by Judith Curry

At the Conference for World Affairs, in Boulder Colorado.

This past week, I’ve been participating in the Conference on World Affairs. The panels I participated on are listed [here].

Today Kevin Trenberth and I participated in a panel entitled Climate Change: It’s About the Data. We each gave 15 minute presentations, then there was time for a few questions.

For some background on previous Curry versus Trenberth ‘matches’, see:

Our dueling papers on the Climate Null Hypothesis

Our parallel interviews on NPR

After our NPR interviews were aired, I received this in an email from Kevin:

We have got to stop “meeting” like this.

So it was interesting to have a face-to-face session.

Here are links to the ppt presentations:

Nothing new in my talk; I focused on the data, why scientists disagree, and emphasized that there was a lot of disagreement inside of the so-called 97%.

Trenberth’s slides don’t do justice to his presentation – it was forcefully delivered, evangelical even. About 40% of it was about politics.

A few things of interest that came out in the questions/discussion:

Trenberth was asked if he regarded me as a ‘denier’. He hemmed and hawed, and asked me if I regarded myself as a denier. I said I was a scientist, and regarded myself as included in the so-called 97%, whatever that means.

I said that I disagreed with about 85% of Trenberth’s presentation. I don’t have the energy to debunk it here, see my recent Congressional testimony

I said I regarded presentations like Trenberth’s to be propaganda

When Trenberth answered a question citing a bunch of ‘facts’, I said that there are very few facts in all this; there are incomplete and ambiguous observations, theories and hypotheses, and models that don’t work very well. Trenberth responded “That’s rubbish.”

The majority of the audience (an older audience, unfortunately few students) were in Trenberth’s court – not unsurprising given that this is Boulder. But there were a substantial number of people that seemed pretty hungry to sort out the scientific issues. Hopefully I made them all think, at least a little bit.

All in all, an interesting session. But the session was too short; only 50 minutes. Next time (hah!) we each need 30-40 minutes for a presentation, and then we should be questioned by Russ Roberts of EconTalk.