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…
Once upon a time, Canada was considered a world leader on climate and environmental issues. The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, signed in 1987, is widely regarded as the most successful international agreement on environmental protection…
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…
I’ll be heading off to Stockholm in August to present a paper at the 2nd International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies for Sustainability (ICT4S’2014). The theme of the conference this year is “ICT and transformational change”, which got me…
At the beginning of March, I was invited to give a talk at TEDxUofT. Colleagues tell me the hardest part of giving these talks is deciding what to talk about. I decided to see if I could answer the question…
My department is busy revising the set of milestones our PhD students need to meet in the course of their studies. The milestones are intended to ensure each student is making steady progress, and to identify (early!) any problems. At…
Imagine for a moment if Microsoft had 24 competitors around the world, each building their own version of Microsoft Word. Imagine further that every few years, they all agreed to run their software through the same set of very demanding…
What’s the difference between forecasting the weather and predicting future climate change? A few years ago, I wrote a long post explaining that weather forecasting is an initial value problem, while climate is a boundary value problem. This is a…
A few weeks ago, Mark Higgins, from EUMETSAT, posted this wonderful video of satellite imagery of planet earth for the whole of the year 2013. The video superimposes the aggregated satellite data from multiple satellites on the top of NASA’s…
I’ve been trawling through the final draft of the new IPCC assessment report that was released last week, to extract some highlights for a talk I gave yesterday. Here’s what I think are its key messages:
The warming is unequivocal.…
Yesterday I talked about three re-inforcing feedback loops in the earth system, each of which has the potential to accelerate a warming trend once it has started. I also suggested there are other similar feedback loops, some of which are…
At the start of this series, I argued that Climate Science is inherently a Systems Discipline. To develop that idea, I described two important systems as feedback loops: the earth’s temperature equilibrium loop and economic growth and energy consumption, and…
