Author Archives: Doug McNeall
Protected: Damages (from 2009)
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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, […]
A brief observation on statistical significance
This has been on my mind for a while. I think the observation is best summed up as: If somebody asks if something is statistically significant, they probably don’t know what it means. I don’t mean to offend anyone, and I can think of plenty of counter examples*, but this is borne out of long […]
Why I don’t advocate for climate science policy
I was going to write a long essay on why I try to avoid advocating for any one particular policy for climate, but I think this probably makes the point fairly well. One of the funny things about the hoo-ha around Tamsin’s piece was that the reaction rather confirmed the point*. People hate hate HATE […]
A sciencey New Year’s resolution
This year, I resolve to only submit any first author scientific papers* to journals that will publish them open access. I will actively encourage the first authors of any other papers in which I am a co-author, to submit them open access. Happy New Year. * I’m sure some wag will point out that I […]
How fast is Arctic sea ice refreezing this year?
Bishop Hill have a post stating “Isn’t the Arctic refreeze quick this year?” I’ve done a quick check on the rate that the ice is refreezing this winter, compared to the previous years. It’s not a terribly scientific method – just copying this years trajectory and moving it to match the previous years by eye. […]
On the value of observations
I’m pretty happy that our paper on finding the potential value of observations for constraining climate models, was published today in Geoscientific Model Development. I posted about the discussion paper here, and you can download a presentation describing the work here. The paper demonstrates a method for working out how useful a new observation might […]
Workshop on stats in process modelling
I’ve been at a great workshop on statistical methods for process models (mostly of the Earth system), set up by Lindsay Lee, from Leeds. It was set up as an opportunity for modellers of many stripes to hear about some of the latest statistical techniques being applied to a range of domains, and I think […]
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