Tag Archives: climate
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 […]
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 […]

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 […]

Sensitivity analysis with R
After last week’s post, I thought it might be useful to have some practical examples of how to do sensitivity analysis (SA) of complex models (like climate models) with an emulator. SA is one of those things that everyone wants to do at some point, and I’ll be able to point people here for code […]
Choosing your next design point
You can use the R package DiceOptim to choose the next point to run your expensive simulator. Here’s a gif of function EGO.nsteps() in action, choosing one point at a time, with an initial design of three points. It doesn’t behave in exactly the way I expected, putting lots of points in that well […]
Could we run a twitter poster session?
I’ve been enjoying following the mega-meetup-12k-scientist-strong EGU conference via the hashtag #EGU15. In particular, people are tweeting pictures of and links to their posters, as adverts for other scientists that happen to be on twitter. This got me to thinking: could we use twitter to run an online-only poster session? I really like poster sessions […]

Internal variability in surface temperature and the hiatus
Our paper Quantifying the likelihood of a continued hiatus in global warming is published today in Nature Climate Change. Here is the New Scientist take, the Carbon Brief take, and the Met Office Research News article. Chris Roberts took on a huge task, processing massive amounts of data in the CMIP5 climate model archive, and leading […]
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. […]

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 […]