Love Letter to Copenhagen

On my way to work every morning I cycle down several tree lined streets – the lime trees are now in flower and the scent will always remind me of Copenhagen in the summertime. I wrote this piece last year and was reminded of it this morning by the perfume, so I dug it out and adapted it a bit, if I get time I’ll add photos later.

It’s mid June and after a baking hot May it’s cooler and humid in Copenhagen. The city is getting very quiet as the locals start to go off to their summer houses on the coast, or in Sweden, for the month of July, leaving the streets to tourists and musicians here for the jazz festival. In some ways it’s the best time of year to actually be in the city. The boulevards and streets are lined with sweet lime trees which has a very beautiful scent and the city is perfumed with it.

The parks and gardens are filled with flowers and in the evenings the remaining residents sit out in the parks with little barbecues. There are lots of areas set aside for sports and games and local teams spring up seemingly spontaneously to play street hockey, table tennis and football.

The zoo has a big elephant enclosure with an outdoor area open to the rest of the big Frederiksberg park, of which the zoo area is a small part. The elephants have a big natural pool and sandy beach and many of the park visitors outside the zoo spend time watching the younger elephants bathe and play in the water and throwing the sand over their backs, sending the ducks scurrying off in a panic with their ducklings trailing behind.

Cycling through the city is wonderful just now, especially in the evenings and especially if there’s no place you really need to be; the smell of flowers and charcoal smoke and grilled food all mixed in together, music being played in little bars and big open squares, even the careless tourists who forget to look for bikes before crossing the cycle lanes are tolerated with amusement, not everyone is so lucky to have a lifestyle like this after all. It really feels like a blessed place and a blessed time to live.

Update: I notice a friend, Kitty B. over at these sublime days has a post about childhood memories. I think the lime tree will be my memory of Copenhagen, and some day, when the Sterna family finally have a nest of our own, we will plant a lime tree so the scent will always remind us of this place.

Return to the Academy

The Sterna family are just back from a holiday at the Hay Festival. This is a wonderful event with a very diverse range of speakers, in fact it was impossible to see everything that interested me. One of events I missed was Bettany Hughes talking about her book The Hemlock Cup, which is about Socrates and his city of Athens, though I have listened to excerpts of the book on Radio 4. However, the subject of the talk led me to think that the festival itself could be considered as a modern form of Plato’s Academy, where problems are posed and discussed in a group of like-minded people. Though of course unlike Plato’s academy, all events were open to the public, even non-geometers (famously above the door to the Academy a Greek phrase ‘let none but geometers enter here’ was inscribed).

However, the concept that discussion of ideas, culture, nature, and the rest of the world can revitalise and refresh is central to the festival (along perhaps with selling books).The natural environment also helps, with beautiful green countryside all around. Sometimes it felt like wandering back in time to a lost world, or at least one I hadn’t thought existed anymore. And then along came the next talk on the secret mathematicians (Marcus du Sautoy),secular philosophy (A.C. Grayling), the smartness of the corvids (Nicky Clayton), the process of aging (Lewis Wolpert) or even the biography of the Ordnance Survey (Rachel Hewitt)  to bring us back to earth.

My other personal highlight was Dara O’Briain, surely one of the funniest people around today? I last saw him many years ago as a student, and now here he is talking about how old he feels when he’s talking to students and the problems of young parenthood. Dara – we’ve grown up together…

There is much more to be written about the festival, which is held every year in the small village of Hay – On- Wye that straddles the English/Welsh border, but frankly, it’s all been said before and like the Academy probably much more interesting to attend than hear about. See you next year.

A space of one’s own

‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write’

The famous opening of Virginia Woolf’s extended essay ‘ A Room of One’s Own’ is the starting point for this post. It was just as applicable to science in the days of the ‘gentleman amateur’ as it was to literature and to an extent it is still true today. In Virginia’s day of course a woman was lucky to get a decent education, never mind the kind of fulfilling job that a woman of her intellectual powers clearly wanted and needed.Which is why the rare exceptions such as Marie Curie and Lise Meitner are so inspiring.

XKCD cartoon about Marie Curie

I started this blog (which has been shamefully empty of new posts for the last couple of months) while I was on leave looking after the sterna chick, I am now back at work and settling in to the daily life of a scientist again. I was reminded of this quote because while I was on leave I literally felt like I had no space or time to work. This may not have been quite true, but sleep, house work and some relaxing quality time with the male sterna were also important variables to factor in to the time equation for me. By going back to work I have not only got the money, but also the room of my own (well shared with a very quiet office mate) that Virginia quite clearly pined for. I can now finally get down to the work that has been niggling at me for the last 8 months. This is not to say that I am stressed out about work, to the contrary, I find my work rewarding, challenging, intellectually stimulating and a fundamental part of my identity.

I may not be able to make a great contribution to literature like Virginia Woolf, and science, certainly these days, progresses in small increments rather than big steps, so I’m not expecting to discover an entirely new chemical element or explain nuclear fission (which would be a bit bizarre given my field anyway). I hope though, that at least in a small way, my work will help to advance the body of knowledge and thus fulfil the promise that a room of one’s own holds.

Living in interesting times

There has never been a better time to be a glaciologist. The old curse about living in interesting times, which is perhaps dubiously ascribed to a chinese saying, seems particularly relevant to science in general and ice and climate specialists in particular right now. We have access to a truly phenomenal range of resources that help us track the changes in the earth system; we can bounce radio waves off rocks buried under 4km of ice and use lasers to measure the height of clouds or the depths of a crevasse with decimetre precision. The GRACE and GOCE satellites whizz around the planet and the tiny relativistic accelerations and decelerations of paired satellites measure the seasonal ebb and flow of groundwater, snowfall and ice melt; and we can use the time signals of the GPS constellation of satellites to measure the millimetre by millimetre relaxation of whole continents as the glaciers melt. We do live in the future.

The planet often seems to me to be very full of people and every corner well explored, but these new techniques still demonstrate that we have large gaps and science is probably the most fundamental form of exploration. This week a paper in Science demonstrated the importance of the freezing on of ice at the bottom of the Antarctic ice sheet (see this article on the BBC science page for a very readable summary). As a process it’s been well known for some decades that liquid water can exist due to the huge pressures under the ice sheets and that this does indeed freeze on at the bed of glaciers. The ice core drilled out of the Antarctic ice sheet at Vostok station lies directly above a lake roughly the size of lake Ontario, known as lake Vostok and shortly to be drilled into directly for the first time. The drilling hit frozen lake water some hundreds of metres before it stopped, with some intriguing hints of lifeforms found within the lake ice.

What is a surprise in the latest work, an airborne radar mission to the Gamburtsev Range (a mountain range the size of the European Alps in East Antarctica but don’t try looking for it on Google Earth because it is also, like Lake Vostok, buried under 4km of ice) is that up to 25% of the total thickness of the ice sheet in this area results from the freezing on of liquid water underneath the ice. This is largely because that water is squeezed up against the mountain sides where the ice is thinner and the pressure consequently lower.

Ice Radar

I first saw some of this work presented at a conference at Northumbria University in 2009, even then, when the actual data was still being analysed, it was clearly very exciting work with many implications for our knowledge of both process and feedback and implications. There are also some important implications for how we evaluate the state of the cryosphere, and neither this process, nor many others relating to how water flows over, through and under ice, what we term glacier hydrology, are captured in current ice sheet models.

Of course, the old curse is famously double-edged, the reason we have access to such great tools and have been able to make so much progress is related to the fact that the climate is changing and the cryosphere is demonstrating behaviour of great concern to the millions of people who live in coastal regions or who depend on snow and ice for water sources. It is up to glaciologists to disentangle important processes from the trivial, to define the current state of the cryosphere and project how it will change. This new work shows just how much we still need to know and how seemingly trivial processes may complicate the picture. Just as well those satellites are continuing to fly.

Welcome to the future.

XKCD cartoon on flying cars

The life expectancy of the glaciologist

Willi Dansgaard died recently. He gave his name to one half of the Dansgaard-Oeschger events, a sequence of rapid (relatively speaking) climate fluctuations that occurred during the last glacial period where rapid warming (of up to 8C over a matter of a few decades) is followed by a long slow cooling over a few hundreds of years. These events are mostly known from the Greenland ice cores,  but there is evidence that they are in fact a worldwide phenomenon.

Willi Dansgaard with ice core
Willi Dansgaard with ice core (taken from the obituary published by DMI)

Willi Dansgaard will probably be mostly celebrated as the “founder” of ice core science, though of course many people helped to develop the ideas and techniques, some of them are still working in Copenhagen today. Remarkably for a scientist you’ve probably never heard of, a full obituary is given in the LA Times

In the last year or two several eminent glaciologists have passed away, almost all of them well into their 80s and 90s, while some of the founders of the modern discipline, including John Nye and John Glen (who together formulated “Glen’s Flow Law” for ice that describes how glaciers move), are still active in attending meetings and producing papers.

For a profession that specialises in the study of cold, dangerous places (more on my own encounter with mortality on a glacier in a later post) glaciologists seem in general to reach a respectable, and healthy old age. I wonder if this is due to the fact that science teaches a healthy inquisitive attitude to life that keeps people young? Or perhaps those attracted to field based research are naturally likely to be more interested in outdoor activities that help keeping active and fit? On the other hand perhaps it just reflects the fact that people are living longer and healthier lives in general?

Either way, I hope I manage to have as long a productive and healthy life as some of the guiding lights of my profession, even if I can’t hope to replicate their genius.

Science under attack

I had planned another subject for todays blog, but having watched the recent Horizon programme on science under attack on BBC iplayer (still available for those with a British IP address) I thought it tied in rather neatly with why I decided to start this blog.

In the first place the idea came to me to start a blog as a way of practicing my own writing skills. Then secondly I thought I might have something interesting to say. When people find out I’m a climate scientist I often get all sorts of questions about climate change ranging from the basic (is it really happening?) to the more nuanced and complex (how do models work?) to, unfortunately, yet another repetition of the usual climate myths (see below). This blog should be a small window on the world where I write about things that interest me and hopefully are interesting to others.

Cartoon from the Union of Concerned Scientists

As I looked in to the world of blogging, and in particular into blogging on climate related themes, a huge number of blogs came up. Unfortunately, many of them are rather weak on science and very overtly political. In fact a quick scan of the google hits brings up rather more blogs and websites by what might (kindly) be called “sceptics” (or otherwise known as “deniers”) than blogs created by scientists. There is some really good material on the web dealing with climate related issues, for example the excellent Realclimate.org blog but in many other places there is a lot of dross and the same empty myths endlessly recycled and repeated (for example, “it’s the little ice age”, “it was warmer in the Medieval period”, “it’s sun spots” etc etc), largely I’m afraid due to lazy and/or politically motivated journalism. All of these common myths have been explained over and over again, usually by people far better qualified, and far more skilled in writing than I, yet somehow they seem to persist.

As the Horizon documentary made clear, this is a source of immense frustration to many in the climate field, including myself, so I feel the time has come to stick my head above the parapet so to speak and start broadcasting my own opinions. At least I hope it will be a small addition to the counterbalancing work done by people like Real Climate and maybe it will help open some minds.

The same documentary blamed scientists for being poor communicators and I would tend to agree with that, it’s hard to talk about uncertainties in models for examples when even the word uncertainty is used very differently in science than in everyday life. On the other hand, this article on communication in the journal Nature by Tim Radford suggests that in fact scientists can be good communicators and he cites such luminaries as Carl Sagan, E.O. Wilson, Stephen Jay Gould and even Richard Dawkins (although I fear the latter has alienated a large part of the audience with his agressive approach to atheism). These are all great examples of great communicators of science, and though I fear I couldn’t possibly get close to their talent, I hope that this blog will help to develop my skills further.

One further point, Ben Goldacre, the Guardian’s excellent bad science columnist is a witty, knowledgeable and hard working advocate of good science who works tirelessly against vested interests, quackery, big pharma and other ‘enemies of reason’. In this post about the Copenhagen climate summit he explores the psychology of climate science and why it is so difficult to communicate. He points out that

‘climate science is difficult. We could discuss everything you needed to know about MMR and autism in an hour: the experimental techniques of epidemiology and other disciplines, how they’ve been misrepresented, the results, strengths, and weaknesses of the key studies. Climate change will take two days of your life, for a relatively superficial understanding: if you’re interested, I’d recommend the IPCC website itself, where they have a series of three executive summaries for policy makers, which are perfectly good pieces of humourless popular science writing.’

This is very true and I am certainly not going to use this blog to explain all issues related to climate change research. In fact, I aim to produce pieces about all sorts of scientific curiosities, natural wonders and society’s response to these. I have imposed two other conditions on myself. Firstly, I should not spend more than an hour on any one post and secondly, I want to post at least twice a week. I’ve broken the latter already, but thanks to my friend Heather I’ve been inspired to try again.

Enjoy.

Forecasting the weather part 1: Differences between forecasts

This is the first part of an occasional series that I intend to write about why it’s so difficult to forecast the weather. In the UK the forecast can be notoriously wrong but it seems to me that most people have no idea how difficult it is to make a good forecast, especially in a maritime climate with air masses coming from all sides. This first piece is based on something I wrote for an online forum when another forumite complained that there were two different forecasts for their area that never seemed to agree.

The divergence between two weather forecasts for the same area over the same period can actually come from a whole range of differences between the different forecasters. In Europe most forecasters use the same observational dataset provided by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF). This cuts out one set of problems as weather is famously chaotic and very small changes in starting conditions can lead to big changes in outcome, otherwise known as the butterfly effect. The famous storm of 1987 which destroyed millions of trees in southern England and caused millions of pounds of damage but which was not forecast accurately turns out to have been a super unpredictable event as shown in this talk given at the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco in December 2010. However, chaos theory is fascinating in it’s own right so perhaps I’ll give it a post to itself another time.

In day to day forecasts, the biggest difference is probably in the resolution of the model (if you imagine that an area, say the UK, is divided up into little squares, the computer model solves a whole lot of equations for each square).
If the square is 5km by 5km in size then some processes, and a lot of the topography will be smoothed out, but if the square is 500m by 500m then a lot more will be captured. Imagine a hill of 1000m rising out of a flat plain only 100m high in a particular location. The elevation of the square is the average of the whole elevation. In the 5km by 5km model, the entire hill and an equal area of plain is captured so in the square the average elevation may be 500m, but in the 500m by 500m model it may need 4 squares to accurately cover the hill alone and each square will have a different elevation.

Temperatures typically go down as you go higher, and rain will fall as the air cools, so if the hill isn’t “resolved” in the model the prediction may be unrealistically warm and dry. This is why forecasters like high resolution models, but that resolution comes at a high cost, because you need to increase the vertical resolution (the number of squares in the atmosphere) and reduce the length of time between each calculation as the horizontal resolution increases.

Another source of difference are the actual equations solved in the model. These can be formulated in different ways and with different approximations and are often “tuned” so a model that works really well in Scotland is unlikely to be so successful in the Sahara (where I imagine forecasting is actually pretty easy – it’ll be hot and sunny). That’s not to say the models are “wrong” just that they perform better in some circumstances than others and are designed for different purposes often.

Finally, a further important difference is the updating of the model with real time observations and at the boundaries. Most models are not run for the whole wold, but only a small portion (the whole world can be run at a resolution of about 20km nowadays, but it takes a lot of very expensive computer power). More effective is running a small section (say the UK), and telling the computer what is happening at the edges of the box based on satellite and ground observations. These can also be fed in to the area within the model to nudge it in the right direction. In practice as I mentioned earlier, in Europe most national agencies get this information from a single source, the ECMWF. Also, the models tend to be “better” than the observations (as measurements can go wrong, instruments might be wrongly calibrated etc), so at any given moment a weighting of about 40% is applied to observations and 60% for the model, depending on what in particular you’re looking at.

So the accuracy of any forecast depends on where you live and also how far in the future you need your weather to be reliable. Most forecasts aren’t bad up to 3 days in advance in general terms but the specifics can change quickly. Beyond that to 5 days is more tricky and depends on the large scale situation, for example is there a stable high pressure dominating or a series of storms and which way will a weather system move. Beyond a week to 10 days the forecasters are basically just guessing (at least in a maritime climate like the UK) and this why the met office has recently discontinued seasonal forecasts as they can be very unhelpful.

Garden birds

Female blackbird on a tree branch
Female blackbird waiting for food

At this time of year about the only thing worth going out into the garden for is to watch the birds. Even in the centre of town where the Sterna nest is located, we have identified 22 different species in the back garden (in no particular order: blackbird, starling, fieldfare, jay, redwing, robin, house sparrow, hedge sparrow, wren, greenfinch, goldfinch, chaffinch, bullfinch, hawfinch, willow warbler, great tit, blue tit, greater spotted woodpecker, magpie, crow, collared dove and pigeon).

As we try to garden for wildlife we’ve left seedheads on plants and I have sacrificed my winter brassica crop to the bloody pigeons (next year I will net them). We have bird feeders for fat balls, seed mix and sunflower seeds and we have also been putting out apples for species such as blackbird and fieldfare. Given the large numbers of birds we’re attracting, it’s no surprise that we have to replenish the food supplies every day or two, especially in the cold weather. I’m still surprised though at how quickly birds find new sources of food. A few years back when we lived in Scotland we put a nyjer seed feeder up in the back garden to attract goldfinches. I’d never seen a goldfinch there beforehand but within a couple of hours we had a pair feeding from it. It’s a mystery to rank with the famous blue tits learning to open milk bottle tops to get at the cream.

Feeding birds deliberately in our gardens is a pretty recent phenomenon, until large urban populations of humans, largely separated from their agricultural roots, were well established, birds were mainly seen as pests, especially species like sparrows which eat grain. It’s also hard to imagine that many of these species were also seen as a human food source until pretty recently. The masterful Birds Britannica book, informs me that goldfinches were almost hunted to extinction in Britain, being considered a food delicacy in the 19th century.  They were in fact one of the first birds the RSPB had on their list of concern. This is pretty incredible to me. They are extremely beautiful, but very small, not much more than a mouthful each and presumably several were needed in each portion. Its a familiar story, as the introduction of modern agriculture with pesticides and the shortage of weed seeds through the winter must also have taken a toll on goldfinches as on many other species, which now have their strongholds in towns rather than the countryside.

Goldfinch and Great Tit on bird feeder
Goldfinch and great tit on bird feeder

The habit of feeding birds has not only caused a shift in which birds live where, it has also apparently led to some species choosing to overwinter much further north than would otherwise have been the case, since there are now reliable food sources about and of course, a run of milder winters has helped. Given the hazards that many songbirds face abroad, for example Cyprus, where they are still eaten and where 1.4 million were taken this winter, this may perhaps be a good thing

Surprisingly though, a recent research study using radioactively labelled foodstuffs found that, in summer at least, bird food from feeders made up only around 5% of an individual bird’s diet. It appears that they see bird feeders as a sort of chip shop on the way home from the pub kind of food – just for a dip in when feeling peckish and not the main source of nutrition except during periods of food scarcity.

Greenfinch eating sunflower seeds while goldfinch looks on
Greenfinch eating sunflower seeds while a goldfinch looks on from above. Good hygiene is essential to prevent the spread of diseases at feeding stations like this one.

Unfortunately there is a dark side to feeding the birds in our gardens. It has been well known for sometime that birds can contract diseases such as aspergillosis, salmonella and e. coli infections as a result of the close contact that bird feeders necessarily encourage. Since 2005, trichomonosis has become an increasing problem too in the finch population, having apparently jumped species from pigeons and doves. It appears to affect greenfinches and chaffinches in particular, but also affects other species and although occurring mainly in the UK, has also been reported in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. The overwhelming popularity of birdwatching in the UK means that it may well simply be better reported than elsewhere.

Now that the snow has melted and the days are started to lengthen again, our feathered friends are bringing us much joy and even the recently hatched Arctic chick is starting to take an interest in their flutterings about the garden.

Apple halves in the frost
Apple halves left out for the birds in the frost

Let it snow…

I have found myself shovelling a lot of snow this winter. As with last winter, it has been cold and snowy across northern Europe so far, which has led to the usual questioning of climate change by the usual suspects. There is some very good work examining this on the real climate blog and Marcus Brigstocke did his usual amusing best on the Now Show towards the end of last year, so I’m not going to write about the difference between weather and climate, or about how regional and global average temperatures differ. Rather, the time spent shovelling snow and wandering around the city streets camera in hand to take photos, really brought home how many of the snow processes that are subjects of active research in remote or mountainous areas are currently on display in our cities.

For instance, today in the local park I noticed that there is preferential melt occurring around the trees. The dark tree trunks absorb and emit more radiation that then melts snow around the trees faster than it melts in the open areas of the lawn. This is an important consideration in the planting of forests in snowy areas, since the presence of vast forests can significantly alter the albedo of the earth’s surface, that is how much radiation is reflected back in to space. Planting trees in the tundra to combat climate change may have the unintended effect of actually enhancing warming through changes of this kind.

Picture of glacier table - a boulder balanced on a thin stack of ice
Glacier table in Switzerland (Glaciers Online)

The process can also be seen to spectacular effect on glaciers, where rocks and boulders shield the ice below them from melting but enhance it around them, leading to the formation of so-called glacier tables, such as this one in Switzerland (from glaciers online).

More seriously, the heavy snow on rooves around the city is currently posing an avalanche hazard rarely encountered outside the mountains. The effect of sunshine on heavy snow, which is resting on a slope of a critical angle, can be extremely dangerous to the unwary. As are the large numbers of icicles which have developed. These are not just a sign of poorly insulated buildings (where the heat leaking out has caused the snow to melt and then quickly refreeze in the low temperatures we’ve had). Icicles falling from buildings show the same mechanics as seracs falling from the steep parts of glaciers known as ice falls. In this case, the ice builds up to such a degree that the sheer weight of it eventually causes fracture when a critical threshold is reached. Pedestrians are learning to walk on the outside of pavements and to look up frequently at the overhanging cornices of snow and ice.

But back to the snow shovelling. I have not done so much digging since fieldwork last winter in Svalbard, where we set up some experiments to study the properties of snow and how this affects the melt, or conversely the growth, of glaciers. Specifically, we were studying the effects of liquid water from snow melt or rain on the snow pack and the glacier surface. Liquid water filters into the snow, or else runs off bare glacier ice if there is no snow and will typically freeze, forming ice lenses in the snow pack, or large areas of what is known as superimposed ice on the glacier surface.   As you can imagine, there was a lot of snow shovelling, especially as the high winds on the glacier kept filling in the trenches we dug to work in.

Now this probably sounds like a fairly esoteric set of experiments, but the purpose is actually quite serious, since we need to know how much melt water refreezes to work out how much the glaciers and large ice sheets of the world are melting and how sea level rise is likely to progress in the future in a warming world.

Identifying the melt area of a glacier or ice sheet is a relatively straightforward task using satellite imagery, but identifying how much of that melt runs off or refreezes is impossible at present, so we generally use a model, based on observations and experiments like these, to make an approximation. We also need to factor in the effect of latent heat, (heat that is released when liquid water becomes solid ice) since this can warm up the snow pack significantly. In Greenland for instance, it is likely that the effects of higher temperatures over the last 20 years or so have been buffered somewhat by the snow pack and refreezing processes. However, as temperatures continue to increase, melt will probably accelerate partly because the saturated snow pack cannot absorb additional melt water but also because it has a higher temperature from the release of latent heat and thus requires less additional energy to melt.

Last winter I tested out some of the techniques we used in Svalbard, in a pile of snow in my back garden. I am also aware of at least one study into permafrost, where patterned ground usually found in Arctic climates was created in a back garden in St Andrews, so it’s even possible to do valid experimental work during the winter time when conditions are right. However, the climate of glaciated regions is generally unlike that of the cities of Europe so there will still be a need to go to places like Svalbard to do experiments quantifying these kind of processes. Nevertheless, I still find this kind of weather inspiring and I’m hoping to get more insights as the winter progresses.

The Arctic Tern

Sterna Paradisaea is the Arctic tern. This amazing little bird lives around 30 years in the wild and every year completes the longest migration in the world, flying from the Arctic, where it breeds, to the Antarctic to feed. It sees more daylight than any other creature and is not only a great endurance flier but a marvellously agile one, a true aerial acrobat like a marine version of the more familiar swallow. It is also a brave parent, chasing away much bigger animals from it’s ground nesting colonies and braving attacks by skuas and other aerial pirates to feed its young.

It has been my privilege and delight to observe these birds while doing fieldwork in Iceland, Svalbard and Greenland. Some years ago while working out of UNIS in Svalbard, I found a desk in an empty office that overlooked a colony. Over 4 short weeks, albeit of continuous daylight, I was able to watch the spectacular aerial courtship displays, the ultra brief matings, the brooding of eggs, the feeding and raising of young and the eventual fledging of new individuals. I had never known I was a nascent birdwatcher before this.

I have decided to start a blog, partly to share my opinions with the world (and thus avoid boring my long-suffering friends), but mainly to improve my writing by preparing short easy to read pieces in an every day style.  I chose the Arctic tern as a symbol of the wide range of subject areas I want to cover. I also like to think that as scientists we are in a constant chasing of the light, and in my field of climate research especially, trying to evade and chase off predators and pirates.

As a scientist, I often feel I am not very good at communicating with non-scientists and I hope this blog will provide me with some good practice and discipline, and of course I hope it will provide you, dear reader, with some interesting diversion. Please feel free to comment and provide feedback on my subjects and my writing style.