Author Archives: Doug McNeall
Small victories
This week, I was an author on an open letter to the climate science community, calling for and end to the use of the dreaded “Rainbow” colour palette for scientific visualisation (mirrored over at my data viz blog Better Figures). It was the busiest day ever at both CLB and BF, and we got lots […]
On tweeting conferences
So Mark Brandon, Sheldon Bacon and Gavin Schmidt have been threatened with a threat of potential legal action, possibly, for live tweeting a scientific meeting. Some details here and here, and under the rather brilliant hashtag #BrandonBergGate (geddit?). I’m with James Annan on this one*, but the whole thing has clearly eaten time, effort, and […]
Why model climate?
I wrote a talk on climate modelling, aimed at the interested-but-non-specialist public. Here it is. It touches on: 1) The choices we have to make as a society. 2) The difficulty of doing controlled experiments with a single Earth. 3) The idea of a climate model. 4) A really simple climate model from first principles. […]
Vulnerability, exposure, and disasters
The office is half empty, so I’m just catching up here really. A couple of weeks ago, I noticed a piece in the Guardian that I thought missed a really important part of the story regarding the increase of weather related disasters. I had a bit of a moan, and, fair play to the Graun, […]
A brief comment on timing
In a comment on Mora et al. (2013), we highlight some errors the authors make in calculating and expressing the uncertainty in the timing of “climate departure” – the time at which a particular place on Earth will see a climate unprecedented in the historical record. There is a reply by the authors of the […]
Protected: Damages (from 2009)
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
What got you into science?
I enjoyed watching Gavin Schmidt’s TED talk on climate models, and wondered if such a thing might inspire a new generation of climate modellers. Keen to find out about the way that others have wound up in science, and in rather a fit of whimsy, I asked a question on twitter: So, what got you […]
The great thing about UQ is we know how to spell it
It’s been pretty busy round these parts, here are a few notes from the last month or so. Natural variability – Energy budget Our paper on natural variability in the Earth’s energy budget got a nice write-up from John Abraham in the Guardian. Mat Collins happened to be passing, and took a nice picture of […]
Pausing for thought
I helped Ed and Tamsin to write a commentary on the communication of the “pause” in global surface warming, and it is online today at Nature Climate Change. We take a good look at the way the pause has been communicated and discussed by scientists and the media, offer some personal perspectives on engaging online, […]
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