I’m traveling today, and my ability to connect to the Internet will be hit and miss. Therefore, I’ve decided to run an open thread along with this question: What Could We do Better?
This applies to WUWT, it’s readers, moderators and guest contributors. Constructive criticisms and feedback are welcome, but for my blog spawn and detractors, your feedback is welcome too, but please leave your rants, vitriol, and hate mail at the front door.
For contributors with posting privileges, feel free to publish today if the mood strikes you.
What I value on this site is the comments section. Most seem to all educated like, unlike just about every other site out there.
If anything, opening it up to topics other than climate (as you sometimes do) would be even better.
They can also express an idea. It is as though WUWT is self-filtering. Which means it tolerates some degree of informed digression.
It would be nice to be able to like comments. I agree, the comments are always fascinating and often highly educational.
270,187,359 views as of today!!
Does any other science blog even come close???
And more than 1,760,000 reader comments! All alarmist blogs put together don’t have that many interested readers.
Are you counting the comments that they’ve deleted?
/grin
#B^)
Here’s what I’d like to see MORE of:
(1) Clear, concise “Abstracts” at the top of articles on the science refuting AGW, backed up by the more technical info. and references down the column for those who want to know more.
(2) Publicize the many climate fluctuations that have taken place in the pre-industrial past, both warmer and colder. This information is being suppressed in the models and MSM, we need to get it out there.
(3) Continue to pound the message that warmer is MUCH BETTER than colder for ALL living things.
(4) Continue debunking outdated Malthusian catastrophizing at every opportunity. DO support sensible environmental initiatives on actionable issues like habitat destruction, species adaptation, etc.
I’d like to see LESS of:
(1) Silly/hysterical alarmist articles, especially from “junk” sources like The Guardian. While fun for us to laugh at, the less people read them, the better. Don’t prolong the shelf life of junk via WUWT!
(2) Less ad-hominem political mudslinging. Don’t sink to their level–keep WUWT factual and focused ON THE SCIENCE, which will ultimately stand on its own merit. Debunk the models, expose the financing sources, etc. but let THEM look desperate and shrill. Having the facts on our side, stay professional and dignified. That alone will make WUWT stand out in a world that increasingly sounds like one big toddler’s tantrum.
(3) Troll-feeding in the Comments section. By definition, one can’t have a rational debate with an irrational person. I’d put most True Believers in that category, along with the ignorant and the virtue-signaling. The data stands for itself–those who want information, not an argument, will certainly find it here!
Keep up the good work, this blog is the best!
Please consider providing simple summaries of the more technical posts for those of us without scientific backgrounds.
Also, proofreading for punctuation errors might help prevent the proliferation of same.
For example, “it’s” = “it is.”
+1 to simple summaries
Some of the technical detail is lost on my feeble mind. I think I would get more out of these lengthy posts if they had a concise summary of the argument, including the conclusion, in lay-speak at the top!
Support simple summaries but only if doesn’t turnoff the valuable heavyweight contributions. If part of the aim is to enlarge the sceptical community then somewhere to lodge and have questions answered would be useful.
Actually I like a site that isn’t written for 7th graders. Challenge the mind a little and look up what you don’t understand.
I often find that I pick up greater understanding from the comments section. I thoroughly enjoy the discussions that take place here and I learn a lot from them. A big Thank You to all who contribute. 🙂
+1 for simple summaries
The comments will usually fill in more detail on some of the more technical posts. I know that on the more complicated posts, I sometimes spend several hours trying to absorb as much as I can of what is being stated. I like the exercise.
“Simple summaries” would be nice but I think that would mainly be up to the author of a particular post and not WUWT in general.
Also WUWT can’t do anything about a commenter hitting the “Reply” button to soon
(But “is’t” really that important?8-)
For clarity and preserving what’s (what is) left of the English language, yes, I am convinced it is.
When reading a book, post, etc., my eyes come to a dead stop when I see its in the context of it is, or vice-versa, it’s as a possessive. It slows me down and makes me wonder about the detail orientation of the writer. To avoid confusion, I think it’s (it is) important to follow accepted usage.
Donna, WUWT is the egghead equivalent of a man cave. I don’t think they much care about punctuation here…
Yes, it is. Also, that should be “too soon”.
With all the degradation of language done by texting abbreviation and the like, I would like to see better care taken with language use here, particularly since this is supposed to be a science site and should reflect precision; not the sloppy use of “science” seen in the alarmist realm. Sloppy language use is indicative of a poorly educated person or simply of carelessness or apathy.
“With all the degradation of language done by texting abbreviation and the like, I would like to see better care taken with language use here, particularly since this is supposed to be a science site and should reflect precision; not the sloppy use of “science” seen in the alarmist realm. Sloppy language use is indicative of a poorly educated person or simply of carelessness or apathy.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-3nnht-b40
I agree Donna.
But it’s not simple typos that slow me down so much as errors that betray a failure to learn a language in the first place, to the extent of failing even to follow one’s own thought patterns while typing or speaking. Those who claim English as their native language should at least be aware of the following common errors.
“should of” instead of “should have”
“capitol” (a building) instead of “capital” (a city)
“irregardless” instead of “regardless”
“could care less” instead of “couldn’t care less”
“seperate” instead of “separate”
“loose” instead of “lose”
“for free; for cheap” instead of “free; cheap”
“cheaper prices” instead of “lower prices; cheaper goods”
“then” used consistently instead of “than”
Beyond that there’s the failure to differentiate subjective and objective pronouns, and to discern possessive case both in the choice of pronouns and use of apostrophes. Those who argue that nothing matters are simply too lazy to learn.
Thank you. Actually, I’m quite forgiving of occasional typographical errors. It’s other language errors that distract me from the meaning of the post, article, or book. Sometimes the omission of proper punctuation affects the meaning of the thought the author is attempting to present.
You might want to add to your list:
affect: to influence: Solar activity may affect climate.
effect: n. result; v. cause. The effects of ENSO vary in different parts of the world.
To effect change, it is necessary to question the status quo, then convince others that one’s conclusions are correct.
Donna K. B, do those “slow-downs” also make you wonder about the religion, race, culture, nationality and/or country of origin that the aforesaid “writer” is directly associated with?
I think it would be much easier if you re-nurtured your subconscious mind to “ignore” those minor infractions in the correct usage of the Queen’s English ….. than it would be for you to re-educate 70% of the US population and/or 99% of the remaining world population ……. to conform to and abide by your vocabulary “standards”..
Our knowledge of the science of the physical world is constantly changing ….. and thus the verbiage we use to define, explain or question said “changes” also has to change either via the coining of new “words” or the assigning of an additional definition to an already defined word.
It’s best to listen to what a person has to say ….. before making a rash judgement as to whether or not said persons knows anything about what he/she is talking about.
As long as we’re being insufferably picky, I’d add the newly emerging “bored of.”
“I’m bored” of climate change alarmism. Please don’t.
I think you are doing quite well, particularly in the management of the comment section. It is contentious, very political, very informative, but avoids dissolving into a total food fight (unlike several other sites).
Have you tried reader ratings on comments, I think they are valuable on sites that I’ve visited
I’m not sure popularity contests reflect well on skeptical outlooks.
Dave Fair
They have done that several times over the last 4 years. I have come to see why they do not use a rating link. Note that readers sometimes give a rating with a +1, or +10, etc, added into their comment.
I’d like an amen button . Says a lot with a click .
Also , at least some chance to clean up typos . With a brief time limit , retains the archival nature of the blog .
Newsvine allows 5 minutes to edit a comment. That was a reasonable time limit for double checking one’s comment.
I thought the mandatory up-vote was +97?
A very amusing site.
Enthusiasm is contagious!
How about a means to track those that are funding their careers or gaining from consistent use of ‘if, might, could, may, likely or those that slander, threaten and dismiss anyone that doesn’t agree with Human Caused Globule Warming (HCGW).
Have the data base capture name, position, employer, grants, ranking article wise, ranking money scored.
It would be interesting knowing how much taxpayer dollars have been spent by HCGW person or how much a group has collected like National Wildlife Federation.
Likewise, paranoia should be avoided to maintain neutral skepticism.
Dave Fair
Kevin Angus stated:
Kevin, here is a list of expended taxpayer dollars that was posted on another thread, …. enjoy, to wit:
Evergreen Solar ($25 million)*
SpectraWatt ($500,000)*
Solyndra ($535 million)*
Beacon Power ($43 million)*
Nevada Geothermal ($98.5 million)
SunPower ($1.2 billion)
First Solar ($1.46 billion)
Babcock and Brown ($178 million)
EnerDel’s subsidiary Ener1 ($118.5 million)*
Amonix ($5.9 million)
Fisker Automotive ($529 million)
Abound Solar ($400 million)*
A123 Systems ($279 million)*
Willard and Kelsey Solar Group ($700,981)*
Johnson Controls ($299 million)
Brightsource ($1.6 billion)
ECOtality ($126.2 million)
Raser Technologies ($33 million)*
Energy Conversion Devices ($13.3 million)*
Mountain Plaza, Inc. ($2 million)*
Olsen’s Crop Service and Olsen’s Mills Acquisition Company ($10 million)*
Range Fuels ($80 million)*
Thompson River Power ($6.5 million)*
Stirling Energy Systems ($7 million)*
Azure Dynamics ($5.4 million)*
GreenVolts ($500,000)
Vestas ($50 million)
LG Chem’s subsidiary Compact Power ($151 million)
Nordic Windpower ($16 million)*
Navistar ($39 million)
Satcon ($3 million)*
Konarka Technologies Inc. ($20 million)*
Mascoma Corp. ($100 million)
Cash for Klunkers ($4 BILLION)
Obama-care Website ($600 MILLION & COUNTING).
OBAMA-CARE (1.5 TRILLION & COUNTING).
ILLEGALS (114 Billion per year to taxpayers).
MICHELLE’S Wardrobe ($200,000)
Obama vacations (4 billion & counting)
I was worried that Purple Rain was a reference to Acid Rain or something worse, but it’s not thank goodness.
This site is the best as is. I think more and more are referring to it, including political leaders and some presidential candidates…
anyway I had a hard time finding this (with the lyrics) on YouTube – no reference to climate change thank God::
“… I had a hard time finding this …”
If you can find the Wall Street Journal for Friday, April 22 — ARENA section, D1 — there is an article called The Singular Legacy of Prince. Therein “Prince aggressively policed the web for unauthorized use of his music … “
I found a lot of “covers” of the song – this (original) will probably be removed soon…
Who ever did the lyrics doesn’t know how to spell “SHAME” ..They put ” Such a SAME our friendship had to end ” !! LOL
And Mean’t when meant would be correct.
But even SHAME is wrong. The word should be PITY.
Well, Prince took it down. He must be alive somewhere like Elvis…
And there I was thinking this would be the one place there’d be no mention of the purple midget…
Yep. Prince removed it. I don’t know how he did it…
Thanks for this opportunity Anthony.
I’d like to ask Dr. Leif S., our resident expert on solar matters, a question. Likely a dumb question but here goes nonetheless. In reading about how scientists like to observe the sun’s corona during an eclipse, wonder if they couldn’t have a satellite that would mimic this in a way that would lend more time to being in a ‘eclipse’ mode, thereby getting in lots of time to study as much as possible. Instead of waiting for an eclipse to happen and hoping for no clouds.
PS I love this site, wouldn’t change what’s not broken, but improvement are simply a matter of tastes to me as this is THE resources site for me. Indexing is great, relevant info, articles and posts always seem so timely. Only thing I can come up with is getting Guest bloggers writings’ in the index tabs, so for example Willis’s work would be all in one spot for easy ref, even though search works well enough, my memory, when working seems to sputter along in a sporadic manner- so if I know he wrote about something specific but all I can recall was that it was in 2012 – then I could look there.
The Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) is one of a number of instruments aboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory satellite (SOHO). LASCO consists of three solar coronagraphs with nested fields of view. (From the Wikipedia article Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph)
I am a sustaining contributor to The Wikimedia Foundation
As Doug noted, we have such a satellite, actually more than one.
Thanks for that Doug and Leif – I hadn’t heard of LASCO although I do know about SOHO of course.
I have sometimes tried to locate a comment I have made in reply to someone and searched for my moniker because I can’t remember which thread it was. The search will locate a story but not a contributor.
That means hunting down the threads one by one. A ‘global search’ button would do the trick. I use multiple devices to attend the site and can’t always leave tabs open even on one.
Sometimes a brilliant comment is needed for a friend and it can’t be located from the main menu three months later.
Yeah, Global Search and Search as it is now.
Thanks
I like it Crispin, a global search might be the better solution; as yes there are often brilliant comments on threads that I bookmark right at that spot, so I don’t lose them.
I use Google advanced search and add the WUWT URL to the “site or domain:” input. Works well most of the time.
If you create a WordPress account, it tracks all of your posts as long as you’re logged in when you do them.
I would love an edit button.
We should be able to create a WUWT account, so we can see all the comments we have made in one click. It’s makes life much easier. Most other websites have such a system. I do think that the current WUWT comment system keeps things clean and orderly, and prevents trolls from taking over, but it could use an upgrade behind the scenes.
I agree with Crispin, though. We need a way to easily search comments. For myself, the comments have been almost as valuable as the article. Please update.
Here’s how I search in Google. Type in, say,
site:wattsupwiththat.com “Crispin in Waterloo”
and then a date range, using search tools, say 1 Jan 2016.
It returns just one comment made by Crispin, who actually was in Waterloo that day. Usually there would be a more generous date range and some topic words to help.
Yes I was thinking along the lines of search functionality too.
I have an incredible knack of wanting to find a great bit of info from a post or comment a few days after I’d read it here, only to not be able to find it.
The advanced Google search should do it but it would be nice to have something site specific. A few searchable keywords relevant to each post would do it.
Apart from that, great site. A true beacon of sanity amongst the dogmatic drivel perpetuated by those driving along the wrong road.
You can see a list of Willis’ posts at a few places, all different:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/author/weschenbach/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/15/an-index-to-williss-writings/
http://wermenh.com/wuwt/cat_willis_autobiography.html
When you want to scan titles by month and year, use the “Archive” tool on the right side Nav bar or try
http://wermenh.com/wuwt/monthly.html
Hint to all: Today is a good day to review the nav bars decorating each page here. Worth doing a couple times a year, there are a lot of good things there.
e.g. coming to mind
Kaizen
The Big Idea – Create a culture of continuous improvement where all employees are actively engaged in improving the company. Nurture this culture by organizing events focused on improving specific areas of the company.
WHAT IS KAIZEN? THE DUAL NATURE OF KAIZEN KAIZEN EVENTS KAIZEN PHILOSOPHY
______________________
but 1st of all:
– listen
– think
then 2nd:
– trust your contribution is welcome
_______________________
for 3rd:
– every quest starts with the first step
I Second the comment on the investigation of monies being used to promote AGW research, and would welcome also, a comparison of approximately how much funding goes towards the possibility that Man is NOT the only source of change on our planet, One of my pet peeves is the amount of Taxpayers monies being used at our Universities to promote Political agendas, aquisition of like Grants and the amount of tax money being spent on the PR of these projects. We can no longer trust Any research coming out of these Institutions due to the undue Political influence of who funds the research and for what gain.
I also like the idea of summarizing some of the data into Layman speak, Cliff notes, so to speak, so that articles can be forwarded to those without deep understanding of phenomena being reported on. Maybe of summary every so often on various topics (Sea level rise, poalr bears etc.) that have recent of current postinsgs.
Other than that, love the site. Thank you all for your efforts!
Kevin Angus –
‘Have the data base capture name, position, employer, grants, ranking article wise, ranking money scored.’
____________
You are not here for Stalin/Dsershinsky – are You – no offent ment. – Hans
..Gotta work on that English Hans…… : )
Marcus –
– no offent meant. – Hans
Gee – can’t wait for that climate swindles done and gone: just waisted time and having other interests.
Find a way for graphs to update on the reference pages. Apparently the wordpress plugin currently being used to get those images caches them and does not refresh when the graph changes. There might be a different plugin available to cache those images that does check the source periodically or maybe a configuration item in the current plugin.
Maxx on April 23, 2016 at 10:31 am
I Second the comment on the investigation of monies being used to promote AGW research, and would welcome also, a comparison of approximately how much funding goes towards the possibility that Man is NOT the only source of change on our planet, One of my pet peeves is the amount of Taxpayers monies being used at our Universities to promote Political agendas, aquisition of like Grants and the amount of tax money being spent on the PR of these projects.
______________________
Maxx,
You are asking for ‘investigative journalism’.
Investigative Journalism has lost its financial base min. 20 years ago to internet, Wikipedia, …
Thankfully there still are platforms like WUWT.
Let’s make the best of it.
1. Get rid of threading.
2. Get back to the basics from time to time. (examples: Ira Glickstein, RGB, Steel Greenhouse)
3. Get rid of threading.
One vote for keeping threaded comments.
I vote Keep.
Hmm…Threading keeps the topic of a comment and the replies to it in one place. That’s good. The downside is that a reply to a comment made yesterday may never be seen.
If it’s possible with WordPress, if it’s not then a suggestion to WordPress, keep the threads “bunched” but also add a link to all recently made comments (ie https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/23/open-thread-saturday-what-could-we-do-better/comment-page-1/#comment-2197879) at the bottom of the comments.
Agreed. I used to read every comment, now I can’t (but I got used to that). Notification doesn’t take you to where the comments are so I gave up on that – too many notifications anyway.
When an article is excellent – lots of those – I will sometimes delay reading the comments until they have grown to a good number. That way I catch most of them. My own comments, then, are lost to most! Generally, however, mine aren’t so important, so it doesn’t matter. 🙂
This is for the commenters: we tend to make sweeping and dismissive statements when describing the CAGW crowd. In this way we lower ourselves, the standard for many of us could be much higher. In my experience, the moment we launch our arsenal of insults we stop listening. And this is amplified when some brave soul enters this site with an argument. We aught to encourage argument.
I have found that the vast majority of commenters here are polite and express themselves with a huge degree of patience. Compared to the battering skeptics get elsewhere, I find this outstanding. I enjoy the discussions here because they are discussions, not shouting matches. Agreed, there are always some, but none of us are saints. Most insults expressed here come from the believer’s camp.
I mostly agree. I’ve read my share of dogpiles and dismissive comments on this site. We like to think we’re above the fray somehow, and compared to diametrical sites we might appear that way. However, I really enjoy a science battle, and I want to encourage a fair fight. Thank opponents for taking the time to visit hostile ground etc
I consider WUWT to be similar to your home. I respect your right to paint the front door the color you want, and to have solar and LEDs as you want. So I thank you (and others) for this fine site.
For those making comments, I suggest realizing English is not the first language of many others, and that spelling** and grammar are easy to read-over. Various input devices are used, including voice to text. So, relax, chill, whatever.
Note in the screen image of the Purple Rain Lyrics (10:14 am) there is a wrong word in the last line – beginning “Such A … .”
_ _ _ _ _ _
[**”I respect a man who knows how to spell a word more than one way” – Mark Twain and others similar wording.]
😎
I’m all for correct spelling and grammar. (Believe it or not for those who have read my comments over the years!8-)
But to dismiss someone’s thought just because of a typo, mistake or an unfamiliarity with, what is to them, a second language?
Or in my case a fifth…
Without edit, one must excuse typos.
Simple typos can be overlooked, especially in the comments. Even Chinese grammar is acceptable if you’re Chinese. Dismiss someone’s thoughts? No, it takes real talent to convince me that education is absent.
Donna K. Becker on April 23, 2016 at 9:57 am
Please consider providing simple summaries of the more technical posts for those of us without scientific backgrounds.
Also, proofreading for punctuation errors might help prevent the proliferation of same.
For example, “it’s” = “it is.”
________________________
Donna – to whom regarding.
Maybe crankup WUWT-TV interviews again?
My only complaint is that as the pace of articles has gone up, I can’t keep up anymore. I now have to choose what articles to read, and which comment threads to follow. I once read all…
Might be nice to have an article asking what the impact of Obama signing the Paris Lunch Money Steal, er deal… is likely to be, and how to get in front of that… and why Congress can’t stop him giving away our money…
Keep multiple pages open..I use 10 across my screen..
Marcus
I use three screens with three computers. I still need more screen room.
BTW, it is 87deg here in Texas right now. But we are already preparing for what is about to happen this coming winter.
When you can’t take the frozen north any more, Com’on down.
Lee
That raises the interesting proposition that commenters could make predictions for a particular season but would have to give reasons for making that prediction and what area it covers.
Tonyb
Is this a photo of you reading WattsUpWithThat, Lee?
http://www.blogcdn.com/www.tuaw.com/media/2007/05/algorerotw.jpg
TonyB
You mean like predicting something like “freezing weather encroachment” south of Dallas?
Or, FROZEN north of US-Can border. I am pretty sure that any predictions such as that will come from the Weather divisions rather the Climate division. After all, everything that is predicted must be caused by Changing Weather Patterns. Surely, if it gets really bad, they will warn us (maybe not ahead of time tho.
Yeah, E.M.Smith, one thing that would be nice is for posts to be put into different categories. Say, science, politics, etc. That way the posts will stick around for a while in each category. As it is, a post can come up in the morning and by night fall it’s so far down that people stop reading. This affects the commenting on each post. People are more likely to answer a reply if the post is still relevant (meaning that it’s not so far down the page)…
Please can it be a rule that the first time an abbreviation or acronym is used by a writer , it is defined.
Amen
You mean define a FTA?
Yes. ASAP, PDQ, please! 😉
I think we all should be careful about using “their” language to describe things. A good example is using the term “fossil fuel”, instead of calling it “petroleum”, which is what it is: “Rock Oil”. It is formed at great depth at high pressure and temperature by a chemical reaction of carbonaceous minerals and water. There are no fossils involved. The use of the “fossil” designation was a trick to make the second most abundant liquid resource on Earth (the first is water) seem rare and pricing it far above its intrinsic value.
Watch this short clip and see what I mean (Col. Fletcher Prouty):
Oil Peak is a lie! It’s not a “fossil fuel”. – YouTube
Also, if you want a broader, very thorough scientific treatise on the subject, read Thomas Gold’s “The Deep Hot Biosphere”, which also discusses coal, to get another slant on it.
By using their terminology, we lose points before the discussion even begins.
+10
WUWT is a great place to exchange views and ideas.
I have grudge against the WordPress, I just realise that they operate graphics cache with net prefix https://i0.wp.com/www….
So if I accidentally make a spelling error on a graph, and I make lots of them, it is not possible to replace it under the same name-link.
I suppose there is nothing anyone can do about it, so it is a more of a warning, than a plea for a change.
p.s. Unfortunately I never fully mastered English spelling, learned English in a haphazard way in my mid twenties; my native language as far as I know is only 100% phonetic language, 30 written characters 30 sounds, no diphthongs etc, practically impossible to miss-spell any word.
Don’t kid me. Phonetic spelling lets you know how to spell basic vocabulary, but it doesn’t mean you’d perform well. There are number of issues, like names, borrowed spelling, dialects, spelling errors related to performance and not competence, which may occur with a spelling system designed for simplicity.
Bud speling duznt matr, wee awl kan reed awful gramr.
Hi Hugs
In addition there are no equivalents for ‘the’ and ‘a/an’ so I often either omit it or use a wrong one. All foreign names or locally non-existent words are ‘fonetised’, result often they may be just about recognizable, normally written in Cyrillic alphabet, but here are some examples in the Latin equivalent.
e.g. Einstein becomes Ajnstajn, Albuquerque = Albekerki, Gloucester = Gloster, differential = diferencialni, aesthetic = estetik
Give me a geographic name with complex spelling, I will instantly ‘fonetise’ it.
The indigenous language of my country is also phonetically spelled. Most languages with recently devised writing systems are. ( there is no “only” in that sentence.)
Writing was devised in the 8th century, when my distant ancestors took lands over from Byzantines and was mixture between greek and roman alphabets. It had some extra signs which would turn sounds for c, d, n, s and z into softer sounds, then in 19th century a literary expert reject those and added extra letters making it 30 in total. Sometimes western translators add ‘h’ to indicate this, as in Milankovi-ch (Milanković), I don’t bother with it a keep it simple vukcevi-c ( Vukčević), but it has the same end sound.
How about a ‘Hate Mail of the Week’ post? I trust there’s no lack of material.
I miss the “how not to measure temperature” posts.
New study claims fossil fuels could be completely phased out in 10 years !!
http://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/35187
I would argue to drop the threaded comments. Very often, people find that their comment goes where it was not intended. I would like to revert to a pure time-sequenced blog, but with each comment identified by a number, so it can be referred to in replies.
Numbering reference is used on Gavin’s RC, it appears that it works OK.
+10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
10^55 votes from one person? Talk about stuffed ballots.
Tom is from Florida, there just to make sure they do at least 10^n recounts , where n is an integer equal or greater than number of presidential candidates, than it is appealed to the Florida Supreme Court. I am told that Al Gore never visited Florida again.
He’s too worried about the sea level rise to go back to florida…
My bad, I left off a zero.
-1 — most comments do wind up where they were intended, and as long as that is the case, the threaded format is more readable and skippable.
If WordPress allows it, it might be worthwhile to allow people to delete their comments. In this way, misplaced comments could be removed and re-inserted into the proper place.
Threaded comments leads to insular and ever more aggressive disputes.
Chronological ordering at least lets the lurker know how hastily the response was given.
I agree. At one time you could follow a sequential argument in its proper date order. Now they pop up all over the place and unless you have time to continually backtrack you are likely to miss interesting comments.
I am not sure about the numbering! as long as reference is made to who you are replying to.
It would be good to examine subjects in greater depth as well but that is not possible when there are so many new articles in a day.
Tonyb
lsvalgaard said:
Each comment is already identified by a number, ….. a url # which can be referred to in replies.
Just “click-on” the date-time that the comment was posted ….. and then right-click on the url at the top-left of the screen ….. and then click “copy” and then paste it in your reply.
Like so, this is the # of your above post that I am responding to, … to wit:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/23/open-thread-saturday-what-could-we-do- better/comment-page-1/#comment-2197930
Or you can create a “hyper-link”, like so, to wit:
“In response to “this comment ” of yours etc., etc. ….”
And I hope I entered it correctly.
OOPS, made mistake, Neither of those above “links” will work because a “space” or a CR was inserted between “we-do-” ….. and “better” thus voiding the url.
Here it tis, I’ll try again:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/23/open-thread-saturday-what-could-we-do-better/comment-page-1/#comment-2197930
And the hyper-link is ….. In response to “this comment ” of
..How come only 4 people have voted up top ?? Come on, hop to guys and gals !! Sheesh…
I really enjoy reading much of the science on this site. However, I think it is possible to think that AGW is exaggerated without having a mindset that requires to one to adhere to a particular political philosophy. Someone may be skeptical about this and still favor a liberal, conservative or any agenda in between. I think that is forgotten by some posters.
I think that is ignored, not forgotten, by some posters.
It is useful for their agenda to try to drive out alternative views.
A sceptical website is as threatening to the American-Right-wing elite as it is to any other elite.
I wholeheartedly agree with this. CAGW scepticism is independent of general political affiliation, and it is counter-productive to needlessly alienate people who might agree with us on CAGW but not on, say, healthcare or marijuana.
Yeah, Michael, i always try to keep my mouth shut about my disdain for GMOs. (for the life of me, i can’t understand why people have a problem with people who don’t want scientists tinkering with the food that they eat…) Polarization is a problem. On the other hand, polarization is really what AGW is all about. The disagreement is not really about climate science, it’s about ideology IMNSHO*. So, in a sense, i like the polarization. Because that’s really what this whole thing is all about…
*in deference to some gripers on this page IMNSHO means “In My Not So Humble Opinion” (wink!)
afonzarelli – so the argument is not about the science, but only about the polarization, that is, the – argument? That is not only not right, it is not even wrong.
Poorly articulated point on my part… (let’s see if i can give it a better shot) i think the whole climate change debate is largely about spin and not about any real quest for the truth. So, when i’m dealing with an agw believer, i’m mostly trying to cut through their spin-mastery. (now the best way to do that is use objective science, so in that sense i think it IS about the science) I think of the debate on the whole as a power verses power like Nietzsche experience and not a rational sort of discourse. i REALLY think that this is what we are dealing with, not any differences in scientific opinion…
hornblower,
There are some of us outside your political spectrum. For example, I am a Rothbard style radical libertarian. That means an anarcho-capitalist. (we get to disagree with everyone involved in the political process!)
:-p
One small change I’d like to see is the “Recent Comments” section on the right be moved up higher in the right hand column.
I second that. There are ways and means of indicating who you are responding to, even if it is not right below the comment you are referring to as I have just done.
One reason for my viewpoint is that when I am done for the present time on a certain post, I will click and save the latest response I read and continue from there perhaps 4 hours later. But if someone makes a response to an earlier comment in the meantime, I will miss it unless I am really, really keen on a certain article and all comments and check through everything.
Granted, using “Ctrl F” is a big help. But if I know there were 49 responses on “april 19” before and later there are 50, I might have to go through 30 of them before I find the latest addition instead of seeing it right away.
As well, a person may ask a question, and 4 hours later another person may ask the same question. But 5 hours after the first question was asked, someone may answer it underneath the first person’s question. So unless the answer is repeated for the second person, that person may never realize the question had been answered.
As well, sometimes threads get incredibly long and one must scroll a long way up to find the last “reply”.
Perhaps having the replies in reverse order, with newest one on top
You mean read the answer then work your way down until you run into the question? No, thanks.
gary
There is, of course, a simple solution [but WP will surely not go along – it is too good]:
If you keep threaded comments, put the newest thread on top.
Unless I am misunderstanding something, 10 different people can respond to 10 different threads in an hour. Does that mean the “newest thread” goes up and down like a yo-yo?
Yep, but the 10 threads will stay on top, but perhaps in a different order among them. In any event one will not have to scroll far to find one. All this is absolutely trivial to implement. Can be done in one page of code [in any language].
“You mean read the answer then work your way down until you run into the question? No, thanks.”
Why not? Isn’t that similar to how Climate$cience™ is done?
Quote feature with newest comment on top, IMHO, would be best.
Newest on top works fine in Disqus because the thread comments still display in historical order, not sure how WP would handle it…
I recall that when I first started reading here that most readers would copy/paste a name to show who they were talking to. such as…
————————————————————————————————————————————-
Werner Brozek
April 23, 2016 at 12:47 pm
=====================================================================
This makes it clear that my reply is aimed at you.
It would be nice if there was a way to build a bridge to what Tony Heller is trying to say. I realize that there is a lack of mutual respect – but he is clearly on the skeptical side and is trying, in his own way, to help the cause.
Evidently, there is something “wrong” with the way he calculates or displays his rants on the quality of published temperature data. I don’t understand the technical issue that makes his stuff not interesting to the folks on this site. Don’t bother dumping in me – just an 81 year old “boy” trying to keep up.
In some posts it is hard to follow the explanation. The authors sometimes could be more careful linking text and graphs. Please just double check if, when reading a text about a graph, it is perfectly clear what you are talking about. The formal format in most scientific journals (Fig. 1), always being mentioned in order of appearance, etc, actually would be a good example.
Except for that, the best website on the net by far. Keep up the good work.
A Climate History page.
I’ve found that few things reassure worried Warmists more than historical evidence of past storms, tornados and floods etc. Easy access to such information would effortlessly puncture the claims of ‘the most intense storm/drought/flood etc etc etc.
And maybe also as Jack Langdon says above some authoritative data on ‘data manipulation’.
Although I believe that he is onto something, Steve Goddard’s occasional, whacky rants leave him vulnerable to debunking.
If WUWT was to publish ‘before and after’ charts from GISS etc, this would go a long way in constructing the case against them.
Charles
As a historical climatologist I have been writing about climate history for years. The trouble is that much of history is dismissed as ‘ anecdotal’ as the fashion has moved on to computers and novel proxies rather than observations.
Tonyb
Tonyb,
And a fine writer of climate history you are. Thanks.
New readers should find Tony’s essays and enjoy.
Great site, thank you. Please keep the ratio of science topics vs politics at the high end of the scale. I agree with other posters hear that the petty mud-slinging degrades the site. It is a sad fact that if you focused purely on science your hits would probably drop by 75%
As a long time reader of WUWT and other climate blogs, I find myself in an embarrassing situation. I don’t know how the often quoted temperature products are assembled.
For example, there are the satellite products that seem to be straight-forward readings from satellites. Then there are terrestrial products, and mixtures of satellite and terrestrial products.
I understand that in the case of the terrestrial based products, temperature readings are averaged on a per-grid-square basis. Fine.
Question: When the temps are averaged, is the time of day the temperature was measured taken into account? Is the resulting average a number that represents all readings taken over the entire planet, day and night? How about a reading taken at noon on none side of the earth at the exact moment another is taken at midnight on the other side of the earth? In other words what are the numbers being averaged?
Question: What are the differences between SST’s and land based thermometer readings? Can you just average the sea surface readings with the land readings without some sort of adjustments?
I have looked on the web for some help in answernig these questions. I don’t think they are magic, and somewhere, somebody has assembled the information I need. Can anyone on WUWT provide a couple of links to help me?
You ask for a lot. About 8 years ago this site, and others, were filled with the sorts of discussion you seek.
WUWT did a series of “how not to measure temperature” — just visible, obvious stuff.
A recent one here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/02/17/how-not-to-measure-temperature-or-climate-change-96/
Here is a thread on “Time of Observation” (TOB) adjustments from 2007:
https://climateaudit.org/2007/09/24/tobs/
There are station dropouts, infilling, …, missing data, and questions about truth: Did stations in Siberia report lower temperatures as a ploy to get more fuel shipped to them? This stuff will give you a headache. How about measuring ocean temperature by flinging a bucket of the rail and hauling up some water? This stuff will give you a headache. Oh, I already said that.
Currently, over at Climate Audit
https://climateaudit.org/2016/04/19/gavin-schmidt-and-reference-period-trickery/
… read it all and you may get a sense of some of the newer issues.
I don’t think anyone has put all this together as you might like.
I find that with some blog posts it is difficult to differentiate which text originates with the writer of the post and which is quoted text taken from another source. Some writers use the quote box style but in a lot of cases the text just runs one into the other and hence can be difficult to follow. Is there a solution for this?
Marcus on April 23, 2016 at 12:07 pm
..Gotta work on that English Hans…… : )
lsvalgaard – comments counted / reversed order
____________________
native anglosaxons miss : with this host you’re talking to people world wide, independent of local topics / terms.
____________________
I get response on my side of the atlantic.
And you, be sure, are heard cross the pacific.
– don’t risk that –
The commenters on this site are on-the-whole very intelligent and wonderful scientists. Their analysis often goes far beyond the content of the article. This great men and women teach me a great deal every day. Thank you.
Please do not confuse the well focused give and take discussions by allowing political and other off topic posts in the article comments section.
Perhaps every day or two you should post an article that reads simply “This is the anyone, anytime, any topic comments section for today. If you want to comment on your favorite topic, talk politics, argue about the issues of the day, this is the place. Have at it.” If I am totally bored, I will check it out to see what’s on the stove today. Otherwise, I can get on with life.
This is the sixth site on my wake up list each day. It comes well before Face Book and You Tube. lol
Inquiring minds want to know 1-5 John? That has to be good!
My first point of contact with WUWT is an RSS aggregator, so I would very much appreciate it if you could change your WordPress setting to allowed full (or at least fuller) summaries in the RSS feed. As it is now, there’s barely enough information in the feed content for me to decide whether or not to click through to read the rest of the article. Thanks.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse defends his attack on oil producers at http://www.providencejournal.com/opinion/20160423/sheldon-whitehouse-climate-change-is-like-tobacco-issue
Interestingly, the Providence Journal, a publication generally favorable to all sorts of Democrat shenanigans, defends the First Amendment right to speech uninhibited by government prosecution in a rebuttal at the end.
BTW, Tips & Notes is full and seems to have trouble updating with new comments.
Hi Anthony
I am in China and most of the visuals are blocked. Not all, but ‘usually’. Is there a way for posted charts graphs and ‘etc’ to be stored automatically and re-linked? There are several countries in the region which block certain content by origin. WordPress isn’t on that list but YouTube is, for example.
I posted two links yesterday and one (to my surprise) showed as a pic and one remained a link.
It may be far beyond your control but it is frustrating to read a post by Bob Tisdale and not be able to see the charts which form the major content. Perhaps there is some neutral ground for the innocuous material.
Thanks for your devotion to this effort
Top Ten Anti-GW List Urgently Needed
I think one feature that is desperately required on WUWT is a prominently displayed button that leads directly to a top ten list of arguments against the Climate Change concept, designed to be easily employed by ordinary folks who wish to counter GW nonsense within their social circles and other opportunities. This also would have benefit to quickly orient WUWT newcomers who haven’t the time to search thousands of articles for core info.
Of course WUWT is an amazing treasure trove of good facts, figures and opinions but for everyday use it is actually quite overwhelming and impractical.
Even though I have followed WUWT for years, when faced with people parroting GW faith, my responses would be off the cuff, inefficient and certainly not prioritized or effective as they need to be.
Let me show you how my typical reply might go. Keep in mind, no one at a party or other social setting wants to hear a lecture. So one might have the opportunity to respond with maybe five arguments; ten if you are lucky and there is interest.
Right off the top of my head, I would begin with what I perceive to be the best and easiest anti-GW points to present and go from there. Clearly if we on the ground are to help as effective conduits of grassroots information, we need better concise information. Please help us out.
My suggestion is that a WUWT top ten list would be complete with a reference or two that could be later provided as certainly many a disbelieving Warmist may ask for sources. Also the list would be dynamic in the sense that it might change as new research and priorities come to light. But this doesn’t have to be a perfectly ranked list, just very useful.
My Inadequate Arguments:
1… Almost none of the fifty or so GW computer models agree or even reflect what is happening in the real world. They all wildly exaggerate the warming predictions yet this is what GW political policy has been based upon.
2… Two different satellite systems, calibrated with balloon readings all agree that there hasn’t been much warming over the past 18 years. Unlike ground temperature stations that are few and far between with limited coverage of the earth and susceptible to nearby heat sources , satellites cover most of the earth and take temperatures throughout the atmosphere multiple times per day.
3… GW theory is that CO2 traps in heat causing runaway heating of the Earth. Actual observations of CO2 and temperature supports no such thing.
4… The Antarctic ice cap is actually growing, not shrinking. Warmists would rather you didn’t know about that.
5… Hurricanes are at an all-time low. In fact there hasn’t been a hurricane making land on the USA since Obama became president. All against GW theory and prediction.
6… The Earth has always had long temperature fluctuations as comfortable Viking settlements in Greenland can attest.
7… Weather is not Global Warming nor Climate Change. For those who point to very mild winters in the North American North West, what do these same people have to say about the record low temps, snow, Great Lakes freeze-ups in the East?
At this point, I would expect that this is about all one could hope to say about Climate change in a social situation. But if the opportunity presented itself, I would continue:
8… The Climate Change science is certainly not settled, as new science including evidence for the existence of a temperature pause and many other climate phenomena, comes and goes.
9… That 97% of scientists believe in dangerous Global Warming is a proven fallacy. Even the man who first invented this concept agrees that these scientists cited never believed the observed warming is actually dangerous.
10… Almost every GW skeptic believes there has been global warming. Just not rampant and dangerous GW. No one argues that CO2 levels haven’t significantly increased and that this is not due to human influence.
11… The rise in CO2 has been responsible for spectacular increases in forests and plant life around the world that is having a beneficial effect on harvests and food production. For that same reason CO2 is routinely added to green houses and aquariums. So the CO2-curbing “Green” movement is actually and literally the opposite. CO2 is not a pollutant but a critical molecule of life.
12… Al Gore’s temperature “Hockey Stick,” that really started the GW movement, has been proven to the satisfaction of most analysts to be completely erroneous.
13… Global Warming is a trillion dollar industry with beholden countries – especially developing countries – and scientists and corporations all looking after their own self-interests.
Clumsy and inadequate. I say WUWT and its knowledgeable followers can provide people like myself with a much more effective set of arguments.
Your best Top 10 list is “The Skeptics Handbook” hosted by Jo Nova.
http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming-2/
Jo runs an outstanding site, many of us check over there often.
Let me see. I’m at a gathering, someone mentions that climate change is going to doom us all, and I should pull out Skeptics Handbook I or Skeptics Handbook II? My other smart alecky response might be that perhaps WUWT needs a button to go to Jo Nova’s site and to the Skeptics Handbook where we might be able to distill the Skeptics Handbook into a top ten list? 😉 That said, I should take a look at it if it’s online.
Hey TonyL, that reference is not bad. A lot of important points I wasn’t even aware about.
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/sh1/the_skeptics_handbook_2-3_lq.pdf
But I believe, to be complete, WUWT needs something similar, maybe with a few more optional points, but even more straightforward than what JoNova is offering.
Clean tips and notes more often. Gets bloated. And keep up the good work.
It would be a real help if Tips and Notes put most recent stuff at the top.
I second both David and Kent’s recommendations. As of now (4/25/2016 @ 1:29 am EDT) there are 2550 posts on “tips and notes.” It was last cleaned 10/2/2015. Posting in reverse chronological order would help, especially if “cleaning” is problematic.
Well, I mentioned this in passing on some thread a while back, but since you asked ; )
It can be confusing (not just to me apparently ; ) at times, which comment is in which column, and it seems to me it would be a good idea to at least try some small indicator(s) that would make it more obvious. I realize a “clean” look is desirable, but think something subtle could still be preferable to occasional misplaced comments.
What I would suggest be tried is a slight coloration of just the left side of just the middle column comment boxes, similar to the line around our name/time boxes. (The “loss” of space to a slight indentation that would then be needed to get the text away from that line could, I believe, be made up for by reducing the column offset, since the distinction would be more obvious due to that line. And the tertiary column could also then be moved over as well, and perhaps even end up a bit wider).
Agreed; it’s hard for me to tell the hierarchy. JoNova does numbering that makes the commenting hierarchy clear. Personally, though, I prefer no threading; let commenters specify the comments to which they are responding.
I use scotch tape at the top of my screen with column marks. Also one on the side so I can use the scroll bar to go where I left off last. The coloration would help.
On the subject of comment threading: Does WP allow to make this a user-selectable option? Then we could all view the site as we like best.
This. There are advantages each way. I could see entering with unthreaded comments, and switching to threaded on an interesting point.
“Nothing succeeds like success”.
I know I mention this often, but I believe that UN Agenda 21 needs to be aired and discussed in every forum especially this one.
Agenda 21 and its under cover agencies ICLEI http://www.iclei.org/and UN Habitat http://unhabitat.org/ and maybe others I am not aware of is responsible for way that government agencies all of a sudden get “green”, long before any voters are even aware of it.
This, as I have pointed out before, is how the administration of my city have taken advantage of our devastating earthquakes and are attempting to make the city of Christchurch, NZ into an international exemplar of sustainability.
Some recent edicts include a 35 km/hr speed limit through the CBD in order to foster the use of bicycles, the deliberate diminishing of CBD parking in order to discourage motor vehicles.
The City Council has more than 100 official marked vehicles in its own parking lot. What is not clear to me is why the Mayor and her large staff as well as council staff can’t use bicycles and buses just like we are expected to. (And of course there is the Christchurch winter with its Antarctic southerly winds to deal with as well)
Well I have said enough, please visit my blog http://www.thedemisefchristchurch.com Please like/dislike and leave a message with your opinions.
Cheers
Roger
ps
Think UN Habitat is a beneficial organization? Check https://thedemiseofchristchurch.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/unitednations-conference-on-human-settlements_habitat1.pdf Section D. LAND. The red emphasis are mine.
A good source to find out about UN Agenda 21 is Rosa Koire. I won’t post my favorite video of hers as I have done in the past many times. She explains how it is being implemented locally in your towns and cities by ICLEI which is basically a United Nations brainchild. They are changing your zoning laws (among other things) by un-elected local officials.
They are changing your zoning laws (among other things) by un-elected local officials. Well the city planners seem to have a lot of self discretion but the council is also trying to move people out of coastal areas citing a predicted 1 meter sea level rise by the turn of the century, (the current rate is 1.7mm/yr with no acceleration detected). However they have backed off on this at the moment because of public outrage, but to my mind they will be back when the fuss dies down. Not many citizens have realized this is AGW and Agenda21 etc. and think they can contradict this by using legal channels. To my mind it is very much a political issue, but what do you do when you are a greenie and your elected council wants your land in case it gets flooded?
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
once it’s been accepted that it’s proper to use laws (and taxes) for behavior modification rather than for the sole legitimate purpose of protecting rights, well- that slippery slope will never let you back up to the surface.
Sorry the link above should read http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
The comments section is the most important part of the website. We get to read a scientific study, and then the experts on this website digest and dissect it. Just what we want. We want to hear about every little nuance.
I kind of like the way the comments work. There is not much time to carry on a lengthy conversation before the Topics scroll off the front page, but that might be a good thing, in that it keeps things focused on the topic at hand, and then moves on.
Off-topic posts do not seem to be a big problem, which is VERY good, and should be kept that way by the posters.
Spelling mistakes should be overlooked. Everyone does it. It doesn’t mean they don’t know how to spell that particular word, it just means they were probably in a hurry and overlooked the spelling error. I have no doubt you can figure out what the poster means even with the misspelled word.
I don’t use a spell checker, I figure I have a pretty good one in my head, but I occasionally misspell a word. In my case, I almost always recall that I misspelled a word, but the recall takes place hours after I have made it. I guess the mistake just hangs in my subconscious for a while and then works its way to awareness.
And this comment below, I find interesting:
climatereason
April 23, 2016 at 2:16 pm wrote:
“Lee
That raises the interesting proposition that commenters could make predictions for a particular season but would have to give reasons for making that prediction and what area it covers.”
I would be very interested in a dedicated section that relates to current weather. This would seem to fit right in with WUWT. After all we are discussing weather, future weather, and I think we should have a place to discuss current weather.
Here’s my contribution to the current weather section: It looks like Oklahoma is in the bullseye for severe weather come about Tuesday. The jet stream is lining up to concentrate its energy right in my neighborhood. I may get nasty.
Weather forcasters should display the jet streams on their weathercasts (most don’t). Without knowledge of the jet streams, you cannot fully understand what is happening with the weather.
Commenting on posts does not work well here if you want to carry on long conversations about a particular subject. If you want something like that, there is dedicated website chat software that could be used, or WUWT could establish a moderated USENET newsgroup where these subjects could be discussed as much as desired.
I would hesitate to change the WUWT website with chat software, but USENET would work perfectly for that purpose, as long as every one knew where to go. And with moderated newsgroups, one can control who has access to post, so you can elimnate a lot of trolls. It does take time and effort though.
WUWT is a great website. Lots of intelligent conversation. No downside, unless you are an Alarmist. 🙂 You really don’t have to change a thing to keep me coming back.
why usenet as opposed to irc, for instance?
don’t you have to pay for usenet access?
You can find free providers of USENET feeds, although many of those only carry the text messages, not the binaries. Most internet service providers give you access to USENET.
“why usenet as opposed to irc, for instance?”
Have you ever heard of an offended hacker kicking someone off IRC?
Hackers can’t kick people out of USENET discussion newsgroups.
As a moderator of a moderated USENET group, I would advise against moderation for a USENET group. Agree otherwise… especially “don’t change a thing…”
You do have to agree that USENET is an excellent discussion format, I would think.
With USENET software you can see at a glance all the new messages posted since the last time you read the thread, and you can tell if any address you specifically. This allows conversations to go on for a very long time without having to reread the entire thing every time you pull it up.
There is some website software that mimics USENET fairly well, although not as good as USENET software, IMO, but it would take a lot of effort to set up either type of discussion.
Leave well enough alone, is probably the best policy for now. 🙂
“it” may get nasty. not me. 🙂
I do know how to spell “it”, I just got in a hurry.
Great thread. I’d like to have a bit less of the very impolite type of responses that non climate skeptics have to deal with when they dare to comment on something here.
And in general I’ve been noticing a lot of fascism/ww2/gulags/etc. references making the rounds. That really should not be happening.
Cheers!
Ben
You are right benben. I have formed the impression that there is a faction among commenters who are attracted to climate scepticism, not so much because they have looked at the science and evolved a sceptical viewpoint, but because (a) it accords with their political or religious worldview or (b) they are offended by the “green-left” political outlook espoused by global warmers (in many cases, probably both). These commenters often use gross insults which are out of place in what is primarily a scientific forum. And I’ve noted a couple of comments that got past the mods, that made me realise there’s a few real bigots on this side of the fence. What can you do? Climate change has become political and politics makes for strange bedfellows.
OTOH humour is a very effective way of making points, and it’s done very well by quite a few of the commenters. as well as the authors of many of the posts. Fact is, from where most sceptics stand (actually where most well-informed people stand), a good deal of the material turned out by aspiring climate scientists is so ill-considered and so out of touch with common sense and common scientific knowledge that ridicule is the only valid way of commenting on it. For example, that thing a week or so ago about digging up ecosystems and moving them so that they can withstand climate change. One forms the impression that climate change is a bandwagon that attracts a lot of amateurs, many of whom don’t seem to be smart enough to have actually studied the issues and drawn conclusions of their own. Anthony does a great job of finding the most ridiculous contributions to climate science, for which I’m grateful.
“Climate change has become political and politics makes for strange bedfellows.”
Exactly right.
Hey Smart Rock,
I appreciate your thoughtful comments. I’m also primarily here for the funny climate news. I’m working in a related field myself and I find it quite enlightening to see some of the stupid shit my colleagues come up with.
That being said, I think there is a large amount of confirmation bias going on here; if you read only WUWT you’d get the idea that environmental sciences is full of nutjubs, while most of the work is just decent but boring and therefore never makes it beyond scientific journals, let alone to a blog like this one.
Cheers,
Ben
benben sez:
“…responses that non climate skeptics have to deal with…”
Forget your feelings for a moment, benben, and think for a change: a “non skeptic” is a non-scientist. The terms are mutually contradictory.
That’s the difference between scientists and climate alarmists. If you can’t see the difference, no wonder you’re confused.
Yes, Stealey, i’ve always noticed a big difference between “believers” and “skeptics”… It seems to me that believers are more often than not marching in lock step with one another. Skeptics, on the other hand, oft have a hard time agreeing on anything. I’m generalizing here a bit, of course, but it does seem to me that skeptics are much less rigid in their thinking…
benben wrote: “And in general I’ve been noticing a lot of fascism/ww2/gulags/etc. references making the rounds.”
Really? I hadn’t noticed. Could you be more specific?
On providing simple summaries:
Here is my (our) predictive track record, from an article that Dr. Sallie Baliunas, Dr. Tim Patterson and I published in 2002 in the PEGG. It is now available at:
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/KyotoAPEGA2002REV1.pdf
Our eight-point Rebuttal includes predictions that have all materialized in those countries in Western Europe that have adopted the full measure of global warming mania. My country, Canada, was foolish enough to sign the Kyoto Protocol, but then was wise enough to ignore it.
[Our 2002 article is in “quotation marks”, followed by current commentary.]
1. “Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”
NO net global warming has occurred for more than 18 years despite increasing atmospheric CO2.
2. “Kyoto focuses primarily on reducing CO2, a relatively harmless gas, and does nothing to control real air pollution like NOx, SOx, and particulates, or serious pollutants in water and soil.”
Note the extreme pollution of air, water and soil that still occurs in China and the Former Soviet Union.
3. “Kyoto wastes enormous resources that are urgently needed to solve real environmental and social problems that exist today. For example, the money spent on Kyoto in one year would provide clean drinking water and sanitation for all the people of the developing world in perpetuity.”
Since the start of global warming mania, about 50 million children below the age of five have died from contaminated water.
4. “Kyoto will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and damage the Canadian economy – the U.S., Canada’s biggest trading partner, will not ratify Kyoto, and developing countries are exempt.”
Canada signed Kyoto but then most provinces wisely ignored it – the exception being now-depressed Ontario, where government adopted ineffective “green energy” schemes, drove up energy costs, and drove out manufacturing jobs.
5. “Kyoto will actually hurt the global environment – it will cause energy-intensive industries to move to exempted developing countries that do not control even the worst forms of pollution.”
Note the huge manufacturing growth and extremely polluted air in industrial regions of China.
6. “Kyoto’s CO2 credit trading scheme punishes the most energy efficient countries and rewards the most wasteful. Due to the strange rules of Kyoto, Canada will pay the Former Soviet Union billions of dollars per year for CO2 credits.”
Our government did not pay the FSU, but other governments did, bribing them to sign Kyoto.
7. “Kyoto will be ineffective – even assuming the overstated pro-Kyoto science is correct, Kyoto will reduce projected warming insignificantly, and it would take as many as 40 such treaties to stop alleged global warming.”
If one believed the false climate models, one would conclude that we must cease using fossil fuels.
8. “The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.”
Governments that adopted “green energy” schemes such as wind and solar power are finding these schemes are not green and produce little useful energy. Their energy costs are soaring and these governments are in retreat, dropping their green energy subsidies as fast as they politically can.
IN SUMMARY:
All the above predictions that we made in 2002 have proven correct in those states that fully adopted the Kyoto Accord, whereas none of the global warming alarmists’ scary warming projections have materialized.
HOWEVER, THAT SIMPLE SUMMARY WAS TOO COMPLICATED FOR OUR POLITICIANS, WHO CONTINUED TO OBSESS ABOUT THE GLOBAL WARMING BOGEYMAN, AND SQUANDERED MANY TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS ON GREEN ENERGY SCAMS.
So I wrote about the intermittency problems of grid-connected wind and solar power, and the need for almost 100% backup from conventional power generation like fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear. I also wrote about the excessively high cost of green energy and its risk of destabilizing the entire electrical grid.
Again, this was too completed for our politicians, who continued to obsess about global warming even though it was NOT HAPPENING, and continued to squander trillions on green energy scams.
Finally, I decided to dumb it down so our politicians might actually understand.
I wrote:
Wind power – it doesn’t just blow – it sucks!
Solar power – stick it where the Sun don’t shine!
Finally, the European politicians seem to be getting the message. However, in North America, the obsession of politicians with (fictitious) global warming sails on, like a ghost ship with its long-dead crew, searching for redemption.
Best to all, Allan 🙂
More simple summaries for our politicians:
“Cheap, abundant reliable energy is the lifeblood of society – it IS that simple.”
“When misinformed politicians fool with energy systems, innocent people suffer and die.”
– Allan MacRae, P. Eng.
CO2 emissions are acidifying the oceans and causing Earth to retain more energy, melting ice and changing the climate, it’s that simple. That’s the conclusion of nearly every informed scientist, scientific institution and society on the planet. The politicians accept it. Infuriating. Isn’t it.
CO2 emissions are acidifying the oceans …
No. they’re not.
That’s the conclusion of nearly every informed scientist, scientific institution and…blah, blah, &etc. The same tired old ‘Appeal to Corrupt Authorities’ logical fallacy.
The politicians accept it.
As do the scientific ignoramuses.
Infuriating. Isn’t it.
Infuriating? More like: amusing. Skeptics of the DAGW nonsense won the scientific debate years ago. Now the ignoratii have shifted their argument from science to to politics.
Infuriating, isn’t it?
“Infuriating. Isn’t it.”
YES, especially when it’s never been proven…
Thanks for the laugh, Dennis Horne.
Also, the sky is falling – it hit you on the head.
🙂
Dennis Horne- One has to conclude either that you cannot read or choose not to. Most on here would accept that global warming might exist even if CO2 has nothing to do with it. Ocean acidification however is complete nonsense. Go ahead- show us a paper that proves what you just said! It doesn’t exist, which is proof that you believe- in the absence of evidence- because you want to believe. Sad! Irrational and sad. Maybe science isn’t your thing?
Since it seems apparent that Dennis Horne can’t read and/or evaluate any of the actual scientific literature for himself, I provided a video link to one of his heroes (Muller) destroying his argument upthread.
It is a bit strange to observe the battle between the climateers and the sceptics.
It is hard to win for the sceptics saying that it is not a problem, even when true. It gains no entusiasme.
The climateers are in the same trouble, they can only predict no change if we follow them, but a lot of problems if we keep on.
Ya gotta be careful when giving advice, someone might actually take it.
I’d love to see a lot more debunkings of articles, YouTube videos, claims, etc. I always enjoy those posts.
Remove the scammer trolls filling up the WUWT facebook page.
I have not read all the comments, but why fix something that is not broken?
If truth is your goal, then you cannot improve anything.
As an onlooker, there is a lot of very cool, very clever people, who take time out to educate an idiot like me.
So yes,…let it be.
1) Keep up the outstanding work.
2) Answer the question “What Can We Do?” I was at a global warming debunking event the at the end an angry mob simply wanted to know “What Can We Do To Stop This Nonsense?” How can we counter the AGW promoters? The answer was to run for your Political Party’s Central Committee. They are the grass roots entry level positions, they are easy to win, and they determine the direction, platform, endorsements and nominations of the political party . Most people have no idea what a Central Committee is, and who the people are when they vote for them.
3) Publish more articles in plane English, focus of the smoking guns, and present them in classroom lecture format. Most people don’t have scientific backgrounds, and need talking points to argue this issue. Find the nuggets that any 8th grader would understand, compile a list of smoking guns, and provide talking points.
4) Define an agenda on how to fight back and put the AGW people on the defensive. An open source temperature reconstruction and climate model, an agency for validating scientific practices and conclusions of Federally Funded Research, penalties for wasting tax payer money, transparency into the process of granting and funding, requirements to release data and methods to the public, banning of “peer review” as an acceptable way of reaching a conclusion.
5) An EEOC for Universities that cuts funding for Universities that show a political bias in hiring.
6) Prosecute people like Michael Mann for corruption, collusion, misrepresentation and misleading the public.
7) Align the grant funding and research priorities process with the Nation’s needs. Climate Change is a made up agenda to fund an agenda promoted by environmentalists and Democrats. America has far more pressing issues like Cancer, Childhood illnesses, Employment, Economic Growth, True Energy Independence, etc etc etc.
Can someone explain why the photos of the sun and the large sun spot on the upper left edge has not changed for well over a week now? I know the sun has not stopped rotating. What is going on?
Thanks,
Allen
It’s probably a caching issue, both WP and your system are trying to speed up access and reduce bandwidth by keeping frequently accessed stuff around. You can try clearing out the cache in your browser and you may be able to change the amount of time it keeps a cached image.
You can (this is usually more hassle than it worth) copy the image URL to your browser, and add a question mark and some random text. The browser will think it’s looking at a new page and fetch from the server. E.g.
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/latest/latest_256_HMIIC.jpg?foo
That should show:
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/latest/latest_256_HMIIC.jpg?foo.jpg
It appears that WordPress has introduce image cache, https://i0.wp.com/www….xyz, saving the initial image, updates will not be visible without ‘clicking’ on the image, then reverts back to the initial one.
Here is example https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/04/22/friday-funny-earth-day-hate-mail/#comment-2197762
I tried to correct spelling ‘breathing’), any idea to overcome the problem.
I edited your comment to change the URL to add “?0.gif” expecting that would force WP to reread the image. It didn’t work, I’m not certain why. I’ll try the new URL on the Test page too.
—-
Curious, it worked on the test page. If you create a CAGW1.gif file with the fix, I can try editing that in.
We’re down to one sunspot today – Sunspot number is 11 – 10 points for the “group” and 1 point for the spot.
http://spaceweather.com/images2016/24apr16/hmi360.gif
Looks like that image still has a tiny bit of the spot no longer being counted. It should be gone by tomorrow.
Thanks Mr. Werme
link to corrected new CAGW1.gif
file
Well, it looks like I’m going to have to take a different tack than everybody else.
As “…the world’s most viewed climate website” this site is an opportunity that is being squandered. The world needs a go-to site that is a well organized reference for the climate change issue. From beginner to expert it would go a long way to influence the outcome in favor of the truth.
For starters, it could outline what is the proper sequence to get from the conjecture of AGW to proper scientific theory. Then it could use the magic of hypertext to drill down into the actual research and news articles that speak to each step of the sequence.
A good example of this is the need for experimentation. Has anybody actually run experiments to see how different levels of CO2 behave in a realistic atmospheric mix? How many people here even know the answer to that question? I have no idea and I can’t find it. If that data exists and doesn’t support an AGW hypothesis then you stop right there.
In my opinion the entire issue is fraught with a seeming inability to argue the larger scientific issues forcefully. Of course, you can’t argue the issues if you don’t frame them properly. What we have is more like a donnybrook where everybody is slugging away at each other and there is no winner.
Regardless of how it is organized, the idea is the same: This site needs to be a reference where anybody can go and readily find the available information on any one of the many facets of this issue.
Although that is an expansion of the scope of this website I don’t think it is an expansion of the mission. I for one am not here to fight. I’m here to win. The sheer volume of traffic on this site is a compelling reason to think boldly about what can be accomplished here.
There are a lot of reference pages hanging off the top nav bar. It sounds like some of your requests would take a huge amount of time to accomplish. Even some of the simple stuff here has taken a huge amount of time, e.g. use this screen capture to find one “simple” experiment and see how long it took to duplicate.
http://wermenh.com/images/top-nav.jpg
A lot of of the experiments you may be asking for are worth an advanced degree and require thousands of dollars of equipment.
Well I might be the last comment but why not have each category placed into various sort categories so we could place the comments and view them into any list fashion we are wanting. Like a preference screen at the top.
I’m not sure what you’re asking for, but anything that requires changes to WordPress’s software is pretty much impossible for us to get. We have very little pull.
What do you call a gaggle of people who think they know more than the entire global community of informed scientists? There must be a word…
‘Climate alarmists’.
They think they know more than the 30,000+ OISM co-signers. heh
Cite ten (or even three) papers in high impact journals that contradict the consensus.
Consensus isn’t science. Therefore consensus isn’t contradicted in scientific papers.
Dennis Horne
High impact journals eh? Would you settle for 3 to 10 high profile worldwide organisations that work actively and aggressively without ceasing, to either prevent such papers from being published, or to otherwise suppress and subvert human advancement.
United Nations,
The New World Order,
The Club of Rome,
Council on Foreign Relations,
The Pope,
The Tri-Lateral Commission,
Greenpeace,
The Illuminati,
Freemasonry,
Media Organisations.
I could find a few more but it’s getting late and I’m hungry.
“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.”
Einstein on consensus science…
Dennis Horne,
I am reminded of a fellow named Albert Einstein who took on the physics dogma/consensus of his day. When asked about the 100 scientists (German; remember the era) who denounced him and his work, he is supposed to have replied that if he were wrong they would only need one to show it.
Once upon a time, every Doctor in the West thought the first thing to do when confronted with a sick patient was to bleed the person. I am sure you would have agreed with them and denounced the Natural Hygienists of the day who objected to the practice.
WUWT’s comment section is a more thorough review process than any “peer reviewed journal”. You ought to start promoting the site as a “peer reviewed journal” for academics to publish. That would drive political activist Michael Mann crazy.
“WUWT’s comment section is a more thorough review process than any “peer reviewed journal””
I agree. If you want a good peer review, come here. 🙂
The model for science journals of the future. Should be followed up with a conclusion by the original author.
An excellent clear paper. Well done. And great comments above. And if it was not for Anthony this would not have happened. I hope that he is properly recognised for his services to the world one day.
I think that, as others have said, we need a concise clear argument.
It is possible that the paper has already been written- https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/21/does-the-leader-of-the-free-world-really-know-so-little-about-climate/
And http://www.truthrevolt.org/commentary/sayet-why-im-denier-hint-because-its-crap
I think it would be great to continue this discussion for some time.
Well, I think I’ve read every comment on this page… or at least 97% 😉
It seems to me that one of the recurring themes is regarding the finding of stuff. This is always a problem in life. As an 80 y.o hoarder, with several moves of house, I may know I have something but putting one’s hand on it could be something different. My hard drive is bulging with ‘stuff’. Computing ‘searches’ is a wonderful thing – but still fraught with problems. It helps to have a tidy mind but when the volume of traffic is so great (as here on WUWT), there is barely enough time to sort and index all the data.
It would probably take an Amazon team of logisticians to show the way; not very helpful for the average user. One method which would help some of the above commenters concerns would be the Disqus comments platform, where the reader can choose (obviously also having the voting system for posts) from three different views: “Best”; “Oldest” and “Newest”. BUT migrating from WordPress to Disqus? Anthony is probably shuddering at that thought.
So, I don’t think there IS an overall answer – not yet anyway. Some new system may evolve one day but I don’t see one as yet. And as Ric Werme said upthread, the amount of time taken to provide what is already here is huge.
What we as users could do is thank Anthony, the moderators and all others concerned with running WUWT more often and more profusely.
Eugene WR Gallun
Where would we be without them? At the mercy of the Alarmists!
Provide an FAQ section so readers can readily locate common questions and answers.
For example:
What is the official estimate of warming during the 20th century?
What is the IPCC’s best estimate of global warming for the 21st century?
A scientist changes his mind:
No, he didn’t. see:
http://www.populartechnology.net/2012/06/truth-about-richard-muller.html
What is warming the oceans is what is driving CO2 higher. These people seem to forget Henry’s Law and the simple concept of multicorrelation. We don’t have date measuring how much sunlight is reaching the oceans. We don’t even have data sets needed to determine what is warming the climate. More incoming radiation reaching the oceans will warm them, warming the oceans will release CO2, it shouldn’t be a shock that CO2 is highly correlated with temperature, CO2 IS A FUNCTION OF TEMPERATURE!!!! Sunspots are irrelevant, the amount of radiation that reaches earth is the relevant factor. It is as if these climate “scientists” never took a course on basic modeling. They mis-specify models, they use the wrong variables, they reverse the dependent and independent variables, they use linear when they should use log, etc etc etc. Climate “science” is simply an example of a group of people with financial, political and personal conflicts of interest trying to make bogus models that are useful in fooling the public and exploit their ignorance of high level statistics and science.
http://environmentcounts.org/article_image.php?image_type=article&id=66
Dennis Horne
Muller was never a skeptic.
Here’s the Muller video you apparently missed:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BQpciw8suk
Muller destroying Mann’s “hockey stick”, and exposing the shenanigans of the UEA crowd.
Of course we are warming. We are in an interglacial and also just came out of the Little Ice Age (clearly noted on Briffa’s graph as presented by Muller, and erased by Mann ).
However, 7/10ths of a degree is hardly a “catastrophic” amount (or “unprecedented” for that matter).
Maybe you can explain why the observed temperatures in the real world do not match *any* of the IPCC’s model temperature projections.
Of course I know you won’t be able to, since there is no logical explanation except that the ‘science’ the IPCC is using is wrong. In science , it doesn’t matter if “97% believe” something, especially if the theory has been falsified. ” Number of believers” only matters in religion.
(1) Earth was cooling at 0.2C a thousand years until industrialisation.
(2) Since Mann’s hockey stick, studies have confirmed the conclusions: the 20th century is the warmest in the last 1000 years and warming was most dramatic after 1920.
(3) The story of UEA is a story of a beat-up. Several investigations cleared the scientists of misconduct.
(4) Evidence for warming to the present and projections from modelling are two entirely different things. Sure we don’t know exactly what effect this will have but ice is being lost and it’s likely captured methane will be released.
Emissions of CO2 causes Earth to retain more energy as predicted.
Two degrees Celsius from CO2 is likely to change the climate significantly. That is the balance of informed opinion: a consensus. We need common sense and courage to accept it.
We need to stop China and India burning coal.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958/mean:24/derivative/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1958/scale:0.27/offset:0.095
The carbon dioxide growth rate has been tracking with temperature since the inception of the mauna loa observatory data set. If the past is any indicator of the future, china and india can burn all the coal that they want. It will NOT impact carbon growth…
An excellent clear paper. Well done. And great comments above. And if it was not for Anthony this would not have happened. I hope that he is properly recognised for his services to the world one day.
I think that, as others have said, we need a concise clear argument. Lots of graphs and diagrams. Summary of all the funding.
It is possible that the paper has already been written- https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/21/does-the-leader-of-the-free-world-really-know-so-little-about-climate/
And http://www.truthrevolt.org/commentary/sayet-why-im-denier-hint-because-its-crap
Coupled with http://joannenova.com.au/2016/04/so-nasa-giss-says-it-does-not-fudge-numbers/
It would be good to tap into readers as a resource to write, check, research.
Be aware of current issues and post accordingly. Hottest year ever, Great Barrier Reef, etc.
I think it would be great to continue this discussion for some time.
And why don’t we all contribute to the tip jar now to reward Anthony for having some time away from the desk!!
Request for Constructive Criticism
Since this comment is a day late and a dollar short, I’ll feel better knowing that few will read this one. I don’t like to criticize even constructively, but here are a few thoughts off the top of my head before dawn on a Sunday morning:
1) The guest posts don’t always have to reflect the views of our host. So, we could have more posts that are not in the “consensus” of those who follow this blog. (stop blaming our host for posts that you don’t like)
2) The site should look more closely at why it is forbidden to link to certain sites of the hard-core skeptics. It may well come to pass that the luke-warmers are also wrong.
3) There should be more questioning of the basic physics behind the alarmist’s “consensus”. As an example, why do they always look at the earth as if it were flat and the sun was always shining coldly. I can tell you that here in Florida we have nights and days — and the sun is darned hot on sunny days.
4) I think more articles on the vast uncertainty that surrounds the current “consensus” would be in order. For example, we can’t get a prediction from the IPCC for 10 years out that is accurate; and they want us to believe they know what will happen 100 years out?
5) More open threads where disagreement with the prevailing consensus is allowed. (lighter moderation of those of us who think CO2 does not warm the surface)
~Mark
I’m very happy with the way the WUWT website is structured (threads etc), and with the open policy (all views welcomed), and I think there is very little that can improve what we have.
But I’m trying to think outside the box a bit, and in a US election year there is definitely more that we can do. I say “we” because Anthony shouldn’t have to do everything and we all need to contribute.
I think it’s time for WUWT to get onto the front foot.
We need to put together a large group of scientists, and others, who can put the case for climate science (real climate science, that is), and we need to search for donors to fund them. They then need to approach all US political representatives, candidates and their advisers, and try to get them to understand that the science is not settled and to understand some of the glaring problems with the IPCC reports and other warmist studies and propaganda. They need to get onto the MSM and get the message across there. They need to run public meetings, and explain how proposed climate mitigation actions will adversely affect everyone’s lives, and how they will adversely affect the US economy. And they also need to explain that adaptation is an eminently more sensible approach than a futile attempt at mitigation, that global cooling is a possibility, and that global warming and CO2 have many benefits too.
Commenter co2islife has touched on this. I think the time is right to start being aggressive about it. OK, it’s a big ask, but this is a crucial election year in the US, and there may never be another opportunity like it.
Mike, as usual is usual from you, a very well articulated point… Doubtful that anything like this will ever happen, though. (admittedly, it would be nice to see) I envision a slow inexorable awakening as agw theory becomes less viable as time goes on. To some degree the hiatus is doing this already. As well, the high cost of renewables is coming up against political reality. (lest we forget, cap and trade is a factor in why we have a republican majority in both u.s. houses of congress) This agw thing will go away in small increments in large part because the watts’s of the world will keep on doing what they’ve been doing (albeit with greater efficacy) as time goes on. What you’re advocating is a sort of quantum leap which may hasten the demise of agw, but i think at the end of the day it will be reality and not activism that will end it. The job of the skeptical community will be to capitalize on that reality as it unfolds by continuing to do what it has always done so well…
“as usual is usual” should read “as is usual”
(my apologies to donna…)
Hi Anthony I’m keen on Geology and it would be good to see comparisons to past natural events such as Mt Tambora eruption in 1815 and the global climate effects from that which were much destructive and quicker than AGW
I like the site, and I like the comments.
Overall it is very good.
But I do think the quality of writing could be improved in some of the guest posts. Many of them are long and rambling and struggle to reach a conclusion. It might be better to change the structure of some of the posts to give a summary and conclusion at the top of the post, backed up by more detail in the meat of the post.
Why not dump the photo thumbnails?
– They usually don’t add anything, being just filler images to make the site look more cheerful. As such they add nothing. This cheerfulness comes at a cost.
– I am pretty sure that Anthony et al spend more time searching for and processing such pointless images than they do on more important web tasks. Because I realize how much effort has gone into these images I find their pointlessness really quite irritating. Don’t believe me? Scroll down the WUWT home page and ask yourself how many of these images have any function other than adding a splodge of color.
– If someone no longer comes to WUWT because there aren’t pointless pretty pictures on the front page then perhaps they shouldn’t be here.
– If for occasional posts a thumbnail is really relevant, you can still use it. I am just arguing that the norm should be no images unless necessary.
Sorry FoS…I love the thumbnails…they are usually amusing and more importantly make it very easy to find an article whose comments you are perhaps following when scrolling down through the list of recent articles.
This site is just great…a wonderful source of inspiration, useful facts and generally thought provoking comments.
Anthony does a great job of finding new relevant articles and the moderators are superb at keeping the comments free of the boorish name calling and vindictiveness that one sees other sites so often degenerate into.
Keep up the good work!
Don’t tell that to the bus driver!
Here’s what I would like to see as a Topic: An animation and discussion of the NH weather circulation patterns during the entire decade of the 1930’s.
The 1930’s was the most unusual, extreme weather decade in modern history. No other subsequent time period even comes close to generating the kind of severe weather seen in the 1930’s.
This extreme weather was *not* caused by humans and CO2, it was caused by something else, something natural, and I think it is very important for us to understand what happened in the 1930’s, because we very well may be going in that direction again, sometime in the future, CO2 or no CO2.
We have to assume that the extreme heat of the 1930’s was caused because of stationary high pressure systems, which, when in place, allow the temperatures to get hotter and hotter the longer they stay in place.
In the case of the 1930’s, the extreme weather lasted nearly the entire decade of the 1930’s, which has to mean that the circulation patterns in the NH were drastically changed from what we see normally. I get the impression that the entire NH circulation pattern was stalled, more or less, for years.
An interesting aspect of the 1930’s, is that we actually had record high temperatures and record low temperatures during the same year, in the 1930’s. I think what accounts for this is sometimes a stationary high pressure system, sitting over the center of the U.S., will “wobble” westward a few hundred miles, which opens up the Eastern U.S. to the jet stream that is arcing north over the high pressure system. The persistent high pressure system causes the jet stream to move farther north than normal which allows the jet stream to funnel very cold air down into the United States on the eastern side of the high pressure system. So inside the high pressure system, we have record high temperatures, and just outside the high pressure system, we have record lows.
I would really like to explore this subject, and I think it is about as pertinent a subject as we have.
TA@6:15 Yes, that would be a very interesting topic.
I would also like to see articles on:
1. Whether our naturally warming world means that the oceans are actually releasing CO2 giving rise to the increase seen in Hawaii or are they a sink due to the increasing partial pressure of CO2 as some here have suggested.
2. Just how much of the 400ppm CO2 is man made (whatever that means) and how much is natural. Is it 1 molecule in every 86,000 as Ian Plimer and others have suggested or much more and how is this decided?
+10
That was aimed at TA. A detailed examination of the 1920/30s would be very educational to compare with cuurent times.
I would also like to submit my definition of “Climate Change”:
Climate change is when a longterm temperature trendline is broken, and stays broken.
Anything we can do, you can do better.
If not for that, each would have their own letter.
But maybe this thread will bear fruit.
I like everything about the variety of topics presented and the way they are presented, from the eloquent to the sophomoric, even the vacuous presentations devoid of anything other than hot air.
I still hate the nested comment design, but less so than when it first changed over.
I keep telling myself that one of these days, I will write a post about what research says about what climate might have been like at the peak of past interstadials and whether or not this present one compares well with previous ones, or if it is catastrophic or could become catastrophic before the cold stadial cometh, regardless of where the source of warmth comes from. Maybe when life slows down.
I have never seen this on a blog [any I have read anyway], but I would really appreciate a “grade” which would represent readability/sensibility/worthability by someone at the “top” of this comment foodchain whom I “trust” as a worth skeptic. Anthony would certainly qualify! As a reader who is technical, but not in a climate sense, and who doesn’t spend every waking hour here, I am not familiar with the “local experts” [well, I do know about Dr Svalgaard and Willis and a ….few…. others], and would really appreciate a forewarning by Anthony or his designated rep before I take off into the deep end of some of these posts. I am finding after all these years it is just too much to digest in the blogosphere. I would expect Anthony to grade worthy “dissents” as well, which he seems to do! There is no more valuable site on the Internet on climate “science.” The grade could be in the responder name line, following, like [GRADE: B- by Anthony] or [GRADE: D by Anthony, “worthy…sometimes troll”]. I am sure there will be flame wars about this, but Anthony is the man at the top of the foodchain I trust. He has earned it. There could be multiple grades as well, such as [GRADE:A by Anthony, C by Svalgaard, etc] REALLY need a quick summary of this stuff!
Since the entire trillion dollar per year “Climate Change” industry is balancing itself upon the theory that co2 causes warming, shouldn’t this part of the climate debate be more strongly zeroed in on?
EM, my view is that it has been, in many ways. But there are lots of moving parts. CO2 is a GHG. Experimental fact. It does not saturate because more raises the ERL in the troposphere. Its direct impact is logarithmic. 200-400ppm has same direct impact as 400-800, both 1.1-1.2C. The easy part.
But how much it will actually warm is uncertain because of feedbacks. The two biggest are changes in water vapor and clouds.
The most important water vapor is the upper troposphere, not the surface. It is specific humidity that counts. At those altitudes, specific humidity is impacted by convective processes like tropical thunderstorms that have to be parameterized beause GCMs inherently lack sufficient resolution (by 6-7 orders of magnitude) to numerically simulate. Parameterization raised the attribution problem beetween natural and anthropogenic.
Clouds are complicated because their altitude, entrained precipitation, and optical depth all matter. Even the IPCC admits in both AR4 and AR5 that climate models don’t do clouds well. Same computational constraints, except more like 10-12 orders of magnitude.
You see how murky the issues get in ‘covering’ your ‘simple’ issue.
ristvan, I’m aware of these complicating factors — shouldn’t this murkiness be more zeroed in on?
I guess this is as good a place as any to ask a question.
I used to work for several railroads in the past, and I know that every U.S. railroad (Don’t know about foreign railroads, but probably the same) recorded the temperature and sky conditions, four times a day, from every little station up and down each rail line, from the time those railroads were first established in the 1800’s. The Station Agents would report the weather conditions to the Train Dispatcher’s Office, where the Dispatcher would write all this down on the trainsheets.
I have always wondered if any of this temperature data was ever used in any way, by climate scientists. It would seem to be a really good source, although you would be hardpressed to find this data today. I suppose some railroad historical society might have archived the trainsheets. These records would be about as accurate as anything available.
I not sure if anyone outside the railroad industry even knows these data were available.
No data but a very interesting article from NOAA
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/pa/history/signal.php
Listed below are a selection of the weather forecasting tools.
A red sun has water in his eye.
When the walls are more than unusually damp, rain is expected.
Hark! I hear the asses bray, We shall have some rain today.
The further the sight, the nearer the rain.
Clear moon, Frost soon.
When deer are in gray coat in October, expect a severe winter.
Much noise made by rats and mice indicates rain.
Anvil-shaped clouds are very likely to be followed by a gale of wind.
If rain falls during an east wind, it will continue a full day.
A light yellow sky at sunset presages wind. A pale yellow sky at sunset presages rain.
Thanks for that link, Vukcevic. I found this interesting:
“Thomas Jefferson bought his first thermometer while writing the Declaration of Independence, and purchased his first barometer a few days following the signing of the document. Incidentally, he noted that the high temperature in Philadelphia, PA on July 4, 1776 was 76 degrees. Jefferson made regular observations at Monticello from 1772-78, and participated in taking the first known simultaneous weather observations in America. George Washington also took regular observations; the last weather entry in his diary was made the day before he died.”
I would like to see more on the scientific method and how the warmists seem to be completely ignorant of it. The first time any warmist tells me that man-made global warming has been proven. I simply ask them how that can be since the scientific method works by disproof. When I show them the UC Berkeley web-site on the scientific method that clearly explains this they all go wella wella but but on me.
The recent emphasis on the lack of replication in science is a very welcome development as well.
Yeah, Jon, this scientific method thing seems to have gotten lost on a lot of people. There’s a lady named janice who posts (wonderful) comments here who claims to be a “non scientist” (which in reality of course she is). She keeps on bringing up the scientific method though which, in my mind, qualifies her as being more scientific than many a scientist. I used to post comments at dr spencer’s blog, but now that he’s closed up his comment page, i come here. One thing that i want to do now that i am here is focus more on that one point. That being that agw has never been proven. We don’t really how much recent warming there would be without human emissions. Temps could have been cooler than they are. On the other hand they could be the same (or even warmer). We simply do not know. People forget, this is all theory. And a theory remains but a theory in the absence of verifiable PROOF…
There is no “proof” outside mathematics.
Whatever the scientific method is, scientists work doing science. They publish their methods and results and other scientists study and assess it. If it passes judgement the findings are more-or-less accepted. Until shown to be wrong. Or others may verify it. If it stands the test of time and there is a widespread consensus it becomes reality for rational people.
There is no proof of evolution. Where do you stand on that?
@ Dennis Horne
April 24, 2016 at 12:31 pm
=========================================================
Nature will prove or disprove a theory regardless of any consensus.
Evolution remains unproven as does creationism…
(so don’t buy into either one…)
(even though creationism is a better theory)…
Dennis Horne April 24, 2016 at 12:31 pm
“[Scientists] publish their methods and results”
Well, no, sometimes we have to fight tooth and nail to get their method because they don’t want us to see how shonky their work is; or our side has to do a major deconstruction to uncover it.
“.. and other scientists study and assess it.”
Other pseudo-scientists with the same mental bent toward a predetermined conclusion give it a casual reading to ensure it complies with their consensus.
“If it passes judgement the findings are more-or-less accepted.”
If it passes pal-review the findings are accepted by the mutual affirmation society.
“Until shown to be wrong.”
And just who do you suppose is going to do that; and when?
“Until” will be too late; Trillion$ are being wasted now, for purely imaginary reasons.
Where have you been Dennis? Have you not heard of Yamal, where a single treemometer can be used to determine the global temperatures of the past? Or are you not aware how reasonable it is to invert a database to make it correlate with an already contrived curve on a graph? Such things are done by the people you call “scientists.” You need to lift your game mate; if you can’t fool even me, how do you hope to fare with the smarter people on this site?
Slacko, excellent points. Horne is fooling only himself, no one else here.
As Prof Feynman said, “YOU are the easiest person to fool.” That’s what Horne is doing, fooling himself. I think he actually believes what he writes here, incredible as that seems.
You might also add the Jetpack plugin, and make use of some of its wonderful offerings, such as Photon.
goldminor: Nature will prove or disprove a theory regardless of any consensus.
Indeed. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The pudding is in the ‘oven’.
Science advances one funeral at a time (Planck). I wish all the antis a long life and time to reflect.
I like that when articles are posted, there is a link to the original research paper that was the basis for the WUWT article. Even IF the paper is not open access, most often there is an abstract shown and sometimes graphics that are embedded, are also shown. I like to be able to go back to the source
What about possibly WUWT directed crown funding support ? Say, for media Ads, or court challenges. A dedicated, one stop link, to see all current funding’s, and results of previous efforts.
that’s crowd funding, sorry .
Most boards or comment blogs have a certaiin amount of time the post can be edited or added to. Something like an hour might be nice to go back, finish or edit a post or add a reference link to it.
not sure if its possible on this software?
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2015/02/25/co2-greenhouse-effect-increase/
Scientists have observed an increase in carbon dioxide’s greenhouse effect at the Earth’s surface for the first time. The researchers, led by scientists from the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), measured atmospheric carbon dioxide’s increasing capacity to absorb thermal radiation emitted from the Earth’s surface over an eleven-year period at two locations in North America. They attributed this upward trend to rising CO2 levels from fossil fuel emissions.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/nature14240/metrics/blogs
Observational determination of surface radiative forcing by CO2 from 2000 to 2010
You missed my point entirely… The carbon dioxide growth rate has been tracking with temperature for over half a century. While CO2 is still rising, the growth rate has remained steady as have temperatures (until the last few years). Thus china and india can burn all the coal that they wish without fear of adding to the rate of growth of CO2 in the atmosphere…
afonzarelli. Rate of growth is not the issue, the amount of CO2 is rising. It’s gone from 280 to 400ppm since industrialisation. That’s a 40% increase, well accounted for by burning fossil fuels. Earth has retained more energy as predicted by the greenhouse effect.
We need to get the amount of CO2 down and coal produces more CO2 per unit of heat than say natural gas.
A 40% rise in harmless, beneficial CO2 did not cause the endlessly predicted rise in global temperature. In fact, global T paused altogether for almost 20 years.
Therefore, your conjecture has been falsified. As Einstein and Feynman said, all it takes is for your ‘theory’ to be contradicted by obervations once, and your ‘theory’ is debunked.
Feynman said, “It’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.”
Whatever you’re promoting here, it isn’t science.
There are as many uses for excess CO2 in man’s natural eco-system, as there are for petroleum by products.
Yes, dennis, the rate of growth IS the issue… Let’s say the growth rate stalls at 2ppm per year (as a result of no temperature increase). China and India can keep increasingly burning coal and CO2 would continue to rise at just 2ppm per year. They would not be adding anything to the growth rate of atmospheric CO2. Any agw proponent should view this as very welcome news…
afonzarelli. If we stop emitting CO2 now with CO2 at 400ppm Earth will continue to retain more energy than it did with CO2 at 280ppm. In reality the CO2 level will rise, and there will be further warming.
That is accepted by scientists and governments, which want to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 – 2C by reducing emissions of CO2.
dbstealey. CO2 has increased 40% from 280 to 400ppm and Earth is retaining more energy; manifest by increased global mean temperature and other phenomenon including loss of ice.
This was predicted a hundred years or more ago and reported by scientists working for an oil company.
Your appeals to Einstein and Feynman to cover your inability to comprehend the science, which is clear and incontrovertible, is tedious. I’m quite certain it would be clear to both physicists as it is to every informed scientist and scientific institution and society on the planet.
Horne,
CO2 went up, big time.
Temperatures did not follow.
Your conjecture is debunked. QED
D. Horne says:
Your appeals to Einstein and Feynman to cover your inability to comprehend the science…
Says the science illiterate.
There was no ‘appeal’, I merely pointed out that I am on the same page with Feynman and Einstein,. We understand the Scientific Method. You don’t.
If your “theory” (AKA: your hypothesis, or your conjecture) is contradicted by empirical observations, your “theory” is wrong.
So your CO2=cAGW “theory” is wrong. “That’s all there is to it.” QED
Dennis Horne,
Your arguments would carry more weight if you could quote an academic paper or reliable empirical facts to support every wild statement you are making.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
I would like to see a place where I can put suggestions or questions. Like a forum maybe.
..Top of page..” Submit Story” and ” Tips and Notes” ….
Thanks
I think ‘Tips and Notes’ is the container I was looking for.
The RSS link doesn’t seem to work (at least for me) – perhaps you could fix it
Stefan-Boltzmann Law can be given by:
P = ε σ A T4
Where
σ= Stefan-Boltzmann Constant = 5.67 × 10−8 W/m2 K4
ε = Emissivity, no units
A = Surface Area, m2
T = Temperature, K
P is the Radiation Energy, W/m2.
………………C……….…K………….K^4…………ε….…….W/m^2
Surface………15……….288……6.88E+09…..0.95………370.6
LT CO2………-40……….233…..2.95E+09…0.000092…..0.0
From what I can tell the “back radiation” from CO2 essentially does not exist.
I know there are several S-B & other experts willing and able to chime with critiques.
dbstealey. The prediction was CO2 causes Earth to retain more energy. It has. More CO2 = More Energy.
Do try to grasp the fact it takes a huge amount of energy to heat a large mass such that there is a measurable increase in temperature.
You’ve been told many times Earth has warmed about 1C, most of that in the last 50 years, and your hiatus is not statistically significant. Even your gang’s “most reliable record” satellites show warming. So your claim is wrong.
Temperatures have soared in the Arctic which is losing massive amounts of ice. The Antarctic is also warming and losing ice, although gaining sea ice short term for complex reasons.
All this despite half our CO2 emissions dissolving in the oceans, acidifying them.
So why don’t you stop your nonsense, that the hypothesis has failed. All that has fallen over is your straw man — that it hasn’t been catastrophic (yet). Show me where (for example) the Royal Society, US National Academy of Sciences, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Physical Society, American Chemical Society, American Meteorological Society or Uncle Tom Cobley released statements saying it was.
Is Al Gore your straw man? He’s no scientist. Is he?
D. Horne,
Wrong again. Nicholas Schroeder explained why right above your comment.
The endless predictions by the alarmist crowd were, among other scary predictions, that runaway global warming and climate catastrophe would be caused by rising CO2.
That has not happened. The alarmist crowd was flat wrong. ALL of their alarming predictions were wrong. No exceptions. Polar bears are proliferating. Oceans are not “acidifying”. Sea level rise is not accelerating. Polar ice has not disappeared. Nothing unusual or unprecedented is happening, therefore you are 100.0% wrong.
You’re getting slaughtered in this thread, Horne, and the basic reason is simple: Planet Earth is not doing what was endlessly predicted. As (harmless, beneficial) CO2 contiues to rise, global tempertures are not rising along with it; there was no global warming at all, as the warming paused for almost twenty years.
Once again it should be pointed out: no one in the climate alarmist crowd is a scientific skeptic. There is zero skepticism, only your belief. The only honest scientists are skeptics, first and foremost.
That eliminates all climate alarmists. If they were honest skeptics, they would have admitted long ago that their CO2=measurable global warming conjecture is wrong — deconstructed by the only real Authority: Planet Earth.
The prediction by scientists was more energy in the system. There is more energy. There is more warming. Ice is being lost. The sea level is rising. There is more flooding.
Your catastrophe is a straw man.
The failed hypothesis is only in your head.
Like the conspiracy you need to explain it.
The Trenberth paper I cite in my postings above and elsewhere shows cooling in figure 10. 7 of the 8 studies posted on the graphic show more energy leaving the ToA than entering, i.e. cooling. BTW the paper was to study what they know/knew about the hydrologic cycle. Just like IPCC TS.6 they concluded, “Not much, not enough, send more money.”
Here it is.
Atmospheric Moisture Transports from Ocean to Land and Global Energy Flows
in Reanalyses
KEVIN E. TRENBERTH, JOHN T. FASULLO, AND JESSICA MACKARO
National Center for Atmospheric Research,* Boulder, Colorado
(Manuscript received 26 October 2010, in final form 7 April 2011)
Kevin Trenberth wrote:
The null hypothesis should now be reversed, thereby placing the burden of proof on showing that there is no human influence.
He was so desperate to support his “heat hiding in the deep oceans” that he was willing to turn the Scientific Method on its head, in effect trying to force skeptics to prove a negative.
And now we have an escapee from the ‘Slayers’ club, trying to explain away the fact that rising CO2 has not caused global warming; the effects are merely coincidental, as any rational reader can see.
Horne’s “more energy in the system” is nothing more than the ‘Slayer’ claims of radiative balance. Empirical observations contradict that claim, therefore it is falsified. And skeptics have no obligation to explain why; just the fact that real world obsevations contradict the “energy in the system” argument is enough to falsify it.
The planet is always right. Wherever there is a contradiction between a “theory” and observations, it is the “theory” that is falsified — not the observation.
Dennis IS amusing, isn’t he?
Yes, amusing because he (Horne) always deflects from the central points:
The alarmist crowd was flat wrong. ALL of their alarming predictions were wrong. No exceptions.
And:
Wherever there is a contradiction between a “theory” and observation, it is the “theory” that is falsified — not the observation.
The alarmist “theory” (actually, only a conjecture) that the rise in CO2 will cause runaway global warming and climate catastrophe began to waver a dozen or more years ago, when they began to call global warming “climate change”.
The only empirical corellation between CO2 and global temperature (T) shows that changes in CO2 follow changes in T. There is plenty of real world evidence showing that relationship.
But there is no verifiable evidence showing that rising CO2 causes a subsequent rise in temperature. That appears to be entirely coincidental.
There are numerous cause-and-effect charts showing that ∆CO2 is caused by ∆T:
That relationship appears across much longer time frames, too:
(Click in charts to embiggen. Note the author’s “NOTE” in the chart.)
But there are NO (non-overlay) charts showing that ∆T is caused by ∆CO2.
Draw your own conclusions…
haha, ok so increasing CO2 is caused by increasing temperature? Oh man oh man. You do realize that the guys running this website readily confirm that CO2 causes temperature to increase (but not by a significant amount).
So your ideas are not even supported on this website. What does that tell you DB? I’m genuinely curious.
Benben
IPCC models say that CO2 adds about 2 W/m^2 of RF to the atmosphere. All things being constant, which they aren’t, then theoretically that added RF should raise the temp 1.5C/century or whatever the model says. That’s what RCP’s 2.6, 4.5, 6.0 & 8.5 are all about. However, as I have noted in other postings and in Trenberth’s figure 10, 2 W/m^2 is lost in the magnitudes, uncertainties, and ebbs and flows of the atmospheric power flux balance. IOW natural variability wipes out anthropogenic miniscule contributions.
Watt is a power unit, energy over time. 3.412 Btu/h or 3.6 kJ/h. English hours w/Btu & metric or SI hours w/ kJ.
Here you go benben; the vertical axis shows ppm per month (so you have to multiply by 12 to get the yearly growth rate):
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958/mean:24/derivative/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1958/scale:0.27/offset:0.095
benben says:
haha, ok so increasing CO2 is caused by increasing temperature? Oh man oh man….
If you didn’t come across as an idiot before, your last comment has confirmed that status.
And “haha”, you didn’t even look at the charts I posted, did you? As usual you misrepresented what I wrote. If you had quoted me verbatim, you wouldn’t appear so juvenile with your strawman arguments.
First, I have never said that AGW doesn’t exist. That destroys your stupid strawman.
Next, I’ve repeatedly challenged you and others to produce charts like I posted here, but which show that ∆CO2 is the cause of subsequent ∆T.
But you can’t produce any such charts, can you? You can’t produce a single verifiable chart showing that CO2 subsequently affects temperature. None. Oh man oh man…
Finally, Nicholas Schroeder is right when he points out that natural variability wipes out anthropogenic miniscule contributions.
AGW is simply too minuscule to measure — which is what I’ve always said, and I have never said anything else.
I don’t know which of you is less scientifically illiterate, you or Horne. It’s probably a tie. Neither of you has the least bit of skepticism. You’re both True Believers who can’t produce any verifiable, testable, empirical measurements that quantify what you claim. All you have is your endless assertions; your beliefs. But no verifiable, measurable science.
I post plenty of empirical evidence; charts based on real world data and observations. But all you puppies have are your beliefs.
Tell us: how are your beliefs any different from a religion? No wonder scientific skeptics of your beliefs are demolishing your lame arguments.
Pamela Gray April 24, 2016 at 7:09 am
..I still hate the nested comment design, but less so than when it first changed over…
============================================
I agree, takes more time to get through the comments when you have to back track.
Takes some of us, a long time just to get through and digest some of the topics. Not to mention, the suggested links and then get back and comment or ask questions…
The concept that doesn’t register is consilience.
The evidence points to more CO2 causing more energy; global warming and climate change.
Oh well, never mind. The science is settled. The political path stretches before us.
This is just bear-baiting. A sideshow.
“The evidence points to…”
That’s a whole lot different than saying it has been proven…