I very much enjoyed last night's lecture by Rob Wilson and it was good to have a couple of chats with him, both before and after the talk. I found him both charming and very engaging. He even gave my own lecture a plug, which was very kind.

Although aimed at a lay audience, Rob managed to squeeze a lot of science into the talk, and I particularly enjoyed the bits about non-climatological uses of tree rings, which is not an area I knew much about.

My abiding impression was one of balance - this wasn't a standard "we're all going to fry" talk, but a much more nuanced look at the field. There was discussion of some of the difficulties of standardisation of tree ring series and the discrepancies between models and paleo work, which I felt left the listener with a reasonable impression the science not being settled.

There was one nice moment where we were shown the AR4 spaghetti graph, which Rob said "could lead you to conclude that current temperatures are unprecedented", or words to that effect. I thought this was a very considered way of putting it and I asked him about his choice of words in the Q&A session. He said that he did think that the IPCC's 66-90% certainty overstated things. 50:50 was mentioned as a possibility.

Another bit that made me laugh was when he talked about the equipment needed to core trees and showed everyone a tree corer. It was hard not to be reminded of the "heavy lifting" equipment that some people in the field have claimed is required for this kind of thing.

Rob's own work involves trying to create a long pine chronology for Scotland - I've often wondered why one hears so little of tree ring series from this part of the world, given that the northern tree line is within fairly easy reach of major population centres. Rob reckons an 8000 year chronology is possible, although a long way off. It was amusing to hear that sampling work has to stop in the summer so as not to disturb the tourists. It must require a certain dedication to one's science to wade around in Scottish lochs outwith the summer months.