meeting Gavin

Gavin Schmidt of realclimate.org was a guest speaker at Univ. of Toronto yesterday. I went to his talk and got to meet him afterward. I described my possibly insane undertaking of the "faces of climate science" and he expressed interest. He picked out several faces from my faint b&w laser print of the top of the photo array. There was some question of why I include prominent 'skeptics' such as Sally Baliunas (I've got a plan in mind - to position the most often showcased skeptics in the sea of faces, in order of citation standings...)

Anyway it was very nice to get to meet Gavin in person. I'm still hard at work filling in my Excel collection of names, homepages and photo URLs. I plan to make a post to realclimate fairly soon inviting people there to check out my faces page (and the tabular text version) to get some feedback.

Tonight I worked on expanding first initials to full given names for a bit past the middle of the alphabet, then I checked on the stats and saw that I've hit 800 homepages and was at 699 photos (so I had to find a few more before turning in to get that nice round 700+).

One small detail to note - a blog entry will save this for posterity:

The original list of names of authors for IPCC AR4 wg I is online at:
http://www.cup.cam.ac.uk/resources/0521705967/4834_AR4WG1_AnnexII.pdf

Eli Rabbett extracted the names, numbered them, added short bio info to the first 11, and posted the list on his Rabbett Run blog at:
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2008/01/list-for-morano-like-john-hersey-eli.html

When I reached the name

KATZ, Robert
National Center for Atmospheric Research
USA

I ran into a wall. Even allowing that many NCAR scientists don't have a home page, there is just no trace online of any Robert Katz there. There is a Robert Katz
here who writes on interesting green themes related to population, but is not a climatologist.

I had already located Richard Katz of NCAR, homepage here, and I followed the link to his CV and searched for "IPCC", and sure enough, there near the bottom of page 2 it says:

2005 – 2007 Contributing Author, Chapter 11, WG I, IPCC 4th Assessment Report

The Annex II PDF file only lists "Robert" Katz, and no "Richard." Ah, ha!

So I claim this proves there is a CLERICAL ERROR in Annex II to AR4 WG I. Having thus documented my superior trivia dirt-digging skills, can I get one of those high-paying sinecure posts at a big denialist belief tank? Make me an offer, all you {Wholesome term} {Enterpise} Institutes!

Love,
BBS