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.
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.”
If I make a premise that there is close private communication between activists for the applied mythology of climate change from burning fossil fuels, then a pause in their public blog and PR activities could be explained by the possibility that they are privately communicating to create new activist strategy within themselves since their old worn out strategy catastrophically failed.
John
Perhaps he has realised that the sky is green after all.
Maybe he finally looked out the window…..
(But I do hope that he hasn’t come to some physical harm.)
He’s still in the top 2 million …
I think his absence is due to him turning over a new leaf and choosing only to post comments and articles which are neither insulting nor completely inaccurate/wrong
The epiphany explanation I find most likely. The weight of evidence finally had to break through that the Earth’s Climate was had passed an inflection point in temperatures and was headed downward. Today the rate downward is barely perceptible to measurements in some measures. But in the coming 2 or 3 years cooling climate will become undeniably real with more polar ice, milder summers, and a return to brutish cold winters.
As the brutish winters come onto unprepared populations, people who have for 20+ years been told to prepare for a hotter weather, the politicians are going to get caught with their pants down. Who will THEY blame when they confront an angry public? The Scientists and the warmist bloggers who lost their way on the path to groupthink and pursuit of grant money.
Tamino’s blog won’t be the last to go silent in the coming 12-24 months. Expect more. You know the who they are without naming them.
Further, several here have predicted that with the coming cooldown, there will be no AR6. The first cracks are small, but they are appearing in the AGW dam.
Perhaps the political class will have their hands full with real problems such as an apparently hard to contain Ebola outbreak?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/13/us/texas-health-worker-tests-positive-for-ebola.html?ribbon-ad-idx=21&src=me&module=Ribbon&version=origin®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Most%20Emailed&pgtype=article
Well Joel, I hope to live long enough to see your prediction come true. If I could just see Brian Williams (NBC) with some egg or pie on his face. An explanation as to why they were fooled would be great.
May he receive all the rewards for his efforts that he most truly deserves.
Ouch!
My hopes are on an epiphany for him.
Maybe he upgraded to the latest WordPress release?
Hah! (Or iOs8)
iOS 8? Maybe worse – Windows 8!
There is no pause. According to official GISS data, after the proper TOBS adjustments and infilling it turns out Tamino has been posting hourly updates all along.
“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.”
There’s no old information, either. Just warmist drivel, propaganda, and spittle-spewing.
Maybe he simply got busted for copyright infringement? The banner appears to be a slice of a famous Hubble photo (Horsehead Nebula in the constellation Orion), and NASA has to grant permission for it’s use (which they will for non-profits, but even educational blogs/users must get permission before they may use it) and the one thing they require is that on the page, you provide attribution for the image to NASA (at least that is how I had to do it some years back when I helped design an on-line learning environment for a PhD research project…). I couldn’t find any attribution….?
The explanation does not stack up. The photo still appears, but the blog is inactive. Surely if a complaint had been made it would have been taken down and replaced with something else. Plenty of other photos available – and changing the design a bit is nothing unusual.
Why would NASA go after a Warmist? That would be like the Obama IRS going after a rule breaking Progressive non-profit, which we know would never happen.
Doh! You got me!?! Darn. Caught thinking like an honest man… You are absolutely, one hunnert percent, key-rect: why WOULD the gummint go after one of their own?
Of course, if he’s had a revelation on his own road to Damascus & starts pumping out what the Left uncharitably calls “denialist propaganda”… They’ll probably be all over him…(gotta stamp out apostasy fast, lest it spread..!)…
I hope that Tamino has gone quiet because of a realization that he is wrong, rather than due to a crisis in his personal life. In terms of recognition, it may not be the “pause” in global temperatures, or the failure of the climate models. It could be Arctic Sea Ice. The reason is that instead of using the “D” word like many others, Tamino calls those who disagree with him “fake skeptics“. In defining the term in 2011 he said this:-
This evidence is based upon satellite data that only starts in 1979. Only last week Paul Homewood quoted from a 1982 book by HH Lamb (founder of the Climate Research Unit at UEA):-
That is, Tamino’s litmus test of a “fake skeptic” is based on looking at a short period of data. What he views as very strong evidence turns out to be somewhat ambiguous. Taken in with the rest of the 20thC recent post 1979 melting could be mostly a reversal of the previous Arctic ice advance and/or a continuation of a longer term trend. The human-caused part might be trivial. Like many alarmists, his take on what constitutes good evidence is deeply flawed.
Interesting. On the 10 June Tamino forecasted the Arctic sea ice minimum to be 4.15 +/- 0.98 million km^2. The September minimum was 5.02 million square kilometers.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
If the extent grows over the next few years he would have to seriously reconsider his position and issue and apology to ‘real’ and ‘fake skeptics’. Would we be justified in calling him a fake Warmist?
Grant Foster’s statistics text books are very readable and more profitable than running a blog; especially one which attracts criticism from those whose minds are closed.
Oh, does the hotwhopper crew stop by his page?
Tamino pre-moderates comments at his blog and is known for not publishing the comments of skeptics. That’s hardly an “open mind”.
No magic, no flute.
…or should that be: “no flute, no magic”?
I’d know better if I actually knew the opera. 😉
“Tamino, a handsome prince lost in a distant land…” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Flute
Maybe all the missing posts are in the deep ocean?
I won’t believe his blog is dead until there are no articles for at least 17 years.
LOL.
With Foster gone, that reduces the number of pro-AGW blogs to five, according to your side bar, Anthony. The skeptic blogs I count at forty-eight. I regard these numbers as significant and I wonder what certain elected officials would make of such numbers if they knew. Pootus, for example.
“I wonder what certain elected officials would make of such numbers if they knew. Pootus, for example”
=========================================
Just lots of folk clinging to their guns and religion I suspect would be the attitude; ignorant “Americans” , flat earther’s, “deniers”, Koch brother’s & fossil fuel funded tea party types.
Foster will not be missed, it was his sour attitude, the whole attitude of that site… I am right, you are wrong no matter what evidence you bring to the table… you have been seen posting on a ‘skeptical’ site before so you can and should be discounted en masse.
Never had this happen to me personally but have viewed it happening to many others, I quit visiting that site long ago so I am part of the ‘decline’ in that graph. Same for the other ‘AGW’ sites.
I pray, as do all of us here, that Anthony will continue to find the courage and strength to maintain this vital record of the slow, ineluctable return of Reason to science for as many more years as it will take for all the blogs of the climate Communists, like the Marxian Communist State itself, to wither away and fall forever silent, one by one.
Already “Real” Climate is a wan and pathetic shadow of its former wan and pathetic self, peddling scarcely more mendacities in a month than Anthony purveys truths in a day.
No doubt there will be a brief attempt to switch from global warming, now disproven by the unchallengeable march of events, to ocean “acidification” as a fall-back redoubt.
Also, where vested interests supervene, as they have here, they will not wish the income-stream to dry. The scam will linger till all the nations that have unwisely funded the climate nonsense come to realize that there are better and wiser things to do with the taxpayers’ money than to make the rich richer and the poor poorer while grievously damaging the environment they falsely claim to defend.
Nor should one underestimate the capacity for enduring self-delusion on the part of those who have long and arrogantly held an entrenched and unlistening position and are reluctant to endure the undoubted embarrassment and humiliation of having to admit they were wrong about what they had told us over and over that they were righter about than anything ever.
In the restoration of reality and reason, science and sense, Anthony has played the leading part, at enormous cost to himself in time, treasure, and good health. Long and gratefully will the world remember him who stood almost alone in the front line against the lies of those who relentlessly bent their hockey sticks, hid their declines, melted their Himalayas, ignored their Antarctics and misrepresented ill-constrained uncertainties as absolute certainties.
Great is truth, says the Apostle, and mighty above all things. But truth will only be heard if there are those who have the courage to speak it when lies are the fashion, and when the liars and the useful idiots who flutter and chirrup about them cackle and squawk at the truth-sayers.
Long live WattsUpWithThat, and long live Watts!
An examination of another mendacious CAGW website is climate central. An examination of the 4 main Climate Central blogs (http://www.climatecentral.org/blogs) shows they have had exactly two new posts in the entirety of 2014 to date. One in January 2014 on China’s coal use, and one last month on tornadoes highlighting their tornado tracker app (very non controversial).
So while climatecentral.org does continue to post “new” news stories, written by their own staff of “scientists”, who seem to specialize in making alarmist rhetoric, their blogs have gone dead.
Hear Hear to that Lord Monckton! Thank you for putting that so well.
Hear! Hear!
Well said Lord Monckton. Thank you.
I don’t pray, since that assumes an all-powerful deity, the evidence of which is non-existent.
I just hope instead.
I pray your hopes are not in vain.
And I hope your prayers are not in vain.
Jeff Alberts
October 12, 2014 at 9:00 pm
“I don’t pray, since that assumes an all-powerful deity, the evidence of which is non-existent.”
Why do you have a consciousness? There’s no materialist explanation.
@DirkH
“I think, but I don’t know why I think, therefore the concept of thought doesn’t actually exist and I don’t really think.”
+1000
Open Mind??? Tamino’s “Open Mind” never existed….
It was the name of a blog but never a reality.
Reminiscent of a Sherlock Holmes solution*, “there never was such a person”….
*when a lady vanished immediately after her wedding
Many of us Americans have noted your efforts in the trenches with Anthony also Monckton of Brenchley. Many thanks to you both.
As others have said, how to put a price on what WUWT has done?
But there are priorities. I wouldn’t want Anthony to pay a personal price greater than he’s willing to pay.
And I wouldn’t want him to lose sight of where his family fits into his priorities.
Sometimes it’s tough to keep things straight.
But I’m sure if he ever no longer host WUWT, it won’t just “stop” if he can help it. He’ll likely pass it on to someone else.
But I’m sure we all want his personal priorities to line up to allow the time to host WUWT.
(Maybe a few more “Open Threads” to allow the time for his other personal priorities? We’ll all behave! … sort of.8-)
A long time ago here on Anthony’s blog, WUWT and soon after Climate Gate and Copenhagen in late 2009, a blogger, who I cannot even recall, commented that he had seen a study on the MSM which showed that it took about seven years for the MSM to change and reverse course and switch attitudes towards a controversial subject.
If applied to global warming that puts the timing of the completion of the MSM switch from a full on promotion of the CAGW meme to an outright skeptical approach to somewhere around 2017.
There is every indication that this timetable is on track in the MSM as well amongst the alarmist promoting blog sphere.
On the part of the MSM, seven years for a major shift and reversal in attitude and approach to a subject makes a lot of sense. Editors will no doubt have moved on by then as will senior reporters, sub-editors and all the paraphernalia of a news organisation will have seen big changes in those seven years with a whole new cohort of MSM wannabe’s trying to differentiate and to make their own mark on their news media’s output.
So a new approach to an old subject which was always a black and white science political subject that was being overturned by new information and doubts would be quite in order as there would be no skin off those new MSM personnel’s own hides if the media organisation they were involved in reversed it’s previous position of the CAGW meme.
I also suspect that there are many more alarmist sites due to do a permanent dissapearing trick over the next year or so followed by a “Who! Me???” from the proprietors of those sites in the years ahead when they are reminded of their rabid denunciations of skeptics or anybody else who had the near criminal temerity to doubt or disagree with their rigid and rabid, “the science is settled ” ideology of the past.
Ah! Revenge will be so sweet particularly when served considered and cold.
2017 is also when the current mendacious Obama Administration (hopefully) fades into the history books.
Coincidentally (?), 2017 is also forecast to be the start of undeniable global cooling. http://solarcycle24com.proboards.com/post/101096/thread.
FINALLY the tide has turned
Anthony, on the occasion of this post let me thank you for all the time you have devoted to this blog and wish you much prosperity in all your relationships and endeavors. Your efforts and sacrifices are greatly appreciated.
I would like to second that!
And so do I.
I agree. I’m fairly new here, and really appreciate this blog.
Ditto’s Anthony, I can’t get here as often as I used to, I am engaged to the most wonderful woman, and she is taking up some of my time, but you do an incredible amount of good! I can argue with alarmists with the latest data!
Mr Foster is a very angry, relatively young man who passionately believes in his world view to the extent that he had no insight into the pain and distress he caused others. he had no respect for opposite views and allowed and encouraged misogynist and bigoted views on his blogs as long as the targets were those he disagreed with like Anthony, Judy and Lucia. His last posts moved away to the subject of women’s rights/men’s wrongs where he seemed to be becoming an ardent feminist. it was hard to reconcile some one who was so nasty to one group of people becoming so nice and supportive of another group.
Good points, he let most people blog there and he knew his maths.
Bad point, as Maxwell would have said, “if only he had used his maths for good instead of…”
Does this mean Tamino’s mind is now … Closed?
Anthony, you’re a class act.
Not sure if sarcastic…
The real debate has not occurred where it should have occurred, in Congress and in the media and in the hallowed halls of science. In those places we saw pal-review and megalomania led by a megalomaniac-in-chief. Instead the real debate and real peer-review has occurred here and at other sites, including even Tamino’s.
In the future the records of web-sites, and especially this website, likely will be studied in the same way we now study the Hansard records to understand the psyche of Britain before World War Two.
If you have the time it is well worth pouring through the Hansard records of the statements of members of Parliament before a significant historical event. (At http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/ ) It is somewhat amazing how utterly wrong very smart people can be, and what lousy prophets most of us mortals are.
The most clear example of this involves the fact Winston Churchill was seen as a war-mongering anachronism, up and until a certain historical event involving a madman. After that event his harshest critics became abruptly silent.
Sometimes we are confronted by an event that is so glaringly unexpected that we need to stop and think. Things grind to a halt. We are “given pause.”
I think this may be happening in the case of Tamino. The question then becomes, “What was the event that was glaringly unexpected?”
IMHO it was the behavior of megalomaniacs, and the megalomaniac-in-chief, in Washington. It is increasingly apparent they don’t care a hoot about science, or about the scientific debate about Global Warming. In fact it would not surprise me if they quit funding scientists, and abandoned the pretense of requiring proof. They must know they have lost that battle, and I fear they may now employ tactics that are less civilized.
It does give one pause, when one realizes that the person they are trying to persuade isn’t listening.
“They must know they have lost that battle…”
They lost the science battle years ago, Caleb, and that didn’t stop them. What is derailing their train is the public battle. The media din is as noisy as ever, but the public is completely tuning out. The New York climate summit was an utter disaster; even paying rent-a-mobs couldn’t bring out a respectable turnout. Everything that’s happened in the past four years has just served to confirm the end of any international agreement after it froze to death in the Copenhagen snow in 2009.
I hope you are right. However whenever I see a rent-a-mob I have a queasy feeling in my gut, and imagine that same rent-a-mob arriving at my door on a witch-hunt. After all, I’m a Yankee from New England, and we do have a blotch on our record involving trials in Salem in the 1600’s….and it is getting close to Halloween…
However worry is a waste of energy. It is better to use energy simply speaking the truth, over and over and over and over….
http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/567477/20140925/australia-un-climate-summit-change-obama.htm#.VDtE4VduowQ
And they keep beating a dead horse. Why?
[97% of climatologists find live data is harder to hit than dead horses. .mod]
Caleb,
South of New England we don’t worry about a mob crashing thru the door. We, as individuals have a perfect means to counter it. 😉
It is amazing to learn that many in Europe and the US were very slow to realize that there were plans underway to exterminate people in the late 1930s and early 1940s by that madman and some others of his party.
Serious question for Mr. Watts re. Real Climate. What are the numbers on that site these days? Used to be an interesting place, but now it seems as though it’s Hank Roberts posting to himself, and even the Bore Hole has lost its juice. Still viable?
Have you ever wondered why sceptical blogs kept winning the blogger awards for specified categories? I suspect they are in the loud minority.
As always in the way of mankind there will also come a time when Anthony Watts, Jo Nova, Andrew Montford, Pierre Gosselin, Judith Curry, Steve McIntyre and many other prominent skeptic bloggers who have been central to both raising the questions about the claims and the predictions of the Climate warming alarmists and central to the spreading of alternative views on climate science will call it a day.
They have all excelled in their own ways in raising extremely relevant questions about the over the top claims of a climate catastrophists and in creating the outlets to both provide an outlet for the frustration , the doubts and the opinions of the ordinary interested citizen as well,
Through their blogs they have created a facility for community discussion on the claims of the alarmists and much else in science, domestic politics, international politics, energy and renewable energy and much else and how it all affects the lives of the ordinary citizen.
As the alarmist meme collapses as it appears to be now doing as “Nature” completely refuses to co-operate with any predictions regardless of whether from models or from trend lines out of hard data, they , the Skeptic bloggers will also take stock and many or most of them will decide they have accomplished what they set out to do, they have had enough and it is time to go onto another stage in their lives.
As Anthony has increasingly pointed out, the immense mental and psychologically draining efforts needed to keep a blog running for many years will have taken it’s toll on their mental, physical, family and social life and it will be time to close down the blog or just use it as a irregular outlet for their thoughts on some subject when they feel like it as Steve McIntyre now does.
For many of the Skeptic bloggers it will be a departure that is deeply regretted by their fans and denizens of their blogs but it is also very much a case of it being far more personally satisfying to those bloggers if they hear the message from their many fans and the community as;
“Why did you go” ?
rather than
“Why don’t you go”?
For most that time is still to come in the next few years ahead but the whole climate catastrophe cause is moving into the end game and the essential and critical role that the skeptic climate bloggers filled is now also drawing towards a closure.
I think you will find that AGW is basically dead and that unfortunately ALL climate related sites will vanish as people lose interest in the subject. I for one am beginning to lose interest as its obvious the skeptics have won and obvious that the alarmists know that they have lost but will simply just fade away..The proof is in the pudding… BTW Most lukewarmer sites as well, ie aka Lucia rarely posts anything these days ect ect…..
“ ect ect….
Might want to get that looked at.
The warmist blogs are moderating themselves to state of irrelevance. Punters aren’t going to visit a blog if they are not able to contribute. Blogs are not going to attract corporate sponsorship if the numbers of hits are not there. It is a credit to Anthony that he runs an inclusive blog that has heaps of content from guest contributors.
The other key thing is that comments are closed on his blog and have been since late July.
Thank You Mr Watts!
But lets not count the chickens before all the eggs have hatched… no way this is over. It’s a temporary setback for the warmists. They are plotting a new strategy as we speak and will be back reincarnated in another form, much like the communists did after the fall of the Soviet Union.
It is not over. Medusa has many heads and the main brain has yet to be cut off…
Anthony, you are too much of a gentleman sometimes! Do you believe he would reciprocate the sentiments in your final paragraph if the roles were reversed ?
No, but I have my own set of rules about how to treat people.
There is little doubt that Anthony has done an absolutely sterling job, and I agree with Caleb that this and some other outstanding sites will be a source of fruitful research by many a sociologist and historian. But we have much to do yet, and while we now see the tide turning, it is really only a few of the Generals that we see starting to leave the field of battle. The MSM will be some of the last to know. So let’s keep our muskets ready, and our powder dry! Also, there’s plenty more powder and shot on the way.
There’s nothing unusual about a blog suddenly stopping without any prior announcement. Bloggers often get tired of making the effort, or they run out of new things to say, or they get discouraged by the small size of their audience. Sometimes they take a break to deal with real-world stuff and find that they don’t want to go back. It’s the blogs that continue for year after year without ever slowing down that are unusual, because it requires such an exceptional degree of commitment.
I used to have a hard time avoiding erasure at “Open Mind”. I started my blog to write comments without having to worry about editorial control, so in a sense people like Tamino helped me get free to write. The problem I face is that I don´t usually agree with anything. This is why later I decided to get more serious and start writing science papers, with references and everything. I don´t think the Tamino blog would like most of what I write, but one never knows, maybe he´s growing up?
What will eventually occur is that when it becomes irrefutable that climate sensitivity to CO2 is absolutely incorrect, the entire group of Warming Alarmists will go dark. And when the global climate begins to steadily but slowly cool, they will all reemerge as Global Cooling Alarmists. They will do this without embarrassment nor irony. In 15-20 years they will have proven that man-made CO2 causes Global Cooling (children in the Northern Hemisphere will be warned that hot, dry summers will become a thing of the past).
Anthony you are very kind and classy to one who would likely gloat if the tables are turned.
My opinion of the situation:
“off the perch ” indeed..
The fate of blogs may be one of the best indicators of reality. For example, you can find everything you need to know about “Peak Oil” by checking out the rise and fall of ” The Oil Drum”.
He’s hiding in the abyss.
You’re a good man, Anthony Watts, to wish someone like that well. I don’t think he’d return the favor if you took a break of any kind.
Based on the Climategate emails, I’d expect that the Hockey Team would have a party if WUWT took a breather. You are appreciated, thanks for your hard work!
Tamino’s climate currency seems to have been spent. Suits me fine.
E. Grant Foster had a couple valid citations as a lay volunteer in a real astronomer’s work product but, as far as I can tell, no actual academic credentials, and yes, in the aftermath of the defamations per se he threw at me in 2010 that caused WordPress to freeze his blog until he removed them (he chose to delete all), I had looked. If anyone has knowledge to the contrary, please do share it.
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.”
– “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, Charles Mackay, 1841
E. Grant Foster’s recovery can be expected to be slower than average.
A list of pamphlets (12 to 71 pages) of light curves by the late astronomer, Dr. Janet Mattei, that E. Grant Foster contributed to are here:
http://www.paperbackswap.com/E-Grant-Foster/author/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Aky%C3%BCz_Mattei
More of his actual useful work at AAVSO (2 out of 3)
http://www.aavso.org/new-stats-book-grant-foster
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/archimedesbooks
The alarmist book found at the last link has usual suspect mandias (Scott Mandia, BS/MS meteorology, a community college professor) describing Foster as a “world class mathematician” but doesn’t specify which world Mandia was referring to.
I do not hope or pray that he has simply gone away for a while to ‘recharge his batteries’.
Nor do I hope he or his are experiencing personal problems or tragedy.
I sincerely hope he’s reconsidered his position in light of the evidence. That would be a breakthrough.
Once the cabal starts to shed members, the ‘dark age’ of climate science will quickly come to an end. And maybe we’ll start to learn things about our climate again.
Perhaps our children’s lives will be better for it.
Open Mind??? Tamino’s “Open Mind” never existed….
It was the name of a blog but never a reality.
Reminiscent of a Sherlock Holmes solution, “there never was such a person”….
Is a commenter being open minded when he/she tries to persuade other commenters to accept the positions of the virtually unpersaudable Grant Foster (aka Tamino)?
John
Anthony, I’m curious: what’s been happening with the Alexa ranking of Peter Sinclair’s ClimateCrocks.com? Is it sinking, too?
I was active there for several years, because it was the only alarmist blog I could find that didn’t censor polite skeptical comments. But Sinclair banned me on February 24th. I wonder how his blog has fared since then?
Yes, it does appear in this thread that WP is not posting some comments in chronological order.
Example: the below comment seems to have been posted out of chronological order:
John
The reason for the prolonged decline in “Open Mind” readership is quite simple: like many blustering blog-lions, Tamino had no real expertise in analyzing climatic time series. This was made evident by his amateurish take on various analytic issues and by his naive use of “FFT filtering” among many other lapses.
Maybe Tamino forgot the password.
It may be as simple as the world realizing that climate change, which always happens and is normal, is not the greatest threat to humankind after all and that something as simple as a bushmeat diet caused by poverty is distributing world wide a virus capable of producing the worst pandemic in human history.
Bushmeat as food and poverty as a life style are both characteristics of an alarmist designer planet where affordable fuels and reliable energy generation are withheld from societies that specifically could benefit most were that unwarranted withholding removed. Perhaps the next outreach of progressive elitist caring could be direct genocide. God forbid these asshats should allow bushmeat eaters become self-sufficient, productive, and happy.
My recommendation to the idiot in chief is to redirect all monies currently being wasted on climate issues to finding a cure for ebola and other diseases of the third world that have found their way to foreign shores. It would be more valuable than windmills and solar panels, both of which require living users to be of any benefit. More specifically I would deny any future government money to Mr. Hockey Stick as he’s wasted far too much of our anti-pandemic budget already.
Hear hear! Well said dp.
“Wormtail”? Wow, that is a high quality blog worth reading. [/sarc]
The reason these guys are not posting anymore might be because it is difficult to tell people that the planet is warming when they are freezing.