Overnight, another milestone occurred. As of 6:20 AM PST, the WUWT hit counter shows:
Thank you readers, thank you moderators, thank you guest contributors.
Traffic has slowed from about half of what it was during the heady days of Climategate and Copenhagen in December, but I note that this is not unique to WUWT, as other climate blogs have also experienced similar drops since then. However I’m pleased to say that WUWT has kept many new readers since then.
Here’s an Alexa comparison of WUWT and four other commonly visited climate websites:
For my part, I’ve gone through a period of exhaustion and illness due to keeping up the pace a couple of weeks back, and for awhile, resorted to posting a lot of press releases rather than analysis and commentary.
This is why I value the work of our volunteer moderation team and our guest contributors so much. You have my heartfelt thanks for your continued efforts.
At the moment, I’m facing survival issues with my own business due to the downturn the economy has suffered, and I’ll be unable to put as much time into WUWT as I have in the past. Even the Google Ad words hits have dropped off as the economy cools. The economy has finally caught up to my little niche.
Given the situation, I hope readers will forgive me if I showcase a weather station product or two in the future as a way to gain revenue. WUWT gets more hits than my business does, so I’d be a fool not to take advantage of this traffic. I figure many WUWT readers might be interested in some of the weather products I’ve invented and offer. Most recently I’ve been working on a personal weather radar channel, a small box that you can add to the back of any flat screen LCD TV/monitor, that gives you 24/7 automated radar display for your location, and without any data fees. Look for that in a week or two.
Again, thank you all for making WUWT the most visited climate science blog in the world. – Anthony
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Thanks to everyone who makes this site pssible.
I am one of those who visited after Climategate as a somewhat disinterested lukewarmer and have since really had my eyes and mind opened from what I have learned from everyone here.
Thank you for your dedicated work and for all you have done. It truly is a service to mankind.
Expect surges of visitors come Bonn and Cancun.
Congratulations on the succes of this site. I am one of those who found this site after I heard about Climategate. I have visited this site daily since. The effort you put in is greatly appreciated. I’ve always had a feeling something wasn’t right with the AGW position and the hype surrounding it and I find it refreshing to get news and commentary on the subject without all the BS and hyperbole. Keep up the good work.
Anthony
40,000,000 hits – I bet this guy is no fan of yours. This is from Private Eye magazine, the scourge of incompetent, corrupt politicians and bureaucrats in the UK.
Carbon Trading
Profits of Doom
Carbon emissions trading might be useless at tackling climate change, but it is highly profitable for the financial engineers behind it.
The godfather of pollution trading is an American called Richard Sandor, famous as one of the founders of financial derivatives in the 1980s at junk bond trader Drexel Burnham Lambert, where he pioneered the “collateral mortgage obligations” that eventually brought the financial markets to their knees. He was also architect of the first pollution permit trading scheme (in sulphur emissions) in the US, in the 1980s.
Now he chairs the company controlling more than 80% of EU carbon emissions trading, Climate Exchange Plc, which regularly launches “innovative” carbon products such as daily futures contracts and has set up trading exchanges in China, Canada and Australia. Sandor meanwhile has been a big mover behind plans for a mandatory trading system in the US that would see his company’s income multiply.
Under Sandor and chief executive ad offshore insurance specialist Neil Eckert, Climate Exchange Plc owns the European Climate Exchange based in London’s Bishopsgate, as well as the Chicago Climate Futures Exchange. Business is especially booming in London, as Eckert boasted in a recent results announcement last week: “ECX had a wonderful year and with the continuing EU discussions of an anticipated 30% cut (in emissions) by 2020 and particularly the move to 100% auctioning (of allowances) in 2011, shows significant long term growth potential.” Last year Sandor earned $1m and Eckert £575,000. Sandor’s shares in the company are worth more than £40m, and Eckert’s around £5m, on top of £7m worth of options.
These riches came on the back of operating profits last year of £11.5m, made almost entirely in London where trading in £70bn worth of emissions allowances by the European exchange’s 100 members, including such renowned environmentalists as Shell, Barclays and RBS, earned the exchange £11.4m. Not that any of this finds its way into the (UK) government’s coffers in the form of tax that might be invested in slightly more useful environmental measures.
The rest of this article can be found on page 29 of the March 19th edition of Private Eye, Britain’s leading satrirical magazine.
Here’s a little something you may find interesting. Small change as these things go, but I found the participants interesting. More Climate Models! I wonder how a “Battle of the Models” will entertain us for the next few years. 🙂
“USDA, DOE & NSF Agree to Joint Climate Change Prediction Research Program
WASHINGTON – March 22, 2010 – The U.S. Departments of Agriculture (USDA) and Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) today created a joint research program that designates nearly $50 million to develop climate system models that provide insights on climate variability and impacts on ecosystems.
“Climate change and its impacts on the land, crops and animals raise some of the most serious issues faced by producers and by society at large,” said Roger Beachy, director of USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture.”
http://www.dtnprogressivefarmer.com/dtnag/common/link.do?symbolicName=/ag/blogs/template1&blogHandle=weather&blogEntryId=8a82c0bc268be2db01279abda4430d5d&showCommentsOverride=false
Anthony, thanks so much for hosting such a great virtual party! My own consulting business has been the pits also, and my wife threatens to kill my laptop quite frequently, so I understand your plight!
Please get healthy and throw us some bones once in a while, I think we have a good rhythm going amongst moderators and commentators.
Your contribution to the understanding of the political and societal ramifications of global warming cannot be understated. We’ll be here when you get caught up with stuff. Also, hat-tip to Moderators!
Anthony,
Sell us anything you think we’d value and benefit from. I’d only advise that it be reasonably relevant to our interests so that the anti-commercial among us be only minimally annoyed.
I’m also not hip to other ad sellers on blogs, but on Traders-Talk we use several and I can make a recommendation or two that might be able to augment ad revenue a bit. Feel free to contact me.
Mark
No worries, the self proclaimed statistical geniuses over at “real” climate will match your numbers any day of the week, and one doesn’t even have to do any qualified guesswork to come to that conclusion since they have yet to present any kind of raw data that is unmolested.
Now you just need 10 more mil. to reach 50. :p
OK, I just visited the store.
You have GOT to put some of those products on rotation on a banner on the site. We won’t know they are there unless you show us.
I want the ProScope. I can’t figure out why I need it, yet, but I WANT it. That has a major cool quotient.
http://www.weathershop.com/proscope.htm
Mark
Hi Anthony,
I also want to thank you deeply for the information on your blog. I have visited daily for the last 6 months or so (starting before climategate) and always enjoy it.
Looking forward to your new merchandise too!
Malcolm
Impressive achievement!
Using this popular site to advertise your Weather Shop gadgets is a great and welcome idea. Many of us dive right into the posts and comments here with barely a glance at the right column or a detour to the Shop. If you can have Google ads in the main column, why not put your own in, too? A ‘Gizmo of the Day!’ or ‘Top Three Best-selling Gadgets!’ would draw lazy fingers like mine toward the WS.
Also, have you considered WUWT and WeatherShop paraphernalia? You know: hats, shirts, buttons, bumper stickers, mugs, calendars, etc.? How about low-end gift gadgets for folks looking for Christmas and birthday presents? And you could diversify to non-weather items, too, e.g. gyroscopes (remember those?), multi-band radios, atomic clocks (whatever LaCrosse’s weather-gadget deficiencies, I have a wall atomic clock I got from them for only about $25 that works great). Just suggestions.
/Mr Lynn
I want a WUWT coffee mug. With pictures of crappy weather stations all over it.
Peter Miller (08:44:35) :
I gave up on the Eye after they kept pushing the MMR vaccine scare and jumped on the AGW bandwagon. They’re great investigative reporters, but they have a couple of rather massive blindspots and, in the end, they’re part of the same lumpen media they’re supposed to be satirising, sharing all the same vulnerabilities.
Anthony:
I started visiting your site about 8 months ago after I independently realized that AGW is technically inaccurate, based on the non-relationship between CO2 and global temperatures in the geologic past, and because the narrow IR band is already completely absorbed. I started to do a few feeble bits to counter the politics, but was extremely heartened to see your results so much greater than mine. Thanks for giving me hope.
On the product side, how fast will your weather radar screen update? If it’s more often than once a minute, there’s a market in light airplanes. Currently, you can get GPS with this, but it’s about $50/month and only available on the more expensive units. It wouldn’t be a big market for you, but you may save a few lives. Send me an email if you’re interested.
Dan
REPLY: It is every 5 minutes, but might still be useful for small airport wall displays. – Anthony
Congratulations!
This is my first post, but I have been reading you for about 2 years now. It’s been a great ride – amazing in the last few months. Thanks for all the great work.
A. Watts says,
’bout damn time. 😉
Thank you for all that you do here !!!!
Please continue with the great work !!!
Well tell us the truth Anthony, is that 40 million number adjusted for inflation ?
You know the world population has increased a lot since you started this thing, so it is only natural that your readership should have gone up.
Roy Spencer says that the world population density is going up too; so I’m not so sure you guys aren’t in cahoots on this thing.
Anyway; if you think your door bell ring count is going up; just wait till you see what is going to happen to your taxes (and mine).
Anyway; bloody good show Mate; you and Chasmod and his gang have done a lot of hard work to achieve this result.
George
Congratulations Anthony!
Keep up the good work! I think WUWT is doing very well, surely most WUWT readers appreciate the many guest posts too! Regarding your main interest http://www.surfacestations.org/, I wonder if you have considered the following “trick” that may “hide the decline”?
Removing urban sites due to the urban heat island effect may hide the warm period in the thirties since:
1. Urban surface stations may be old – covering the warm thirties.
2. Rural surface stations may be new – not covering the warm thirties.
I Norway we have one example where they have excluded one urban station for our capitol where 1934 is the warmest year and instead included another rural station where a dramatic temperature increase is seen.
I’ll put this bluntly, some people don’t know what really keep sales on the up and up.
If you have already bought a weather station gadgety thingy, will you buy another one any time soon?
A vibrating apparatus on the other hand will sell again and again, and you can still call it a thermometer if you want, heck it could even include a whole set of thermometers.
I’m just saying, if you want to sell stuff, sell the right stuff. :p
I wonder if you actually are able to track those of us who do not use a browser but use our email readers to follow WUWT. With an email reader I can filter out topics that do not interest me, keep posts that do interest me and in general have much more flexibility than in something like google reader. Of course google reader may not track either???
Good Job.
Dave W
Congrats & Thanks Anthony!
I may be one of the few “warmists” on this site, but generally have been treated very well, and the dialog is always enlightening!
Folks, hit the DONATE button !
Yes – we want weather products – maybe there’s something I could use. I’m fascinated by the UHI effect upon max and min daily temps. To study this would require a rural counterpart around the Ottawa region.