What with holiday travel, and various other commitments, we’ve missed a few interesting stories over the last week or so.
First off, AGU has posted highlights from this year’s meeting – mainly the keynote lectures, and there are a few interesting presentations for instance from Tim Palmer on how to move climate modelling forward, Ellen Mosley-Thompson on the ice records, and David Hodell on abrupt climate change during the last deglaciation. (We should really have a ‘videos’ page where we can post these links more permanently – all suggestions for other videos to be placed there can be made in the comments).
More relevant for scientist readers might be Michael Oppenheimer’s talk on the science/policy interface and what scientists can usefully do, in the first Stephen Schneider Lecture. There was a wealth of coverage on AGU in general, and for those with patience, looking through the twitter feeds with #agu10 shows up a lot of interesting commentary from both scientists and journalists. Skeptical Science and Steve Easterbrook also have good round ups. [edited]
Second, there was a great front page piece in the New York Times by Justin Gillis on the Keeling curve – and the role that Dave Keeling’s son, Ralph, is playing in continuing his father’s groundbreaking work. Gillis had a few follow-up blogs that are also worth reading. We spend a lot of time criticising media descriptions on climate change, so it’s quite pleasing to be praising a high profile story instead.
Finally, something new. Miloslav Nic has put together a beta version of an interactive guide to IPCC AR4, with clickable references, cited author (for instance, all the Schneiders) and journal searches. This should be a very useful resource and hopefully something IPCC can adopt for themselves in the next report.
Back to normal posting soon….