5 most popular posts this month:

• The difference between Verification and Validation Nov 29, 2010 (3,998 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 (3,475 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 (450 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 (194 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 (120 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 (394,813 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 (356,053 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 (18,376 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 (13,648 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 (12,115 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 (9,875 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 (9,739 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 (9,338 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 (7,911 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 (6,414 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 (5,652 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 (5,011 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 (4,507 views) My department is busy revising the set of milestones our PhD students need to meet in the course of...
• What is Climate Informatics? Sep 21, 2012 (4,229 views) I've been using the term Climate Informatics informally for a few years to capture the kind of...
• The Ethics of Climate Change Feb 24, 2011 (4,148 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 (3,782 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 (3,602 views) Great news - I've had my paper accepted for the 2010 FSE/SDP Workshop on the Future of Software...
• Climate Model vs. Satellite Data Feb 14, 2014 (3,514 views) A few weeks ago, Mark Higgins, from EUMETSAT, posted this wonderful video of satellite imagery of...
• How much extra energy are we adding to the earth system? Jan 11, 2012 (3,469 views) Update (Aug 15, 2013): After a discussion on Twitter with Gavin Schmidt, I realised I did the...
• High level architecture of earth system models Aug 11, 2010 (3,316 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 (3,303 views) Yesterday afternoon, I managed to catch the Bjernes Lecture, which was given by Richard B. Alley:...
• Who is pulling the strings? Apr 7, 2010 (3,289 views) My exposé of why academics' private emails sometimes seem cranky has gotten a lot of attention....
• Why Systems Thinking? Aug 20, 2013 (3,214 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 (3,125 views) I wrote earlier this week that we should incorporate more of the key ideas from systems thinking...
• Tracking down the uncertainties in weather and climate prediction Jul 6, 2010 (2,933 views) Gavin beat me to posting the best quote from the CCSM workshop last week - the Uncertainty Prayer....
• On the Uses and Abuses of Infrastructural Inversion Aug 26, 2010 (2,859 views) Nearly everything we ever do depends on vast social and technical infrastructures, which, when they...
• The Climate as a System, part 4: earth system feedbacks Sep 2, 2013 (2,807 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 (2,770 views) I took a break from blogging for the last few weeks to take a vacation with the family in Europe. We...
• Validating Climate Models Nov 30, 2010 (2,727 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 (2,708 views) For a talk earlier this year, I put together a timeline of the history of climate modelling. I just...
• The future of Software Engineering? Nov 11, 2010 (2,688 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 (2,585 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 (2,529 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 (2,358 views) A common cry from climate contrarians is that climate models need better verification and validation...
• The CMIP5 Climate Experiments Sep 15, 2011 (2,345 views) I'm on my way back from a workshop on Computing in the Atmospheric Sciences, in Annecy, France. The...
• Systems thinking and Genetically Modified food May 25, 2012 (2,334 views) I've been following a heated discussion on twitter this past week about a planned protest on Sunday...
• Epistemology of Climate Modeling Sep 28, 2010 (2,140 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 (2,074 views) Susan Leigh Star passed away in her sleep this week, coincidently on Ada Lovelace day. As I didn't...
• How Big is the Climate Change Deficit? Feb 15, 2013 (2,067 views) Last week, Damon Matthews from Concordia visited, and gave a guest CGCS lecture, "Cumulative Carbon...
• If we can't make mistakes, then we can't do science Apr 9, 2010 (1,997 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 (1,878 views) In part 1, I described the central equilibrium loop that controls the earth's temperature. Now it's...
• Open Climate Science or Denial of Service attacks? Nov 26, 2009 (1,785 views) I wasn't going to post anything about the CRU emails story (apart from my attempt at humour),...
• The Discovery of the Greenhouse Effect Mar 9, 2017 (1,772 views) Here's another excerpt from the draft manuscript of my forthcoming book, Computing the...
• The Climate as a System, part 3: greenhouse gases Aug 27, 2013 (1,743 views) The story so far: First, I argued that Climate Science is inherently a Systems Discipline. To...
• AGU Day 3 part C: How good are predictions from climate models? Jan 7, 2010 (1,633 views) The highlight of the whole conference for me was the Wednesday afternoon session on Methodologies of...
• Disinformation Works (for receptive audiences) Feb 28, 2011 (1,593 views) Here's an interesting study by Lawrence Hamilton, published in Climatic Change in December:...
• "Daddy, what did YOU do in the climate wars?" Apr 16, 2009 (1,578 views) When my children grow up, the world they live in is likely be very different from ours. There's a...
• Oil Shocks and Food Prices Feb 28, 2011 (1,553 views) I've been dipping into another new book this week, "Transport Revolutions: Moving People and...
• Academics always fight over the peer-review process Mar 26, 2010 (1,469 views) Note: This started as a comment on a thread at RealClimate about the Guardian's investigation of the...
• The first Numerical Weather Prediction on ENIAC Jan 25, 2011 (1,421 views) Last summer, when I was visiting NCAR, Warren Washington gave me some papers to read on the first...
• A simpler slogan? Sep 15, 2011 (1,403 views) Al Gore is part way through a 24-hour, round-the-globe, live broadcast, called Climate Reality. I...
• The Climate as a System, part 5: clouds Sep 3, 2013 (1,377 views) Yesterday I talked about three re-inforcing feedback loops in the earth system, each of which has...
• Detecting Crap on the Internet Oct 27, 2014 (1,368 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 (1,362 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 (1,325 views) On Thursday, Kaitlin presented her poster at the AGU meeting, which shows the results of the study...
• An AGU Global Environmental Change Bookshelf Dec 17, 2010 (1,234 views) I spent most of Wednesday attending a series of sessions featuring bestselling authors from the AGU...
• Why I don't eat meat Jul 22, 2011 (1,228 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 (1,211 views) I'll be heading off to Stockholm in August to present a paper at the 2nd International Conference on...
• Systems Thinking for Climate Systems Feb 15, 2011 (1,209 views) In pulling together my thoughts for a workshop last week on systems thinking, I've realised how much...
• When did ignorance become a badge of honour for journalists? Aug 28, 2010 (1,204 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 (1,192 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 (1,168 views) I've spent some time pondering why so many people seem unable or unwilling to understand the...
• Bill Gates is very wrong Jan 26, 2010 (1,118 views) In a blog post that was picked up by the Huffington post, Bill Gates writes about why we need...
• Some CMIP5 statistics Apr 29, 2012 (1,107 views) I'm attending a workshop this week in which some of the initial results from the Fifth Coupled Model...
• xkcd: How to Write Good Code Jan 7, 2011 (1,097 views) It would be very easy to re-post pretty much everything from xkcd, and I'm trying hard to resist,...
• The Principle of Complementarity (1) Mar 22, 2011 (1,089 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 (1,084 views) On March 30, David Mackay, author of Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air, will be giving the...
• What is Science Literacy? May 29, 2012 (1,080 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 (1,077 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 (1,045 views) Last week I was at the 2012 AGU Fall Meeting. I plan to blog about many of the talks, but let me...
• New Grad Course on Computational Models of Climate Change Jan 6, 2013 (1,026 views) This week, I start teaching a new grad course on computational models of climate change, aimed at...
• Growth of code complexity Jul 2, 2009 (1,015 views) I'm busy revising our paper on the study of the software development processes at the Hadley Centre...
• Commuting by bike is a dangerous sport Jun 8, 2011 (1,012 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 (987 views) One of the biggest challenges in understanding climate change is that the timescales involved are...
• A Hierarchical Systems Approach to Model Validation Dec 6, 2011 (972 views) I'm at the AGU meeting in San Francisco this week. The internet connections in the meeting rooms...
• Formal Verification for Climate Models? Sep 23, 2011 (972 views) Valdivino, who is working on a PhD in Brazil, on formal software verification techniques, is...
• AGU talk: Tim Palmer on Building Probabilistic Climate Models Dec 19, 2010 (966 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 (928 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 (911 views) Next year, I'll be teaching a new undergraduate course, as part of an initiative by the Faculty of...
• The Power to Change Systems Oct 16, 2011 (905 views) What unites both the climate crisis and the financial crisis? What is it that has driven scientists...
• Fun with urban transport data Jun 30, 2011 (888 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 (858 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 (816 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 (810 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 (783 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 (782 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 (773 views) I had several interesting conversations at WCRP11 last week about how different the various climate...
• Weather balloons vs. climate balloons Feb 21, 2014 (752 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 (731 views) I've been invited to a workshop at the UK Met Office in a few weeks time, to brainstorm a plan to...
• 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...
• Another cognitive bug: Attempting to correct a misperception often reinforces it May 31, 2010 (695 views) I'm fascinated by the cognitive biases that affect people's perceptions of climate change. I've...
• The Need for T-shaped Students Aug 15, 2013 (689 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 (688 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 (668 views) Here's a question I've been asking a few people lately, ever since I asserted that climate models...
• New Course: Systems Thinking for Global Problems Mar 28, 2012 (668 views) Sometime in May, I'll be running a new graduate course, DGC 2003 Systems Thinking for Global...
• How Climate Science is Done May 2, 2012 (668 views) In the talk I gave this week at the workshop on the CMIP5 experiments, I argued that we should do a...
• 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...
• Climate Model Bake-Off Mar 5, 2014 (646 views) Imagine for a moment if Microsoft had 24 competitors around the world, each building their own...