Guest essay by Ric Werme
As we close into the 250 millionth page view at WUWT (likely to happen in a few hours done), I’ve been thinking both back to the early days and and wondering what today would be like if WUWT never existed.
Before the impending catastrophe of global warming was introduced to the world, I recall two things that got my attention. The first was the initial release of the Keeling curve. That pretty much silenced the impending Ice Age crowd, which I had mostly given up on anyway. After Keeling, I started pointing out that nuclear power plants didn’t release CO2. A decade or two later, I heard what was probably a short news note on the Hockey Stick, and figured that CO2 must actually be doing us in. I started souring on that when I realized later it also got rid of the Little Ice Age. How could that be? I had heard too much about the LIA to think it could be wiped away with a wave of a hockey wand.
Various tidbits made me think solar activity was a significant driver, and when I learned about the PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) and began to meet people like Joe D’Aleo I decided to bide my time for a bit longer and start getting active when the PDO next flipped negative and SC23 (Solar Cycle #23) reached its end. At another talk by Joe, he said both of those had essentially happened. That was February 2008. SC23 hung on for another year or two before it finally got an updated tombstone, but it was pretty much moribund during that period.
By then I had found Anthony Watt’s Surface Stations project and discovered that the surface record was worse than I could have ever imagined. I found RealClimate, but found WUWT made more sense. I found videos from Bob Carter about the scientific method, something I have deep respect for, and that led me to write my first real climate web page, http://wermenh.com/climate/science.html – Science, Method, Climatology, and Forgetting the Basics. It’s now somewhat dated, but not bad. I found that the science behind the Hockey Stick was worse than I could have imagined.
I settled in at WUWT becoming a daily reader. My main two regrets then were first, wishing I had started reading WUWT when it started late in 2006, and when I learned about John Daly, one of the first serious skeptics, I wished I had been able to see him in action before his death in 2004. The former seems a bit silly now, the latter I’m glad I’m helping preserve http://john-daly.com
The most momentous event in WUWT’s existence was the release of the Climategate Emails in 2009. Now we had proof that much of the manipulation we suspected was going on behind the scenes really was. I stayed up until 3 AM unable to pull myself away from the Harry README file. As a software engineer, I related very well to what that poor guy had to deal with. More science, worse than I could have imagined.
Climategate changed WUWT forever. Whereas before the posters generally had a lot of technical background, a flood of new readers came in (I expected for a short while), some with a technical background, but a lot more just plain folks goaded into looking into the global warming claims they now had reason to question. This new cohort is still here, having found that WUWT is the best source of information within the climate community. Very little escapes WUWT, in part because its reach encourages people to submit stories here than try to start their own blog. (A couple have been successful – especially https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/ and https://chiefio.wordpress.com/)
All in all, WUWT has “won” a battle for readers it never tried to win. Anthony has managed to find an almost perfect level of moderation where things are kept under control, but people given enough slack to prove their character warrants banishment. He and the moderation team do an incredibly good job of handling an impossible task. Anthony credits his years as a TV meteorologist in helping understand audiences, that makes a lot of sense to me.
Anthony could have thrown in the towel at many points along the way, and shutdown or radically changed the blog to give him more time for his professional and personal lives. I know the impact on me and my “obsession,” I can imagine WUWT feels like a heavy burden at times for Anthony. After all, he once said way back in 2007:
I don’t want fame, fame is painful. A complete and thorough accounting of the surface temperature record is all I want.
Forecasting the future is difficult….
I’ve also been wondering what would the climate scene be if WUWT had never been created? Some of the “specialty” blogs would certainly be around and thriving. Other “generalist” blogs likely would have appeared, but unless they were run by someone who understood his audience I doubt they’d be as successful as WUWT.
I’d bet there would be blogs as tightly controlled as RealClimate and Skeptical Science. They would fade from lack of reader support. There would be blogs that are a total free for all to “do things right,” but they would collapse under battles between competing trolls, forcing people with a genuine curiosity out to look for someplace else or just give up.
Ten or twenty years or so from now people will try to analyze the history of the climate debates, I think WUWT will come out both as important and influential. Maybe we can find Anthony some relatively painless fame then.
“……but unless they were run by someone who understood his audience I doubt they’d be as successful as WUWT.” – I think this is true, Anthony has been the ideal host for the debate that otherwise would not be taking place at this level and pitch. His struggle to elucidate the truth has been inspirational and fruitful. I wonder how much longer we must wait for the tide to change, and how quickly it will go out after reaching its high water mark.
Exactly. The title has said it all along, the question mark of real science.
Just today I was telling someone that this is my “Oasis of Sanity” online that I flee to daily. All the right questions, civil participation and great minds among the commenters.
I first wandered in here from Solar Ham: SolarCycle23 a long time ago, during the Surface Station project.
Thank you so much Anthony!
As a rule I do not make recommendations for products, services, candidates or anything else. WUWT is one of the few exceptions to this rule. Congratulations on 1/4 Billion and all of the well earned blog awards over the years.
While I have been VERY busy the past few months I still try to make it a point to check in on WUWT at every opportunity. Been watching the views count and somehow I had ‘half a billion’ views crossed with ‘a quarter of a billion’. I feel like an idiot for that. A ‘quarter of a billion’ is a milestone and it’s growing at a rapid rate of increase. Anyway, the next ‘quarter of a billion’ views will come much quicker.
I would like to say the interest in WUWT would present a true hockey stick increase but that could be interpreted in a bad way. So let me say ‘by leaps and bounds’!
By the way, could we get a screen capture from viewer number 250,000,000 (that’s a quarter of a billion). Maybe even number 250,000,001.
Maybe I’ll have a crack at it as soon as I feed my dog!
Whoa … Nellie ….. this thing’s going at digital speed!
Congrats from Germany. Even for us WUWT is a daily must. And I as former Green (still a bit, but skeptic) have learned here so much.
About ten years ago I was having a pint with an old friend after eighteen holes and casualty said that it looks as though the earth is warming up and things might get serious. “No it’s not” he said, and then told me about WWWT. I have been a regular visitor and occasional contributor ever since. Thank you for providing such an informative and stimulating site Anthony,
A good measure of your success is the increasing level of bile that WWWT generates on the sites that blindly support the orthodoxy.
Sorry: WUWT!!!!!!!’
Just a drive-by thank you. I have been looking in occasionally since ’04 or ’05, when I asked a question of a really smart guy at MIT Lincoln Labs, and he blew my mind. Voraciously trying to inform myself ever since. Only ever commented I think this year, but now your site is a valued (and subscribed) part of my information stream . Love it and keep up the good work.
A few off the cuff thoughts
1. Thanks Mr Watt for the seed.
2. WUWT is no longer yours. You may decide what gets published or even moderate to your hearts desire but you created an idea that will flourish in WUWT’s babies.
3. I’ve been to the mountaintop and it wasn’t worth the effort. Fame is a joke played on the desires of the ego.
F_ck you money.
A roof over your head and 3 squares.
Finding humor with the person in the mirror.
Freedom to seek truth.
These are the things I wish for any man.
Amazing how far truth will go.
Congrats to Anthony and all who make this site possible.
An island of sanity in a delusional `world.
While Anthony is to be congratulated, it would be nice to see a mention of John Daly and Steve McIntyre in there. They were keeping the flame alive when it was very weak…
Um…. John Daly is mentioned…
Whoops, sorry. Missed it!
You’re forgiven, mostly. I didn’t want my post to become too much of a name dropping essay, so I deliberately left out a lot of people. I figure there will be plenty of space in the comments to acknowledge all the people I didn’t.
Steve McIntyre is mentioned, though not by name, as he’s the person most responsible for me (and many, many others) realizing how bad the the hockey stick science is. His account of his expedition to the Bristlecone pines and back is great. Perhaps I’ll hunt down the link after work.
Ric W. (@ur momisugly 1:16)
Go to CA and search for ** Ohio State **
John, yeah, that works fine. From https://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2005/09/ohioshort.pdf from around page 15, Steve starts off with a quote from Mann:
Well, yeah, except that some of the Bristlecone data Mann used came from Colorado, and this led Steve to formulate his Starbuck’s Hypothesis:
Steve’s expedition was completely successful, from latte in the morning to finding the actual trees that had been previously sampled, and later discovering record keeping issues with several of the old core samples. Moral of the story? Do not try to snow Steve McIntyre.
I’ve always been fond of citizen science. Some fields work closely with the amateurs (ornithology and astronomy lead the way), but too many of today’s climate scientists wish we would just disappear. That’s something that we could change, though given the revelations from Climategate and Ricochet! (the Jagadish Shukla affair), more change will have to come from the professionals.
Thank you Anthony, Moderators and everyone else, I have learned a lot, I never knew about PDO or AMO or UHI just to name a few. I think I can say this; because of WUWT the education level of many people world wide has increased, in all areas of science and human endeavors.
michael
As a geophysicists crunching numbers for seismic data used for finding oil & gas there was never any room for defunct theories and when I started digging into the physics behind AGW sometime around the turn of the century and realized that it was wrong, it was a relief to find WUWT and the fair and balanced review of many topics in the field of science. I will always be a lifelong fan of this site, and visit it every morning with my first cup of coffee.
LT
I’ve been here since the beginning on a virtually daily basis, and contributing occasionally.
What I miss these days are the critiques of published papers. Perhaps there are fewer since the eagle eye and maths of Steve McIntyre is now sure to be trained on anything that professes to be “peer reviewed” and experience has demonstrated that Steve always wins!
If I knew how to submit graphics (GIFs?) I’d be submitting more often – I’ve plenty to tell. Who can help?
Look for Rik Werme’s Guide to WUWT on the right side bar.
On my display it’s just link to the Unreliable website Skeptical Science.
That’s how I learnt to post links.
Missing words in the above (boldfaced):
“On my display it’s just under the link to the Unreliable website Skeptical Science.”
Thanks rogerknights.
That was a bad faux pas.
Nothing helpful would have come from following my directions.
WUWT – always presents alternative science in a most entertaining way 🙂 A real gamechanger
Thank you. Yes, WUWT presents your kind of alternative ‘science’ because it does not censor comments with a different point of view.
We like to see your ‘alternative’ views because it keeps us on our toes. Of course, there hasn’t been an ‘alternative science’ comment that couldn’t be easily deconstructed by skeptics. But for a mental workout, it’s at least as challenging as tic-tac-toe. ☺
Ya gotta take compliments when given, even on the backhand 🙂
I think a h/t should go to the late Michael Crichton.
The warmist scare-mongers would be much diminished, not to mention Al Gore’s wealth, if Crichton were still alive writing novels about the Big Lie of climate alarmism.
joelobryan,
Yes, agree/100%. And I’d also add the late, great John Daly. If they were still with us, between Daly and Crichton the alarmist cult would be solidly on the ropes. To the extent that they already are, we can thank them — and Anthony Watts, who has taken up the standard and is providing the means to demolish the “dangerous AGW” hoax.
dbstealey:
I support your commendations of the good work done by the deceased Daly and Chrichton. However, I wish to add Helmut Metzner to the list of deceased heroic crusaders for science against the AGW-scare.
Helmut operated in the East and – arguably – had the greatest success because the Russian Academy of Sciences did not adopt the scare.
And if the living are to be counted then Fred Singer is the giant on whose shoulders all present-day climate realists stand whether or not they know it.
Richard
Richard Courtney,
I agree re: Singer. But I admit to knowing very little about Herr Metzner. I will do a search and try to get up to speed.
Well, after a few hours of searching it seems that Herr Metzner is an un-person, pretty much erased from the internet.
dbstealey:
You say
That is sad but understandable.
Herr Prof. Dr Helmut Metzner operated out of Leipzig University in East Germany.
He responded to the ‘acid rain’ scare raging in the West by founding the Europaische Akadamie fur Umweltfragen. His purpose in founding that organisation was to protect against a repeat of the disaster imposed on the Soviet Union by political adoption of the flawed science of Lysenko.
Metzner used his organisation to encourage Eastern scientific Institutions to assess criticisms of ‘popular’ so-called ‘scientific’ fads (environmental, food, etc.) and to inform politicians of evidence for the fads, risks of the fads, and any significant doubts concerning the evidence and the risks.
The Precautionary Principle (PP) was promoted by Western environmentalist organisations who obtained much success because they encountered no coherent opposition to adoption of the PP.
But in the East the PP was opposed by Metzner and his Akadamie who reminded of the disaster that had resulted from adoption of policies based on the inadequate scientific evidence provided by Lysenko. The result was that the Russian Academy of Sciences, the USSR – and subsequent to the USSR, Russia – did not adopt the environmentalist scares which in the West are distorting scientific funding and political policies on energy and economics.
Metzner began working with Fred Singer in the West with the onset of Glasnost then the fall of the USSR. The collaboration of the left-wing Metzner and the right-wing Singer continued until Metrzner died.
The life of Helmut Metzner, his activity and his success are all history that environmental activists would wish to be “erased from the internet” because those activists promote the PP and the falsehood that all scientific Institutions support the AGW-scare.
Richard
From his Wikipedia page (badly but quickly translated from the German by Google)
dbstealey:
This is an off-topic anecdote about Helmut Metzner.
In 1995 Metzner and Singer organised a conference about AGW in Bonn, Germany. Speakers were both pro and anti AGW and I was one of the anti-AGW speakers.
The Conference began on the Monday and the Conference Speakers were to have a meeting on the afternoon of the previous day. So, the Sunday morning was free and – it being sunny – Helmut and I went for a walk beside the river.
We came across a broken wall with a sign on it and I asked Helmut to translate the sign for me. He said the sign explained the sign said the wall was all that remained of the largest synagogue in Bonn on the morning after kristallnacht . He added that Jews have an annual Service there to remember that night.
I replied that I was thrilled at such serendipity. That day was Remembrance Sunday in my country (as next Sunday is). On Remembrance Sunday heroes of wars are honoured and all who have suffered from wars are remembered. It is a day of great importance to both true warriors and true pacifists such as myself (but not to the ‘Ban the Bomb’ nutters). I regretted that I was missing the Remembrance Sunday celebrations.
Helmut said such celebrations were forbidden in Germany because they could encourage ex-SS members to demonstrate. (Incidentally, one member of my congregation at Mabe – who died 3 years ago – had been a member of the Waffen SS and was completely included in our Remembrance Sunday Services.)
Helmut and I looked at the broken wall as we discussed WW2.
I said my family was blitzed by the Luftwaffe and thus lost everything in that war.
Helmut said he had hoped to study Art History at university but was enlisted into the German navy as a submariner. His submarine attacked ships on the Murmansk run but as the Russian army moved westward his submarine was forced to operate from further and further west. Eventually they ran out of fuel and then waited – in fear – for the Russian army to arrive. When the Russians did arrive they could not be bothered with the submariners who they told to go away. So, Helmut set off on foot across devastated Europe to seek a German university that would teach him Art History. But German universities had been destroyed and could only start his education by teaching him theoretical physics (knowledge, blackboard and chalk were all that were needed to teach that). He became a scientist and never did obtain a formal education in Art History.
For some minutes Helmut and I stood beside each other in silence as we looked at the broken wall and each remembered all the people, the things and the events it represented for us. Then we continued our walk alongside the river.
That was my best Remembrance Sunday ever, and I have often used Helmut’s walk across Europe as a sermon illustration.
This coming Sunday among my Remembrance I will honour my friend Helmut who was a true warrior, a great scientist, and a man of true integrity.
Richard
Thanks for that, Richard. A very moving story – and remembrance.
Mods:
I made a post that is an off-topic anecdote about Helmut Metzner that I intended for dbstealey. that post has vanished with no note about moderation.
Please be so kind as to see if it is in the ‘bin’. If it is then please post it or otherwise get it to dbstealey. If it is not then please let me know so I can post it again.
Thanking you in anticipation
Richard
. .Great job Anthony and company !!! Now, if you could only do something about the Toronto Maple Leafs I would be truly impressed !!! Actually , I’d be astounded !!!
That’s OK!
The Mets managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and blew the World Series.
More good news this week !!!
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2015/11/02/nuclear-fusion-just-got-boost-with-arrival-this-stellarator.html
It’s a shame that those first 1000 or 1500 threads aren’t indexed and can’t be found with the search box. Anthony ought to ask for volunteers to do the job.
I put “screeching mercury monkey” in the search box and it brought up a post from August 12, 2007, (which is about the time I started reading). I don’t know how many post were before then, but that’s the most unique string I could remember.
Congrats to Anthony and crew. Thanks for all the hard work.
No, those early threads are findable with the search box. For example, try searching for Zeptowatt.
However, I believe the comments added to any post are not searchable there (try Google et al instead). Also, I don’t believe those old posts have categories or tags. I’ve considered offering to add them, or at least the categories, as I maintain Tables of Contents for those at http://wermenh.com/wuwt/categories.html . However, I don’t have time for that now.
Well, I’m at work and don’t have a dumb jpg editor, but I captured
I also have 249,997,683.jpg, I’ll trim them tonight.
I would like to thank Ric Werme for his selfless volunteer efforts on behalf of this great site, and everyone who volunteers their time, articles, comments, and the many supporting links, which are very much appreciated by this reader. I have literally thousands of charts, references, peer reviewed papers, and .pdf articles saved in various folders.
And of course, thanks to Anthony Watts. Without his tireless efforts none of this would have happened. WUWT has made a huge difference, as we can see by the flack it generates.
Tada!
http://wermenh.com/images/249,997,683.jpg
and
http://wermenh.com/images/250,000,866.jpg
Woo Hoo! A quarter billion! Congrats!
I do hope that Christopher Booker of the (UK) Sunday Telegraph gets some ‘props’ for all the references to WUWT he has made over the last ten years.
It occurs to me that a quarter billion comments is minuscule when one thinks of the numbers of dollars that the likes of Gore, Mann, Hansen. Pachauri, Stern, et-al have spirited away from the poor over the years.
It was Booker and his associate Richard North who first got me hooked on the amazing story of the AGW climate scam. I’d followed him on various topics before that (esp the evils of the anti-democratic EU) so was disposed to enquire further into this one.
Since then I’ve followed WUWT for many a year – pretty well from the start I guess – and I re-post links esp on Facebook whenever they are generalist enough to be comprehensible to those who have not been following the debate as avidly as most of us here.
I have thanked Anthony, and mods, of course many times in the past. It is high time I thanked Ric Werme for all the contributions he makes towards WUWT? being a pleasure to read and a joy to be educated by.
I am indebted to all who provide their knowledge, experience and time to the world’s most viewed site on global warming and climate change.
Thank you Ric Werme, Anthony and the most excellent moderators.
It was Al Gore who brought me to WUWT. Honestly! I was staying with some friends in 2007 or 8 and they had just received videocassettes of An Inconvenient Truth and The Day After Tomorrow. I had heard of the Greenhouse Effect but it did not loom on my horizon back then. After suffering through those two films all afternoon, I was utterly disgusted. So much so that I went to my computer and googled the opposite of Global Warming–Global Cooling. That search led me straight to WUWT and iceagenow.info ,the two sites I read every morning and I am very grateful to Al for that. Incidentally, the politics of climate and Google have changed. That search no longer finds you, at least, up to page five, despite your quarter billion. I guess I’m not surprised.
I actually came across a report prepared in 1974 for the CIA regarding the effect of GLOBAL COOLING and the geopolitical effects.
Together with material that I had read on the Little Ice Age, I was already doubtful of the warming.
Exactly when I can’t recall, but I read a political article that mentioned WUWT, and decided to check it out.
At that time Anthony was concentrating on the surface stations project. and I was hooked.
Since then WUWT has been at the top of my climate bookmark list.
I started reading on the web in the fall of 2008 when DSL arrived out in our part of the rural county. Prior to that, with POTS, using the internet was painfully slow.
Thanks Ric for what you have done.
Thanks Anthony.