I was in Edinburgh last night for a public lecture by Gabriele Hegerl. Hegerl, some of you may remember, is a climatologist and she appears briefly in the Hockey Stick Illusion as a witness at the NAS panel hearings.
The lecture was frankly rather disappointing, being pitched at an introductory level, and being largely a run through of the standard AGW talking points. That said, there were a few issues that I noted down as being of interest.
The first of these was when, early on in the talk, she said that the IPCC acknowledges different sides to scientific debate but that disputes are resolved, often by the author teams taking a position on the debate. As I understand it this is what happens, but it is against the guiding principles of the IPCC.
Glaciergate got a brief mention. Hegerl said in essence that Fred Pearce has misheard the number, which is not the way I remember the story at all. She also said that the figure SPM was correct in the SPM but the figure was wrong in the chapter. I hadn't heard this before.
Climategate was mentioned extremely briefly - there was an overwhelming sense of "moving swiftly on", with just enough of a pause to say that the allegations emerging from the emails had been "largely refuted".
There was little discussion of paleo although the spaghettin graph (Fig 6.13) from AR4 was shown. Hegerl said that the medieval/modern differential wasn't of particular interest - the response of temperature to drivers was more important.
She said that sceptics were "stupid" and that she wished we asked more intelligent questions.
[Updated to correct the nuance on what was said about Glaciergate]