climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Shed beside a Welsh lake.
All over the Welsh countryside there are walls and paths made of slate. The amount of labour involved in building them all must have been colossal.
Our first group photo, in front of the view we had from all three peaks on the first day.
Climbing Snowdon was a foggy business.
On the third day, we hiked up to a ridge but found it too windy to continue. On the way down, we walked around this lake.
Wales was not without surprises, two of which I will quickly detail now.
The first concerns the ‘barn’ in which we were to stay. When I heard the term, I thought about the barn that Meghan Mathieson’s family has in Duncan: uninsulated wooden walls, big swinging doors, hay, and the rest. What we actually got was a ‘hut’ belonging to the Pinnacle Club – a group of women climbers. It was the size of a house, warmed by a coal stove. It had fridges and stoves and showers and a special room for drying sopping gear (though our numbers and level of soppingness challenged it). When compared with my initial expectation – better than a tent, with the possibility of rats – it was downright palatial.
The second surprise should be evident from the videos I posted last night. We were almost constantly buffeted by gale force winds during the first two days, and still encountered moderate winds at high altitudes on the third. I spent much of the trip literally holding on to my hat. Since it has no chin-strap and I could not come up with a way to tether it that did not risk either destroying the hat or garroting me, I had one hand on the brim (or atop my head) for the better part of all the hiking. On Snowdon, the cold and relative thinness of my gloves meant that my non-hat-holding-hand was always desperately trying to recapture warmth in a fleece pocket, before I did the switch – mindful that a pause could send the hat flying off into the foggy abyss.
As is so often the case after a vacation, things have piled up in my absence. I have two issues of The Economist to read, two letters to respond to, several dozen emails to deal with, and a thesis chapter ostensibly due on Wednesday (with all the reading and writing that entails). Forgive me if I am a less prompt correspondent than usual for the next while.
This short clip was made when the Oxford University Walking Club reached the peak of Snowdon – the highest point in Wales – on March 10th, 2007. As you can see, we did not get a terribly good view for all of our upward marching.
Here is another short video, and some photos on Facebook. I will post some nicer versions here soon. For now, I need to prepare for my meeting with Dr. Hurrell tomorrow.
I should be getting back to Oxford any time now. I hope so, at least, since I am meeting Dr. Hurrell on Tuesday to discuss chapter two and I am meant to submit a complete version of chapter three on Wednesday. With luck, I got at least a bit of reading or editing done while I was in Wales.
This is my last full day in Wales. Hopefully, we will have seen a bit of sunshine so far. One of the best things about climbing mountains is the view from the top. Speaking on illumination…
Intuitively, I have long had the sense that solar power makes a great deal of sense as an alternative power source. There are no greenhouse gas emissions, there is no need to operate any massive industrial processes, other than manufacturing panels, and the technology only needs to become incrementally better to be cost-effective against fossil fuels. This map of solar energy, which was used in C.G. Rapley’s presentation, shows the size of solar collectors of the present efficiency that would be needed to satisfy our present electrical needs.
Cost is the first big problem with solar, though it may be a temporary one. According to The Economist:
Decades of research have improved the efficiency of silicon-based solar cells from 6% to an average of 15% today, whereas improvements in manufacturing have reduced the price of modules from about $200 per watt in the 1950s to $2.70 in 2004. Within three to eight years, many in the industry expect the price of solar power to be cost-competitive with electricity from the grid.
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The other big one is load balancing. Because solar output isn’t constant, there is a need to either store power or redistribute it across long distances. Storage across the daily light-dark cycle is of inescapable importance, and the means for doing so are not terribly clear. Batteries are costly and bulky, as well as of a limited lifetime. Solar energy could be used to electrolyze water into hydrogen and oxygen, which could then be fed to fuel cells, but I expect that would increase costs a lot, while reducing efficiency. As with transportation, I think energy storage is a bigger long term problem than energy generation.
Of course, one technology is unlikely to be the solution, in and of itself. There are lots of places where hydro, wind, and geothermal power make sense. There may even be situations where biodiesel is an appropriate choice, despite the inefficiencies of production.
[Update: 3 May 2007] Antonia sent me an interesting BBC article about a solar thermal plant near Seville.
By now, I have quite possibly finished climbing the highest mountain in Wales – almost certainly in the pouring rain. A saner person would have been at his desk with a cup of tea and a thesis draft progressing. An even saner person would have finished the draft before leaving…
One thing I have been pondering lately is the logistics of moving on from here. I arrived in Oxford with a big suitcase, a backpack, and a suit bag. Heavily laden, I made my way in the rain from the train station to Wadham. While here, I have picked up about thirty books. I also have about ten binders and a box of hanging files, mostly related to the thesis. If I am going to do another research degree in the future, I am probably going to want this stuff. Not bringing my environment related books here was a mistake I have regretted many times.
The most sensible option would seem to be putting the books and binders into one or more big boxes, wrapping the file box, and sending the whole collection back to Canada by the slowest and cheapest form of mail possible. Given that I will be working, rather than going to school, I won’t need it urgently.
Has anyone undertaken such shipping? How much can I expect to pay, either by weight or by size? Is there a better option than the normal mail service?
By the time anyone is reading this, I will be well on my way to Snowdonia with the Walking Club. Rather than make this the longest pause in blogging in recent memory (four days!), I have queued up some short entries with images.
This post is a fairly esoteric one, of interest only to people who are either using WordPress of thinking of setting up a WordPress blog. It details two little programming tricks that improve the WordPress experience. Continue reading “Two useful WordPress hacks”
I should pause from the frantic assembly of rain gear and the overly optimistic inclusion of thesis reading in my rucksack to say that I am off to Wales in a few hours (there seems to have been some confusion about whether I had already gone). I will be away until late on Monday, making this the longest interruption in my love affair with the internet since I went to Scotland in July. One day longer, and it would be beaten only by the Bowron Lakes canoe trip in the summer of 2004.
This is what happens when even the cheapest hostels have web access, and internet cafes are plentiful. The worst a connected person need endure are unfamiliar foreign keyboards.
Despite the urgency with which I will need to finish my third thesis chapter, you can expect some photos to find their way online within a few hours of my return. Expect panoramic vistas, drenched hikers, and sheep.
PS. Fellow Canadians trying not to forget all their French may be interested in a new blog that Richard Albert, from Lady Margaret Hall, has established. Now that quarterly Oxford bloggers’ gatherings have fallen by the wayside, I need a new way to decide how frequently to update my list of Oxford blogs.
Looking over my introduction and first chapter, both show an acute need for additional work. Many thanks to Tristan for giving them a much more comprehensive look than anyone else has. The chapter on problem identification, particularly, shows signs of having been written in haste. I need to integrate arguments in response to many things I have read, but not discussed in the present draft. I also need to work on the structure, language, and arguments.
Even more worryingly, I am meant to submit my chapter on consensus formation next Wednesday, and it is nowhere near where I wanted it to be before I left for Wales. I am not naive enough to think I will be able to get any work done there, but I am committed to the expedition now. Expect some truly frantic, crazed entries early next week.
I wish I had my noise isolating headphones. Even more, I wish I had the ability to simply read efficiently for many hours at a stretch. Memory suggests I could do this once, but perhaps I am not recalling things accurately.
The Earthwatch Institute lecture tonight was an educational experience, for a whole slew of reasons. I learned a lot about the organization, the talk itself was very well done, and I spoke with some unusually interesting people.
Earthwatch is a slick organization: corporate partnerships, wine receptions before and after talks given at the business school, and a 153-page full-colour glossy book distributed in a ‘treat bag’ to each attendee at the end. This all gives a really interesting glimpse into the world of relationships between private actors. These people aren’t lobbying the state, they are engaging with the scientific and business communities, along with individuals inclined towards certain concerns. Anyone who thinks that regulating carbon emissions is a matter for the leftist fringe should probably meet these people. In the ecosystem of contemporary international actors, they are an unusual species, worthy of further study.
The talk was given by Professor C.G. Rapley, the Director of the British Antarctic Survey. He was well chosen: articulate, funny, and capable of presenting technical material in an engaging and highly effective way. That this is an outset of an international polar year made the choice particularly timely. My transcript of the talk is available on the wiki.
Perhaps the most unusual thing he said – his greatest deviation from the Stern-Gore Axis – was the suggestion that we could (and should) jump-start the demographic transition. This is is transition from high birth and death rates, to massively lowered death rates (due to medicine, agriculture, etc), through massive population growth to the eventual lowering of birth rates and stabilization of the population overall. Rapley alleged that 76m unwanted pregnancies occur each year, worldwide. Giving these people effective contraception and social orders in which they can use it could accomplish a number of good things: he focused on the reduction of future emissions and a reduced push towards urbanization. Of course, the politics of birth control are fiendishly complex, and the possibilities for harm considerable. That said, a world where women have more control over how many children they have would, all other things being equal, be a much better one. Rapley seems to have written more on population for the BBC.
My thanks to all those – both employees of Earthwatch and fellow guests – with whom I spoke at the receptions. Altogether, this evening has reinforced my conception that climate change is the single greatest challenge facing the world today. It has also bolstered my hope that it is something that we can overcome.
