5 most popular posts this month:

• The difference between Verification and Validation Nov 29, 2010 (2,952 views) Sometime in the 1990's, I drafted a frequently asked question list for NASA's IV&V facility....
• How to write a scientific abstract in six easy steps Jan 26, 2010 (2,133 views) Here's the abstract for a paper (that I haven't written) on how to write an abstract: How to Write...
• Who first coined the term "Greenhouse Effect"? Aug 18, 2015 (311 views) Today I've been tracking down the origin of the term "Greenhouse Effect". The term itself is...
• Population growth vs. emissions growth Jun 18, 2009 (203 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 (89 views) This week, I'm featuring some of the best blog posts written by the students on my first year...

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All time most popular posts:

• How to write a scientific abstract in six easy steps Jan 26, 2010 (405,832 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 (369,718 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 (18,410 views) "] We spent some time in my climate change class this week talking about Hurricane Sandy - it's a...
• Aerosols: Are They Good or Bad? Apr 3, 2012 (14,045 views) This week, I'm featuring some of the best blog posts written by the students on my first year...
• Who first coined the term "Greenhouse Effect"? Aug 18, 2015 (13,459 views) Today I've been tracking down the origin of the term "Greenhouse Effect". The term itself is...
• Population growth vs. emissions growth Jun 18, 2009 (10,842 views) I gave my talk on SE for the Planet again this afternoon, to the local audience. We recorded it, and...
• What Does the New IPCC Report Say About Climate Change? Oct 8, 2013 (9,911 views) I've been trawling through the final draft of the new IPCC assessment report that was released last...
• Initial value vs. boundary value problems Jan 16, 2010 (9,544 views) Weather and climate are different. Weather varies tremendously from day to day, week to week, season...
• Getting the source code for climate models Jun 24, 2009 (8,171 views) First, we have to be clear what we mean by a climate model. Wikipedia offers a quick intro to types...
• Simple Climate Models to play with in the classroom Jan 25, 2013 (6,589 views) I've been collecting examples of different types of climate model that students can use in the...
• TEDx talk: Should we trust climate models? May 23, 2014 (5,697 views) At the beginning of March, I was invited to give a talk at TEDxUofT. Colleagues tell me the hardest...
• A portable climate model Jul 22, 2010 (5,051 views) One of the exercises I set myself while visiting NCAR this month is to try porting the climate model...
• Skills needed for a successful PhD Apr 7, 2014 (4,604 views) My department is busy revising the set of milestones our PhD students need to meet in the course of...
• The Ethics of Climate Change Feb 24, 2011 (4,407 views) James Garvey: The Ethics of Climate Change. Continuum, 2008. One of the pleasures of teaching is...
• What is Climate Informatics? Sep 21, 2012 (4,353 views) I've been using the term Climate Informatics informally for a few years to capture the kind of...
• Climate Change: A Software Grand Challenge Aug 24, 2010 (3,900 views) Great news - I've had my paper accepted for the 2010 FSE/SDP Workshop on the Future of Software...
• What makes software engineering for climate models different? Mar 24, 2010 (3,838 views) This week I attended a Dagstuhl seminar on New Frontiers for Empirical Software Engineering. It...
• How much extra energy are we adding to the earth system? Jan 11, 2012 (3,677 views) Update (Aug 15, 2013): After a discussion on Twitter with Gavin Schmidt, I realised I did the...
• Climate Model vs. Satellite Data Feb 14, 2014 (3,580 views) A few weeks ago, Mark Higgins, from EUMETSAT, posted this wonderful video of satellite imagery of...
• High level architecture of earth system models Aug 11, 2010 (3,472 views) To get myself familiar with the models at each of the climate centers I'm visiting this summer, I've...
• AGU Day 2: The role of CO2 in the earth's history Dec 17, 2009 (3,358 views) Yesterday afternoon, I managed to catch the Bjernes Lecture, which was given by Richard B. Alley:...
• Why Systems Thinking? Aug 20, 2013 (3,333 views) Early in my career I trained as a systems analyst. My PhD was about the ability to identify and make...
• The Climate as a System, part 1: the central equilibrium loop Aug 22, 2013 (3,321 views) I wrote earlier this week that we should incorporate more of the key ideas from systems thinking...
• Who is pulling the strings? Apr 7, 2010 (3,290 views) My exposé of why academics' private emails sometimes seem cranky has gotten a lot of attention....
• On the Uses and Abuses of Infrastructural Inversion Aug 26, 2010 (3,010 views) Nearly everything we ever do depends on vast social and technical infrastructures, which, when they...
• Tracking down the uncertainties in weather and climate prediction Jul 6, 2010 (2,988 views) Gavin beat me to posting the best quote from the CCSM workshop last week - the Uncertainty Prayer....
• The Climate as a System, part 4: earth system feedbacks Sep 2, 2013 (2,981 views) At the start of this series, I argued that Climate Science is inherently a Systems Discipline. To...
• What will sea level rise mean for Venice? Oct 28, 2010 (2,845 views) I took a break from blogging for the last few weeks to take a vacation with the family in Europe. We...
• The History of Climate Models Nov 2, 2012 (2,798 views) For a talk earlier this year, I put together a timeline of the history of climate modelling. I just...
• Validating Climate Models Nov 30, 2010 (2,794 views) In my last two posts, I demolished the idea that climate models need Independent Verification and...
• The future of Software Engineering? Nov 11, 2010 (2,696 views) I went to a workshop earlier this week on "the Future of Software Engineering Research" in Santa Fe....
• Verification and Validation of Earth System Models Sep 18, 2010 (2,640 views) I've been meaning to write a summary of the V&V techniques used for Earth System Models (ESMs)...
• AGU Day 3 part B: Data Provenance and Open Science Dec 21, 2009 (2,546 views) Wednesday morning also saw the poster session "IN31B - Emerging Issues in e-Science: Collaboration,...
• Systems thinking and Genetically Modified food May 25, 2012 (2,401 views) I've been following a heated discussion on twitter this past week about a planned protest on Sunday...
• The CMIP5 Climate Experiments Sep 15, 2011 (2,375 views) I'm on my way back from a workshop on Computing in the Atmospheric Sciences, in Annecy, France. The...
• Do Climate Models need Independent Verification and Validation? Nov 27, 2010 (2,371 views) A common cry from climate contrarians is that climate models need better verification and validation...
• The Discovery of the Greenhouse Effect Mar 9, 2017 (2,159 views) Here's another excerpt from the draft manuscript of my forthcoming book, Computing the...
• Epistemology of Climate Modeling Sep 28, 2010 (2,142 views) This will keep me occupied with good reads for the next few weeks - this month's issue of the...
• How Big is the Climate Change Deficit? Feb 15, 2013 (2,102 views) Last week, Damon Matthews from Concordia visited, and gave a guest CGCS lecture, "Cumulative Carbon...
• A sad farewell to Susan Leigh Star Mar 27, 2010 (2,088 views) Susan Leigh Star passed away in her sleep this week, coincidently on Ada Lovelace day. As I didn't...
• If we can't make mistakes, then we can't do science Apr 9, 2010 (1,998 views) My debate with George Monbiot is still going on in this thread. I'm raising this comment to be a...
• The Climate as a System, part 2: energy consumption Aug 26, 2013 (1,946 views) In part 1, I described the central equilibrium loop that controls the earth's temperature. Now it's...
• The Climate as a System, part 3: greenhouse gases Aug 27, 2013 (1,836 views) The story so far: First, I argued that Climate Science is inherently a Systems Discipline. To...
• Open Climate Science or Denial of Service attacks? Nov 26, 2009 (1,786 views) I wasn't going to post anything about the CRU emails story (apart from my attempt at humour),...
• AGU Day 3 part C: How good are predictions from climate models? Jan 7, 2010 (1,641 views) The highlight of the whole conference for me was the Wednesday afternoon session on Methodologies of...
• "Daddy, what did YOU do in the climate wars?" Apr 16, 2009 (1,603 views) When my children grow up, the world they live in is likely be very different from ours. There's a...
• Disinformation Works (for receptive audiences) Feb 28, 2011 (1,594 views) Here's an interesting study by Lawrence Hamilton, published in Climatic Change in December:...
• Oil Shocks and Food Prices Feb 28, 2011 (1,572 views) I've been dipping into another new book this week, "Transport Revolutions: Moving People and...
• The first Numerical Weather Prediction on ENIAC Jan 25, 2011 (1,495 views) Last summer, when I was visiting NCAR, Warren Washington gave me some papers to read on the first...
• Academics always fight over the peer-review process Mar 26, 2010 (1,470 views) Note: This started as a comment on a thread at RealClimate about the Guardian's investigation of the...
• The Climate as a System, part 5: clouds Sep 3, 2013 (1,441 views) Yesterday I talked about three re-inforcing feedback loops in the earth system, each of which has...
• A simpler slogan? Sep 15, 2011 (1,412 views) Al Gore is part way through a 24-hour, round-the-globe, live broadcast, called Climate Reality. I...
• Detecting Crap on the Internet Oct 27, 2014 (1,382 views) For our course about the impacts of the internet, we developed an exercise to get our students...
• Ethics of Climate - Talk by Ray Pierrehumbert Apr 23, 2010 (1,371 views) After catching the start of yesterday's Centre for Environment Research Day, I headed around the...
• The Software Architecture of Global Climate Models Dec 10, 2011 (1,329 views) On Thursday, Kaitlin presented her poster at the AGU meeting, which shows the results of the study...
• Systems Thinking for Climate Systems Feb 15, 2011 (1,269 views) In pulling together my thoughts for a workshop last week on systems thinking, I've realised how much...
• Why I don't eat meat Jul 22, 2011 (1,253 views) My wife and I have been (sort of) vegetarian for twenty years now. I say "sort of" because we do eat...
• From Computational Thinking to Systems Thinking Jun 6, 2014 (1,243 views) I'll be heading off to Stockholm in August to present a paper at the 2nd International Conference on...
• An AGU Global Environmental Change Bookshelf Dec 17, 2010 (1,238 views) I spent most of Wednesday attending a series of sessions featuring bestselling authors from the AGU...
• When did ignorance become a badge of honour for journalists? Aug 28, 2010 (1,205 views) Here's an appalling article by Andy Revkin on dotEarth which epitomizes everything that is wrong...
• A first glimpse at model results for the next IPCC assessment Sep 16, 2011 (1,199 views) Over the next few years, you're likely to see a lot of graphs like this (click for a bigger...
• Social epistemology and climate denialism Aug 6, 2009 (1,173 views) I've spent some time pondering why so many people seem unable or unwilling to understand the...
• Some CMIP5 statistics Apr 29, 2012 (1,156 views) I'm attending a workshop this week in which some of the initial results from the Fifth Coupled Model...
• Bill Gates is very wrong Jan 26, 2010 (1,126 views) In a blog post that was picked up by the Huffington post, Bill Gates writes about why we need...
• The Principle of Complementarity (1) Mar 22, 2011 (1,106 views) I introduced some ideas from systems thinking last month, and especially the idea of second order...
• Crowd-Sourced Carbon Calculators (inspired by David Mackay) Mar 11, 2010 (1,104 views) On March 30, David Mackay, author of Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air, will be giving the...
• xkcd: How to Write Good Code Jan 7, 2011 (1,102 views) It would be very easy to re-post pretty much everything from xkcd, and I'm trying hard to resist,...
• What is Science Literacy? May 29, 2012 (1,094 views) A few people today have pointed me at the new paper by Dan Kahan & colleagues (1), which...
• Measuring Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Cities Apr 22, 2010 (1,094 views) This morning I attended the first part of the Centre for Environment's Research Day, and I'm glad I...
• Successful Predictions (AGU 2012 Tyndall Lecture) Dec 11, 2012 (1,076 views) Last week I was at the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting. I plan to blog about many of the talks, but let me...
• Growth of code complexity Jul 2, 2009 (1,046 views) I'm busy revising our paper on the study of the software development processes at the Hadley Centre...
• New Grad Course on Computational Models of Climate Change Jan 6, 2013 (1,034 views) This week, I start teaching a new grad course on computational models of climate change, aimed at...
• The Power to Change Systems Oct 16, 2011 (1,026 views) What unites both the climate crisis and the financial crisis? What is it that has driven scientists...
• Commuting by bike is a dangerous sport Jun 8, 2011 (1,013 views) I thought I'd write a little on cycling in the Toronto this month, partly because is Bike Month,...
• Inertia on the pathway to decarbonization Oct 21, 2016 (1,001 views) One of the biggest challenges in understanding climate change is that the timescales involved are...
• Formal Verification for Climate Models? Sep 23, 2011 (977 views) Valdivino, who is working on a PhD in Brazil, on formal software verification techniques, is...
• A Hierarchical Systems Approach to Model Validation Dec 6, 2011 (974 views) I'm at the AGU meeting in San Francisco this week. The internet connections in the meeting rooms...
• AGU talk: Tim Palmer on Building Probabilistic Climate Models Dec 19, 2010 (971 views) On Thursday, Tim Palmer of the University of Oxford and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather...
• Climate Science and Software Quality Feb 12, 2010 (929 views) Here's a letter I've sent to the Guardian newspaper. I wonder if they'll print it? Professor...
• The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet? Apr 10, 2013 (914 views) Next year, I'll be teaching a new undergraduate course, as part of an initiative by the Faculty of...
• Fun with urban transport data Jun 30, 2011 (899 views) I spent a little time this afternoon trying to get hold of data. I guess I have high expectations...
• AGU day 3: Science literacy means understanding the process Dec 20, 2009 (859 views) Picking up from my last post on communicating with policymakers, the first session on Wednesday...
• Do "Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow"? Dec 11, 2009 (822 views) As a follow-on from yesterday's post on making climate software open source, I'd like to pick up on...
• National Geographic's 6 degrees Jul 11, 2011 (811 views) Okay, so it's a few years old, but I'd never seen this series of videos by National Geographic...
• Climate change is mankind's defining crisis (Mobiot/Lomborg debate) Dec 1, 2009 (789 views) This evening I'm attending a debate on climate change in Toronto, at the Munk Centre. George Monbiot...
• How long have we known? Feb 18, 2010 (785 views) I'm giving a talk today to a group of high school students. Most of the talk focusses on climate...
• One Model to Rule them All? Nov 6, 2011 (779 views) I had several interesting conversations at WCRP11 last week about how different the various climate...
• Weather balloons vs. climate balloons Feb 21, 2014 (765 views) What's the difference between forecasting the weather and predicting future climate change? A few...
• IEEE Software Special Issue on Climate Change: Software, Science and Society Dec 5, 2010 (741 views) Call for Papers: IEEE Software Special Issue on Climate Change: Software, Science and...
• Data Challenges in Creating a new Surface Temperature Record Aug 25, 2010 (739 views) I've been invited to a workshop at the UK Met Office in a few weeks time, to brainstorm a plan to...
• Unsustainable Apr 9, 2013 (731 views) We're taking the kids to see their favourite band: Muse are playing in Toronto tonight. I'm hoping...
• Another cognitive bug: Attempting to correct a misperception often reinforces it May 31, 2010 (699 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 (697 views) I've been thinking a lot recently about why so few people seem to understand the severity of the...
• The Need for T-shaped Students Aug 15, 2013 (695 views) I love working in a University. Every day I encounter new ideas, and I get to chat to some of the...
• AGU session on Software Engineering for Climate Modeling Dec 14, 2010 (693 views) Here's the first of a series of posts from the American Geophysical Society (AGU) Fall meeting,...
• The Affordances of Bike Lanes Jun 10, 2011 (687 views) As a followup to my post earlier this week about how dangerous cycling is in Toronto, I decided to...
• What's the pricetag on a Global Climate Model? Sep 3, 2010 (681 views) Here's a question I've been asking a few people lately, ever since I asserted that climate models...
• How Climate Science is Done May 2, 2012 (669 views) In the talk I gave this week at the workshop on the CMIP5 experiments, I argued that we should do a...
• New Course: Systems Thinking for Global Problems Mar 28, 2012 (669 views) Sometime in May, I'll be running a new graduate course, DGC 2003 Systems Thinking for Global...
• Another tiresome exoneration for climate science Jul 7, 2010 (663 views) The Muir Russell report came out today, and I just finished reading the thing. It should be no...