This post announces my (William Connolley’s) departure from RealClimate, and indeed from the professional climate field in general, in favour of the wide world of Cambridge software engineering. I’ve enjoyed my time with (Real)Climate, but now its time to move on.

Normally the career change of one minor scientist would be of little interest to the outside world, and perhaps this one will be too, but the climate arena does get rather highly charged. So perhaps a few words of explanation are in order.

This doesn’t represent any disenchantment on my part with the state of the science, or with IPCC, or with RealClimate – all of which continue to have my respect. I’m sure that RealClimate will continue to deserve its high reputation as a source of accessible explanation and comment on important climate issues. It’s more a reverse of that – in some senses, much of the main areas of climate science have now become much clearer than when I began to be interested; the obstacles to progress are now very obviously political not scientific.

I expect to continue my (now amateur) interest in climate; my pet blog will remain at least for a while – feel free to join me there.