Applying systems thinking to computing, climate and sustainability
Today, it emerged that the Trump administration is working to shut down NCAR, the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, one of the most important research centres in the world for meteorology, climate change, and the physics of our planet s atmosphere. I wrote about NCAR s work in my book, Computing the Climate, so I m publishing here [ ] The post An ode to NCAR first appeared on Serendipity .
When Mark Carney stepped into the Prime Minister’s role in Canada, there was a rare moment of optimism from across the political spectrum. Here was a leader who seemed to understand how our multiple crises interact, and what to do about them. A respected economist and seasoned central banker who protected Canada from the financial [ ] The post Carney’s pipeline deal contradicts everything he knows…
Last year I wrote a Climate Rocks post, with lots of songs about climate change. It s time for part 2, with a whole load more songs! 1) G. T., How Dare You Last year s post ended with The 1975, and a song that put a Geta Thunberg speech to music, as a sort of spoken [ ] The post Climate Rocks Again first appeared on Serendipity .
It s the first week of term here in Toronto, and I m busy launching a new course. It s a small-seminar, first-year undergraduate course, open to any student in the Faculty of Arts and Science, called Confronting the Climate Crisis. I m launching it as a small seminar course this year as a pilot project, with the aim [ ] The post New course: Confronting the Climate Crisis first appeared on…
I m teaching a new course this term, called Confronting the Climate Crisis. As it s the first time I ve taught since the emergence of the latest wave of AI chatbots. Here s what I came up with: The assignments on this course have been carefully designed to give you meaningful experiences that build your knowledge and skills, [ ] The post Course Policy for use of generative AI first appeared on…
As my book has now been published, it s time to provide a little more detail. My goal in writing the book was to explain what climate models do, how they are built, and what they tell us. It’s intended to be very readable for a general audience, in the popular-science genre. The title is “Computing [ ] The post Computing the Climate first appeared on Serendipity .
Last year, I posted a regular Friday twitter thread #ClimateRocks featuring songs I ve been listening to over the last few years that address climate change in some way. As I m no longer on Twitter, I m putting the whole thing here. Enjoy! First up has to be 1) Marillion, Seasons End Incredibly, it was written in 1988 [ ] The post Climate Rocks first appeared on Serendipity .
I ve been thinking a lot this week about the role of Universities in the Climate Crisis. I plan to write more on this, but first, here s a piece I scribbled on a napkin during a workshop prior to the pandemic, on bringing human values in to computer science, and never got around to sharing We speak of [ ] The post The Discontinuous Future first appeared on Serendipity .
In honour of today s announcement that Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann and Giorgio Parisi have been awarded the Nobel prize in physics for their contributions to understanding and modeling complex systems, I m posting here some extracts from my forthcoming book, Computing the Climate , describing Manabe s early work on modeling the climate system. We ll start the story with [ ] The post Nobel…
The meteorologist, Norman Phillips died last week, at the grand old age of 95. As I ve written about his work in my forthcoming book, Computing the Climate, I ve extracted this piece from the manuscript, to honour his contribution to climate modelling—not only did he create the first ever global circulation model, but the ideas in [ ] The post In memory of Norman Phillips first appeared on…