Perusing the front page of Scienceblogs.com this morning I notice that the call for a science debate in the U.S. presidential race is the top news. I can certainly understand why that would get the most attention. It is indeed an important initiative that I hope continues to get stronger.
But, even looking down at the list of some of the individual posts of the day, there are very few (if any) posts about the American Geophysical Union fall meeting in San Francisco this week, which is *the *annual meeting for earth, planetary, and space science. This is a __huge __event.
Is it because the bloggers on scienceblogs.com don't care about earth science? Of course they care. I think the problem is there is a serious lack of earth/planetary/space science bloggers over there. The geoblogosphere's strongest link to that community is Chris over at Highly Allochthonous...and he's doing a great job of blogging about geoscience-related topics. Additionally, there are other bloggers who discuss climate science as well.
I enjoy several of the bloggers over at scienceblogs, but, as time goes on, I find myself not going there as much. Firstly, I simply can't keep up with fast blogging pace (those who do multiple posts a day). Additionally, while I understand blogging and discussing political/societal issues is *extremely *important, I sometimes don't feel like sifting through it all when I'm in the mood for information about the latest science in other fields.
I'm not sure what the solution is ... it's not so much about *adding *more earth science bloggers to their roster. The number of blogs over there is getting so large that I find it hard to keep up with anything. Will scienceblogs be like a stock and have to split at some point? At what point does the sheer size of it start to hinder rather than help the goal of communicating science?
Anyway, back to my point ... if you *do *want information about the AGU meeting, the folks over at RealClimate have some great real-time (or close to it) blogging of the big happenings with respect to climate science this week. Check out the latest here and here.
Andrew over at About.com is also summarizing some of the news coming out of the meeting.
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