WEDNESDAY 4 JULY 2007

PROFESSOR ALAN RODGER, PROFESSOR GRAHAM SHIMMIELD, PROFESSOR BOB DICKSON AND PROFESSOR ANDREW WATSON

  Q440  Chris Mole: Should we charge the Met Office or Proudman, or somebody, with having a long-term monitoring role?

  Professor Watson: I think it would be a good idea to have an agency that had that role, yes.

  Q441  Chris Mole: Do others share that view?

  Professor Rodger: I accept there is a need for long-term monitoring, I accept there is a need to do it in an integrated way, but whether you need a separate organisation is one that I am less convinced by. It is about integration. As I have said to some of you before, the earth is an integrated system and exactly which box you draw there are always going to be people on the edges of that box or outside that box.

  Q442  Chris Mole: Is it not a problem that things keep just falling off the monitoring list if there is not somebody charged with doing it? We nearly lost SAHFOS a while ago.

  Professor Dickson: The point you made is an interesting one about whether monitoring is mindless monitoring or whether it is research. In many cases, and you used sea gliders in the example, we are waiting for sea gliders that will work under the ice and within the shelf, for example. We are waiting for sea gliders that will go all the way to the ocean floor—they do not at present. So these are very intense research efforts that are going on necessarily in only a few places. The ones we use come from Seattle. That is a whole new research topic just now and eventually it will be used for monitoring.

  Q443  Chris Mole: I think, Professor Watson, you touched on the numerical climate change modelling. We are talking about gliders and buoys and things; you can buy an awful lot of them for the super-computing power we need to get a step-change. Where is the balance there? Do we need that super-computing power tomorrow or should we spend the money on buoys and gliders?

  Professor Watson: Moore's law states that computer power doubles every 18 months, or something like that, but what we actually need is to be able to run a model at eddy-resolving, which is 10 km resolving, for 1,000 years with the full ocean physics and chemistry and biology, and we still need to wait for, probably, 20 years of Moore's law doubling before we will get there. You asked for the balance: it is certainly true that with the current modelling—the Argo programme, for example, has dramatically increased the usefulness of the short-term modelling that we are doing, so that was very well worth spending. There are some other areas where we certainly need to spend more on monitoring, and that will come before the computing. However, the computing is desperately important.

  Q444  Chris Mole: We have been world-leading, have we not?

  Professor Watson: We have been.

  Q445  Chris Mole: Are we about to lose that?

  Professor Watson: I do not think so. My impression is that we are still very good. In the oceans in particular there has been something of a hiatus and the new model that the Hadley Centre will be using shortly is actually a French model—for which we have to swallow our pride! It is a good model. In general, we are doing very well.

  Q446  Chairman: Just before we leave the super-computing, we heard from the previous panel, and we have heard this on a number of our inquiries, about the lack of super-computing capacity in the UK. Do you feel—and this is just a question outside this brief but it clearly affects it—that UK, either through STFC or some other body, needs in fact to actually concentrate on that issue of providing super-computer capacity in order for us not to have simply the large climate change models but models for all sorts of other areas as well? Is this a weakness in British science or are you not able to answer that?

  Professor Rodger: All areas of science are benefiting from high degrees of super-computing. It is one of the things that Britain has been, traditionally, excellent at, in high-resolution super-computing. It is one of the things that we can hold up as a flagship. What it offers us is the integration, often, and that is a very powerful activity, that you can bring data and theory together.

  Q447  Chairman: I am not arguing against this.

  Professor Rodger: I would argue that you could use more super-computing across the board in science.

  Q448  Chairman: I just wanted to know whether it is actually holding us back—the lack of super-computing power and availability. But you do not believe that is the case.

  Professor Rodger: We need multiple runs, for example, in the environment rather than a single run; we do not have the resources to run as many multiple, high-resolution runs for as long as we would wish at the current time.

  Q449  Chairman: Okay. Thank you very much indeed. Professor, Shimmield, you spoke earlier about partnerships and co-ordination, and it has been a feature of this inquiry that there are a very significant number of partnerships—in fact, often, too many to mention. We have got the Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership, the Marine Environment Change Network and the Office for Climate Change. Do they make a ha'ppeth of difference and do scientists actually get very much involved with them?

  Professor Shimmield: You are right to identify a range of partnerships and arrangements. Going to the next level down you will see where some of the differences are; some are more focused on the impact of biodiversity in the coastal systems as a consequence of climate change; some are more directed at climate change consequences on the human populations and coastal zone management. I think what you may be alluding to is the need to have some better integration between these activities. They probably show the breadth and pervasiveness of understanding climate change impact across the marine and terrestrial environment.

  Q450  Chairman: How effective are these partnerships? How involved are you?

  Professor Shimmield: I think they have been quite effective in producing some of the new status reports that are coming out; we are able to see in a more holistic way some of the inter-annual variability in climate change impacts, particularly on shelf seas around the UK. That is one definite benefit that has come out of some of the partnerships.

  Professor Watson: I am from a university and, at the coalface, fairly well down the food chain here, but I would have to say that many of these do not make a lot of difference at the practical level of the day-to-day doing of the research. The best ones are those which do involve, from my perspective at least, the people who are actually doing the research and not simply those that are talking about it and doing reports.

  Q451  Chairman: Which ones?

  Professor Watson: For example, the IGBP (that is the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme) which has a Committee that sits nationally, and there is the GER Committee (Global Environmental Research Committee) that sits under the auspices of the Royal Society. Those Committees are very useful; they organise meetings, for example, that one may go to.

  Q452  Chairman: I will move on briefly. Do you think that NERC does a good job in co-ordinating the whole of climate change science including work on the oceans?

  Professor Rodger: NERC, well, who is going to answer this question?

  Q453  Chairman: Professor Rodger, you are a good advocate for NERC.

  Professor Rodger: Thank you very much for that. NERC in the past has taken a different role in the sense that it has often seen itself as a funding agency. Under its new Chief Executive it is definitely trying to be more directed, more focused, and therefore there are particular activities where there is an attempt to do much more co-ordination, much more addressing the critical question. So in the new strategy you will find "climate change" and then under there you will only find six or seven key questions that are to be addressed, so I think again we are at a point of change where we are going to be more integrated and more directed at addressing the key questions that are relevant not only to the UK but internationally, globally.

  Q454  Chairman: Any other comments?

  Professor Dickson: The funding of the Hadley Centre by Defra is one major strength in the UK and I must say that when we look at, for example, the NERC programmes in the ocean in the north for the IPY, they are done in collaboration with the Hadley Centre effort, as is the remote sensing of ice freeboard in University College London, so the thing I like about it is that there are a number of departments and agencies who are all well aware of each other's abilities and the need to feed back and forth in an iterative way between observations and modelling, so I wouldn't say it is just NERC.

  Q455  Dr Spink: Chairman, can I just take us on to the next question. On specific programme funding such as the global ocean observing systems and climate variability programmes, should these be funded direct from NERC, would that improve them, or should they come through specific programme fundings?

  Professor Rodger: Again I think we go back to what we said; I do not think it matters as long as it is done.

  Q456  Chairman: With respect, Professor Rodger, that is not satisfactory, is it, because unless somebody takes ownership of it—

  Professor Rodger: --- unless somebody takes ownership of the question—

  Q457  Chairman: --- then it could easily slip off the radar here.

  Professor Rodger: Going back to your question then, I think Defra has to take a significant responsibility for defining the problem and then encourage NERC and make sure NERC and the other organisations carry out the requirements.

  Q458  Dr Spink: So there needs to be better co-ordination then?

  Professor Rodger: Yes.

  Professor Watson: I would say that I very much welcome NERC's new strategy on which there has been widespread consultation, but historically I would say NERC has not done a great job of co-ordination—as Alan says perhaps they are going to change because of that. The problem is, as I say, that NERC is very focused on its own institutes and it does not necessarily know what is happening in the community as a whole which is quite a lot larger than the institutes. There is a reorganisation of government science and the universities now coming together under a new department.

  Q459  Chairman: Do you support that?

  Professor Watson: I certainly would. I think that that is a good idea and perhaps an opportunity to get this co-ordination across the piece a little better than it has been done in the past.

  Chairman: Okay, on that note I will pass to you, Brian.