5 most popular posts this month:

• The difference between Verification and Validation Nov 29, 2010 (5,594 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 (3,987 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 (335 views) Today I've been tracking down the origin of the term "Greenhouse Effect". The term itself is...
• Aerosols: Are They Good or Bad? Apr 3, 2012 (196 views) This week, I'm featuring some of the best blog posts written by the students on my first year...
• Population growth vs. emissions growth Jun 18, 2009 (112 views) I gave my talk on SE for the Planet again this afternoon, to the local audience. We recorded it, and...

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All time most popular posts:

• How to write a scientific abstract in six easy steps Jan 26, 2010 (326,838 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 (271,700 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 (18,278 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 (10,863 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 (9,154 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 (8,515 views) Weather and climate are different. Weather varies tremendously from day to day, week to week, season...
• Population growth vs. emissions growth Jun 18, 2009 (7,297 views) I gave my talk on SE for the Planet again this afternoon, to the local audience. We recorded it, and...
• Getting the source code for climate models Jun 24, 2009 (6,832 views) First, we have to be clear what we mean by a climate model. Wikipedia offers a quick intro to types...
• Who first coined the term "Greenhouse Effect"? Aug 18, 2015 (6,360 views) Today I've been tracking down the origin of the term "Greenhouse Effect". The term itself is...
• Simple Climate Models to play with in the classroom Jan 25, 2013 (5,534 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 (5,212 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 (4,865 views) One of the exercises I set myself while visiting NCAR this month is to try porting the climate model...
• What is Climate Informatics? Sep 21, 2012 (3,791 views) I've been using the term Climate Informatics informally for a few years to capture the kind of...
• Skills needed for a successful PhD Apr 7, 2014 (3,786 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 (3,498 views) James Garvey: The Ethics of Climate Change. Continuum, 2008. One of the pleasures of teaching is...
• What makes software engineering for climate models different? Mar 24, 2010 (3,446 views) This week I attended a Dagstuhl seminar on New Frontiers for Empirical Software Engineering. It...
• Who is pulling the strings? Apr 7, 2010 (3,282 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 (3,225 views) Yesterday afternoon, I managed to catch the Bjernes Lecture, which was given by Richard B. Alley:...
• Climate Model vs. Satellite Data Feb 14, 2014 (3,214 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 (2,911 views) To get myself familiar with the models at each of the climate centers I'm visiting this summer, I've...
• Climate Change: A Software Grand Challenge Aug 24, 2010 (2,880 views) Great news - I've had my paper accepted for the 2010 FSE/SDP Workshop on the Future of Software...
• How much extra energy are we adding to the earth system? Jan 11, 2012 (2,826 views) Update (Aug 15, 2013): After a discussion on Twitter with Gavin Schmidt, I realised I did the...
• Tracking down the uncertainties in weather and climate prediction Jul 6, 2010 (2,725 views) Gavin beat me to posting the best quote from the CCSM workshop last week - the Uncertainty Prayer....
• Why Systems Thinking? Aug 20, 2013 (2,656 views) Early in my career I trained as a systems analyst. My PhD was about the ability to identify and make...
• The future of Software Engineering? Nov 11, 2010 (2,598 views) I went to a workshop earlier this week on "the Future of Software Engineering Research" in Santa Fe....
• What will sea level rise mean for Venice? Oct 28, 2010 (2,537 views) I took a break from blogging for the last few weeks to take a vacation with the family in Europe. We...
• AGU Day 3 part B: Data Provenance and Open Science Dec 21, 2009 (2,437 views) Wednesday morning also saw the poster session "IN31B - Emerging Issues in e-Science: Collaboration,...
• Validating Climate Models Nov 30, 2010 (2,413 views) In my last two posts, I demolished the idea that climate models need Independent Verification and...
• The History of Climate Models Nov 2, 2012 (2,309 views) For a talk earlier this year, I put together a timeline of the history of climate modelling. I just...
• The CMIP5 Climate Experiments Sep 15, 2011 (2,257 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 (2,196 views) A common cry from climate contrarians is that climate models need better verification and validation...
• Verification and Validation of Earth System Models Sep 18, 2010 (2,195 views) I've been meaning to write a summary of the V&V techniques used for Earth System Models (ESMs)...
• The Climate as a System, part 1: the central equilibrium loop Aug 22, 2013 (2,181 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 (2,146 views) At the start of this series, I argued that Climate Science is inherently a Systems Discipline. To...
• Epistemology of Climate Modeling Sep 28, 2010 (2,124 views) This will keep me occupied with good reads for the next few weeks - this month's issue of the...
• A sad farewell to Susan Leigh Star Mar 27, 2010 (2,027 views) Susan Leigh Star passed away in her sleep this week, coincidently on Ada Lovelace day. As I didn't...
• On the Uses and Abuses of Infrastructural Inversion Aug 26, 2010 (2,001 views) Nearly everything we ever do depends on vast social and technical infrastructures, which, when they...
• Systems thinking and Genetically Modified food May 25, 2012 (1,947 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 (1,915 views) My debate with George Monbiot is still going on in this thread. I'm raising this comment to be a...
• How Big is the Climate Change Deficit? Feb 15, 2013 (1,872 views) Last week, Damon Matthews from Concordia visited, and gave a guest CGCS lecture, "Cumulative Carbon...
• Open Climate Science or Denial of Service attacks? Nov 26, 2009 (1,769 views) I wasn't going to post anything about the CRU emails story (apart from my attempt at humour),...
• Disinformation Works (for receptive audiences) Feb 28, 2011 (1,587 views) Here's an interesting study by Lawrence Hamilton, published in Climatic Change in December:...
• AGU Day 3 part C: How good are predictions from climate models? Jan 7, 2010 (1,565 views) The highlight of the whole conference for me was the Wednesday afternoon session on Methodologies of...
• Oil Shocks and Food Prices Feb 28, 2011 (1,511 views) I've been dipping into another new book this week, "Transport Revolutions: Moving People and...
• The Climate as a System, part 2: energy consumption Aug 26, 2013 (1,467 views) In part 1, I described the central equilibrium loop that controls the earth's temperature. Now it's...
• Academics always fight over the peer-review process Mar 26, 2010 (1,466 views) Note: This started as a comment on a thread at RealClimate about the Guardian's investigation of the...
• "Daddy, what did YOU do in the climate wars?" Apr 16, 2009 (1,445 views) When my children grow up, the world they live in is likely be very different from ours. There's a...
• The Climate as a System, part 3: greenhouse gases Aug 27, 2013 (1,372 views) The story so far: First, I argued that Climate Science is inherently a Systems Discipline. To...
• A simpler slogan? Sep 15, 2011 (1,357 views) Al Gore is part way through a 24-hour, round-the-globe, live broadcast, called Climate Reality. I...
• Ethics of Climate - Talk by Ray Pierrehumbert Apr 23, 2010 (1,341 views) After catching the start of yesterday's Centre for Environment Research Day, I headed around the...
• Detecting Crap on the Internet Oct 27, 2014 (1,290 views) For our course about the impacts of the internet, we developed an exercise to get our students...
• The Software Architecture of Global Climate Models Dec 10, 2011 (1,277 views) On Thursday, Kaitlin presented her poster at the AGU meeting, which shows the results of the study...
• The Climate as a System, part 5: clouds Sep 3, 2013 (1,228 views) Yesterday I talked about three re-inforcing feedback loops in the earth system, each of which has...
• An AGU Global Environmental Change Bookshelf Dec 17, 2010 (1,224 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 (1,200 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 (1,179 views) Over the next few years, you're likely to see a lot of graphs like this (click for a bigger...
• The first Numerical Weather Prediction on ENIAC Jan 25, 2011 (1,160 views) Last summer, when I was visiting NCAR, Warren Washington gave me some papers to read on the first...
• Social epistemology and climate denialism Aug 6, 2009 (1,144 views) I've spent some time pondering why so many people seem unable or unwilling to understand the...
• Why I don't eat meat Jul 22, 2011 (1,097 views) My wife and I have been (sort of) vegetarian for twenty years now. I say "sort of" because we do eat...
• Bill Gates is very wrong Jan 26, 2010 (1,058 views) In a blog post that was picked up by the Huffington post, Bill Gates writes about why we need...
• xkcd: How to Write Good Code Jan 7, 2011 (1,057 views) It would be very easy to re-post pretty much everything from xkcd, and I'm trying hard to resist,...
• Crowd-Sourced Carbon Calculators (inspired by David Mackay) Mar 11, 2010 (1,054 views) On March 30, David Mackay, author of Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air, will be giving the...
• From Computational Thinking to Systems Thinking Jun 6, 2014 (1,027 views) I'll be heading off to Stockholm in August to present a paper at the 2nd International Conference on...
• Measuring Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Cities Apr 22, 2010 (1,018 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 (1,004 views) Last week I was at the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting. I plan to blog about many of the talks, but let me...
• Systems Thinking for Climate Systems Feb 15, 2011 (995 views) In pulling together my thoughts for a workshop last week on systems thinking, I've realised how much...
• Commuting by bike is a dangerous sport Jun 8, 2011 (986 views) I thought I'd write a little on cycling in the Toronto this month, partly because is Bike Month,...
• The Principle of Complementarity (1) Mar 22, 2011 (986 views) I introduced some ideas from systems thinking last month, and especially the idea of second order...
• New Grad Course on Computational Models of Climate Change Jan 6, 2013 (972 views) This week, I start teaching a new grad course on computational models of climate change, aimed at...
• What is Science Literacy? May 29, 2012 (970 views) A few people today have pointed me at the new paper by Dan Kahan & colleagues (1), which...
• Some CMIP5 statistics Apr 29, 2012 (964 views) I'm attending a workshop this week in which some of the initial results from the Fifth Coupled Model...
• A Hierarchical Systems Approach to Model Validation Dec 6, 2011 (951 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 (947 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 (943 views) Valdivino, who is working on a PhD in Brazil, on formal software verification techniques, is...
• Climate Science and Software Quality Feb 12, 2010 (924 views) Here's a letter I've sent to the Guardian newspaper. I wonder if they'll print it? Professor...
• Growth of code complexity Jul 2, 2009 (901 views) I'm busy revising our paper on the study of the software development processes at the Hadley Centre...
• The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet? Apr 10, 2013 (897 views) Next year, I'll be teaching a new undergraduate course, as part of an initiative by the Faculty of...
• AGU day 3: Science literacy means understanding the process Dec 20, 2009 (854 views) Picking up from my last post on communicating with policymakers, the first session on Wednesday...
• Fun with urban transport data Jun 30, 2011 (829 views) I spent a little time this afternoon trying to get hold of data. I guess I have high expectations...
• National Geographic's 6 degrees Jul 11, 2011 (804 views) Okay, so it's a few years old, but I'd never seen this series of videos by National Geographic...
• Do "Many eyeballs make all bugs shallow"? Dec 11, 2009 (793 views) As a follow-on from yesterday's post on making climate software open source, I'd like to pick up on...
• The Power to Change Systems Oct 16, 2011 (773 views) What unites both the climate crisis and the financial crisis? What is it that has driven scientists...
• Climate change is mankind's defining crisis (Mobiot/Lomborg debate) Dec 1, 2009 (772 views) This evening I'm attending a debate on climate change in Toronto, at the Munk Centre. George Monbiot...
• One Model to Rule them All? Nov 6, 2011 (741 views) I had several interesting conversations at WCRP11 last week about how different the various climate...
• How long have we known? Feb 18, 2010 (734 views) I'm giving a talk today to a group of high school students. Most of the talk focusses on climate...
• Data Challenges in Creating a new Surface Temperature Record Aug 25, 2010 (721 views) I've been invited to a workshop at the UK Met Office in a few weeks time, to brainstorm a plan to...
• IEEE Software Special Issue on Climate Change: Software, Science and Society Dec 5, 2010 (720 views) Call for Papers: IEEE Software Special Issue on Climate Change: Software, Science and...
• Are you aware of your own (in)competence? Jun 11, 2009 (686 views) I've been thinking a lot recently about why so few people seem to understand the severity of the...
• Another cognitive bug: Attempting to correct a misperception often reinforces it May 31, 2010 (683 views) I'm fascinated by the cognitive biases that affect people's perceptions of climate change. I've...
• AGU session on Software Engineering for Climate Modeling Dec 14, 2010 (674 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 (664 views) As a followup to my post earlier this week about how dangerous cycling is in Toronto, I decided to...
• Another tiresome exoneration for climate science Jul 7, 2010 (660 views) The Muir Russell report came out today, and I just finished reading the thing. It should be no...
• Weather balloons vs. climate balloons Feb 21, 2014 (660 views) What's the difference between forecasting the weather and predicting future climate change? A few...
• The Need for T-shaped Students Aug 15, 2013 (659 views) I love working in a University. Every day I encounter new ideas, and I get to chat to some of the...
• How Climate Science is Done May 2, 2012 (650 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 (639 views) Sometime in May, I'll be running a new graduate course, DGC 2003 Systems Thinking for Global...
• Climate Models are Good Quality Software (?!) Apr 30, 2010 (632 views) Excellent news: Jon Pipitone has finished his MSc project on the software quality of climate models,...
• Inertia on the pathway to decarbonization Oct 21, 2016 (627 views) One of the biggest challenges in understanding climate change is that the timescales involved are...
• What's the pricetag on a Global Climate Model? Sep 3, 2010 (611 views) Here's a question I've been asking a few people lately, ever since I asserted that climate models...
• Climate Model Bake-Off Mar 5, 2014 (602 views) Imagine for a moment if Microsoft had 24 competitors around the world, each building their own...