A distraction

we interrupt the regular service to provide you with a message about contemporary (UK) politics 

For obvious reasons, this year's Ditchley Annual Lecture, given by The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, is worthy of both comment and analysis.

Superficially it is hard to disagree with the general thrust of the argument, that Government should better reward risk taking, that the Civil Service should have more diversity of thought, that centralising decision-making in London means that the cultural outlook of the majority decision-makers does not reflect the wider cultural outlook of the country, and that the Government is piss-poor at measuring success, and should do better.

But anyone with even a passing interest in UK politics over the last 5 years will have noticed that our politics is now entirely tribal. We are just as split between individuals who identify as pro and anti Brexit as the US is between those who identify as pro and anti Trump. A significant number of former comrades find themselves stuck behind enemy lines - more on the right than the left, where there are plenty of Conservatives aghast at what the current leaders of their nations are doing on trade, security, fiscal policy and common decency yet are unable to align themselves with the Tories/Dems - but on the left, too, though these types are perhaps more used to being out of step with the majority of 'their' tribe. Pro-protectionist anti-immigrant leftists exist, and have existed forever, but are very much in minority, and have been for years.

The lecture is aimed solely at one tribe, and blames their woes solely on a foe with all the realism of Mantel's Thomas Cromwell -- i.e. there are grains of truth, in here, rooted in documented historical fact, but the overall concoction is entirely fictional  -- or perhaps some mythical version of Clive of India as a Hero of the Empire. If I were to ask you what went wrong in 2008, and has failed to go right since, I doubt you'd point the finger of blame at the Civil Service. Maybe you would. Maybe I'm too close. But I suspect the voices that are now claiming the Civil Service is ideologically attached to Europe would, 30 years ago, have claimed that the Civil Service was too slow to adopt to the benefits offered by globalisation. Where politicians lead, Civil Servants follow. The single market was a political creation and one which diminished the powers of Whitehall. It wasn't dreamed up by Mandarins nor do I imagine they were terribly keen on it in the early days, given that power flowed away from them. And we all know that austerity was a political, not technocratic choice. Officials seldom advocate policies which will see their Departmental budgets decimated, or as was the case for several Departments, far worse than decimated.

But I'm going on too long. Many many columns will be written about the impending re-organisation of Whitehall. Here are some others.

But I would like to point out what I think is a flaw at the heart of the argument that we need . It's about Maths and Science. As a physical scientist, I completely reject the assertion that decision-making should be "less reliant on those with social science qualifications and more welcoming to those with physical science and mathematical qualifications".

As a citizen rather than a Civil Servant I've seen policies come and go. Most policies, in my observation, fail or a best offer extremely poor value for money compared to readily available alternatives. Some crash and burn spectacularly, like privatization of probation services, or the Green Deal. Most chunter along, eating money and not doing much active harm or good. Occasionally we hit a great one (in my field, both the boiler regulations, which drove down UK gas use, or Contracts-for-Difference which, in the wind sector at least, have driven renewable electricity prices down beyond our wildest dreams.

But yeah. Policies usually suck. And they usually suck because the real numbers bear no resemblance to the forecast numbers.

So, more numerate people = better policy outcomes?

I'm afraid it's not that simple. There are a lot of numerate people in Government. The Government Economics Service runs the show, so far as policy appraisal (that is, assessment before the fact) goes. They know their stuff. And the Government spends a lot on building complex, often (in my view) over-complex, models to discover the truth.

And there you have it. If your model of the world is wrong, then no amount of mathematics can help you. Let me put to one side any beliefs I have about any given Government's moral model of the world. Let us just assume something morally neutral, like the way people make decisions to buy gas boilers. If your mental model of that "simple" decision is wrong (and, it turns out, it isn't a simple decision at all) no amount of numeracy can dig you out of the hole in which you find yourself. Indeed more complex models (by which we really mean equations, hidden from view, nestling in code) makes it worse, because you cannot easily see (or even difficultly see) where you went wrong, so many twists and turns have you taken.

Big data and machine learning (let us not even pretend that AI has any short or medium term role in policymaking) are a deeper concern. In finance these tools are already used. They make a small number of people a lot of money. They don't, obviously, know anything about the immediate health or outlooks for any given stock, beyond what values humans have already applied themselves, through the buying and selling which provides the data the machines then 'feed' on.

Nothing scares me more than the idea of a data scientist who knows nothing abut decarbonisation using a learning algorithm to find the 'answer' to a complex policy problem. This isn't a joke. If you 'analyse' the data without understanding what real world forces give rise to the data, you can kill lots of people.

If data can be used to provide insights which then allow humans, and most particularly social scientists (I exclude economists from this category), to investigate patterns and find out probably reasons for them, then more power to the data monkeys. But if we believe that the Civil Service is too reliant on Social Sciences, we will fail to generate policy that has a positive impact on citizens, because citizens are rooted in society, and society follows social science 'rules', not the rules of physics.

It took me 9 paragraphs to say that policies depend on a robust understanding of the behaviour of citizens, and that only by properly equipping the Civil Service with Social Scientists - not merely economists - can we ever hope for better policy. That numbers alone mislead without human insight. A lack of understanding of Natural Science, or Mathematics, or Social Science, will lead to choices which, with hindsight, look very foolish.

To illustrate my point with a field that I know something about. Civil Servants, we are told, need to know "how to interrogate climate modelling". Well, the Civil Servants who work on climate already possess this knowledge. Indeed, it is an area where the Civil Service already has deep expertise, and better, can draw on the deep expertise of the Met Office, and others. But that isn't the real issue. The big question is what "interrogate climate modelling" means. It should not mean that Civil Servants should be looking at climate models to better forecast when Hebden Bridge will next flood. Because climate models cannot tell you when Hebden Bridge will next flood. They can't tell you what the probability of Hebden Bridge flooding is. They can't even tell you what the probability of the level of rainfall that last caused Hebden Bridge to flood falling over the next 5 years is. They can tell you what the probability is of that rainfall level occurring according to the model  but (and very few people seem to recognise this) the model is not reality.

What can climate models tell us? Well, if we have a range of climate models all of which can resolve rainfall at the level required to tell us something about Hebden Bridge and floods, we could look at the range of outputs from those models, and perhaps look at how well each model performs historically (a model which doesn't produce weather over the last decade that in any way resembles the actual weather over the last decade is probably a poor guide to future weather). It doesn't give us a numerical probability of Hebden Bridge flooding, because none of the models are reality and the 'average' of all the models certainly isn't a model of reality but it gives us the best possible scientific insight as to whether Hebden Bridge is more likely to flood over the next decade than it did in the last. Which is useful policy-relevant information.

But at this point you can see that it is easy to get lost in the numbers, and begin to believe that the numbers tell you some 'truth'. The do not. They numbers are shadows on the walls of a cave.

I'm not for a moment suggesting that climate modelling is a wasted endeavour or that we should not take notice of the outputs of climate models. It is precisely because climate models tell us that changing the concentrations of GHGs (and particulates) in the atmosphere changes the weather around us that we should pay attention to them, particularly as climate models are significantly more skillful (I don't care what the dictionary says, "skilful" looks awful and both spellings are valid) than anyone who tells you that GHGs don't cause climate change. But our response to climate models, particularly as civil servants, should not be to interrogate the data. It should be to look at the data, and decide what actions are a proportionate response to the evidence available.

What I am talking about here is risk management, at national (and, of course, global) level. The fact that the future is unknowable does not prevent us from making decisions because we can predict, with some greater or lesser certainty, what is likely to happen. I am very uncomfortable with putting numbers on these things, as it gives a false sense of precision. Rather I would suggest we believe that an outcome which all models predict in most circumstances is more likely than one which only some models predict, which is more likely still than an outcome which only one model predicts, and infrequently. (But of course, the low probability event can't be ruled out).

So if "interrogate climate modelling" means understand the strengths and limitations of climate models and use that to develop a risk framework that focuses the available resources for climate change adaptation where we predict they will do most good, and prevents stupid policy (like building in areas which are predicted to be increasingly prone to catastrophic flooding) then I am all for it. But if "interrogate climate modelling" means drilling down into the data to find deeper meaning, then I fear some fundamental misunderstanding of what a climate model is and isn't, has occurred.

I hope by now, if you have made it this far, you recognise that a framework to respond to climate change relies on social scientists just as much as it does on physical scientists (and that mathematicians, while they have an essential role in developing and verifying models, are of limited use when it comes to applying them in the real world).

We live (and continue to live, we hope) in a world of people. If you don't understand people, you can't build effective policy.    

Can you hear me?

2016 – 2017: Buildings (Innovation)

The main thing I learned, which is unsurprising, is that innovation projects are a lot harder to run than research projects. For a start, if a research project goes wrong, you can usually find a way to bring it back on track. That's a lot harder with innovation, where a lot of money can get spent before problems become obvious.

Then there's the commercialization problem. A technically successful project doesn't mean you've innovated. Without a route to market, new stuff just sits in the innovator's shed. To change the world, we need new things which sell.

So, building on my previous work, let's imagine that a couple of million people have used thin wall insulation, but more people can't be arsed, and nobody has a Heat-Pump because everyone has gas, and It. Just. Works. How do you get them off gas? Policy people, because they see everything in terms of policy levers, think you just need to find the right lever to pull. Maybe we can innovate to reduce the cost of Heat-Pumps (this doesn't work - nothing is simpler than a gas boiler, because as a Professor of Buildings once told me, a gas boiler is just a tube with a flame on the end. It's that simple). OK. So we can subsidise people to buy Heat-Pumps. Well, yes, but that's horrendously expensive and only rich people bother, so you are subsidising the heating bills of rich people. OK. Maybe we ban gas? Sure, I say, go ahead. Ban gas.

Energy-as-a-service (bear with my here) completely re-imagines (yeah, I said "re-imagines", so what?) energy retail. Or, put another way. Imagine I can put a small box in your house that controls heating, individually, in every room in your house, and you can programme it with you iPhone. For a fixed monthly cost (just like your mobile contract) you get whatever heating pattern you specify (just like your phone contract, the more minutes you buy -- in this case, warm hours -- the more it costs). If the boiler breaks that isn't your problem. Your provider has to fix it.

Now maybe you are tech-head. You want PV on your roof, a Tesla PowerWall in your cellar, a zero-carbon heating system and a complex low-carbon energy tariff which turns of your freezer for 15 minutes when the power price spikes. Maybe. But most people don't, and don't want to live with that level of complexity. I mean, I live and breath this stuff and I don't want that level of complexity.

In an energy-as-a-service world all those problems go away. Insulation? The service provider installs it if it saves them money (because they pay for the heating, you are paying a fixed price). Complex energy tariffs, batteries and PV? If they make commercial sense, your service provider gives them to you for free. (But they take a cut of the profit they make, of course). When you finally buy that Tesla, the box automatically charges it for you when power price is low. It's a win-win.

And if the builder who fits the insulation, the heat-pump, the batter, messes it up? Not your problem. Your service provider has to fix it, and they fit the bill. So they only employ people who do a good job.

So, we can build the box. The box can even measure how leaky your home is, so the service provider knows what monthly price to quote you. The tech to insulate your house and make it zero carbon exists (Those good builders who do a great job? Yeah, I'm afraid they don't exist yet. But they can learn).

Oh, we tested this stuff. We gave people a free iPad and 24/7 emergency support in case any of it went wrong. People love it. I think we did 25, and 23 of those 25 never wanted it taken out when the trial finished. 94% success rate? New stuff never does that well.

The problem? No idea how to roll out the first 1 million boxes. When people have got the box they won't want to go back. But how do you sell a new product to people when nobody has it, and you can't explain why it's so great?

So there we are. Great tech exists. People will love it, once they get it. It can change the world. But how do we get it to market?

Fascination

2014 – 2016: Buildings (Research)

The UK has a very heterogeneous building stock (i.e. lots of different sorts of building, designed and built in many different ways, and altered in many different ways since originally built), and it’s a very old building stock at that. Over 7 million homes without a cavity wall! We have a very high penetration of one sort of heating system (gas). This makes elimination of fossil fuels extraordinarily difficult in buildings because electric heating is expensive and impractical (we’d need about 10x more power stations to heat our buildings in the winter, but most of these power stations would only need to generate power for 5 – 10 days a year, which makes them a little … uneconomical.)

But there are solutions. Some research I kicked off (yep, I done a thing) showed that a ‘thin’ layer of insulation delivers most of the benefits of traditional solid-wall insulation (i.e. 4-5 inches of battens, insulation and plasterboard) at a fraction of the price.

So there you have it. Insulate those 7 million old buildings, plus any poorly performing more modern buildings, with a couple of centimetres of insulation, and you've already massively reduced heat-demand across the UK housing stock. The costs of installing a zero-carbon heating system (e.g. a heat-pump) are massively reduced. Result!

Who can I be now?

So, a conversation got me thinking. My new role is hardly the pivot Bowie made when he abandoned Glam Rock (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs) for Plastic Soul (Young Americans). 

As Alexis Petridis put it, “just how influential Young Americans was didn’t become fully apparent for another decade… And Bowie made the transition seem effortless”. 

(Though personally I find the transition from that to “Station to Station” to be an even more remarkable evolution)

I don’t imagine a stint as on climate science will have quite the impact that either of those albums had (and we haven’t even got to Low yet…) On the other hand, I’m ingesting significantly less cocaine than Bowie was during this period. Which is good, as we need to save up for a new kitchen.

Yeah. So, 6 years, 3-and-a-half jobs, a lot learned. I’m not going to talk about what I did (who cares?) but what I learned, which is relevant to anyone interested in climate change, particularly from a UK perspective (though doubtless some of this applies elsewhere, too). I'm going to send a version of this article as an email to my mother and she'll have to pretend to be interested...

Real Life. Ish.

It's just about possible that someone reads this blog to find out what I am up to. Seems rather unlikely but not outside the bounds of possibility.

So, Kate, Fergus and I are living on Columbia Road in Shoreditch. It's a great spot, offering easy access to the Flower Market, Brick Lane, Broadway Market & London Field (inc. lido), Kingsland Road (yum yum Viet Grill yum yum), Hoxton Square (including The White Cube) and the city.

I am working at DECC, in a vaguely scienceish role. I no longer travel the world and engage in fruitless negotiations. At work I am particularly interested how the electricity system fits together, and how it will fit together in future. Precisely what will the mix of carbon capture (if any), nuclear (if any) and renewables be, how will it all be balanced, will electricity storage (how do you do this at scale - we don't know) play a role, what will that role be, and how will smart meters, smart grid and, well, a smart system work? And what should government be doing (both in terms of innovation support, and policy) to make it happen.

It's one thing to come up with a successful pathway using the 2050 calculator (and you really should do this), it's quite another to make that pathway happen. Particular as you don't know what technologies will be available and what they will cost in 2020, let alone 2050. The answer probably is not to build very large amounts of wind power as this might turn out to be a very expensive and unreliable way of decarbonising the electricity sector. On the other hand, if wind becomes significantly cheaper, and a reliable (and cheap) way of dealing with times when the wind doesn't blow (or blows less than needed) then wind could produce a very large fraction of the UK's electricity demand. Indeed, if you are pretty bullish you can find a route to zero-carbon electricity in the UK that relies almost entirely on wind and foregoes the need to build any nuclear or carbon capture (CCS) plant. However, the question remains (and here you have to read the small print - If there are five cold, almost windless, winter days in 2050, then up to 56 GW of backup generation capacity will be required to ensure that electricity is always available. ) - how do you back it up?

There are no simple answers to these questions. Or if there are, I'm not aware of them.

So that's me.

Kate is working for an NGO that blackmails big companies into reporting their GHG emissions.

Fergus is one (and 6 days), in a nursery 3 days a week, is growing rapidly and is beginning to talk. He can say "yum yum", "bye bye", "no" and "daddy" though his pronunciation is a little off. And he refuses to address Kate as anything other than "daddy". He does this deliberately and then laughs when we try to correct him.

You are welcome to visit. We have 5 kinds of tea in the house and a new coffee machine.

Well, he did ask

Colin wondered (by text message).

My response to his wondering is as follows :

There are a number of things one could do to impact on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

One is to couple carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology with biomass. This enables you to remove CO2 from the air (using a plant) and capture CO2 (by burning the plant in a CCS ... er ... plant). This has been discussed. It requires you to be able to produce, in a sustainable manner, a lot of biomass.

Cquestrate have a rather novel method, which doesn't act on the atmosphere directly, but rather on the ocean. You can contribute to the development of this idea, since it is open source.

Air Fuel Synthesis have a rather different idea.

Cquestrate and AFS both require one to be able to generate a very large amount of energy in a way that does not emit large amounts of CO2.

2050 pathway : How to decarbonise the UK

I've been playing with the DECC tool (I can do this at work because it's my job). I have decarbonised the UK. Can you?

2050 pathway

Promises, promises

I did promise, back in Copenhagen, that I'd share my thoughts on what actually happened, once I'd moved job. It has taken longer than expected, but I have moved job.

I'll try to post something concise, novel and interesting later this week.

Post-Kyoto negotiations : The Bali Roadmap

So excited am I that Juliet chose to make a comment on the blog (the first in goodness knows how long) I've decided to celebrate by presenting two postings in one day. Another good reason for doing this is that I then don't have to justify, over and over, my ridiculous trip to a beachy paradise in the name of climate change.

So, what is the Bali Roadmap (I think it's now called the Bali Action Plan, to be precise)? Well, this is the Bali Action Plan.

Fine. What does that mean?

Historically this is a slow process. COP 1* met in Berlin in 1995. The Convention had already been signed by many countries but this COP recognised that, as it stood, the Convention alone could not solve the problem of Climate Change. It dealt with general principles rather than specific actions. "The Berlin Mandate" called for parties (i.e. countries) to find a way to deliver something under the Convention to solve (or at least start to solve) the problem.

2 years later, at Kyoto, the Kyoto Protocol was came into being. The Protocol set up a number of principles include specific targets for emissions reductions during the period 2008 - 2012. The Protocol was not designed to expire after this date but it did not specify what action would occur after this date. It is a commonly held misconception (spread by some, but by no means all, Americans, and by many others) that China and India do not have obligations under this Protocol. The do not have an emissions reduction target for 2008 - 2012. However they do have obligations to continue to do what they signed up for under the Convention (see Article 10 of the Protocol). Furthermore, since the Protocol only commits parties to quantified emissions reductions until the end of 2012, a second phase of Kyoto (i.e. action "post-2012") could include either more parties joining Annex I (the parties that take hard cuts) or additional/new/different commitments by non-Annex I parties.

It is my personal opinion that, had the US joined Kyoto, they would now be in a far stronger position to negotiate with non-Annex I countries, particularly big emitters like China, Mexico, Brazil and South Korea. I shall ignore India for the time being, because although are a large country, their per capita emissions are so low that it seems unlikely they will take an hard cuts any time soon.

Enough of personal opinion (for the time being).

The drafting of the Kyoto Protocol was not, in itself, significant. It required ratification by the parties. At COP 6, in 2000, in The Hague, negotiations on ratification broke down. By COP 6 bis
the following year President Bush had already indicated that he wasn't going to support US ratification (though to be fair, even if he had supported ratification it would likely have been impossible to persuade the US Senate to follow suit). The EU and Japan, as well as others, did ratify, but the Protocol could not come into force until sufficient numbers of parties, including a significant proportion on Annex I parties, ratified. In effect this meant that until Russia ratified, the Protocol was stalled.

Russia finally ratified in 2005 and the Protocol was then, for all intents and purposes, alive. So it only took 10 years from the text of the Berlin Mandate, to actually getting an emissions reductions treaty up and going. In that 10 years emissions globally increased significantly, and the world's largest emitter of GHGs decided not to join in.

That brings us, via 4 rather technical COPs, to Montreal in 2005. In Montreal the UK played a particularly significant role, in the role of President of both the EU and the G8. In essence Montreal started a discussion that could lead to a negotiation that could lead to future commitments. At Montreal parties eventually committed to looking not just at what Annex I (i.e. developed) parties can do, but also what all parties can do to enhance the Convention (code for talking about what non-Annex I (developing) countries can do.

Two years after Montreal (slow process, right) Bali gives us a mandate to negotiate over the next 2 years (!) in order to deliver a new, long-term goal for emissions reductions that will require contributions from both Annex I and non-Annex I countries. The principle of common but differentiated responsibilities is still enshrined in the text of this Action Plan, which means that non-Annex I countries will not (in the first instance, by which I mean 2013) have emissions reductions targets. What precisely this all means is up for negotiation. As I've written elsewhere

... in the short term what we are going to see is a growth in Chinese and Indian emissions, and hopefully a decrease in Annex I emissions.

The plan would be that

i) Annex I takes deep cuts from 2013 onwards.

ii) India and China (and all other developing countries, or at least significant ones) do more to improve energy efficiency, so that their emissions growth is significantly lower than predicted

iii) Annex I contribute to ii) with technical and financial support

iv) Eventually China, then later India, enter into full emissions reductions commitments

The devil is in the detail, of course, which is why the negotiations over the next two years are so important.

What level of cuts do we take in i)? And how is that cut divided up? What level of reductions will Japan sign up to, vs. US, vs. EU?

What will China and India (and Mexico, Korea, Brazil etc.) do in ii)? And how do we monitor it? And how do we hold them to doing it?

How do we support ii) through iii)? To what level? What level of support in iii) is tied to ii)? i.e. will we end up in a stupid argument where we say they aren't doing ii) and they say that's because we didn't give enough support under iii)?

On iv), when?

Don't forget that the average Chinese emits about 1/5th of what the average American emits. But also don't forget that there are 1.3 billion of them.



A lot of these issues would be easier to deal with had the USA stuck with Kyoto. Having made cuts it would now be in a stronger negotiating position. As it is, China (and particularly India, who have very low per capita emissions) are saying to the US "You caused this problem. You move first. Once we see you move we will consider moving"

So that's the reality.

There is a potential way forward, which is sectoral agreements. We could look at particular sectors, like manufacturing in China and India, and include them in a global reduction agreement, while letting the electricity consumption for, say, domestic purposes, increase. Sectoral agreements are complex, and I'm no expert, but I expect to see this sort of thing being talked about over the next two years.

Does that help?

* Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

Promotion

The not particularly exciting news is that I was promoted to Senior Scientific Officer last week.

What I am up to?

Incidentally, if you were wondering what I was up to, the Summary for Policy Makers of the 4th report of Working Group to the IPCC (pdf file) may assist. The words "across different economic sectors" on page two are mine, I think. And there are a few commas in there that owe their existence to me.

I'm probably not allowed to say anything political about the report, but I can say that all the delegates and authors seemed pretty happy when it was finished off on Friday morning, which implies (to me, at least) that we got a good report, the full text of which will be online later this year.

Off to Bonn tomorrow, for UNFCCC negotiations. Unlike the IPCC negotiations, which are basically scientific and technical in nature, the UNFCCC process is political. Should make for an interesting two weeks.

Working for the man

Hello

In Bangkok at IPCC Working Group 3 meeting to finalise the third volume of the 4th Assessment report (Full WG1 report and WG2 summary are already out). It's 12:40am and we are still arguing about content. Due to close at 2am. We won't finish the report tonight. In fact, I don't imagine we won't get much, if any, sleep tomorrow. Discussions expand to fill the space available to them, and we don't have to finish until Friday morning.

Bangkok is a cool city. I have met all 13 million citizens yet and I've only seen a small fraction of the city (and I doubt I'll see much more, stuck in this conference hall as I am) but I'd say it's pretty good. Lots of Buddas.

Don't ask me how I fell into the boat.

Working on a Saturday

Hello

Long time no see. How are you? Me, I'm peachy. /Completely/ snowed under, of course. Well, today's Greenhouse Gas Inventory Expert is a busy man. You know how it is, statitistical releases, submissions to the UN and EU, audits, reviews, questions... I hardly know where to start and when to stop. Oh, but I do blather on, don't I?

Well, it's been lovely bumping into you again. We must have that drink sometime, mustn't we?

Ta ta.

Not dead. Yet.

The lack of recent activity round here has nothing, really, to do with our engagement. I mean, Kate and I have been doing fun things(TM) but this hasn't taken my away for long enough to excuse the lack of e-mail and journalism of late. Rather, I've been sitting in front of a computer all day, every day, at work, and it isn't an inspiring setting to wax lyrical about things of minor interest.

So what has happened? Well, life goes on and our (UK) GHG emissions have gone down. Or rather, they went down by 3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent or so between 2004 and 2005. Which was nice.

Outside of work it is snowy, there are lovely beer festivals, exciting parties and fun games. I like Puerto Rico.

Oh, and England won two cricket matches, which was perhaps the most remarkable thing of all.

No date yet. We aren't talking about that kind of thing for a while, do don't ask.

Greetings from Geneva. I'm afraid I have nothing to say of interest, unless you were particularly interested in Greenhouse Gas Inventory Guidelines. If you are particularly interested in Geenhouse Gas Inventory Guidelines, you are probably here. It's easy to check if you are in Geneva. If there's a big lake on one side, big mountains on the other side, and every second person works for the UN, the yup, it's Geneva.