Author Archives: Doug McNeall

Abuse of climate scientists on social media

I was quoted in this piece in the Observer by Anna Fazackerly, on why climate scientists are being targeted for abuse on social media. Ed’s tweet about it generated lots of interactions, many of them (e.g.) – inevitably – conforming the report’s basic premise. I had an interesting chat with Anna, and I think she […]

Constraining the carbon cycle in a land surface model – a talk for EGU23

I’m attending the EGU 2023 assembly this week, and gave a talk on our latest paper Constraining the carbon cycle in JULES-ES1.0. Attending online works fine, but doesn’t give you all the bonuses of meeting in person, getting the lowdown on the coolest talks coming up, and catching up with old colleagues and friends. One […]

Communicating climate science through social media

I give various versions of this talk to students and other scientists. Get in touch if you’d like me to give it to your organisation – it usually gets lots of good discussions going. The fun thing this year is that TikTok is a mainstream thing now, and Twitter is dying. Going to be an […]

Communicating climate change through social media

I updated my previous talk for scientists on surviving social media for a more general audience – this time for MSc students. They were an engaging bunch, and a 50 minute lecture stretched into a two-and-a-half-hour mega discussion, which obviously I’m all for. One thing that came up is that one of the students was […]

Uncertainty quantification and exascale computing in climate science

I was asked to sit on a discussion panel at this meeting on uncertainty quantification (UQ) with exascale computing. I prepared a short statement (below) on future challenges for UQ at exascale, but I would have made a slightly a longer one (below that) if there was time. A great resource for thinking about the […]

Climate science in 10 minutes

I was recently tasked with explaining the basics of (physical) climate science in 10 minutes, for a general audience of non-scientists. I tweeted a long thread which covered most of the talk here: And the ThreadReader app collected the whole thread for viewing here: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1298911570127446016.html

A pairs density ploy of the JULES inputs that pass level 1 constraints.

Visualising input spaces using emulators

In a previous post, I looked at some of the ways we could visualise the input space of climate models, when they are constrained to produce behaviour that looks something like the real world. I used parallel co-ordinates plots and pairs plots to visualise the high (32) dimensional input space of the JULES land surface […]

Visualising weird input spaces

I’ve been working on a fairly large (~500 member) perturbed-parameter ensemble of the land surface model JULES. The model simulates the global historical land surface, and each ensemble member is forced by the same global reanalysis on the HadGEM2 grid scale. Differences in the model output are therefore caused by the different values of the […]

More on surviving social media

I updated this talk [download slides] from last summer (time flies!), offering some personal thoughts on surviving a sometimes-hostile social media environment. [The sound gets better after I decide to hold the tiny mic rather than have it stuck in my shirt.] I was talking to my peers this time, so the mood is somewhat […]

Surviving the climate communications environment

The title was carefully chosen. On Monday, I gave a talk to around 100 engaged and engaging students taking part in the University of Exeter’s Grand Challenge 2017. The students are introduced to a number of global challenges, and expected to work in interdisciplinary groups to come up with solutions. This year, climate change features […]