Calling climate scientists in Melbourne and Wellington! I'll be passing through late August early September 2010. Climate researchers and energy policy analysts wishing to touch base or a lecture could get in touch with Alan. If you do early enough (and especially if accommodation costs are covered) I may be able to extend my visit. (October - November 2010 sees China and India as part of the route home maximising travel energy value but the schedule here is already largely sorted.)

Summer 2010. Talking of international travel, I looked into the fossil carbon burden (a better term than 'carbon footprint') of my forthcoming round the World trip. To my surprise, so low is my normal fossil carbon usage, that even with this international travel my fossil carbon burden for the year will be less than that of the average UK household!

Summer 2010. The Can We Beat the Climate Crunch? analysis presented last year has been somewhat prescient as this year a couple of official analyses have come to exactly the same conclusion, that we are unlikely to keep global warming to within the theoretically safe 2°C warming limit. These official reports are now referenced in a 'Stop Press' at the article's end. While I reluctantly confess to some academic pleasure at continuing to be ahead of the climate science game, this is tempered by my taking no delight whatsoever in being pessi- mistic as far as human impacts are concerned, even if the biosphere will continue with but a hiccough in the on-going geological record.

Spring 2010. A break from usual activities came at the May Bank holiday weekend when co-running a workshop with fiction authors for would-be SF film makers: the authors' job was to facilitate participants' developing plots while another scientist (microbiologist) and my role was to keep said plots' science as plausible as possible. The venue down in London was the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. Then earlier, over Easter, there was the presentation of a couple of exotic science talks given at the 5-day European SF Society Euro-Conference, Odyssey 2010 (in Britain). The event itself saw some 1,300 attend. The talks were on 'climate change scepticism' and 'exobiology', the latter being a sugar-coated exploration of the tension between divergent and convergent evolution (as well as homologous and analogous biological forms). Then there were a couple of panels including one on 'geo-engineering' with Oliver Morton (former news editor at Nature), who also gave a solo talk (the George Hay memorial lecture) on that topic at the event.

Autumn 2009. It is the run-up to the big climate meeting in Copenhagen and so I have put up an article Can We Beat the Climate Crunch?. +++ Subsequent to the afore the UK Met Office has just announced that warming might be at the high end of the IPCC forecast. Given that prior to this I doubted whether we can keep below 2ºC (based on mid-range IPCC 2007 data) this new Met Office high-end IPCC result means that we certainly need to invest in coping with the effects of climate change as well as switching to a zero fossil economy. +++ October sees a new paper in the journal Science that suggests that safe CO2 is below 450ppm (see BBC here). I myself consider that too high and go for below 400ppm. +++ At the end of September '09 the Government's new Climate Change Scientific Advisor, David MacKay, said that the UK reductions in carbon emissions are 'an illusion'. Of course readers of my Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects will be aware that I made the same point in 2007 (see bottom of page 435).
Autumnal ventures include:-
     - Preparing a proposal for an expanded and updated version of Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects
     - On-going Crossness work
     - Two science and religion projects
     - On-going Concatenation genre work
     - An Islamic women's climate change venture.

Then it is all clear the decks for 2010 and:-
     - 5 lectures/talks so far scheduled
     - notwithstanding a tour of Australia and New Zealand (best to combine the two to keep the fossil carbon per event low)
     - the organization of a major two-day geological/climate symposium
     - the actual updating and expanding of Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects

Summer 2009. Crossness exhibition plans drafted. Following Crossness getting about £3m funding, the next leap in restoration is proceeding at full speed, which means less promotional work as there are fewer public events while it becomes an active (rather than its usual sedate) building site. On the other hand the preliminary exhibition designs are in and these needed careful consideration.
     Parliamentary briefings were many over the summer. (See text and picture in the left column opposite.)
     Consultation outcomes included the White Paper from DfID to which in the Spring I worked on the Renewable Energy Association's response and also the House of Commons Select Committee report Putting Science at the Heart of Government Policy. The Commons Select report especially seemed to have taken on many of the points made.
      Yet more (possibly undeservingly) kind book reviews. The past six months have seen three rather generous reviews of Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects. Only now has the time been found to add substantial snippets of them to the book's reviews excerpts page.
      Appearing at a cinema in London's West End has to be one of the more unusual venues for one of my public exotic science presen- tations (and coincidentally just up the road from where I've been working for three months). This time is was a couple of hours on alien biology along with a researcher from University College London and a rapper who had songs commissioned by NASA. It was the only time I have been totally out-screened by the truly enormous backdrop used to project my slides! My approach was to discuss convergent and divergent evolution (well it has been 200 years since Darwin's birth and 150 since On the Origin of Species). Later the UCL researcher (Lewis Dartnell) asked to use part of my pre- sentation for his own lecture at this year's Cheltenham science fest: it's good to generate ripples.
      Concatenation, the cousin effort to 'Concatenation Science', continues with over 20% per annum growth. The Science Fact & Science Fiction Concatenation has maintained this high growth for over nine years (virtually its entire internet lifetime). It therefore has been doubling its traffic every three years. Currently a five-figure number of unique visitors access a six figure number of the site's pages each month. Not bad for a site that is only updated seasonally and is text only: it is the quality of information delivered without frills that seems to count. A loose team of half a dozen, mainly sci- entists who are into SF, supported by a looser group of a score or so regular contributors, keep things going.

Spring 2009. It has been three months working for the non-fossil energy sector. Despite being surprisingly strange to begin with, it provided a fascinating insight into how the UK non-fossil energy sector is battling to grow fast enough to meet UK policy aspirations: though growing targets are unlikely to be met unless policies radically change. The work -- based within sight of Parliament -- ranged from mundane office tasks and website work through to more specialist energy data mining, compiling a response to a Governmental (DfID) White Paper consultation, and taking the lead on the preparatory logistic work for a Parliamentarian briefing on marine-based energy. All varied stuff and some good contacts made. It was a great team so the time quickly passed. What will not be missed was the resumption of the commute down to London; fortunately this time it was only three days a week and only for three months.
      Deep time perspective climate symposium. The go-ahead has been given by a major scien- tific body to organise a two-day meeting on how the 55 million years ago Eocene carbon isotope excursion (CIE) event relates to our current global warming CIE episode. Alas Con- catenation Science does not have all the necessary Eocene expertise but a chance encounter at the 2008 European science communication awards reception has brought a university researcher onto this project and so it is proceeding satisfactorily. We will return to this towards the end of next year (2010). Meanwhile if you are interested/curious about this neglected topic I wrote an article about it in Geoscientist a couple of years ago.