A Load Of Hot Air

One thing that happened recently is that we had a team meeting about the imposition of emissions quotas on the lab. Nominally, the department as a whole is supposed to reduce its emissions by 50% from 2018 by 2030, as part of the Paris climate agreement[1]. And, one way of achieving this that seems to be favoured by the senior staff[2] is by setting quotas for emissions at a team level that would gradually drop over the next decade. Of course, right now, the lab is killing it on emissions reductions because no one’s going anywhere or doing anything, but we’re thinking ahead here to when travel to conferences or field sites might be a thing again. Whatever happens, it seems this year and next are likely to be a test phase with nothing actually imposed, because the quotas are a bit pointless until normality has returned somewhat.

So, of course, the discussion turned into a very lengthy affair. This being France, there was a fair amount of mistrust of the motives of ‘la Direction’ and whether this was some sort of attempted power-grab over the heads of the People[3]. Some people advocated for what could be termed a ‘delay-until-forced’ position – i.e., basically ignoring the quotas until they were imposed, making best efforts to reduce travel, etc. in the meantime, and then dealing with them when we actually had to. To me, this seems a slightly short-sighted approach – as one person pointed out, the very fact that we needed to even discuss a quota was a clear sign that things weren’t working and we needed something more to get our emissions down. Equally, the maximalist position of ‘cut everything now’, whilst it’s one I have more sympathy with and which was also advocated, isn’t all that helpful because it won’t have broad-based-enough support to be actually effective. There were also plenty of other comments, such as whether upgrading the energy-efficiency of the lab rather than forcing people to travel less would help; if quotas are imposed, who’s going to be doing all the admin work to keep track of them, assign them and so on; will people, particularly early-career scientists, be prevented from going on fieldwork or to conferences in a way that might jeopardise their career; and many many more. It is, very obviously, a complicated and emotive issue. The general breakdown was, probably, that the older and securely tenured members of the team were more in favour of delay and the newer, more-precarious members were more in favour of doing something, but it wasn’t a perfect split along those lines by any measure.

My point is, though: this was 20-odd career, climate(-adjacent) academics. Everyone involved in the discussion was undoubtedly clever. Everyone was working on glaciers in some form, so certainly knew what the problem was and wasn’t in any doubt about what was at stake. Everyone (probably) was somewhat liberal and progressive. And we still couldn’t agree. We. Still. Couldn’t. Agree. On what, when it comes down to it, is a fairly minor thing that pretty much means, on a personal level, don’t fly to conferences in the US or Japan or whatever too often, and take the train to ones in Europe. It’s not exactly sacrificing your second-born son to prove to God that he’s your bestie[4]. We got bogged down in administrative minutiae, questions of responsibility, personal inertia and a thousand other things. If we couldn’t agree on this one little thing, this least of things, is it any wonder that, scaling this up to the world, the various climate negotiations never seem to get anywhere? Or that there’s a vast amount of societal inertia among the majority of the population?

It seems to me that, as climate scientists, we should really put our money where our mouth is and make the sacrifices that we’re telling everyone else they should be making. Otherwise, we’re morally bankrupt at the very least and what expectation can we have that anyone else will listen to us?[5].

So I signed up to be on the committee for sorting this all out, because I must be a bureaucracy fetishist. May as well try to contribute in a way that isn’t just doing quizzes, right? It’s not as if I wanted to do any work anyway, so replacing all my time with what I imagine will be a lot of meetings that run in circles seems entirely sensible. Oh well, alea iacta est. Hopefully, it doesn’t end up with me being stabbed by a load of people who are worried I’m arrogating too much power to myself….

[1] You’d like to think the French would take something signed in their own capital seriously.

[2] Leadership team, management, bosses, call them what you will. No one actually seems to be quite sure how much it’s favoured or how likely it is that it’ll be imposed or even what imposition might look like were it to happen – will people actually be prevented from travelling if there’s no quota left? No one really knows. It’s also not clear exactly what the scope of the quotas will be – are we talking about only declared, work-related travel? – or how adherence is going to be monitored.

[3] Inside every French person, there’s a bit of a Revolutionary who thinks the solution to every problem is build a barricade, wave flags around, sing patriotically, and stick it to anyone in a position of power. This can be unhelpful.

[4] To be fair to God, he does then tell Abraham to stop, via an angel, just before Abraham offs Isaac. But still, dick move, God. Dick move. Maybe Abraham knew God wasn’t ever actually going to let Isaac die, but, still, it’s a bit extreme. No one had told Isaac what was going on!

[5] This also suits me very well. I can hopefully parlay my general aversion to conferences into morally superior environmentalism and I get to spend more time on trains, which I like, rather than in airports or on planes, which I dislike. Just in case you thought I was being altruistic or anything.

The Difficult Sequel

After a rather protracted publishing process, my second paper, on radar observations of calving at a big glacier, has finally seen the light of day in the pithily named Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface[1]. This represents, entirely illogically, the first chapter in my thesis, the second one having already been published a year ago. Research and narrative logic are not necessarily the same thing.

I originally submitted the paper just before Christmas 2019, after which JGR took an age over the review process, eventually rejecting it in May 2020. There were three reviewers and an associate editor assigned: the associate editor and Reviewer 1 recommended minor revisions; Reviewer 2, who’d most closely read the paper, entirely justifiably recommended major revisions; and Reviewer 3 seemed to have read their own idiosyncratic version of the paper, made a lot of insane critiques[2], and recommended rejection. The eventual decision was rejection, largely, we think, because the revisions would have taken a while and the journal’s metrics look better if revisions aren’t left hanging; rejection and resubmission don’t show up in the same way.

Now, while that’s a slightly shady way of massaging the metrics, it personally suited me very well. I was right at the end of my PhD, coming out of first lockdown[3], and was thoroughly fed up with life in general and academic work in particular. So, not having any especial deadline to do the revisions by was really very handy. Because, after spending one painful two-hour session barely managing to force myself to do the lowest-hanging fruit of correcting minor typos at some point in July, I finally felt recovered enough to actually sort the paper out in September. If I’d had to do the revisions quickly, I think that might have been the thing that pushed me over the edge.

After the usual amount of batting things back and forth between co-authors, I resubmitted the paper just before Christmas 2020, almost exactly a year to the day since the original submission. Reviews came back in February – Reviewers 1 and 3 had declined to re-review the paper; Reviewer 2 did re-review and made a further set of helpful (minor) critiques, which I tidied up without too much trouble, leading to the happy situation of acceptance and publication[4]. And this, I hope, marks the end of my career in observational glaciology. Writing this paper has convinced me that it’s not really my jam, marmalade, jelly or other sugary spread – people get so caught up on things like error bars and accuracy and all that. Much better to stick with models, where you can blame model artefacts and wave your hands around a bit to get out of minor inconsistencies[5].

But there we go. I’m glad it’s done and, whatever its flaws, the review process with JGR has resulted in a much better paper than what I originally submitted. As for the third chapter of my thesis, I just submitted the resulting paper for that for the first time, so we’ll see what happens with that….

[1] Apparently, I’m a geophysicist now. Who knew? I didn’t.

[2] My favourite one was them criticising the length of the record of calving we’d gathered (which is possibly the, definitely one of the, longest calving records published) and then recommending we be more like a paper with a record three times shorter. It’s great when you feel the reviewer understands what’s going on.

[3] Remember when we all thought the need to qualify ‘lockdown’ with an ordinal adjective was mad? Such innocence….

[4] Though it turned out I had managed to forget to update the bibliography after the final revisions, which was a bit embarrassing when the production staff emailed me to point it out.

[5] Imagine a winky face here. What I’m getting at is that I just don’t seem to have the right mindset for dealing with observations compared to model results. It’s just something about the way I think.

Pat Testing

One of my major projects of my first few months in France, which I would probably have done anyway, even without being forced to spend nearly all my time in Grenoble, has been to work through all the wares of my local boulangerie-pâtisserie. Because we all need something to look forward to every week. I present here the results of my in-depth research. First, the bread ranking with explanatory notes, followed by the sweetmeats ranking, with explanatory notes AND pictures[1]. I accept no responsibility for any food envy or feelings of hunger that may arise as a result of reading this. This is not quite a complete list – some of the loaves of bread are just unnecessarily large for a person living alone to buy, and there are some of the sweeter things I know I’m just not very interested in.

Bread:

1. Six céréales – because more kinds of grain is definitely good.
2. Grand campagne – quality and quantity.
3. Baguette – would be higher if I didn’t eat it up so quickly.
4. Moisson – I’m not quite sure what it tastes of, but it tastes intriguingly different.
5. Complète – brown bread. Bit dull.
6. Mexicain – very yellow, so presumably corn bread and therefore great if you’re gluten-intolerant. If not, seems a bit unnecessary. Not really worth the extra money.
7. Seigle – rye bread. If you’re feeling malnourished and what you’re really looking for in your bread is density.
8. Grand viking – someone saw the rye bread and thought ‘that, but more so’.
9. Pain aux noix – the walnuts do not make up for a sub-par loaf that is not worth the money.

I’m going to list the sweeties in reverse order in a feeble attempt to build the tension. I’d also like to note that, after the bottom four, the gap between all the remaining entries is wafer-thin and I would happily eat any of them at any time. I would probably very literally bite your arm off if you offered me any of them, so be warned.

So, at the bottom, we have Le Royal:

I liked this so little, I couldn’t even hold the camera steady.

It’s not at the bottom because it’s bad, but because it’s coffee cake. I really dislike coffee cake or, indeed, coffee in any format[2]. And the problem was I didn’t realise this was coffee cake until I ate it – I should perhaps have guessed from the colour, but I was hoping for caramel or fudge so something similarly brownish. The shock was an unpleasant one and I seriously considered throwing the remainder away[3]. If you like coffee cake, it was very good coffee cake, though, but it’s just not my bag.

Second from bottom, we have the praline yule log:

It’s so pale.

This wasn’t unpleasant, but was just a bit nothingy. I sort of ate it without realising I’d actually eaten anything. A tad bland, though it does get extra points for the chirpy little cocked meringue.

Third from bottom is the flan:

YELLOW.

Much like the praline yule log, this was just a bit beige, both literally and figuratively. Perfectly inoffensive, but aggressively unexciting – it’s slightly vanilla-y eggy stuff topped with slightly lemon-y egg-y stuff, all with lashings of gelatin. However, if what you want is quantity, this is the one to go for. One slice is HUGE.

Rounding out the bottom four, we have the grand sablier:

At least you’re getting a good view of the range of plates I have to hand.

This was a big, vaguely shortbread-y biscuit covered in chocolate on one side. Again, not unpleasant, but a little dull compared to the more exciting options on offer.

Jumping up a long way to the bottom of the peloton, as it were, we have the noix au caramel:

I haven’t got any other different plates now, sorry.

It’s just walnuts slathered in caramel on a biscuit base. Very nice, but a right pain to eat and slightly less flavourful than the others, which is why it’s at the bottom of the front-runners.

Moving up, we have the chocolate éclair:

Hopefully you knew what an éclair looked like already.

Very nice; loses points because I felt the ratio of choux pastry to chocolate was too weighted towards the pastry. Which is clearly the less interesting component.

In a surprise healthy entry comes the tarte aux pommes.

I think I’m just really bad at taking clear photos.

Nice. Good flaky pastry, very neat apple slices, but, ultimately, it’s a less good apple crumble, so it finds itself a long way from the top.

Above this we have the tarte au framboise/fraise/myrtille – they’re all the same, just with a different fruit on top. I’ll leave the translations to you, as an exercise in learning French. Anyway, for illustrative purposes, here is the framboise version:

In case you haven’t worked it out yet, those are raspberries.

The surprise layer of vanilla custard hidden underneath the fruit was an especially pleasant discovery and really pushed these fruit tarts up the rankings. Not too sweet either, even though they looked as if they might be.

Moving on up, we have the grenoblois:

It’s very beige, isn’t it?

I think this is walnut frangipane with a caramel topping. But I may be wrong as I’m very bad at identifying flavours. It was pretty tasty, regardless of what it was, but loses points for being a tad dull.

Perhaps surprisingly high is the barquette marron:

Clearly the target audience is musicians.

This is, pretty much, an iced sponge (extra points for the fiddly treble clef) filled with what I think is chestnut jam. Which it turns out is really quite delicious. It’s also a good portion size – smaller rather than leaving you feeling uncomfortably full (I’m looking at you, Flan).

Up next is the tarte au citron. It was a very good example of a lemon tart and only fails to rank higher because of the crucial lack of chocolate[4].

The filling-to-pastry ratio is excellent.

Squeaking in above the lemons, we have the chocolate version of the yule log:

It’s clearly better: it’s got more chocolate.

This was far superior to the praline version. My only real criticism was that the portion size was a bit small. I could have done with a little bit more.

We’re really entering the big league now. The margins between all the remaining cakes are best measured in angstroms. They’re all so good. So, next up is ganache au chocolate:

OK, it’s maybe not the most attractive-looking piece of confectionary ever….

This is basically the chocolate éclair with the choux-chocolate ratio much improved. However, the fact that there is still choux knocks it down a few places. I mean, choux is fine, but it’s not my favourite thing.

Then we have the millefeuille:

I know: no chocolate!

The only reason this isn’t top is because it contains no chocolate. Otherwise, it would definitely win. If I’d have had an entire tray of it, I would have had to exert a serious effort of will to stop eating before the whole lot was gone. The vanilla flavour was superb.

In what might be called an example of whimsical pâtisserie, we now have a pingouin:

Looks like a penguin. Sort of.

These were much nicer than a real penguin, which, by all accounts, is a distinctly unpleasant bird to eat. They’re basically chocolate ganache in icing. Mmmmmmm.

Continuing the theme, we have the cochon:

My Mr Pig, what a big nose you have.

This is the same idea as the penguin – chocolate ganache covered in icing – but this ranks just ahead, because I think the pig shape is marginally more convincing that the penguin shape.

Which brings us to the runner-up: the succès noir.

Think I used the flash on this one. Can you tell?

It’s dark chocolate covering chocolate ganache and sponge layers. Why wouldn’t you like it? Unless you’re one of those deviants who doesn’t like chocolate, in which case I’m very sorry for you.

The winner is[5], therefore, entirely unsurprisingly, the triple chocolate cake:

Look, see, there’s an apple in the background. I don’t just live on pâtisserie, you know.

Isn’t it wonderful? It’s almost entirely chocolate, apart from the bare minimum of sponge to provide structure. I need to stop looking at it, or I’m going to find myself making an impromptu pâtisserie visit soon….

If you’ve made it this far, I apologise if you’re now feeling rather hungry. I certainly am.

[1] Mostly quite bad pictures. I’m not a very good photographer.

[2] With the sole exception of tiramisu. For some reason, it doesn’t bother me in there, which is great, because I really like tiramisu. But any other coffee-flavoured product is awful.

[3] I didn’t, because I hate wasting food even more than I hate coffee. But it was a close-run thing.

[4] If you hadn’t guessed yet, I really like chocolate. And therefore quantity of chocolate is an important scoring criterion in this ranking.

[5] Drum roll!

Growing the Qult

A few weeks ago, I reported that I’d accidentally ended up being persuaded to bring the light of quiz to Grenoble. Well, the quiz has now happened and I can report that I’m now head of a cult. Which is awkward. Or, to put it slightly less melodramatically, it went quite well. Very well, even. People got incredibly invested – one of the PhD students started a comedy rumour about another team cheating and a whole email thread of increasingly surreal accusations among all the participants was spawned. I think I may have underestimated quite how bored people were. The result being that I’m probably on the hook to do one of these things every couple of months until they get rid of me. Fortunately, I’ve got quiz numbers 2 and 3 basically ready to go, minus the French translations.

This was also my first time running a pub-quiz-type thing over Zoom, which was interesting. It’s definitely a bit more sterile than running one in a real pub or bar. On the plus side as the quizmaster, heckling is much harder[1], but the general interaction with the teams is much more constrained and can’t be quite as spontaneous. But, all things considered, it went very smoothly and I’ve now levelled up my Zoom skills significantly, ably assisted by my glamorous co-organiser[2]. Hopefully, at some point later on this year, I’ll be able to run one in an actual place with actual people. But, plenty of people were nursing drinks of one kind of another anyway and getting into the spirit of things[3], so fun was being had and the feedback was all very positive.

Which also suggests that, despite my worries beforehand, I actually managed to set the quiz at about the right level. The winning team scored 40 out of 60 – my general aim is for the winning team to score somewhere in the 65-80% region – so they were at the lower end of that range, but not below it. And the lowest-scoring team only dropped a bit below 50%, so I didn’t make it impossible, seemingly. Possibly, I erred very slightly on the hard side, but clearly not disastrously so[4].

Basically, though, I’m now Grand Dragon of the Grenoble Quiz Cult and I look forward to indoctrinating more members over the coming months. Now to order me some natty robes, mystic bling[5] and a big hat.

[1] And if you want to be really despotic, you can just boot the hecklers off the call à la Handforth Parish Council.

[2] Assistant. Minion. Underling.

[3] Very literally in at least one case – someone was on the whiskey. And one or two people were, I think, quite drunk by the end.

[4] If I wanted to really work out what was going on, I’d code all the questions by category, work out where teams scored most of their points and re-balance things accordingly. I’m unlikely to be that bored, though, and will instead adopt the heuristic of ‘what I did before was fine; let’s do more of that’.

[5] The All-seeing Eye seems particularly appropriate to quiz.

Feel The Pressure

Here goes: another entry in the list of ’embarrassing things that have happened to me’. For some reason, these seem to be popular with all you schadenfreude-obsessed people. Anyway, a few weeks ago, my doorbell rang unexpectedly[1]. I opened the door to reveal a young man who let loose a torrent of very rapid French. Now, my French is pretty good, but at the end of the day, distracted by not having quite finished work, and being a bit tired, I wasn’t on peak form. At the time, from what I gathered, I thought he was here to read the electricity meter. Which was odd, because it’s a smart meter, so the whole point is no one needs to read it regularly. But I thought maybe he was just checking that the transmitted reading matched the actual reading and that the meter was working properly or something along those lines. So I directed him to the meter, which is in the corridor. I also thought he said he was from the electricity company and that he said that some sort of protection I should have been automatically signed up to, I didn’t actually have. So when he said ‘Do you want this?’, I said ‘yes’. This turned out to be a bad move.

Because what he actually was was an insurance salesman. Though thinking back, I’m pretty certain the word ‘assurance’ didn’t come up at any point in the conversation. He was also doing an extremely good job of pressure selling – at no point did the torrent of French let up, nor did I have time in my slightly weakened state to really consider what was going on. This didn’t mean I didn’t realise what was going on, but by the time I did, we were already well in to the sign-up process and I’d wasted quarter of an hour that I didn’t have time for. So, I was now pressure-selling to myself, which is rather amusing in retrospect, so I wanted to get him to leave as quickly as possible. However, I’m also British, so I couldn’t possibly do that in any way that gave offence or could be considered impolite. In my slightly het up state, I therefore determined the best course of action was to just let him sell me the insurance and cancel it later on in what could be charitably interpreted as master-level passive-aggression, or uncharitably as extreme cowardice and conflict-aversion. I was pretty certain there’d be the statutory 14-day cooling-off period during which I could cancel without penalty, so it seemed a good idea.

After another ten minutes of him dicking around on the phone with head office, I finally managed to get rid of him and I could get on with salvaging what was now a severely compressed timeline for the evening. When I actually got around, later on in the evening, to checking the contractual information I’d been sent[3], I found out that what I’d just bought was basically loss-of-earnings insurance. If, for some reason, I suffered a loss of earnings (illness, redundancy, that kind of thing), I’d immediately get €1000 to cover my bills, more or less. All for €12.90 a month. Picking back through the conversation, this clarified a lot of what the man had been saying, but he certainly hadn’t, to put it charitably again, been all that up-front about it, who he was working for or literally anything – he certainly never showed any ID and I was too off-balance to insist on it. I was also relieved to see that I could indeed cancel within 14 days for the price of sending them a letter, which I did the following morning at the cost of 10 minutes of messing around with the printer at work. Because I certainly didn’t want the insurance and it’s extremely unlikely I’ll actually need it[4].

So, to turn this into a school lesson, what are the key learning points from this experience? Probably to not believe strange men who turn up unannounced at the door, which is a pretty basic one. And if you’re not happy with what’s going on or don’t really understand, to stop things by either asking for clarification or slamming the door in their face. In other words, I should be a bit more confrontational on occasion. So, if you should unexpectedly turn up at my door, don’t be surprised if I throw the door open and rush at you screaming with a kitchen knife. Because the best defence against door-to-door salesmen is a good offence against door-to-door salesmen[5].

tldr: I’m an utter n00b sometimes.

[1] And extremely inconveniently. I was just about to finish off work for the day and start cooking dinner in order to be ready in time for whatever it was I was doing that evening. So I was on a bit of a schedule[2].

[2] OK, I’m always on a bit of a self-imposed schedule, because that’s just how I roll, but, on this occasion, there was actually some external constraint rather than just my merciless internal clock.

[3] Which, looking back, I realise I’d had no chance to actually read. I’d been given a garbled summary, but it’s fair to say that things had not been properly explained.

[4] I realise that that’s (usually) the case with insurance, but I have enough savings that a temporary loss of income of the sort that the policy would protect me against would be an extremely negligible risk compared to the certain cost of paying for the policy. I’m less sanguine about, say, health or contents insurance, where the risk may still be low, but the potential costs of not having any insurance are much higher.

[5] Slightly more seriously, I’m surprised that door-to-door salesmen still exist. In the UK, people who usually randomly ring on your doorbell are either canvassing because an election is coming up, trying to get you to join a cult, or looking for donations to a charity. I think once that a tinker turned up, selling household products as part of a scheme to give homeless people work – I duly bought a couple of things that I sort-of needed – but actual door-to-door salesmen are something I’ve never encountered outside Monty Python sketches that are 50 years old now. They seem to have been replaced by spam calls and texts on your phone, which are presumably cheaper to operate. It may also be that there’s a different legal framework in France and the UK, making door-to-door sales less attractive in the UK, but after five minutes of trying to look into this and wading through various websites, I decided that ignorance really does equal bliss in this case and stopped bothering.