Why does so much research go unpublished?

As described in my last blogpost, I attended an excellent symposium on waste in research this week. A recurring theme was research that never got published. Rosalind Smyth described her experience of sitting on the funding panel of a medium-sized charity. The panel went to great pains to select the most promising projects, and would end a meeting with a sense of excitement about the great work that they were able to fund. A few years down the line, though, they'd find that many of the funds had been squandered. The work had either not been done, or had been completed but not published.



In order to tackle this problem, we need to understand the underlying causes. Sometimes, as Robert Burns noted, the best-laid schemes go wrong. Until you've tried to run a few research projects, it's hard to imagine the myriad different ways in which life can conspire to mess up your plans. The eight laws of psychological research formulated by Hodgson and Rollnick are as true today as they were 25 years ago.



But much research remains unpublished despite being completed. Reasons are multiple, and the strategies needed to overcome them are varied, but here is my list of the top three problems and potential solutions.

Inconclusive results

Probably the commonest reason for inconclusive results is lack of statistical power. A study is undertaken in the fond hope that a difference will be found between condition X and condition Y, and if the difference is found, there is great rejoicing and a rush to publish. A negative result should also be of interest, provided the study was well-designed and adequately motivated. But if the sample is small, then we can't be sure whether our failure to observe the effect is because it is absent: a real but small effect could be swamped by noise. 



I think the solution to this problem lies in the hands of funding panels and researchers: quite simply, they need to take statistical power very seriously indeed and to consider carefully whether anything will be learned from a study if the anticipated effects are not obtained. If not, then the research needs to be rethought. In the fields of genetics and clinical trials, it is now recognised that multicentre collaborations are the way forward to ensure that studies are conducted with sufficient power to obtain a conclusive result.

Rejection of completed work by journals

Even well-conducted and adequately powered studies may be rejected by journals if the results are not deemed to be exciting. To solve this problem, we must look to journals. We need recognition that - provided a study is methodologically strong and well-motivated - negative results can be as informative as positive ones. Otherwise we are doomed to waste time and money pursuing false leads.  As Paul Glasziou has emphasised, failure is part of the research process. It is important to tell people about what doesn't work if we are not to repeat our mistakes.



We do now have some journals that will publish negative results, and there is a growing move toward pre-registration of studies, with guaranteed publication if the methods meet quality criteria. But there is still a lot to be done, and we need a radical change of mindset about what kinds of research results are valuable.

Lack of time

Here, I lay the blame squarely on the incentive structures that operate in universities. To get a job, or to get promoted, you need to demonstrate that you can pull in research income. In many UK institutions this is quite explicit, and promotions criteria may give a specific figure to aim for of X thousand pounds research income per annum. There are few UK universities whose strategic plan does not include a statement about increasing research funding. This has changed the culture dramatically;  as Fergus Millar put it: "in the modern British university, it is not that funding is sought in order to carry out research, but that research projects are formulated in order to get funding".



Of course, for research to thrive, our Universities need people who can compete for funding to support their work. But the acquisition of funding has become an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. This has the pernicious effect of driving people to apply for grant after grant, without adequately budgeting for the time it takes to analyse and write up research, or indeed to carefully think about what they are doing.  As I argued previously, even junior researchers these days have an 'academic backlog' of unwritten papers.



At the Lancet meeting there were some useful suggestions for how we might change incentive structures to avoid such waste. Malcolm MacLeod argued researchers should be evaluated not by research income and high-impact publications, but by the quality of their methods, the extent to which their research was fully reported, and the reproducibility of findings. An-Wen Chan echoed this, arguing for performance metrics that recognise full dissemination of research and use of research datasets by other groups. However, we may ask whether such proposals have any chance of being adopted when University funding is directly linked to grant income, and Universities increasingly view themselves as businesses.



I suspect we would need revised incentives to be reflected at the level of those allocating central funding before vice-chancellors took them seriously.  It would, however, be feasible for behaviour to be shaped at the supply end, if funders adopted new guidelines. For a start, they could look more carefully at the time commitments of those to whom grants are given: in my experience this is never taken into consideration, and one can see successful 'fat cats' accumulating grant after grant, as success builds on success. Funders could also monitor more closely the outcomes of grants: Chan noted that NIHR withholds 10% of research funds until a paper based on the research has been submitted for publication. Moves like this could help us change the climate so that an award of a grant would confer responsibility on the recipient to carry through the work to completion, rather than acting solely to embellish the researcher's curriculum vitae.

References

Chan, A., Song, F., Vickers, A., Jefferson, T., Dickersin, K., Gotzsche, P., Krumholz, H. M., Ghersi, D., & van der Worp, H. B. (2014). Increasing value and reducing waste: addressing inaccessible research Lancet (8 Jan ) : 10.1016/S0140-6736(13)62296-5




Macleod, M. R., Michie, S., Roberts, I., Dirnagl, U., Chalmers, I., Ioannidis, J. P. A., . . . Glasziou, P. (2014). Biomedical research: increasing value, reducing waste. Lancet, 383(9912), 101-104.

Arctic in early January 2014

In early January 2014, Arctic sea ice extent reached levels as low as they were in early January 2013, as illustrated by the image below.

Methane levels over the Arctic remain extremely high. The image below shows methane readings for the period January 1 - 11, 2014, with the inset showing the situation in 2013 for the same period.

Similarly, the image below makes a comparison between methane recorded in 2013 and in 2014 for this period (January 1-11), this time focusing on the Arctic and only showing methane readings of 1950 ppb and higher in yellow.

Below a combination of images by Dr. Leonid Yurganov, also comparing methane levels between early 2013 and 2014. The difference isn't as marked in the image below as in the above image, as the highest value in the image below is 1920+ ppb, whereas the above image highlights levels of 1950+ ppb.

These high methane releases from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean are contributing to the over 20°C temperature anomalies that have hit parts of the Arctic Ocean recently, as illustrated by the image below.

In conclusion, the Arctic is hit by three kinds of warming, while there are at least 13 feedbacks that further accelerate warming in the Arctic, as described in the post The Biggest Story of 2013.

Post by Sam Carana.

Off with the old and on with the new: the pressures against cumulative research

 

Yesterday I escaped a very soggy Oxford to make it down to London for a symposium on "Increasing value, reducing waste" in Research. The meeting marked the publication of a special issue of the Lancet containing five papers and two commentaries, which can be downloaded here.



I was excited by the symposium because, although the focus was on medicine, it raised a number of issues that have much broader relevance for science, including several that I have raised on this blog, including pre-registration of research, criteria used by high-impact journals,  ethics regulation, academic backlogs, and incentives for researchers. It was impressive to see that major players in the field of medicine are now recognizing that there is a massive problem of waste in research. Better still, they are taking seriously the need to devise ways in which this could be fixed.



I hope to blog about more of the issues that came up in the meeting, but for today I'll confine myself to one topic that I hadn't really thought about much before, but which I see as important, namely the importance of doing research that builds on previous research, and the current pressures against this.



Iain Chalmers presented one of the most disturbing slides of the day, a forest plot of effect sizes found in medical trials for a treatment to prevent bleeding during surgery.

Based on Figure 3 of Chalmers et al, 2014

Time is along the x-axis, and the horizontal line corresponds to a result where the active and control treatments do not differ. Points which are below the line and whose fins do not cross it show a beneficial effect of treatment. The graph shows that the effectiveness of the treatment was clearly established by around 2002, yet a further 20 studies including several hundred patients were reported in the literature after that date. Chalmers made the point that it is simply unethical to do a clinical trial if previous research has already established an effect. The problem is that researchers often don't check the literature to see what has already been done, and so there is wasteful repetition of studies. In the field of medicine this is particularly serious because patients may be denied the most effective treatment if they enrol in a research project.



Outside medicine, I'm not sure this is so much of an issue. In fact, as I've argued elsewhere, in psychology and neuroscience I think there's more of a problem with lack of replication. But there definitely is much neglect of prior research. I lose count of the number of papers I review where the introduction presents a biased view of the literature that supports the authors' conclusions. For instance, if you are interested in the relation between auditory deficit and children's language disorders, it is possible to write an introduction presenting this association as an established fact, or to write one arguing that it has been comprehensively debunked. I have seen both.



Is this just lazy, biased or ignorant authors? In part, I suspect it is. But I think there is a deeper problem which has to do with the insatiable demand for novelty shown by many journals, especially the high-impact ones. These journals typically have a lot of pressure on page space and often allow only 500 words or less for an introduction. Unless authors can refer to a systematic review of the topic they are working on, they are obliged to give the briefest account of prior literature. It seems we no longer value the idea that research should build on what has gone before: rather, everyone wants studies that are so exciting that they stand alone. Indeed, if a study is described as 'incremental' research, that is typically the death knell in a funding committee.



We need good syntheses of past research, yet these are not valued because they are not deemed novel. One point made by Iain Chalmers was that funders have in the past been reluctant to give grants for systematic reviews. Reviews also aren't rated highly in academia: for instance, I'm proud of a review on mismatch negativity that I published in Psychological Bulletin in 2007. It not only condensed and critiqued existing research, but also discovered patterns in data that had not previously been noted. However, for the REF, and for my publications list on a grant renewal, reviews don't count.



We need a rethink of our attitude to reviews. Medicine has led the way and specified rigorous criteria for systematic reviews, so that authors can't just cherrypick specific studies of interest. But it has also shown us that such reviews are an invaluable part of the research process. They help ensure that we do not waste resources by addressing questions that have already been answered, and they encourage us to think of research as a cumulative, developing process, rather than a series of disconnected, dramatic events.



Reference

Chalmers, Iain, Bracken, Michael B., Djulbegovic, Ben, Garattini, Silvio, Grant, Jonathan, Gülmezoglu, A. Metin, Howells, David W., Ioannidis, John P. A., & Oliver, Sandy (2014). How to increase value and reduce waste when research priorities are set Lancet : 10.1016/S0140-6736(13)62229-1

High Methane Levels over Arctic Ocean continue in 2014

The high methane levels over the Arctic Ocean, the biggest story of 2013, continue in 2014, as illustrated by the image below.

As above image shows, high methane readings (as high as 2301 ppb on January 6, 2014) continue in 2014. High methane concentrations continue to enter the atmosphere where the sea ice is thin and where the sea ice is carried by currents outside of the Arctic Ocean.

The inset shows ice thickness on January 6, 2014. The inset highlights the huge amounts of sea ice that are carried by the sea current from the north of Greenland into the Atlantic Ocean.

What is the impact of these high methane releases over the Arctic Ocean on global methane levels? The image below shows the most recent global methane levels available from NOAA.

The image below shows readings from surface flask at Mauno Loa, Hawaii, with two recent readings (in the top right corner) reaching levels close to 1880 ppb.

Clearly, methane levels are rising globally and high releases over the Arctic Ocean are contributing to the global rise. The images below show recent data from stations in the Arctic, i.e. the image below showing readings from in situ measurements at the station at Barrow, Alaska, and the image further below showing flask samples taken at Tiksi, Russia.

Note that the above images reflect land-based measurements taken at altitudes that are typically too low to capture the extent at which methane is rising in the atmosphere over the Arctic Ocean. Nonetheless, the wind can at times carry along some of the methane from the Arctic Ocean, as is apparent in a number of readings in above images showing levels of over 2100 ppb.

The image below shows high methane releases over the Arctic Ocean, as recorded on (part of) January 7, 2014, when levels were reached as high as 2381 ppb.

The image below shows methane levels on (part of) January 8, 2014, when levels as high as 2341 ppb were recorded. The inset confirms indications that these high levels originate from the Arctic Ocean.

These high methane concentrations over the Arctic are contributing to high temperature anomalies that further accelerate warming in the Arctic, as illustrated by the image below.

For a more detailed description of the kinds of warming and feedbacks that are hitting the Arctic, see the post The Biggest Story of 2013.

Post by Sam Carana.

Global Warming and the Gulf Stream

Global Warming and the Gulf Stream - Our Atmospheric Pollution Roadway to Subsea Arctic Methane-Induced Climatic Hell

by Malcolm P.R. Light, 5th January, 2014

The amount of water presently transported north eastward by the Gulf Stream varies from 30 million cubic metres per second off Florida to a maximum of 150 million cubic metres per second south of Newfoundland at 55° is transported within this volume of water is approximately equal to the amount carried north east by the atmosphere which gives North Western Europe its milder climate (Wales, 2013).

The surface temperature off the Coast of the United States in the western North Atlantic shows the warm Gulf Stream (in red on Figure 1) while colder oceanic zones are in dark blue (Wales, 2013).

Figure 2 from Csanady (2001) shows the heat gain and loss for the Atlantic Ocean which was posthumously published from Bunker in (1988) In: the North Atlantic from Bunker and Worthington (1976).

Csanady (2001) says that "the contours connect points of equal heat gain in watts per square meter (Wm-2)(negative if heat is lost). The zero-gain contour cuts through this ocean along a diagonal roughly from Spain to the island of Hispaniola in the Caribbean. North of this contour the ocean loses heat, at spectacularly high rates over the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. Here the annual average rate of loss exceeds 200 watts per square meter (exceeds 250 watts per square meter off New England/Canada - my insertion). On the other side of the ocean, off the Norway coast, a northwards tongue of the Warm-Water-Sphere (Gulf Stream - my insertion) is still responsible for heat losses between 50 and 100 watts per square meter, and even higher off Lapland".

When humans get too hot their bodies perspire (sweat) water and this water evaporates at a high rate in windy conditions giving them "wind chill". The excessive heating off the Gulf Stream by pollution clouds pouring off the coast of North America is directly related to excessive heat loss in the same region (Figure 2) because the heat induced extreme atmospheric pressure change generates very strong winds which "wind chill" the overheated ocean there. Gulf Stream water temperatures range up to 13°C to 26.5°C (Hurricanes) and water in this temperature range requires about 2440 to 2470 thousand Joules of energy per kilogram for it to change from a liquid into a gaseous state (Latent heat of evaporation; Hyperphysics, 2013; Lide and Fredrickse, 1995). The loss of this latent heat of evaporation is the main reason for the extreme heat loss shown by the hot Gulf Stream waters offshore North America (Figure 2).

Figure 3. shows the yearly human carbon dioxide emissions in tons per person versus inflation adjusted income (Image from gapminder.org, 2013).

The total carbon dioxide emitted by each country is proportional to the size of the circles (Figure 3).

The United Kingdom emitted the most carbon dioxide per person at the start of the industrial revolution but the United States caught up with the U.K. at the start of the 20th century (Figure 3).

From then on the U.S.A. grew to be the largest emitter of carbon dioxide (Figure 3). An average U.S. citizen causes 3 times as much carbon dioxide to be emitted (19 tons of carbon dioxide/person) than a person in China (4.7 tons of carbon dioxide/person)(Figure 3).

China however due to its large population emits a lot of carbon dioxide in total (Figure 3). 5 states, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Australia, U.S.A. and Canada have the most extreme human carbon footprints on Earth (Figure 3) (Light, 2013).

Figures 4a shows the giant equatorial current gyres in the Southern and Northern Hemispheres.

The southern gyre (South Atlantic) is very symetrical, while the northern gyre (North Atlantic) shows extreme asymetry with the elongated core rotational zone lying only a short distance east of the coast of North America and the narrow Gulf Stream current here is elevated and shows the highest volume of transport (150 Sverdrups = 150 million cubic metres per second).

This extreme asymetry is due to global warming from the large volume of pollution clouds pouring off the industrialized zones along the east coast of North America.

This generates a massive atmospheric pressure gradient and accelerates the strong prevailing South Westerly wind flow.

These winds drive the Gulf Stream to high velocities and force surface waters to move offshore from Ekman transport, piling them up (Figure 4b) (Csanady, 2001).

Figure 4b also shows the limited extent of the Sargasso Sea in the late 20th century.

In the late 18th century the Sargasso Sea extended over the entire middle of the North Atlantic (Figure 4c; Krummel 1891).

The extreme asymetry presently The extreme asymetry presently shown by the North Atlantic current gyre (Figure 4d) in the middle of the 20th century was caused by the migration of the rotational core zone more than 1500 km north west as the strength of the prevailing South Westerly winds picked up along the Gulf Stream offshore N. America due to the global warming caused by pollution clouds pouring offshore from the onshore U.S. industries.

The extremely high current transport rates of the Gulf Stream directly offshore the industrialized United States varied from 55 in 1942 to up to 150 Sverdrups (millions of cubic metres/second) at the present day indicating the effects of extreme global warming enhancement here (Figure 4d, Csanady, 2001; Sverdrup, Johnson and Fleming, 1942; Wales, 2013). In addition this map shows the extreme asymmetry of the North Atlantic current gyre, the heated ocean waters in the region of the Gulf Stream (line ornament) and the north east extension of the Gulf Stream via the Hebrides and Norway to the Arctic Ocean (Figure 4d, Sverdrup, Johnson and Fleming, 1942). Csanady (2001) says that:- "South of the zero-gain contour, over most of the subtropical gyre, the ocean gains heat as colder waters flow southward (Canary Current - my insertion) and absorb solar heat. The energy gain through this "cold water advection" process being, however, moderate, typically 25 watts per square meter. In this region, evaporation is also high, raising the salinity of surface waters". Figure 4d. shows the hot north - east trending Gulf Stream feeding into the North Atlantic Drift and a number of south east trending higher salinity branches which flow clockwise back into the extreme surface salinity zone in the North Atlantic (Weather - online 2012).

The spectacular rates of heat loss from the Gulf Stream waters off the coast of the United States can be clearly followed north east to Norway where they split into the eastern Yermack branch entering the Barents Sea and the West Spitzbergen (Svalbard) Current which dives beneath the floating Arctic Ice Cap (Figure 2). This northward pointing tongue of hot and saline Gulf Stream water is also clearly visible on the salinity map (Figure 5) as strong inflexions in the contours first west of Ireland and then south of Svalbard just before the Gulf Stream dives beneath the floating Arctic Ice cap as the West Spitzbergen Current (Figure 5).

The Gulf Stream (West Spitzbergen Current) follows the southern shelf edge of the Arctic Eurasian Basin to the Laptev Sea destabilizing the subsea Arctic methane hydrates en route and releasing ever increasing amounts of methane into the Arctic atmosphere (Figure 6). The West Spitzbergen Current is still losing some 50 watts per meter by the time it reaches the floating ice cap west of Svalbard but the shallower eastern Yermack Current looses much larger amounts of heat (100 - 600 watts per metre depending on the seasons). Häkkinen and Cavalieri, 1989 indicate that in mid-winter off Lapland, heat losses reach 600 watts per square meter while in August they range from 20 to 40 watts per square meter, where the ice-sheet edge stops any exchange of heat from the sea to the air.

Figures 7, 8 and 9 show the yearly north-eastward Gulf Stream transport of the energy (watts) from the North Atlantic Sub-Tropical Gyre to the Arctic Ocean. The map uses Gulf Stream flow volumes in Sverdrups (= one million cubic metres/second) calibrated to the heat flow trend from eight measured heat flow values along the Gulf Stream (Csanady, 2001). The calibration constant is 3.85 x ten to the power of 7. The heat flow data comes from Csanady, 2001; Gulf Stream flow volumes from Sverdrup, Johnson and Fleming, 1942, Wales J., 2013 and the University of California, (CDL, 2013).

The Gulf Stream shows a zone of anomalously large global warming heating, extremely high rates of South Westerly wind induced ocean current flow, extreme wind chill (caused by evaporation of the sea surface) and elevation of the surface of the Gulf Stream along the coast of the industrialized United States and Canada (Figures 7 to 9 and Figure 4b).

Quite clearly the global warming caused by pollution clouds pouring off the coast of the industialized United States is generating a large air pressure differential, accelerating and heating the prevailing South Westerly Wind flow with its consequent wide ranging effects on the Gulf Stream seen as far north as the central Arctic. As mentioned previously this global warming has increased the rate of water transport from 55 Sverdrups in 1942 to up to 150 Sverdrups at the present (Sverdrup et al. 1942, Wales, 2013).

The heat necessary to liberate methane from the methane hydrates in the Arctic Ocean and cause runaway global warming, total deglaciation and extinction in 2052 represents only one thousandth of the total amount of heat being added to the Arctic ocean by the Gulf Stream (Figure 9). The Yermack Current (E. extension of the Gulf Stream) in the Barents Sea intersects the West Spitzbergen Current (W. extension of the Gulf Stream) at the junction of the Eurasian Basin/Laptev Sea (Figure 7 - 9). This represents an extreme subsea - atmospheric methane emission point above a zone of hydrothermal methane hydrates formed on the Gakkel ridge where it enters the Laptev Sea (Light 2013).

Human-induced global warming caused by the burning of fossil fuels is found to be continuous when the ice, land and atmosphere heating data (Church et al. 2011) is combined with the 5 - year average ocean heat content to a depth of 2000 metres (Levitus et al. 2012)(Figure 10a. Nuccitelli et al. 2012).

The lack of incorporation of this data in the global warming equation by the IPCC, is the reason for the extreme 50 year error found in estimating the floating Arctic ice cap melt time using global atmospheric models as discussed in previous papers (Light 2012, Light 2013). The rate of increase of global warming heat is equivalent to 8 x ten to the power of 21 joules per year (Nuccitelli et al. 2012). The ocean has absorbed 93.4 percent of the heat from global warming (Figure 10b, ACS 2013). The total amount of heat generated by human induced global warming between 1990 and 2010 is some 14 x ten power 22 joules which is equivalent to an absorbed energy flux of 2.2 x ten power 14 watts, i.e about 0.5 watts per square metre of the earth's surface (ACS 2013).

The relative amount of human-induced global warming energy in watts being added every year to the oceans, ice, land and atmosphere and being transferred by the Gulf Stream to the subsea Arctic methane hydrates is shown in Figure 11 (Nuccitelli et al. 2012).

Methane release rates from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (Shakova et al, 2013) combined with the area of the Arctic Ocean have been used to determine mean methane release rates for the entire Arctic Ocean (Light, 2013). If only a few percent of the subsea methane hydrate reserves in the Arctic Ocean (some 1000 billion tons of Carbon) are dissasociated and the methane released to the atmosphere, it will cause total delaciation and a major extinction event (Light and Solana 2002. The energy necessary to produce these Arctic methane release rates require only about one thousandth of the heat energy input from the Gulf Stream to dissociate the methane hydrates (Figure 11).

Furthermore the energy necessary to produce these Arctic methane release rates represent less than one millionth of the global warming heat energy being added to the oceans, ice, land and atmosphere by human fossil fuel burning (Figure 11). The total human induced global warming is equivalent to 4 Hiroshima atomic bombs detonating every second (Nuccitelli et al. 2012).

Humanity has signed its death warrant and our final extinction will be carried out by Mother Earth within the next 30 to 40 years unless we immediately take extremely drastic action to entirely curb our carbon dioxide pollution, eliminate large quantities of methane from the subsea Arctic Ocean, seawater and atmosphere (down to ca 750 ppm) and revert completely to renewable energy.

The rate of water transport of the Gulf Stream off the industrialized United States, south of New Foundland at 55° (Sverdrup et al. 1942) to 150 Sverdrups by 2013 (Wales, 2013). This is a 95 Sverdrup increase in transport over 71 years, at a rate of 1.338 Sverdrups/year equivalent to 1.85 x ten to power 14 watts/year using the conservative factor derived in figure 13.85 x ten to power 7 to covert Sverdrups to energy transport in watts/year. Previous analysis of earthquake activity, Arctic ice cap melt back data and the mean atmospheric methane content of the atmosphere indicate that the Arctic methane hydrate (clathrate) gun began to fire continuously in 2007 and the world is now far advanced into runaway global warming which will increase the mean temperature of the atmosphere by 8 degrees C by the mid 21st century (2050 - 2052)(Light 2013). This will lead to total deglaciation and a major extinction event. (Light 2013). The critical transport in 2007 off the Gulf Stream offshore the indutrialized United States, directly south of New Foundland at 55° west longitude is 42 Sverdrups which precipitated the start of the continuous firing of the methane hydrate (clathrate) gun and runaway global warming.

The Gulf Stream transport rate started the methane hydrate (clathrate) gun firing in the Arctic in 2007 when its energy/year exceeded 10 million times the amount of energy/year necessary to dissociate subsea Arctic methane hydrates. Therefore the United States and Canada must sharply reduce their airborne pollution from fossil fuel extraction and use, to cut back the Gulf Stream transport rate to less than 142 Sverdrups south of New Foundland at 55° west longitude. Here the Gulf Stream transport rate should be reduced to below 130 Sverdrups or even 100 Sverdrups to make sure that the methane hydrate (clathrate) gun completely terminates firing in the subsea Arctic. Unless this is done immediately humanity will be facing complete extinction in a methane induced firestorm by the middle of this century.

Our Only Hope for Survival

Light (2013) clearly showed the required massive reduction in global warming fossil fuel burning emissions that the United States and Canada must undertake immediately, if there is any faint hope of stopping the runaway global warming that is now underway (since 2007). The power, prestige and massive economy of the United States has been built on cheap and abundant fossil fuels and Canada is now trying to do the same. The present end of the financial crisis and recovery of the U.S. economy will take us down the same fossil fuel driven road to catastrophe that the U.S. has followed before. Unless the United States, Canada reduce their extreme carbon footprints (per unit population) (Figures 29 and 30), they will end up being found guilty of ecocide and genocide as the number of countries destroyed by the catastrophic weather systems continues to increase.

The United States and Canada with their expanding economies and their growing frenetic extraction of fossil fuels, using the most environmentally destructive methods possible (fracking and shale oil) as well as the population's total addiction to inefficient gas transport is leading our planet into suicide. We are like maniacal lemmings leaping to their deaths over a global warming cliff. What a final and futile legacy it will be for the leader of the free world to be remembered only in the log of some passing alien ship recording the loss of the Earth’s atmosphere and hydrosphere after 2080 due to human greed and absolute energy ineptitude.

The U.S. Government and Canada must ban all environmentally destructive methods of fossil fuel extraction such as fracking, extracting shale oil and coal and widespread construction of the now found to be faulty hydrocarbon pipeline systems. All Federal Government subsidies to fossil fuel corporations, for fossil fuel discovery and extraction must be immediately eliminated and the money spent solely on renewable energy development which will provide many jobs to the unemployed. All long and short range (high consumption) fossil fuel transport must be electrified and where the range is too large, electrical trains must be used instead of trucks for transport. All the major work for this conversion and railway construction can provide a new and growing set of jobs for the unemployed. Nuclear power stations must continue to be used and should be converted to the safe thorium energy system until the transition is complete.

The U.S. has to put itself on a war footing, recall its entire military forces and set them to work on the massive change over to renewable energy that the country needs to undertake, if it wishes to survive the fast approaching catastrophe. The enemy now is Mother Nature who has infinite power at her disposal and intends to take no prisoners in this very short, absolutely brutal, 30 to 40 year war she has begun. I cannot emphasise more, how serious humanity’s predicament is and what we should try to do to prevent our certain final destruction and extinction in the next 30 to 40 years if we continue down the present path we are following .

Monitoring the Effects of a Reduction in Atmospheric Pollution from the United States and Canada

In conjuction with the massive cut back in pollution emissions by the United States and Canada, the United States must set up a project through the Woods Hole and Rutgers universities to continuously monitor the Gulf Stream flow rate offshore the industrialized United States south of New Foundland at 55° the critical transport rate of 142 Sverdrups. As already shown, the critical transport in 2007 off the Gulf Stream of 142 Sverdrups precipitated the start of the continuous firing of the methane hydrate (clathrate) gun and runaway global warming. As the United States and Canada sharply reduce their airborne pollution from fossil fuel extraction and use, it will cut back the Gulf Stream transport rate to less than 142 Sverdrups south of New Foundland at 55° west longitude. Here the Gulf Stream transport rate should be reduced to below 130 Sverdrups or even 100 Sverdrups to make sure that the methane hydrate (clathrate) gun completely terminates firing in the subsea Arctic and humanity has some breathing space to give it time to completely revert to renewable energy. The Gulf Stream transport rate monitoring work of the Woods Hole and Rutgers universities will be of vital significance in humanities last ditch attempt at surviving the fast approaching extinction event.


References

ACS 2013. Thermal Energy in the Ocean. ACS Climate Science toolkit/Oceans, Ice and Rocks.
http://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/climatescience/oceanicerocks/thermalenergy.html

Balmaseda M.A., Trenberth K.E., Källén E., 2013. Distinctive climate signals in reanalysis of global ocean heat content. Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 40, Issue 9, 1754 - 1759.

Bryden, H.L., 1979. Poleward heat flux and conversion of available potential energy in Drake Passage. J. Marine Res., 37, 1 - 22.

Bunker A.F. 1976. Computations of Surface Energy Flux and Annual Air-Sea Interaction Cycles of the North Atlantic Ocean. Mon. Wea. Rev. 104, 1122 - 1139.

Bunker A.F. 1988. Surface Energy Fluxes in the South Atlantic Ocean. Mon. Wea. Rev. 116, 809 - 829.

Bunker A.F., and Worthington V., 1976. Energy Exchange Charts of the North Atlantic Ocean. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. 57, 670 - 678.

Carana, S. 2011a. Runaway Warming 2011. Geo-engineering blog
http://geo-engineering.blogspot.com/2011/09/runaway-warming.html

Carana, S. 2011b. Runaway global warming 2011. Knol
http://knol.google.com/k/sam-carana/runaway-global-warming/7y50rvz9924j/64

Carana, S. 2011g. Runaway Global Warming. In: Climate Change the Next Generation.
http://climatechangepsychology.blogspot.com/2011/04/sam-carana-runaway-global-warming.html

Carana, S. 2012. Striking increase of methane in the Arctic. In: Arctic News
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2012/05/striking-increase-of-methane-in-arctic.html

Carana S., 2012. Record levels of greenhouse gases in the Arctic. Arctic News. Wednesday, May 2, 2012.
http://www.3.bp.blogspot.com/hBD8fyXU_A/T6E7CIJEZWI/AAAAAAAACrM/4IU5JVN3rTO/S1600/846537569836.jpg

Carana S., 2012. The accumulating impact of methane releases in the Arctic and how much time there is left to act.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/how-much-time-is-there-left-to-act.html

Carana S., 2012. How much time is there left to act? Abrupt release of 1 Gt of methane.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/how-much-time-is-there-left-to-act.html

Carana S., 2013. Quantifying Arctic Methane.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/11/quantifying-arctic-methane.html

Carana S., 2013. Methane - hydrates.
http://methane-hydrates.blogspot.com/2013/04/methane-hydrates.html

Carana S., 2013. Methane up to 2241 ppb at 742 mb on January 23, 2013. In: Carana S., 2013, Dramatic increase in methane in the Arctic in January 2013.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/02/dramatic-increase-in-methane-in-the-arctic-in-january-2013.html

Carana S., 2013. Global warming, accelerated warming in the Arctic and runaway global warming. - How much will temperatures rise?.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2013/04/how-much-will-temperatures-rise.html

Carana S., 2011b. Light, M.P.R. and Carana, S. 2011c. Knol - A unit of Knowledge - Methane linked to seismic activity in the Arctic.
http://knol.google.com/k/sam-carana/methane-linked-to-seismic-activity-in/7y50rvz9924j/85?collectionId=7y50rvz9924j.39#

CDL, 2013. The Oceans, their Physics, Chemistry and General Biology. UC Press E-Books Collection, 1982 - 2004. University of California Press. California Digital Library (CDL).
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=kt167nb66r&chunk.id=d3_5_ch15&toc.id=ch15&toc.depth=1&brand=eschol

Church J.A., White N.J., Konikow L.F., Domingues C.M., Cogley G., Rignot E., Gregory J.M., van den Broeke M.R., Monagham A.J., Velicogna I., 2011. Revisiting the Earth's sea - level and energy budgets from 1961 to 2008. Geophysical Research Letters. Vol. 40, Issue 15, 4066. Article first published online 8 Aug. 2013.

Cook J. 2013. 4 Hiroshima bombs worth of heat per second. In: Skeptical Science.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/4-Hiroshima-bombs-worth-of-heat-per-second.html

Csanady G.T., 2001. Air - Sea Interactions. Laws and Mechanisms. Cambridge University Press. 239 pp.

Gapminder, 2012. Yearly Human Carbon Dioxide Emissions
http://www.gapminder.org/world

Häkkinen S., and Cavalieri D.J., 1989. A study of oceanic surface heat fluxes in the Greenland, Norwegian and Barents Seas. J. Geophys. Res. 94, 6145 - 6157.

Hyperphysics, 2013. Heat of Fusion, Heat of Vaporization.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.ed/hbase/thermo/phase2.html

Krümmel D.O., 1891. Die Nordatlantische Sargasso Sea. Map. Scale 1:31300.000. Gotha: Justus Perthes.
http://www.gc.noaa.gov/images/gcil/1891_SargassoSee_Krummel_Petermanns_lores.jpg

Levitus et al. 2012. Global Ocean Heat Content. NOAA/NESDIS/NODS Ocean Climate Laboratory. Updated from Levitus et al. 2012. Global Oceanic Heat and Salt Content. In: NOAA National Oceanographic Data Center (NODS), United States Department of Commerce.
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OCS/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/Index.html

Lide R., and Frederickse H.P.R., 1995. CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. 75th Edition. 1-1 to 1-33.

Light M.P.R., 2012. Global extinction within one human lifetime as a result of a spreading atmospheric Arctic methane heatwave and surface firestorm. Arctic-News.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/global-extinction-within-one-human.html

Light M.P.R., 2013. The Non - Disclosed Extreme Arctic Methane Threat. The 2013 Australian above average temperatures set a record of 0.22oC higher than the 12 month period prior to 2013 and confirm a mid - 21st century atmospheric methane - induced global deglaciation and major extinction event.
https://sites.google.com/site/runawayglobalwarming/the-non-disclosed-extreme-arctic-methane-threat

Light M.P.R. 2011a. Use of beamed interfering radio frequency transmissions to decompose Arctic atmospheric methane clouds. Edited by Sam Carana.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/decomposing-atmospheric-methane.html

Light M.P.R. 2011c. Stratospheric methane global warming veil. Edited by Sam Carana. In: Arctic News.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com

Light M.P.R., 2012a. Global exctinction within one human lifetime as a result of a spreading atmospheric methane heatwave and surface firestorm. Edited by Sam Carana. In Arctic News.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com

Light M.P.R., 2012b. How much time is there left to act, before methane hydrate releases will lead to human extinction? Edited by Sam Carana. In: Geo-Engineering.
http://Geo-Engineering.blogspot.com

Light M.P.R. 2012c. Angels Proposal - A Proposal for the Prevention of Arctic Methane Induced Catastrophic Global Climate Change by Extraction of Methane from beneath the Permafrost/Arctic Methane Hydrates and its Storage and Sale as a Subsidized "Green Gas" Energy Source. LGS. 49 pp. In: Arctic News.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com.es/2012/05/proposal-to-extract-store-and-sell.html

Light M.P.R. and Carana, S., 2011. Methane linked to seismic activity in the Arctic. Edited by Sam Carana. In: Arctic News.
http://arctic-news.blogspot.com

Light M.P.R. and Solana C., 2002a. Arctic methane hydrates - Mapping a potential greenhouse gas hazard. Abstract and Poster, EGS, Nice.

Light, M.P.R. and Solana, C. , 2002b- Arctic Methane Hydrates: A Potential Greenhouse Gas Hazard
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2002EGSGA..27.4077L

Murphy D.M., Solomon S., Portmann R.W., Rosenlof K.H., Forster P.M., Wong T., 2009. An obervationally based energy balance for the Earth since 1950. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres (1984 - 2012), Vol. 114, Issue D17, 16 September 2009.

Nuccitelli D., Way R., Painting R., Church J., Cook J., 2012. Comment on "ocean heat content and Earth's radiation imbalance.II Realtion to climate shifts". Physics Letters A. Vol. 376, Issue 45, 1 October 2012, 3466 - 3468.

Rutgers, 2013a. Atlantic Ocean Gyre Map.
http://www.i-cool.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/ce058700fg0010.gif

Rutgers, 2013b. South Atlantic Gyre. I-Cool. International Coalition of Ocean Observing Laboratories. http://www.i-cool.org/?p=4916

Shakova N., 2013. A thawing ocean floor pours methane into the atmosphere and it's only getting worse. PRI. Science. Tech and Environment.
http://www.pri.org/stories/2013-12-12/thawing-ocean-floor-pours-methane-atmosphere-and-its-only-getting-worse

Sverdrup, Johnson and Fleming, 1942. In; introduction to Physical Oceanography.
http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/ocng_textbook/chapter 11/chapter11_04.htm
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=kt167nb66r&doc.view=popup&fig.ent=http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/data/13030/6r/kt167nb66r/figures/kt167nb66r_fig187.gif

Wales J., 2013.
- Wikipedia; Gulf Stream.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Golfstrom.jpg
- Wikipedia; Methane.
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane
- Wikipedia; South Atlantic Gyre
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:South_Atlantic_Gyre.png
- Wikipedia; West Spitsbergen Current
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West-Spitsbergen-Current
- Wikipedia; Sverdrup
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdrup

Weatheronline, 2013.
http://www.weatheronline-co.uk/reports/wxfacts/North-Atlantic-Drift-Gulf-Stream.htm

A New Year's letter to academic publishers

My relationships with journals are rather like a bad marriage: a mixture of dependency and hatred. Part of the problem is that journal editors and academics often have a rather different view of the process. Scientific journals could not survive without academics. We do the research, often spending several years of our lives to produce a piece of work that is then distilled into one short paper, which the fond author invariably regards as a fascinating contribution to the field. But when we try to place our work in a journal, we find that it's a buyer's market: most journals are overwhelmed with more submitted papers than they can cope with, and rejection rates are high. So there is a total mismatch: we set out naively dreaming of journals leaping at the opportunity to secure our best work, only to be met with coldness and rejection.  As in the best Barbara Cartland novels, for a lucky few, persistence is ultimately rewarded, and the stony-hearted editor is won over. But many potential authors fall by the wayside long before that point.


But times are changing. We are moving from a traditional "dead tree technology" model, where journals have to be expensively printed and distributed, to electronic-only media. These not only cost less to produce, but also avoid the length limits that traditionally have forced journals to be so highly selective. Alongside the technological changes, there has been rapid growth of the Open Access movement. The main motivations behind this movement were idealistic (making science available to all) and economic (escaping the stranglehold of expensive library subscriptions to closed-access journals). It's early days, but I am starting to sense that there's another consequence of the shift, which is that, as the field opens up, publishers are starting to change how they approach authors: less as supplicants, and more as customers.


In the past, the top journals had no incentive to be accommodating to authors. There were too many of us chasing scarce page space. But there are now some new boys on the open access block, and some of them have recognised that if they want to attract people to publish with them, they should listen to what authors want. And if they want academics to continue to referee papers for no reward, then they had better treat them well too.


This really is not too hard to do. I have two main gripes with journals, a big one and a little one. The big one concerns my time. The older I get, the less patient I am with organizations that behave as if I have all the time in the world to do the small bureaucratic chores that they wish to impose on me. For instance, many journals specify pointless formatting requirements for an initial submission. I really, really resent jumping through arbitrary hoops when the world is full of interesting things I could be doing. And cutting my toenails is considerably more interesting than reformatting references.


I recently encountered a journal whose website required you to enter details (name/address/email) of all authors in order to submit a pre-submission enquiry. Surely the whole point of a pre-submission enquiry is to save time, so you can get a quick decision on whether it's likely to be worth your while battling with the submission portal! There's also the horror of journals that require signatures from all authors at the point when you submit a manuscript: seems a harmless enough requirement, except that authors are often widely dispersed - on maternity leave or sailing the Atlantic - by the time the paper is submitted. The idea is to avoid fraud, of course, but like so many ethics regulations, the main effect of this requirement is to encourage honest, law-abiding people to take up forgery.



Oh, and then there are the 'invitations to review' (makes it sound so enticing, like being invited to a party), which require you to login in order to register your response – which for me invariably means selecting the option that I have forgotten my password, then looking at email to find how to update the password, meanwhile getting distracted by other email messages so I forget what I was doing, and eventually returning to the site to find it wants me now to change the password and enter mandatory contact details before it will accept my response. Well, no.  I'm usually a good citizen but I'm afraid I've just stopped responding to those.


You'd think the advent of electronic submission would make life easier, but in fact it can just open up a whole new world of tiny, fiddly things that you are required to do before your paper is submitted. Each individual thing is usually fairly trivial, but they do add up. So, for instance, if you'd like your authors to suggest referees, please allow them to paste in a list. DO NOT require them to cut and paste title, forename, initial, surname, email and institution into your horrible little boxes for each of six potential referees.  It all takes TIME. And we have more important things in life to be getting on with. Including doing the science that allows us to get the point of writing a paper.


Even worse, some of the requirements of journals are just historical artefacts with no more rationale than male nipples.  Here's a splendid post by Kate Jeffery which in fact was the impetus for this blogpost. I thought of Kate when, having carefully constructed a single manuscript document including figures, as instructed by the Instructions for Authors, I got to the submission portal to be strictly told that ON NO ACCOUNT must the figures be included in the main manuscript. Instead, they had to be separated, not only from the manuscript, but also from their captions (which had to be put as a list at the end of the manuscript). This makes sense ONCE THE PAPER IS ACCEPTED, when it needs to be typeset.  But not at the point of initial submission, when the paper's fate is undecided: it may well be rejected, and if not, it will certainly require revision. And meanwhile, you have referees tearing their hair out trying to link up the text, the Figures and their captions.


The smaller gripe is just about treating people with respect. I do have a preference for journal editors whose correspondence indicates that they are a human being and not an automaton. I've moaned about this before, in an old post describing a taxonomy of journal editors, but my feeling is that in the three years since I wrote that, things have got worse rather than better. Publishers and editors may think they make their referees happy by writing and telling them how useful their review of a paper has been – but the opposite effect is created if it is clear that this is a form letter that goes to all referees, however hopeless.It is really better to be ignored than to be sent an insincere, meaningless email - it just implies that the sender thinks you are stupid enough to be taken in by it.


So my message to publishers in 2014 is really very simple. The market is getting competitive and if you want to attract authors to send their best work to you, and referees to keep reviewing for you, you need to become more sensitive to our needs.  Two journals that appear to be trying hard are eLife and PeerJ, who avoid most of the bad practices I have outlined. I am hoping their example will cause others to up their game. We are mostly very simple souls who are not hard to please, but we hate having our time wasted, and we do like being treated like human beings.

How the government spins a crisis: the blame game

from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkHb9q-jpDU

Thousands of people in the UK had a truly miserable Christmas, with extreme weather leading to flooding and power cuts. They were shocked and cold, blundering around in the dark, sometimes for as long as three days. When David Cameron went to visit Yalding in Kent on 27th December, he got an earful from local residents, who complained they had been abandoned, and had no help from the council, who had "all decided to go on holiday."



Cameron's visit was widely seen as a PR disaster: he was criticised for using the floods as a way of getting cheap publicity, and his government's cuts in spending on flood defences were commented on.


On 30th December, we had Owen Paterson, the Energy Secretary stating that energy companies had "let customers down" in their response to the storm.


Yesterday we heard that Tim Yeo chairman of the energy select committee, planned to summon bosses of energy companies to explain their poor performance.


Now, I have no love for the energy companies, whose rapacious pricing strategies are causing real hardship to many. But I find myself wondering what exactly they were supposed to do over the Christmas period. Presumably, if a power line comes down, it requires specialised machinery and replacement parts to be sourced and brought to the site – which may well be affected by flooding – and engineers who not only have the expertise to diagnose and correct the problem, but who are also fit and brave enough to do this in horrendous weather conditions. I doubt that large numbers of such people are just sitting around waiting to be called upon, and indeed over the Christmas period, some of them may have gone away on holiday, and others may themselves be affected by the flooding.  There was much criticism concerning the lack of information given to those affected by flooding and power cuts. But it's just not realistic to expect an organization to magic up large numbers of call centre staff out of nowhere in the middle of a crisis-ridden Christmas break. It's also worth noting that much of the valiant work of helping people deal with the flooding crisis was the responsibility of the fire service, currently under pressure from cuts to funding.


I simply don't know whether the energy companies could have done better; maybe they could have done more with live updates of information through websites, Twitter or local radio. Maybe they could have issued earlier warnings, or cancelled leave for key staff. But it concerns me that we have the Environment Secretary making a very public judgement on this matter, directing blame at energy companies, just a few days after the Prime Minister has been criticised, and long before there has been a chance to evaluate what happened, and which agencies were responsible for what, in a calm and thorough manner.



Forgive me if I seem cynical, but a rapid and punitive response seems to have become a standard reaction of government to situations where they are attracting adverse publicity. Find a scapegoat and come down on them heavily, whether it be Brodie Smith, Sharon Shoesmith or David Kelly. This deflects criticism from the government and makes them look strong. All the better if the criticism can be laid instead at the door of a person or organization who is already unpopular.


By all means, let us consider the response to the crisis to see what could have been done better. But the issues are far too important to be used as propaganda to enhance a government's popularity. Let us not be distracted from a much more important priority: calling the government to account for its policy of cutting back on measures of flood prevention.