1) A new paper in Ecology Letters, Regime shifts in ecological systems can occur with no warning, by Alan Hastings and Derin B. Wysham shows that in models certain types of regime shifts do not exhibit any signs of early warning.  In their abstract they write:

… we show that the class of ecological systems that will exhibit leading indicators of regime shifts is limited, and that there is a set of ecological models and, therefore, also likely to be a class of natural systems for which there will be no forewarning of a regime change … We then illustrate the impact of these general arguments by numerically examining the dynamics of several model ecological systems under slowly changing conditions. Our results offer a cautionary note about the generality of forecasting sudden changes in ecosystems.

2) Climate charts and graphs is a useful blog about using R to download and analyze publically available climate data.

3) Tom Fiddaman makes a simple systems management game in Processing.

4) Alex Steffen on World Changing  claims that Bill Gates gave the Most Important Climate Speech of the Year:

On Friday, the world’s most successful businessperson and most powerful philanthropist did something outstandingly bold, that went almost unremarked: Bill Gates announced that his top priority is getting the world to zero climate emissions.