Blogging breakdown
Posted on September 2, 2009
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This is a bit of a double-entendre title.
First off, my blogging routine has somewhat ground to a halt and I’m not updating this site as much as I used to (or would like to). Work commitments keep me pretty busy and whatever online time I do have, I tend to contribute over at AcademicProductivity.com instead. So part of this post is to say sorry to those readers who might have been looking for updates on the UK microgeneration scene or other news.
But this post is also about trying to understand why my blogging efforts didn’t really take off. There’s any number of sites that will tell you what you need to do to be successful – post frequently, build a community, etc. – and yes, I’ve neglected much of that advice: mea culpa. That’s just big picture stuff though and I’d like to do a proper statistical post-mortem to understand why my blogging habits broke down. In other words, WWNSD*?
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Measuring urban greenhouse gas emissions
Posted on July 3, 2009
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I’ve just returned from the 5th Urban Research Symposium in Marseille, which this year focused on cities and climate change. We were presenting our work on the modelling of urban energy systems and it was a great chance to talk shop and see what others were doing in the same area.
One of the main themes running through the event was how to measure greenhouse gas emissions from cities. There have been numerous figures published recently, such as the IEA’s estimate that cities are responsible for 71% of global direct and fossil-fuel related emissions. There was much hand-wringing among the conference participants though about whether the methods for compiling such inventories are sufficiently mature to facilitate comparative studies or for use in international trading arrangements.
Some of the worry seems misplaced. Of course better data is always desirable but as a representatitve from ICLEI pointed out, the world hadn’t even agreed on the official list of greenhouse gases in 1992. Now 17 years later, we’re complaining about too many competing methods. And anyway, if the world is aiming for massive emission reductions on the order of 80% by 2050, then surely we have enough information to act.
This pragmatic view was best expressed in a paper by Chris Kennedy, Anu Ramaswami and others titled A protocol for City based GHG emission indices. Using the corporate emissions protocol of the World Resource Institute, they suggest that the emissions of a city should include:
- Scope 1 emissions from the consumption of fossil-fuels directly within the city boundary (e.g. natural gas);
- Scope 2 emissions from the indirect consumption of imported fuels like electricity, heat or steam; and
- a limited set of Scope 3 indirect emissions from key resources consumed within the city (e.g. cement, steel, food) and a share of major cross-boundary transport (e.g. air travel, freight).
The key thing about this approach is that by using a reduced set of Scope 3 emissions, you can capture the open nature of cities, i.e. their dependence on resources imported from other regions, without introducing too much administrative hassle. It’s a question of diminishing returns and this proposal seems like a sensible one if a practicable international framework for urban emissions inventories is to be established.
The full paper, and the accompanying presentation, should be available from the URS website in the coming days.
The UK to become Newfoundland?!
Posted on June 9, 2009
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This article at the London Review of Books is the longest, funniest and best summary of the credit crunch I’ve yet seen. Highly recommended even if it does mean you’ll be facing a week of sleepless nights.
Wolfram Alpha and cities
Posted on June 8, 2009
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As you’ve probably heard, there’s a new kid on the search block: Wolfram Alpha. Search is a bit of misnomer actually. Alpha bills itself as a “computational knowledge engine” and although it’s still early days, it does offer a powerful tool – and something notably different from Google. It’s definitely not a search engine.
Alpha’s main advantage is that it contains large amounts of curated data, codified in a robust manner that allows for “computation”. Reasoning might be a better word. If you enter a query like “GDP US vs. France“, it knows that you want to compare the GDP time series, whereas “GDP US / France” works out the ratio between the two values. In other words, Alpha is a demonstration of the potential of the semantic web. If all data is labeled and the relationships between types of data explained in an ontology, then computers can use this information to manipulate data and answer pretty complicated user queries: like “how many UK Premiership footballers come from home towns over 3000m altitude?” (why you’d want to do such a query is another, perhaps unanswerable, question).
At the moment, many of the Alpha datasets are incomplete and so you can only do limited queries. But since I work mainly on cities, I wanted to check what’s available on this topic.
EU Elections
Posted on June 4, 2009
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So, on Tuesday I was in London and coming out of Kings Cross station, I encountered a number of people handing out leaflets, blocking the forecourt like pins on a Plinko board. They were asking commuters not to vote for the BNP, which is sensible enough, but I was curious why they were all wearing RMT jackets. Why should London Underground workers be telling commuters who to vote for?
Then on Wednesday, we got some leaflets through the door and I found out that the head of the RMT, Bob Crow, is campaigning with the No2EU party. Ding! So he’s selfishly competing for the anti-Europe vote as opposed to altruistically warning about the dangers of electing racists who exaggerate. (The leaflet stack had one from the BNP claiming that the main parties want to “give 80 million Muslim Turks the right to swamp Britain”. A) There are 72 to 75 million Turks and B) I doubt all of them want to come over here.)
But is that really kosher? Having your members, who work for a public body, go out and picket on behalf of their shop steward? Shame the elections aren’t next week – they could have handed out the leaflets during their planned strike instead and saved themselves a day of holiday.
Prosperity Without Growth
Posted on April 30, 2009
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At the end of March, just before the G20, the Sustainable Development Commission released a provocatively titled report: “Prosperity Without Growth“. I didn’t actually hear about it when it first came out but only stumbled across it later via an email newsletter.
At first I thought, ‘Well, I must not have read the paper properly that day.’ But a retrospective search turns up only two Guardian articles (one news, one opinion), a cranky opinion piece in the Times, and nothing in the Telegraph, Independent, or Economist.
This is disappointing. The report asks serious questions about how our society seeks to improve the lives of its citizens and it’s been almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media. And while the blogs do take up some of the slack, the debate isn’t always as rigorous as one might hope.
Having now read some comments from around the web, and re-examined the original report, I think part of this apathy is because of the definitional baggage and misunderstanding that surrounds the concept of economic growth. Let me explain what I mean.