One of the most acerbic, caustic, and self-absorbed climate blogs has gone AWOL, and there has been no new information seen since the middle of July. The antithetically named ‘Open Mind’ blog run by the blogger known as ‘Tamino’ aka Grant Foster from Maine, has gone silent. And, there has been no explanation for his hiatus either by announcement, or in comments, that I can find. Below is a screen cap of his last posting on July 18th, 2014.
Doing a blog is hard work; doing a blog on climate science is even harder. It requires dedication, research, tolerance, and huge amounts of effort. There have been times when I’ve just wanted to walk away from it, to get my life back so that I could spend much more time with my wife and children, who have been sorely deprived of my company at the expense of WUWT on many occasions. So, I “get” how somebody could just walk away after deciding it isn’t worth it anymore. In the case of “Open Mind” the numbers he had been getting were in a “death spiral” long before he decided to quit in mid-July of this year.
Shown above is the graph I get from my Alexa dashboard, which gives me more details than is available to non-subscribers, which doesn’t provide any data once you slip below the ranking waterline of 100,000.
Was it by choice, or is it some personal or professional crisis that forced it? Did he have an epiphany over ‘the pause’ in global temperature and the disparity between climate models and reality? Did he finally realize that climate sensitivity is lower than has been claimed, and thus not a crisis as advertised? Did he finally realize that climate skeptics are starting to be embraced rather than reviled, and thus there is no longer a place for the sort of vitriol he had peddled in the past?
Like this?
[added]
I have no idea.
But, despite us being at odds over the issues of climate science, I wish him and his family well. I hope that it is nothing more than just needing to recharge and re-invest in himself, as we all need to do sometimes. The never ending grind of this effort can take its toll, and I more than anyone know just how much of a personal impact that can become.
Whatever the outcome, I sincerely wish you good luck, Grant Foster.
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Not the greatest loss to the blogosphere…
I visit his website every day. That is not as easy as it sounds. Caustic Mind would be a better name.
He might have grant applications due, or have started a sabbatical. Odd not to mention on blog but if you don’t have many readers …… Or he could be sick. If so, I wish him the best.
A good lawyer never asks a question in open court they don’t already know the answer to.
Pointman
Perhaps he is working on a redesign, to disappear some embarrassing posts. Last time he redesigned, he removed the archives, and it eliminated the post where he quoted Ian Jolliffe with regards to the hockey stick, citing him as the guy who wrote the book on the subject, only to have Mr Jolliffe come back and correct him.
I thought I remembered reading a conversation between him and Chris Colose, but looking for them, including on twitter I can’t find anything recent. It might be worth check out some of the blogs tamino frequents.
Gotta run….
Didn’t concern troll petey grace show up about the same time this guy vanished?
I say without apology: may this be first of many pro-AGW sites, to close up shop.
He’s just trying to puff you up some more, Grace! Just full of puff.
Say, petey, how’s that laughing-gas study going, anyway?
So. That explains a lot…
On any blog, you can always tell the hard core net nutjobs because they can’t resist building up conspiracy theories about how the automated parts of the posting software are personally persecuting them.
This happens on every blog which allows comments – sometimes a comment shows up where you want it, sometimes a comment shows up somewhere else – the systems have a lot in common with climate models, they just aren’t that reliable. And all of us who use these things have gotten used to it, because it’s just one of those little annoyances that really isn’t a big deal
I don’t need to have been there to know that No One looked at your comment and said “heh heh heh, I’m going to allow it but then slyly put it someplace else in the thread. BURN!!!”
only delusional paranoids think like that.
How does one accrue points from something that has none?
I’ve spent a lot of time since 1977 debunking nuclear winter & CACA, without benefit of funding from any source. As a combat veteran of my nations wars, I would welcome attempts by the Team’s brain dead supporters to attack me in my house.
Bring it. Please.
No doubt confused and ineffective writing is due to your a and ineffective mind.
Anthony, Nice post!
His one saving grace was that he allowed one sceptical post and argued against it before banning you for life.
Real Climate just dumps the post to purgatory.
Real Climate IS purgatory.
No, Real Climate is where you end up if you flunk Purgatory.
” Alexa traffic ranking for “Tamino’s Open Mind” blog.”. (snigger)
Ya reckon maybe he woke up one day and realized he was full of crap on the climate science and therefore had been wasting his time all along?
Your old fan Lewandowsky co-author Mike Marriot went quiet as well – global warming will end, not with a bang, but with a whimper 🙂
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/07/watching-the-deniers-makes-hilarious-goof-while-accusing-wuwt-of-doctoring-nsidc-images/
In the end it will all just melt away quite suddenly. Or another way to look at it is “in the end global warming will just ice up quite suddenly”.
Read Mona Charen’s book, “Useful Idiots”, to see the next step. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and by the mid 1990s, apologists for Communists were very thin on the ground. Turns out there never WERE apologists for the eastern block. John Kerry, Teddy Kennedy, and many, many others quite suddenly claimed to have been Cold Warriors from the beginning.
It took Mona’s dedicated reporting to put the Then and Now quotes together.
“Victory has a thousand fathers; defeat is an orphan.”
You are mistaken.
The apologists resurfaced mostly as the Greens. Shape shifters. better described as “water mellons”: green on the outside, but deep -command economy, statist, authoritarian- red on the inside. They never actually disappeared; they just morphed.
These are the very folks who have been driving the CAGW/CACC agenda in the [more or less] market economies in the West since the fall of the Wall in 1989.
A fifth column -as per the words of one of the IPCC’s founders, Canadian socialist Maurice Strong on mike at the 1992 Rio Summit- with the objective of “saving the earth” by “dismantling the developed industrial economies of the West”. Found at all levels of society, politics and bureaucracy, most of them hapless and gullible -in Lenin’s words “useful idiots”.
What better way to achieve that destruction than by taking away abundant hydrocarbon energy – one of the key elements in capitalist wealth creation. Well? By hijacking a segment of science to promote man-made CO2 driven climate catastrophe? Hijacking science to achieve broader economic and societal goals: think Lysenko and eugenics and the parallels stare you in the face.
As Ottmar Edenhofer -one of the IPCC’s top cardinals- said to reporters at the 2010 Cancun climate summit: “it is no longer about the science, it’s about the re-distribution of global wealth”.
Next time you meet a Green, a convinced CAGW alarmist, you are dealing with someone who lives somewhere on a scale between Utopian Socialism and hard core Leninist.
Don’t be fooled: all of them are driven by the need to tell you, and control, how to live your life.
By means of climate “science”. Settled…
Anthony, it is helpful that every visitor here understand the work, the effort, the dedication and the sacrifice that you personally put forth every day to keep WUWT going.
I come here every day. I learn so much. I have my eyes opened and my understanding deepened by the information you and your guest posters and commenters bring to WUWT.
This seems so trite… this little reply. But I want you to know that so many come here (as you know) because we LEARN — and there are so precious few places to go for that these days.
WUWT is the modern equivalent of the Library at Alexandria. Here one can find knowledge, understanding and insight.
WUWT is a gift without price, except the one you pay every day.
My heartfelt best wishes to you and your family. I realize they sacrifice as much as you.
Please thank them on our behalf and…
THANK YOU so much.
Agreed !
Double +1000
Amen, and amen!
Absolutely! It’s the go to place for anyone wanting to learn about the CAGW issue. Your contributions are invaluable and you’re doing a great thing for humanity.
Absolutely right. Spot on.
An-Th-ony – my thanks – and likely the thanks of thousands of others here – and billions in the real worls.
Folks – a Nobel for our host?
Maybe 2017/8?
Auto
Those the gods wish to destroy they first confer Nobel prizes.
That would be “Rick”…
He deserves something much better than a Nobel. Remember algore and obummer got one just for lying.
What Rick K says!
I am continually amazed at the amount accomplished by Anthony Watts. A single posting out of the many things he posts each day would take me much more than a day of solid work to produce (no travel, no correspondence, no engagement with friends and neighbours). Respect.
Respect indeed. I don’t know how you do it, I have trouble just reading all your posts each day never mind producing them!
Yes very good. Clearly you have not been infected by the virus of the Cult.
It might be he has other things on at the moment.
However, unless he is a complete idiot, he will have realised that the old meme of catastrophic warming is dead in the water. At best we might be in for some slow warming that will be well contained and on the whole will be beneficial until fossil fuel stocks start to decline. We are at solar peak and have the decline to minimum to come, then we will have the AMO going negative, a partial recovery in Arctic ice and no chance of a rapid acceleration in sea level rise.
The best thing for people like Foster is to slowly withdraw, don’t renounce, just sink out of sight and let the idiotic remaining zealots take all the coming flak. Try and retain as much of his ego as he can and pretend he only ever was interested in discussion about a possible threat and he never pushed an agenda personally.
Alan
Your logic makes sense. And it is supported by the diminishing number of true believers who bother with the Guardian comments pages.
And I hope it is that and not a personal problem for Tamino. It is never easy to leave a long-running project.
Not with a clangour, but with a whisper.
============
My thoughts as well, Alan.
The smart thing to do at this point is to cash in your chips and make yourself scarce. When the wind changes, you will then be able to claim that you simply stood by science and, right or wrong, you still do today.
The 2014 Super El Nino that wasn’t probably didn’t help either. By late July, the SO portion of ENSO was clearly not cooperating.
Multiple strikes against any GW
– The 17+ year Pause
– The realization of a less active sun, now and the next 6 years
– El Nada.
– AMO soon to go neg
– PDO neg
– slowing sea level rise, Implying no missing heat in the oceans
– Antarctic sea ice levels hitting records in the middle of Southern winter, where there is no fresh water meltwater to provide an excuse.
– Arctic Ice recovery
No, a corner has been turned, and not just in the Climate global temperature anomaly. Look at the counter CAGW Ops-Eds recently, Koonin, now Curry. NASA’s legacy Apollo era astronauts openly calling CAGW a fraud.
We are seeing AGW collapse before our eyes. And it is accelerating.
I think what has happened is that the the climate scare is slowly fading with the public, and this is driving the numbers down on blogs dedicated to the proposition of climate disaster. The most likely explanation is that the fall in Open Mind’s rankings has caused Tamino to give up on his blog. I am guessing that once you enter such a spiral, there is no climbing out.
Maybe he lost his funding?
Possibly, Yancey. But the rating for climate Skeptic blogs does not seem to be falling the same. WUWT has been fairly steady around 10 for over a year now, and while they are both lower on the rating, Jo Nova and Climate Ect. Seem to be stable.
Maybe he went back to selling sunglasses. Oh wait….
An incredibly dull echo chamber which stiffled debate at every turn. A heat engine with no heat. Bu-bye to Tamino and his French friend too.
His French friend? Would that be Tu Quoque?
Ner, that’s his Roman friend…
Pierrehumbert
Pierrehumbert? Who in their right mind would listen to him?
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/raypierhumbert1.jpg?w=720
Dadgumit db !
Whyja have to go and post a pix of Peter Humbug playing on a squeezebox. And who would leave a glass of California Pinot Noire, to press on one of those things ??
G
I notice the Alexa site had a link to a ‘rabett’ blog. Eli Rabett, perhaps?
… the ranking was over 4,000,000.
That´s probably me. I use the Rabbett blog to jump to other sites. I like Eli Rabbet, and they seem to like me a little bit as well. But, you know, I like to write very kindly about everybody. Lately they almost never insult me.
He’s probably off partying with Kim Jong Un somewhere.
So that’s what happened to Kim!
Jim, you beat me to the Kim Jong Un observation.
In Kim’s case, it could be something as simple as gout.
In both cases, perhaps the best response to the provocations is to simply put them on ignore.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-29581342
Jack Simmons
He may have slipped into “oh never mind” mode believing he would be better off simply changing the channel on his life TV.
People have done so in many circumstances and successfully transitioned with a clean click of their personal remote control.
If that is what Foster has done he is no longer paying attention to anything climate and perhaps has even turned away from watching or reading any media.
Lunatic Appell, who talks to himself on his blog, should do the same.
It’s about promoting a political Agenda with politicised climate science. And he probably is a “helper”. The question is does he know or is he just a useful “fool”?
Doing a blog is hard work; doing a blog on climate science is even harder. It requires dedication, research, tolerance, and huge amounts of effort….all of which have nothing to do with Grant
Heh, mebbe he’s banging on Nate Silver’s little Maxwell.
=============
You gracious good-bye to Tomino could only be made by a person who is also experiencing the strain on ones life that blogging takes. I would agree with the “epiphany” statement. How could a logical, thinking individual continue to expend his life’s energy supporting the misery that the AGW meme causes? [snip – sorry, while I have issues with Mr. Foster, that portrayal of him is an unfair comparison -Anthony]
The blog of the most scared Slovak alarmist, Alexander Ač of Czech Globe (ac.blog.sme.sk), became silent on April 15th, too. I assure you he was alive and well just a few weeks ago.
In both cases, the scientific literature offers about 38 different explanations of the hiatus.
hah
Ya gotta give the warmistas credit for one thing … I think they own the “Most Inaptly Named Web Sites & Blogs” category. 🙂
I mean “Real Climate”, “Skeptical Science”, “Open Mind” … I could go on but I’m laughing too hard already.
Disingenuous Orwellian naming of blog sites, in a feeble attempt to disguise their determined AGW agenda, fools few. ‘Open Mind’ blog was/is a perfect example, suggesting free exchange of ideas but accepting only one perspective and censoring any disagreement.
In regards to the demise of ‘Open Mind’, an Orwellian cliche applies well:
“Ending Is Better Than Mending.”