Moving water at Sydney Uni

Finally some rain again in Sydney, it has been pretty dry. It is not much better in some parts of country NSW, as this article in the SMH attests to. In contrast, Victoria seems to be getting plenty for a change. The climate keeps us guessing where the falls will occur this time.

While I was mulling over this variability this morning, I listened to Macca on the ABC. I always get a bit upset with him, but maybe that is ok. I think he tends to be very simplistic in some of his environment comments, or maybe it is just that he lets people I don’t agree with air on the show. So that is not a bad thing, I can write my blog, he can have these people on the show. Anyway, this morning someone was having a go at wind energy and arguing that we would still need coal fired plants to pick up the peak demand. The main concern of the caller was the visual damage of wind energy to the landscape.

One of my PhD students read last week’s blog and commented on my use of the term win-win versus win-lose from an economic perspective. Her comment was that if we would maximise utility it should be a win-win situation. I think some of this was purely in the syntax and choice of words, but it gives me a nice new topic to talk about. Maximising utility is an economic concept I have struggled with for a while and it is a constant discussion point between myself and some of my colleagues in the economic area. I will explain.

Earth hour has struck again and people have switched of their lights all over the world. Does it really matter? And does it really have an impact?

It is the beginning of a new semester and that always creates a bit of a sense of excitement for me. Many students always ask me whether I had a nice holiday, but I actually don’t have many more holidays than anyone else. In fact, the time between semesters is often one of the busiest times of the year the break between semesters is a time when I tend to work quite hard on my research and writing proposals. So when the semester starts, it seems like a change of pace and focus.

Another thing that is happening is cyclone Hamish on the Queensland coast. I have put a link in here, but I doubt it will work after next week, but you can find past cyclone tracks on the Bureau of Meteorology website. I probably will talk more about this next week, but right now it brings a buzz of excitement to me and one of my PhD students, I will explain.

Today I am badly stuck with my research. It is a real annoying feeling and of course, it being Sunday, there is no one around to have a good discussion with. I could try my children, and maybe if I can explain the problem to them I might find the solution.

I often have this, if I actually try to explain the problem to someone who is not totally familiar with it, I often find the solution while I am talking. This brings me to the topic of this blog post. I had promised earlier that I would talk more about multidisciplinary research, particularly since my colleague Michael Harris is also steering that way. The point above I just made is probably one of the main reasons why working in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams is good. Rather than talking to your disciplinary friends, you have to explain your research in a much broader context and this throws up all kinds of new questions, but often also provides lots of answers.

Having said that, why am I not more involved in multidisciplinary research? I think this is an issue many of us are struggling with. In fact we all would like to be involved, but it never seems to work that way, and often, if you do get involved in a multidisciplinary project, the project never works out the way you wanted.

This means there are two major barriers towards multidisciplinary work. The first is: how to get involved into a large project with many colleagues from different disciplines, the second (and I think more manageable one) is: How do we make sure we all get something really good out of the project.

X-mas and the new year are almost upon us, so I thought I write a more philosophical blog this time intermingled with some lighter stuff. After that you probably won’t hear from me until in 2009, as I need a little break to refresh my brains. A key thing I am constantly struggling with is to understand the relationship between responsibility and freedom. Total freedom means total responsibility, but what does that mean if we are dealing with water resources? I need to give a talk for prospective students on the Infoday on 6 January and I thought I would explore this topic in that talk.
But first: I am recruiting! I am looking for a bright student wanting to take on a PhD in scaling problems in Hydrology. Anyone interested?

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).

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.

Coca cola is allowed to extract water for free and sell it. I wonder if this is an example of “highest value use” of water. I can understand the criticism on such a decision, particularly given the low price ($200) Coca Cola is paying for the water and the profit the allegedly make from the water. In general, I don’t understand at all why people drink bottled water unless there is nothing else available.

It sometimes seems that every major public government decision that is made is criticised and the constant criticism sometimes leads to secrecy and avoidance. This suggests that criticism is a bad thing, can be damaging and should be avoided. Interestingly, a comment in the Sydney Morning Herald this weekend pointed out that not enough criticism has lead to the current credit crisis. Basically, the manager all set around selling each other wilder and wilder products with no one daring to criticise the ideas.

This is going to be a short one, bit busy this week. I was listening in to a discussion between some of my colleagues, economists, in the Faculty. They were having a quite in depth discussion about presenting some material at the upcoming Ecological Society of Australia Conference at the University of Sydney. At some point in the discussion the following point was raised by Dr. Michael Harris.
"An overarching theme of all this is, as you say, to think about “values” and how economists regard values in an anthropocentric context (hence: can be monetized) while ecologists will (typically) think of them in terms of some biophysical metric or benchmark. Bridging this divide seems crucial."
I actually had to think about that for a while.

As I am currently in the Netherlands, I have a chance to consider different political perspectives on water management. There area few things I would like to comment on. I noted that Prof. Garnaut has published his report this week in relation to possible targets and prices of carbon. My PhD student Claire and her husband Vivek have been sending me information about the devastating floods in Bihar, possibly the result of lack of maintenance on a dam in the river. In addition, Haiti and other Caribbean areas are suffering from the effects of a series of Hurricanes and are bracing for more . And here in the Netherlands a government commissioned report on the future needs of water management under climate change has been published.

This is partly an unashamed plug for our Faculty and the degrees that we offer. Don’t be scared, even though we are called “Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources”, we don’t all wear 10 gallon hats. Next weekend on Saturday is Sydney Uni Live! Come and have a look, I am actually scheduled to give a mini-lecture at 10 am, so if you wonder who is behind the blog, here is your chance!

This week the ABS came out with a new report which summarises the statistics of the Murray Darling Basin. The media immediately picked up the story pointing out that cotton was the biggest water user in the Murray Darling Basin. What I want to talk about is that, while the ABS document is of course well balanced and clearly indicates that this is a snapshot over a series of years, the media coverage only selected one period (2005 – 2006) to cover. This brings me to statistics, the power of statistics and the use of statistics in argument. Basically, I believe that statistics are often abused in arguments and education about statistics in the wider community is poor, it is seen as some sort of wizardry.

There is water on Mars!
Well, if we are going to manage it as well as we do here in Australia… Hang-on, the real pictures of Mars look a bit like what Australia will look like in a couple of years. So maybe we can learn something! On the other hand, it all sounds like a lot of money and effort which might be spend somewhere else.

Of more concern to me is water management here in Australia, and in particular the biophysical sciences needed to really make a difference. From the discussions about water in the media (see my earlier blogposts) I am becoming more and more worried that there is still a major gap between what we know and what we need to know. Prof. Johan Bouma at a soils conference once spoke of: The things we know we know, the things we know we don’t know and … the things we don’t know we don’t know. I am afraid that in terms of hydrology in Australia the last two are still the largest.

I was talking to a friend of mine on the phone this weekend and he made a great remark. It was something like this, we were talking about issues in finding the optimal environmental policy and he said: It is like a cheap badly made T-shirt, it fits nobody (not the slim people and not the big people), but it is still useful if you need something to wear. So you will have to wear it if there is nothing else around or you can’t afford anything else.

I’ll get back to this later.

20/20 is great vision but 2020 is much harder it seems from reading the water and sustainability contributions at the 2020 summit. I wasn't at the summit and since I have already commented on the budget I went back and read some older stuff.

The key thing that struck me was the vagueness of many of the issues that are mentioned and the lack of connection to real positive outcomes. Many of the suggestions would be what I call "feel good" activities.

This is my first blog post. I intend to use this blog on a weekly basis to highlight issues related to water, water management and hydrological research. It is intended for students, fellow academics and other interested people.

The major thing in water that happened this week was of course the National water initiative announcement from the Minister for Water the Hon. Penny Wong.