“WUWT Year End Report“. Anthony Watts says:
Thanks to everyone that continues to help make WUWT “…the world’s most viewed climate website”
– Fred Pearce The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth about Global Warming
Strangely, Anthony shows no interest in being the most informative climate website. I wonder if any of his readers will click-through to the Amazon link he included, where the Climategate “scandal” is summarized thus:
Although the scandal caused a media frenzy, the fact is that just about everything the public heard and read about the University of East Anglia emails is wrong. They are not, as some have claimed, the smoking gun for a great global warming hoax, nor do they reveal a sinister conspiracy by scientists to fabricate global warming data.
Watts Up With That visitor stats. Don't worry, the "decline" is just bad charting. Surprise!
Wott's Up With That? 
A number of notes on some recent postings:
“stable OH radical”: reading the article, it says “Montzka et al.’s findings support several past model studies”… oddly, Watts seems to have totally missed the story that new measurements are more consistent with models than old measurements – could it be because that is totally opposite to his worldview?
Willis, in “zero point three times the forcing”: ah, yes, the classic skeptic with a spreadsheet, trying to claim that his approximation of a model is a perfect representation of the model. Oddly, he doesn’t try applying his approximation to ModelE _forecasts_, just to the ensemble mean of 5 hindcasts…
On sealevel drops: http://sealevel.colorado.edu/current/sl_ib_ns_global.jpg shows the most accurate data for determining trends, by correcting for barometer and seasonal variability… yup, sea level is still rising.
On Petersen and “knife fights”: are we surprised that an “alarmist” has been quoted out of context yet again?
-M
And now… a graph about how a study on snow feedback is wrong because winter snow isn’t decreasing (despite the fact that the quoted press release specifically cites “reduced spring snow cover and summer sea ice”).
And a post by D’Aleo trying to claim that Ed Long successfully showed that NOAA added artificial warming to the rural stations with no trend… when it is well known that those were the stations most likely to have time-of-observation bias corrections. Additionally, analyses of the GHCN adjusted and non-adjusted datasets, on a global basis, are within 0.03 degrees per century of each other.
-M
“AAAS withdraws ‘impossible’ global warming paper” (WUWT,Jan19,2011)
Anthony’s title is literally true, but seems to overstate the level of acceptance.
The non-profit news service Eurekalert! withdrew a news release when it learned that it was erroneous. “The study came from a little-known, non-profit group based in Argentina,” and had been submitted by a PR firm.
I suppose the proof reading staff will now have to be given a crash course in the sciences (climate,…) of interest to WUWT. Where bloopers can be inflated to Himalayan glacier proportions.
Other disciplines can be expected to be more forgiving.
What a pathetic human being, trying to exist in a fake blog like this, nipping at the heels of the internet’s Best Science site.
Let us know when you decide to move out of your mom’s basement, whenever that happens. Maybe when you turn 45?
In the mean time, I’ll be at the real science site, where my comments are read by thousands of interested readers — not by a hanful of sad misanthropes.
[Smokey, I know you are an enthusiastic and self-satisfied commenter at Watts Up, so I feel that you should be aware that some asshole is signing your name to stupid comments. – Ben]
Ah, so that’s where all the people interested in ‘Climategate’ went.
They quit searching for news
http://www.google.com/trends?q=climategate
They went to WTF, where they check in but don’t check out.
“In the mean time, I’ll be at the real science site”
You mean realclimate, right? I mean, you can’t possibly mean What’s Up With Random Cranks Spewing Their Ignorant, Wrong, and Inflammatory Hypotheses to Great Acclaim by Sycophantic Readers, right? Hey, they even had a cold fusion article recently!
-M
Speaking of sad, I see that WUWT has posted some more cold weather events without any mention that record HI’s are going on at the same time. We have some new HI’s happening in Oregon right now. I was out riding bikes with my son this evening when we should have been shivering and rainy.
Ah, Willis Willis Willis.
Of course, of the 19 citations in Web of Science (the 49 from google scholar not being the best count of real citations), several are direct rebuttals of the paper, or responses to the direct rebuttals. A quick survey of the other articles which I have access to seems to indicate that many of them refer to the paper only to dismiss its assumptions – eg, a rebuttal of a Spencer paper mentions the Schwartz paper to point out that Schwartz used a bigger ocean slab, and even that bigger slab is widely considered to be too small.
Then, of course, Willis promptly follows with the denier favorite, which is to claim that a set of equations that mostly match a climate model’s global average temperature for past century runs is actually equivalent to that model, and therefore if the equations do something wrong, the climate model must therefore also be wrong: “He also showed that the GISS climate model slavishly follows the simple equations in the S2007 paper. Falsifying the substitutions thus means that the GISS climate model (and the S2007 equations) are seen to be exercises in parameter fitting. ”
-M
UAH prelim – January temp may be below normal globally (WUWT,Jan28,2011)
This is a new category of WUWTianisms: a preview blogpost of next week’s (monthly) UAH Jan temperatures blogpost. I suppose there is general disappointemnt over there that the biggest La Nina in 50 years hadn’t derailed a hottest year. So they now want two bites of the apple; i.e., two blogposts about a cold month.
“USGS on their mission to explore African drought” (WUWT,Jan29,2010)
“…The temperature and rainfall increases in this region have produced a westward extension of the western ascending branch of the atmospheric Walker circulation. Diabatic heating due to increased mid-tropospheric water vapor condensation elicits a westward atmospherer response that SENDS AN EASTERLY FLOW OF DRY AIR ALOFT TOWARD EASTERN AFRICA. In recent decades (1980-2009), this response has suppressed convection over tropical eastern Africa, decreasing precipitation during the ‘long rains’ season of March-June…Increased Indian Ocean SST’s appear to continue to strongly modulate the Warm Pool circulation, reducing precipitation in eastern Africa…” abstract, emphasis added
“In summary global surface temperatures are strongly correlated with Indian Ocean SSTs during (March-June). As temperatures have increased, convection and precipitation over the Indian Ocean have increased and long-rains precipitation in eastern Africa has declined…”
“…The anthropogenic Indian Ocean warning response appears to be one of the most consistent…and well understood…responses to greenhouse gas emissions. This anthropogenic warming appears to have significantly altered the earth’s largest circulation feature and impacted its most food insecure inhabitants.”
“A western extension of the warm pool leads to a westward extension of the Walker circulation, drying eastern Africa” Williams&Funk,2011
This is a paper about recent changes in the large scale Walker circulation. And Anthony complains about man’s slow and steady changes to the environment.
A given reason for USGS’s interest in Africa was the considerable value of the food aid previously contributed.
Using the Kilimanjaro study to dicuss deforestation is a particularly lame argument. Just how many other tropical mountain glaciers are there, that this study would apply to? This is a study about how the large area of trees on the lower slopes of a mountain act to increase the precipitation on a smaller area above the tree line.
The east flank of the Ethiopian Highlands does not sound like a comparable situation.
“On the lower forested slope the mountain surface is consistently cooler and moister than the atmospheric boundary layer. In contrast temperatures and moisture on the higher slopes above tree line (3000m) are decoupled from the free atmosphere, showing substantial heating/cooling by day/night and import of moisture up from lower elevation during day light hours. The mountain is universally warmer than the background atmosphere at 1500 EAT, the sparsely vegetated upper slopes acting as the focus for the most intense heating…This means that the upslope flow from the forest zone is an important supplementary source of moisture for the upper slopes of the mountain…”
“The montane circulation on Kilimanjaro…” Pepin,et al,2010.
“Frequency of Big Snows: Northeast U.S. and Colorado” (WUWT,Jan29,2011)
Nobody contests the generalization: there will be more evaporation over warmer (whatever the reason for the warming) oceans. Therefore, there will be more rain and snow over land.
And there’s something pretty obvious about large scale (global or hemispheric) measurements to avoid regional variation.
Deniers however must resort to these regional variations to counter large scale reality. In this article Richard Keen considers the northeast US. He also changes the obvious ‘quantity of snowfall’, to ‘snowstorms’.
And then he jumps to a public safety index, that includes the number of people living in the affected area.
Northeast Snowstorm Impact Scale (NESIS): “…the primary focus is on areal coverage and population affected by heavy snowfall”
In denierdom this is a satisfactory meteorological measurement. And it brings out the reminiscences (mostly shoveling) in the comments.
“Pielke Sr. The Westerlies Explain The Recent Extreme Winter Weather, Not “Global Warming”” (WUWT,Jan30,2011)
Shorter Pielke Sr:
The Weather Explains The Recent Extreme Winter Weather, Not “Global Warming”
All those people saying that Global Warming might have changed weather patterns are clearly wrong because the extreme winter weather is caused by weather patterns.
My perfect climate model which I have yet to reveal to the world tells me definitively that recent weather has definitely not been affected by global warming.
And I am not even going to mention arctic sea ice.
[Rescued from the spam folder. Pielke Sr’s perfect climate model sounds exciting! And there is no reason for gentlemen to refer to that impudent Arctic sea ice. :-) – Ben]
I’ve just taken a look at Alexa and site visits to wattsupwiththat seem to be holding pretty steady with visits up at the 3 month level although down in January:
7 day 0.01050 -16% Change in Reach over the trailing 7 day period
1 month 0.01170 -10% Change in Reach over the trailing 1 month period
3 month 0.01180 +6% Change in Reach over the trailing 3 month period
[Oh, I have no doubt that Anthony will continue to find an enthusiastic audience… – Ben]
“The temperature claims of 2010” (WUWT,Feb3,2010)
This is at least the 10th in the WUWT series discounting 2010 as being a warmest year. David Whitehouse made these same arguments, though over just 10 months, in the first of the series, on Dec 6,2010.
Tamino’s response was titled, “Hide the Incline with the ‘Rank Trick’.” He points out that the CRUTEM3gl data set used is for land areas only. And then destroys Whitehouse’s arguments, with a few graphs.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/12/09/hide-the-incline-with-the-rank-trick
Imagine David Whitehouse’s match play scoring applied to baseball. The winner would then become the team that had scored higher in more innings.
Alexa stats.
Realclimate visitors
1 month change: +39%
3 month change: +23%
WTFUWT visitors
1 month change: -13%
3 month change: +7%
As an anomaly, and given the highly technical nature of RC,.. ;)
[No doubt Anthony will bluster about appropriate sample periods if questioned on this! – Ben]
It’s been a while since you’ve posted, Ben. Your efforts are much missed. Totally understandable, of course, if you’ve simply become weary of trying to keep with all the BS on the Watts site.
Could you let me know one way or t’other, please? I want to give your site a plug, but, obviously, if it’s no longer current . . .
Best regards, either way. And thanks for all you’ve done.
[Not gone, just trying to decide how I can contribute to fight against deception and ignorance. There’s no question that Anthony Watts shows a dogged determination to mislead and misrepresent that overwhelms rational response, but it must be done… I’ve been paying attention to neglected personal matters but also doing a bit of behind-the-scenes retooling, trying to figure out a way to attract and incorporate assistance. – Ben]
Ben, the blogosphere misses you. Hope you find some time in the near future to start blogging again.
[Thanks! Hoping to be back soon… – Ben]