Update on the Japanese trawler

No news to tell, she's still making slow, stately circuits of the Ross Sea under the sole control of the elements. I've discussed the issue with several people here though, and one of them said that 'if the ship continues to threaten an oil spill in the area, the Australian's should just blow her out of the water'.

I looked hard into their eyes for any sign of irony, but none were forthcoming.

My working conditions are out of this world

I've just received an email proudly stating that there will be 'NO HEAT NO AIR - FOR 1 WEEK'*. They're really cracking down on the budget these days - I had just about got used to supplying my own printer paper, but having to bring in my own oxygen bottles seems a little harsh. It makes the department sound like the Martian winter. If I really want the feeling that I'm on another planet, all I need do is engage one of the older faculty members in conversation. However, if I want my imagination to take me further afield (say a different universe or an alternative dimension), then I find that dealing with the payroll department usually does the trick. I've given up reading Kafka for similar reasons - it has become unnecessary.

* Despite the sensationalist tone of the email, it was just a badly-worded memo explaining that the building air-conditioning plant is faulty.

My favourite story of the week

This week, I am mostly laughing at the Japanese whaling ship that may need to be towed away from the Antarctic coast. The ship, from the Japanese Institute of Cetacean Research, was presumably doing a valuable scientific investigation into how many protected mammals it is possible to harvest from a region covered by several international treaties, when its engine caught fire. Thankfully there are several vessels in the region that could rescue the crew and tow the ship to safety - the closest of which is a Greenpeace vessel.

The Japanese captain is unamused though, and is honouring the Samurai spirit by refusing the offer of such help, whilst environmentalists are wringing their hands in case she starts hemorrhaging fuel into Ross Sea. Well, environmentalists always are wringing their hands, aren't they?

For once, and in a break with their finest traditions, Greenpeace has actually got it right this time. They're mostly worried about penguin colonies, but a significant oil spill into the Ross Sea region would have major
consequences for the entire west Antarctic. The Ross Sea is one of the major Southern Hemisphere perennial ice sheets (the other is the Weddell Sea - that would be a fisheries disaster of hemispheric
proportions). A major reason why ice can exist there throughout the Antarctic summer is that being highly reflective, it bounces most of the sun's radiation back, so that only heating by air or the ocean (which
doesn't really happen here) can melt it. However, a fuel spill would taint a significant portion of that ice with a black liquid - you get the picture.

Major ice loss from that shelf (which has so far been relatively stable) has far reaching consequences. Firstly, the Ross ice shelf holds back land-based ice sheets, so we could expect an acceleration of glaciers in the Vinson Massif. Secondly, (and this is my area of knowledge by the way) that area is key in modulated the air and ocean flow to the Antarctic Peninsula, the region which has shown a higher rate of warming over the last forty years than almost anywhere else in the world. How this modulation works exactly nobody yet fully understands (I'll tell you in about 18 months time, maybe). However, we do know that because the ice acts as a thermal insulator between the ocean and atmosphere, removing the ice sheet will release a lot of thermal energy into the atmosphere, which will disrupt the air currents that are warming the west Antarctic ice sheet in (as yet) unpredictable ways.

So what's my point? At the risk of advocating gunboat-diplomacy, the international community needs to stop fannying around trying to be diplomatic with these people. If the Japanese continue to endanger the whole region on a stupid point of cultural pride, then either the Australian, New Zealand or Chilean Navy needs to get in there and drag them out, kicking and screaming if necessary. The Treaties that protect Antarctica from damage by commercial exploitation have not yet been fully tested - this seems to be as good a time as any.

Have I told you lately that you're a contemptible cretin?

It was Valentines Day today, apparently. Personally I try to avoid such things with the same vigour that I avoid cat feces, but somebody sent me an 'anti-Valentine' message. As an expression of ironic derision it completely failed, after all one wouldn't think of sending an anti-Valentine' unless one gave the whole sordid festival some sort of credence, but it did at least remind me why Google had a daffy icon today. I'm told that this is the day for telling those closest to us how much they mean to us. At the time the person closest to me was my office-mate, so I turned to her and told her that I thought she was a contemptible cretin. Then she started crying, which made me feel better about wasting ten seconds of my valuable time on the 'anti-Valentine' debacle.

Some colleagues tried to get me to sign up for a special campus Valentine's speed-dating event, presumably so that they can sit 'downstream' from me and make themselves look concerned and caring after some sensitive soul has been deeply offended by me. They're pretty desperate obviously, and I suppose the Victoria's Secrets ads that surface at this time of year don't help. I refused because frankly I was a little insulted, mainly by the notion that it would
take me a whole two minutes to traumatise another graduate student. (Some of them have a tendency to take themselves a bit seriously, so it's like shooting fish in a barrel.) Anyway, since it's a
special day for couples and coupling I thought I would take the opportunity to give more
of my valuable advice regarding relationships.

A friend has emailed me with a problem - she's been lusting after a Frenchman in her office, and
apparently he has 'a gorgeous body' (what the hell kind of office is this that she's seen his body?). Unfortunately she's in a long-term relationship so she says 'obviously she doesn't want anything to happen'. (I don't know why obviously, there's a 50% divorce rate in the UK at the moment so it's fair to say that the notion of mutual-exclusivity here has been stretched by a fair few people). Anyway, despite generally acting like a sixties schoolgirl ('whenever I see him I giggle, act like a 12 year old and run away!') he seems to be equally attracted, and she wants to know how to tell him that there's no chance of a knee-trembler in the stationary cupboard.

The Captain replies...

Well, for a start giggling and running away is not the actions of a modern twelve-year-old I my experience, pinching his wallet and running away is more the style nowadays. However, that's beside the point. In terms of your problem I really wouldn't worry too much, he's probably just
concerned about your welfare. If a woman in my workplace kept giggling and running away, I would naturally assume that she was in some way mentally retarded, and the company was filling a government quota so that they could claim tax relief for employing 'individuals with special needs'. Either that or he's a pederast and the little-girl act is really doing it for him - he is French after all. In either case, all you need to do is start acting like a fully-grown adult woman in a position professional responsibility (by which I mean restrict your flirting to potential clients and drunken senior managers). If that doesn't work, you could always email your entire office a link to this post, I find it always helps to get these things out in the open.

So long, Anna Nicole Smith

Anna Nicole may have gone, but thanks to Playboy we'll always have the mammaries...

I should have been a bin man

The latest IPCC assessment report is out today, which means that a lot of scientists fly around the world in order to go to a conference and tell everybody that they should stop flying around the world. It also means the re-igniting the usual tedious debates about whether or not climate change is real or a conspiracy of flag-burning unwashed bolsheviks to take away every man's God-given right to drive the kid's to school in a V8. I refuse to enter these debates now, since the issue of climate change is like party politics - everybody decided twenty years ago what side of the fence they stood on, and any new information is hailed as startling validation of both sides' policy.

Aside from the poorly-argued scientific debates, there is an absolutely mendacious argument from skeptics that we made it all up to generate cash for ourselves. Senator Jim Inhofe (R-OK) was a particular fan of this one. Just out of interest, I wonder how much money these people think we make? The current salary of a US Senator is about $165,000 pa (that's before a couple of non-executive directorships, some nice incentives from the lobbyists and a pretty sweet pension scheme). That's about the same as an extremely succesful scientist in a top position after 30-40 years of research. More realistically, the average researcher at, say, NCAR, or a tenured professor at a Well-Known West Coast University can expect to top out at around the $70,000 mark. This is in America, which is considered to be the land of milk and honey as far as academic pay-scales are concerned.

I could be earning a packet, you know. I could be on Wall Street or The City trading in weather-based derivatives, or working for an insurance company doing long-term risk assessment. A bit of pressure maybe, a bit less sexy when chatting up someone in a Hollywood bar, but at least I'd get weekends off and a decent Christmas bonus. Instead I'm in the lab on yet another friday evening, whilst fuckers like Bill O'Reilly accuse me of fudging the numbers to keep the insurance premium going on my brand new Jaguar.

Sod this, I'm going to contact AEI for a job.