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Not waving but drowning
It’s not often one gets a paper on uncertainty in estimates of ocean heat content written by a clarinettist whose wikipedia page has a section on their extra curricular activities that goes – as they say – hard. Life is sometimes generous in its treats. The paper is a sceptical confection whipped up by Jonathan… Continue reading
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For a rainy day
Each month, you put a little aside in a savings account. It’s not always the same amount because – you know – life is life, but each month a little gets squirreled away. Then you get a promotion and the amounts, though still variable, get bigger. If you were to give the monthly balances of… Continue reading
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Verisimilitude
Someone on Bluesky was asking people for their favourite $20 words. That seems kind of steep, but such is inflation. Mine were: peristeronic, septentrional, titivation, and velleity. However, the list could go on and on because languages have to express such an astonishing array of things and these were the four that came instantly to… Continue reading
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From noise, all this
A new paper has appeared on arXiv: Generative deep learning improves reconstruction of global historical climate records. It uses, as you might guess from the title, generative deep learning to reconstruct global historical climate records. It does temperature and precipitation, but I’m largely interested in temperature. This is a good thing to try because This… Continue reading
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Read (or looked at the pictures) in 2025
I read 35 books in 2025 out of my 24 book “reading goal”. Damned if I can remember what happened in half of them. Occasionally, I took notes. Here is my attempt to dredge something up from the sump of my memory. Mostly what I remember are the hilariously bad Goodreads reviews for each of… Continue reading
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Why do we do what we do the way we do what we do?
In a narrow sense, LLMs are superhuman. They operate at computerish speeds and can now churn out text in seconds or minutes, that a human would take hours to write, if they could write it all. Thus, generating text joins the list of things that computers can do very well, like mathematical calculations, playing chess,… Continue reading
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It looks like you’re writing an IPCC assessment report?
The climate science literature is big and getting bigger. Data volumes are increasing. Assessment reports like the IPCC assessment reports, which synthesise that literature, are also big and getting bigger. The scope of it all is sprawling. Honestly, what is one to do? These days in such a situation, one’s thoughts turn inevitably to AI… Continue reading
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Peering into the future
In films, the hero/genius issues commands to a disembodied computer voice which then effortlessly manufactures a pair of rocket boots. Donning the boots, the hero – without practice – ascends to the heavens on twin pillars of fire, defeats the baddies and saves the day. In reality, we’re not quite there yet. The rocket boots… Continue reading
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Look at it this way
I saw an interesting discussion about this graph from the BBC on bluesky. I don’t like the graph for a few reasons. The first is that it uses two different elements to show the same thing: the bar height and the colour of the bar both indicate the temperature. The variation in colour doesn’t add… Continue reading
Diagram Monkey 