Are you toiling away at your project with nothing but your wits, a few hand-me-down scripts, and a supervisor who only has time to interact with you as they hurriedly walk down the corridor on their way to their next meeting? Perhaps it seems like it will be much easier to just get to work hammering away at your task, the way you were originally shown?

It may surprise a few people to learn that this cliché is more-or-less accurate when it comes to most modern research. More-often-than-not researchers expect us to take their results on faith.

Raoul is a diligent and hard working PhD student: He immerses himself in his subject, and feels like there is so much to learn with so little time. He may often feel on the outside looking in, racked with doubt, wondering whether he could ever contribute something meaningful to his field. His supervisor has given him some old code, allegedly related to an unrecognisably early version of their PhD project, maybe in something like FORTRAN or Matlab. Raoul doesn't have time to stop and smell the roses, he has to get cracking to produce results, write papers, defend, and get on the fast-track to academic success! For him, his main priority is learning his subject, and generating a new contribution to his field.

Regression testing, unit tests, Test driven development, automated testing, defensive programming. Despite years in research, these were not terms I had heard, not from my supervisors or peers, not at conferences, and certainly not in journals or other scientific forums. Yet after working for a few months in UCL's RITS Research Software Development team, a group that emphasises software development to improve Science, I have woken up to the reality that software developers have known for a long time:

It has been a while since my last post, and a lot has changed. My time at the Department of Geosciences in the University of Oslo as a postdoc research fellow sadly came to a close; it was hard to move on and leave behind my friends and Norwegian life. I have many great memories of Norway, and hope it won't be too long before I return. Perhaps that will even be my last postdoc and the end of my professionally active research career. After 3 postdoc contracts I would say that is a bitter-sweet thought, as there are many pros and many cons of being a postdoc-probably a mix which you won't find in any other job-but 6 years of that lifestyle may be my limit. (And it is certainly not a lifestyle that is particularly complimentary to married-life!)

This story starts around 2012, when I received a request to review a paper on solar activity and the Indian Monsoon from the journal Advances in Space Research. I have reviewed many such papers (perhaps ~20) so this was nothing unusual. A quick read revealed some tortured data, abused statistics, and nonsense prose. All in all a fairly typical manuscript in its field. A version of it can be found at ArXiv. (To get some idea of why I say this is a typical paper, have a look at Barrie Pittocks 1978 piece "Solar Cycles and the Weather: Successful Experiments in Autosuggestion?", although it is, unfortunately, pay-walled.)

Last November someone e-mailed me a strange request, they wanted to use a method from a paper I wrote in 2013. Shocking I know. I had included in the paper a link to some IDL code meant to reproduce the figures, of course, it was already broken. It had aged badly, inaccessible a full 2 years ahead of Jeff Rotheberg's prediction ("digital information lasts forever — or five years, whichever comes first"). After digging through my file system and recovering the old script I had the feeling that if the link not been broken it would probably not have been of much help. Needless to say, at the time I wrote the paper I thought the approach I took was great. I didn't know much about coding then, and I hadn't heard of version control either. Although, to be fair, no one in the field I was working in talked about these issues or showed much interest in code. In fact, asking to see peoples code was a good way to loose friends ("You don't trust me?" or "You want to steal my work?"). A few years on, and I now know enough to see that approach I took was not terribly helpful if the aim was to create reproducible science.

Over the past 4 years, more than 80 scientists from 20 countries across Europe have come together, in an EU-funded COST project, called TOSCA. These scientists came from a whole range of different backgrounds, including Solar and Space Physicists, Climatologists and Atmospheric Scientists, and everyone in-between. Over that time, they produced much on the subject of natural climate forcing mechanisms, including many meetings, workshops, training schools, short-term research grants, original research studies, synthesis reports, special journal editions and outreach materials. But the crown jewel of the collaboration is their newly-launched book, titled 'Earth's climate response to a changing Sun'.

I recently attended a one-day evaluation workshop for the PERCICLES Project as an invited reviewer. PERICLES (#periclesfp7) stands for Promoting and Enhancing Reuse of Information throughout the Content Lifecycle taking account of Evolving Semantics. The aim was to give feedback and suggestions on the projects progress and how they could meet their goals. The meeting was hosted at the Belgium Institute for Space Aeronomy, in Brussels, and it took place on 29th October, 2015.

I have just returned from a research trip in Croatia (8--19th September), with my friend and long-time collaborator Dr. Jasa Calogovic. Every now-and-then Jasa and I manage to have some schedule overlap for a collaborative trip: This time, he kindly put my wife and I up the beautiful Hvar Observatory, which is built around (and inside of) a Napoleonic Fortress.

Scientists as advocates. Should Scientists step outside of their archetypal roles as dispassionate investigators of the physical world, taking time away from asking questions of how things are, and instead offer opinions on how they think things should be? Is this a moral obligation? Or is it simply dangerous irresponsible territory beyond their purview? Should we just be good little investigators and know our place? Or in fact, are these the wrong questions to ask, devoid of the nuance and perhaps ironically implying that even needing to ask it begs only the answer, 'when you grow up'.

This post differs from my usual fare as it follows the format of an FAQ of sorts. For me, it is representative of a conversation I have had a number of times now. I have found that the points raised are usually asked of me by people of a right-leaning political persuasion with some background knowledge of climate. But first some brief back-story to explain how this came about...

Earlier this year some colleagues emailed around the latest paper claiming a strong causal relationship between the solar cycle and some Earth-bound phenomena, in this case the fertility and lifetime of people born during different phases of the solar cycle in Norway from historic records. Usually, such studies are cause for some mirth, and make for useful examples of common statistical problems, see for example the relationship between cosmic rays and car crashes, or heart attacks and the solar cycle. The study was carried out by a group of Norwegian researchers and published in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society B, and could be considered to be a confirmation study as it notes that it is supported by earlier findings.

Helping at the Software Carpentry course, June 2--3rd Oslo run by Lex Nederbragt and Karin Lagesen, certainly gave me a lot to consider. The two-day course taught novice users Bash, Git, and Python (Jupyter Notebook). Three invaluable and complimentary tools which are the centre of my own work-flow. I was excited to see how people were introduced to these tools and the Software Carpentry teaching methods. The collaborative Git-based lesson materials are especially nice, and I can only hope this teaching model spreads far and wide. I certainty appreciated running through the course material, and in particular I don't remember seeing a clearer introduction to Git and Bash.

Between 2010 and 2014 I was a postdoc at the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias on the island of Tenerife of the Canary Archipelago. From time to time, we would experience extreme climate events known locally as Calima. These are periods where mineral dust from the Sahara, exported in discrete and often-dramatic outbreak events, are suspended in the air. The Calima conditions last from hours to days. During this time dramatic changes occur in the local climate.