There’s no such thing as a climate scientist

 Here in Australia, the new Coalition government, which won office in 2013 on a head-in-the-sand approach to climate change, is busy dismantling all of the federal early warning and advisory bodies on climate.  There are snide gloating remarks floating around the internet to the effect that the climate scientists have been exposed, and that the conservatives need to cut the dole before these fake scientists can get any more government money. The election of Donald Trump to the American presidency in 2016 has generated similar chatter on their side of the internet. However, these ungracious comments also suffer from factual deficits.  There are no climate scientists; there are only scientists who study climate.

       Most of these scientists are Earth scientists. However, a substantial and growing proportion of them are also physicists, astronomers, mathematicians, meteorologists, and other physical scientists. The type of scientist generally describes how they attack scientific problems, not which problems they attack.

     A person who has mastered the physical and chemical tools that allow us to understand the Earth system can apply those tools to whatever knowledge suits their fancy.  I know el Niño experts who started out on gold mines, and frackers who started out studying el Niño.  I know isotope specialists and paleontologists who have applied their skills to both ocean heat uptake and oil & gas exploration.  Even Tim Flannery, the recently sacked chief of the climate commission, had a previous career in vertebrate paleontology.  

       So you don’t need to worry- or gloat- that the end of climate funding will mean these climate scientists will have nowhere else to go.  Sure, they will be disruptions, but the same skills that make them good at climate will let them pursue other Earth Science goals, or other careers that value the ability to constrain complex systems with limited and unusual data.  Many of these folks may even stay in climate, generating predictions that inform insurance companies who to raise rates on, or hedge funds who to divest out of. In fact, they might even end up better off.

There is an oft repeated criticism of climate researchers that they are only in it for the money. But nothing could be further from the truth.  Most recipients of university and advanced degrees in physical science are able to pull down significant salaries, because people who have these skills can solve a wide variety of important and lucrative problems. It is hard to say exactly how much a climate scientists is underpaid by, since academic career tracks are notoriously fickle, and comparative industry tracks often have share options, bonuses, profit sharing, or other financial inducements which can be difficult to predict. But by applying a broad uncertainty envelope, I think it is safe to say that from the moment a geologist finishes their undergraduate university degree, choosing a career in climate research rather than energy or mineral resource extraction generally results in a lifetime earnings deficit of somewhere between one and five million dollars. So climate researchers are not fattening up at the research funding trough. They are quite literally sacrificing a fortune to determine what kind or world we will be leaving our children.

    What this means is that the recent shuttering of government climate organizations will not mean the end of climate scientists, or even of climate science.  It simply means that Australians- and now possibly Americans- as a whole will no longer be the beneficiaries of their immense talents. Even if you, the reader, don’t have a job, these scientists will. It’s just that they won’t be working for you- or the rest of the public-  anymore; they’ll be working for someone much richer than you are, who probably doesn’t share your interests or values.

updated: 14 June 2017

You had me at “citation”

I recently attended the 2013 Goldschmidt conference in Florence Italy.  This is the largest geochemistry conference in the world.  It migrates between Europe and North America every year, with occasional forays into the Asia-Pacific region.  It is a big conference, with attendance in the mid thousands.

Unlike workshops, symposia, and little topical conferences, big conferences serve more as social and professional networking events than scientific problem solving sessions.

Senior scientists present the direction of their big projects.

Grad students show what they are capable of.

Junior scientists make sure they get widely known enough to pass their tenure review.

For young scientists looking for their next career move, it is important to meet people in their field.  Having been asked for advice on this topic, I thought I’d present the basics:

It is important to match those names that block out half a page of your thesis references with a face. These people will probably evaluate your proposals, work with you or your colleagues, and review your papers. 

The best way to do this is just to introduce yourself.

Try not to be nervous.  Or at least strive to be nervous gracefully.  And if you are nervous, don’t cover it up by trying too hard to show how smart you are.

The basic point is that if you see the name of a paper you like on a nametag, say hello.  Let the person know you liked their work.  There are very few scientists who don’t like being told that their research is interesting and useful.  Tell them you’re basing your work on theirs, and you’ll have them at “citation”

It’s not a symposium until somebody dangles their ‘nads

Scholarly debate can warm things up, but it isn’t until the pants come off that the logical arguments really start to fly.  At least, that was my impression on seeing Peitro Testa’s drawing “The Symposium” at the Uffizi gallery in Italy.  I am not an art person.  Nor am I a cultural person.  But a went to the Uffizi anyway because I had a day to kill in Florence, and even thought the subject isn’t my thing, I appreciate just about anything done well, and I try to do activities while traveling that I can’t do at home.  As a premier collection of Renaissance art, the Uffizi fulfills both requirements.

I did not take a tablet, speaking tours, or other digital media for simultaneous information gathering as I went through.  I did get a guidebook just so that I knew what was where, and I took a paper notebook and a pen, on the off chance I would have a thought or two and put a few sentences down.  My notes ran to five pages, and are typed up here for the amusement of those of my dear friends and family who are art people.

The Roman copy of a (presumably lost) Greek Herucles and the centaur Nessus statue is astounding- the look of concentration on his face is gripping, and the detail is such that you can see the veins bulging out of his forearms.

The whole gold leaf fad of the 1300’s could not have ended too soon.

I think this Botticelli guy could have spent a bit more time and effort depicting the water around the shell. 

Pallas and the Centaur is good- I need to read up on whichever myth puts them together.

One subtle but interesting feature of the Botticelli room is that if you glaze out- or even (in my case) take off glasses to totally defocus- and cast eyes around the room, The religious paintings that dominate the west and north walls are noticeable darker than the mythological ones on the south and east.  Part of this could just be contrast- there is shiny gold leaf on some of the religious ones (I thought you were above that, big B).  But I think there is more than that.  The religious paintings are dominated (in terms of fractional surface area) by people in dark or deep red robes.  The buildings are also dark, and the skies are generally dusky.

In contract, the classical paintings have brighter skies (forest excluded), fewer dark buildings, and more bright water.  Most importantly, perhaps, the people who dominate these paintings are wearing far fewer clothes than their religious counterparts.  So pale white skin replaces drab dark robes.  Also, the west wall isn’t actually Botticelli (glasses back on now so I can read the tags), so maybe it is just a personal style thing.

I like the lizard in the skull of Signorelli’s crucifixion.

Leonardo’s landscapes are more impressive, relative to his contemporaries, than his people.

Perspective must have been the 15th century equivalent of computer graphics.  Crazy math changing the way we render images of the world we see.

Nice floor in the classical sculpture room.

Grotesque hallway ceilings more interesting than the classical busts. 

The porphyry she-wolf could be ground up for zircons!

Ceilings have changed from grotesque cartoons to perspective heavens.  I like the one with the soldier falling back to Earth.

The mom in Michaelangelo’s Holy trinity reminds me of one of those WWII working women posters.  Must be the biceps.

Ariadne get a new head every 200 years!?

The murder of innocents is as horrible as it sounds.  Horrible, but masterful in its depiction of evil and the effect on society.  The expressions on the mother’s faces are heart-rending.

Montegna’s circumcision is fun to look at.  I like the composition, the style, the fantastical landscapes.  Not sure the foreskin ascending to Heaven adds much, tohugh.

Vecchio’s Adam and Eve:

Adam has bedroom eyes, and Eve is like, “The apple?  Are you kidding me?”

The boy with the thorn sculpture- random awesomeness.

“Rooms of foreign painters” Because all those masterpieces you’ve been looking at so far?  Those are just the local talent, bitches.

Allegory of Vanity.

I doubt Pereda meant it this way, but the Angel comes across as a passive-aggressive minion of evil.  I see no salvation in his dark lurking figure or slack-faces, cold-eyed stance. 

The hopeless decadence of the skulls, weapons, wealth, and trinkets is palpable, but the unsympathetic angel and fiery Armageddon suggest that the ministry of angels offers nothing but the perpetration of European destruction.

The brightest thing in the painting is the globe, centered on “America si ne India Nova”.  This suggests that the only hope of salvation lies in the New World.  Or maybe that’s just my American eyes interpreting it all.

Is Saint Jerome penitent or shocked? “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!”

Was there an obesity epidemic in the 1600’s?  Potatoes coming back from the new world?

The landscape with dead birds ain’t all that, but I like the turtle.

“Ships in a storm” by Plattenberg.  Now that is a seascape.  Send notes ro Mr. Botticelli.  Seriously, though, the Dutch landscapers are pretty good. I’m guessing they inspired the Hudson River school north of New Amsterdam a few centuries later.

Every American should see Reuben’s Bacchanalia

Stella’s painting looks more like Christ scolded by angels.  The angels go from adoring to stroppy from back to front.  Did he use the same model and keep deferring her payment?

Gabbiani’s Ganymede looks like he’s about to be dumped.  The expressions are fantastic.  The boy is blushing, “Is this love?” and the eagle’s cold predatory eye is utterly remorseless.

So was Mazzola one of those folks who thinks kids should breastfeed until four?

Zimbo’s corruption of time is gruesomely graphic.  Rich people with sick taste commissioning horrors evidently ain’t a new trend.

I want to see the original Perseus and Medusa by Foggini.

Carvaggio’s Bacchus is suitable jaded, but his Medusa shield is cheesy and shallow.

The expressions in Stormer’s Annunciation are fabulous. “Who, me?”

Spardino’s banquet of the Gods is oddly portentous of a not-too-distant future where the powerful look down on earth, half in a stupor, from their windowless server farms and wreak havoc on those who displease them, or dare threaten their carnal bacchanalia.

And just when my brain filled up, there was the end.

Except…

You know you’re in an art museum when you aren’t sure if it is a urinal or a watersculpture.  Sometimes, all you have is context.  So if you need to go, and it’s just across from the stalls…

The best book you've never read...

My current job involves a fair amount of long haul air travel. This isn't great, but it does mean that I get to read a bit more than I used to. I generally chew through a paperpack per long haul flight.  So I've knocked off the usual suspects- Hunger games, Game of Thrones, various offerings, cultural and otherwise, from the late Iain M. Banks.  But I've also been lucky enough to catch some lesser known books.

The Woodenman series by Harry Connolly is a prime example.  A rare example of navel-gazeless urban fantasy, these books combine the velocity of a page-turning action story with the twists and turns of a whodunnit against the backdrop of unimaginable Lovecraftian horror. Refreshingly free of pretense and unapologetically relentless in their depiction of the corruption of power, the series balances accessibility and heft with style. The final book in the series is particularly gripping and poignant.  But just as Ray, the protagonist, is relentlessly drawn into battles between forces crueler and greater than himself, so went the books themselves.  "Circle of Enemies" was released just as the bookselling giant Borders was demolished, and failed to sell enough copies to extend the series.  Which makes is a very good book with a tiny circulation- a rare treasure in the ponderous landscape of pulp.
Ironically, though the loss of a bookstore chain doomed this story, its ghost lives on in the purgatory of the online retailer that slew it.  The e-books can still be conjured up via the internet, and even some paperbacks seem to still be in stock.
I'm don't know if the novelist will be publishing anything else- for all I know he's just a well constructed pseudonym of J. K. Rowling- but I hope he gets another chance, as his first three books were quite enjoyable.
 

这是一个语言的科学吗

Since the end of WW II, English has been the dominant language of science.  This was not always the case.  The late 19th century industrial and scientific explosion in Germany made German a potential contender before geopolitical events depopulated Germany of its scientists.  And earlier in the 19th century French, and originally Latin, were the languages of the day.

The reasons for this are simple.  England has long been a leader in scientific inquiry, and the post-war assimilation of European scientists by the USA and subsequent technological revolution there during the space race and information revolution has kept English on the forefront.

None-the-less, many scientists do still publish in their native languages.  And even when they do publish in English, there are many Journals, such as the Journal of South American Geology Earth Sciences, which offer abstracts in other languages, such as Portuguese and Spanish, the dominant languages of that continent.  Similarly, Geostandards and Geoanalytical Research publishes French Abstract, since is is based in France and published by a French research organisation.

None-the-less, I was surprised to see that the Australian Journal of Earth Sciences is now publishing abstracts in Chinese for its English articles.  Australia is an English speaking country, and although there are small but locally important groups of immigrants who speak various Chinese languages, they are not over-represented in the Earth Sciences.  And while Chinese geologists compete internationally better than their scientists on other fields, and Chinese investment is important in the Australian mineral export industry, it is still a bold move by the AJES editors to pick Chinese as the next language of science.

p.s. If you can't read the title, check that your operating system has Asian characters enabled.

Grains of sand

How many grains of sand are there on earth?  That is a good question.  But a ball-park estimate is fairly simple.

We will look at fine sand (grain size = 100 microns), and coarse sand (grain size = 1 mm).

So a cubic mm can hold 1000 grains of fine sand, or 1 grain of course sand.  Obviously grain size is important.

There are 1x10¹⁸ cubic millimeters in a cubic km.

How many cubic km of sand, sandstone, etc we have Is a tricky question.  But if we say the average thickness of all sand for the globe is 200m (a thin number in any sedimentary basin, but most of the Earth is not a basin in the traditional sense.  The surface area of earth is 5x10 ⁸ km2, so a 0.2 km layer gives 10 ⁸ cubic km of sand.

This brings the total grain count to somewhere between 10³ x 10 ¹⁸ x 10 ⁸ = 10 ²⁹ for the fine sand, and a thousand times less than that, or 10 ²⁶ grains of the coarse sand.  If you want to know how that compares to the number of stars in the sky, ask an astronomer.

How many of your co-authors have you actually met?

In my meandering career from academia to government to private sector, and back into all the grey areas in between, I've been an author on a few journal articles, government reports, and other publications. Usually, these are collaborations between groups of separated people, not all of whom interact with every other member of the team.  For example, in the academic literature, I have a total of 21 co-authors, of whom I have met 9.  If we include government reports as well as papers, then I have 42 co-authors, of whom I have met 17.  I find it interesting that this ratio is so similar between the two types of reporting (about 40%).  So I was wondering: for those of you who read this blog and publish, is your ratio about the same?

Universities Australia sticks it to the Australian high technology industry

Universities Australia has launched a recent ad campaign decrying proposed funding cuts to university research.  This ad showcases the products of off-shore corporate giants which are trying to destroy the Australian high tech industry. 

The complicated scientific instrument pictured in the ad from 0:12 to 0:17 is something called a IMS-1280, manufactured by the American technology amalgamation Ametek under the brand name of Cameca, a European tech company which Ametek took over last decade. Ametek is perhaps the most aggressive corporate giant around in trying to leverage the recent high Australian dollar to destroy the Australian technology industry. 

Obviously, Australia is only a mid-size country, and most instrumentation in Australian universities is sourced from off-shore suppliers.  But many of these suppliers are good corporate citizens, who set up Australian subsidiaries, employ Australian graduates, and work closely with Australian agents, subcontractors, and scientists to sustain the high technology industries that define advanced economies in the 21^st century.  Indeed, one of these companies, the Japanese technology group JEOL, has an electron probe installed just across the hall from where the picture in the ad was taken.

Ametek is not a good corporate citizens.  Instead of collaborating with Australian manufacturers, they hire foreign lawyers to block sales around the globe.  While other companies reinvest in Australian research they hire slick Morden-like spokespeople to belittle the achievements of Australian academics.  And instead of helping Australian universities improve productivity and reduce costs through co-developed hardware and software modifications, they lock their customers into exorbitant service contracts, the proceeds of which allow them to underbid Australian companies whose instruments are generally preferred by researchers all over the world.

Every time one of the instruments pictured in this ad is purchased instead of an Australian equivalent, Australian universities lose hundreds of thousands dollars in direct payments from Australian companies and their international customers. It also means that Australian companies cannot create jobs for university graduates, such as those pictured in the first part of the ad.

The government is proposing cuts to university funding because of a revenue shortfall.  Revenue is down because aggressive corporate tactics by companies like Ametek are denying work to Australian companies, resulting in fewer hours worked, reduced income for the employees, and reduced income tax payment to the government.  So the approach of Universities Australia to showcase one of the most aggressive job-killers in their ad asking for government money is incredibly callous to all Australian trying to earn a living outside of the Ivory tower.