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.
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…”