Saturday, July 6, 2013

Is Anthony Watts going to propose a Climate Disinformation Conference?


Anthony Watts is miffed at the AGU.   Some members of AGU organised an AGU Chapman Conference: Communicating Climate Science: A Historic Look to the Future.


Anthony Watts is self-aggrandising


Anthony isn't miffed that he missed an invitation to attend the Chapman conference.  No, not at all.  In fact from what he writes he heard about it in time to get there and learn something, if he'd wanted to.  What he's miffed about is that he didn't hear about it in time to get in his abstract for a presentation.  He writes as if it would have been a no-brainer that he'd be invited to present, if only he'd heard about it in time to put something together.  Talk about self-aggrandising!

On the one hand, unlike all the other presenters, Anthony doesn't have much of a publication record or a very good history of communication climate science (as opposed to anti-science).  On the other hand, if I recall correctly, he was mentioned once or twice at the conference, so you never know...

Here's what the Conference was about.  I'll let you mull over how Anthony Watts would have fitted in.  Would it be as a scholar?  A social scientist? A journalist?

The goal of this Chapman Conference is to bring together scholars, social scientists, and journalists to discuss both the history and recent advances in the understanding of climate science and how to communicate that science to policymakers, the media, and society. A research agenda of the conference will focus on the efficacy of scientific communication, with ideas on improved practices arising as an outcome from collaborations spawned at the conference.
This exploration will take place through: 1) discussions covering the history of climate science and successes and failures in communicating scientific ideas to the policy makers and public; 2) an assessment of where we are with respect to current knowledge of climate science and its communication and acceptance by society; 3) a comparison with experiences in other areas producing similar difficulties between scientific knowledge dissemination, societal acceptance of that knowledge, and governance.

In case any HotWhopper readers missed the live webcasts, here is a link to the videos.

Anthony is probably keeping an eagle eye on the AGU Chapman website looking for an opportunity to submit an abstract of his blog research.   Maybe a paper on the impact of different baselines on the global surface temperature record.

Any AGU member may propose to convene a Chapman Conference (though there is no guarantee of its acceptance). Watch out for a Climate Disinformation Conference coming your way soon :)


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