CLIMATE SPECIALTY GROUP

Minutes of the 2001 Business Meeting (New York, NY)

The meeting was called to order at 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, February 28, 2001.

1. The minutes of the 2000 meeting were approved without revision.

2. Election of New Officers (Officers)

Two new officers were elected for the 2001/02-2002/03 term: Keith Henderson (Villanova) as Director and Jeff Hardy (East Stroudsburg University) as Young Scholar Director.

3. Chair’s Report (Brent Yarnal)

  1. According to information provided by the AAG central office, membership in mid February 2001 was 216. It is unclear what this number means in terms of the membership trend. The membership was 233 in March 2000, but that number reflected a time of five and one half months between mailing of the AAG dues request in October 1999 to the March statement. This year, the time from mailing of the dues request to the February statement was only a month and a half. We suspect that numbers are at least stable.
  1. The CSG sponsored 28 sessions for this New York AAG meeting, several of them co-sponsorships with other specialty groups. The CSG sponsored a plenary session featuring Dr. Chet Ropelewski and co-sponsored a plenary session with the Human Dimensions of Global Change Specialty Group featuring Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig.

4. Treasurer’s Report (David McGinnis)

5. Announcements (Brent Yarnal)

  1. Announcements from the AAG were passed to the CSG:
  • There will be a change in date of membership renewals.
  • Some specialty group members have been claiming specialty group status but not sending in their dues. The AAG will no longer cover these dues.
  • There will be a downloadable, printable tri-fold brochure on Careers in Geography available at the AAG Website.
  • The Annals needs more submissions to the Environment section. Please be responsive to requests for reviews and be timely in delivering those reviews.
  • Reg Golledge’s Geography and Education Network needs volunteers, especially programmers.
  1. Contact Johan Feddema with any suggestions for changes to the CSG Website. Volunteers to help Johan would be appreciated.
  1. Contact Brent Yarnal, the new chair, with suggestions for next year’s plenary speaker. Some suggestions were made.
  1. Honor Committee Report (Barry Keim). The 2000 student paper competition in Pittsburgh had many entrants. Award winners were Jennifer Salmond (University of British Columbia), David Brown (University of Arizona), Tim Hawkins (Arizona State University), and Mike Walegur (University of Delaware). The judging committee consisted of Barry Keim, Anthony Vega, Hengchun Ye, Keith Henderson, Diane Stanitski-Martin, Leslie-Ann Dupigny-Giroux, and Michael Janis. Thanks to John Wiley & Sons for the generous book awards.
  1. The Lifetime Achievement Award was made to Roger Barry.
  1. The first annual Paper of the Year Award was made to Franco Biondi, University of Nevada, Reno, for his paper “North Pacific decadal climate variability since AD 1661.”

6. Business

  1. The protocol for conducting the Paper of the Year Award submission and judging was discussed. The following decisions were made:
  • Submissions and nominations are due January 10 before the AAG meeting.
  • Papers accepted or published in the year prior to the AAG meeting.
  • Judging committee conflict of interest—the community will trust the committee to “do the right thing,”
  • The judging committee chair will be the person who has served on the committee for the longest time.
  1. Plans for the 2004 AAG Centennial Meeting in Philadelphia were discussed. It was decided that:
  • The Chair would appoint a committee to develop a time-line for climate studies in Geography. The committee will coordinate with the Geography in America Timeline, led by Don Dahmann .
  • Although it would be desirable to develop a “Companion to Climatology in Geography” volume in the Blackwell Companion to Geography Series, it might be difficult to coordinate the timing to coincide with the Centennial meeting. Nevertheless, it was decided that members of the CSG would look into producing such a volume independently of the Centennial.
  • The Chair will appoint a committee to look into developing a series of special sessions honoring the six CSG Lifetime Achievement Award recipients that will have accrued by the Centennial.
  1. New Business (Brent Yarnal).
  • The CSG needs to appoint a standing committee to report to the Geography Research and Education Network being organized by Reg Golledge. The charge of the standing committee will be to identify and recommend two to three top case studies, educational projects, or courses every two years that show what climatologists in Geography do and can do. Only completed projects are eligible. The Network is especially interested in digital case studies with visualizations, QuickTime model runs, and so forth. The Chair will appoint this standing committee.
  • On the AAG Web site, the “Geographers at Work” section of the “Careers in Geography” Web page needs vignettes that show what geographers do and Geography gave them an edge. As an additional part of their charge, the Chair will ask the standing committee named in the previous point to identify non-faculty geographers for the “Geographers at Work” section.
  1. The remainder of the meeting was devoted to discussion of the problem faced by graduate programs in Geography to get enough specialists in climatology to cover their existing courses and grants and, in the future, insure enough PhDs to fill vacant faculty positions. It is a problem that appears to be facing all programs. Although the problem could not be resolved, the open exchange about the problem brought up suggestions for how to alleviate it.

7. Adjournment.

The meeting was adjourned at 7:45 p.m.

Respectfully submitted,

David McGinnis, Secretary/Treasurer