Hi,

I thought you might like to see some of the changes I've been making to our website, to make the content more up-to-date and useful for participants.

I'm also always keen to hear any comments or feedback you might have about the site.

If there's content you'd like to see, please let me know.

First off, what do you think of the new Climate Science pages?

This includes a Climate Science Glossary of terms we use on the website.

Are any of these explanations confusing? Are there other words or phrases you'd like us to add?

Many thanks for your feedback,

Keep crunching!

Cheers,
Hannah

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Hannah Rowlands
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No longer Communications Officer for climateprediction.net, as of October 2015

Very good! I would love more references though. Not just the climate-science-resources page, but footnotes after sentences/paragraphs.

In general, I like what you've done here. It's the kind of nice simple explanation I can cite when I squabble with deniers, as well as referring to when I'm trying to explain things to the less educated on the subject.

I agree with Tullus, however. Levels of knowledge vary, but it's always good to have the references.

--- "For state-of-the-art General Circulation Models/Global Climate Models (GCMs) such as the one used in the climateprediction.net experiment, it is more a case of trying to represent everything, even if things then get so complicated that we can�t always understand what�s going on."

Uh uh. I think this is badly worded. I've been in too many arguments with deliberately obtuse deniers. I understand what you mean here. The deniers will deliberately misunderstand. They will try to make it look like you mean that you're just guessing. I suggest rewording this (if necessary, you can then mod this comment, because I don't want them twisting what I said to make it mean what they want it to mean (coverup), and not what I meant (clarification)).

How about something like, "Often our analysis of complicated results challenges our theories and gives us a better understanding of our modelling of the climate"? I know you are intelligent scientists, but the deniers are always looking for evidence otherwise, even if it's a misleading statement taken out of context.

--- Under resources, the list could get very long, but I'm a heavy user of Skepticalscience, somewhat less so of Carbonbrief, although it's still a valuable resource. Just some thoughts.

--- There is something I would like to see.

We're using our computing resources (and electricity budget) to assist in climate modelling, and I'm happy to do so. Sometimes I feel a little taken for granted, in the sense of doing this in return for what are basically worthless bead-tokens (BOINC credits). I'd like to know what that computer time was used for. Perhaps one way to do this would be a post on the science forum by one of the scientists involved in most projects to let us know what you're doing with the data.

Some things to think about (I don't want to make this too restrictive):
* What model did you use?
* How many model runs did you use?
* were these new runs, or data from last year you found a new use for?
* What were you investigating?
* What did you find?
* Why does it matter? What policy might it inform?
* Is there a peer-reviewed paper coming out? Where? Will it be open access?


I did a quick back-of-an-envelope calculation on the 80,000-ish runs we've been chewing our way through lately. Assuming they all complete first time, at the rate I'm getting through them, that's about 900 processor-years worth of crunching between us. This had better be worth it!

The way you kept us up to date on the Weather@home UK flooding attribution was very much appreciated; the silence on the ANZ attribution project somewhat less so. Did I miss something? I liked this blog by Dr Stott: http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2014/02/what-climate-change-attribution-can-tell-us-about-extreme-weather-and-the-recent-uk-floods/

I don't expect a briefing on everything. First, I know those scientists are busy. They need to be doing science. Equally, with civilisation and entire ecosystems at stake, someone needs to be communicating it. Second, sometimes an experiment may not show any effect (which may mean that, for example, particular events were not the result of climate change or that the models are not sensitive enough to show it, either of which may give aid and comfort to the deniers, even where other factors may have been involved: not everything can be readily shown to be down to climate change).

As I'm sure you're aware, debates with deniers are ongoing on blogs, forums and newspaper letter pages all over the world in an effort to transform public opinion. I will help you make bullets: if you give me bullets back, I will help fire them. If I can tell deniers that climate change increased the probability of severe flooding by n% at the 95% CI, this is useful.

Hi, Thanks Tullus and Niall, those are all really helpful comments.

I'll have a think about how to implement them and get back to you!

Best wishes,
Hannah

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Hannah Rowlands
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No longer Communications Officer for climateprediction.net, as of October 2015

Open access publications

Hi, I've just been going through our publications page on the website, noting which are Open Access:
http://www.climateprediction.net/publications/

Unfortunately, Nature, one of the big journals, is not open access, so out papers published there won't be accessible...

I hope this will be useful for those of you wanting to read more about the research outputs from the project.

If I missed any, please let me know!

Many thanks,
Hannah

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Hannah Rowlands
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No longer Communications Officer for climateprediction.net, as of October 2015

Hey Hannah!

Maybe you can answer what these new kind of models called "UK Met Office HadCM3 short" are?

Some part of Geoengineering or what?

New batch of about 20000 workunits was just released!

Cheers
Melvyn

Hi - you can read a bit more about the models used in our experiments on the website here:
http://www.climateprediction.net/climate-science/models-used/#HadCM3S

But yes, it's being used for the solar radiation geoengineering experiment.

(the "s" doesn't actually stand for "short", it's a relatively arbitrary letter to note that this model is a modified version of HadCM3)

Cheers,
Hannah

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Hannah Rowlands
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No longer Communications Officer for climateprediction.net, as of October 2015

Hi,

We've got several new projects starting, with some new researchers joining the team.

Firstly, MaRIUS - Managing the Risks, Impacts and Uncertainties of drought and water Scarcity:
http://www.climateprediction.net/weatherathome/marius/
This project is being carried out with water researchers at the Environmental Change Institute, where climateprediction.net is based:
http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/news/articles/2014/0212-marius.php
We welcome Dr Beno�t Guillod to the team - he'll be the main researcher on this project.

And secondly, TITAN - Transition Into the Anthropocene:
http://www.climateprediction.net/weatherathome/titan/
This is a collaboration with the University of Edinburgh and is looking at how climate change might have changed the risk of extreme weather events in the early 20th century, such as the American Dust Bowl.

And I've already mentioned World Weather Attribution, which is our new project we're doing with Climate Central:
http://www.climateprediction.net/weatherathome/world-weather-attribution/
We've got 2 new researchers just started in Oxford who are working on this - Dr Karsten Haustein and Dr Peter Uhe (who will be added to the website shortly).

These new projects are all at the very early stages, so don't expect any models from them just yet. I'll keep you updated as to their progress.

Best wishes,
Hannah

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Hannah Rowlands
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No longer Communications Officer for climateprediction.net, as of October 2015

And now I've added a page for the next weather@home regional project, coming soon: Weather@home East Asia: Causes of 2013 Heatwave, where we'll be working with colleagues in Korea looking at extreme weather events in China, Korea and Japan.

Don't forget you can find out the latest goings on with climateprediction.net on Twitter and Facebook - it would great to see more volunteers from the forums here join us on social media!

Cheers,
Hannah

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Hannah Rowlands
--
No longer Communications Officer for climateprediction.net, as of October 2015