Here a few of the videos of the named lectures from last week that are worth watching. There are loads more videos from selected sessions on the AGU Virtual Meeting site (the AGU YouTube channel has quite a lot more from past meetings too).
All well worth the time.
Charney Lecture: Drew Shindell “Mitigating Near-Term Climate Change While Advancing Human Development”
Nye Lecture: Elizabeth Morris: “Hot Ice and Wondrous Strange Snow: Three-Phase Mixtures or Something More?”
Sagan Lecture: Piers Sellers “The Race to Understand a Changing Planet”
Schneider Lecture: Warren Washington: “The Transformation of Climate Models to Earth System Models and their Role in Policy Development and Decision Support”
Tyndall Lecture: (Our very own) Ray Pierrehumbert: “Successful Predictions”
If there are any other standouts in the rest of the videos, please bring them up in the comments.
#50 Are you proposing that we reject all solutions that are not biased on the reduction of the burning fossil fuels. That rejects carbon sequestration, and cap and trade.
Do I understand you correctly?
#50 I am not sure I understand. Carbon sequestration does not involve a reduction in the burning of fossil fuels. So, according to your logic, it seems that carbon sequestration technology could not be part of the solution. Carbon sequestration technology addresses the levels of atmospheric CO2, but it does not reduce the burning of fossil fuels.
> Carbon sequestration
That’s like fusion — they hope to have it working soon.
Unless I missed a report from AGU on success.
Anything this year?
Off topic again.
50 Hank asked, “If we had been burning _half_ as much fossil fuel all along — would there be a problem now?”
Well, at current CO2 concentrations half gets absorbed now, but with 1/2 the emissions the percentage of CO2 in the atmosphere would seriously decline and the absorbed portion would similarly decline.
Would that result in 50% absorbtion at the lower rate? Dunno, but the resulting train wreck would probably be at half speed or a bit slower. My guess is it would be less entertaining to watch, but it’s the same sort of video…
Damn those 3 hour flicks that give the Hero extra time to Save The Day….
I am hoping one of the modelers has some facts beyond opinion on that what-if. I doubt the science fiction fans can come up with the money to model it.
What if the fossil carbon that industrialization burned had never exceeded the capacity of the natural world to use it rapidly, so it wouldn’t build up in the atmosphere and ocean?
Or — oh, wait — does that “half” number just mean the CO2 goes into the oceans, not into photosynthesis? I suppose (sigh) that’s more likely — and that wouldn’t do much good in the long run.)
I’m hoping those who were at the AGU have more to say.
#53 Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS)has a current capacity of 500,000+ tons of CO2 per year. AR5 called BECCS a key technology for for reaching low CO2 atmospheric concentration targets. Estimated by then Royal Society to have the potential reduce CO2 up to 150 PPM. BECCS is considered to be a mature technology with no practical barriers to introduction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bio-energy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage
BECCS is way way ahead of fusion.
Does seem off topic. But we are discussing the whether the notion that protesting fossil fuel burning is our only hope is f**cked or not.
Yearly for quite a long while, I complete the same relatively resultsless search efforts: attempts to find transcripts of AGU papers.
I greatly appreciate sites like raypierre’s faculty site’s publications links page.
For AGU itself, perhaps there might be some kind of single-visit cookie, a permission to download a paper during a finite time. In the legal profession there is one website with which I am familiar which provides such temporary access token-cookies bypassing the age-old US courts system’s pay-by-the-page access to new court decisions; the paywall system the courts use is based on electronic data interchange, EDI, a download model developed thirty years ago. Modern court documents behind the current court paywall which begins with the letters ECF are unavailable except to privileged persons like attorneys party to the litigation.
If Agu would let some of its presenters offer temporary access without charge to download the transcript of specific, designated, important presentations, and similarly if some climate and geophysics journals could do what the ECF system is doing for researchers in contemporary law, by allowing temporary free access, there might be a lot more well informed people learning climate science and following new research in the Agu matrix of specialized fields related to climate. It’s too much of a professional society atmosphere closed to outsiders now, except for the assiduous few who follow the best blogs like RealClimate.
A31D-0062: Atmospheric Methane over the Arctic Ocean: Satellite Data
http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2012/eposters/eposter/a31d-0062/
http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2012/files/2012/11/AGU12ch4v2.pdf
Another compilation of his submission http://fallmeeting.agu.org/2012/files/2012/11/ePosterYurganov_rep.pdf
> Yurganov links
Do those contain anything new?
If so could someone familiar with it all summarize what’s new?
Has anything been published yet?
The Tyndall lecture was very nice, but I can’t believe Pierrehumbert attributed to Feynman the expression “not even wrong”, which was, of course, coined by Wolfgang Pauli.