AGU 2014 – Day 4

AGU Fall MeetingThe interview insanity continued today with another long round of interviews with some great people. So again I wasn’t able to attend any sessions for this day.

Though I do know that John Cook was present for the talk Scientists Are from Mars, Laypeople Are from Venus: An Evidence-Based Approach to Consensus Messaging. It was a great talk summarizing the science behind consensus messaging and how effective it is.

There was also the talk Biases in the instrumental temperature record: the policy and communications context by Kevin Cowtan. A great talk about the work Cowtan did on extending the surface temperature record into regions where we don’t have a lot of temperature stations. The work of Cowtan and Way showed some interesting results and basically showed that there’s a cool bias in current temperature records. With the correction they did the so-called hiatus is almost gone from the temperature record.

During the evening I went to the screening of The Merchants of Doubt. Lovely documentary with good messaging that is delivered with some very memorable moments. Well worth watching if you like Naomi Oreskes’ Merchants of Doubt or Michael Mann’s book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.

I also had interesting chat with Patrick Michaels from the CATO institute about their poster session. He was kind enough to let me record our chat so that I could talk with him without the constant need for taking notes. When I’m back there’s more than enough material for an interesting article about what we talked about.

Today was also the last day of filming at AGU which means that I’m free to move about tomorrow. I’m going to visit as many talks as possible and seriously explore the exhibit and poster hall. Just to make the most of the last bit of time I have before I leave on Saturday.

Collin Maessen is the founder and editor of Real Skeptic and a proponent of scientific skepticism. For his content he uses the most up to date and best research as possible. Where necessary consulting or collaborating with scientists.