Open thread – what could we do better?

Forgive those who off topic. Often those posts are timely and tips and notes takes a long time to load with our small town Internet provider.

Could it be possible to number the comments? When I leave the site and come back a couple of hours later I find it difficult to return to where I left off. Numbering would help alleviate this problem.
Otherwise WUWT is terrific as it allows alternative opinions.

Encourage more alarmists to contribute empirical evidence of CAGW. Let’s stop belittling them, and spur them to share the evidence that they have, beyond models, that we are causing the world to warm, or change, or disrupt, or whatever the claim is. Woops, there I go belittling them again.

I have two things that “weigh on my mind” all the time, every time I come to Wattsupwiththat(TM).
Number 1. Is the seeming “dis-interest” in the concept that one really does not understand the heat balance of the Earth, unless one starts calculating the “heat content” of the Atmopshere, and..of course the oceans. (As a side bar, the FLAT heat content of the oceans, particularly the first 1000′, via the Argo bouys is very telling, that indeed there is NO SIGNIFICANT WARMING of either the Oceans or the atmosphere, WARMING MEANING AN UPWARD SHIFT OF THE HEAT CONTENT OF THE ATMOSPHERE, in absolute terms.) If this were tackled more directly, which of course…leads to the concept that watching shifts in the tropospheric “temperatures”, is very meaningless as a metric for the “heat balance” of the atmopshere, we’d be doing real “science” (and engineering) rather than allowing the “herd” to dictate reality for us.
Number 2. A vigorous pursuit of the actual “lines of code” for the atomspheric modeling programs.
There are plenty of us who have PROGRAMMED (I dislike the modern term, “coding”, it obscures things…but I do know Fortran, Cobol, C++, Java, Perl, Cold Fusion, even “machine language”)…enough to start looking at the wonderous (in their own minds) atmospheric codes.
I rather suspect, one of the reasons a lot of these places are keeping these things covert, has nothing to do with ownership, rights, obligations to financing agencies, etc. But rather, if they are open and above board with them….it will become transparent to the world how full of bugs, assumptions, and outright “stupid” errors they are and expose them to be fundementally useless exercises in futility. (But gosh, great things to keep your “grant funded, graduate slaves” working on, while you the “Perfesser”, live in luxury. (Note: Not a personal attack, but a more generic attack on the “academic clique” involved in the “climate change” money laundry scam…)
Clarity on both of these matters would vindicate WUWT for eternity, as far as I’m concerned.
Max

Well it’s an excellent site, but since you ask I’d say the number one thing is that WUWT does have a fairly high barrier to entry to casual and new followers (am I supposed to know who Lucia is?) A lot of cryptic abbreviations, a lot of inside-baseball references to various climate figures by one name with no identifier. For the cognoscenti, it’s fine to speak of Judith’s paper on TSI. But I assume you don’t want this site to only ever be of use to several thousand hard-core readers who have followed every post for years. There are any number of people I’d like to refer to various posts here, but so often the posts and their references are just too abstruse for the uninitiated. I don’t mean the science, and you can’t and shouldn’t dumb down the physics. But the presentation.
Related to the above is something that also touches on what Warren Bonesteel pleaded for: professionalism. It sounds insulting to imply that there’s anything amateurish about the site, but of course there is at times. Specifically the frequent cartoons which combine several flaws: the above-alluded-to tendency toward cryptic references to warmist and other figures that are now household names, the somewhat primitive humor that is employed, and the general air the cartoons gives the site of not being 100% serious.

There are so many things I love about WUWT, and so very little that needs changing. The only thing that annoys me and feel harms the quality of WUWT is the high number of comments on some articles that are not productive to the conversation. I’m talking about those comments where the poster feels they are being cute with some spiffy, clever one-liner that pokes fun at an Alarmist and/or idea. On some articles, over half the responses seem to be of this variety, and it detracts from the scientific nature of the site and the reading enjoyment of others.

Pamela Gray says:
June 15, 2014 at 9:18 am
On/topic: I agree with your first sentence :”I like it just the way it is.”
Off/topic: You are a teacher, but do not have children in school yourself. I can tell you that taking my children out of public school ( where there were 30-35 kids per teacher ) and moving them to a private school has transformed them into completely different children (now confident A students). Ill-supported, my ass.
In public school the motivation to label (especially boys) ADHD is funding driven, coupled with an overburdened teacher who could not possibly cope with 30-35 elementary school age children on his/her own. There is a systemic problem in the school system that you can ignore at North America’s peril. We are producing a generation of scientifically illiterate children.
In conclusion, there are many holes in the science of climate and weather and I am glad that Anthony allows all sorts of assertions to be presented, but you better bring your A-game. Post with certainty about ENSO, AMO, TSI, etc., where in reality we have no idea what truly drives these, and their global implications and resultant effects ( i.e.not enough data ).
It is clearly not Co2, but the suns effects have not yet been ruled out, despite what Pamela (Leif) tells you, because all the blanks have not been filled in.

You don’t need to change a thing. You need to solicit support for a movement that the informed public can contribute to to advance the truth on climate topics, This needs to be done with the same or greater fervor that those in opposition to that message enjoy. If this doesn’t happen, the logic of your position will continued to be steamrollered. Many news reporter are quick to link every event to global warming. How do you stop this? By a counter comment every time it happens.

WUWT is many things all at once, and I think, with the resources at hand, especially the hands of people, it does the best job that can be done. I’ve often said that I believe the time is right for WUWT to create a collateral, online, peer-reviewed (eek!) scientific blog-enterprise to publish new, or re-evaluated research on climate, and allow the peer review to occur withinthe published blog-journal in real-time (after initial review for basic soundness). Many times real science is expressed and theorized) in the comments and is often equally obscured by the colloquial and anecdotal commentary (for which I am no less guilty). There is a true and valid place for both, but it is the very devil to sort out for those of us who are technically trained but not presently topically engaged.
As others have said, it is frustrating to not have the time or opportunity to consolidate the collective wisdom that flows from a introduced topic. Other than a 36 hour day and infinite income, I don’t have an answer for this last point, other than to find a way to meaningfully segregate some of the science out of the discourse, as I previously suggsted.
To an extent, the parallelism already exists between WUWT and Climate Audit. I think the two of you (Anthony and Steve) together, along with the legions of allies out there, could create a new, third alternative that might form the foundation of a brand new means to communicate real science, out of reach of the agenda-prop.