Reporting from #AGU15

I’m in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union convention and I will be reporting from here all week. Postings may be a bit erratic, as I have to juggle attendance and time for writing, but I will be live Tweeting regularly from my Twitter feed from the sessions. https://twitter.com/wattsupwiththat

The headlines here have already been humorous.

Right, if natural variation kicks in I’m sure we’ll see “we did it!” as the subsequent headline.

One of the sessions I will be attending will be this one from Dr. MIchael Mann:

U13A-02: If You See Something, Say Something…More

Scientists have a collective ethical obligation to communicate the implications of their science and to communicate it as accurately and fully as possible. Nowhere is that obligation more profound than in areas of research, like climate change, where the stakes are so great, and where societal decision-making demands the most accurate assessments of risk. If scientists remain on the sidelines, they insure that others with an axe to grind will fill the void, game the process of risk assessment, and insure sub-optimal policy decision-making. But simple participation is not adequate either. Scientists, when they communicate climate change risk, must resist the temptation to downplay high-risk and high-cost scenarios in an effort simply to avoid criticism by contrarians. Otherwise, the net affect is the same, with bad faith actors achieving their goal of minimizing the emphasis placed on mitigation efforts in the policymaking process. We will discuss some examples including the critically important case of ice sheet collapse and sea level rise.

That promises to be entertaining if nothing else.

These also look curious:

OS43B-05: Global Warming ‘Pause’ – Oceans Reshuffle Heat

• Despite the fact that greenhouse gases are still increasing and all other indicators show warming-related change (+0.0064 °C/year since 1880 or +0.0077 °C/year during 1993-2002), surface temperatures stopped climbing steadily during the past decade at a rate of +0.0010 °C/year from 2003 to 2012. We show that in recent years, the heat was being trapped in the subsurface waters of the western Pacific and eastern Indian oceans between 100 and 300 m. The movement of warm Pacific water below the surface, also related to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation climatic pattern, temporarily affected surface temperatures and accounted for the global cooling trend in surface temperature. With the Pacific Decadal Oscillation possibly changing to a warm phase, it is likely that the oceans will drive a major surge in global surface warming sometime in the next decade or two.Reference: Nieves, V., Willis, J. K., and Patzert, W. C. (2015). Recent hiatus caused by decadal shift in Indo-Pacific heating. Science, aaa4521.

BTW you can watch this also, as it will be part of the AGU on Demand streaming video:

https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm15/meetingapp.cgi/Session/9143

To watch, you have to register here: http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2015/virtual-options/

I’m not even sure this one [below] is worth attending, as we all know it will be the same set of rants we’ve all heard before. There’s likely no science in this, just the usual talking points:

U13A-03: Reticence, Accuracy and Efficacy 

• James Hansen has cautioned the scientific community against “reticence,” by which he means a reluctance to speak in public about the threat of climate change. This may contribute to social inaction, with the result that society fails to respond appropriately to threats that are well understood scientifically. Against this, others have warned against the dangers of “crying wolf,” suggesting that reticence protects scientific credibility.We argue that both these positions are missing an important point: that reticence is not only a matter of style but also of substance. In previous work, Bysse et al. (2013) showed that scientific projections of key indicators of climate change have been skewed towards the low end of actual events, suggesting a bias in scientific work. More recently, we have shown that scientific efforts to be responsive to contrarian challenges have led scientists to adopt the terminology of a “pause” or “hiatus” in climate warming, despite the lack of evidence to support such a conclusion (Lewandowsky et al., 2015a. 2015b). In the former case, scientific conservatism has led to under-estimation of climate related changes. In the latter case, the use of misleading terminology has perpetuated scientific misunderstanding and hindered effective communication.Scientific communication should embody two equally important goals: 1) accuracy in communicating scientific information and 2) efficacy in expressing what that information means. Scientists should strive to be neither conservative nor adventurous but to be accurate, and to communicate that accurate information effectively.

I do find it curious thought that Lew is listed as being with UWA. I wonder if his Bristol gig went sour. Or it could simply be that he’s so busy finding moon landing deniers among the climate skeptics that he didn’t update his AGU profile. Anything is possible.

Here is what I’m presenting at AGU on Thursday, December 17th, at 1:40PM:

I’ll have a detailed post regarding my session that will publish on Thursday. I think it will be worth everyones time to mark their calendar to have a look.

Thanks again to everyone who helped get me here.