Recently, this blog passed a few milestones that I thought would be worth sharing with readers. For all of our critics and the vitriol all they throw our way, I challenge any of them to find a climate related blog that even comes close to the level of readership we enjoy here. We recently passed 300 million views and 2 million approved comments (more on that later).Here are screen grabs from the WUWT dashboard showing the numbers:
We also recently passed 40,000 email subscribers.
Given these events, I thought it might be time to refresh some of our readers on the most contentious part of operating this blog and that is the comments section. One of the downsides of being number one is that you’re also the biggest target. And being the biggest target we have a plethora of “anonymous cowards” who try to post comments here that are either wildly off-topic, inappropriate, angry, hateful, or otherwise uncivil. Some of the serial offenders use fake IDs, fake e-mail addresses, and even fake IP addresses to try to get their unwelcome point of view or hate-mongering across.
Because of that I’ve had to implement a strong filter to catch a lot of these people so that such inappropriate comments are not published. Occasionally some get through but fortunately readers tend to point them out and they get deleted by moderators or myself because they don’t adhere to site policy. This would be a good opportunity for all readers to review the site policy which you can view here.
Some of our critics say that we should allow for some of the other points of view to be discussed here such as barycentrism, atmospheric pressure theories, chemtrails, electric universe, geo-engineering theories, etc. etc. etc. In the earlier days we did some of that, and quite frankly a lot of that stuff proved to be nothing more than nonsense, and turned into food fights in the comment section. Been there, done that, not going to do it again. There are other venues and blogs to discuss those things, feel free to go there but don’t ask for them to be discussed here or make comments about those topics. They will be deleted. I don’t allow those topics here for the same reason I don’t share my home with a honey-badger; it’s not productive, it’s noisy, and somebody gets hurt in the end. And like a honey-badger meme, I just don’t care. 😉
For those of you that have wondered why some comments may disappear that contain what you seem to think are very innocuous words, this is the reason; some of the most persistent fake commenters use particular word combinations or phrases that are part of their writing style that we have identified, and sometimes regular commenters fall into that trap accidentally. Bear in mind that each comment is reviewed and if it meets the site policy it will be published. Occasionally there are some comments that may not fit into the categories defined by the site policy but don’t get published. That’s why we have a clause for “on an event basis” to cover such instances. There’s no need to e-mail us to say my comment disappeared! We will find it and recover it if it meets site policy, if you don’t see it after a few hours, you can consider it out of bound for site policy.
There is also no need to keep posting the same identical comment dozens of times hoping that if you just keep trying it will somehow get through. All that does is just create extra work for the moderation staff to clean out duplicate comments. Speaking of extra work, we cannot move comments between threads if you somehow accidentally commented on the wrong thread, and generally we don’t have time to edit people’s comments when they request such things. It would be better if you would just post a new comment directly below it saying the previous comment had an error and fix it, or just simply repost the appropriate comment in the appropriate thread.
Some of our critics say that we should publish all comments because otherwise we’re engaging in censorship. To that I say, bollocks. We wouldn’t have reached 2 million comments in my opinion if this blog allowed a Wild West policy for commentators, and I think the success speaks for itself in the numbers. I challenge any other blog that covers climate to show me their numbers.
I’d also like to make a note about e-mail subscribers. We don’t have a management tool for e-mail subscribers because the entire system is run by WordPress.com and it is designed to be self maintaining by the end-user. Therefore if you want to unsubscribe you have to do that yourself. Each e-mail that comes from each blog post contains a link that will allow you to unsubscribe if you look carefully.
Finally, I’d like to mention that occasionally some of the ads here cause some readers problems due to the ads injecting inappropriate code or badly formed code. Over the past year I have worked very closely with WordPress.com to help them weed out some of the advertisers that have done stupid things with their ads like injecting code that causes the scrolling the jump right back to the ad every 5 seconds. Largely as a result of complaints from our readers about these problems and due to the efforts I put into troubleshooting and relaying the information to WordPress.com staff, I’m happy to announce that about two months ago they implemented a “predatory code filter” that weeds out these kinds of advertiser tricks. I’m happy to report that since this has been done the number of complaints I received has dropped to near zero.
That said, I still occasionally get complaints from readers about pages being slow or pages not loading completely, etc. a lot of this has to do with browsers and the state of the computer hosting their web browser. I have noted a common theme in many complaints like this which is: fear of upgrade. The Internet is an evolving animal and if you don’t keep your web browser updated and most importantly your computer updated you may find that you get left behind at the back of the herd. For those that are interested, I consider the best browser for viewing this website is Chrome with at least 4 GB of memory and processor that’s running at least 1.5 GHz. About two years ago Firefox was my browser of choice but it had become buggy and unstable and I abandoned it. If you are still using Firefox you might want to consider downloading Chrome for a better experience.
As always, I thank you the reader for making the success of WUWT possible. I also thank the many moderators and guest contributors that keep this blog running smoothly and make the wide variety of content available here.
My best regards to all – Anthony Watts
[note: about 10 minutes after publication, a number of typos were corrected that came from voice recognition dictation imperfections]
If only I had time to read everything on this site…Sadly, I have to work and put food on the table.
Congratulations and thank you.
Respect to you Anthony. As you know I am pretty critical of right wing politics and challenge sceptical views that I think are mistaken. But you tolerate me when many of the posters here would love to see me blocked. I have always used my real name, I don’t see the point of discussing yourself if you truly believe in what you say.
I get pretty rough treatment at times, but hopefully I give as good as I get ! You have influenced me (Installing Solar power systems and getting decent hearing aids) so i always think that one day with patience and facts I may be able to influence you or others. Thanks for putting up with me !
Climate science shouldn’t be a question of left or right wing politics. It should be based on facts. Unfortunately most of left wings representatives are defenders of the AGW thesis.
To Anthony – many thanks for WUWT, presenting papers not following the mainstream in climate science and politics !
Thanks, that’s cheering news.
Anthony,
You and your staff do a superb job. Recently one of the trolls decided to impersonate me in order to discredit me. Once I pointed out the issue, most of the offending postings were deleted and the have been further incidences. I know you can’t completely prevent these kind of things from happening, but I want to thank you for quickly stopping it when it happens and making it difficult for the miscreants to continue with their infantile misdeeds.
All I have to add to that are my profound thanks to you and the moderators for the tireless work you’ve all put in to make this site the outstanding success that it is.
Well done, kudos to all,
w.
Thank you for everything.
Congrats! And OT: the comment form is missing on your Tips and notes page. Here’s something potentially interesting. I have been checking the Skeptical Science trend calculator now and then. It uses Foster and Rahmstorf 2011 methodology to calculate error margins for temperature trends in various datasets. Despite the ENSO peak in the end, almost all of the available datasets continue to show a “pause” (no warming exceeding the uncertainty margin, using the calculator’s default settings) during the last 12 to 25 years.
This month, the Berkeley land-only dataset disappeared from calculator. It was the longest dataset available, starting in 1752. It indicated a “pause” of about 20 years, the longest pause in the non-satellite datasets. The NOAA land-only dataset was removed too. It had a pause of over 15 years. It seems likely that their trendless periods would have extended with the El Nino waning.
At the same time HadCRUT4 and NOAA land+ocean were labelled “non-global”. Here the calculator seems to disagree with its data sources. The CRU describes HadCRUT4 as “a global temperature dataset”. NOAA’s respective wording is “global surface temperature dataset”. UAH 5.6 which is still getting monthly updates was labeled “non-current”.
The only datasets without a >10y pause (as defined above) at the moment are NOAA land+ocean and GISTEMP.
The calculator was written by Dr. Kevin Cowtan. The data is mirrored on his personal web page. Wayback machine has archived versions before and after the change: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/tempdata.xml
Has Trump’s administration started the long-feared erasure of climate data? Are his dark agents literally twisting Kevin Cowtan’s arm and threatening the Skeptical Science team? I mean, what other reason could they have for hiding some of the longest datasets showing a continuing 15 to 20 year global warming pause. The guys need our support!
Thanks, fixed Tips and Notes.
Mr. Watts,
Thank you. Thus far your instincts have been superlative. …..And also, monumental thanks to moderators of past and present.
Thank you Anthony for this exceptional source of information, wisdom, open debate and humour (there are usually a few coffee/beer-spilling comments on most days!).
To me and many of my colleagues who enjoy your outstanding site on a regular basis, it is a source of wonderment and joy that, from our seemingly remote locations in Africa and other distant corners of our planet, we can communicate from hour to hour, and often within minutes, with anyone in the world.
When I started my career as a medical entomologist over fifty years ago, I used to write letters on a typewriter from South Africa to my contacts at the British Museum in London, and the Smithsonian in Washington. If I got a letter back within three weeks, that was really fast!
And in those days, one of the life-changing, earth-shattering technical breakthroughs was the IBM Golf-ball typewriter! Wow man, you could change the golf-ball and type ITALICS – how awesome was that!
Regrettably, better speed does not mean better quality, so your moderation is welcomed and supported.
Strength to you and ‘The Team’ at WUWT.
You are making history.
Thank you.
Thanx, dude! You rule!
This is one of my favorite daily reads.
Careful with the housecleaning, I once received a junk mail from someone using my e-mail and had to change the password immediately.
Are you aware of this new study: “Improved estimates of ocean heat content from 1960 to 2015”?
Lijing Cheng,*, Kevin E. Trenberth, John Fasullo, Tim Boyer, John Abraham and Jiang Zhu
Link: http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/3/e1601545.full
Dear Mr. Jakobsen,
Until Anthony replies to your question….
Trenberth and Fasullo, et al. (2017) appears to be just a re-hash of their prior papers.
From paper at your link above:
(Trenberth and Fasullo in Results, Implications for Planetary Energy Imbalance)
Bob Tisdale on this topic:
(Tisdale, here: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/26/climate-models-fail-global-ocean-heat-content-based-on-toa-energy-imbalance/ )
And that’s all I’m going to say on this off-topic subject. A GOOD topic, but, best posted to “Tips” not here.
I only commented here to show readers that this paper is very likely just more JUNK SCIENCE.
Best wishes getting the truth out about human CO2 and ocean heat content,
Janice
P.S. (I beg your pardon — I forgot to copy/paste this in above)
Trenberth and Fasullo are using what appears to be a BOGUS comparison of Cadillac versus Model T data:
(T and A (2017))
Congrats Anthony.
I’ve visited here daily for nearly all that time. I value this site and your contribution immensely.
For those using old Windows Vista computers, which Chrome no longer supports, try Opera.
Congratulations on this achievement.
When you look at the decline of New Scientist and Scientific American it is something very special indeed to make a popular science blog on the internet.
BTW: Edge, Explorer and Chrome all work fine for me with this site, except for Tips and Notes. Nothing seems to let that huge page load on my little laptop.
You single-handedly and literally changed with world for the better, Anthony. And that’s not just admiring hyperbole, either. It’s a fact. “Well-done!” doesn’t cover it. Congratulations and profound thanks. 🙂
And thanks to the mods here for their tireless work, good humor, and cooperative support.
Let’s see … 305 million views … that means every single person in the US has entered the site once, including all the babies. That’s got to be a unique accomplishment. That estimate also illustrates the difference between a statistical truth and a physical fact. 🙂
By the way, when one searches “wuwt” or “watts up with that” Google provides a search page that open with a prominent boxed Wiki link right at the top that says, “Watts Up With That? (or WUWT) is a blog promoting climate change denial that was created by Anthony Watts in 2006… (my bold).”
Google is promoting Wiki’s outright lie; most likely a William Connolley composition. There’s no helping WC, but shame on Google.
Congrats to Anthony and his behind the scenes support folks.
I have visited this site almost every day since about 2008. I was a regular reader of Christopher Booker in the Sunday Telegraph and he praised WUWT in one of his articles questioning global warming. I visited the site and became a regular. About a year later, the ClimateGate story broke. I think Anthony was on a plane at the time. I shall never forget the drama as the disgraceful behaviour of a number of climate scientists became exposed as the emails became public. The site readership soared.
Those of us interested in the science that affects our climate, and who wish to separate the genuine from the false alarmism, owe a huge debt to Anthony, his moderators and guest posters. Thanks to you all.
I was trying to remember how I first came across WUWT, years ago now. You have given me the reminder that it was almost certainly via Christopher Booker in the Sunday Telegraph (UK) and I learnt so much over the years. I never manage to read all of it and have tended to read Jo Nova a lot lately but still pop over here when I can. Many thanks to Anthony and Mods for all you do and good wishes for the future too. Regards, Annie.
I am also indebted to Christopher Booker for his reference to WUWT. I now visit daily. I have learned so much, especially from the commentators. Is this the new peer-review?
Thank you Anthony for your many years of hard work, and your dedication to maintaining your site, and to all the mods who keep it civil. That is why WUWT is so good and world leading.
Great blog and I’ve learned a lot here. My only complaint would be that in the wee hours I sometimes find it impossible to post. I figure it’s site maintenance. Other than that the only other issues I have encountered have been addressed. Thanks!
Thanks for everything, Anthony. What sets WUWT apart for me is the amount of well-sourced information and the overall high quality of the comments. Dissenters aren’t instantly blocked, and everyone has to stand on the quality of their argument or be plowed under.
People will always find the quality product, and this is the best around. Thank you!
What a great blog and what a fantastic service to the world. Anthony, on behalf of your many admirers in the UK, thank you for all that you and your team of moderators do.
My elder brother Dave recommended WUWT to me many years ago. I came over to have a look and I stayed to be educated and entertained. I have had the honour of having a small article posted on the front page following some information that I provided, greatly enjoyed the back-and-to (usually civilized and often amusing) between posters and greatly enjoyed not only the knowledge but also the wit and writing ability displayed by Willis and others.
By the way, WUWT displays just fine in Safari, too. Once again, greetings and thanks from the UK.
Thanks for all you do. It is nice to have views unfiltered by a biased press here. It does not feel like an echo chamber as there are many views expressed here. I can’t remember when I started, but it has been an exceedingly wonderful trip.
Bravo Anthony!
“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”
Ditto
“The beast at Tanagra, his eyes closed”
Sincerely, well done Anthony and WUWT! Science shouldn’t be afraid to answer criticism and you serve up plenty of it, for good or ill. That comes from a ‘warmist’ by the way. (Well, a ‘lukewarmist’ anyway.)
Well done Anthony and his team of helpers. Great work and wishing you ongoing success. Cheers from down under.