The American Meteorological Society wrapped up its annual meeting in the newly expanded Phoenix Convention Center with a week of perfect temperatures and blue skies.
More than 2,000 of the world’s leading atmospheric scientists were in town to discuss a broad range of weather and climate-related issues including hurricanes, climate change, space weather, drought, flash floods, 2008 weather highlights, atmospheric chemistry, observation systems, etc.
On Wednesday, author Chris Mooney was presented the 2009 Louis J. Battan Author’s Award by AMS for his book, Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming.
Chris' book was honored as “an accurate and comprehensive overview of the evolving debate on the impacts of global warming on hurricanes that illustrates the complexities of this significant scientific problem.”
He came to town a day earlier for a strategy meeting of the founders and leaders of Science Debate 2008, hosted by Lawrence Krauss at ASU. I joined them Tuesday afternoon and had the pleasure to sit between Chris and the utterly charming Sheril Kirshenbaum [right], who are coauthor
ing a new book due out this May, titled Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future.Chris was one of the dozen participants in the NSF-sponsored workshop that Judy Scotchmoor and I organized in 2006 that led to the formation of COPUS and the celebration of 2009 as the Year of Science.
Is that enough name-dropping for this post? People talk about 6 degrees of separation - I'm convinced that within the science community, it's really only a single degree. We are all closely connected.