Liveblogging from the EGU – Day 1

20. April 2009 · 4 comments · Categories: climate science, EGU 2009 · Tags:

Okay, here’s my first attempt to do liveblogging from the EGU General Assembly in Vienna. I’ve arrived and registered, but now I face my first problem: the sheer scale of the thing. The printed program runs to 140 pages, and it doesn’t even tell you the titles and authors of any of the papers – it mainly consists of table after table mapping session titles to rooms. Yikes! 

And the next problem is that the wireless internet is swamped at 10,000 geoscientists all try to check their email at once. There’s this neat tool on the conference website that allows you to click on any talk or session while you’re browsing the online program, to add them to your personal program. But as I can’t get the website to load now, I can’t see what I put on my personal program. Ho hum. Ah, it’s loaded.

Looks like I got here too late for Stefan Rahmsdorf’s review of the stability of the ocean circulation under climate change scenarios. I wanted to see it because Stefan has been consistently warning of higher sea level rise than the numbers in the IPCC reports.

Okay, next interesting paper is in the Earth Systems Informatics session, entitled “Semantic metadata application for information resources systematization in water spectroscopy“. Let’s see if I can find the room before the talk is over….

14:56: Found the room, but talk is nearly over. Next up is more promising anyway: Peter Fox, talking about Semantic Provenance Management for Large Scale Scientific Datasets…

15:06: Peter Fox is up. I should point out that this is the last talk in the session (which is on semantic interoperability, knowledge and ontologies). He’s showing some data flow analysis of the current way in which scientific images get passed around – processed images (e.g. gifs) get forwarded without their metadata. He’s characterized the problem as one of combining information from two different streams – the raw images from the instruments (which then get processed in various ways), and comments from observers (both human and tools) who are adding information about images. Another use case: two different graphs from the same data – a daily time series and a monthly time series (for Aerosol Optical Thickness), but the two averagings are produced by different tools, and one tool inverts the Y axis. The scientist working with the two graphs spent two days trying to figure out why the two series seemed to contradict each other! The key idea in this work seems to be the use of a semantic markup language, PML, for capturing additional information on datasets.

15:30: Next session is on International Informatics Collaborations and first speaker is Bryan Lawrence, (who incidentally, I’ve been meaning to get in contact with since he commented on Jon’s blog back in December about our brainstorming sessions). He’s talking about the European Contribution to a Global Solution For Access to Climate Model Simulations. Much of the data is available at WDCC: the World Data Centre on Climate. From this summer, they are expecting to collect a petabyte of data per year. Main task right now: CMIP5, which is the collection of model runs ready for comparison and analysis for the next IPCC assessment. Overall impression of Bryan’s talk: lots of technology problems, just shipping large streams of data around, authentication, and not enough bandwidth! Oh, and there’s a new European framework 7 project just starting up, IS-ENES, which is supposed to increase the collaboration around earth system modeling tools and frameworks.

15:45: Talk on EuroGEOSS, another big European project, just about to kick off next month. It’s hard to get my head around these big interoperability projects: to the outsider, it’s hard to tell what the project will actually focus on.

16:00: I like the title of the next one: Herding Cats: The Challenges of Collaboratively Defining the Geology of Europe, presented by Kristine Asch.  Here’s her motivation: Rich data exists, it’s critical for society, but it’s hard to find, access, share, understand. There is an EU directive on this, called INSPIRE: Infrastructure for Spatial Information in Europe. Looks like the directive involves lots of working groups. Kristine is talking about OneGeology, a project to create an interoperable geological map of Europe. The challenge is that everyone currently maps their geological survey data in different (incompatible) ways. Here’s an example of how deep the problem goes: 20 people sitting around a table trying to reach agreement on what terms like “bedrock”  and “surface geology” mean. Lots of cultural challenges: 27 countries (each with their own geological survey organisation), 27 different standards, national pride, and everyone speaks different variants of English.

Question Session: here’s a good question – have they thought of bringing in any social scientists or anthropologists to study the communities involved in this, to ensure we learn appropriate lessons from the experience. Okay, I’m off on a tangent now, because this question reminded me of an old colleague, Susan Leigh Star, and I just discovered she has a book out that I somehow missed: Sorting Things Out: Classification and it’s consequences. 

16:30: A talk on Siberia. Actually, on the Siberian Integrated Regional Study, important because of the role of melting permafrost in Siberia and its effect as a climate feedback. The disappointing thing about this talk is that he’s talking a lot about creating web portals, and not much about the real challenges.

17:30: Okay, change of scenery. There’s a session on Education, Computational Methods and Complex Systems in Nonlinear Proceses in Geophysics. First talk by Jeffrey Johnson (prof of complexity science) is about eToile, a Social Intelligent ICT-System for very large scale education in complex systems. Jeff was instrumental a few years ago in setting up the Complex Systems Society. The idea behind eToile (see also related project: Assyst) is to change how we design a curriculum. Normally: define curriculum & learning outcomes, create course materials, deliver them, examine the students, mark exam scripts, and pass/fail/grade the students. This is enormously expensive, especially the bits that are proportional to the number of students (e.g. marking is linear in # of students). Can set up a web portal to provide curriculum and assessment, with semi-automated marking. But how do we provide appropriate learning resources for very large numbers of students to use? Solution: create a “resource ecology”, initially populated with some junk URLs. When students submit work, they also have to submit the web resources they used; these become part of the ecology, and links that many students find useful rise in the ecology. Also, stuff that gets outdated falls in value as fewer students use it, or if the curriculum changes, you get the same effect. Jeff argues that this is a much cheaper, more scaleable way of providing education. In the question session, he clarified: it’s only intended for grad students (who are sufficiently capable of self-study), and probably wouldn’t work for undergrads. Reminds me of some of the experiments we’ve played with on my grad courses with the students contributing web resources to our growing collection.

17:45: Next up: a talk on education around flood management. Big paradigm change, from fighting floods, where engineers are the dominant stakeholder, to “living with floods” when it becomes much more of a shared issue among many different kinds of stakeholder. Set up displays, with lots of cylinders of water, to help people visualize different flood levels. Lots of hands on learning to get stakeholders to take ownership of the problem.

Okay, jetlag kicking in seriously. Off to get some air…

“Daddy, what did YOU do in the climate wars?”

16. April 2009 · 7 comments · Categories: advocacy, books · Tags: , ,

When my children grow up, the world they live in is likely be very different from ours. There’s a small chance that humanity will rapidly come to its senses, start massive program of emissions reductions, and avoid the worst climate change scenarios. The Hadley Centre gives us about a 50/50 chance if carbon emissions peak by 2015, and then fall steadily at a rate of 3% per year (They are currently rising by nearly 3% per year). If we manage to pull this off, and also win the 50/50 bet, our children and grandchildren will ask us how the hell we managed it.

If we can’t stop emissions growth in the next five years, things look much more grim. Perhaps the simplest way to explain it is the picture painted by the New Scientist: How to survive the coming century: a world that is 4°C warmer, 90% of the human population wiped out, the rest relocated to dense cities in Canada, Scandinavia and Siberia. Uninhabitable deserts across the subtropics. Virtually no life in the oceans. And that’s the good part. The New Scientist article glosses over the climate wars that are almost certain if large parts of the world become uninhabitable. If they survive, our children will demand to know what the hell we were doing: we knew it was coming, we knew how bad it would be, and still we did almost nothing to prevent it.

What did you do in the war?When my kids ask me these questions in decades to come, I need to be ready with an answer. I’d like to say that I did everything I could possibly do. I’d like to say that what I did was effective. And I’d like to be able to say that I made a difference.

Interdisciplinary Graduate Studies

15. April 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: collaborative science, courses, philosophy, systems thinking · Tags: , , , ,

Having talked with some of our graduate students about how to get a more inter-disciplinary education while they are in grad school, I’ve been collecting links to collaborative grad programs at U of T:

The Dynamics of Global Change Doctoral Program, housed in the Munk Centre. The core course, DGC1000H is very interesting – it starts with Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point book, and then tours through money, religion, pandemics, climate change, the internet and ICTs, and development. What a wonderful journey.

The Centre for the Environment runs a Collaborative Graduate Program (MSc and PhD) in which students take some environmental science courses in addition to satisfying the degree requirements of their home department. The core course for this program is ENV1001, Environmental Decision Making, and it also include an internship to get hands on experience with environmental problem solving.

The Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) also has a collaborative doctoral program, perfect for those interested in design and evaluation of new knowledge media, with a strong focus on knowledge creation, social change, and community

Finally, the Centre for Global Change Science has a set of graduate student awards, to help fund grad students interested in global change science. Oh, and they have a fascinating seminar series, mainly focussed on climate science (all done for this year, but get on their mailing list for next years seminars).

Are there any more I missed?

Agent-based simulations

14. April 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: climate modeling, climate science, systems thinking · Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Had an interesting conversation this afternoon with Brad Bass. Brad is a prof in the Centre for Environment at U of T, and was one of the pioneers of the use of models to explore adaptations to climate change. His agent based simulations explore how systems react to environmental change, e.g. exploring population balance among animals, insects, the growth of vector-borne diseases, and even entire cities. One of his models is Cobweb, an open-source platform for agent-based simulations. 

He’s also involved in the Canadian Climate Change Scenarios Network, which takes outputs from the major climate simulation models around the world, and extracts information on the regional effects on Canada, particularly relevant for scientists who want to know about variability and extremes on a regional scale.

We also talked a lot about educating kids, and kicked around some ideas for how you could give kids simplified simulation models to play with (along the line that Jon was exploring as a possible project), to get them doing hands on experimentation with the effects of climate change. We might get one of our summer students to explore this idea, and Brad has promised to come talk to them in May once they start with us.

Oh, and Brad is also an expert on green roofs, and will be demonstrating them to grade 5 kids at the Kids World of Energy Festival.

Reinventing Computer Science

13. April 2009 · 1 comment · Categories: collaborative science, philosophy, systems thinking · Tags: , , , ,

Computer Science, as an undergraduate degree, is in trouble. Enrollments have dropped steadily throughout this decade: for example at U of T, our enrollment is about half what it was at the peak. The same is true across the whole of North America. There is some encouraging news: enrollments picked up a little this year (after a serious recruitment drive, ours is up about 20% from it’s nadir, while across the US it’s up 6.2%). But it’s way to early to assume they will climb back up to where they were. Oh, and percentage of women students in CS now averages 12% – the lowest ever.

What happened? One explanation is career expectations. In the 80’s, its was common wisdom that a career in computers was an excellent move, for anyone showing an aptitude for maths. In the 90’s, with the birth of the web, computer science even became cool for a while, and enrollments grew dramatically, with a steady improvement in gender balance too. Then came the dotcom boom and bust, and suddenly a computer science degree was no longer a sure bet. I’m told by our high school liaison team that parents of high school students haven’t got the message that the computer industry is short of graduates to recruit (although with the current recession that’s changing again anyway).

A more likely explanation is perceived relevance. In the 80’s, with the birth of the PC, and in the 90’s with the growth of the web, computer science seemed like the heart of an exciting revolution. But now computers are ubiquitous, they’re no longer particularly interesting. Kids take them for granted, and a only a few über-geeks are truly interested in what’s inside the box. But computer science departments continue to draw boundaries around computer science and its subfields in a way that just encourages the fragmentation of knowledge that is so endemic of modern universities.

Which is why an experiment at Georgia Tech is particularly interesting. The College of Computing at Georgia Tech has managed to buck the enrollment trend, with enrollment numbers holding steady throughout this decade. The explanation appears to be a radical re-design of their undergraduate degree, into a set of eight threads. For a detailed explanation, there’s a white paper, but the basic aim is to get students to take more ownership of their degree programs (as opposed to waiting to be spoonfed), and to re-describe computer science in terms that make sense to the rest of the world (computer scientists often forget the the field is impenetrable to the outsider). The eight threads are: Modeling and simulation; Devices (embedded in the physical world); Theory; Information internetworks; Intelligence; Media (use of computers for more creative expression); People (human-centred design); and Platforms (computer architectures, etc). Students pick any two threads, and the program is designed so that any combination covers most of what you would expect to see in a traditional CS degree.

At first sight, it seems this is just a re-labeling effort, with the traditional subfields of CS (e.g. OS, networks, DB, HCI, AI, etc) mapping on to individual threads. But actually, it’s far more interesting than that. The threads are designed to re-contextualize knowledge. Instead of students picking from a buffet of CS courses, each thread is designed so that students see how the knowledge and skills they are developing can be applied in interesting ways. Most importantly, the threads cross many traditional disciplinary boundaries, weaving a diverse set of courses into a coherent theme, showing the students how their developing CS skills combine in intellectually stimulating ways, and preparing them for the connected thinking needed for inter-disciplinary problem solving.

For example the People thread brings in psychology and sociology, examining the role of computers in the human activity systems that give them purpose. It explore the perceptual and cognitive abilities of people as well as design practices for practical socio-technical systems. The Modeling and Simluation thread explores how computational tools are used in a wide variety of sciences to help understand the world. Following this thread will require consideration of epistemology of scientific knowledge, as well as mastery of the technical machinery by which we create models and simulations, and the underlying mathematics. The thread includes in a big dose of both continuous and discrete math, data mining, and high performance computing. Just imagine what graduates of these two threads would be able to do for our research on SE and the climate crisis! The other thing I hope it will do is to help students to know their own strengths and passions, and be able to communicate effectively with others.

The good news is that our department decided this week to explore our own version of threads. Our aims is to learn from the experience at Georgia Tech and avoid some of the problems they have experienced (for example, by allowing every possible combination of 8 threads, it appears they have created too many constraints on timetabling and provisioning individual courses). I’ll blog this initiative as it unfolds.

Modeling challenge (part 2)

09. April 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: books, reducing emissions, research ideas · Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Okay, here’s a slightly different modeling challenge. It might be more of a visualization challenge. Whatever. In part 1, I suggested we use requirements analysis techniques to identify stakeholders, and stakeholder goals, and link them to the various suggested “wedges“.

Here, I want to suggest something different. There are several excellent books that attempt to address the “how will we do it?” challenge. They each set out a set of suggested solutions, add up the contribution of each solution to reducing emissions, assess the feasibility of each solution, add up all the numbers, and attempt to make some strategic recommendations. But each book makes different input assumptions, focusses on slightly different kinds of solutions, and ends up with different recommendations (but they also agree on many things).

Here are the four books:

Cover image for Monbiots Heat
George Monbiot, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. This is probably the best book I have ever read on global warming. It’s brilliantly researched, passionate, and doesn’t pull it’s punches. Plus it’s furiously upbeat – Monbiot takes on the challenge of how we get to 90% emissions reduction, and shows that it is possible (although you kind of have to imagine a world in which politicians are willing to do the right thing).

Joseph Romm, Hell and High Water: Global Warming–the Solution and the Politics–and What We Should Do. While lacking Monbiot’s compelling writing style, Romm makes up by being an insider – he was an energy policy wonk in the Clinton administration. The other contrast is Monbiot is British, and focusses mainly on British examples, Romm is American and focusses on US example. The cultural contrasts are interesting.

David MacKay, Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air. Okay, so I haven’t read this one yet, but it got a glowing write-up on Boing Boing . Oh, and it’s available as a free download.

Lester Brown, Plan B 3.0L Mobilizing to Save Civilization. This one’s been on my reading list for a while, will read it soon. It has a much broader remit than the others: Brown wants to solve world poverty, cure disease, feed the world, and solve the climate crisis. I’m looking forward to this one. And it’s also available as a free download.

Okay, so what’s the challenge? Model the set of solutions in each of these books so that it’s possible to compare and contrast their solutions, compare their assumptions, and easily identify areas of agreement and disagreement. I’ve no idea yet how to do this, but a related challenge would be to come up with compelling visualizations that explain to a much broader audience what these solutions look like, and why it’s perfectly feasible. Something like this (my current favourite graphic):

Graph of cost/benefit of climate mitigation strategies

Graph of cost/benefit of climate mitigation strategies

Stakeholders in our own destruction

08. April 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: advocacy, politics · Tags: , , , ,

This is depressing.

We were at the bank this morning, setting up some investment plans for retirement and for the kids to go through University (In Canada-speak: RRSPs and RESPs). We started to pick out a portfolio of mutual funds into which we would be putting the investments, and our financial advisor was showing us one of the mutual funds he would recommend when I noticed the fund included a substantial investment in the Canadian Oil Sands. “No way” says I. So we went to his next pick. Same thing. And the next. And the next….

The oil sands have been described as the most destructive project on earth. They are the major reason that Canada will renege on its Kyoto treaty obligations. They will devastate a huge area of Alberta, and threaten clean water supplies and the wildlife of large parts of North America.

So, I was struck by the irony of funding the kids through University by investing in a project that will so thoroughly screw up the world in which they will have to live when they grow up.

But then I thought about it some more. Pretty much the entire middle class in Canada must have money invested in this project, if it shows up in most of the mutual funds commonly recommended for retirement and education savings plans. Most of them probably have no idea (after all, who actually looks closely at the contents of their mutual funds?) and of those that do know, most of them will prefer the high rate of return on this project because they have no real understanding of the extent of the climate crisis.

Those funds are being used to maximize the profit from the oils sands, by paying for lobbyists to fight environmental regulations, to fight caps on greenhouse gas emissions, and to fight against alternative energy initiatives (which would eat into the market for oil from the oil sands).

How on earth can we make any progress on fighting climate change when we all have a financial stake in not doing so?

We’re fucked.

Kid’s books

06. April 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: books, climate science · Tags: , , ,

As my son (grade 4) has started a module at school on climate and global change, I thought I’d look into books on climate change for kids. Here’s what I have for them at the moment:

Weird Weather by Kate Evans. This is the kids favourite at the moment, probably because of its comicbook format. The narrative format works well – its involves the interplay between three characters: a businessman (playing the role of a denier), a scientist (who shows us the evidence) and a idealistic teenager, who gets increasingly frustrated that the businessman won’t listen.

The Down-to-Earth Guide to Global Warming, by Laurie David and Cambria Gordon. Visually very appealling, lots of interesting factoids for the kids, and a particular attention to the kinds of questions kids like to ask (e.g. to do with methane from cow farts).

How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate by Lynne Cherry and Gary Braasch. Beautiful book (fabulous photos!), mainly focusing on sources of evidence (ice cores, tree rings, etc), and how they were discovered. Really encourages the kids to do hands on data collection. Oh, and there’s a teacher’s guide as well, which I haven’t looked at yet.

Global Warming for Dummies by Elizabeth May and Zoe Caron. Just what we’d expect from a “Dummies Guide…” book. I bought it because I was on my way to a bookstore on April 1, when I heard an interview on the CBC with Elizabeth May (leader of the Canadian Green Party) talking about how they were planning to reduce the carbon footprint of their next election campaign, by hitchhiking all over Canada. My first reaction was incredulity, but then I remembered the date, and giggled uncontrollably all the way into the bookstore. So I just had to buy the book.

Scientific Expertise

05. April 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: climate science, research methods · Tags: , , , , , ,

Whom do you believe: The Cato Institute, or the Hadley Centre? Both cannot be right. Yet both claim to be backed by real scientists.

First, to get this out of the way, the latest ad from Cato has been thoroughly debunked by RealClimate, including a critical look at whether the papers that Cato cites offer any support for Cato’s position (hint: they don’t), and a quick tour through related literature. So I won’t waste my time repeating their analysis.

The Cato folks attempted to answer back, but it’s largely by attacking red herrings. However, one point from this article jumped out at me:

“The fact that a scientist does not undertake original research on subject x does not have any bearing on whether that scientist can intelligently assess the scientific evidence forwarded in a debate on subject x”.

The thrust of this argument is an attempt to bury the idea of expertise, so that the opinions of the Cato institute’s miscellaneous collection of people with PhDs can somehow be equated with those of actual experts. Now, of course it is true that a (good) scientist in another field ought to be able to understand the basics of climate science, and know how to judge the quality of the research, the methods used, and the strength of the evidence, at least at some level. But unfortunately, real expertise requires a great deal of time and effort to acquire, no matter how smart you are.

If you want to publish in a field, you have to submit yourself to the peer-review process. The process is not perfect (incorrect results often do get published, and, on occasion, fabricated results too). But one thing it does do very well is to check whether authors are keeping up to date with the literature. That means that anyone who regularly publishes in good quality journals has to keep up to date with all the latest evidence. They cannot cherry pick.

Those who don’t publish in a particular field (either because they work in an unrelated field, or because they’re not active scientists at all) don’t have this obligation. Which means when they form opinions on a field other than their own, they are likely to be based on a very patchy reading of the field, and mixed up with a lot of personal preconceptions. They can cherry pick. Unfortunately, the more respected the scientist, the worse the problem. The most venerated (e.g. prize winners) enter a world in which so many people stroke their egos, they lose touch with the boundaries of their ignorance. I know this first hand, because some members of my own department have fallen into this trap: they allow their brilliance in one field to fool them into thinking they know a lot about other fields.

Hence, given two scientists who disagree with one another, it’s a useful rule of thumb to trust the one who is publishing regularly on the topic. More importantly, if there are thousands of scientists publishing regularly in a particular field and not one of them supports a particular statement about that field, you can be damn sure it’s wrong. Which is why the IPCC reviews of the literature are right, and Cato’s adverts are bullshit.

Disclaimer: I don’t publish in the climate science literature either (it’s not my field). I’ve spent enough time hanging out with climate scientists to have a good feel for the science, but I’ll also get it wrong occasionally. If in doubt, check with a real expert.

Collective Intelligence for Global Change

03. April 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: collaborative science, research ideas · Tags: , , , , ,

I just spent the last two hours chewing the fat with Mark Klein at MIT and Mark Tovey at Carleton, talking about all sorts of ideas, but loosely focussed on how distributed collaborative modeling efforts can help address global change issues (e.g. climate, peak oil, sustainability).

MK has a project, Climate Interactive,[update: Mark tells me I got the wrong project – it should be The Climate Collaboratorium. Climate Interactive is from a different group at MIT] which is exploring how climate simulation tools can be hooked up to discussions around decision making, which is one of the ideas we kicked around in our brainstorming sessions here.

MT has been exploring how you take ideas from distributed cognition and scale them up to much larger teams of people. He has put together a wonderful one-pager that summarized many interesting ideas on how mass collaboration can be applied in this space.

This conversation is going to keep me going for days on stuff to explore and blog about:

And lots of interesting ideas for new projects…

If you’re not yet scared…

01. April 2009 · 2 comments · Categories: advocacy, climate science, psychology · Tags: , , , ,

In our brainstorm session yesterday, someone (Faraz?) suggested I could kick off the ICSE session with a short video. The closest thing I can think of is this:

Wake Up, Freak Out – then Get a Grip

It’s not too long, it covers the recent science very well, and it is exactly the message I want to give – climate change is serious, urgent, demands massive systemic change, but is not something we should despair over. It also comes with a full transcript with detailed references into the primary scientific literature, which is well worth a browse.

Except that it scares the heck out of me every time I watch it. Could I really show this to an ICSE audience?

Modularizing Climate Models

31. March 2009 · 1 comment · Categories: climate modeling, climate science, research ideas · Tags: , ,

One of the things that came up in our weekly brainstorming session today was the question of whether climate models can be made more modular, to permit distributed development, and distributed execution. Carolyn has already blogged about some of these ideas. Here’s a little bit of history for this topic.

First, a very old (well, 1989) paper by Kalnay et al,  on Data Interchange Formats, in which they float the idea of “plug compatibility” for climate model components. For a long time, this idea seems to have been accepted as the long term goal for the architecture for climate models. But no-one appears to have come close. In 1996, David Randall wrote an interesting introspective on how university teams can (or can’t) participate in climate model building, in which he speculates that plug compatibility might not be achievable in practice because of the complexity of the physical processes being simulated, and the complex interactions between them. He also points out that all climate models (up to that point) had each been developed at a single site, and he talks a bit about why this appears to be necessarily so.

Fast forward to a paper by Dickinson et al in 2002, which summarizes the results of a series of workshops on how to develop a better software infrastructure for model sharing, and talks about some prototype software frameworks. Then, a paper by Larson et al in 2004, introducing a common component architecture for earth system models, and a bit about the Earth System Modeling Framework being developed at NCAR. And finally, Drake et al.’s Overview of the Community Climate System Model, which appears to use these frameworks very successfully.

Now, admittedly I haven’t looked closely at the CCSM. But I have looked closely at the Met Office’s Unified Model and the Canadian CCCma, and neither of them get anywhere close to the ideal of modularity. In both cases, the developers have to invest months of effort to ‘naturalize’ code contributed from other labs, in the manner described in Randall’s paper.

So, here’s the mystery. Has the CCSM really achieved the modularity that others are only dreaming of? And if so how? The key test would be how much effort it takes to ‘plug in’ a module developed elsewhere…

Computers have big lifecycle footprints

30. March 2009 · 2 comments · Categories: greentech, reducing emissions · Tags: ,

Well, here’s an interesting analysis of the lifecycle emissions of a computer. Turns out that computers require something like ten times their weight in fossil fuels to manufacture. Which is an order of magnitude higher than other durable goods, like cars and fridges, which only require about their own weight in fuel to manufacture. Oh, and the flat screen display accounts for the majority of it.

Okay, so I’ll concede that my computer is an order of magnitude more useful to me than a fridge (which after all, only does one thing). But it does mean that if we focus only on power consumption during use, we might be missing the biggest savings opportunities. 

The analysis is from the book Computers and the Environment, edited by Kuehr and Williams, and here’s a brief review.

How to choose a research method

27. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: conferences, research methods · Tags: , ,

Well, this is a little off topic, but we (Janice, Dana, Peggy and I) have been invited to run this year’s International Advanced School of Empirical Software Engineering, in Florida in October. We’ve planned the day around the content of our book chapter on Selecting Empirical Research Methods for Software Engineering Research, which appeared in the book Guide to Advanced Empirical Software Engineering. It’s going to be a lot of fun!

Why there’s no silver bullet

27. March 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: climate science, reducing emissions · Tags: , , , , , ,

There is no silver bullet for climate change, just as there’s no silver bullet for software engineering. To understand why this is, you need to understand the magnitude of the problem.

Firstly, there’s the question of what a “safe” temperature rise would be. There’s a broad consensus among climate scientists that about a rise of around 2°C (above pre-industrial levels) is a sensible upper limit. I’ve asked a number of climate scientists why this threshold, and the answer is that above this level, scary feedback effects start to kick in, and then we’re in serious trouble. If you look at the assessments from the IPCC, the lowest stabilization level they consider is 450 ppm (parts per million), but its clear from their figures that even at this level, we would overshoot the 2°C threshold. Since that report, some scientists have argued this is way too high, and 350ppm would be a better target. Worryingly, the last IPCC assessment was based on climate models that did not include feedback effects.

Then, there’s the question of how to get there. Stabilizing at 350-450ppm requires a reduction of greenhouse emissions of around 80% in industrialized nations by the year 2050. Monbiot argues that if you think in terms of a reduction per capita, you have to allow for population growth. So that really means a reduction more like 90% per person. And again, due to our uncertainty about feedback effects, the emissions targets may need to be even lower.

How do reduce emissions by 90% per person? The problem is that our emissions of greenhouse gases come from everything we do, and no one activity or industry dominates. I was looking for a good graphic for my ICSE talk, to illustrate this point, when I came across this chart of sources of emissions:

 

World Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Sector

World Greenhouse Gas Emissions by Sector

 

 

I think that’s enough on it’s own to show there is not likely to be a silver bullet. The only way to solve the problem is a systemic analysis of sources of emissions, and we have to take into account a huge number of different options. If you want more detail on the figures, Jon Rynn at Grist has started to put together some spreadsheets to add up all the sources of emissions, and some specific contributors.

BTW, the IPCC’s frequently asked questions is a great primer for anyone new to the physics of climate change.

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