The other divergence problem – climate communications

I regularly get angry emails from people who are convinced that I’m single-handedly destroying the world with my opinion which is supposedly funded by “big oil” and the Koch brothers. Of course, having nothing else, that’s all part of the huge lie people like Dr. Mann likes to push, like this bit of libel over the weekend:

I’m dealing with Dr. Mann’s libel separately, but for the record I’ve never gotten a dime from the Koch brothers, or “big oil”, nor am I a “denier for hire”, and Dr. Mann knows this because he backed down from a similar claim in the past when challenged on it. Now, knowing that, he’s demonstrated malice, fulfilling one of the tests for libel.

That aside, and along the same lines, I recently got an email that included this claim:

“…your pathetic little attempt at pushing climate denialism isn’t working. Places like Real Climate and Skeptical Science are putting your little enterprise to shame.”

So, I thought I’d check and run some numbers to see if I’m shamed or not. Climateers often talk about their climate change cause being a “communications problem”. The numbers I’ve found seem to support that. Witness the new divergence problem:

These are rankings from Alexa.com Lower numbers are better, for example, Google is ranked #1.

It seems that it’s not just globally strong for WUWT, but in the USA too. WUWT is about 8 times more popular in the USA than “Skeptical Science” (SkS), and about 15 times more popular than Real Climate (RC). See the Rank in Country column three:

Look at the bounce rate under Engagement Metrics. Note that over 2/3rds of visitors to SkS don’t engage further. Note also the time on site. WUWT readers spend three times more reading than SkS and almost 9 times more than at RC.

Hmm, well since the email was sent anonymously (as most of the rants are), and I don’t know where the person was located, maybe they were talking about Australia where SkS is located? Maybe that’s where they are kicking our butt? Note column three, Rank in Country (AU):

Eh, guess not- the ratio holds. RC doesn’t even have enough traffic in AU to do a comparison.

Even with Dana Nuccitelli’s signing on with the Guardian and making sure that every time he bashes me and/or WUWT in his column he uses a [nofollow] tag or web citation link to prevent web traffic, it seems that he hasn’t succeeded in keeping WUWT down nor in significantly growing his audience on “Skeptical Science” in the USA or Australia.

Maybe it’s in the UK, where the Guardian is located. Surely SkS is beating me there with all that mass media driven Guardian backed firepower? Note column three, Rank in Country (GB):

Apparently not.

Let’s expand the comparison a bit. My subscription to Alexa allows me to run up to 10 comparisons. I identified what I think to be the most widely read websites on climate that aren’t mixed in with part of a larger organization, making tracking their stats impossible. This of course precludes places like “Climate Progress”, which are part of the larger “Think Progress” or the Guardian, which has many other departments.

While I wish I could run more than 10 on the same graph,  here’s what I learned, again lower numbers are better:

Surprisingly, not only is WUWT leading the pack by a significant margin, it has now surpassed the newspaper “Grist” which has become something of a climate centric enterprise. They also have a paid staff.

Note also Al Gore’s “Climate Reality Project”, which is dead last. It appears that Gore’s million$ don’t translate into traffic. That’s some “reality drop” for him.

That bump that Climate Depot got in late July was from being featured on “The Drudge Report” by the way. Good show Marc Morano.

The metrics are also telling:

So to whoever wrote that email, thanks. It made me look deeper.

Truly, it looks like the climateers have a communications problem. People don’t seem to be engaging them like they used to. Personally I think people are seeing through it all, and angry, irrational, rants from people like Mike Mann don’t seem to be helping his cause at all. I can understand their cognitive dissonance though, because in the world where they exist, where everything is grant/funding driven, surely some former TV weather guy in Chico California and his collection of “flying monkeys” (in SkS parlance) can’t possibly be doing what he’s doing without some massive “big oil” funding behind it. Right? Surely the Koch brothers must be secretly paying for it, like Mann thinks. The truth is, WUWT exists on donations, some advertising revenue sharing managed by wordpress.com, and stamina. I couldn’t live on it, but I’m sure that won’t stop people like Dr. Mann from imagining all sorts of nefarious schemes, like his hilarious Christmas calendar episode.

I think that if I was not a broadcaster, I wouldn’t have the stamina to keep WUWT on the air. As a broadcaster, I learned long ago that dead air peppered with occasional feature rants doesn’t keep viewers coming back. It might work for awhile, but eventually people tire of it. That’s the lesson here. We can be thankful that we have so many examples of climate ugliness in the realm of the Climateers, because they drive people to the other side.

But most of all, thanks to my readers and volunteer moderators and contributors, because without all of you, WUWT wouldn’t be where it is.