Geoscientist Online

Sir, We write to welcome the news from Rob Butler that the Society has set up its Geoconservation Committee. However, we wish to note that the Geoconservation Commission, which preceded it - although always very well supported by the Society over the years - was semi-independent, and had GeoConservationUK as one of its members.

The new committee, unfortunately, does not have direct representation from bodies like us, the UK's national organisation matching the statutory agencies, which grew out of the Nature Conservancy Council's Geoconservation Review (1990). Several of our Executive are Fellows of the Society and Chartered Geologists.

We would also like to place on record the many and major contributions to geodiversity of the voluntary sector represented by our 55 member county groups, trusts and societies.  We would extend this comment to include the work of The Geology Trusts, Geologists' Association and geoparks. Between us, we have decades of experience in geoconservation and in a range of ways of being involved including finding sources of very significant funding, replying to national and local consultations across the UK as well as in the nut and bolts of site works, interpretation etc.  The 2011 Geologists' Association Conference 'Geoconservation for science and society' along with Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, 2013, Vol 124.4 give recent examples of the breadth of current work in geoconservation by many of the organisations.

We look forward to collaborating in this new venture and welcome the prospect of the Society supporting an annual geoconservation meeting and perhaps also providing funding to the geoconservation pot.  With the Scottish Geodiversity Forum now in full swing and Scotland's Geodiversity Charter 2012-17 published, the English Geodiversity Forum gearing up and writing an England's Geodiversity Charter, we await to see how these relatively new bodies work together.  We anticipate that Wales and Ireland will follow suit.

Mike Browne  is Chair, and writes on behalf of, the Executive Committee of GeoConservationUK

Sir, As a former mining geologist for the Beckermet Iron Ore Mines in West Cumbria, I was surprised that Nirex even considered the Sellafield area as a possible site for nuclear waste disposal (Fallout over radwaste – Geoscientist 23.11).  All the evidence from underground iron ore mining in the mines only a few kilometres north and east of the site indicated that there was a major problem with groundwater to the south and west of the mine workings.  In particular, attempts to mine at Whangs, west of Egremont, had to be abandoned due to the inability to cope with the inflow of water, while at Beckermet Mine itself, westward exploration along the West Drifts encountered a fault zone carrying so much water that the drifts had to be sealed with concrete dams in order to protect the rest of the mine. 

All this was well known to the West Cumbrian mining and geological community and seems to have been completely ignored by Nirex, who then went on to waste £400M of taxpayers’ money on an ill-considered proposal with more political than geological justification.

Dave Greenwood was British Steel Mine Geologist, 1967-1981

Sir, Recent opinion in these pages, Down to Earth, and others, have raised (and conflated) two issues: the progressive demise of field-based research and field instruction in British (not Irish) universities, and the BGS move towards phasing out the classic “1” Sheet and Memoir” in favour of a digital base from which one can order.  The former is appalling, the latter, with some reservations, to be applauded.

The Oxburgh Review in the late 1980s was a disaster for geology but not for the Earth sciences.  Many excellent small departments that trained undergraduates superbly were closed in favour of larger more research-oriented departments, to the detriment of undergraduate training.  Modern Earth science needs everything from field observation to remote sensing; thin-section analysis to advanced instrumentation and mensuration, and analogue to numerical modelling.  Tragically, in the UK, the Oxburgh Exercise has led to the downgrading of field-based geology and mapping in favour of physically easier and more ephemeral laboratory and office work.  Recently, a senior professor has been heard to remark that “observations at less than the scale of several kilometres are not useful in tectonics”.  My experience suggests that this is nonsense; tectonics depends, critically, upon fine-scale field observation.

As an undergraduate, I was given a one-inch map every week throughout the three-year course to analyse for structure, stratigraphy and history.  From this and courses in mineralogy, petrology, palaeontology, structural geology, and stratigraphy, I learned both the structure and evolution of Britain and much of the basic ‘principles of geology’.  For finals, we were given the geological map of the British Isles and asked to deduce its history solely from information on the map and its legend.  The digitisation of data by the BGS should enhance study of the British geological map by allowing print-off of any area at any scale.  My only concern is that BGS field-data acquisition appears to be diminishing rapidly; perhaps BGS should collect, analyse, and synthesize geological data from multiple sources rather than relying solely upon its own diminishing field staff.

Change and evolution is critical in keeping a subject vibrant and important to society but field-based geology and its central role in industry have been hi-jacked by those with a background in physics and chemistry who seem not to understand the critical role that field observation plays in understanding the constitution and history of the Earth.  Many of these folk are uneasy with something that they have not practised and do not understand.  Geologists need to raise their heads above the parapet and protest against these developments.  If the Geological Society of London and the British Geological Survey do not lead and promote this issue, geology in the UK is doomed.  This would be sad for mining and petroleum companies who are now desperate for employees who understand the geological map, how it is made and how it can be integrated with the section, and who actually know something about Earth history.

Lastly, geology must be regarded as equal to other sciences and taught in our schools.  Geology among so-called amateur organisations across Britain and Ireland is immensely popular.  Like astronomy, young people love geology, especially in the field.  Iain Stewart has done much to present geology coherently and brilliantly across the globe at a popular level with great enthusiasm.  I hope that this is having a major effect in getting young people excited about geology and that some departments in the UK will still be teaching field-based geology when they come to university.

Sir, Sadly in an otherwise thoughtful editorial about the decline of fieldwork in relation to youthful freedom being hindered by a fearful society (Out of love?, Geoscientist, November 2013), Dr Ted Nield had his Daily Mail moment - the increasing prevalence of anaphylactic shock and allergies has nothing to do with this. The most cursory Internet search will confirm deaths have risen steadily from a few extremely rare cases, to examples of fit young people simply dropping dead.   

Even if one of my nephews didn’t carry an epipen (adrenaline auto-injector, only prescribed by a doctor) this is no laughing matter. While I wonder if the rising environmental exposure to increasing permutations of synthetic chemicals may help explain this phenomenon, he was not brought up wrapped in cotton wool in a household awash with cleaning products and air fresheners - which unlike the smells they are trying to mask, make me nauseous.   

This increasingly pallid indoors generation is hindered by a pernicious combination of tabloid hysteria, car culture and schools with open catchments. As a result in North London, one lot of kids is driven past another set, going in the other direction - meaning the roads are noticeably less congested during the holidays. At least I had the freedom to travel around with friends and walk the two miles to school and (with parental approval) pocket my bus fare -  a great way of keeping fit if you not a partially sporty kid!

Sir, In the latest Geoscientist (Vol. 23, No. 11) Colin Summerhayes provides a robust defense of the Society's position statement on climate change. He, quite rightly in my opinion, mentions the pioneering work of Thomas Chrowder Chamberlain (1843-1928) and the link between atmospheric CO₂ and the Earth's temperature. Chamberlain's seminal papers (1897 and 1906) may, however, have been inluenced by the writings of Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), one of the 'founding fathers' of the United States, who was keenly interested in science. In 1784, while Commissioner for the United States in Paris (1776-1785), he made what may have been the first connection between volcanic eruptions, atmospheric CO₂ and global climate. In 1783, the climate in Europe was extremely cold and crops failed for three years. This was almost certainly caused by the eruption of the Laki Fissure in Iceland where 75% of the livestock and 25% of the population died of famine or toxic gases. Temperature data from the USA recorded record lows in the winter of 1783/4.

Earlier, in 1763, Franklin and some colonial schiolars had debated the link between deforestation and local climate. He also published the first chart of the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic, hypothesising that the Trade Winds were responsible for driving warm water into the Gulf of Mexico, which returned into the North Atlantic by way of the Florida Strait. On his way to Europe - in 1775 - he measured ocean temperatures, showing that the Gulf Stream was ~6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding ocean.

Benjamin Franklin, who was such a respected member of the establishment in the early history of the United States, must surely have influenced the following generations of scientists in that country, including Thomas Chamberlain.

Sir, Stephen W Foster's letter (Dec/Jan Geoscientist) conflates several issues.  First, it is true that not all members can subscribe to all the Society's position statements.  The Society is a democracy, but democracy has its limitations. (Cartoon example: The left is traditionally associated with liberalism and state-run ventures and the right with authoritarianism and free enterprises.  However some on the right are liberal and some on the left value private enterprise in a mixed economy, yet they vote the way they do.)  This is why the Society constantly asks for Fellows to stand for Council, participate on committees, and vote so as to make it as democratic as we humanly can, flaws and all.  (Indeed the only reason I have not put myself forward for any role is that I belong to neither academia nor industry and so could not be representative of the fellowship at large.) 

Stephen opines that the IPCC does "not reflect the views… of even a majority of meteorologists, climatologists and physicists".  Actually, surveys of those working in climate change related science (including geologists and physicists) from Oreskes, N., (Science, 306, 1686) onwards demonstrate that the majority do agree with the IPCC's core conclusions and only disagree in aspects of its detail and nuance; but then the IPCC is providing a consensus view.  The Geological Society's view largely chimes with that of other learned bodies including the Royal Society and indeed the international collective of such academies.

Stephen says that the case for CO₂ concentrations being a cause of direct temperature change "has not been proved". Leaving aside the philosophical question of strictly not being able to prove anything, science works by falsification (see works of Karl Popper and others).  So if there is an alternative view to the IPCC's it is up to science 'sceptics' to try to falsify it with a contrary view that better fits all the evidence as a whole.  Yet after a quarter of a century since the IPCC was established, this they have failed to do so turning climate 'scepticism' into 'denial'.

Stephen also says '"we can see from the past that the climate warms when CO₂ goes up" but it is equally valid to say that "as temperatures rise so do too CO₂ concentrations"'.  In fact, this is the IPCC's view regarding glacials and interglacials: Milankovitch insolation variations act as a pacemaker of the ice ages and various feedbacks amplify the temperature change between semi-stable climate modes.  For example: as the Earth cools so CO₂ is drawn into the oceans enhancing cooling and as it warms the ocean vents the greenhouse gas amplifying the warming.  Among the latest supporting evidence for this is Shakun et al. (Nature, 484, 49-55). They note that "a net global warming of about 0.3°C precedes the initial increase in CO₂ concentration at 17.5 kyr ago" (the Milankovitch pacemaker) and that subsequently the deglaciation saw "warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations" exactly as conventional theory predicts (you need the greenhouse gas to provide the warming).  This neither alters the fact that we are adding CO₂ to the atmosphere today, nor CO₂'s thermal-absorbing properties that can me tested in most school laboratories.

Finally, despite saying climate change "has become politicised to such a degree it is now almost impossible to hold reasoned debate" Foster goes on to say that "the wider public is being deceived by pseudoscientific reports".  This is derogatory to the professionalism of the IPCC and the literally thousands of researchers' papers cited by three IPCC Working Groups over five Assessments together with an assortment of interim specialist reports.  He then says that this is "largely driven by the politics of academic science", a statement that more than suggests a lack of ethical standards and hints at fraudulent behaviour.  I am indebted to Stephen alerting us to this.  He should present his evidence to the authorities forthwith: there may well be a legal case for fraud and, indeed, he warns that "science in general, and this Society in particular, will suffer".

Sir, Although I never got around to visiting the Isle of Man (referred to in Ted Nield's editorial (Geoscientist 23.10 November 2013), and where my PhD supervisor, Alec Simpson did his ground-breaking mapping of the stratigraphy and structure of the Lower Palaeozoic rocks¹) daily for a period of about five years, I would occasionally glimpse the Island from the Lake District.  I would start virtually at sea level, laboriously slogging up often near vertical rock faces and scree to reach the summit at (over 600m) of Black Combe, where each day's mapping would begin.  It was a strenuous test of stamina!  Trying to unravel the polyphase tectonics² also exercised the mind and was, if anything, the more painful experience.

Desk-bound geologists may doubt the sanity of this, but I doubt if there can be any other geological activity which gives so much satisfaction - rewarding in every sense. The toughest part has to be writing up the results of one' s field-based exploration.

Apart from the fact that, for the most part, academic field mapping is all work for little or no pay and may contribute to the inevitable degeneration of parts of the skeletal anatomy (which was probably going to occur anyway) there is nothing like the buzz you get when, after all the effort and set-backs on the way, you finally get to see your hard work rewarded in print ^2,3,4.

To those who deny the value of field geology I would say: field mapping is not just a thin-skinned  intellectual exercise; it teaches you to think in 3D.  This is essential training even for the exploration geologist.  I can vouch for this as, for a while, I worked for BP in the Saharan desert where, if you thought you saw an outcrop it must have been just a mirage.  How else, without training gained in the field, can it be possible to confidently reconstruct the sub-surface geology if all you have to go on is well-logs and some geophysics?

As a committed evangelical geologist, may I wish you the best of luck in your crusade to save field geology from the kind of extinction that was inflicted on the dinosaurs and is now threatened by the advocates of the eradication of the field-work component of university geology degrees.

References

1. Simpson, A. 1963. The stratigraphy and tectonics of the Manx Slate Series, Isle of Man. quart.J.Geol Soc. 119. 367-400.
2. Helm D.G. 1968. PhD Thesis. University of London.
3. Helm D.G. 1970. Stratigraphy and Structure in the Black Combe Inlier, English Lake District.  Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society. 38, Part I, No.5 . 148pp.
4. Helm D.G and B Roberts 1971. The Relationship between the Skiddaw and Borrowdale Volcanic Groups in the English Lake District. Nature Physical Science,Vol.232, No.35. 181-183.

Sir, I have always considered that there was a link between the influence of heavenly bodies and earthquakes (water movement and the lubrication of faults) and was therefore most interested to read Alan Watsons’ article ‘Gravity & Mind’ in Geoscientist 23.10 November 2013.

This interest was heightened by the Government's recent assurances that there is no danger from fracking for gas. It led me to speculate future newspaper headlines like ‘Riots in Blackpool Over Price of Chips’. However, the 14 day period when such riots might be expected prior to the earthquake described by Alan Watson might not apply, depending on the nature of the fracking. I was also wondering if there was any evidence in the USA linking behavioural patterns of man and animals in relation to fracking?

Sir, In responding to Stephen Foster, I hereby wish to fill the vacuum left by Colin Summerhayes' reluctance to comment on the integrity and independence of the IPCC (which I do not believe should go unchallenged). 

Dr Foster's letter is essentially a lengthy re-statement of a number of talking points promoted by organisations like the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which Colin has already rebutted in detail.  Furthermore, given how much effort Colin makes to be reasonable and conciliatory, I am disappointed by the apparent indignation in Foster's letter.

However, I am more surprised by his apparent willingness to self-identify as a conspiracy theorist.  I recognise that this is not a very 'conciliatory' remark but, what else am I supposed to conclude from his repeated use of the term "UN-IPCC"?  

The IPCC is an independent panel of relevant experts, drawn from all corners of the globe, which synthesises and summarises climate science for the benefit of governments and policy makers (i.e. as opposed to some part of an insidious plot to establish worldwide authoritarian government and punitive taxation via the UN).

There is simply no evidence for a left-wing conspiracy to over-tax and over-regulate people (so as to make everyone poorer), but there is a great deal of evidence for a right-wing conspiracy to under-tax and under-regulate industry (to make a few people richer).

Furthermore, whereas I am not aware of any significant precedent for a politically-motivated campaign by scientists to promote their research funding, there are very clear precedents for business-funded campaigns by industries to protect their vested interests. 

Sir, Recent issues of Geoscientist have devoted many column inches to the need for geological mapping skills, and more recently, Desmond Donovan (Letters, November 2013) has questioned whether new geological mapping is needed in the UK at all.

If the process of mapping is simply to replace an existing geological map with a shiny new one, showing  more faults and more detailed stratigraphy, we'd be inclined to agree that the new map might deliver only a marginal additional benefit.  However, as many correspondents have remarked, the skill commonly described in shorthand as ’geological mapping’ is all about acquiring and communicating a spatially constrained 3Dl understanding of the properties and structure of the geosphere, using all the field observations, subsurface data and skills at geologists’ disposal. 

It is also all about understanding the events and environments of the geological past as well as the processes that operate now and in the future, which will help us manage resources, hazards and environmental change.  It is about mapping and understanding the impacts that humans are having within the geosphere and its interactions with the landscape, the atmosphere and oceans, especially in our cities. 

Most importantly of all, it is about working with the users of geological information and knowledge to ensure that environmental and economic benefits are delivered.  The needs and priorities for geological mapping are driven not by a simple peer group assessment of the quality and accuracy of existing maps but by the gap between what we know, and what we need to know, as communicated by our clients, stakeholders and taxpayers.  Those needs continue to change, so the law of diminishing returns does not apply.

In this form, geological mapping is alive and well as a skill and priority activity in BGS.  We continue to recruit geologists into our onshore survey, marine, groundwater, energy and international programmes, and candidates with 'mapping' skills remain at a considerable advantage in those recruitment competitions.  Computers cannot replace those skills, but they are wonderful tools for assembling and analysing multidisciplinary data sets and communicating the results of 'mapping' as maps, models and a plethora of online services, products and apps.  It is true that BGS is winding down its production of traditional, lithoprinted geological maps, but this is simply because there are now alternative and increasingly diverse technologies for delivering the results of geological mapping and ensuring that the outcomes meet society's needs.

As we approach the 200^th anniversary of William Smith's great map, to be celebrated by the Society in 2015, it is fitting to remember that Smith was driven by the need to communicate knowledge about the resources required to sustain the industrial revolution.  The map was the best technology at his disposal to communicate that knowledge, not an end in itself.  Since then, digital technology may have all but replaced the paper map, and unconventional hydrocarbons, radwaste, CCS and the growing competition for underground space beneath our cities are among the new geological challenges of our time.  The resources, environment and processes within the shallow geosphere are changing rapidly, because humans are making those changes, and making new demands, over ever decreasing timescales.  We need better tools and new observatories to monitor, model and forecast those changes but, alongside these, new mapping and mapping skills, practised by appropriately educated and trained geologists, remain paramount.

• Andy Howard is Science Director Geology and Regional Geophysics, BGS

Sir, I read with interest your editorial on undergraduate mapping in the November issue of Geoscientist. Particularly the penultimate paragraph.

‘In my time, love of the countryside drew us to geology in the first place’. Me too. I was a farmer’s son and the idea of sitting in an office was abhorrent.  ‘We were all outdoorsy; we already had the bots and most of us were hikers and climbers’. Me too.  ‘We knew how to conduct ourselves’. Probably true.  ‘We tended not to fall over and break limbs’. I did fall over on my mapping trip, whilst climbing up a coarse grit sequence, leading to some impressive abrasions and a landing on a spiky plant. It resulted in a bloody mess.  But no broken limbs.

‘We had been stung by bees long ago’ (me too), ‘but didn’t make a habit of it’ (who would?), ‘rarely suffered from allergies’ (not that I was aware of, until I went mapping….) ‘and never went into anaphylactic shock’.

And that is where it all went wrong.  Stung by a hornet, I ended up in the emergency room of a hospital suffering from - anaphylactic shock.

I know. My fault for choosing to map in Southern California!

Sir, I write in response to the critique submitted by S.W. Foster (16.10.13) of my letter of 24.09.13. Mr Foster creates confusion by conflating two separate things – the reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and the Geological Society’s statement on climate change. We wrote the latter because we did not like how the IPCC had addressed past climate change. Our drafting group made a completely independent report based on our own research experiences and a survey of the literature. We became convinced that CO₂ plays an important role in governing climate change, as expected from the physics of greenhouse gases, and that adding significant amounts of CO₂ to the atmosphere risked warming the Earth. Our arguments are supported by an extensive checkable geological literature.

If anyone disagrees with the findings of our statement, they must clearly state their grounds. What other agent caused the rise in temperature at the Palaeocene-Eocene boundary, if not the remarkable rise in CO₂? What else caused the cooling of the Cenozoic, if not the remarkable fall in CO₂? Geologists know that volcanic activity produces CO₂, that weathering mops it up, and that the CO₂ ends up as carbonate sediments or organic deposits. Volcanism and weathering are not always balanced, so changes in climate may result from changes in CO₂ with time. The geological record shows that climate and CO₂ are related. Correlation is not always causation, but one cannot let it pass without a plausible explanation.

CO₂ is not the only cause of climate change.  Volcanoes also provide aerosols that can cool the Earth. Eruptions in Large Igneous Provinces can affect climate temporarily. Milankovitch cycles in the Earth’s orbit change insolation, so affecting climate. Short term variations in solar output do too, though with smaller effects. Orbital variations made Earth’s climate cool significantly over the past 10,000 years. Superimposed on that decline were small warmings and coolings (e.g. Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age) related to fluctuations in solar output ¹. Muscheler’s analysis of solar output, based on ¹⁴C and ¹⁰Be data, discovered significant positive peaks in 1100, 1790, and 1960. I see that most solar output since 1960 has been significantly less than it was in 1960 ², yet global temperatures are much warmer. Our geological findings suggest that the most likely culprit is rising CO₂. If not that, then what?

Mr Foster asked me to comment on the workings of the IPCC. Not being a member of, or contributor to, the IPCC, I would rather stick with evaluating the geological record.

Colin Summerhayes, Scott Polar Research Institute

 

Sir, I don’t want to be seen to be keeping this argument going but in response to with Mark Brodie’s opinion that grads are ignorant of drilling rigs etc. when they join the industry (Geoscientist VOL 23 No 7 Aug 2013).  I have carefully checked my final year notes, in more detail than when I used them to revise, and they are full of references to boreholes and words such as 'cable percussive' and 'rotary drilling'. 

As part of a multidisciplinary consultancy firm I sit within a team of civil engineers, structural engineers and tunnelling engineers.  Only a few of us started off as geologists and this is patently evident in the fact that we are the ones often relied on to explain anticipated site conditions very early in a project lifecycle (usually at tender stage).  While many civil engineering courses teach geology or geotechnics as a module, the ability to be able to get inside the geology is a skill that only trained ‘field-soiled’ geologists possess.

As an A-level student I was put forward to sit the higher paper for geology (I know, check me out!).  Having recently been on a two-week placement-internship thingy ('work experience' as it was called back then) with a local ground investigation contractor, I could not believe my luck when I read ‘discuss the importance of geological mapping in a commercial environment' (or words to that effect).  Having seen then, and knowing now, how important the ability to read maps and undertake mapping work is, the thought of replacing or reducing, this tranche of undergraduate education is very concerning.

There are many topics that universities don’t cover that would be useful – assessment of abandoned mine workings anyone? But if we start expecting universities to cover everything then they won’t be teaching geology degrees, they’ll be teaching undergraduates how to be consultants and contractors.  I for one don’t want that to happen.  We need graduate to have a sense of wonder at the thought of practising their chosen science.

At a recent careers event I was outlining an example day in the office to two young geologist types.  They had genuine faces of wonder at the thought of being able to assess the route of a pipeline or map geohazards on hillsides.  Would they have looked like that if I had said ‘oh yes of course you get to spend the first few years logging cores in a drafty shed’?

Geology as a science arose, partly, from the need for engineers to be capable of mapping their surroundings for the purposes of engineering.  Please let ‘s remember this, vocational courses have their uses but we are a science and we need to develop young minds to think like scientists. 

It’s a bit like the Karate Kid; we’re not polishing cars or painting fences, but it’s the fact that we know how to that really matters (yes I am referring to the original Karate Kid film!).

Sir,  Re. your recent Editorial, 'Out of love?': I am a first year undergraduate, and from what I have experienced so far on my course (physical geography and geology) is that everyone loves the fieldwork.  We spent a week observing stratigraphy and biostratigraphy of the Jurassic Coast and we all loved it, everyone was prepared with equipment (boots, etc.), and not much of it was new!  

However I do recognise in my little cousin a lack of ambition to be outside.  He’s 11, and completely rejects being outside because instead ‘you can see it all on the Internet’. My hope is that the fascination of the geology will be more than enough to inspire more young people to choose the subject, and that then they will see the beauty too.

Sir, I read with interest the article Gravity & Mind by Alan Watson (Geoscientist 23, November 2013). It resonated with an article I wrote in 1979 concerning Earth phenomena associated with earthquakes. I drew upon a paper in Nature published by H. Tributsch, 7 Dec 1978, vol.276, pp.606-608, entitled “Do aerosol anomalies precede earthquakes?”.

He proposed that earthquake stresses generate positive ion anomalies in the atmosphere which in turn stimulate secretion of the neurohormone serotonin in mammals. Serotonin release can lead to nausea, irritability and headaches, symptoms that can also be experienced during thunderstorms. Tributsch based some of his work on an earlier paper in Nature by Finkelstein & Powell, 1970, vol.228, pp.759-760 entitled “Earthquake Lightning”, in which the authors calculated that strain in rocks can generate 500-5000 volts/cm by the piezoelectric effect. This electric potential could lead to ionization of water droplets and produce lumniscence locally.

This sphere of research needs more work, but I believe one way forward is to monitor small but significant positive-ion anomalies in affected areas. In 1979, ion detectors were not sensitive enough to measure small anomalies. Maybe progress has been made in instrumentation.

Sir, I write in response to the letters of J G Gahan (21.  8.  13) and C Summerhayes' response (24.  9.  13).  I wish to add my voice to that of J G Gahan: the Society and the IPCC do not reflect the views of all members of the Society or of all, or even a majority, of meteorologists, climatologists and physicists.  I also found parts of Summerhayes’ letter to be condescending: those who disagree with the IPCC and its supporters do not use textbooks to learn about the current status of scientific research because we are fully aware of the biased and unreliable nature of such sources.  Instead we use original scientific reports, albeit different ones from those used and quoted by Summerhayes and his colleagues.  A central presupposition of Summerhayes' letter, and that of the GSL statement on climate change, that CO2 concentrations are a direct cause of temperature change has not been proved by any of the statements in this or any other of his letters or IPCC reports, or by any research data.  It may be true that "we can see from the past that the climate warms when CO2 goes up", but it is equally valid to state that "as temperatures rise, so too do CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere".  Correlation is not the same as cause.

I therefore ask that Prof Summerhayes consider and respond to the following criticisms with hard data rather than opinion disguised as fact. 

Why has the IPCC in its latest report:

1. failed to explain its twenty three year long track record of proven inability to accurately predict climate change?
2. not publicly and fully disclosed inherent flaws in its methodology that have been repeatedly pointe out by its critics?
3. kept silent on other climate theories and models that are far superior to those used by the UN-IPCC?

In addition he needs to explain why all global temperature indices from the primary US government and UN sources of global temperature data and trends show that there has been no effective growth in the Earth’s temperatures for sixteen years.  (Ad hoc arguments about thermal transfer from the ocean surface to the depths (again unsupported by any substantial data), will not do).  Two global climate parameters, atmospheric and oceanic temperatures, have been in steep decline for seven and ten years, respectively, yet Summerhayes does not mention this anywhere.  The criticism do not stop there.  The AR5 Summary (of the most recent IPCC report) fails to account for the fact that this Summary and all previous UN- IPCC reports and associated global climate models (GCM) have failed by a wide margin to accurately predict climate change. 

Why is this so if the underlying assumptions of CO2 levels forcing climate change are true? In a recent report by the Space and Science Research Corporation (an independent body which has no links with any political bodies), 19 claims or climate predictions in the IPCC Summary were evaluated.  Five of these claims were found to be misleading and 14 were found to be false or highly unlikely.  None were found to be accurate.  These are serious and extremely worrying observations which call into question the integrity of the science which is being used to justify the claims of the IPCC and its supporters, and the statement of the GSL on climate change, and these cannot be ignored, yet they continue to be so.  Many meteorologists and climatologists have therefore come to the very reasonable conclusion that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere may be a response to, and not a cause of, temperature change, and have anyway long since recognised that simplistic, linear, single causes of complex processes are a product of a naive and outmoded approach to scientific problems. 

I am very aware that this subject has long since moved from being one where contrary opinions can be held and debated in relatively balanced manner and that it has become politicised to such a degree that it is now almost impossible to hold a reasoned debate.  Instead we are being presented with spurious statements about "95% probabilities" of certainty which deliberately ignore contrary data and the considered opinions of many well informed individuals from a wide variety of relevant disciplines.  Science is not a democracy - we do not vote on the data, nor is an idea correct just because an influential group supports it.  It is a method whereby we try to better understand our material world and how it works, and this inevitably means that contrary opinions will be held and need to be assessed against all of the relevant data.  Only when contrary opinions are respected and refuted with relevant data can we hope to return to a sensible debate and perhaps gain a better understanding of the complexity of the Earth's climate. 

In the meantime the wider public are being deceived by a series of pseudoscientific reports largely driven by the politics of academic science.  The very real danger here is that science in general, and this Society in particular, will suffer from a collapse of confidence by the general public when the political machinations that lie behind the alarmist and unrealistic claims and predictions of the IPCC and its supporters are revealed as the Earth's climate cools over the next decades.  Those who cry wolf need to consider the longer term consequences of their foolhardiness and think more carefully about how they present their case.

Sir, The first paragraph of Meet the Frackers (Geoscientist Vol 23 No 9) did not bode well for what was to come.  We are told that there was “a small flurry of earthquakes near Blackpool” and, the authors continue: “the largest event being M2.3 at Preece (sic) Hall”  - actually Preese Hall No 1 – “was quickly attributed to gas drilling close by at Becconsall, where the operators  were testing the technique properly referred to as ‘hydraulic fracturing’” 

The M 2.3 tremor at Preese Hall 1 took place on 1 April 2011; but the Becconsall No 1 well was not spudded until five months later on 23 August 2011.  Of course this does not mean that the earthquakes were never ignorantly ‘attributed’ to it, but we feel this discrepancy in dates should be made clear.  Our understanding is that Becconsall No 1 well was drilled vertically and there was no intention of hydraulically fracturing the Bowland Shales at that locality.

Sir, Overall this is a most welcome and useful article but the section on methane concerns me.  The article concludes: ‘Crucially, in none of the thousands of water samples analysed did Jackson’s research team find any chemical trace of fracking fluid’.   I take this to convey that the authors would expect traces of such fluid along with the observed methane.

However, gases can migrate and escape through materials which are impermeable to liquids (this is experienced at various lined/sealed waste disposal landfills), so the absence of fracking fluid should not come as to much of a surprise.

My own view is that shale gas should be explored and, hopefully, developed throughout the British Isles, but objectors will not be convinced by flawed science.

Peter Bennett is a retired hydrogeologist

Sir, I am glad that the Society is recognising the issues surrounding shale gas (Features, Geoscientist 23.09 October 2013). However there are geological reasons why shale gas in the UK is going to prove difficult, apart from all the regulatory and HSE issues that blight it.

Everyone seems to be jumping on the shale gas bandwagon just now, either in the hope of getting rich quick or, at the other end of the spectrum, from the evangelical environmental perspective. But shale gas rock systems in the UK are very poor cousins of those found in North America and elsewhere in the world. This is not a ‘slam dunk’, they say over the water. We have a lot of hard work to do before we understand the rock systems we find in Europe.

I believe it will be very difficult to make shale gas in the UK economic. One should never say never, and yes, some shale gas will be produced here eventually. But the big players like XOM, Shell and BP seem unable to make this work, even with the prodigious shale gas plays of the United States. So it will be the smaller companies like IGas, 3rd Energy and Cuadrilla, who will make some money from this kind of venture. Yet at every stage they are being beaten up by the Green lobby - and to some extent the media - when they should, in my view, be encouraged and supported.

I have worked in shale gas now for over six years. This may not sound long, but it is a young field. I have seen most of the shale gas wells drilled in Europe and a number from some of the prolific shale gas plays in North America. Believe me - the rocks are different here in Europe. We need to understand these differences to better characterise these plays. This is paramount but it can only be achieved by drilling and testing.

All I see now however are road blocks, put in place by the regulatory bodies (whose present regulations are already more than adequate) and local governments who seem to be trying to appease the Green lobby and their more vocal constituents. The BGS resource figure of 1300 TCF quoted by Mike Stephenson is all very well; I take it with a pinch of salt myself, but in the end but it’s what comes out of the ground that matters, and we are not addressing this key issue.


Andrew Foulds, Petrafiz Ltd.

Sir, Why are so many of the Chartership applications that I and my fellow scrutineers receive increasingly backed up by irrelevant and long-winded supporting documentation that often fails to address the required competencies, and does not cast the applicant in an exactly favourable light?  More puzzling still is the fact that these applications come to us fully assessed by the candidates’ sponsors, at least one of whom is a CGeol.  They will have completed a ‘Sponsors’ Statement’, in which they attest that the candidate possesses the necessary skills and expertise for chartership, meets the competencies and that the application and supporting documents both comply with requirements.

So, how can it be that so many applications are in fact NOT in accordance with requirements?  How can it be that the most common reason for applications being deferred is that the candidate either lacks required skills and or understanding of geology to meet the competency criterion for a professional geologist (Criterion 5.i) or that the candidate has failed to show that they are able to evaluate and model geoscience information critically, and thus satisfy Criterion 5.ii.  (Such candidates then often also go on to fail criterion 5.iii as well.)

Where are these applications going wrong?  It seems to me that either some candidates are submitting against advice, or that some sponsors are failing to check the whole application and basing their recommendation purely on personal acquaintance, the Professional Report, or merely the six-page Application Form. 

So, on behalf of all Scrutineers, may I make a plea that Sponsors spend more time evaluating the entire application, and are more critical over what is submitted in terms of clarity and relevance?  For if this is not done before submission, it will be done – more critically and severely – by the scrutineers themselves, based purely on written evidence.  This cannot be in candidates’ best interest.

The only real alternative would be to change the system entirely, from the current rather relaxed and human process (which seems to me to be a ‘good thing’) and towards rigid procedures like those favoured by many other chartering institutions in the UK.

The author works as an independent Environmental Consultant and has been a CGeol since 1993.  He has been a scrutineer for seven years and a member of the Appeals Panel since September 2011.  Chartership Officer Dr Bill Gaskarth has had occasion to voice similar concerns in the August 2013 issue.  Editor

Sir,  Regarding Roger Mason's Soapbox article 'Charnia Threat' - we write to correct some historical points regarding the discovery of the fossil Charnia masoni.  

Schoolgirl Tina Negus was in fact the first to see the fossil, and took a rubbing of it in 1956 but was disbelieved by her teacher.  Richard Blackford saw it while climbing with Dick Allen and Roger in 1957.  Sadly, Richard Blackford died from bipolar disorder shortly afterwards.  He called Roger to look at it, and Roger told his father.  This sequence of events, which is rather more complicated than history generally tends to relate, has been published in the journal Mercian Geologist.

Dr Helen Boynton, Chair, Charnia Research Group, Dr Trevor Ford

Sir, I am delighted to see the current issue of Geoscientist focus on Shale Gas; and particularly delighted to see reference to incontrovertible evidence (from Duke University in North Carolina) that fracking wells leak. 

As Professor Peter Styles has pointed out in a previous issue, leakage of methane from extraction, transportation, and delivery infrastructure - as well as from boilers and cookers - means that shale gas cannot be considered to have a low carbon footprint (or intensity).  

For this reason alone, large-scale pursuit of fracking will make it incredibly difficult for the UK to reduce its CO₂ emissions.  Despite the advice of the International Energy Agency and International Monetary Fund that such a strategy is unwise, it would appear that the UK is going to gamble on making Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) work  in order to be able to get its CO₂ emissions down in the long term.  

However it may be eventually achieved, CCS will probably be the only way to reduce CO₂ emissions (in the UK and globally) in the way the IPCC says is now necessary in order to avoid excessive anthropogenic climate disruption (ACD).  I genuinely hope that we can do this but it is more hope than expectation; as the challenges of scaling-up and rolling-out CCS technology globally such that it will be effective at mitigating ACD are almost certainly without precedent in the history of human endeavour.

In its most recent assessment, the IPCC has made it very clear that ACD is now a very real, large, and immediate problem that humanity simply cannot afford to ignore any longer; because further delay will not be cost effective.  Given the reality, scale and urgency of the need for humanity to decarbonise its global power generation systems (IPCC AR5), I was therefore disappointed that Professor Mike Stephenson did not acknowledge that the important question is not "how much shale gas can we get out of the ground?".  The really big question is "can we actually afford to burn it?".

Sir, In response to John Gahan’s comments of August 21, the Geological Society's Statement on Climate Change was very careful to exclude all comment on the merits of climate models produced by the meteorological and climatological science communities, because they are not in our sphere of expertise.  Our statement was based on a careful appraisal of the geological evidence for the role of greenhouse gases, especially CO₂, in causing climate change in past times. 

Investigations on this topic began in the 1890s, with the American geologist T.C.  Chamberlin, but were then suspended for lack of the detailed information required to test the hypothesis.  Much of the information needed from spectroscopists about the absorptive properties of atmospheric gases required advanced scientific equipment that was not available until the mid to late 1950s, and geochemists did not get deeply into trying to understand the role of CO2 in past climate change until the early to mid 1980s.  Since the year 2000 a great deal of information has become available from ice, plankton, leaves and soils about the past distribution of CO₂ and its relation to temperature. 

The most recent ice data show that CO₂ and temperature evolved in synchrony (not sequentially) with the last deglaciation – that gives us a new perspective.  In addition, the recent data from leaves and plankton demonstrate how CO₂ and temperature declined from the greenhouse climate of the Cretaceous into the icehouse climate of the Neogene, as the sources of CO₂ from volcanism associated with sea floor spreading declined and as mountains and associated weathering drew CO₂ out of the atmosphere.  Much of this information is sufficiently new that it is not yet widely recognised in basic geological textbooks.  Many people, some geologists included, are unaware that following the peak in insolation reached some 11,000 years ago at the end of the last deglaciation, planet Earth experienced a continued steady decline in insolation accompanied, not surprisingly, by cooling that led our planet into what some Earth scientists refer to as the ‘Neoglacial’, marked by the development of the Little Ice Age. 

Superimposed on that cooling curve, which, by the way, is projected to continue for another 1000 years or so, we see small warming and cooling events lasting some few hundreds of years that are related to cyclical changes in the sun's output as expressed through sunspots and recognised in Earth materials via the radionuclides ¹⁴C and ¹⁰Be.  According to the insolation curve we should still be in the Neoglacial and experiencing the continued delights of the Little Ice Age – like Frost Fairs on the Thames.  However, from the ice cores from the Antarctic coast, as well as from global thermometer records, it is clear that significant warming began to cut across that insolation driven cooling trend in synchrony with the rise in CO₂ that began with the industrial revolution in the 1770s.  Solar output rose too, for a while, as seen from sunspots, but declined slightly since 1970, while temperature continued to rise.  What did continue to rise after 1970 was CO₂, a known greenhouse gas.  People would like to know why global warming stalled after the year 2000 (note that it did not go into reverse, by the way). 

Explanations are already arriving from the oceanographic and meteorological community for those who like to read their literature on the front line.  For one thing, more heat is being taken down deep into the ocean interior than before.  And for another thing we are also seeing the effect of a natural cycle, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).  Just as El Niño events in the Pacific raise global temperatures slightly above the global mean temporarily, and La Niña events there cool the planet temporarily, so too the longer-lived PDO can have the same effect.  It is now in a cool phase, which helps to explain the current global stand-still (see Kosaka and Xie, in Nature, 19 September 2013).  Underlying my remarks is the unchanged conclusion of the GSL’s Statement on Climate Change, which is that we can see from the past that the climate warms when CO₂ goes up.  It is hardly surprising that meteorologists and climatologists reach the same conclusions, albeit by different methods.

Sir, Mark Brodie’s Soapbox article (Geoscientist 23.07 August 2013) is scary and ignorant of the needs of industry. Mark suggests that, at the expense of field mapping, Universities should teach wire-line logging because it is relevant to the small part of an industry he has experienced.

He is totally wrong because:

1. Most if not all geological data are spatially coordinated, they sit on a map, or its modern variant a computer 3D image.
2. A significant number of industry geologists map for a living. For instance a grade-control geo on a gold mine will daily record structure, alteration and lithology in the underground heading, and mineral geologists always map exploration tenements. 
3. While some geologists do not “map” as a part of their industry job all use maps, cross-sections and 3D models. The ability to read an unconformity or on-lapping stratigraphic sequence is enhanced when the geo has mapping experience of that phenomenon.
4. Industry needs Universities to teach those topics it cannot and does not train staff in. This includes the basics exemplified by geology mapping.

A challenge for industry is to find staff with quality field skills. Today, the better Universities are still teaching good field mapping despite the pressure from budgets and protocol safety. They are successful because they are finding ways to integrate mapping with modern technologies in a changing environment. Industry will always need their graduates.

Mark Brodie (Geoscientist August 2013) is a good example of why an individual mapping project should be an essential part of an undergraduate course in earth science. Mark did not see the point of it. But it is the first, and for some geologists perhaps the only occasion on which he/she has to gather data in the field and make a three-dimensional interpretation of it. Many geologists to-day may never see an outcrop in the course of their work, unless perhaps on a field trip for professionals. Or, indeed, actually handle a piece of the rock which they are drilling through.

I do agree with Mark that the interpretation of geophysical borehole logs should also be taught – having had occasion to use borehole logs and having had to teach myself. The basic principles are not difficult to understand and it wouldn’t take very long. And how about seismic interpretation, now much more sophisticated than in my early days.

Coming back to mapping, the chief fount of expertise in the art has always been the British Geological Survey. Their geologists have mapped all of England and Wales and much of Scotland on a scale of 1:10 000, new recruits being trained by their experienced colleagues. Over much of lowland Britain, where you hardly ever see a natural rock exposure, this is a skill not to be sneezed at, and far superior to what can be acquired during a student project. But do we need it any more? The last BGS printed catalogue, 2010, shows coverage of England and Wales complete at the 1:50 000 scale, except for 21 sheets (out of 356) only available at 1 inch to a mile, and nine which are presumably unavailable colour printed (‘contact the sales desk ..’).

Six-inch, later 1:10 000 revision of the earlier maps was begun more than a century ago and is, I believe, virtually complete. Quality of work no doubt varies but information on local geology based on large scale mapping is generally available. The six-inch originals can be examined at BGS offices. So do we still need to know how to do it?

It can be argued that revision of the national mapping can never be finished. A recent example is the Chalk. For most of the 20^th Century three divisions were mapped: Lower, Middle and Upper Chalk, and these were used, for example, in a partial six-inch revision of the Shaftesbury (313) One-Inch sheet in 1923. Towards the end of the century the area was again revised, and ‘it was found that the Chalk could be divided into nine mappable units … in the Shaftesbury and adjacent districts.’ (Bristow et al. 1995, 111) and these were shown in the 1993 map. Similar refinements may be found in other rock groups. And what about the vast areas of Triassic mudstones, showing no faults because they could not be mapped, or faults shown on the Dorset coast which are not continued inland? In any case some of the earlier six-inch revisions are certainly capable of improvement.

I doubt this is the present philosophy of BGS. Mapping gets more and more time-consuming and more and more expensive, though air photography and satellite imagery can help, as in the Shaftesbury case. A new revision is surely something that any public servant would view with horror !

Reference

Bristow, C R, & 7 others, 1995. Geology of the country around Shaftesbury. Memoir of the British Geological Survey.

 

Sir, With reference to Adler deWind's piece 'Question Time' (Geoscientist 22.07 pp. 16-19), the Geological Society of London’s (GSL) official stance on anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has contributed to negative and technologically flawed implementation by successive UK governments. 

I venture to suggest that there was, and is, a great deal of underlying dissent by many fellows and physicists who doubt the validity of carbon dioxide atmospheric sensitivity, or in the relatively recent (theoretical) discovery and cause of (inevitable) climatic variations - how can such imperceptible shifts in CO₂ sensitivity be responsible for, or empirically linked to, AGW?  Like most sceptics (as I shall persist in describing us) we strongly object to our colleagues, and Adler deWind in his article, who imply that we are spinners of ‘denialist misinformation’ - at the same time as extolling the dubious merits of climate modelling.  We are in fact sceptical (unpaid) scientists for the most part, not ‘denyers’, who learn that stasis in global warming since 1996 (MET Office, 2013) offers no evidential explanation by climate scientists (the orthodoxy). deWind’s piece reports a number of contentious issues, but notably the (questionable) precision of GM models to predict climate outcomes is passed over without a murmur.

• http://www.parliament.uk/business/committees/committees-a-z/commons-select/science-and-technology-committee/inquiries/parliament-2010/climate-change/ (View all)

From Michael Welland and Andrew Hynes

Sir, We write, with considerable professional sadness, in response to the ‘Soapbox’ piece by Mark Brodie (“Masters of mapping”). Mr. Brodie asks “whether the time has come to map out a new future for the undergraduate geologist’s skill-set,” and our answer is yes, given that skill-sets always need to evolve, but emphatically not in the way he suggests.

Mr Brodie appears to be labouring under a misconception of what the science of geology is actually about. The basic “skill-set” that the science requires is an ability to understand, to visualise, the fabric of the surface and subsurface of our planet in a way that most accurately reflects its glorious complexity in four dimensions. It doesn’t matter whether we ultimately view that complexity portrayed on a map, in an electric log, or on seismic, potential field or remotely sensed data; the only way to reduce the uncertainty surrounding our interpretation is to be able to calibrate it to reality. And that reality is the Earth itself. That’s what fieldwork and Mr. Brodie’s much-derided “mapping” is about. A crevasse splay is not a log response or a seismic signature, it is a body of sediment with internal architecture and external relationships with the surrounding geology. We would suggest that arriving at an adequate petrophysical or seismic interpretation and developing an appreciation of its uncertainty would be extremely difficult for someone who had not grappled with one in reality and attempted to map it. The best and most efficient way in which to be equipped with a “skill-set” that allows us to determine whether a fault pattern is geometrically feasible or not is to have mapped examples, in all their complex relationships and unpredictability.

Certainly, few geologists “start or even end their career mapping” but this is entirely irrelevant. Never to have had to go through the intellectual exercise of interpreting real geology in four dimensions is to have removed the skill-set needed to interpret an electric log or indeed conduct any geological evaluation.

We speak as an industry and an academic geologist, both of 40+ years' experience (although we have chosen to discard our tweed). Neither of us would consider hiring a geologist who had studied drilling engineering and investment finance instead of mapping because we would have no faith in their ability to interpret anything.

No, Mr. Brodie, your suggestions of “relevance” in “today’s world” don’t sound “woolly”, they sound to us ignorant of your chosen discipline.

Sir, I have often wondered about the significance of markings in Victorian kerbstones near where I live in Lee Green, SE London. They are apparently confined to a relatively small area to the south of the Manor House and occur at the corners of several streets covering an area of roughly 900 square metres.

The letters have been crudely chiselled into what, in the absence of a thin section, appears to be a medium to coarse equigranular, mesocratic igneous rock.

The pairs of letters, viz. DX, of which there are 10 (with the possibility of an additional four pairs lost when pedestrian dropped corners were installed in recent years).

In every case the pairs of letters are sidewalk facing, i.e. RWU facing away from the road and positioned close to, but never at, the point of maximum curvature of the kerb at street corners.  The meaning of “DX” is unclear.

Perhaps they are surveyors marks, similar to bench-marks, though without elevations, and somehow reflect the close proximity to the grand Manor House and its gardens. They do not appear to be obviously related to services.

Sir, David Owen (Letters, July 2013) is correct in identifying geoconservation as a key activity for Earth Science within the UK and an endeavour that the Geological Society should indeed support strongly.  He also identifies the long and noble history throughout the UK of volunteer organisations, such as the various RIGS groups, in developing local initiatives to preserve and promote the geological heritage in their regions.  As Owen puts it, the “quarries, pits, mines and cuttings” watched over by these groups are important training resources for past, present and future generations of Earth Scientists. 

But just as importantly, geological outcrops represent prime shop-windows for our science, and many are important milestones in the development of our science.  In recognition of these and other challenges facing the UK’s geological heritage and our access to it, the Society has restructured its geoconservation activities. 

The new, reconstituted Geoconservation Committee is active in feeding into the Society’s External Relations and Science agendas.  It will represent the views of the Fellowship, and redouble our efforts to act on them.  For example, we have responded to the Scottish Government’s Planning Consultation drawing attention to the significant numbers of un-notified sites from the Geological Conservation Review and the threat this lapse represents. 

Such interactions with public policy are clearly important for future safeguards throughout the UK.  The Society will also continue to play an important role in providing a forum for practitioners in geoconservation across the UK to share good practice, ideas and generally to network.  There will be an annual gathering hosted by the Society to provide just these opportunities.  The next one is set for the morning of 10 October.  Interested individuals wishing to attend should email [email protected].  

Dr Rob Butler is Chair, Geoconservation Committee 

Sir, I am grateful to John Cope and Bernard Leake (Geoscientist, June 2013) for raising the issue of Library cuts but two things disturb me: the fact that they waited so long after the event, and the fact that it was answered (July 2013) not by an Officer of the Society but by one of its employees.  This follows a trend that has been developing for over a decade, in that many key decisions seem to be made by staff, with the role of committees and perhaps even Council reduced to that of a rubber stamp. 

As Cope and Leake point out, the savings achieved pale into insignificance against the money currently being spent to glorify the Council Room – going way beyond structural necessity – or that spent to create the under-used Lyell Room – a resource that is lovely to look at but of little practical use (have you ever tried to spread a map on a round table?).

The Library Advisory Committee, which strongly opposed the journal cuts, was ‘suspended’ in December and the cuts went ahead.  A similar thing happened around 15 years ago.  Then, a proposal from the ruling executive to change reception arrangements at BH (retaining the Courtyard entrance, but removing the reception desk and remodelling the general office) was opposed by the House Committee on grounds of expense and security.  That committee too was promptly disbanded.  The change went ahead, was found to be unworkable, and a proper reception re-instated (in the Piccadilly entrance, during the Bicentenary refurbishment). 

The Society is fortunate in having a hard-working and professional staff; we pay them to run the day-to-day business of the Society, to give us advice and to implement decisions on our behalf.  Are we content that they now seem to be making the decisions?

Dr Michael Price is a former member of Council, chairman of Library Committee, and member of the former Library Advisory Committee

Dr Jonathan Turner, Council Member, and Chair of the Publication and Information Committee, replies:

The decision on the journal cuts for 2013 was made by Council at its meeting on 28 November 2012, at which I was present. Two lists of journals for possible cancellation were considered by Council, one having been prepared by the Library Advisory Committee and one by the Society’s professional librarian with responsibility for managing our journal collections. After discussion, Council found in favour of the latter list.

Regarding the works completed or underway in Burlington House the Society has an obligation under the terms of its lease to maintain the building in a fit and proper state and investment in refurbishment is an investment in the future of the Society, and the security of its location in central London.

On the question of ‘who makes the decisions’ at the Geological Society we are indeed fortunate to have such hard working and professional staff, and it is the close communication and collaboration between staff, committees and Council that enables the Society to operate so successfully in an increasingly complex environment. Policy and strategy are, of course, set by Council and its reporting committees, but if we wish to continue to progress and develop our services we need staff who are capable of interpreting these polices and intelligently applying their initiative.

 

Sir, In June’s Geoscientist (v. 23.05), Nina Morgan stressed the benefit, to geologists, of accurate topographic base maps.

This stirred memories of my first appointment, from 1949 to 1955, to the Gold Coast Geological Survey.  The Gold Coast (now Ghana) could boast full one inch to the mile cover, thanks to the interest and support of a former Governor (himself a trained land surveyor) some decades previously. 

Not long after arrival in the colony, I found myself supervising a drilling programme designed to explore the site of a proposed dam on the Volta River.  The contoured maps were invaluable and I recall, in particular, sending out my labour force to clear access to an area of interest, a small rise on the far bank wholly covered in dense vegetation.  For several days thereafter, I levelled along cut lines that resolutely refused to reveal the contours I was seeking, until I reluctantly had to conclude that some head office draughtsman, long ago, had used his imagination to fill a space that had escaped the survey. 

Not long after this episode, I asked my Ghanaian field assistant (who, as it proved, had an odd sense of humour) to explain why certain paths on the maps were marked “fit for hammocking.”  As a result, and on his assurance that he had seen hammocks in store at Survey HQ, I put in a requisition for two hammocks, since being carried in this hilly area would undoubtedly improve my efficiency.

HQ’s response was frosty to say the least; they confirmed existence of the hammocks but pointed out that their use had been phased out in the 1920’s; also that the best geologists were the ones that saw the most rocks and that this was best achieved by inspecting the ground over which they walked.  This story got around!

Sir, John Cope and Bernard Leake’s SoapBox piece (“No to journal cuts!”, Geoscientist, June 2013) rightly highlights the importance of the Society’s Library collections to Fellows and others, and the need to ensure that the information requirements of future geoscientists are met. They are also correct in saying that some journal subscriptions were cancelled in 2012 and 2013. However, it is important to review those cuts in context, and to understand their impact on Library users.

The background is the Library Review, approved by Council at the end of 2010 for implementation in 2011 and forward. Central to the Review was the sustainable development of the Library to meet the evolving needs of Fellows, and the recognition of its status as a jewel in the Society’s crown. Library operating costs had increased by 49% over the previous 5 years and Society spending has to be balanced across a wide range of competing priorities. Council decided that there would be a phased reduction in the net operating costs over three years. Cuts of 9 titles in 2012, saving £11k and 26 titles in 2013, saving £10k should be viewed against the acquisition of around 600 journal titles a year, and about 25,000 uses of journal content.

Specifically, of the 26 journal titles cancelled for 2013:

• Four titles had no recorded use at all in the previous year
• Seven titles had been used only one or two times
• Three titles were cancelled in print only and are still available to us online
• One title was a duplicate subscription and two are now supplied on exchange
• Two were, in fact, book series and are now purchased selectively from the book budget
• The total recorded usage amounted to 87 incidents, equivalent to less than half a percent of overall journal usage.

Should we have cancelled journal titles in areas and disciplines re-emerging as of importance, modern approaches to publishing make it ever easier to access non-subscribed content by pay-per-view and archive purchase schemes.

Looking ahead the Library is exploring new ways to generate income to offset its operational cost. There is a new book sales facility. We are evaluating the earning potential of our extensive and unique collection of maps. A new information service will launch in January 2014 – the Geofacets GSL Millennium Edition.

The Society and its Fellows work in an ever-changing environment and it is essential that our services – whether it be publishing, conference, Library or website – develop accordingly.

Neal Marriott, Director of Publishing, Library and Information Services

Sir, At the risk of being banished to pedant's corner (oops! wrong magazine), I was just wondering how the London Clay Formation can be described as "...stiff, homogeneous and highly impermeable..." without any kind of caveat or qualifying comment?  While much of the sequence can indeed be described as stiff, blue grey clay to some significant thickness at many locations across the London Basin, this is by no means the end of the story. In my experience it may not be unusual to encounter sandy beds and laminations, silt partings, claystones, glauconitic zones, calcareous zones with gypsum, pyritic zones, shelly layers etc. Accompanied by water ingress. Not quite homogeneous then. Just saying. It's all a case of location location location.

Kudos to the Mr Black and Mr Whyte's efforts on the Rubislaw Quarry Project. An admirable effort.

Sir, I was very pleased to read your editorial singing the praises of 'holes in the ground' (Geoscientist, May 2013) and their value to the geoscience community and to educating and informing the public. 

However, it was sad to see that you don't mention the ongoing work, carried out over many years, to conserve and enhance these important, valuable and often historic places by local geoconservation groups, Geology Trusts and RIGS Groups.

As one of your distinguished Fellows, Dr Joe McCall, realised many years ago, geoconservation - that is, the conservation, management and interpretation of sites of geological interest an importance - is a worthwhile cause. I had the honour and privilege to work with Joe during my time with Gloucestershire Geology Trust, on geoconservation projects and assisting with the production of the Cirencester In Stone book. When I joined the Trust in 2001, Joe was already a long serving, indeed one of the founding, members of what was then Gloucestershire RIGS (Regionally Important Geological and Geomrphological Sites) Group.

In Gloucestershire, GGT has had a programme of geoconservation work for over 15 years, has developed close links with quarries in the county and has even bought a disused quarry of its own, Huntley Quarry, in which the East Malvern Fault can be demonstrated. Based around this site, the Trust has just set up a community group known as the Geowardens, who are taking on the management and conservation of the Quarry as a community project.

Other important sites where GGT has carried out conservation work include Cleeve Hill and Leckhampton Hill in the Cotswolds - where the most complete and thickest inland sections of Inferior Oolite are available for study, Puddlebrook Quarry in the Forest of Dean where the worlds oldest known moss fossil was discovered, Foss Cross Quarry - one of the most important sections in the Great Oolite, and location of a very rare 'beetroot stone' exposure. The list goes on.

I spent 10 years working for GGT, and over that time was involved with numerous projects concentrating on both conservation and awareness raising/education. It wouldn't have been possible to undertake the education and awareness raising projects without first having done the groundwork to conserve the sites and make them safe and available. I have always considered myself to be a geologist, as opposed to a conservationist, but I don't feel that I was regarded in this way by the Geological Society. Despite the GSL supporting the running of the Geoconservation Commission, I have never felt that it was any type of priority (I have just checked the Geoconservation Commission website, and it does not appear to have been updated since September 2011!). 

One thing I would like to see is a form of CPD for Geoconservation, as those working in this field have to have a well-rounded knowledge of geology - technical enough to know what is important, how to spot it and whether it is worth conserving, but general enough to be able to explain to the general public on a field trip how the rocks were formed, the environment at the time and what has happened to form the landscape they see today.  Coupled with this geological knowledge must be the skill and experience to be able to communicate clearly and enthusiastically to a wide variety of people.

I realise that the Geol Soc has to concentrate for the most part on industry and academia, as this is where the majority of practising geoscients reside (I myself am now an Engineering Geologist, not being able to support a constant living wage from Geoconservation). However, we must not lose sight of the fact that these quarries, pits mines and cuttings diligently looked after by the geoconservationists is where all of these people learnt their trade, and if we lose them, we won't be able to get them back.  More support for Geoconservation please, Geol Soc!

Sir, Adding to Nina Morgan’s account of geological partnerships (Distant Thunder, Geoscientist March 2013 p27) could I mention that most poignant geological relationship between Edward Greenly and his wife Annie. In 1875 Edward had become a friend of Annie when he was 14; she was 11 years his senior, but with their parents’ blessing they accompanied each other on geological walks in the Bristol district over four years. However, when Edward was 18 his mother decided they should be officially engaged; Edward resisted, at which Annie was deeply hurt and the couple parted for 11 years.

Edward joined the Geological Survey in 1889 and met Annie again in 1890, both admitting to thoughts of the other through the intervening years. Married in 1891, he returned with Annie to his work in the remotest part of Scotland. Aware of her feeling of isolation he reluctantly left the Survey in 1894, but was determined to continue with geological mapping at his own (and Annie’s) expense. He settled on Anglesey as it was a self-contained area that had never been mapped and contained a large area of schists, with which he was familiar.

He attributes much of his “outcrop” style of mapping – now universally adopted - to Annie’s advice. Annie was a frequent spectator, often sitting on hilltops while he mapped and was his look-out for express trains in railway cuttings. She visited him at weekends bringing home-made food, often walking five miles from the nearest station. She made him send her ‘quarterly returns’, as he would have in the Survey, giving the linear miles of boundaries and the square miles mapped. Annie, aged 75, died at home in his arms; Greenly was devastated but spent the next 10 years writing a two-volume memoir that is essentially a tribute to Annie.

Read response to Colin Summerhayes' previous contribution

In the published debate on the GWPF web site we agree that the palaeoclimate record is important and overlooked, so we have got that point across quite well to the public. In my view to go further at this point would be to raise the discussion to a level of detail beyond that of interest to the public in a forum like that offered by the GWPF; instead these matters of fine detail need taking up in a science meeting. The GSL is already organising a science meeting on Holocene climate change, on April 4-5, to explore the science of fairly recent climate change from the geological perspective.

Personally, I consider Barry Saltzman's efforts to examine the workings of the climate system to be highly illuminating, and his models suggest that what are commonly regarded as Milankovitch forcings of temperature at 100,000 year intervals during the ice age may rather be forced by CO₂ (see his book 'Dynamical Paleoclimatology' 2002). Models, of course, are not  reality - they are aids to thinking. But along the  same lines we now have the March 2013 paper in Science by Parrenin et al. showing that the changes in CO₂ and temperature seen in ice cores in the last deglaciation were synchronous, which suggests more control by CO₂ than has been agreed previously. These new models and data are compelling; no doubt the role of CO₂ will be clarified further as yet more data come in."

Regards

Colin

Sir, I was disappointed by Bruce Misstear's Soapbox article, although I agree with him almost entirely. The disappointment arises because we seem to be faced once again with unthinking and fundamentally illogical bureaucracy. Whether it comes from politicians or administrators isn't clear, but, sadly, there is no element of surprise there. Perhaps it comes from both. This is at least the third such occurrence with respect to hydrogeology in the last thirty years. It might have been reasonable to hope that current administrators, bureaucrats, politicians - call them what you will - would have learnt from the second round of such behaviour, if not from the first.

My only issue with the article is in the statement that "... the implications for the profession will be serious". While that is certainly true, I do not believe that it is strong enough or its scope wide enough. The implications will be serious for the country and its environment as a whole; the profession is only one part of that, important though it is in itself.

It seems reasonable to assume that the Hydrogeology Group of the society will make strong representations on the subject in all relevant places. It is very important that it does so. It might be that, in this case and because we face the same issues about this fundamental subject yet again, some higher level of representation should also be considered. I wonder whether the society's council and president might approach government directly, both independently - ie, on behalf of geology - and in association with The Royal Society, The Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment, and any other bodies likely to share our concerns.

Sir, I think the reality that the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, one of the earliest to recognise that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would lead to global warming, presented the idea in a spirit of optimism because he thought that it would be 'a good thing' ("ameliorate") [Letters, Dec 2012] will have passed an awful lot of readers by. I hate to think what will happen if climate change 'sceptics' get hold of this!  One thing seems certain: they will not conclude that, as a Swede from the frozen north he was just being foolishly parochial. This being the case, however, Arrhenius cannot be said to be among those who first 'warned of the danger' (since he did not see it as one).

Furthermore, as many commenters have pointed out on my blog 'Lack of Environment', Arrhenius was also not the first to investigate a link between atmospheric CO₂ concentration and the Earth's global average temperature: At least three other scientist preceded him: Joseph Fourier (1824), George Perkins Marsh (1847) and John Tyndall (1859).

Finally, I should wish to point out that, far from being a wake-up call, since he managed to over estimate the doubling time for CO₂ by a factor of eight (i.e. allowing for all greenhouse gases), Banham's article in 1910 would appear to have been more like a bedtime story.

This letter, to Dr Benny Peiser of GWPF, has been reproduced here by agreement.  It was revised after initial submission on March 4.  Editor

Dear Dr Peiser, Thank you for the opportunity to respond to the critique by Drs Carter and Courtillot of my note of 14/2/13 on “The Geological Perspective of Global Warming”. I initially wrote to you to draw attention to Geological Society of London’s statement on this topic, because the geological perspective is usually overlooked in discussions about climate change, and it should not be. But, because Drs Carter and Courtillot moved the debate out of just the geological arena, I am responding in my own capacity, not as a representative of the GSL.

Drs Carter and Courtillot took exception to my use of the phrase “The cooling [of the past 50 million years] was directly associated with a decline in the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere”, saying that correlation was not causation. True. What I should have said was “The cooling of the past 50 million years was driven by a decline in CO₂ in the atmosphere.” Prior to the Ice Age of the last 2.6 million years the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere resulted from the interplay between the emission of CO₂ by volcanoes and its absorption by the weathering of rocks, especially in mountainous areas, as well as by sequestration in sediments. Methods to determine the likely concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere in the geological past have improved in recent years. They include the numbers of pores (stomata) on leaves, the abundance of the mineral nahcolite (stable above concentrations of 1000 ppm CO₂), and the carbon isotopic composition of alkenones from marine plankton. Methods for determining global temperature through time have also improved. We now know that the Eocene was a time of greater volcanic output of CO₂, and that the rise of major mountain chains after that time pulled CO₂ out of the atmosphere. Geochemical models of the carbon cycle simulate the decline in CO₂ after the middle Eocene. Convergence between the CO₂ data and the output from those models provide confidence that we understand the process. There is no geologically plausible alternative. We are not talking about a loose association where there is uncertainty about cause as Drs Carter and Courtillot imply. Indeed, even Drs Carter and Courtillot accept that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, and that accumulation of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere warms it. Likewise, its loss will cool the atmosphere.

Besides that, the GSL statement regards the massive injection of carbon into the atmosphere that took place over a short period 55 million years ago, raising temperature, raising sea level, and causing ocean acidity, as a case history that we can draw upon to tell us what may happen in the future if we continue to pump CO₂ into the atmosphere at rapid rates. It was not alone; there was another such event in the Toarcian, for example, some 180 million years ago.

Moving on to the Ice Age of the past 2.6 million years, by this time the levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere were so low that other drivers of the climate system had more effect. The primary drivers of change in the Ice Age were the tiny changes in solar radiation received at the Earth’s surface due to regular and predictable changes in the Earth-Sun distance and in the tilt of the Earth’s axis. These made the climate of the Ice Age fluctuate between cold periods – glacials- and warm ones – interglacials – in one of which we now live. The role of CO₂ in this system was to provide positive feedback to the rises in temperature that took us from glacials into interglacials. In this narrow context, Drs Carter and Courtillot are correct – CO₂ increased during the interglacials mainly by outgassing from the ocean. But that was not the main source of CO₂ during the Cenozoic era.

We should all reflect on the fact that the past 4 interglacials were warmer than today, and sea levels then were higher than today. Drs Carter and Courtillot wonder if we know enough about the behaviour of the climate system during the Ice Age to be confident in our analysis. Yes we do. The uncertainties are minor. Given what we know from the link between CO₂ and temperature with time from the geological record, it would be foolish to imagine that if we warm our planet to the same extent as it warmed in previous interglacials, we will not also see similar rises in sea level to those that occurred in them.  In any case, waiting until all small uncertainties are resolved is not a reasonable option.

Our geological knowledge of past climate change is independent of the numerical models used by climatologists to tell us what may happen if we add more CO₂ to the atmosphere. The geological data, recalibrated in 2012 by the PALAEOSENS team led by Eelco Rohling (Nature 491, 683-691, 29 November 2012), tell us that the sensitivity of the climate in the past to a doubling of CO₂ was 2.2-4.8°C, about the same as calculated for the modern climate by the climate modellers who feed data to the IPCC. This match is unlikely to be a coincidence. Indeed, it suggests that the climate modellers may well be on the right track, and that Dr Lindzen and others may be wrong in suggesting that the sensitivity is 1°C or less. However, Drs Carter and Courtillot are right to point out that some recent studies suggest that the climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO₂ may be closer to the low than to the high end of the IPCC range. While that may appear comforting, it only postpones the inevitable.

Drs Carter and Courtillot took me to task over the relationship between CO₂, temperature and sea level. However, their sea level calculations are simplistic. The 20 cm rise that we have seen since 1900 is not an equilibrium response – it is instead a transient response to a rise in temperature of 0.8°C occasioned by a rise in CO₂ of 40%, or 100 ppm. The sea level will go on rising even if we stop putting CO₂ into the atmosphere, as the ocean equilibrates with the atmosphere over decades to centuries, and as ice sheets slowly decay. Models suggest that the equilibrium position may be 0.5m/1°C due to thermal expansion alone. Currently thermal expansion accounts for around 1/3 of sea level rise, and glaciers and ice sheets for another 1/3 each. It is not difficult to see how a further rise in CO₂ could by 2100 lead to a rise in sea level of perhaps as much as 1.4 m as estimated by Stefan Rahmstorf and colleagues.

Drs Carter and Courtillot took exception to my statement that the Earth should have been cooling over the past 10,000 years. Indeed it should because that’s what we calculate from known phenomena like changes in the Earth-Sun distance and tilt of the Earth’s axis. Other shorter-term changes will of course be superimposed upon that trend. Drs Carter and Courtillot emphasize them by providing a graph of Greenland temperatures, but as they point out those were regional. Even so, that graph too shows underlying cooling for the past 5000 years. The small divergences from the mean on the Greenland graph were caused by short term climate changes like those of the Medieval Warm Period and the cooling of the Little Ice Age, which coincided with the Maunder Minimum in sunspot activity between around 1645 and 1715. Both events seem to have been most intense in the North Atlantic and European region, not globally. There is no evidence that the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today globally. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that we are now living through a similar event.

Drs Carter and Courtillot would like us to believe that the current rapid global warming event is purely natural. This seems odd given that they also accept that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that warms the lower atmosphere and that a portion of human emissions of CO₂ is now accumulating in the atmosphere. Moreover one of their key references (Ring et al 2012) makes it clear that human activity has caused the warming since 1900. All our attempts to relate the post 1970 warming to natural sources of heat have failed. Our burning of fossil fuels is detectable in the atmosphere from a reduction in oxygen as well as from an increase in CO₂ and from the carbon isotopic signature typical of the burning source materials. Since the 1970s, warming has been taking place while the suns output has not been increasing. Nobody has yet come up with a better explanation of this recent warming than that it is caused by the known increases in CO₂ and related greenhouse gases, much as we might expect from what we know of the effect of CO₂ in the climates of the past, and from the basic physics of radiation.

The warming of the recent past up to and including 2012 is shown in the attached graph by Hansen, J., Sato M., and Ruedy, R., 2013 “Global Temperature Update Through 2012” (available from www.columbia.edu/~jeh1). The reader will notice that the rise has not proceeded smoothly, but in a series of steps like the one that started in 2002. It was inaccurate of Drs Carter and Courtillot to suggest that this flat spot started in 1998, which was a prominent El Niño year. During El Niño years, shown in the lower graph, the emission of heat from the Pacific Ocean warms the world. Temperatures drop during the subsequent cool La Niña events. They also drop during volcanic eruptions large enough to eject fine particulates and acid gases into the stratosphere. Thus the 1998 El Niño effect visible in the graph was not the start of a flat step; it was followed by a cooling due to a large La Niña. Other large-scale oscillations within the climate system will also have had an effect, one such being the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation, which shifted to a positive phase in the 1970s and led to a warmer Pacific. In the 2000s that Oscillation reversed, cooling the Pacific and likely thereby contributing to masking the rise in global temperature (EOS, v.94, No.6, 5 February 2013).





Fig. 1. From Hansen, Sato and Ruedy, 2013. Global surface temperature anomalies relative to 1951-1980. The Nino index is based on the detrended temperature in the Nino 3.4 area in the eastern tropical Pacific. Green triangles mark volcanic eruptions that produced an extensive stratospheric aerosol layer. Blue vertical bars are estimates of the 95% confidence interval for comparisons of nearby years.

In conclusion, I consider that the data from the geological record are consistent with the data from the modern environment, and with projections made on the basis of those modern data as to how our climate may change in the future. Anyone who accepts that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas, as Drs Carter and Courtillot do, must expect that a large increase in its concentration is bound to have a warming effect, and observations show a warming that is consistent with this effect. Remarkably few climate scientists dispute that fact. The world is indeed exposed to real short-term climate related events, as Drs Carter and Courtillot point out, but what we face in human-made global warming is an insidious underlying upward trend that will exacerbate those short term events unless action is taken to deal now with the causes of that trend.

C.P.Summerhayes, Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge

 

Sir, I suspect that most Fellows who have put themselves through the procedure to become validated as Chartered Geologists would agree that the process is (quite rightly) an onerous one, intended to confirm that holders of the qualification possess a certain degree of experience, commitment and professionalism.

I note from the published minutes of recent Council Meetings that there is concern at the top of the Society about both the low rate of uptake of the qualification and the current high non-renewal rate among Chartered Fellows.

As a recently qualified Chartered Geologist and European Geologist, my active participation in the Society's on-line CPD scheme is mandatory, I am therefore disappointed that this facility was removed without warning in October 2012 when the Society's Website was updated. At the time of writing (16 February 2013) it remains unavailable with a notice stating that ‘online CPD reporting will be relaunched on the new website towards the end of January 2013’. For the last four months, I have effectively been unable to fulfil the one of the obligations necessary for me to maintain my professional qualifications.

I am very grateful for the tireless efforts of all the people who strive to make the chartership validation process successful and I really don't wish to criticise anyone, but if we are not seen to take the qualification's requirements seriously, especially in such a visible place as on the Society's Website, how can we expect others to aspire to become Chartered, to value the qualification appropriately and to maintain it long term?

Editor writes: The Web Team send their apologies and tell me that the first version of the CPD reporting system has been tested and is currently back with the web developers for fixing. They intend to have it up and running by the end of February or early March 2013.

Sir, you encourage Fellows to increase the level of voter turnout in Council elections. Similar exhortations have been made in recent years. However, if the participation level compares well with other learned societies and financial institutions, perhaps we should only be concerned if the levels are on a downward trend?

The day to day running of a learned society is conducted by professional staff who by all accounts perform a sterling service. The Council’s role is to oversee those staff, set strategy and budget, and in some cases appoint the senior employees. However, with short duration terms of office it is difficult to see how the average Council member can achieve fundamental change to the Society’s activities.

We should applaud the candidates who put themselves forward for election to any learned society or professional institution. It must be assumed that they have no self-interest at heart, merely a desire to serve the wider membership. However, unlike a political election the candidates don’t usually represent (or state if they do) fundamentally different strands of opinion. Nor do they set out radical agendas for strategy or change. Indeed any personal profiles provided generally contain blandishments which are variations on a theme. As result the potential voter assumes that the Society will carry on functioning regardless of who is elected, and therefore sees no need to choose between what to them is a fairly set of random set of interchangeable individuals.

I assume that those who have participated generally vote for either the candidates they know (usually zero in my case) or to express a preference for a particular age group, gender or professional background etc. We can also compare the situation with any sporting or leisure organisations we belong to. The majority of the membership will be generally be happy to take a back seat and show little appetite to serve on committees.

Therefore I acknowledge your editorial urgings, but perhaps he should be satisfied that the low turnout reflects satisfaction with the status quo?

Sir, In the interest of contributing to the evidence-based debate on climate change I thought it would be constructive to draw to your attention the geological evidence regarding climate change, and what it means for the future. This evidence was published in November 2010 by the Geological Society of London in a document entitled “Climate Change: Evidence from the Geological Record”, which can be found on the Society’s web page at www.geolsoc.org.uk/climaterecord

A variety of techniques is now available to document past levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere, past global temperatures, past sea levels, and past levels of acidity in the ocean. What the record shows is this. The Earth’s climate has been cooling for the past 50 million years from 6-7°C above today’s global average temperatures to what we see now. That cooling led to the formation of ice caps on Antarctica 34 million years ago and in the northern hemisphere around 2.6 million years ago. The cooling was directly associated with a decline in the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere. In effect we moved from a warm “greenhouse climate” when CO₂, temperature and sea level were high, and there were no ice caps, to an “icehouse climate” in which CO₂, temperature and sea level are low, and there are ice caps. The driver of that change is the balance between the emission of CO₂ into the atmosphere from volcanoes, and the mopping up of CO₂ from the atmosphere by the weathering of rocks, especially in mountains. There was more volcanic activity in the past and there are more mountains now.

Superimposed on this broad decline in CO₂ and temperature are certain events. Around 55 million years ago there was a massive additional input of carbon into the atmosphere – about four times what humans have put there. It caused temperatures to rise by a further 6°C globally and 10°C at the poles. Sea level rose by some 15 metres. Deep ocean bottom waters became acid enough to dissolve carbonate sediments and kill off calcareous bottom dwelling organisms. It took over 100,000 years for the Earth to recover from this event. More recently, during the Pliocene, around 3 million years ago, CO₂ rose to levels a little higher than today’s, global temperature rose to 2-3°C above today’s level, Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf melted, and sea level rose by 10-25 metres.

The icehouse climate that characterised the past 2.6 million years averaged 9°C colder in the polar regions and 5°C colder globally. It was punctuated by short warm interglacial periods. We are living in one of these warm periods now – the Holocene – which started around 11,000 years ago. The glacial to interglacial variations are responses to slight changes in solar energy meeting the Earth’s surface with changes in: our planet’s orbit from circular to elliptical and back; the position of the Earth relative to the sun around the Earth’s orbit; and the tilt of the Earth’s axis. These changes recur on time scales of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. CO₂ plays a key role in these changes. As the Earth begins to warm after a cold period, sea ice melts allowing CO₂ to emerge from the ocean into the atmosphere. There it acts to further warm the planet through a process known as positive feedback. The same goes for another greenhouse gas, methane, which is given off from wetlands that grow as the world warms. As a result the Earth moves much more rapidly from cold to warm than it does from warm to cold. We are currently in a cooling phase of this cycle, so the Earth should be cooling slightly. Evidently it is not.

The Geological Society deduced that by adding CO₂ to the atmosphere as we are now doing, we would be likely to replicate the conditions of those past times when natural emissions of CO₂ warmed the world, melted ice in the polar regions, and caused sea level to rise and the oceans to become more acid. The numerical models of the climate system that are used by the meteorological community to predict the future give much the same result by considering modern climate variation alone. Thus we arrive at the same solution by two entirely independent methods. Under the circumstances the Society concluded that “emitting further large amounts of CO₂ into the atmosphere over time is likely to be unwise, uncomfortable though that fact may be.”

* Vice-President Geological Society of London and Emeritus Associate Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge.

• This letter was addressed to the Global Warming Policy Foundation (Benny Peiser, Director, [email protected]) and copied to the media.
• To read responses to this letter, please go to the GPWF website.

Sir, Fifteen years ago I was part of a Women's Committee of this Society, brought together to look at whether the GS was sufficiently welcoming to women geologists, or whether it still retained some aspects of a London gentlemen's club. As I recall, we disbanded reasonably satisfied.

It was with dismay and disbelief, that I read the 4 October email advertising the Founders Day Lecture and Dinner 2012. It's good to see an interesting lecture by a leading woman geologist. But you then advertise the dinner as "Dress, black tie", "ticket price £80" and "[midnight] carriages".

Why does the Geological Society choose to celebrate its inauguration with an elitist, snobbish old-fashioned function, or to tell its members what to wear? And what on earth are women expected to wear: ball gown, suit and tie, or just a strategically arranged black tie? It reinforces all the old prejudices that this Society is a club for well-to-do London gentlemen.

Sue Treagus

PUMPKIN TIME

Sir, I find it regrettable that in the name of gender equality and modernity Sue Treagus (Geoscientist 22.11 - see above) takes umbrage at the dress code guidelines and timing that accompanied the invitation to the Founders’ Day Lecture and Dinner.

If, as many Society members do, you live outside ‘night bus’ range, it is nice to know when events end so that travel or hotel arrangements can be made. The simple if somewhat archaic term “Carriages” provides all one needs to know clearly and succinctly. In addition, it lets guests know what time to leave, so that our hosts do not have to spend even more time easing stragglers out of the door long after their welcome has run out!

The same applies to the guidance as to what should be worn at the event. “Dress: Black Tie” again is a very clear instruction - to both genders - as to the formality of the evening, preventing embarrassment for both guest and host when attending wrongly attired.

“Dress: Black Tie” and “Carriages” are merely good etiquette.

Nigel Davis

TIES THAT BIND

Sir, I think Sue Treagus misses the point of dinner jackets. A dress code simply ensures that the men attend in uniform - the same uniform - leaving the ladies to provide the sartorial sparkle and glamour.

Without a dress code I, as a member of the working class, might turn up in a costermonger's apron and find myself sitting next to a duke in ermine and coronet. Which might make both of us feel uncomfortable. A dress code actually removes any sense of elitism or snobbery.

Of course, one can always walk out early, but I feel that on one point Sue is right; there is no need to drag the event out to midnight. A well organised evening can finish at 22.30 - as do Livery Company dinners. This enables those of us living south of the river to get back to darkest Dulwich at a reasonable hour!

Robert Freer

HELL ON HEELS

Sir, As a female geologist who moved to London several years ago, I have never attended one of the 'Black Tie/Dress' events for exactly the reason raised by Ms Treagus. As much as I would like to network & meet other geologists it sounds like I would feel completely out of place.

For men it’s simple; 'black tie' equates to popping down to the nearest rental place & hire a standard issue suit & maybe have a shave. As a woman, the expectation is posh dress chosen from a vast array in a multitude of shops; tights, stockings, sunbeds/fake tan, shoes, heels of correct colour, matching handbag, necklace/other jewellery, not to mention the hair and makeup. All great if you love all that. I don't.

If I was interested in dressing up I would have studied fashion or read Cosmo instead of Geoscientist. As a geologist I'm not too fussed if I break a nail. I tried a black tie event once. I even got myself a personal shopper to assist with the attire. In the end I gave up. The trauma and the stress I can happily live without. Must be nice to just hire a suit & turn up for a few drinks with the guys. Black tie event says to me "well-to-do London gentlemen" and their wives who can catch up on the latest goss & skin care tips, while the guys talk shop.

When the next 'jeans & t-shirts (preferably sporting extracts from "Sticks and Stones" for a laugh & ice breaker) down to earth day' is on I'll pop along for sure.

[Name and Fellowship Number supplied]