5 most popular posts this month:

• How to write a scientific abstract in six easy steps Jan 26, 2010 (2,577 views) Here's the abstract for a paper (that I haven't written) on how to write an abstract: How to Write...
• The difference between Verification and Validation Nov 29, 2010 (2,377 views) Sometime in the 1990's, I drafted a frequently asked question list for NASA's IV&V facility....
• Notes from Hurricane Sandy Nov 1, 2012 (841 views) "] We spent some time in my climate change class this week talking about Hurricane Sandy - it's a...
• New Grad Course on Computational Models of Climate Change Jan 6, 2013 (348 views) This week, I start teaching a new grad course on computational models of climate change, aimed at...
• Simple Climate Models to play with in the classroom Jan 25, 2013 (226 views) I've been collecting examples of different types of climate model that students can use in the...

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All time most popular posts:

• How to write a scientific abstract in six easy steps Jan 26, 2010 (33,375 views) Here's the abstract for a paper (that I haven't written) on how to write an abstract: How to Write...
• The difference between Verification and Validation Nov 29, 2010 (18,445 views) Sometime in the 1990's, I drafted a frequently asked question list for NASA's IV&V facility....
• Notes from Hurricane Sandy Nov 1, 2012 (13,336 views) "] We spent some time in my climate change class this week talking about Hurricane Sandy - it's a...
• A portable climate model Jul 22, 2010 (3,206 views) One of the exercises I set myself while visiting NCAR this month is to try porting the climate model...
• Who is pulling the strings? Apr 7, 2010 (3,197 views) My exposé of why academics' private emails sometimes seem cranky has gotten a lot of attention....
• AGU Day 2: The role of CO2 in the earth's history Dec 17, 2009 (2,501 views) Yesterday afternoon, I managed to catch the Bjernes Lecture, which was given by Richard B. Alley:...
• Initial value vs. boundary value problems Jan 16, 2010 (2,285 views) Weather and climate are different. Weather varies tremendously from day to day, week to week, season...
• Epistemology of Climate Modeling Sep 28, 2010 (1,950 views) This will keep me occupied with good reads for the next few weeks - this month's issue of the...
• Getting the source code for climate models Jun 24, 2009 (1,836 views) First, we have to be clear what we mean by a climate model. Wikipedia offers a quick intro to types...
• The future of Software Engineering? Nov 11, 2010 (1,760 views) I went to a workshop earlier this week on "the Future of Software Engineering Research" in Santa Fe....
• Open Climate Science or Denial of Service attacks? Nov 26, 2009 (1,656 views) I wasn't going to post anything about the CRU emails story (apart from my attempt at humour),...
• A sad farewell to Susan Leigh Star Mar 27, 2010 (1,625 views) Susan Leigh Star passed away in her sleep this week, coincidently on Ada Lovelace day. As I didn't...
• Population growth vs. emissions growth Jun 18, 2009 (1,551 views) I gave my talk on SE for the Planet again this afternoon, to the local audience. We recorded it, and...
• Disinformation Works (for receptive audiences) Feb 28, 2011 (1,530 views) Here's an interesting study by Lawrence Hamilton, published in Climatic Change in December:...
• AGU Day 3 part B: Data Provenance and Open Science Dec 21, 2009 (1,485 views) Wednesday morning also saw the poster session "IN31B - Emerging Issues in e-Science: Collaboration,...
• Validating Climate Models Nov 30, 2010 (1,391 views) In my last two posts, I demolished the idea that climate models need Independent Verification and...
• Academics always fight over the peer-review process Mar 26, 2010 (1,357 views) Note: This started as a comment on a thread at RealClimate about the Guardian's investigation of the...
• Do Climate Models need Independent Verification and Validation? Nov 27, 2010 (1,277 views) A common cry from climate contrarians is that climate models need better verification and validation...
• High level architecture of earth system models Aug 11, 2010 (1,273 views) To get myself familiar with the models at each of the climate centers I'm visiting this summer, I've...
• What makes software engineering for climate models different? Mar 24, 2010 (1,241 views) This week I attended a Dagstuhl seminar on New Frontiers for Empirical Software Engineering. It...
• Tracking down the uncertainties in weather and climate prediction Jul 6, 2010 (1,240 views) Gavin beat me to posting the best quote from the CCSM workshop last week - the Uncertainty Prayer....
• Climate Change: A Software Grand Challenge Aug 24, 2010 (1,231 views) Great news - I've had my paper accepted for the 2010 FSE/SDP Workshop on the Future of Software...
• If we can't make mistakes, then we can't do science Apr 9, 2010 (1,199 views) My debate with George Monbiot is still going on in this thread. I'm raising this comment to be a...
• Ethics of Climate - Talk by Ray Pierrehumbert Apr 23, 2010 (1,160 views) After catching the start of yesterday's Centre for Environment Research Day, I headed around the...
• When did ignorance become a badge of honour for journalists? Aug 28, 2010 (1,137 views) Here's an appalling article by Andy Revkin on dotEarth which epitomizes everything that is wrong...
• An AGU Global Environmental Change Bookshelf Dec 17, 2010 (1,086 views) I spent most of Wednesday attending a series of sessions featuring bestselling authors from the AGU...
• What will sea level rise mean for Venice? Oct 28, 2010 (1,032 views) I took a break from blogging for the last few weeks to take a vacation with the family in Europe. We...
• Oil Shocks and Food Prices Feb 28, 2011 (978 views) I've been dipping into another new book this week, "Transport Revolutions: Moving People and...
• The CMIP5 Climate Experiments Sep 15, 2011 (965 views) I'm on my way back from a workshop on Computing in the Atmospheric Sciences, in Annecy, France. The...
• AGU Day 3 part C: How good are predictions from climate models? Jan 7, 2010 (959 views) The highlight of the whole conference for me was the Wednesday afternoon session on Methodologies of...
• The Ethics of Climate Change Feb 24, 2011 (872 views) James Garvey: The Ethics of Climate Change. Continuum, 2008. One of the pleasures of teaching is...
• Climate Science and Software Quality Feb 12, 2010 (870 views) Here's a letter I've sent to the Guardian newspaper. I wonder if they'll print it? Professor...
• A first glimpse at model results for the next IPCC assessment Sep 16, 2011 (856 views) Over the next few years, you're likely to see a lot of graphs like this (click for a bigger...
• "Daddy, what did YOU do in the climate wars?" Apr 16, 2009 (848 views) When my children grow up, the world they live in is likely be very different from ours. There's a...
• Social epistemology and climate denialism Aug 6, 2009 (846 views) I've spent some time pondering why so many people seem unable or unwilling to understand the...
• xkcd: How to Write Good Code Jan 7, 2011 (838 views) It would be very easy to re-post pretty much everything from xkcd, and I'm trying hard to resist,...
• Verification and Validation of Earth System Models Sep 18, 2010 (814 views) I've been meaning to write a summary of the V&V techniques used for Earth System Models (ESMs)...
• AGU day 3: Science literacy means understanding the process Dec 20, 2009 (801 views) Picking up from my last post on communicating with policymakers, the first session on Wednesday...
• Systems thinking and Genetically Modified food May 25, 2012 (792 views) I've been following a heated discussion on twitter this past week about a planned protest on Sunday...
• Measuring Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Cities Apr 22, 2010 (767 views) This morning I attended the first part of the Centre for Environment's Research Day, and I'm glad I...
• Crowd-Sourced Carbon Calculators (inspired by David Mackay) Mar 11, 2010 (757 views) On March 30, David Mackay, author of Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air, will be giving the...
• AGU talk: Tim Palmer on Building Probabilistic Climate Models Dec 19, 2010 (748 views) On Thursday, Tim Palmer of the University of Oxford and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather...
• Formal Verification for Climate Models? Sep 23, 2011 (725 views) Valdivino, who is working on a PhD in Brazil, on formal software verification techniques, is...
• The Software Architecture of Global Climate Models Dec 10, 2011 (721 views) On Thursday, Kaitlin presented her poster at the AGU meeting, which shows the results of the study...
• Climate change is mankind's defining crisis (Mobiot/Lomborg debate) Dec 1, 2009 (683 views) This evening I'm attending a debate on climate change in Toronto, at the Munk Centre. George Monbiot...
• National Geographic's 6 degrees Jul 11, 2011 (659 views) Okay, so it's a few years old, but I'd never seen this series of videos by National Geographic...
• Bill Gates is very wrong Jan 26, 2010 (659 views) In a blog post that was picked up by the Huffington post, Bill Gates writes about why we need...
• IEEE Software Special Issue on Climate Change: Software, Science and Society Dec 5, 2010 (646 views) Call for Papers: IEEE Software Special Issue on Climate Change: Software, Science and...
• What is Science Literacy? May 29, 2012 (641 views) A few people today have pointed me at the new paper by Dan Kahan & colleagues (1), which...
• Do "Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow"? Dec 11, 2009 (615 views) As a follow-on from yesterday's post on making climate software open source, I'd like to pick up on...
• Why I don't eat meat Jul 22, 2011 (614 views) My wife and I have been (sort of) vegetarian for twenty years now. I say "sort of" because we do eat...
• Another tiresome exoneration for climate science Jul 7, 2010 (609 views) The Muir Russell report came out today, and I just finished reading the thing. It should be no...
• A simpler slogan? Sep 15, 2011 (588 views) Al Gore is part way through a 24-hour, round-the-globe, live broadcast, called Climate Reality. I...
• AGU Day 0: Restarting the Climate Conversation Dec 14, 2009 (584 views) This week I'll be blogging from the American Geosciences Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, one of the...
• Aerosols: Are They Good or Bad? Apr 3, 2012 (582 views) This week, I'm featuring some of the best blog posts written by the students on my first year...
• AGU session on Software Engineering for Climate Modeling Dec 14, 2010 (575 views) Here's the first of a series of posts from the American Geophysical Society (AGU) Fall meeting,...
• A Hierarchical Systems Approach to Model Validation Dec 6, 2011 (573 views) I'm at the AGU meeting in San Francisco this week. The internet connections in the meeting rooms...
• Data Challenges in Creating a new Surface Temperature Record Aug 25, 2010 (547 views) I've been invited to a workshop at the UK Met Office in a few weeks time, to brainstorm a plan to...
• How much extra energy are we adding to the earth system? Jan 11, 2012 (542 views) I've been meaning to do this calculation for ages, and finally had an excuse today, as I need it for...
• Climate Models are Good Quality Software (?!) Apr 30, 2010 (533 views) Excellent news: Jon Pipitone has finished his MSc project on the software quality of climate models,...
• One Model to Rule them All? Nov 6, 2011 (529 views) I had several interesting conversations at WCRP11 last week about how different the various climate...
• Summer projects demo session Jul 20, 2009 (521 views) Next Wednesday, we're oganising demos of our students' summer projects, prior to the Science 2.0...
• Commuting by bike is a dangerous sport Jun 8, 2011 (518 views) I thought I'd write a little on cycling in the Toronto this month, partly because is Bike Month,...
• Another cognitive bug: Attempting to correct a misperception often reinforces it May 31, 2010 (509 views) I'm fascinated by the cognitive biases that affect people's perceptions of climate change. I've...
• Are you aware of your own (in)competence? Jun 11, 2009 (496 views) I've been thinking a lot recently about why so few people seem to understand the severity of the...
• What is Climate Informatics? Sep 21, 2012 (491 views) I've been using the term Climate Informatics informally for a few years to capture the kind of...
• The Affordances of Bike Lanes Jun 10, 2011 (473 views) As a followup to my post earlier this week about how dangerous cycling is in Toronto, I decided to...
• The Principle of Complementarity (1) Mar 22, 2011 (467 views) I introduced some ideas from systems thinking last month, and especially the idea of second order...
• The first Numerical Weather Prediction on ENIAC Jan 25, 2011 (455 views) Last summer, when I was visiting NCAR, Warren Washington gave me some papers to read on the first...
• Shall we debate the existence of gravity? Mar 3, 2010 (450 views) Someone recently challenged me to debate the existence of climate change. Debates are extremely...
• On the Uses and Abuses of Infrastructural Inversion Aug 26, 2010 (448 views) Nearly everything we ever do depends on vast social and technical infrastructures, which, when they...
• Modeling challenge (part 2) Apr 9, 2009 (439 views) Okay, here's a slightly different modeling challenge. It might be more of a visualization challenge....
• A Requirements Modeling Challenge Mar 21, 2009 (436 views) Here's a challenge for the requirements modelling experts. I've phrased it as an exam question for...
• Fun with urban transport data Jun 30, 2011 (431 views) I spent a little time this afternoon trying to get hold of data. I guess I have high expectations...
• I never said that! Sep 1, 2010 (428 views) I'm pleased to see that my recent paper, "Climate Change: A Software Grand Challenge" is getting...
• How Climate Science is Done May 2, 2012 (427 views) In the talk I gave this week at the workshop on the CMIP5 experiments, I argued that we should do a...
• Studying team coordination and software verification practices for earth system modeling May 19, 2010 (425 views) I've been busy the last few weeks setting up the travel details for my sabbatical. My plan is to...
• Liveblogging the EGU - day 4 Apr 23, 2009 (422 views) Day 4 at the EGU, in which I attend a session on education, in which we discover that it's becoming...
• A target limit of 2°C. Is this possible? Jul 9, 2009 (413 views) Big news today: The G8 summit declares that climate change mitigation policies should aim to limit...
• You can't delegate ill-defined problems to software engineers Nov 16, 2010 (407 views) I had lunch last week with Gerhard Fischer at the University of Colorado. Gerhard is director of the...
• What's the pricetag on a Global Climate Model? Sep 3, 2010 (403 views) Here's a question I've been asking a few people lately, ever since I asserted that climate models...
• Successful Predictions (AGU 2012 Tyndall Lecture) Dec 11, 2012 (400 views) Last week I was at the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting. I plan to blog about many of the talks, but let me...
• AGU talk: Michael Oppenheimer on how to communicate science Dec 18, 2010 (398 views) To follow on from the authors session on Wednesday morning, Michael Oppenheimer, from Princeton,...
• A Tale of Two Graphs Feb 1, 2011 (396 views) While preparing for my class this morning, I was looking for graphs that show model projections for...
• Climate Change in a Nutshell Feb 8, 2011 (395 views) This is brilliant: There's a whole series. Each video is less than three minutes, but...
• Can we improve the engineering of climate software? Jul 13, 2010 (392 views) William Connolly has written a detailed critique of our paper "Engineering the Software for...
• Open Questions about Open Source for Open Science Jan 12, 2011 (385 views) This post contains lots of questions and few answers. Feel free to use the comment thread to help me...
• Designing your own Earth System Model Jul 15, 2009 (379 views) Spurred on by Michael Tobis's thoughts about building a readable/understandable climate model in...
• New grad course: Climate Change Informatics Mar 10, 2010 (377 views) I'm proposing a new graduate course for our department, to be offered next January (after I return...
• How long have we known? Feb 18, 2010 (374 views) I'm giving a talk today to a group of high school students. Most of the talk focusses on climate...
• Software Quality in Climate Research Dec 8, 2009 (373 views) Well, this is what it comes down to. Code reviews on national TV. Who would have thought it? And, by...
• Up for review: Assessing climate model software quality Feb 15, 2012 (373 views) Our paper on defect density analysis of climate models is now out for review at the journal...
• The different meanings of "Climate Sensitivity" Jan 19, 2011 (371 views) I spent some time this week explaining to my undergraduate class the ideas of thermal equilibrium...
• New Grad Course on Computational Models of Climate Change Jan 6, 2013 (369 views) This week, I start teaching a new grad course on computational models of climate change, aimed at...
• Data Limits vs. Computational Limits Sep 30, 2010 (368 views) For many decades, computational speed has been the main limit on the sophistication of climate...
• Understanding non-linear systems: Hurricane Damage Dec 20, 2011 (364 views) One of the things that strikes me about discussions of climate change, especially from those who...
• Where the Denialists Are Nov 25, 2009 (363 views) (with apologies to Maurice Sendak) The night Mike wore his lab coat, and made scientific...
• My own hockey stick Dec 5, 2009 (362 views) A moment of irony. In their all out attempt to destroy the credibility of the hockey stick...
• Don't feed the trolls Aug 8, 2012 (354 views) It's AGU abstract submission day, and I've just submitted one to a fascinating track organised by...
• Mutual Incomprehension May 28, 2011 (351 views) This xkcd cartoon made me laugh out loud, because it beautifully captures my attitude towards...