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on quantities in AR5 (fwd)
Bärbel, the text below is long, meant just as a list of metrologic
problems of IPCC documents. A published older letter which does not stress
the GtC nonsense at the introduction is
http://amper.ped.muni.cz/jenik/letters/public/msg00358.html ,
so it can be referenced. My old remark on faults in AR4 is at the
end of
http://amper.ped.muni.cz/gw/ipcc_cz/
- but the Gt"ofsomething" made not such a attack that time.
(The Oct beg for a pdf versions of figures became obsolete, they are
really as good pdf in current typeset version, as the TS answered me.)
jenik
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2013 14:57:33 +0100 (CET)
From: Jan Hollan <hollan@mail....cz>
To: wg1@ipcc....ch
Subject: vector format of figures in AR5
Dear Technical Support Unit of WG I,
may I ask you for vector versions of the figures in the first part of
AR5, esp. from its SPM?
........
PS
The above beg is what we need urgently. Another issues are my 2 wishes
on terminology, don't bother to study them in a hurry.
A) C and CO2 amounts - expressing them transparently is a serious
matter.
If you would not mind, I'd change the formulations like "CO2 emissions
(PgC)" into transparent "emissions of carbon / Gt" in my translations.
I am sure the 1/1000 of carbon which is not oxidized but emitted as
black carbon
( http://www.epa.gov/blackcarbon/basic.html ),
can be neglected when speaking about gigatons.
My decade long experience says that measuring CO2 in strange units
"1 GtC" which equal 3.67 Gt
leads to complete confusion of even the most educated public. Even for
me it takes time to be certain whether the authors mean
1 Gt, 3.67 Gt or 1/3.67 Gt
in various texts and their parts. Many quotations from such texts get
it entirely wrong.
B) on metrology in general -- I strongly recommend to adhere to the
NIST rules, and some other improvements to AR#, as I wrote earlier to
another addresses:
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2013 18:42:54 +0200 (CEST)
From: Jan Hollan <hollan@mail....cz>
To: IPCC-Sec@wmo..., rchrist@wmo...
Cc: midgley@ipcc....ch, ...
Subject: following NIST rules would make AR5 better
Dear Secretary,
I have noticed that WG I drafts for AR5 suffer the same problem as all
previous IPCC documents: they ignore some good rules for expressing
quantities.
In short, there must be a space before %, °C, and between Pg or Gt and
C.
It is no trifle, as I reason in length, with apologies to bother you. If
you know a better person to whom should I address my concern, please fw
my letter accordingly.
In length, now:
Those rules are explained by NIST, there are serious arguments why they
should be obeyed. In all documents, but mainly by such, which may
influence millions of readers for many years.
I have decades of experience that writing quantitative expressions
carelessly results in misunderstanding; it prevents people getting a
proper knowledge of the issue.
Fortunately, there are not many kinds of such sloppy quantitative
expressions in IPCC reports. They are easy to correct by a script (in
html versions) or by an editor, just replacing several types of strings.
No need to discuss it with authors or reviewers. Writing standards are
nothing to struggle with.
A shortest possible introduction into proper writing of units etc. is
http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec11.html
- a checklist for editors.
So, several things to be corrected in AR5:
1) there is to be a space between a number and %
-- see item 10 of the checklist or, in more length,
http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec07.html#7.10.2
(It continues by a paragraph recommending to avoid ppm, ppb and ppt,
but I think their use is OK for concentrations; they are separated by
space from the number in AR5 drafts, correctly, it is perhaps obvious
that the % sign has to be treated the same way.)
2) the same for degrees Celsius, for more reasoning see
http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec07.html#7.2
3) PgC is a nightmare. No symbols of units are to be mixed with another
stuff, see items 4 and 6 of the checklist, or
http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/sec07.html#7.4 and 7.5
So, please never write PgC or PgCO2. A space must be between the unit
and a chemical symbol: Pg C, Pg CO2. The gram is always the same thing,
there are no special grams for different stuffs.
(A similar mistake is "having" watts of electricity and heat, like We
and Wt - if needed, the "W (e)" or "W (t)" can be written to distinguish
between work and thermal flux.)
(As for Pg, I'd much prefer Gt, as fuels are sold rather by tons than by
grams; giga is a much more common prefix than peta -- but of course,
using petagrams is no mistake, just an obstacle for at least 90 % of
readers. Kiloton, megaton, gigaton -- all are OK for NIST, unlike
militon, and are accepted for use with the SI. Rejecting Gt in favour of
Pg is, in my honest opinion, of no good. I will change Pg to Gt in
translations, knowing no argument against.)
The whole NIST Special Publication 811 is available, as a single pdf or
a html tree, at
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/bibliography.html
and is worth while to study, for any authors and editors. Perhaps there
is another document which may supersede the NIST one, but I don't know
any. So I adhere to SP 811...
Actually, I mentioned it to some TSU of an IPCC special report already.
A hint is the end of the English
http://amper.ped.muni.cz/gw/ipcc_cz/README.html
at my page with Czech versions of IPCC documents:
http://amper.ped.muni.cz/gw/ipcc_cz/
I understand that they may be reasons why NIST recommendations are not
followed by IPCC - but in such a case, a document explaining them should
exist, and a paragraph on conventions differing from NIST should precede
any document which does not adhere to NIST fully.
yours sincerely,
Jenik Hollan, maintainer of a Czech electronic library on Climate
Change,
http://amper.ped.muni.cz/gw/
PS
Another thing which may be of interest for AR5, is making the
glossaries
hypertext. Like http://amper.ped.muni.cz/gw/ipcc_cz/glossary_i.htm or
http://amper.ped.muni.cz/gw/ipcc_cz/glossary_i.pdf
or a bilingual English-Czech ones, html or pdf, like
http://amper.ped.muni.cz/gw/ipcc_cz/gloss_en_cz.html
-- it was a bit of programming to create it from the original, but I
think it was worth while. I hope I have the needed scripts somewhere,
so
that I would be able do the same for AR5.
And, the glossaries should perhaps explain, what is understood by
Earth System - like
http://www.igbp.net/globalchange/earthsystemdefinitions.4.d8b4c3c12bf3be638a80001040.html
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Jan Hollan, Ph.D.
CzechGlobe - Global Change Research Centre of the Acad. Sci. Czech Rep.
AdMaS - Advanced Materials, Structures and Technologies Centre of the
Brno University of Technology
home:
Lipová 19, 602 00 Brno fix. +420 5 43 23 90 96
mob. +420 606 073 562
volunteer of the Ecological Institute Veronica
Panská 9, 602 00 Brno, Czechia http://www.veronica.cz
e-mail: hollan@ped....cz http://amper.ped.muni.cz/jenik
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