The meteorologist, Norman Phillips died last week, at the grand old age of 95. As I’ve written about his work in my forthcoming book, Computing the Climate, I’ve extracted this piece from the manuscript, to honour his contribution to climate…

Here’s another excerpt from the draft manuscript of my forthcoming book, Computing the Climate. The idea that the temperature of the planet could be analyzed as a mathematical problem was first suggested by the French mathematician, Joseph Fourier⁠, in the…

I was doing some research on Canada’s climate targets recently, and came across this chart, presented as part of Canada’s Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) under the Paris Agreement: Looks good right? Certainly it conveys a message that Canada’s well…

This is an excerpt from the draft manuscript of my forthcoming book, Computing the Climate. While models are used throughout the sciences, the word ‘model’ can mean something very different to scientists from different fields. This can cause great confusion.…

One of the biggest challenges in understanding climate change is that the timescales involved are far longer than most people are used to thinking about. Garvey points out that this makes climate change different from any other ethical question, because…

I’ve been exploring how Canada’s commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions stack up against reality, especially in the light of the government’s recent decision to stick with the emissions targets set by the previous administration. Once upon a time, Canada…

Today I’ve been tracking down the origin of the term “Greenhouse Effect”. The term itself is problematic, because it only works as a weak metaphor: both the atmosphere and a greenhouse let the sun’s rays through, and then trap some…

This week I’m reading my way through three biographies, which neatly capture the work of three key scientists who laid the foundation for modern climate modeling: Arrhenius, Bjerknes and Callendar. Crawford, E. (1996). Arrhenius: From Ionic Theory to the Greenhouse…

I’m heading off to Florence this week for the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). The highlight of the week will be a panel session I’m chairing, on the Karlskrona Manifesto. The manifesto itself is something we’ve been working on…

For our course about the impacts of the internet, we developed an exercise to get our students thinking critically about the credibility of things they find on the web. As a number of colleagues have expressed in interest in this,…

It’s been a while since I’ve written about the question of climate model validation, but I regularly get asked about it when I talk about the work I’ve been doing studying how climate models are developed. There’s an upcoming conference…