@Paul A few times at live shows I I've sat 2m away from Adam Rutherford
One time he said "We won't be hearing any of that climate skeptic nonsense here"
That confirmed my prior opinion that he is a full on blinkered true-believer.

That back story is that the perfectly good science show Material World had aired some more balanced climate items. The whole show was then ended (presenter kicked off into rare appearances) and replaced with the new one fronted by Adam Rutherford as if the section head wanted the slot to be fronted by a climate evangelist.

I have observed that some BHers have a soft spot for Tamsin, but I don't find her a reliable source. She is not an evangelist, but seems to be stuck in climate cult world. So I don't expect much of her media appearances.

Thank’s @PaulW that’s bizarre, but I already knew
Bottomline despite Tamsin trying hard to be objective that description I gave above does seem to have been proved right.

That it got used on a slide is not the only bizarre coincidence .. I was actually in Swansea for the festival, but I stay away from the climate alarmism lectures, cos they so often seem like propaganda exercises preaching to the converted with tightly controlled questioning etc.
But I have been briefed about Tamsin’s lecture (which was about her teams research into modelling a possible tipping point scenario of an ice sheet in a particular part of the West Antarctic Ice Shelf, in Antarctica), cos two friends went, one a secret skeptic and the other a CAGW True-Believer..

Look at my description that she quoted.. Yet there is something heavily ironic ..Turns out she tried to be moderate in the lecture, but automatically slotted into to using one of the cult’s most common tricks.

Indeed the night before I had said to my two friends, especially the True-Believer. “Look there is a trick that use : They start by talking about the ice loss in the Arctic which they conveniently calculate from the historic high ice point at the beginning of the satellite era. They need to gloss over the modern era ice growth at the Antarctic, so they move quickly on to the talking about one particular place in the Antarctic ..a particular spot in the West Antarctic ice shelf where indeed ice is dropping..due to something..maybe an underwater volcano …they won’t talk about the rest.”

“Stew, unbelievable she pulled that trick you mentioned !” My skeptic friend said *
(* Apparently my True-Believer friend is so pissed off that that happened he will no longer talk to me…probably in denial I guess.)
Now if we can see that there must have been people in t hat lecture who could see that also.

Seems in so many other aspects she played calm saying : “Ice Free Arctic wouldn’t come until 2050, Peter Wadhams is a bit crazy etc.” “The overall sea level rise even accounting for Ice sliding in a particular part of West Antarctic ice shelf will only be 1.5m by 2100..Athough other similar ice shelves might start sliding and this can only lead to irreversible catastrophe in the long run.” (I’m paraphrasing from my friend’s notes)

So surprisingly she spent the first 10 minutes of a lecture about a particular area of the West Antarctic Ice Shelf, talking about the Arctic instead !
Additionally she quoted an Eskimo saying sea and lake ice falling was now affecting fishing. (Climate attribution is a thing to be careful about)

Now I would have thought that in a talk about her work of modelling the ice sheets in a particular region of the Antarctic she would have covered the CONTEXTS
#1 Whole world ice loss,
#2 mention Arctic,
#3 Mention ice growth over the whole of Antarctic
#4 Context that with the West Antarctic ice loss in that particular special area.

You’d mention your modelling that had been proved right before.

So she spent the first 10 mins of the lecture NOT talking about the Antarctic, but rather showing dramatic slides of Arctic ice loss, then broke to talk about science outreach.(That‘s when the slide had my BH quote). Then spent the remaining 25 mins talking about modelling that special area.

This particular modelling is about a special kind of glacier which gets a gully underneath the base. The theory being that warmer sea water comes in thus ever widening the gully. This “Grounding Line Retreat” is a self sustaining process as more glacier drops into the sea the more the sea undermines it.
And that eventually this causes the huge glacier into the sea, and that this process is certain and IRREVERSIBLE. Really ? I makes me wonder : if the same effect doesn’t ever work in reverse? Like can glaciers only grow slowly or could not entire estuaries get blocked at the mouth and quickly become a glacier ?

She showed a world sea level rise chart of the mid 4/6ths of Sea Level scenarios (IPCC) 0.3 to 1m by 2100.*
She said the catastrophic glacier fall on that special part of the West Antarctic Ice Shelf could push it to 1 to 1.5m by 2100
(* OK looking at his notes we’ve got that she said 5% confidence interval for above 30cm rise, surely that’s a typo and means 95% confidence interval)
Talked about adding Bayesian weighting to climate models

Cos she only talked about this glacier loss we don’t know if she didn’t account for ice the Antarctic gains on it’s mountains; like doesn’t that take water from the sea and lower it ?

She finished up by saying after the first one the same “Grounding Line Retreat” glacier fail would/could happen first in other places in the West Antarctic Ice sheet, then over more places in the whole of the Antarctic…Hmm seems speculative to me.
After the lecture there were only 2 questions ..From True believers he said, but he didn’t write them down.
And then everyone rushed off to other lectures.

ah There is one other thing
@Paul Matthews she made a point at the end of saying how proud she was of her 3? segments with Adam Rutherford on Inside Science ..and put the URL's up on the last slide.

I have qualms about back seat driving what is researchers business, but the tax payer does ultimately pay for it and the laws/policies based on it.

Look the Earth could be destroyed by an asteroid.
I am not saying that catastrophic event is in an impossibility, and that we should never think about it.

Here Tamsin’s team are talking modelling the possibility of catastrophic glacier collapse in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which they reckon could be a TIPPING POINT raising sea level and setting off a series of similar glaciers.
And I am not saying that could never happen, even tho for other things other unthought of forces seem to crop up pushing the “domino” the other way (negative feedbacks etc)
But he point is with if you are going to make extraordinary claims like “this starts a tipping point”, you need to show extraordinarily robust evidence.
You can’t do the headless chicken thing of running around saying we are all going to die, cos that damages the credibility of science. Neither should you be doing a toned down version of that where the context is skewed as you omit talking about Antarctic ice gain (even our Gavin’s twisted Alarmist PR machine called NASA admit that “A new NASA study says that an increase in Antarctic snow accumulation that began 10,000 years ago is currently adding enough ice to the continent to outweigh the increased losses from its thinning glaciers” Oct 2015)

@PaulW My take away from that lecture is :
- The omit talk of Antarctic ice gain trick.
- That her Eskimo weakened hunting example, was not robust attribution of ice loss climate change.
(It’s like counting glaciers that decay, but not those that grow.. Possibly Ice decays in one areas and grows in others in super long term cycles)
- I would have asked about negative feedbacks as well as negative ones , eg their point is melting glaciers raise the sea causing more glaciers to be undermined, but surely if huge glaciers collapse I guess you end up cooling the sea with all kinds of secondary effects.
- That 1.5m by 2100 doesn’t seem like a great problem compared to existing IPCC projections of 1m ..It’s not like the 10m predictions we have heard elsewhere.
- There wasn’t any real world validating of the models was there ? You’d expect them to be able to quote a clear past event perhaps like a smaller glacier which decayed and collapsed during the time they were monitoring it or one in the past.

- If you are going to make extraordinary claims like “this starts a tipping point”, you need to show extraordinarily robust evidence ..and it seems to me there wasn‘t .
- Contexting is so important : #1 about today’s rates of ice loss #2 what a 1.5m sea level rise means
and #3 What catastrophe means..It’s too easy to be black and white.

To understand different levels of catastrophe, take scenarios of volcano going off
#1 ..but you’ve got all the people out or into shelters
#2 ..no preparations and thousands die
… well you rebuild over decades and life goes on
#3 ..It’s a super volcano ..and you lose 2 summers
…likewise .. Over decades life goes on.
#4 It’s so powerful ..It wipes out humanity
… In the long run the planet goes on.. And you might have human genes stored in space etc.
#5 It’s so powerful ..It wipes out the entire planet.
..OK that is genuinely catastrophic.
Scenarios need to be contexted against the costs of preventing them.

And we are back to is 1.5 sea level rise a big deal ?
In contexting you have to think whether it’s worth spending money now or saving it for when you are more certain. Looking at the new Panama Canal project makes me think there is immense scope for re-engineering to lower world sea level. Even parts of the The Vestfold Hills in the Antarctic are 30m below sea level. The shoreline of the Dead Sea is approximately 413 meters below sea level. World list of places below sea level
I guess you could set a process to continually mine the bottom of the sea, so deepening it.

There is truth, and there is narrative. And since some people can end up in a bubble world they can all too easily drift into keeping to narrative,but from the outside that can be spotted. That is the danger of not properly engaging with the outside.