recognition for publishing anything other than papers in scientific journals.  For a climatologist to put themselves on the line as the public face of academic climate research is not worth it in terms of career payback or the celebrity and potential backlash that would go with it.

Climate scientists have engaged with politicians for many years and generally do not shy away for engaging with the media but, for the scientists at the coal face, there is little to gain from proactively engaging the public.