Posted on 11 April 2019 by BaerbelW

As the main post was getting too large and unwieldy quickly, I decided to break it up into one post per day. As each day becomes available, the previous post will link to it at the end.

Tuesday, April 9 - Taking in Posters and a press conference

On Tuesday I started my day roaming hall X4 where the poster only session "Science in tomorrow's classroom" (EOS1.3) provided lots of input and food for thought. One of the posters was put up by Pariphat Promduangsri, David Crookall, and Pimnutcha Promduangsri from France who had also presented in Monday's PICO-session. Their poster in spot X4.315 was about the importance of debriefing when including serious games as learning exercises. They had a game on their poster where people were encouraged to draw lines between various „Global Warming Causes and Consequences“ (GWCC). For a larger version click on the picture.

To see how the GWCC-game section of the poster had evolved during the day, click here.

As it fit my "schedule" I joined the press conference about monitoring the Earth from space: new findings (PC4) This wasn't related to climate but provided a wide range of topics where data collected by satellites helps to detect changes on Earth.

• Cornelius Senf talked about how forest disturbances (logging & natural events) can be seen from space. (related abstract)
• Francesco Casu talked about monitoring volcano deformation from space (related abstract)
• Lauren Biermann explained her new research about detecting macroplastics by satellite (related abstract)
• Torsten Neubert shared informatimon about lightning in the atmosphere and how difficult it is to measure (related abstract)

If you are interested to know more, you can watch the recording of the press conference here.

At 2pm I managed to grab a chair in room 0.49 where a session about "Climate tipping points, critical thresholds and ecosystem resilience" (CL4.16) was held. The very first presentation in the session was given by Stefan Rahmstorf from PIK, the Potsdam Institute for climate impacts research and it asked the question "Is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) approachinga tipping point?" The room was definitely too small to accomodate all the people who wanted to see it! CarbonBrief's Robert McSweeny shared a picture showing the packed room on Twitter. And to answer the incoming question, Stefan Rahmstorf thinks that it's fairly certain that the system is moving towards a tipping point but that we can't tell how long it will take to reach it.

I skipped the other talks in the session and roamed the conference center for a while, picking and chosing some posters to look at, deciding which 3 pictures in the photo competition I liked most (hard choice!) and finally went to poster hall X5 for PICO-session "Scientists, artists and the Earth: co-operating for a better planet" (EOS12.1) which was a bit of a mixed bag with the two most memorable short presentations being Frank Raes' "An artist and a climatologist reflect on humans and the Earth with thehelp of an IT developer." and George Sand Franca's "The process of creation of theatrical show for scientific divulgation".

Recap for Monday - Main Post - Recap for Wednesday