Conference time of the year

There are a couple of large conferences coming up in the following month. The UN climate change conference COP18 in Quatar and the American Geophysical Union 45th Annual Fall Meeting in San Francisco. Like many others, I'm fairly sure that COP18 will little more than delegates from member countries politely agreeing to disagree on emission reduction targets. The AGU however has always attracted the worlds best earth and space scientists and I'm looking forward to this years talks more than ever. Incidentally, I had the opportunity of contributing a poster on some research I did earlier in the year, but exams and chemistry study in general got in the way as usual. Maybe next time...

I might link to one of my favourite AGU talks from past years though. This was from Richard B. Alley who takes you on a very interesting historical tour of carbon dioxide throughout the geological record. 4.6 billion years of Earths history gets condensed nicely into his 1 hour presentation which takes into account deep time, extinction events, the sun as a contributor to warming and the ice ages.

It was back in 2009 and he does a decent job of setting straight the mis-representations without making it the focus of the talk.

A bit heavy on the science at times, but hey.... either that, or more media circlejerk.

http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml