Estimating the global warming emissions of the LCAXVII conference: connecting flights matter.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conferences are an important element of scientific activity but also one of the major causes of environmental burden. In this conference report, we analyse the carbon footprint of the annual conference of the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment, as well as some of the potential ways to reduce it. The average emissions per participant are estimated to be 952 kg CO2eq, but with a large variability due to differences in travelled distance. Results indicate that studies should use distance-dependent flight emissions to increase the accuracy of the assessment. Connection flights are found to increase emissions up to 32 % compared with direct flights, due to the increased number of take-offs and landings. A method to calculate the ideal location is proposed, which can be used to identify unreasonably distant conference locations. Some of the measures taken to reduce the impact, such as meat-free menus, had a relatively minor contribution to emissions reductions, but could be important, as scientist advocating for the reduction of environmental burden should lead by example.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".