A small milestone

10⁸  – A big number in some contexts, small in others. Magnitude is in the eye of the beholder.

It looks like we hit that number sometime around 7:45-7:46 AM PST today. Unfortunately the WordPress Blog stats widget seems to update only every 15 minutes or so (probably to minimize server CPU cycles) so it looks like we’ve missed the actual clickover. It went from 99,999,962 at 7:45AM PST to 100,004,397 views just after 8AM PST.

First I want to say, thanks. Second this really is no big deal. The only reason is is notable is that no other blog dedicated to climate science has announced reaching such a milestone, and contenders like Real Climate haven’t even come close.

In honesty, let me say that WUWT probably passed the 10⁸ mark sometime in the last two days, because in the first year of my blog, it was on the servers of the Chico Enterprise Record (where it started in 2006) and that first year of traffic data (~100,000 views) was lost when I switched to wordpress.com in October 2007 because that server couldn’t handle the load nor provide the features I needed, so the newspaper graciously let me move to a better platform. WUWT is still listed under the ChicoER umbrella at www.norcalblogs.com.

Christopher Monckton muses in his recent guest post Hurrah for 8 orders of magnitude!:

“And it is hard work, 24/7, 366 days a year.”

Well yes, but being a broadcaster trained me to be like this. Before there was blogging, there was me on television, working nights, weekends, some holidays, and sometimes into the wee hours of the morning covering severe weather outbreaks. Blogging has one benefit not found on TV; I don’t have to wear a suit and makeup. But, it does seem like second nature to me.

Ric Werme has chosen a selection of WUWT classics, and offers them in his WUWT Index Page. I’ve repeated them below.

WUWT Classics

Here are some posts that deserve to used as reference works, not just as comment-du-jour. The real reference is usually elsewhere, but a lot of us heard it first here.

• 2008 Jan 28: Warming Trend: PDO And Solar Correlate Better Than CO2

  This is Anthony’s summary of work by Joe D’Aleo. It predates my “obsessive” involvement on WUWT by a few weeks, that happened in large part to hearing about this from Joe directly. This convinced me that CO2 wasn’t dominant and with the negative PDO in place things were about to turn interesting.

  Latest update 2010 Sep 30: AMO+PDO= temperature variation – one graph says it all The comments raise a number of concerns about looking at correlations between time-smoothed series, and the new paper leaves out the CO2 test, so it’s not as striking as before.

• 2008 Jun 2: Livingston and Penn paper: “Sunspots may vanish by 2015”.

  By my reckoning, this is the most fascinating material I’ve read on WUWT. Now in mid-2010 the data is pretty much tracking predictions some four years after the paper was written.

  Latest update 2010 Sep 18: Sun’s magnetics remain in a funk: sunspots may be on their way out. This reports on a new paper Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields. An updated estimate of the majority of sunspots becoming invisible is 2021-2022, but I and others think some of the delay is due to some events already being invisible and hence aren’t included in the average, and that leads to an apparently slower decline.

• 2009 Jun 14: The Thermostat Hypothesis

  This revisits the well observed and understood phenomenon of daily tropical thunderstorms from the novel viewpoint that they keep the Earth from overheating.

• 2009 Nov 15: Reference: 450 skeptical peer reviewed papers
• 2009 Nov 19: Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked – hundreds of files released

  I remember where I was when the story broke. I was on my computer surfing the web. Duh. I think I stayed up until 0300 that night. 1,616 comments to this post!

• 2010 Mar 27: Earth Hour in North Korea a stunning success

  The nighttime satellite photo says it all. Definitely a solution we don’t want to emulate.

• 2010 Jun 4: Under the Volcano, Over the Volcano

  Willis Eschenbach’s description of how CO2 measurements at Mauna Loa are made and the steps they take to exclude measurements with recent CO2 releases from local volcanic and anthropogenic sources.

• 2010 Jul 9: Aliens Cause Global Warming: A Caltech Lecture by Michael Crichton

  This is a superb lecture about what distinguishes science from wishful thinking; the hazards of consensus science; and how science hasn’t learned from the past.

• 2011 Apr 29: Friday Funny – science safety run amok

  This started out as a rant about “a chemistry kit with no chemicals.” Disppointing, despicable, disheartening to be sure, but certainly not worthy of being listed here.However, WUWT Nation is full of people who’ve learned chemistry the fun way, from 1960’s chemical sets to making their own rocket fuel. They (we!) hijacked the thread to reminisce about all the chemistry that society (and Homeland Security) frown upon today. Enjoy! BTW, the link goes to the first comment, if you want to read about depressing chemistry sets, you’ll have to scroll up or edit the URL.

• 2011 Sep 15: WUWT’s answer to Al Gore’s 24 hour Climate Reality Project

  The CRP was a 24 hour event repeating Al Gore’s new presentation, once per time zone in a particular language of that time zone. Meanwhile, WUWT readers were being treated to a new post each hour with a cartoon by Josh preceeding the details. The result is a very good introduction to Climate science and where Al Gore gets it wrong.

Guest poster Willis Eschenbach always comes up with fascinating posts. Even his autobiographical posts are remarkable. He’s collected An Index to Willis’s Writings up to May 2011 and deserves this special entry here.

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I’d like to add one of my own favorites to the classics list, since I worked harder on this post than any other. It took weeks of hunting down equipment, long hours of patience in replication, and hundreds of dollars to produce:

Replicating Al Gore’s Climate 101 video experiment shows that his “high school physics” could never work as advertised

Bill Nye was annoyed enough to respond, if you can call this a response. It seems rather science-free compared to what I offered. Heh.

Speaking of responses, it appears that from the Climategate 2 emails, WUWT has been putting a burr in the saddle of the team. E.M. Smith (Chiefio) points out all the emails where I or the blog have been discussed. I’m surprised there were so many.

I suppose that  if this blog were not effective, I wouldn’t be attacked so much by defenders of the team, such as the juvenile activist/scientist Peter Gleick (with his B.S. award) and the tree and pig whisperer, James Lenfestney. They seem like burned out 60’s hippies, because they certainly don’t act like professionals. You just have to laugh. I liked this kid’s take on it, who is experiencing similar things. Remember on August 19th 2011, when I reported on the science project for putting solar cells in a tree like arrangement? Novel idea – arrange solar panels like Nature designed it. It seems the kid has made some people angry. From the New York Times story on him this week:

A new way of collecting solar energy has polarized scientists around the world and ignited fierce debate on the Internet, where the innovator in question has been called everything from an alien to the agent of a global conspiracy.

Sound familiar? We skeptics get that a lot. Here’s his response:

He got some constructive advice, said Aidan’s mother, Maureen. “Then there were people who were just—”

“Haters,” Aidan chimed in with a grin.

That’s a great attitude! Yep, haters. WUWT and I have collected a lot of those too. Somehow these haters (and you know who you are)  think that by spreading hate, I’ll change my way of thinking and doing things. Nope, it only strengthens my resolve.

As much as I’m denigrated for running this blog, the fact that I’m writing this today, and that I gain new friends worldwide every day, reminds me of a famous line:

Remember,  no man is a failure who has friends! –Clarence

Thanks to everyone who makes this community special, from the volunteer moderators, to the regulars and passers by, down to the trolls, and on the bottom, the haters. Thanks to Josh too, who provided the title graphic (from a suggestion by Barry Woods) as a surprise. I’m turning that into a commemorative coffee cup which I’ll offer soon.

Thanks are due Steve McIntyre and the late John L. Daly, who both set the standard, and slogged on for years in obscurity before climate skepticism became a mainstream issue. I’d like to thank Dr. Roger Pielke Senior, for his encouragements too.

I leave you with a video that shows just how much trouble climate change is, in fact, after watching this video it could be argued that it is “worse than we thought”.

10⁷