Top all-time · #6339
Easterbrook.ca
Personal blog · easterbrook.ca/stevesciencesystemsprogramming
Easterbrook.ca is a personal blog at easterbrook.ca about science, systems and programming. Since 2010, 13 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (9) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link Steve Easterbrook's posts as sources on climate models, scientific source code, and urban density and sprawl. No comment judges the writing itself.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 9 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- /steve/2009/06/getting-the-source-code-for-climate-models/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-03-28
What Hacker News says?
I found some links for source code here: https://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2009/06/getting-the-source-... https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/#GCM_code
Comment linking /steve/2009/06/getting-the-source-code-for-climate-models/
on “Climate change: IPCC report is 'code red for humanity'”Submitted Who first coined the term “Greenhouse Effect”? (2016) as a story · 16 points
HN discussionI can recommend looking into the IPCC report, chapter 9, Evaluation of Climate Models [0], chapter 11, Near-term Climate Change: Projections and Predictability [1] and chapter 12, Long-term Climate Change: Projections, Commitments and Irreversibility [2]. The models run on inputs and include uncertainties (how much emissions will there be? How many clouds will really be produced in a warmer climate? ..), thus you ge…
Comment linking /steve/2009/06/getting-the-source-code-for-climate-models/
on “Big fish are found deep not because of age, climate, or prey, but because of us”Submitted What makes software engineering for climate models different? (2010) as a story · 12 points
HN discussionI used to maintain a large FORTRAN codebase - it seemed like every time new grad students showed up, everyone got a wise idea to re-build everything in a modern language. This question is revisited a lot, but the general consensus has been that FORTRAN is fast, simple, easy to understand and code, and the compilers used are super optimized (Intel's FORTRAN compiler was really a gem - it managed to do a ton of automa…
Comment linking /steve/2010/12/agu-session-on-software-engineering-for-climate-modeling/
on “Rewriting Fortran Software in Rust”Submitted In memory of Norman Phillips, climate modeller as a story · 2 points
HN discussionHah, that's fantastic. This reminds me of a talk I attended about how most of science/academia has a lot of fast-moving glue to stitch together all the old/hard bits. https://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2010/12/agu-session-on-soft...
Comment linking /steve/2010/12/agu-session-on-software-engineering-for-climate-modeling/
on “Perl Data Language: Scientific Computing with Perl”Submitted When is a model not a model? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionThere's a lot of evidence on how bad sprawls are: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_density http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2011/06/fun-with-urban-trans...
Comment linking /steve/2011/06/fun-with-urban-transport-data/
on “The electric car has dropped out of favor in Denmark”Submitted Inertia on the pathway to decarbonization as a story · 1 points
HN discussionEPA has a website describing the mid and long term effects of climate change in N America. With plenty of citations a dedicated student or teacher could follow up on. Very accessible, and did not include "will destroy the world". Incidentally, your critique also applies to literally most science, including very good and obviously successful science. Can you really prove to your students that Intel doesn't have magic…
Comment linking /steve/2009/06/getting-the-source-code-for-climate-models/
on “A researcher's response to people pointing out 150 errors in four of his papers”Submitted Why systems thinking? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThat's not correct. Just to name a few examples, we have quite good data of CO2 concentrations and CO2 infrared behaviour. But what's also strange in your argument, you say that if we know less about the effects, then we should freely change the climate system more . Here's a free online book by Spencer Weart of the history of climate science for anyone who is interested: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/simple.ht…
Comment linking /steve/?p=2828
on “World Bank envisions a +4°C future”Submitted Climate Change: A Software Grand Challenge | Serendipity as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe climate research is not the weather forecasting. I wanted to give you an idea how litle sense has to predict for any particular year. The Earth doesn't function that way. The trend however is absolutely predictable. For the future, look here (the Figure SPM.10 from the last IPCC report, PDF linked later): http://www.easterbrook.ca/steve/2013/10/what-does-the-new-ip... What will happen depends only on our fossil…
Comment linking /steve/2013/10/what-does-the-new-ipcc-report-say-about-climate-change/
on “An insider’s story of the global attack on climate science”Submitted Proposed CS course: Climate Change Informatics as a story · 0 points
HN discussionIn this place I'm citing from, the writer originally used Joules, but was critiqued by some anonymous commenters and switched. They noted: > Note: Before anyone complains, I’ve deliberately conflated energy and power above, because the difference doesn’t really matter for my main point. Power is work per unit of time, and is measured in watts; Energy is better expressed in joules, calories, or kilowatt hours (kWh).…
Comment linking /steve/2012/01/how-much-extra-energy-are-we-adding-to-the-earth-system/
on “IPCC climate crisis report delivers ‘final warning on 1.5C’”
