5 most popular posts this month:

• How to write a scientific abstract in six easy steps Jan 26, 2010 (612 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 (281 views) Sometime in the 1990's, I drafted a frequently asked question list for NASA's IV&V facility....
• Who first coined the term "Greenhouse Effect"? Aug 18, 2015 (174 views) Today I've been tracking down the origin of the term "Greenhouse Effect". The term itself is...
• The Climate as a System, part 1: the central equilibrium loop Aug 22, 2013 (73 views) I wrote earlier this week that we should incorporate more of the key ideas from systems thinking...
• How much extra energy are we adding to the earth system? Jan 11, 2012 (70 views) Update (Aug 15, 2013): After a discussion on Twitter with Gavin Schmidt, I realised I did the...

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All time most popular posts:

• The difference between Verification and Validation Nov 29, 2010 (487,408 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 (479,672 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 (25,419 views) Today I've been tracking down the origin of the term "Greenhouse Effect". The term itself is...
• Notes from Hurricane Sandy Nov 1, 2012 (18,449 views) "] We spent some time in my climate change class this week talking about Hurricane Sandy - it's a...
• Population growth vs. emissions growth Jun 18, 2009 (16,162 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 (15,511 views) This week, I'm featuring some of the best blog posts written by the students on my first year...
• Initial value vs. boundary value problems Jan 16, 2010 (11,917 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 (10,292 views) I've been trawling through the final draft of the new IPCC assessment report that was released last...
• Getting the source code for climate models Jun 24, 2009 (9,795 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 (7,973 views) I've been collecting examples of different types of climate model that students can use in the...
• The Climate as a System, part 1: the central equilibrium loop Aug 22, 2013 (7,017 views) I wrote earlier this week that we should incorporate more of the key ideas from systems thinking...
• Climate Change: A Software Grand Challenge Aug 24, 2010 (6,724 views) Great news - I've had my paper accepted for the 2010 FSE/SDP Workshop on the Future of Software...
• TEDx talk: Should we trust climate models? May 23, 2014 (6,496 views) At the beginning of March, I was invited to give a talk at TEDxUofT. Colleagues tell me the hardest...
• The Ethics of Climate Change Feb 24, 2011 (5,562 views) James Garvey: The Ethics of Climate Change. Continuum, 2008. One of the pleasures of teaching is...
• What is Climate Informatics? Sep 21, 2012 (5,526 views) I've been using the term Climate Informatics informally for a few years to capture the kind of...
• A portable climate model Jul 22, 2010 (5,385 views) One of the exercises I set myself while visiting NCAR this month is to try porting the climate model...
• How much extra energy are we adding to the earth system? Jan 11, 2012 (5,364 views) Update (Aug 15, 2013): After a discussion on Twitter with Gavin Schmidt, I realised I did the...
• On the Uses and Abuses of Infrastructural Inversion Aug 26, 2010 (5,153 views) Nearly everything we ever do depends on vast social and technical infrastructures, which, when they...
• Skills needed for a successful PhD Apr 7, 2014 (5,104 views) My department is busy revising the set of milestones our PhD students need to meet in the course of...
• Why Systems Thinking? Aug 20, 2013 (5,021 views) Early in my career I trained as a systems analyst. My PhD was about the ability to identify and make...
• What makes software engineering for climate models different? Mar 24, 2010 (4,394 views) This week I attended a Dagstuhl seminar on New Frontiers for Empirical Software Engineering. It...
• Climate Model vs. Satellite Data Feb 14, 2014 (4,078 views) A few weeks ago, Mark Higgins, from EUMETSAT, posted this wonderful video of satellite imagery of...
• The Climate as a System, part 4: earth system feedbacks Sep 2, 2013 (4,017 views) At the start of this series, I argued that Climate Science is inherently a Systems Discipline. To...
• High level architecture of earth system models Aug 11, 2010 (3,831 views) To get myself familiar with the models at each of the climate centers I'm visiting this summer, I've...
• The Discovery of the Greenhouse Effect Mar 9, 2017 (3,786 views) Here's another excerpt from the draft manuscript of my forthcoming book, Computing the...
• The History of Climate Models Nov 2, 2012 (3,601 views) For a talk earlier this year, I put together a timeline of the history of climate modelling. I just...
• The Climate as a System, part 2: energy consumption Aug 26, 2013 (3,576 views) In part 1, I described the central equilibrium loop that controls the earth's temperature. Now it's...
• AGU Day 2: The role of CO2 in the earth's history Dec 17, 2009 (3,456 views) Yesterday afternoon, I managed to catch the Bjernes Lecture, which was given by Richard B. Alley:...
• The Climate as a System, part 3: greenhouse gases Aug 27, 2013 (3,454 views) The story so far: First, I argued that Climate Science is inherently a Systems Discipline. To...
• Tracking down the uncertainties in weather and climate prediction Jul 6, 2010 (3,375 views) Gavin beat me to posting the best quote from the CCSM workshop last week - the Uncertainty Prayer....
• Who is pulling the strings? Apr 7, 2010 (3,340 views) My exposé of why academics' private emails sometimes seem cranky has gotten a lot of attention....
• Verification and Validation of Earth System Models Sep 18, 2010 (3,276 views) I've been meaning to write a summary of the V&V techniques used for Earth System Models (ESMs)...
• Computational Thinking vs. Systems Thinking Mar 8, 2009 (3,181 views) Greg reminded me the other day about Jeanette Wing's writings about "computational thinking". Is...
• Validating Climate Models Nov 30, 2010 (3,163 views) In my last two posts, I demolished the idea that climate models need Independent Verification and...
• Systems thinking and Genetically Modified food May 25, 2012 (3,128 views) I've been following a heated discussion on twitter this past week about a planned protest on Sunday...
• What will sea level rise mean for Venice? Oct 28, 2010 (2,983 views) I took a break from blogging for the last few weeks to take a vacation with the family in Europe. We...
• How Big is the Climate Change Deficit? Feb 15, 2013 (2,789 views) Last week, Damon Matthews from Concordia visited, and gave a guest CGCS lecture, "Cumulative Carbon...
• The future of Software Engineering? Nov 11, 2010 (2,739 views) I went to a workshop earlier this week on "the Future of Software Engineering Research" in Santa Fe....
• AGU Day 3 part B: Data Provenance and Open Science Dec 21, 2009 (2,650 views) Wednesday morning also saw the poster session "IN31B - Emerging Issues in e-Science: Collaboration,...
• Do Climate Models need Independent Verification and Validation? Nov 27, 2010 (2,518 views) A common cry from climate contrarians is that climate models need better verification and validation...
• The CMIP5 Climate Experiments Sep 15, 2011 (2,465 views) I'm on my way back from a workshop on Computing in the Atmospheric Sciences, in Annecy, France. The...
• Unsustainable Apr 9, 2013 (2,226 views) We're taking the kids to see their favourite band: Muse are playing in Toronto tonight. I'm hoping...
• Epistemology of Climate Modeling Sep 28, 2010 (2,185 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 (2,134 views) Susan Leigh Star passed away in her sleep this week, coincidently on Ada Lovelace day. As I didn't...
• The first Numerical Weather Prediction on ENIAC Jan 25, 2011 (2,124 views) Last summer, when I was visiting NCAR, Warren Washington gave me some papers to read on the first...
• If we can't make mistakes, then we can't do science Apr 9, 2010 (2,115 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 5: clouds Sep 3, 2013 (1,962 views) Yesterday I talked about three re-inforcing feedback loops in the earth system, each of which has...
• "Daddy, what did YOU do in the climate wars?" Apr 16, 2009 (1,943 views) When my children grow up, the world they live in is likely be very different from ours. There's a...
• Open Climate Science or Denial of Service attacks? Nov 26, 2009 (1,804 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 (1,691 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 (1,648 views) I've been dipping into another new book this week, "Transport Revolutions: Moving People and...
• Systems Thinking for Climate Systems Feb 15, 2011 (1,644 views) In pulling together my thoughts for a workshop last week on systems thinking, I've realised how much...
• Disinformation Works (for receptive audiences) Feb 28, 2011 (1,603 views) Here's an interesting study by Lawrence Hamilton, published in Climatic Change in December:...
• From Computational Thinking to Systems Thinking Jun 6, 2014 (1,596 views) I'll be heading off to Stockholm in August to present a paper at the 2nd International Conference on...
• Detecting Crap on the Internet Oct 27, 2014 (1,535 views) For our course about the impacts of the internet, we developed an exercise to get our students...
• Academics always fight over the peer-review process Mar 26, 2010 (1,494 views) Note: This started as a comment on a thread at RealClimate about the Guardian's investigation of the...
• The Power to Change Systems Oct 16, 2011 (1,483 views) What unites both the climate crisis and the financial crisis? What is it that has driven scientists...
• Ethics of Climate - Talk by Ray Pierrehumbert Apr 23, 2010 (1,446 views) After catching the start of yesterday's Centre for Environment Research Day, I headed around the...
• A simpler slogan? Sep 15, 2011 (1,431 views) Al Gore is part way through a 24-hour, round-the-globe, live broadcast, called Climate Reality. I...
• Why I don't eat meat Jul 22, 2011 (1,424 views) My wife and I have been (sort of) vegetarian for twenty years now. I say "sort of" because we do eat...
• The Software Architecture of Global Climate Models Dec 10, 2011 (1,399 views) On Thursday, Kaitlin presented her poster at the AGU meeting, which shows the results of the study...
• Growth of code complexity Jul 2, 2009 (1,396 views) I'm busy revising our paper on the study of the software development processes at the Hadley Centre...
• Inertia on the pathway to decarbonization Oct 21, 2016 (1,373 views) One of the biggest challenges in understanding climate change is that the timescales involved are...
• Some CMIP5 statistics Apr 29, 2012 (1,357 views) I'm attending a workshop this week in which some of the initial results from the Fifth Coupled Model...
• An AGU Global Environmental Change Bookshelf Dec 17, 2010 (1,289 views) I spent most of Wednesday attending a series of sessions featuring bestselling authors from the AGU...
• The Principle of Complementarity (1) Mar 22, 2011 (1,288 views) I introduced some ideas from systems thinking last month, and especially the idea of second order...
• Bill Gates is very wrong Jan 26, 2010 (1,280 views) In a blog post that was picked up by the Huffington post, Bill Gates writes about why we need...
• Crowd-Sourced Carbon Calculators (inspired by David Mackay) Mar 11, 2010 (1,251 views) On March 30, David Mackay, author of Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air, will be giving the...
• A first glimpse at model results for the next IPCC assessment Sep 16, 2011 (1,234 views) Over the next few years, you're likely to see a lot of graphs like this (click for a bigger...
• When did ignorance become a badge of honour for journalists? Aug 28, 2010 (1,219 views) Here's an appalling article by Andy Revkin on dotEarth which epitomizes everything that is wrong...
• Social epistemology and climate denialism Aug 6, 2009 (1,204 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 (1,191 views) It would be very easy to re-post pretty much everything from xkcd, and I'm trying hard to resist,...
• Successful Predictions (AGU 2012 Tyndall Lecture) Dec 11, 2012 (1,175 views) Last week I was at the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting. I plan to blog about many of the talks, but let me...
• Measuring Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Cities Apr 22, 2010 (1,142 views) This morning I attended the first part of the Centre for Environment's Research Day, and I'm glad I...
• What is Science Literacy? May 29, 2012 (1,138 views) A few people today have pointed me at the new paper by Dan Kahan & colleagues (1), which...
• Formal Verification for Climate Models? Sep 23, 2011 (1,085 views) Valdivino, who is working on a PhD in Brazil, on formal software verification techniques, is...
• New Grad Course on Computational Models of Climate Change Jan 6, 2013 (1,079 views) This week, I start teaching a new grad course on computational models of climate change, aimed at...
• Commuting by bike is a dangerous sport Jun 8, 2011 (1,048 views) I thought I'd write a little on cycling in the Toronto this month, partly because is Bike Month,...
• What's the pricetag on a Global Climate Model? Sep 3, 2010 (1,019 views) Here's a question I've been asking a few people lately, ever since I asserted that climate models...
• AGU talk: Tim Palmer on Building Probabilistic Climate Models Dec 19, 2010 (995 views) On Thursday, Tim Palmer of the University of Oxford and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather...
• A Hierarchical Systems Approach to Model Validation Dec 6, 2011 (995 views) I'm at the AGU meeting in San Francisco this week. The internet connections in the meeting rooms...
• When is a model not a model? Nov 30, 2016 (972 views) This is an excerpt from the draft manuscript of my forthcoming book, Computing the...
• Climate Science and Software Quality Feb 12, 2010 (957 views) Here's a letter I've sent to the Guardian newspaper. I wonder if they'll print it? Professor...
• Fun with urban transport data Jun 30, 2011 (943 views) I spent a little time this afternoon trying to get hold of data. I guess I have high expectations...
• The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet? Apr 10, 2013 (939 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 (882 views) As a follow-on from yesterday's post on making climate software open source, I'd like to pick up on...
• AGU day 3: Science literacy means understanding the process Dec 20, 2009 (867 views) Picking up from my last post on communicating with policymakers, the first session on Wednesday...
• How long have we known? Feb 18, 2010 (849 views) I'm giving a talk today to a group of high school students. Most of the talk focusses on climate...
• Missing the Target: Canada's Deplorable Record on Carbon Emissions Oct 18, 2016 (847 views) I've been exploring how Canada's commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions stack up against...
• National Geographic's 6 degrees Jul 11, 2011 (830 views) Okay, so it's a few years old, but I'd never seen this series of videos by National Geographic...
• Weather balloons vs. climate balloons Feb 21, 2014 (829 views) What's the difference between forecasting the weather and predicting future climate change? A few...
• Climate change is mankind's defining crisis (Mobiot/Lomborg debate) Dec 1, 2009 (822 views) This evening I'm attending a debate on climate change in Toronto, at the Munk Centre. George Monbiot...
• AGU session on Software Engineering for Climate Modeling Dec 14, 2010 (817 views) Here's the first of a series of posts from the American Geophysical Society (AGU) Fall meeting,...
• One Model to Rule them All? Nov 6, 2011 (802 views) I had several interesting conversations at WCRP11 last week about how different the various climate...
• The Need for T-shaped Students Aug 15, 2013 (787 views) I love working in a University. Every day I encounter new ideas, and I get to chat to some of the...
• Data Challenges in Creating a new Surface Temperature Record Aug 25, 2010 (756 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 (751 views) Call for Papers: IEEE Software Special Issue on Climate Change: Software, Science and...
• Another cognitive bug: Attempting to correct a misperception often reinforces it May 31, 2010 (725 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 (714 views) I've been thinking a lot recently about why so few people seem to understand the severity of the...
• The Affordances of Bike Lanes Jun 10, 2011 (714 views) As a followup to my post earlier this week about how dangerous cycling is in Toronto, I decided to...