Month: October 2023

Flying less

If you follow me on mastodon you may have noticed a higher than normal number of posts, boosts and the like, many of them dealing with train travel in Europe.

View from a bridge: crossing the Great Belt Bridge (Storebæltsbroen) on the way to Germany

It is annual meeting season and that means the Horizon Europe projects I’m involved in (PolarRES, PROTECT, OCEAN:ICE) are gathering together somewhere more or less central (this year the Netherlands is popular) and discussing, presenting and planning with consortia members is going full speed ahead. After the pandemic when projects started online only or were written entirely via online meetings, even involving people who had never met each other, it’s clearly past time to come together in-person and discuss the newest findings.

I am involved in many different projects in varying roles (work package lead, project scientist, project coordinator). I find these meetings are incredibly stimulating and challenging. They help to get the scientific creativity going, to make new connections and meet new researchers, often early career scientists with new ideas and new techniques. Often this is an opportunity to see results that will not appear in the literature for months or years, as well as being an opportunity for planning new work.

On the way to Utrecht for PolarRES annual meeting. The first train of the meeting season was a Deutsche Bahn IC train loaned by Danish operator DSB to cope with increased demand between Copenhagen and Hamburg.

They’re also exhausting, often starting 8.30am and nominally finishing at 6pm but with many delegates in the same hotels and meeting over breakfast, not to mention late into the evening discussions over dinner, the days are long and non-stop.

I suspect it is much worse for those who do not have English as a first language. My Danish is fairly fluent these days, but I know how tiring it is to speak a foreign language all day. At the end all you want to do is crawl away to a dark room with no sensory stimulation at all..

The PROTECT project on sea level rise contributions from the cryosphere had a field trip this year, to the Eastern Scheldt Barrier, a wonder of the modern world and really frontline when it comes to European sea level rise adaptation. Inspiring to see how our work can be applied but also an opportunity for networking and informal discussions

This year, as in other years, I’m trying to do as much travelling as possible by train. It’s actually a nice way to travel to meetings, with plenty of time and space to get work done while travelling.

Far more pleasant than flying, with more legroom, space to move about and without the ridiculous security queues. I use my time to prepare presentations for the meeting and reflect and follow up from them on the way home as well as to (try) to keep my inbox under control..

(I have notably failed at this task this year, but on the up side I’ve drafted or contributed to 3 different papers, which I think/hope will endure a bit longer than my emails.)

An impromptu dinner meeting: also an opportunity to write papers and see how colleagues write their code.

The Deutsche Bahn trains are particularly pleasant, especially the ICE including buffet cars, excellent food and nice spacious train seats with good WiFi. The TGV was by comparison a little disappointing in terms of comfort but a nice smooth ride. Let’s not get into a discussion on punctuality..

Relaxing on the way home in the dining car with Deutsche Bahn’s finest vegan pasta and a good (actually *excellent*) book. Skål.

Train tickets can be surprisingly economical compared to flying, though usually the plane wins on money and time alone. My current trip from Copenhagen cost a mere 18 euros to get to Hamburg and the sleeper train connection to (near) Paris actually saves money as a berth turns out to be far less than the Paris hotel room I otherwise would have stayed in.

It is, however, aggravating how few sleeper connections there are between major European cities. Surely a connection to Brussels at least if not also Amsterdam makes sense? Props to the Austrian railways for keeping the sleepers alive at all in northern Europe.

There is a toll on family life from flying less. Although my family is growing more independent, the series of meetings have not made me popular at home, and probably rightly so. Travelling by train even to somewhere relatively close like the Netherlands or Paris easily adds a day either side. Letting the train take the strain turns out to also lead to strain on partners and children. In this I have to more than acknowledge my husband who is taking on far more than his fair share this month and who is also extremely supportive when it comes to the extra time.

I imagine not all employers are as tolerant of the extra day on either side travelling either, though as I said, it’s often quite productive, without meetings and office interruptions. Certainly, most of the other scientists have travelled by train from London, Vienna, Grenoble and even Kyiv.

A sleeper connection from city centre to centre would make all these links much more bearable from both points of view.

Even the few remaining sleepers leave only from Hamburg, not Copenhagen. That means a 4.5 hour (on a good day, it can be up to 6 hours on a slow train) each way connection to Copenhagen to factor in. Though, I should give an honourable mention to the Snälltaget, whose Stockholm- Copenhagen -Hamburg -Berlin service has been so popular it is now a year round service after being a temporary summer trial.

Don’t get me wrong, I quite like Hamburg, it is, if not charming, certainly culturally vibrant and a melting pot to rival London (let’s not forget it’s where the Beatles learnt their trade) and there is some excellent food and drink at the station. I’m practically at the Syrian mezze kitchen (seriously, check it out next time you’re passing through). However, it is also a gigantic bottleneck on the railway network and I’ve learned the hard way to allow at least an hour connection time and preferably more ..

Then there is the whole hassle of booking tickets and finding connections. Which is not to be underestimated. As a committed train traveller, I’m pretty good at it now, but it takes a lot of practice and as Jon Worth has eloquently pointed out, particularly when transferring internationally, some rail companies take a perverse delight in senseless connection times..

This is why I am a huge supporter of the Trains for Europe #CrossBorderRail initiative. If we want to reduce flying. And let’s be frank. We MUST, there is no way around it if we want to keep carbon out the atmosphere, then making it easy to replace planes with trains and buses (comfy, long distance ones and where possible electrified) is going to be essential.

And harmonising timetables, tickets and booking across Europe could be the kind of boring stuff that turns out to usher in a kind of quiet revolution in transport…

For now, I’m starting out on my last trip for a while, to Paris to meet OCEAN:ICE collaborators collaborators. Next year, after our historic hundred- year event storm flood last weekend , I will offer to host it in Copenhagen, so another group of cryosphere and ocean scientists can visit the frontline in the consequences of sea level rise.

I hope they will be able to take the train.

Journey’s end: arrival back in Copenhagen after a late night train from Hamburg. You don’t get this view from the airport…

The storm is coming in…

UPDATE THE MORNING AFTER (21/10/2023): water levels are now falling rapidly to normal and the worst of the gales are past, so it’s time for the clean-up and to take stock of what worked and where it went wrong. It’s quite clear that we had a hundred year storm flood event in many regions, though the official body that determines this has not yet announced it. Their judgement is important as it will trigger emergency financial help with the cost of the clean-up.

In most places the dikes, sandbags and barriers mostly worked to keep water out, but in a few places they could not deal with the water and temporary dikes (filled pvc tubes of water km long in some cases) actually burst under the pressure, emergency sluice gates and pumps could also not withstand the pressure in one or two places.

Trains and ferries were delayed or cancelled and a large ship broke free from the quayside at Frederikshavn and is still to be shepherded back into place.

Public broadcaster DR has a good overview of the worst affected places here.

Water levels reached well over 2m in multiple places around the Danish coast and in some places, water measurements actually failed during the storm..

In other places, measurements show clearly that the waters are pretty rapidly declining. So. A foretaste of the future perhaps? We will expect to see more of these “100 year flood” events happening, not because we will have more storms necessarily but because of the background sea level rising. It has already risen 20cm since 1900, 10cm of that was since 1991, the last few years global mean sea level has risen around 4 – 4.5 mm per year. The smart thing to do is to learn from this flood to prepare better for the next one.

But we as a society also to assess how we handle it when a “hundred year” flood happens every other year…

-Fin-

Like much of northern Europe we have been battening down the hatches, almost literally, against storm Babet in Denmark this week. DMI have issued a rare red weather warning for southern Denmark, including the area I often go kayaking in.

Weather warning issued by DMI 20th October 2023 There are three levels, blue signifies the lowest, yellow is medium and the highest is red, which is rather rarely issued. The boxed text applies to the red zome around southern Denmark and states it relates to a water level of between 1.4 and 1.8m above the usual.

From a purely academic viewpoint, it’s actually quite an interesting event, so beyond the hyperbolic accounts of the TV weather presenters forced to stand outside with umbrellas, I thought it was worth a quick post as it also tells us something about compound events, that make storms so deadly, but also about how we have to think about adaptation to sea level rise.

I should probably start by saying that this storm is not caused by climate change, though of course in a warming atmosphere, it is likely to have been intensified by it, and the higher the sea level rises on average, the more destructive a storm surge becomes, and the more frequent the return period!

Neither are storm surges unknown in Denmark -there is a whole interesting history to be written there, not least because the great storm of 1872 brought a huge storm surge to eastern Denmark and probably led directly to the founding of my employer, the Danish Meterological Institute. My brilliant DMI colleague Martin Stendel persuasively argues that the current storm surge event is very similar to the 1872 event in fact, suggesting that maybe we have learnt something in the last 150 years…

Stormflod 1872
Xylografi, der viser oversømmelsens hærger på det sydlige Lolland
År: 1872 FOTO:Illustreret Tidende

However, back to today: the peak water is expected tonight, and the reason why storm surges affect southern and eastern Denmark differently to western Denmark is pretty clear in the prognosis shown below for water height (top produced by my brilliant colleagues in the storm surge forecasting section naturally) and winds (bottom, produced by my other brilliant colleagues in numerical weather prediction):

Forecast water level for 1am 21st October 2023 note that the blue colours on the west show water below average height and the pink colours in the south and east show sea level at above average height.
Forecast wind speeds and directions indicated by the arrows for 1am, Saturday 21st October 2023

Basically, the strong westerly winds associated with the storm pushed a large amount of water from the North Sea through the Kattegat and past the Danish islands into the Baltic Sea over the last few days. Imagine the Baltic is a bath tub, if you push the water one way it will then flow back again when you stop pushing. Which is exactly what it is now doing, but now, it is also pushed by strong winds from the east as shown in the forecast shown above. These water is being driven even higher against the coasts of the southern and eastern danish islands.

The great belt (Storebælt) between the island of Sjælland (Zealand) and Fyn (Funen) is a key gateway for this water to flow away, but the islands of Lolland, Falster and Langeland are right in the path of this water movement, explaining why Lolland has the longest dyke in Denmark (63km, naturally it’s also a cycle path and as an aside I highly recommend spending a summer week exploring the danish southern islands by bicycle or sea kayak, they’re lovely.). It’s right in the front line when this kind of weather pattern occurs.

These kind of storm surges are sometimes known as silent storm surges by my colleagues in the forecasting department because they often occur after the full fury of the storm has passed. I wrote about one tangentially in 2017. This time, adding to the chaos, are those gale force easterly winds, forecast to be 20 – 23 m/s, or gale force 9 on the Beaufort Scale if you prefer old money, which will certainly bring big waves that are even more problematic to deal with that a slowly rising sea, AND torrential rain. So while the charts on dmi.dk which allow us to follow the rising seas (see below for a screengrab of a tide gauge in an area I know fairly well from the sea side), water companies, coastal defences and municipalities also need to prepare for large amounts of rain, that rivers and streams will struggle to evacuate.

Water height forecast for Køge a town in Eastern Sjælland not far from Copenhagen. The yellow line indicates the 20 year return period for this height. Blue line shows measurements and dashed black lines show the forecast from the DMI ocean model. You can find more observations here.

In Køge the local utilities company is asking people to avoid running washing machines, dishwashers and to avoid flushing toilets over night where possible to avoid overwhelming sewage works when the storm and the rain is at the maximum.

This brings me to the main lessons that I think we can learn from this weather (perhaps super-charged by climate) event.

Firstly, it’s the value of preparedness, and learning from past events. There will certainly be damage from this event, thanks to previous events, we have a system of dykes and other defence measures in place to minimse that damage and we know where the biggest impacts are likely to be.

A temporary dike deployed against a storm surge in Roskilde fjord

Secondly, the miracle, or quiet revolution if you will, of weather and storm forecasting means we can prepare for these events days before they happen, allowing the deployment of temporary barrages, evacuations and the stopping of electricity and other services before they become a problem.

This is even more important for the 3rd lesson, that weather emergencies rarely happen alone – it’s the compound nature of these events that makes them challenging – not just rising seas but also winds and heavy rain. And local conditions matter – water levels in western Denmark are frequently higher, the region is much more tidally influenced than the eastern Danish waters. This is basically another way of saying that risk is about hazard and vulnerability.

Finally, there are the behavioural measures that mean people can mitigate the worst impacts by changing how they behave when disaster strikes. Of course, this stuff doesn’t happen by itself. It requires the slightly dull but worthy services to be in place, for different agencies to communicate with each other and for a bit of financial head room so far-sighted agencies can invest in measures “just in case”. We are fortunate indeed that municipalities have a legal obligation to prepare for climate change and that local utilities are mostly locally owned on a cooporative like basis – rather than having to be profit-making enterprises for large shareholders..

This piece is already too long, but there is one more aspect to consider. The harbour at Hesnæe Havn has just recorded a 100 year event, that is a storm surge like this would be expected to occur once ever hundred years, in this case the water is now 188cm. The previous record of 170cm was set in 2017. We need to prepare for rising seas and the economic costs they will bring. The sea will slowly eat away at Denmark’s coasts, but the frequency of storm surges is going to change – 20cm of sea level rise can turn a 100 year return event into a 20 year return event and a 20 year return event into an ever year event.

Screenshot of the observations of sea level from Hesnæs

We need to start having the conversation NOW about how we’re going to handle that disruption to our coastlines and towns.

Really fantastic piece over on the cryopolitics site: The death of Arctic exceptionalism

Worth a read and subscribing..

Following the invasion of Ukraine, Arctic exceptionalism is no longer. The region is reproducing deep divisions between Russia and the West in lower latitudes.

The death of Arctic exceptionalism

How (and why) to use Mastodon: a beginners guide.

Lessons from a year in the fediverse…

It’s been almost a year since I started to seriously explore Mastodon and the rest of the fediverse. I wrote a piece on here in December 2022 and again in February 2023 as I transferred pretty much all my activity to mastodon. There are other competitors to the dead bird site, and mastodon is not a complete replacement for the site formerly known as twitter, but it’s also very clear that in spite of recent improvements, it’s still quite hard for people to transfer. If at this point you want to skip ahead to the quick start go ahead, but indulge me a little justification first, there is a point, I promise…

EDIT: if you’re just here looking for good climate follows, the climate migration account at mastodon.world has put together this great list. Did you know you can import .CSV formatted files of accounts on mastodon?

As to why you should transfer or at least consider diversifying to different platforms? Well, we all have our own thresholds, but the increasingly appalling behaviour of the new owner means I certainly do not regret my decision to switch last year. I did not and do not want to have my “content” making X or whatever you call it now money either. If you wouldn’t buy a newspaper given outrageous racism and circulation of misinformation, then it’s probably worth asking yourself if there’s any difference posting to a social media site that has been proven to be a haven for trolls and one of the most active ways that misinformation spreads.

So where then? Well it’s a fractured social media environment today and as I wrote before, I’ve ended up blogging a lot more. And it’s been fun. I’ve really enjoyed restarting this effort.

I have been offered a couple of BlueSky invites, and I may check it out, but it will never be an “only” because that would suggest we have learnt nothing from handing over control of our digital lives to yet another VC funded start-up. If their promises of interoperability come good, I may review this opinion. I might start to share these wordpress posts over at Substack too – though there also the ownership gives me pause, I will certainly not allow it to be come the one platform to rule them all.

This excellent post by Elizabeth Tai put it much better than I can. And at least with Mastodon I have much more control and ownership over my own content and my own data – nobody is trying to monetise me.

“The Twitter meltdown made me realize something important: I’m a seriously prolific content creator. And I’ve been giving away all that content free to a platform that not only profits from it but treats me like garbage unfairly when it comes to sharing said profits. Meaning, they don’t share a dime. When I downloaded my Twitter archive, it hit me like a ton of bricks that most of that content was not sitting in my website, so they could just disappear if a billionaire decides to cut me off from the platform.”

Essayist Elizabeth Tai

The point of course is that we do not need to be bound to just one platform, it takes time and effort but it is still possible to share in more than one place, if we can keep out of the walled gardens. In the future my strategy is probably something like longer thoughts and pieces here, probably also shared on substack at some point (if relevant) and then shared out via mastodon, where I’m on the fediscience server – and if you’re a scientist you might want to join too (see point one below though) and linked in (yes I know, weird, it’s like a zombie, keeps coming back and seems to be booming). But it will not go on the dead bird site, nor the meta site (which I left long before for basically similar reasons) and certainly not after the latest lurch into

So to the point of this post. Hopefully you got to this part and you’re thinking, great. Where do I start?

Here’s a really quick start guide from fedi.tips who you should probably also start by following (@feditips@mstdn.social). And while we’re on that subject, maybe try @FediFollows too- the same person (group?), highlights interesting accounts to follow under a particular theme every day. Worth a look.

You can also Check out this slightly longer list of helpful resources by fedi.tips.

Screenshot from https://fedi.tips/ where the links are live

Now to repeat: Mastodon is *a bit* like Twitter, but it’s not quite the same. You’ll probably have to use it a bit to get used to it. Now twitter, used to be thought of as “difficult” too. It really was (as an ancient episode of Dr Who proves, the place only nerds went to hang out). The last I read (may no longer be accurate), only 10% of the people who set up accounts were active a year later. So it does take some time to get used to a new platform and you should definitely bear that in mind.

Social media needs to leverage network effects. it takes time to get to the stage of “but this is how it’s always done”. With that in mind, and given that social media is absolutely not for everyone, here are some tips (based only and in a completely biased way, on my own experiences)

  1. Mastodon works on servers – it really doesn’t matter that much which server you choose initially, but you probably want to avoid the really big ones. They are sometimes unstable and it can be difficult to follow. There’s a huge range from single user servers (called instances) to large language/country/interest based ones. I’m on fediscience.org. You can use the servers page on joinmastodon.org to find one you think sounds interesting. And if you don’t like it you can switch (and take your followers with you, though not your posts). Within mastodon you will have a button to see what other people on your server are posting, so choosing something relevant and larger may help at first. (Map nerds might like to check out this beautiful visualisation tool -see what I mean about the creativity and do it yourself attitude of the fediverse?)
  2. Set up your profile with as much detail as possible, include an OrcID, a personal webpage, some interests so people can see who you are if that’s important. it’s also fine to be anonymous on the fediverse though. You decide.
  3. Make an introduction post, tagged and if you know a few people already on there tag them too. If they are on different servers to you will need to include the server address. In much the same way that an email to @alice is not going to arrive but an email to @alice@emails.com will.
  4. Follow a lot of people. And I mean really a lot. At first you may want to follow all the people you can find, they will be your algorithm, you can easily prune back later.
  5. Use lists to organise by topic or interest. For instance i have one for climate scientists, one for danish mastodon, one for press accounts – it’s an easy way to curate your feed a bit.
  6. More on finding people to follow: There’s a github for that which includes many curated lists on specific topics. If you’re following me, it’s quite likely you’re interested in earth science, so here’s a list to check out and to add yourself too if you want. You can also download and upload lists of followers in csv format which is quite helpful for bulk following. Once you have a few followers there’s a handy tool called followgraph that will scan your followers and they look at who they follow to help you find similar accounts
  7. Boost much more than you think you need to, including reupping your own posts to catch different audiences at different times of day (it’s like twitter before the algorithm became so dominant). Likes just make the person who posted feel warm fuzzy. There is no algorithm! You have to make your own feed
  8. Follow hashtags to find good content and new accounts that interest you. As an example I follow , + among others. Some user interfaces (e.g. Halcyon.social) allow you to read these in the same way you would on tweetdeck. Sprinkle your posts liberally with hashtags too.
  9. Try out different apps to find the one you like best. I have been mostly using Tusky on my phone but I’m now testing fedilab too. I believe you have even more choice on iphones On the desktop using elk.social gives a very beautiful interface.
  10. Put in some effort to curate your own experience in the early days. You’ll need to work at it the first few weeks to find good accounts, hashtags etc to follow. Don’t expect everything to be served up on a plate, it’s different here. As I already said, it’s hard to remember how much like hard work twitter was at this stage and Mastodon is doing it on a shoestring budget.
  11. If you experience harassment and spam, and I’m sure it happens, though I’ve not seen anything like the abuse on the dead birdsite, report and block. If you have a good instance admin they will be on it straight away. If you don’t, move to a different instance. Unfortunately mastodon does have its share of reply guys. I just shrug and ignore. They seem to go away. If they don’t, see above.
  12. Give it time. To build up a network and a feed takes time. Invest a little and you’ll find you reap rewards. And remember to boost much more than you think is necessary.
  13. Some additional tips: check your preferences in your profile. If you are hoping to connect with others with a similar interest, make sure you are findable.
  14. You can set a post to have different levels of visibility. I usually post to everyone, but sometimes I might make replies unlisted so people don’t get their timelines spammed with a long thread. Be aware that direct messages between you and other users are not encrypted and can easily be read by your instance admin (Mind you there is evidence this is true of twitter too – this story is another reason to get off the platform in my opinion).

I think this is about it. If you find it useful or if you have stuff to add please feel free to leave a comment. There is in fact a wordpress ActivityPub plug-in that allows comments to crosspost to mastodon, which I may investigate at some point, when I have time.

A final thought, different people have different tolerances for privacy and data sharing – as I’ve got older, and frankly as I’ve been more on mastodon where people talk about this stuff, and refuse to take for granted the normal tracking that happens elsewhere in the web, my tolerance for being tracked has gone down and down, so here is something else to consider.

Thanks to mastodon user @micron for this image showing just how much data you hand over access to on different services.

And that should be that, except:

I have an extra message to governmental institutes and agencies.

Does this sound familar?

“I represent a government agency, all our users are on twitter/X/facebook”

I would argue that the last thing governmental agencies should be doing is supporting or relying on these commercial platforms, especially if your job is to distribute information important for public safety or wellbeing. Your users are there, because you are there – they will find other ways to access your info if you do.

If you’re a government employee, you might want to draw your employer’s attention to the very helpful FediGov.eu – why? Well as their website says:

“Sovereignty Digital sovereignty pursues the goal of enabling the independent and self-determined use and design of digital technologies by the state, the economy and individuals. Decentralized free software solutions, give all people and organizations the right to use, understand, distribute and improve them for any purpose. This is a cornerstone for our democracy in an increasingly digitalized society.

Privacy The public should not be forced to pass on their data to large corporations in order to be able to communicate with public institutions. The public administration should support the public in data protection and therefore also offer alternatives.

Public funds When using taxpayers’ money, care must be taken to ensure that it is used efficiently and effectively. The procurement, provision and use of free software solutions must therefore be the focus of digitization.

Legal certainty The use of social networks by large, globally active digital corporations is difficult to reconcile with European data protection laws. As a public authority, it is necessary to ensure a legally compliant communication for the public. In the area of social networks, public institutions and authorities must therefore also rely on federated free software solutions!”

The German and Dutch governments have already set-up their own instances. Shouldn’t you be using them or setting up your own if you live in a different country?