Equipped to deal with uncertainty in climate and impacts predictions: lessons from internal peer review

The quantification of uncertainty is an increasingly popular topic, with clear importance for climate change policy. However, uncertainty assessments are open to a range of interpretations, each of which may lead to a different policy recommendation. In the EQUIP project researchers from the UK climate modelling, statistical modelling, and impacts communities worked together on ‘end-to-end’ uncertainty assessments of climate change and its impacts. Here, we use an experiment in peer review amongst project members to assess variation in the assessment of uncertainties between EQUIP researchers. We find overall agreement on key sources of uncertainty but a large variation in the assessment of the methods used for uncertainty assessment. Results show that communication aimed at specialists makes the methods used harder to assess. There is also evidence of individual bias, which is partially attributable to disciplinary backgrounds. However, varying views on the methods used to quantify uncertainty did not preclude consensus on the consequential results produced using those methods. Based on our analysis, we make recommendations for developing and presenting statements on climate and its impacts. These include the use of a common uncertainty reporting format in order to make assumptions clear; presentation of results in terms of processes and trade-offs rather than only numerical ranges; and reporting multiple assessments of uncertainty in order to elucidate a more complete picture of impacts and their uncertainties. This in turn implies research should be done by teams of people with a range of backgrounds and time for interaction and discussion, with fewer but more comprehensive outputs in which the range of opinions is recorded.

Teachers' habitus for teaching English

In this examination of monolingual and multilingual pedagogies I draw on literature that explores the position of English globally and in the curriculum for English. I amplify the discussion with data from a project exploring how teachers responded to the arrival of Polish children in their English classrooms following Poland’s entry to the European Union in 2004. While both Poland and England are a long way from Australia, the sudden arrival of non-native speaking children from families who have the right to work and settle in the UK is interesting of itself as a development in the migration agenda affecting many nations of teachers in the 21st century. Indeed, this view of migration adds to the overview of migration in an Australian context and recent Australian immigration settlement policies often mirror this with new arrivals moving to rural areas resulting in an EAL presence in schools which may be new. Until recently it was most commonly the case that teachers in schools in inner city and other urban parts of the UK might expect to teach in multilingual classrooms, but teachers in smaller towns and in areas identified as rural were unlikely to confront either linguistic or ethnic differences in their pupils. I use the theories of Bourdieu to analyse the status of the curriculum for English expressed in research literature, and the teachers’ interview data. This supports a level of interpretation that allows us to see how teachers’ practice and the teaching of English are formed by schools’ and teachers’ histories and beliefs as much as they are by the wishes of politicians in creating educational policy. It adds to the view presented in the first article in this issue that provision for EAL/D learners sits within a monolingual assessment structure which may militate against the attainment of non-native English speakers. I present a wide-ranging discussion intentionally, in order that the many complexities of policy impact and teacher habitus on teachers’ practice are made apparent.

Capturing and sharing our collective expertise on climate data: the CHARMe project

For users of climate services, the ability to quickly determine the datasets that best fit one's needs would be invaluable. The volume, variety and complexity of climate data makes this judgment difficult. The ambition of CHARMe ("Characterization of metadata to enable high-quality climate services") is to give a wider interdisciplinary community access to a range of supporting information, such as journal articles, technical reports or feedback on previous applications of the data. The capture and discovery of this "commentary" information, often created by data users rather than data providers, and currently not linked to the data themselves, has not been significantly addressed previously. CHARMe applies the principles of Linked Data and open web standards to associate, record, search and publish user-derived annotations in a way that can be read both by users and automated systems. Tools have been developed within the CHARMe project that enable annotation capability for data delivery systems already in wide use for discovering climate data. In addition, the project has developed advanced tools for exploring data and commentary in innovative ways, including an interactive data explorer and comparator ("CHARMe Maps") and a tool for correlating climate time series with external "significant events" (e.g. instrument failures or large volcanic eruptions) that affect the data quality. Although the project focuses on climate science, the concepts are general and could be applied to other fields. All CHARMe system software is open-source, released under a liberal licence, permitting future projects to re-use the source code as they wish.

Perspectives on the specification of Building Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) technology in construction projects

Innovative, low carbon technologies are already available for use in the construction of buildings, but the impact of their specification on construction projects is unclear. This exploratory research identifies issues which arise following the specification of BIPV in non-residential construction projects. Rather than treating the inclusion of a new technology as a technical problem, the research explores the issue from a socio-technical perspective to understand the accommodations which the project team makes and their effect on the building and the technology. The paper is part of a larger research project which uses a Social Construction of Technology Approach (SCOT) to explore the accommodations made to working practices and design when Building Integrated PhotoVoltaic (BIPV) technology is introduced. The approach explores how the requirements of the technology from different groups of actors (Relevant Social Groups or RSG's) give rise to problems and create solutions. As such it rejects the notion of a rational linear view of innovation diffusion; instead it suggests that the variety and composition of the Relevant Social Groups set the agenda for problem solving and solutions as the project progresses. The research explores the experiences of three people who have extensive histories of involvement with BIPV in construction, looks at how SCOT can inform our understanding of the issues involved and identifies themes and issues in the specification of BIPV on construction projects. A key finding concerns the alignment of inflection points at which interviewees have found themselves changing from one RSG to another as new problems and solutions are identified. The points at which they change RSG often occurred at points which mirror conventional construction categories (in terms of project specification, tender, design and construction).

Interannual-decadal variability of wintertime mixed layer depths in the North Pacific detected by an ensemble of ocean syntheses

The interannual-decadal variability of the wintertime mixed layer depths (MLDs) over the North Pacific is investigated from an empirical orthogonal function (EOF) analysis of an ensemble of global ocean reanalyses. The first leading EOF mode represents the interannual MLD anomalies centered in the eastern part of the central mode water formation region in phase opposition with those in the eastern subtropics and the central Alaskan Gyre. This first EOF mode is highly correlated with the Pacific decadal oscillation index on both the interannual and decadal time scales. The second leading EOF mode represents the MLD variability in the subtropical mode water (STMW) formation region and has a good correlation with the wintertime West Pacific (WP) index with time lag of 3 years, suggesting the importance of the oceanic dynamical response to the change in the surface wind field associated with the meridional shifts of the Aleutian Low. The above MLD variabilities are in basic agreement with previous observational and modeling findings. Moreover the reanalysis ensemble provides uncertainty estimates. The interannual MLD anomalies in the first and second EOF modes are consistently represented by the individual reanalyses and the amplitudes of the variabilities generally exceed the ensemble spread of the reanalyses. Besides, the resulting MLD variability indices, spanning the 1948–2012 period, should be helpful for characterizing the North Pacific climate variability. In particular, a 6-year oscillation including the WP teleconnection pattern in the atmosphere and the oceanic MLD variability in the STMW formation region is first detected.

Talking AIDS in Hong Kong: Cultural models in public health discourse

This paper explores issues of cultural models in the discourse of public health in a multicultural, multilingual context through a 'frame analysis' of 20 AIDS awareness campaigns aired in both English and Cantonese in Hong Kong from 1987 to 1994. Using a methodology derived from the work of Goffman (1974), and Gee (1990), it examines how the authors of AIDS awareness messages in Hong Kong project cultural models on several different levels of "framing" and how these models both reflect and validate dominant ideologies within the society.