Some first impressions from #AGU14

Mann, Cook, Nuccitelli get put off-site for their presentations

I spent Monday looking around at the sights on the opening day of AGU 2014. Before I get to that I want to give some thanks to some people. First of all I want to give thanks to my readers for their gracious assistance in getting me here via help with expenses, secondly I’d like to thank Joan Buhrman and Peter Weiss of AGU for their assistance in getting me set up with media passes and hearing assistance. They have been quite gracious.

That said, here are some of my first impressions of the conference. Number one it’s very large; thousands of people milling about going to different sessions and breakouts and halls it can be quite overwhelming just simply getting from point A to point B due to the volume of people. Along way I did spot some things of interest and I’ve taken some photographs which I’ll share below.

One thing that did strike me as different this year was this seems to be less emphasis on climate alarmism than their wares in years past. I’ve noted there’s less advertising for things like this session last year….

….in fact it seems to have been muted a bit….no mention of “attacks”:

….and there doesn’t seem to be any special session with the usual suspects on being “attacked” like last year:

Perhaps my report on it last year had something to do with it, once people saw how ridiculous and egomaniacal the entire session was. But then again, there was this item from Dr. Mann this year: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/14/hilarious-irony-michael-mann-to-give-lecture-on-professional-ethics-for-climate-scientists/  so I’m not completely convinced that AGU has dialed back, but there are encouraging signs.

For example, the whole John Cook/Dana Nuccitell Skeptical science social media attack dog universe seems to have been moved off-site to the Marriot Marquis hotel rather than be in the main buildings at Moscone Center:

The same thing seems to have happened to Chris Mooney, who is also presenting off-site…

Even Michael Mann has been relegated to the back forty:

So, there is encouraging signs that maybe the rhetoric is being put on the back shelf a bit, we shall see. I haven’t decided if I’ll even bother to go to any of these, as there’s nothing new. Maybe I’ll just show up to get a head count.

One other thing that struck me as different this year was the fact that the poster sessions seemed to have doubled in size over AGU 2013. There are now two halls, Moscone West, and Moscone main that have poster sessions. They were quite popular and well attended yesterday.

Though…it might have been due to the free beer provided by AGU:

Imagine the wailing if Heartland provided free alcohol at their ICCC conferences at sessions.

I looked at a number of posters yesterday many of which were dealing with carbon in the Arctic something that seemed is been missing last year released not as prominent. This year there were at least a half-dozen of not more posters just on Monday alone dealing with carbon soot in the Arctic one of the posters struck me as being quite profound because of the mapping of carbon deposition in southern Greenland as you can see in this photo below.

A close up showing the deposition pattern:

What was most interesting was that the author of this poster had no idea about the actual carbon set being seen at collecting in meltwater ponds on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet. I showed her this photo from one of my earlier blog posts, and she and another person standing there were just flabbergasted.

Of course images like this one at left showing water tumbling down a huge moulin are being held up with gloom and doom scenarios that say Greenland’s Ice is melting “faster than expected” and we’ll get six feet of sea level rise from it along with a 10-15°F temperature rise by the year 2100.

Perhaps. But, moulins have existed since Greenland had ice, they are just part of the natural landscape and processes. They aren’t “new” to our time.

One of the photos we don’t often get to see was also circulated in the email, by somebody who lives in Greenland and knows what this is really all about.

It’s a real eye opener:

Image from National Geographic online slide show – Photo: James Balog – click for more

I saw quite a bit of good science being presented at this conference I was especially impressed with this poster that had a caveat at the end, seen in the closeup.

“correlation does not equal causation” Hmmm, where have we heard that before?

I’ll have more reports later tonight or tomorrow from what I learn today.