Introspection is always a good thing, and with that in mind, the suggested topic today – what could we do better at WUWT? Some background first.
I get lots of requests to change things, do things differently, or if you listen to some people, just shut down altogether; because they simply can’t tolerate an opinion contrary to their own views that gets as much attention as WUWT does.
One of the great things (or not so great depending on your viewpoint) about running a successful enterprise like this is that it now has other blogs dedicated solely to taunting that success, much like Obama has invoked taunting more than half of the citizens of the United States who have a different view from him on climate change. I see such blog spawn ( I need to update that page as there are more now) as a measure of success; flak, target, and all that.
A few caveats about things I can’t change right now that I often get asked about:
1. I can’t offer comment editing post facto, to do that I either need to spend $500/month to use the WordPress Enterprise feature (which I tried on invitation and decided it was not worth the price tag) or run on a self-hosted server. Since I don’t have time to chase down script kiddies and bot attacks like Lucia does, staying on WordPress.com is the only real option.
2. I can’t do research for people. Every day I get emails asking me to do research for questions, or go to some blog/newspaper/magazine and offer commentary to counter somebody in comments. I simply don’t have the time, I’m sorry.
3. I can’t change what ads popup on WUWT. They are entirely controlled by wordpress.com. That said, they are also contextually based on your browsing behavior. If you are getting ads that you think you should not be, chances are you’ve been pigeonholed for some reason. Clearing your browser cache/cookies always helps. That said, there was a rogue advertiser this past week that attempted to do re-directs. Alert readers alerted me, and I alerted the wordpress management who booted the advertiser.
4. Climategate 3 file dump: lots of people have looked at it, searched it, and scoured the output – there was nothing new there of any value.
Now that I’m asking you to air your opinions and ideas about what we could do better at WUWT, I’m going to air mine about those of you who comment here.
What I’d like to see different about readers and commenters on WUWT:
1. Saying “off topic” and then posting an off topic comment doesn’t actually make it OK. We have Tips and Notes (see menu below the header) for that.
2. I’d like to see less cryptic comments (like from Mosher) and more in-depth comments.
3. I’d like less name calling. The temptation is great, and I myself sometimes fall victim to that temptation. I’ll do better to lead by example in any comments I make.
4. I’d like to see less trolling and more constructive commentary. One way to acheive that is to pay attention
5. I’d like to see more click-throughs on science articles. I note that articles that discuss papers sometimes don’t get as many click-throughs as articles that discuss the latest climate inanity. While such things can be entertaining, bear in mind it is important to keep up with the science too.
So, tell me, what could we do better, do different, add, or remove from WUWT?
Please be thoughtful and respectful in such comments.
Thanks for your consideration – Anthony
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Bob Tisdale says: June 15, 2014 at 9:50 am
…………….
Hi Mr. Tisdale
note: I commented on the tallbloke’s blog referring to your posts here.
Anthony, you have a great blog and I appreciate the hard work.
I have a request for assistance, for anyone who might know the answers.
I am looking at the issue of fossil fuel usage worldwide during the great depression (1929 – 1933), and comparing it to the time series of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
I am trying to find the best sources for CO2 concentration for the time period. From what I can tell, the warmists are using the ice core measurements from Etheridge et al (1996) that are available here on NASA’s GISS website:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/ghgases/Fig1A.ext.txt
There is also this site:
http://www.biomind.de/realCO2/data.htm
I downloaded their spreadsheet, but it only gives a a few data points for the period I am interested in, and they come from several different sources.
Are there any other sources? Please correct me if I am wrong, but as far as I can tell, the warmists are only using the Etheridge data?
Samuel C Cogar:
In your post at June 15, 2014 at 11:35 am you write
I did not say there is.
I refer you to the post by Gunga Din at June 15, 2014 at 11:00 am which is here.
Richard
Bob Tisdale says:
June 15, 2014 at 9:50 am
“I’m writing an in-depth book as we speak. But I am not going to bother with paleoclimatological data. I do not find it credible.”
Bob, a lot of what has been done to paleo in the name of climate science in recent decades may not be credible, but there is much that was known from more than a century ago that is pretty solid. Louis Agassiz’s discovery that there WERE ice ages is pretty important, I’m sure you would agree. It wasn’t a given.
“Agassiz’s theory of mass extinction was based on his “discovery” of the “Great Ice Age” which he had vigorously defended toward doubting colleagues, ever since 1837 when he had first presented his ideas to the Swiss Society of Natural Sciences in Neuchâtel. The theory of a past ice age, which initially had been rejected by many leading geologists, was not new to many Alpine naturalists. But it was slow in gaining general acceptance by the profession, especially against the ingrained concept of the �Great Flood,� which could explain so many of the features Agassiz ascribed to ice action. Eventually, he won enough colleagues over by showing them the evidence in the field, especially the scratched surfaces of bedrock where rocks in the moving ice had gouged out deep marks before dumping them in a moraine.”
http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/virtualmuseum/climatechange2/02_1.shtml
If you don’t at least include a brief description of this, the most extreme of climate changes, as a backdrop, your book will be wanting. The message of the backdrop should be that the earth has oscillated in temperature a matter of only ~+/- 3 to 4 C over a couple of billion years -a remarkable stability that (with the unbroken chain of life) proves, unequivocally that there is no precedence for runaway temperatures in this long haul.
It likely was a fair amount warmer in early Precambrian (Archean- 3.8 billion to 2.5 billion years ago) when there were massive outpourings around the world of a very hot type of lava not found today called ‘komatiites’. These would seem to be part of the planetary development, although there is evidence of Archean ice ages…
A simple mention of ice core’s and what the graphs purport to show, even if you want to say the subject appears to be in no way conclusive of much. Surely, at least, it is a climate event worthy of mention that mere snowfalls alone can build up 4-5km of ice – this must have taken a long time.
Also, Google the Little Ice Age to show what a bit of cooling can do ( freeze NY harbor so that people could walk to Staten Island! Bosphorus froze over! 1/3 of Finns died! etc.).
Such an introductory chapter to history of climate change could be done in 20 pages, would impress your reader and give context to your more detailed stuff.
=================================================================
Sorry for missing your intent at first.
My only connection to the internet is via PC. I don’t have a tablet or even a cell phone so I can’t add to any suggestions on what would make the site easier/better for those who use them, but, sure if WordPress allows it.
” tteclod says:
June 15, 2014 at 11:33 am
Here’s another one: thread the comments. Even my site manages that trick.”
Threaded comments, aka comment nesting, was tried here once. It was an decided nightmare. Multiple conversations ensued with no chance of cohesion to the main topic. A single thread forces (ok, “encourages”) commenters to attempt continuity on the thread topic, albeit ocasionally unsuccessful. This site collects far too many comments to make threading useful. It is possible to create a parallel blog to which topics with more than the usual dialogue could be carried over to and allowed to run their course. Call it WUWT Redux or some such thing. Be willing to step up as a moderator… 🙂
I come here for some science and LOTS of entertainment. The ratio here is better than at Reason.com
Mike Mangan says:
June 15, 2014 at 9:51 am
More boobies! Works for the Daily Caller, eh?
Here’s proof boobies do come here. 😉
Many use terms to define others in this discussion. But, no one knows what these terms actually mean. What is a denier? What is a warmist? By using these terms people in the discussion use these as convenient labels to dismiss anyone who does not agree 100% with their position. I think it would be useful to come up with a list of say 5-6 categories that people could use to better define their position, say Level 1 to Level 6.
Level 1: Warming occurring, man over 80% responsible due to CO2, results will be dire
Level 2: Warming occurring, man over 50% responsible, results will be harmful
Level 3: Warming occurring, man contributing, results unsure but we should take steps just to be careful.
Level 4: Warming has been occurring, man may/may not be contributing, no big deal
Level 5: Warming/cooling all part of a natural cycle, why it changes we just don’t know, not much we can do.
Level 6: We have no idea what the temperature has been doing because our data is so poor
Warren Bonesteel says:
June 15, 2014 at 8:50 am
In your articles, don’t trash talk anyone. Ever. Don’t just be professional. Set the standard for professionalism.
====================================================================
Anth@ny’s summary provides everything I want to see. Although after clearing my computer, and all the cached web pages, I still got that silly gamer web site taking over Safari and I have never played an on site game – and my computer is password protected so I know it wasn’t my kids.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1. I would like to be able to search commenter’s names. Some folks make great comments and leave fantastic references. Sometimes I find them hard to find again. However, I now copy them and put them in a searchable file.
2. I like the site as it is and I am constantly amazed at the number of articles and speed at which people like Willis, Bob Tisdale RGB, Jimbo and others provide articles and defences that would take me days to find or even write a short note on. I have many years of math, physics, chemistry, geology, hydrology, meteorology(some), microbiology, …. that I have long forgotten about. Sometimes I go back to a page several time to get through the information as I am getting on and I don’t read/absorb things as quickly as I used to. I think I have hundreds of bookmarked pages and something like 800 short articles I have written based on WUWT that I have prepared and left on my computer for my grandchildren to read when I die.
3. I like the fact that many different views are presented here about climate and weather – and other sciences. I would would welcome warmist views, if only readers here could avoid acting like trolls. Even in what we might consider “wrong” headed thinking, there can be good commentary. The excellent presentation by Dr. Lindzen showed that the IPCC has many take aways. I didn’t read AR5 but I did read AR3 and 4 cover to cover and noticed the disharmony between the actual science and the Summary for Policy Makers. The people here who point out these things are doing a service to the world. I am happy to read Mosher’s reasonable posts, but it is easy to ignore the “drive bys” he posts. Lots of smart people here with odd senses of humour, even me, so tolerance is the word and move on to the next post.
4. Per Warren (June 15, 2014 at 8:50 am) and many others (and I may have been guilty) – no need to be snarky with anyone. It actually takes something away from the commenter and probably achieves the objective of the person being snarked.
5. Don’t feed the trolls. You can’t argue with people who quote DeSmog, you are wasting your breath and diverting your valuable time you could apply to more positive things like reading someone’s hard work that you may not agree with (Lief, Vuc, etc)
6. Accept that the world warms and cools and prepare to adapt, no need to fight or argue about 10th’s, or 100th’s of a degree or direction. ( Where I live the annual variation is 70 – 80 degrees C)
7. Accept that the whole Climate Change thing has been politicized and corporatized – politicians and corporations will try to use it for profit. Be a watch dog, but don’t get angry. When you get angry, they win. Write letters. Provide references you found here and other places. At some point, they will get it.
8. Never forget that we might be wrong. I have looked at/plotted lots of temperature and precipitation (rain and snow) information for areas in Canada and the NW States that I am interested in. Sometimes they show warming, sometimes cooling, sometimes nothing, sometimes more precip, sometimes less. There is a signal there that looks an awful lot like ENSO but it probably isn’t that important. Look at the graph Dr Lindzen did for Boston. Not exactly scary no matter which way the trend is.
9. Look at the policy of your professional organizations and express your opinion. I am in the process of letting my membership in The Association of Professional Engineers and Geophysicists of British Columbia lapse due to their Position Paper on Climate Change that REQUIRES that we consider the impact of INCREASING temperatures, rain, drought AND CARBON TAXES in our designs. It used to be BEST PRACTICES but apparently the legal beagles in BC decided that it MUST be addressed. They may be right, but after looking at up to 100 years of data for a number of locations, I would not use CLIMATE MODEL they propose we use. The real data actually gives more extremes than the models from what I have seen so far. It would be interesting to see how many people are affected by the policies of the organizations they belong to. Being retired, I can say things I could not say when I was active, so I understand why people post anonymously, but still I think it would be telling to have some articles on organizational policies.
Thank you to everyone who posts, trolls and all, as there are take aways from everything.
Apologies for the rambling post and thanks for the education.
Samuel C Cogar: Thanks for your support for a much needed function.To be fair to Richard Courtney, he didn’t say there was already a ‘tab/button’ for this: he merely expected users to be able to use CTL/F etc – which is fine if on a PC – and you know the keyboard short-cuts, but a tablet is an animal of a different stripe even if it is “…possible to doubt [my] choice of equipment..” (I bet you’re an Apple user, Richard) [grin].[no snark].
I enjoy this site as it provides me with information that isn’t available in the echo chamber sites.
Thanks for all your hard work. You make a difference.
Suggestions for improvement:
1. Maybe see if you can get scienceofdoom to pop in once every couple of weeks or so to do some Climate Science Basics 101 series of articles on the science. His site has a great deal of excellent content and I think we all could learn a lot. Maybe Nic Lewis can co-write? I find both of these individuals articles very readable.
2. Resist the urge to write articles taunting Dr. Mann. Stick to the science as much as possible.
3. Avoid voice-of-Gavin style inline comments. It’s very off-putting and the reason I completely avoid RealClimate these days. I know Nick Stokes can push your buttons sometimes, but Lucia seems to handle it a lot better on the Blackboard.
I’d really like to see 1) if you could get scienceofdoom to agree to it. I think fostering a learning environment would really help to get rid of a lot of the misunderstandings.
RE; Emoticons – Emoticons seem to work on WUWT. I use Free EMOJI Light and I believe they show up – I have checked from other computers, but maybe I have Emoticons on them, Off to load this on another computer without emoticons to see. 😊
Oh yeah , kids just called – Happy Father’s Day to y’all. 😍
His speech at the commencement ceremony for UC Riverside June 15, 2014 at Angel’s Stadium was the Burning Man of rhetorical pretentiousness. Actually, that was USI. I was stuck in traffic with people trying to get to UCR, so I had UCR on the brain. See, even with Word I can screw up. ; )
UCI. I GIVE UP!
It would be nice to have a list of frequent guest article authors and links to each of their posted articles (perhaps with a title or subject area listed with each). There are many times when I want to go back to one of Willis’ older posts, and have to spend some time digging it out.
Hey, I love the blog, it has great resources and has started doing its’ own science – which is where it will really come into its own. A few suggestions…
1. As noted above, the alphabet soup is really intimidating for a newbie. My first 6 months were spent with an open wiki page beside the blog page… I am of the determined sort, I have a degree in chemistry and physics so I got throught it. The 90% would not.
2. Why not have a feature where you host and post science? Some fearless few have tried in the past to get constructive feedback on papers in process and they took a lot of abuse for it. Those types of papers and input need more encouragement. You have a host of retired experts who could provide sage advice without the abuse. Either team them up in the background or have more agressive control of the comments allowed for those types of papers/features.
3. My strongest suggestion is some kind of positive feature – where increasing warming has been good for bio-diversity, good for crop growth, good for greening the sahara, good for whale food supply in the arctic, good for human health, etc. You will not get a flood of comments, but the readers will take and use that info more readily and more widely than any or all of the deconstructive arguments.
Kindly ask Vincent courtillot to make a guest post.
On Mac’s. Command/F works the same as Ctrl/F At least on mine.
I have just come from a NASA website where they have a pivoting circle of illumination and a celestial sphere description of the reason for the seasons –
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=52248
“On March 20 and September 20, the terminator is a straight north-south line, and the Sun is said to sit directly above the equator. On December 21, the Sun resides directly over the Tropic of Capricorn when viewed from the ground, and sunlight spreads over more of the Southern Hemisphere. ” NASA
This generation,including contributors here, are completely at sea when it comes to basic facts including why the temperatures rise and fall across latitudes are the Earth travels around the Sun. Quite amazing actually that nobody is astonished with the NASA explanation and the manipulation of images of the Earth from space to force through a conclusion but then again both sides in this ‘climate change’ fuss are different sides of the same speculative coin.
I’m a lawyer and graduate engineer who has been following your site for fifteen years, stayed pretty much in the background. My career for thirty five years is in persuading one side to accept my viewpoint, and attacking the logic of the other, and I have cross examined many experts in that time whose ‘expert’ opinion sounded logical, but didn’t hold up.
Thanks in part to your website, I have yet to lose a debate when the issue was whether its a fact that: Global warming materially exists, and man materially causes it through carbon emissions, and man can stop it. Once I prove its not a fact at all, then I ask why it isn’t reasonable for any critical thinker to question it….why do you ridicule critical thinkers when it turns out you were just proven wrong…..and that’s where the real issue seems to surface for most of the AGW crowd…”well it doesn’t hurt to get off fossil fuels”, or some version of the Precautionary Principle….first, they don’t realize they just lost the ‘debate’ on the ‘consensus’ not being a fact, but second, the real tipping point for most alarmists is that it should be obvious that its worth the risk to try and do whatever we can to get off fossil fuels (they usually are anti fossil fuel crowd from the beginning, as either dirty or a finite resource). This is their comfort fallback for their view.
So, in my view, the precautionary principle is why my AGW friends can’t get out of their rigid absolutist nearly preconceived views….and there needs to be as much a debate attacking the Precautionary Principle. (I have lost some debates over the years where I was arguing an issue the judge wasn’t really interested in).
I’m suggesting a topic at the top of your page dedicated to contributions to a debate on the Precautionary Principle. I explain to many that ‘burning our food supply’ (corn into ethanol) caused the very hunger and riots in certain part of the world around 2005 when corn and grain prices shot up as surplus corn and grain was used up when the EU mandated ethanol….and later backed off….the very starvation and riots that the global warmists predicted would occur years from now if we didn’t do something was being caused.
Either way, from my debates, its clear others are in denial about the science, and that often is evidence there is something deeper driving them, no matter how much logic is out there against the certainty of their position….and I think it is not only their predisposition to dislike fossil fuels, capitalism, or want worldwide wealth redistribution…..its also what they always fall back on to make them feel comfortable…the Precautionary Principle.
When climategate hit, anyone who was fearfull before that the science showed the world might come to an end due to global warming….should have been somewhat relieved that maybe the world wasn’t going to boil after all. But the response was the opposite, they wanted the earth to be at risk, were defending the indefensible, and weren’t pleased at all that maybe the ‘asteroid would pass us by’ so to speak. They doubled down, they needed the earth to be at risk. While that shows to me an agenda, they still use the Precautionary Principle as the last logical basis for extreme action.
While I doubt they would follow too much logic there either if they have an agenda (after all, if you dislike fossil fuels, you will love AGW and you need the earth to be at risk), my point is that the Precautionary Principle is the real issue that justifies their view, and its an issue that doesn’t get the attention it needs….in my view.
Short of that, the only thing we can hope for is worldwide temperatures dropping over time. Too many scientists, etc., are invested in their viewpoint to admit they might be wrong before that happens.
Would like to see you add this topic to your homepage with more visibility and input.
Thanks, your site does a great service to all.
Latitude:
Because, presumably, you find the noise-to-signal ratio too high to make the effort worthwhile, a fact you put down to the nesting. (You’re not alone. I think S McIntyre feels similarly.)
I’m also sympathetic. I often find the comments on CE very hard to read. But I also do quite often on WUWT. This is at least in part a function of both blogs’ success. My earlier point was that it’s helpful for the future to have both nested and un-nested blogs with high-volume, to see how each turn out and, hopefully, learn. All the best with your own travels!
Keep moderation light (as it currently is).
Don’t thread the comments. It is too easy to miss some with that format.