A photo essay. What follows are a series of photos and comments that catalog my impressions of today.
As you may know, I’m attending the 2013 AGU Fall Meeting. After some hassle a couple of months ago, I was able to finally get a press pass:
![IMG_20131209_162335[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/img_20131209_1623351.jpg?quality=83)
It took me three weeks, but I persevered.
First, my video gear case and tripod:
![IMG_20131209_122932[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/img_20131209_1229321.jpg?quality=83)
During registration while waiting in line, some people recognized “WUWT” and I got a couple of dirty looks.
On my way to my first exhibit hall, I encountered this fellow:
![IMG_20131209_122143[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/img_20131209_1221431.jpg?quality=83)
I suppose his method works just as well as some of the geoengineering ideas to stop climate change being floated here.
This was the first sign I saw walking into Moscone West:
![IMG_20131209_122342[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/img_20131209_1223421.jpg?quality=83)
Sometimes climate scientist Richard Alley and an Open Mic at a Bar? I’d call that an Alley Ooops.
I assume he’ll be studying tipping points with James Hansen there? Maybe there will be dancing too.
Signs are big at this show, so is blogging apparently, though I’ve never heard of any of these.
![IMG_20131209_122711[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/img_20131209_1227111.jpg?quality=83)
Apparently they need sign ups.
![IMG_20131209_130857[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/img_20131209_1308571.jpg?quality=83)
My first session was the Ethics Workshop.
It addressed the lack of ethics in several hypothetical situations. But addressing the lack of people interested in ethical issues of science research might have been a better topic:
WUWT regular John Whitman was there and reports:
I was at this ethics session. The audience was divided into 4 groups. Each group was given Mickey Mouse (in my view) ethicaly hypothetical scenarios to evaluate and present to the other groups. My group had a plagiarism case.
Overall, it did give me the opportunity to see that the audience was not generally subjective in ethics.
If there is another ethics workshop like this one, I would decline attending on the basis that it did not deal with actual critique of ethic controversies in climate science.
Right after the ethics session, I ran into Kevin Trenberth in the hall, but he was too busy to talk, he ran off to the authors prep room to prep for his presentation. No chance for an interview.
Both Hansen and Trenberth are big this year:
![IMG_20131209_131005[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/img_20131209_1310051.jpg?quality=83)
![IMG_20131209_151710[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/img_20131209_1517101.jpg?quality=83)
Trenberth gets an award for climate communications? Nobody can explain this and it is a travesty that we can’t.
I hear plain English works best for communicating science.
![IMG_20131209_131350[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/img_20131209_1313501.jpg?quality=83)
This looks like a billboard that you’d see for ambulance chasing attorneys along the highway:
![IMG_20131209_131354[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/img_20131209_1313541.jpg?quality=83)
Some people protest against fossil fuels with their electric fossil fuel powered laptops. Irony impaired I suppose.
![IMG_20131209_145107[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/img_20131209_1451071.jpg?quality=83)
The thing that struck me most was the sheer size of this convention and the number of people attending…and almost everyone of them is doing it on the taxpayer’s dime.
Up next, the descent into poster normal science.
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“Facing Legal Attack About Your Science? Concerned You Might Be?”
Was Yoda giving the talk?
Nazi extremist-tippers movement hijacked the AGU I’d say. Only difference in the fellow with the “Repent” sign outside and the President on the sign inside is … location. Ha!
You are going to use lye soap to feel clean again.
Oh, man (no pun intended).
Gas sucks…ride a bus.
Nothing sums up the low-knowledge acolyte’s evangelical data-free belief.
Maybe some twisted version of this applies to Al Gores private jet usage: commercial airline CO2 sucks, use private jets.
“One-on-one Availability with An Attorney”
Words fail me… ;->
Oh, and note the wall mounted video surveillance camera aimed directly at “gas sucks” lady’s laptop. I wonder which three-letter organization is monitoring her online activities. Come to think of it, there must have been many such cameras scattered throughout the convention centre, eh?
You have my admiration Anthony, don’t thing I could stand being in a den of thieves.
Kumbaya, Esalen lives on in preparation of the fossil hippie Eucharist. You need a big phat gold chain, Tony. Lord knows, you deserve it.
Anthony: It sounds like many of the usual culprits are there. Borenstein put this cold record article out on the AP. I guess if it is not measured next to a heat exhaust it cannot be an oficial record.
http://news.yahoo.com/cold-dis-comfort-antarctica-set-record-135-8-231816344–politics.html
WASHINGTON (AP) — Feeling chilly? Here’s cold comfort: You could be in East Antarctica which new data says set a record for “soul-crushing” cold.
Try 135.8 degrees Fahrenheit below zero; that’s 93.2 degrees below zero Celsius, which sounds only slightly toastier. Better yet, don’t try it. That’s so cold scientists say it hurts to breathe. A new look at NASA satellite data revealed that Earth set a new record for coldest temperature recorded. It happened in August 2010 when it hit -135.8 degrees. Then on July 31 of this year, it came close again: -135.3 degrees. The old record had been -128.6 degrees, which is -89.2 degrees Celsius.
Ice scientist Ted Scambos at the National Snow and Ice Data Center said the new record is “50 degrees colder than anything that has ever been seen in Alaska or Siberia or certainly North Dakota.”
“It’s more like you’d see on Mars on a nice summer day in the poles,” Scambos said, from the American Geophysical Union scientific meeting in San Francisco Monday, where he announced the data. “I’m confident that these pockets are the coldest places on Earth.” However, it won’t be in the Guinness Book of World Records because these were satellite measured, not from thermometers, Scambos said.
“Thank God, I don’t know how exactly it feels,” Scambos said. But he said scientists do routinely make naked 100 degree below zero dashes outside in the South Pole, so people can survive that temperature for about three minutes.
Most of the time researchers need to breathe through a snorkel that brings air into the coat through a sleeve and warms it up “so you don’t inhale by accident” the cold air, Scambos said.
On Monday, the coldest U.S. temperature was a relatively balmy 27 degrees below zero Fahrenheit in Yellowstone, Wyo., said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of the private firm Weather Underground.
“If you want soul-crushing cold, you really have to go overseas,” Scambos said in a phone interview. “It’s just a whole other level of cold because on that cold plateau, conditions are perfect.”
Scambos said the air is dry, the ground chilly, the skies cloudless and cold air swoops down off a dome and gets trapped in a chilly lower spot “hugging the surface and sliding around.”
Just because one spot on Earth has set records for cold that has little to do with global warming because it is one spot in one place, said Waleed Abdalati, an ice scientist at the University of Colorado and NASA’s former chief scientist. Both Abdalati, who wasn’t part of the measurement team, and Scambos said this is likely an unusual random reading in a place that hasn’t been measured much before and could have been colder or hotter in the past and we wouldn’t know.
“It does speak to the range of conditions on this Earth, some of which we haven’t been able to observe,” Abdalati said.
Next time, don’t persevere. Your presence is not helpful.
[Reply: Actually, it was very helpful, “Ralph”. ~ mod.]
Hey lady in the last photo. I ride a bike. It runs on ‘gas’ and only gets around 70 miles on a full tank. I’m not losing sleep over it.
http://bit.ly/1gkRVQq
I am surprised you did not get a red strobe light ID in addtion to the “GISS map red” badge. I am certain some folks would have lobbied for that to more easily avoid you. LOL
Have fun Anthony !
Good for Anthony! He wasn’t afraid to step into the lion’s den.
I had to laugh at the pitiful appeal for eyeballs for their blogs [pic #6]. I’ve been following this debate since the 1990’s, and I didn’t recognize a single one of them.
They could add all those blogs together, and even if they doubled and squared their traffic, they wouldn’t reach nearly as many readers as WUWT.
Cut off the attendees’ taxpayer funding, and Anthony & John Whitman might be the only ones there! Those other folks need real jobs.
NBC, ABC, CNN, BBC….DBC (Deer Creek Broadcasting) puts them all to shame!
“Some people protest against fossil fuels with their electric fossil fuel powered laptops. Irony impaired I suppose.”
The student had a sign that promoted alternative transportation. “gas sucks; ride a bike”.
If you bike to school or work 5 miles on way, which is about what most people would think is not overdoing it, you would save 2/5 of a gallon of gas (assuming your normal car gets 25 mpg in the city). Converting gas to kwatt-h (x 34) and assuming your computer uses about 50 watts when its on, I figured that biking one day is worth 34 days of using your computer 8 h/day.
My macBook air uses about half of that, so I’m good for about 2 months…
By the way, do you have to get the permission of people when you take pictures and post that way? I’m just wondering.
REPLY: This woman was sitting in a commons area in the basement of Moscone south with a bunch of other people using laptops. This is a public place, no permission needed. Besides, she’s flaunting, she WANTS to be noticed. Besides, she’s already being photographed by the camera in the background.- Anthony
Those who are doing God’s work (of damning or saving) are beyond ethics.
We need to save the planet even if it means a religious war.
(My tongue is starting to spasm from being in my cheek)
Well I guess I am covered then, in my 20’s I rode 10miles one way to work and back each day for 2.5 years.
Pippen Kool says:
December 9, 2013 at 6:27 pm
But you missed out on her fossil fuel fridge and fossil fuel lighting and fossil fuel hot water system and fossil fuel washing machine, TV, oven,cooktop.central heating etc etc. I bet she doesn’t bike on a freezing cold day either.
Gas Sucks Ride a bike??
R U 4 Real?
I have run across idiots like that before. Ride a bike all week then drive a car to go skiing for one day in the mountains west of Denver….
with respect to the permissions issue. I’m a professional photog and although laws differ across borders the basic rule is that if you are in a public place, on public land than you are fair game. but if the photog is on public land and you are not, say in the privacy of your garden? You are still fair game.
The blurred lines come if you are both on private property, whoever owns it, then the individual being photographed, has the right to withhold their image providing that they are recognisable in the photograph.
I don’t know this Moscone place but I’m guessing that it’s a private place of business even if it has public areas. As such an individual could expect to be afforded certain privacy rights. I’d hate to give any crackpot greenie ideas but I’d think that they have a legal right to ask for an image which identifies them to be removed. ( that does not extend to an image of images which identify individuals ). There is no legal recourse unless there is a refusal to remove images which may or may not infringe someone’s rights.
REPLY: Moscone Center is the city’s convention center. It is a public facility. Thus, photos of anyone on the public city owned property is fair game. – Anthony
I bet that many of them think you are “just a child” while they are “emperors”….
(:<))
We might agree! Because you have clear vision…
“Gas sucks, ride a bike”
One wonders how the out-of-towners arrived at the convention. I don’t think James Hansen and Kevin Trenberth came in on a flying unicorn and fairy dust.
@ur momisugly Pippen — not ONE of those people in Anth-ny’s photos has a reasonable expectation of privacy in the locations they were in when photographed. You only reveal your ignorance by asking that question.
***************************
Anthony! YOU ARE MY HERO. What a guy. When I saw that case with “WUWT” boldly proclaimed on the side, I felt SO PROUD OF YOU.
Re: Alley — LAUGH — OUT — LOUD. His “dance” reminds me of Dickens’ description of that ultra-scumbag Uriah Heep’s slimy twisting and gyrating in David Copperfield. Heh, I think he was attempting a weird combination of The Hustle and The Macarena… . He should just sit down and shut up. His voice doesn’t sound like he’s a vocalist, either…. “Open mike… .” I think you’d better stay far away from that place, sounds veeerrry creepy.
And, ho, ho, ho, union man Hansen is going to promote, like, what — the Teamsters? A.F.C.I.O.?
Widdo Trenberth (Mr. Liar of the Year Award — “Climate Communication Prize” my eye) — wan awaaaaay. Hiding out. COWARD (that is, btw, what ALL liars are, at bottom).
Anthony, YOU ARE SO COOL to walk in there so manfully, head held high, making NO apologies for standing up for the truth.
(at the risk of people equating me with the man with the sign, head shake, Imprayingforyou.)
Take care, O Hero for Science Truth,
Janice
P.S. @ur momisugly Bike Girl — and on your metal rims, no doubt? Wearing a steel helmet, too, hm? Your hat looks like it’s made out of polyester… .
addendum to my previous post. if you simply ask someone politely if you may take their photo and they give permission? That image is your in perpetuity.
A.F.L.C.I.O. (as if I really care)