Exoclimes 2012

Exoclimes 2012 is wrapping up

I have been hanging out at Exoclimes 2012 this week, taking in the latest results on exoplanetary atmospheres, both observations and theory, as well as future prospects.
It is clearly a very active and rapidly expanding field with prospects for huge amounts of near/medium term data, and a qualitative improvement in our understanding of the atmospheric processes on extrasolar planets.

The meeting is at the Aspen Center for Physics, one of a series of seven workshops held this year in different physics subfields.

Exoclime 17th Jan 2012

In addition to hanging out at the meeting, I have also started work on scheduling next year's workshops, when we get to do it all over again! Due to that and other time critical workload I couldn't liveblog the conference.
Maybe the next one, eh?

The meeting brought together about 80 astronomers, planetary scientists and geophysicists, with great success.
Personal highlight for me were: a good review of the multi-year controversy over whether super-Earths would have active plate tectonics or a "still lid" - turns out the answer is "depends", and it all makes sense now; a presentation on the proposed FINESSE Explorer class mission, for dedicated IR spectrography of already known exoplanets; and, Ray Pierrehumbert's DeWolf public lecture on Science Fiction Atmospheres.

I also realised part way through one talk, that this charming speaker was working a Smiths' song lyric into (almost?) every slide.
Awesome.
I think he started something.

I am so totally stealing this at some suitable occasion, though not the Smiths of course, maybe Billy Bragg, or Half Man Half Biscuit...

However, even that revelation was outdone by hearing of the Chicago Climate Change song...

They Are Climate Scientists: Chicago Style!

Sadly I can't stay for next week's Transients workshop...