by Judith Curry
A very interesting session yesterday, I now have links to the ppt presentations.
Richard Lindzen: Climate v. Climate Alarm [ACS-2011 lindzen]
Ross McKitrick: The influence of anthropogenic surface processes and inhomogeneities on gridded global climate data. [mckitrick_acs_august]
Bob Carter: The geological context of climate change as a basis for policy [carter acs]
Judith Curry: Climate Science and the Uncertainty Monster [uncertainty monster acs]
I don’t have a copy of Shaviv’s post, we are discussing his work in the context of the Cosmic Ray thread.
Peter Bonk will make available the podcasts within a few days.
JC reactions to session: I really enjoyed the diverse perspectives in this session, for a lawyer, an economist, and astrophysicist, a geologist, and two atmospheric scientists. It isn’t often that you get such diversity in a single session. I’m not sure what the chemists in the audience made of this, since several of the presentations were pretty technical.
With regards to the technology, it enabled people from 3 continents to participate in the session at no cost (other than the webinar fee). I definitely appreciate not having to travel for that (although I leave for Denver/Boulder later today). I found it a little bit disconcerting giving my presentation in this way, i don’t think my verbal presentation was up to my usual (moderate) standards. Although I think my slides were good, honed by comments from the Denizens :)
ACS Session on “Empowering Tomorrow’s Climate Super Heroes”
In the tradition of the AGU and AMS, the ACS had a session on science communication that looked “interesting,” WUWT has written a cynical post. But I doubt there was anything there that met the standards of the talks by Greg Craven at AGU and Kevin Trenberth at AMS.
Stephen Schneider Climate Change Symposium
Almost concurrently with the ACS meeting, the Stephen Schneider Climate Change Symposium was held in Boulder 25-27 August. The website for the Symposium is [here], along with the program and list of attendees and abstracts for the talks. The climate “glitterati” was well represented, with Nobelists and the media, with a letter from Al Gore who couldn’t attend.
I’ve googled to see what has been written on the actual symposium itself (not before the symposium), and I haven’t spotted much. Michael Tobis has a post on Uncertainty, Uncertainty, Uncertainty, which wonders why I am complaining about uncertainty treatment by the IPCC since so many talks at the Schneider Symposium were about uncertainty.
Well, an answer is provided by an email sent to a colleague that was forwarded to me, a brief anonymous excerpt:
I was disturbed at the way the words “risk”, “probability”, and “uncertainty” were used; almost as if they were synonyms.
Also, apparently my in press paper “Climate Science and the Uncertainty Monster” was mentioned.
In any event, I hope that we hear more about this Symposium from somebody, but with all the media people in attendance, I’m surprised we haven’t heard more.
Trying to beat down the uncertainty monster
I just spotted this over at skeptical science, looks like the uncertainty monster is upsetting people :) My paper “Climate Science and the Uncertainty Monster” is in press at the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, December issue, preprint should be ready before that.