Moving water at Sydney Uni

It is difficult to understand the climate if southern Queensland is getting washed away and is reconsidering recycling while Murray irrigators are told allocations are unlikely to reach 30%. This always seems to be the case from a human perspective. There often is plenty of water available, but in the wrong form (for example saline) or in the wrong place (Wet tropics rather than in the semi-arid regions).

This week I have to finish my submission to the senate inquiry into sustainable water management in the Murray Darling Basin. So I was scanning the papers and the news media to make sure that I comment on the latest developments. There were a few things that caught my eye: “Irrigators keep the tap on” , “State pays $34m for Darling river water” in the Sydney Morning Herald and “pick of the crop” on landline on the ABC. That last one seems maybe not so relevant, but I will explain that this is probably the most crucial story of all three and mostly missed in the media.

I am bit early this week, but this is too ridiculous and needed reaction. During my regular browse of the news media on the internet I happened to stumble across Michael Duffy’s column from 8 november 2008 in the Sydney Morning Herald It is clear from the column that Mr. Duffy is a climate sceptic, and I have no problem with that issue. What I do have a problem with is the fact that he accuses Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of presenting inaccurate data during a recent seminar at the University of NSW. I am not with the University NSW and could have ignored this. But I am a researcher and this goes to the heart of scientific inquiry and I would be very concerned if a fellow scientist would publicly present fudged data. So I set out to investigate who was right, Mr. Duffy or Dr. Pachauri.

I want to spend a few moments talking about ranking of scientific journals in the hydrology area. I was looking at the rankings last week trying to plan papers with one of my PhD students. As you might know ranking has become more and more important in academia to assess our output. There are two main tools. The first is the so-called h-index which indicates how successful you are as a scientist. The index calculates the number of papers (h) that are cited at least h times (so if you have 10 papers your h-index will be 10 if your last paper is cited at least 10 times, and I will be quiet about my h-index). Modifications have been suggested to the h-index to reflect the number of co-authors etc. The second tool is by ranking the quality of journals using the impact factor. This is calculated by dividing the number of citations in the last 3 years by the number of papers published. Very highly ranked journals such as Science and Nature have impact factors closed to 30, but we were looking at journals which publish papers in physical and statistical hydrology.