For the first day I don’t have a lot to report about the happenings at AGU 2014. Unfortunately I spent the entire morning in an interview room and during the afternoon I was at Berkeley for another interview. Though I did catch a few tidbits in the hallways about interesting talks that happened at AGU.

The first one I heard about was Frontier’s Of Geophysics Lecture, Presented by Jeffrey Sachs. I’ll be watching it myself via the virtual options AGU offers when I’m back home.

Another interesting presentation that I missed was Richard Alley talking about abrupt climate change tipping points. I heard that there wasn’t anything new in the talk but that Richard Alley made it a great talk.

Kevin Trenberth had a good talk named How Does Drought Change With Climate Change. He critiqued the recent NOAA report on droughts really well. He explained that the NOAA report didn’t contain anything new. As droughts are always the result of natural conditions, but are then intensified by human influences, and NOAA totally neglected to mention this.

I did luck out during the small breaks between interviews and bumped into a lot of people. I had for example a short chat with Scott Mandia who I ran into. Encountered the good folks from the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund and The Union of Concerned Scientists. Of course I met a whole cadre of scientists and Skeptical Science members. A lot of these great folks were willing to be interviewed by me for videos that I have in production.

I did have the honour of attending the Skeptical Science Shindig in the evening. A little gathering of scientists, science communicators, and friends at Rob Honeycutt’s place. He was a lovely host and it gave me the chance to talk to most of the people I bumped into. The AGU Fall Meeting is a great place to meet scientists and science proponents for networking.