5 most popular posts this month:

• How to write a scientific abstract in six easy steps Jan 26, 2010 (4,772 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 (3,582 views) Sometime in the 1990's, I drafted a frequently asked question list for NASA's IV&V facility....
• Aerosols: Are They Good or Bad? Apr 3, 2012 (159 views) This week, I'm featuring some of the best blog posts written by the students on my first year...
• What Does the New IPCC Report Say About Climate Change? Oct 8, 2013 (132 views) I've been trawling through the final draft of the new IPCC assessment report that was released last...
• Simple Climate Models to play with in the classroom Jan 25, 2013 (88 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 (126,015 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 (104,293 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 (17,983 views) "] We spent some time in my climate change class this week talking about Hurricane Sandy - it's a...
• Initial value vs. boundary value problems Jan 16, 2010 (5,415 views) Weather and climate are different. Weather varies tremendously from day to day, week to week, season...
• What Does the New IPCC Report Say About Climate Change? Oct 8, 2013 (5,200 views) I've been trawling through the final draft of the new IPCC assessment report that was released last...
• A portable climate model Jul 22, 2010 (4,203 views) One of the exercises I set myself while visiting NCAR this month is to try porting the climate model...
• Getting the source code for climate models Jun 24, 2009 (3,515 views) First, we have to be clear what we mean by a climate model. Wikipedia offers a quick intro to types...
• Who is pulling the strings? Apr 7, 2010 (3,246 views) My exposé of why academics' private emails sometimes seem cranky has gotten a lot of attention....
• Population growth vs. emissions growth Jun 18, 2009 (3,245 views) I gave my talk on SE for the Planet again this afternoon, to the local audience. We recorded it, and...
• Aerosols: Are They Good or Bad? Apr 3, 2012 (3,084 views) This week, I'm featuring some of the best blog posts written by the students on my first year...
• TEDx talk: Should we trust climate models? May 23, 2014 (2,958 views) At the beginning of March, I was invited to give a talk at TEDxUofT. Colleagues tell me the hardest...
• AGU Day 2: The role of CO2 in the earth's history Dec 17, 2009 (2,926 views) Yesterday afternoon, I managed to catch the Bjernes Lecture, which was given by Richard B. Alley:...
• Simple Climate Models to play with in the classroom Jan 25, 2013 (2,715 views) I've been collecting examples of different types of climate model that students can use in the...
• The future of Software Engineering? Nov 11, 2010 (2,193 views) I went to a workshop earlier this week on "the Future of Software Engineering Research" in Santa Fe....
• What is Climate Informatics? Sep 21, 2012 (2,113 views) I've been using the term Climate Informatics informally for a few years to capture the kind of...
• Epistemology of Climate Modeling Sep 28, 2010 (2,085 views) This will keep me occupied with good reads for the next few weeks - this month's issue of the...
• AGU Day 3 part B: Data Provenance and Open Science Dec 21, 2009 (2,020 views) Wednesday morning also saw the poster session "IN31B - Emerging Issues in e-Science: Collaboration,...
• High level architecture of earth system models Aug 11, 2010 (1,935 views) To get myself familiar with the models at each of the climate centers I'm visiting this summer, I've...
• Tracking down the uncertainties in weather and climate prediction Jul 6, 2010 (1,933 views) Gavin beat me to posting the best quote from the CCSM workshop last week - the Uncertainty Prayer....
• The Ethics of Climate Change Feb 24, 2011 (1,922 views) James Garvey: The Ethics of Climate Change. Continuum, 2008. One of the pleasures of teaching is...
• Climate Model vs. Satellite Data Feb 14, 2014 (1,907 views) A few weeks ago, Mark Higgins, from EUMETSAT, posted this wonderful video of satellite imagery of...
• A sad farewell to Susan Leigh Star Mar 27, 2010 (1,818 views) Susan Leigh Star passed away in her sleep this week, coincidently on Ada Lovelace day. As I didn't...
• The CMIP5 Climate Experiments Sep 15, 2011 (1,808 views) I'm on my way back from a workshop on Computing in the Atmospheric Sciences, in Annecy, France. The...
• Validating Climate Models Nov 30, 2010 (1,790 views) In my last two posts, I demolished the idea that climate models need Independent Verification and...
• Do Climate Models need Independent Verification and Validation? Nov 27, 2010 (1,770 views) A common cry from climate contrarians is that climate models need better verification and validation...
• Open Climate Science or Denial of Service attacks? Nov 26, 2009 (1,703 views) I wasn't going to post anything about the CRU emails story (apart from my attempt at humour),...
• What will sea level rise mean for Venice? Oct 28, 2010 (1,651 views) I took a break from blogging for the last few weeks to take a vacation with the family in Europe. We...
• What makes software engineering for climate models different? Mar 24, 2010 (1,639 views) This week I attended a Dagstuhl seminar on New Frontiers for Empirical Software Engineering. It...
• Climate Change: A Software Grand Challenge Aug 24, 2010 (1,572 views) Great news - I've had my paper accepted for the 2010 FSE/SDP Workshop on the Future of Software...
• Disinformation Works (for receptive audiences) Feb 28, 2011 (1,564 views) Here's an interesting study by Lawrence Hamilton, published in Climatic Change in December:...
• Systems thinking and Genetically Modified food May 25, 2012 (1,482 views) I've been following a heated discussion on twitter this past week about a planned protest on Sunday...
• If we can't make mistakes, then we can't do science Apr 9, 2010 (1,471 views) My debate with George Monbiot is still going on in this thread. I'm raising this comment to be a...
• Academics always fight over the peer-review process Mar 26, 2010 (1,439 views) Note: This started as a comment on a thread at RealClimate about the Guardian's investigation of the...
• How much extra energy are we adding to the earth system? Jan 11, 2012 (1,320 views) Update (Aug 15, 2013): After a discussion on Twitter with Gavin Schmidt, I realised I did the...
• AGU Day 3 part C: How good are predictions from climate models? Jan 7, 2010 (1,312 views) The highlight of the whole conference for me was the Wednesday afternoon session on Methodologies of...
• Ethics of Climate - Talk by Ray Pierrehumbert Apr 23, 2010 (1,269 views) After catching the start of yesterday's Centre for Environment Research Day, I headed around the...
• Oil Shocks and Food Prices Feb 28, 2011 (1,261 views) I've been dipping into another new book this week, "Transport Revolutions: Moving People and...
• Verification and Validation of Earth System Models Sep 18, 2010 (1,254 views) I've been meaning to write a summary of the V&V techniques used for Earth System Models (ESMs)...
• Why Systems Thinking? Aug 20, 2013 (1,252 views) Early in my career I trained as a systems analyst. My PhD was about the ability to identify and make...
• How Big is the Climate Change Deficit? Feb 15, 2013 (1,209 views) Last week, Damon Matthews from Concordia visited, and gave a guest CGCS lecture, "Cumulative Carbon...
• When did ignorance become a badge of honour for journalists? Aug 28, 2010 (1,169 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 (1,163 views) I spent most of Wednesday attending a series of sessions featuring bestselling authors from the AGU...
• "Daddy, what did YOU do in the climate wars?" Apr 16, 2009 (1,153 views) When my children grow up, the world they live in is likely be very different from ours. There's a...
• A simpler slogan? Sep 15, 2011 (1,099 views) Al Gore is part way through a 24-hour, round-the-globe, live broadcast, called Climate Reality. I...
• The History of Climate Models Nov 2, 2012 (1,099 views) For a talk earlier this year, I put together a timeline of the history of climate modelling. I just...
• A first glimpse at model results for the next IPCC assessment Sep 16, 2011 (1,048 views) Over the next few years, you're likely to see a lot of graphs like this (click for a bigger...
• The Software Architecture of Global Climate Models Dec 10, 2011 (971 views) On Thursday, Kaitlin presented her poster at the AGU meeting, which shows the results of the study...
• xkcd: How to Write Good Code Jan 7, 2011 (961 views) It would be very easy to re-post pretty much everything from xkcd, and I'm trying hard to resist,...
• Social epistemology and climate denialism Aug 6, 2009 (957 views) I've spent some time pondering why so many people seem unable or unwilling to understand the...
• On the Uses and Abuses of Infrastructural Inversion Aug 26, 2010 (945 views) Nearly everything we ever do depends on vast social and technical infrastructures, which, when they...
• Why I don't eat meat Jul 22, 2011 (943 views) My wife and I have been (sort of) vegetarian for twenty years now. I say "sort of" because we do eat...
• Crowd-Sourced Carbon Calculators (inspired by David Mackay) Mar 11, 2010 (942 views) On March 30, David Mackay, author of Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air, will be giving the...
• Skills needed for a successful PhD Apr 7, 2014 (928 views) My department is busy revising the set of milestones our PhD students need to meet in the course of...
• Measuring Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Cities Apr 22, 2010 (916 views) This morning I attended the first part of the Centre for Environment's Research Day, and I'm glad I...
• Climate Science and Software Quality Feb 12, 2010 (905 views) Here's a letter I've sent to the Guardian newspaper. I wonder if they'll print it? Professor...
• Bill Gates is very wrong Jan 26, 2010 (902 views) In a blog post that was picked up by the Huffington post, Bill Gates writes about why we need...
• AGU talk: Tim Palmer on Building Probabilistic Climate Models Dec 19, 2010 (860 views) On Thursday, Tim Palmer of the University of Oxford and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather...
• What is Science Literacy? May 29, 2012 (846 views) A few people today have pointed me at the new paper by Dan Kahan & colleagues (1), which...
• The Climate as a System, part 1: the central equilibrium loop Aug 22, 2013 (842 views) I wrote earlier this week that we should incorporate more of the key ideas from systems thinking...
• The Climate as a System, part 4: earth system feedbacks Sep 2, 2013 (830 views) At the start of this series, I argued that Climate Science is inherently a Systems Discipline. To...
• Formal Verification for Climate Models? Sep 23, 2011 (827 views) Valdivino, who is working on a PhD in Brazil, on formal software verification techniques, is...
• AGU day 3: Science literacy means understanding the process Dec 20, 2009 (824 views) Picking up from my last post on communicating with policymakers, the first session on Wednesday...
• A Hierarchical Systems Approach to Model Validation Dec 6, 2011 (810 views) I'm at the AGU meeting in San Francisco this week. The internet connections in the meeting rooms...
• Successful Predictions (AGU 2012 Tyndall Lecture) Dec 11, 2012 (803 views) Last week I was at the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting. I plan to blog about many of the talks, but let me...
• National Geographic's 6 degrees Jul 11, 2011 (764 views) Okay, so it's a few years old, but I'd never seen this series of videos by National Geographic...
• New Grad Course on Computational Models of Climate Change Jan 6, 2013 (761 views) This week, I start teaching a new grad course on computational models of climate change, aimed at...
• The Principle of Complementarity (1) Mar 22, 2011 (749 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 (735 views) Last summer, when I was visiting NCAR, Warren Washington gave me some papers to read on the first...
• Commuting by bike is a dangerous sport Jun 8, 2011 (730 views) I thought I'd write a little on cycling in the Toronto this month, partly because is Bike Month,...
• Climate change is mankind's defining crisis (Mobiot/Lomborg debate) Dec 1, 2009 (719 views) This evening I'm attending a debate on climate change in Toronto, at the Munk Centre. George Monbiot...
• The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet? Apr 10, 2013 (717 views) Next year, I'll be teaching a new undergraduate course, as part of an initiative by the Faculty of...
• Do "Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow"? Dec 11, 2009 (716 views) As a follow-on from yesterday's post on making climate software open source, I'd like to pick up on...
• The Climate as a System, part 5: clouds Sep 3, 2013 (716 views) Yesterday I talked about three re-inforcing feedback loops in the earth system, each of which has...
• IEEE Software Special Issue on Climate Change: Software, Science and Society Dec 5, 2010 (688 views) Call for Papers: IEEE Software Special Issue on Climate Change: Software, Science and...
• One Model to Rule them All? Nov 6, 2011 (663 views) I had several interesting conversations at WCRP11 last week about how different the various climate...
• Data Challenges in Creating a new Surface Temperature Record Aug 25, 2010 (653 views) I've been invited to a workshop at the UK Met Office in a few weeks time, to brainstorm a plan to...
• Another tiresome exoneration for climate science Jul 7, 2010 (638 views) The Muir Russell report came out today, and I just finished reading the thing. It should be no...
• Fun with urban transport data Jun 30, 2011 (621 views) I spent a little time this afternoon trying to get hold of data. I guess I have high expectations...
• AGU session on Software Engineering for Climate Modeling Dec 14, 2010 (618 views) Here's the first of a series of posts from the American Geophysical Society (AGU) Fall meeting,...
• Systems Thinking for Climate Systems Feb 15, 2011 (616 views) In pulling together my thoughts for a workshop last week on systems thinking, I've realised how much...
• The Climate as a System, part 2: energy consumption Aug 26, 2013 (607 views) In part 1, I described the central equilibrium loop that controls the earth's temperature. Now it's...
• Are you aware of your own (in)competence? Jun 11, 2009 (603 views) I've been thinking a lot recently about why so few people seem to understand the severity of the...
• AGU Day 0: Restarting the Climate Conversation Dec 14, 2009 (587 views) This week I'll be blogging from the American Geosciences Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, one of the...
• Climate Models are Good Quality Software (?!) Apr 30, 2010 (582 views) Excellent news: Jon Pipitone has finished his MSc project on the software quality of climate models,...
• Another cognitive bug: Attempting to correct a misperception often reinforces it May 31, 2010 (571 views) I'm fascinated by the cognitive biases that affect people's perceptions of climate change. I've...
• Growth of code complexity Jul 2, 2009 (564 views) I'm busy revising our paper on the study of the software development processes at the Hadley Centre...
• Some CMIP5 statistics Apr 29, 2012 (562 views) I'm attending a workshop this week in which some of the initial results from the Fifth Coupled Model...
• Detecting Crap on the Internet Oct 27, 2014 (555 views) For our course about the impacts of the internet, we developed an exercise to get our students...
• The Climate as a System, part 3: greenhouse gases Aug 27, 2013 (553 views) The story so far: First, I argued that Climate Science is inherently a Systems Discipline. To...
• The Affordances of Bike Lanes Jun 10, 2011 (540 views) As a followup to my post earlier this week about how dangerous cycling is in Toronto, I decided to...
• Summer projects demo session Jul 20, 2009 (535 views) Next Wednesday, we're oganising demos of our students' summer projects, prior to the Science 2.0...
• How Climate Science is Done May 2, 2012 (528 views) In the talk I gave this week at the workshop on the CMIP5 experiments, I argued that we should do a...
• The Need for T-shaped Students Aug 15, 2013 (526 views) I love working in a University. Every day I encounter new ideas, and I get to chat to some of the...
• Modeling challenge (part 2) Apr 9, 2009 (506 views) Okay, here's a slightly different modeling challenge. It might be more of a visualization challenge....
• Shall we debate the existence of gravity? Mar 3, 2010 (505 views) Someone recently challenged me to debate the existence of climate change. Debates are extremely...
• How long have we known? Feb 18, 2010 (502 views) I'm giving a talk today to a group of high school students. Most of the talk focusses on climate...
• New Course: Systems Thinking for Global Problems Mar 28, 2012 (496 views) Sometime in May, I'll be running a new graduate course, DGC 2003 Systems Thinking for Global...
• A target limit of 2°C. Is this possible? Jul 9, 2009 (486 views) Big news today: The G8 summit declares that climate change mitigation policies should aim to limit...
• Studying team coordination and software verification practices for earth system modeling May 19, 2010 (486 views) I've been busy the last few weeks setting up the travel details for my sabbatical. My plan is to...
• You can't delegate ill-defined problems to software engineers Nov 16, 2010 (477 views) I had lunch last week with Gerhard Fischer at the University of Colorado. Gerhard is director of the...