General Announcement – 6 August 2023
Scroll to bottom for the update.
The Situation:
Recent reader comments have reminded us, once again, that in the WUWT Archives there are a lot of really good, even important, pieces that have unfortunately become buried in the “mists of time” – and are now only partially remembered. The majority of them are basic education on topics, basic explainers, and even many of the more general posts are just as timely today as they were when originally published – some even more timely now than then.
And while we have a “pretty good” search engine installed, it can often be hard for long-time readers to find that one particular post that they have in mind – they only remember that it was about “some certain subject” but not the one tagged at the top. There have been, after all, over 30,000 posts here since 2006 – averaging 33 per week for 17 years – averaging, long-term, 4 per day. [These are, admittedly, gross estimates from the basic total number but fairly accurate none the less.] In more recent times, we have tried to maintained a schedule calling for about 6 new original posts per day — a grueling demand on authors, editors, sys admins and moderators.
And, like your email account, as more and more new things pour in, the older things sink to the bottom of the page, the bottom of the stack, the bottom of the archive. Further and further down under the weight of the new.
This is unfortunate. WUWT attracts new readers every day. They haven’t had the opportunity to read the previous deeply explanatory posts on important topics. Long-time authors often allude to previous posts — “As I have explained many times….” — but authors just can’t link to ten past posts published over a period of years…and even if they did, most readers following the links would discover they have been assigned a week’s homework reading! And not all of the links would be of the same quality or value.
What We Propose:
The idea, still in its infancy, is to create a new section of the site that would appear in the navigation banner at the top—alongside of About, ClimateTV, Books, etc—named something-along-the-lines-of The Best of WUWT. That link would lead to a list of posts nominated by our readers as the most informative, most useful, most readable, most whatever you readers classify as “best”. These would be probably broken into categories by subject – Best Posts on Sea Level, Best Posts on Surface Temperature, etc.
As “Best” is a judgement call, who better to make those judgements than our readers.
The Rules:
There are no rules.
How to nominate:
Readers only need leave a comment and nominate posts for inclusion. The most useful way would be by URL. If not that then with the post Title (Headline).
Example:
This is a URL — https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/06/01/anthony-on-livestream-what-climate-emergency/
The post title was: “Anthony on LiveStream – ‘What Climate Emergency?’
After that, you can try a post description, but we probably will not have the time or the energy to do the searching for you – so, make your nomination count: give us a URL or Title.
Hint: In recovering the URL for a WUWT post, it can also be useful to use one of the major web search engines which might find your favorite post with a search such as — “by Kip Hansen” Wasting Time WUWT which returns a recent post by that author on that subject as the first item on the list.
It would be helpful if you gave a short statement on why you are nominating a post: “I use this time and time again to show my students….”, “I found this post exceptionally educational.”, “Best primer on the topic I’ve ever seen.” You get the idea. Readers can also suggest a “section” in which the post might be included: “Global Average Surface Temperature”, “ENSO”, Climate Sensitivity”, and the like.
UPDATE:
Perhaps I should’a/could’a been clearer.
This is not a contest. We are NOT looking for the One Best post — we are looking for all of those many Best Posts out of the >30,000 posts in the archives.
Maybe I should have said “suggest” or “recommend for inclusion” – but nominate seemed more fun.
For you this means you don’t have to agonize over which post you think was the #1 Best – if you have any you really liked or really found useful, suggest them in comments – all of them that fit your idea of those that were the best.
You can suggest/recommend/nominate as many as you like –more is better.
Nominations Are Now Open!
– – – – –
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/02/the-big-list-of-failed-climate-predictions/ and
its massive update https://wattsupwiththat.com/failed-prediction-timeline-cr-backup-7_18_23/
— because both precisely identify name and time where “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” has occurred with respect to so-called “climate experts”.
My apologies . . . I could also have referenced the following, albeit having much of the same references as in the second URL I provided above:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/failed-prediction-timeline/
— same reason for proposing inclusion, but in this case no author is cited
And I would like to nominate Bob Tisdale’s article:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/12/13/examples-of-how-the-use-of-temperature-anomaly-data-instead-of-temperature-data-can-result-in-wrong-answers/
Excerpt:
“Yup, that’s right. In addition to the Contiguous U.S. (Figure 3), China also had high surface temperatures in the first half of the 20th Century. (Splain that, oh true-blue believers of human-induced global warming.)”
end excerpt
Thank you for the nomination, Tom.
Regards,
Bob
Thank you for the Tmax charts, Bob. 🙂
My nominee:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/18/replicating-al-gores-climate-101-video-experiment-shows-that-his-high-school-physics-could-never-work-as-advertised/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/05/24/participate-in-the-surfacestations-project-version-2/
and
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/09/28/more-surfacestations-project-vindication-strong-uhi-temperature-biases-confirmed-in-usa/
and
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/05/20/warming-temperature-measurements-polluted-by-bad-data-research-confirms/
— first two by Anthony Watts, third by Sterling Burnett, for publicly advancing how badly official ground temperature monitor station data has been compromised by both urban heat island (UHI) contamination and improperly sited official temperature monitoring stations, thus calling into question the very data used by the IPCC and climate alarmists in general to support the meme of “unprecedented global warming”. There are many preceding articles discussing this problem . . . too many to list. It is largely due to these works posted on WUWT and presented separately in Anthony’s published works on the subject (especially that in Climate at a Glance), that caused NOAA to finally admit that, yeah, UHI is a valid source of error in our compilations of ground temperature measurement records. Very important scientific work and findings.
During my CoVid lockdown, I noted these articles, (many by Willis) were pertinent to my quest to understand cloud feedbacks….
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/01/21/a-chain-of-effects/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/01/28/global-ice-story/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/03/15/clouds-from-both-sides-now/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/08/16/new-paper-from-lindzen-and-choi-implies-that-the-models-are-exaggerating-climate-sensitivity/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/03/27/way-out-of-balance/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/04/17/atmospheric-energy-recycling/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/07/12/a-co2-puzzle/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/11/06/temperature-regulated-cooling-dominates-warming-and-why-the-earth-stopped-cooling-at-15c/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/08/25/a-balancing-act/
The foregoing was taken from a single file on “Clouds”, that had another couple of hundred research papers and tech articles in it. There were 35 WUWT articles in that file, so WUWT is certainly a valuable resource for climate info.
DMacKenzie ==> Just the kind of list we are hoping for.
I forgot this AWE INSPIRING graphical representation in a set of 3 posts by Willis, Fig. 1 should be in every climatology and meteorology textbook to explain what controls the planet’s temperature. Showing a “%of Earth’s surface” bar is true genius.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/10/21/scatterplot-sensitivity/
Well, that is very easy IMHO..
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/08/19/the-ipccs-attribution-methodology-is-fundamentally-flawed/
there is nothing more important currently than a discussion (and hopefully the follow up), what the models can and cannot do, starting with Ross finding that the “translation” into the real world was done incorrectly, so far there is no redeeming response to his findings!
My nomination.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/10/moncktons-schenectady-showdown/
At the bottom is a link to a video of the event ( http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/20909681 ) but unfortunately it says the page can’t be found. If it exist elsewhere it’s well worth watching.
It was in watching his presentation that I came to accept that Man’s CO2 may well have a slight effect on temperature but it’s no big deal.
Kip, of all the many guest posts I have made here there are perhaps 4 worthy of consideration for what you propose. I will give the post titles, then the WUWT search tool finds them easily. All are several years old already. Two were requested by CtM.
Rud ==> I’ll look them up for you.
I nominate a recent one.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/08/02/a-brief-history-of-climate-from-prehistory-to-the-imaginary-crisis-of-the-21st-century
Frankly, I believe it contains everything to discredit the warmunists, and should be required reading in every school(yeah, good luck with that). It requires no complex math that no one will pay attention to anyway, but it well states the killer observation–if the climate has varied immensely over time, completely at odds with CO2 levels. Where’s the panic?
Kip, an excellent idea. Maybe it should not be a once-every-five-years thing. Why don’t you allow readers to upvote/downvote posts, even retroactively? And an option to search by a total score, positive score, negative score, activity? Add categories, if you feel that it is needed. Of course you will have to guard against trolls ..
No-one should down vote anything.
Counter-arguments should be made.
Have long thought that two changes ot WUWT format that have been particularly bad have been the introduction of popularity scores and the loss of the recent comments link on the right of the screen.
My nomination:
Together, both of these show that the milli-Kelvin uncertainty numbers for temperature measurements typically claimed in climatology are optimistic, to be kind.
If anything, the horrible and embarrassing attempt to gatekeep Nikolov and Zeller should be confined to the trash heap of history.
This extremely lame misrepresentation of the theory which shoves NASA’s awful energy budget model down our throats with its stupid physically impossible back-radiation concept was the first clue to me that some of these guys are literally the paid shills alarmists claim they are.
Nikolov and Zeller’s theory displaces the radiative energy budget model, and completely removes the thermodynamic role of back-radiation.
Eschenbach inexplicably focuses on pressure (he clearly read the paper, understood it, and came up with a lame rebuttal to gatekeep against it).
Here’s the elevator pitch.
Solar radiation heats gas.Gas expands and convects.Heat transforms into work, against gravity.It is removed from the radiation budget.The work becomes potential energy.This allows the gravity to later do work against gas and the surface, compressing the airmass.This work transforms into heat, warming the surface.It is not “pressure” that heats, but work. It’s called an atmospheric cell. Radiation is ongoing during this process, but radiation is a factor of temperature. Temperature is “hiding” as potential energy. You cannot model this with a radiation-exclusive energy budget.
You have to accept, as is completely scientifically sound, that cold airmass cannot contribute any heat energy to a warmer surface by radiative means. The frequency density of the cold object’s radiation is not absorbed, but re-emitted, by the warmer surface. This has been experimentally validated.
https://www.thepostemail.com/2019/11/25/greenplate-effect-it-doesnt-happen/
When you remove this non-existent effect from the energy budget, and model in Work in the adiabatic cycle, you have no energy imbalance in N&Z’s theory.
The disingenuousness from the “Koch kids” has been revolting to witness, as a skeptic.
All the other Koch Kids and I propose the inclusion of this post.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/23/the-mystery-of-equation-8/
Add me to the list
Should I make us a Koch kids graphic?
You’re completely aware of the sufficient rebuttal.
https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/nikolov-zeller-reply-eschenbach/
Eschenbach’s inability to conceive of how potential energy can remove heat from the radiation budget.
Anthony Watts’ failure to understand this in the context of the conservation of energy.
This is below their proven caliber of thinking.
In the link you provided we have:
If you dump the physically impossible greenhouse effect, and stop trying to model the whole atmosphere as a black-body, admit there’s heat transport by means other than radiation, and understand how the concept of potential energy works, then what N&Z demonstrated represents the most elementary possible statement on planetary temperatures imaginable.
I’m sure ego and reputation are involved at this point, but I can’t fathom that these basic scientific principles are going misunderstood.
This is disingenuousness and the feigning of ignorance. What would the motive possibly be, for already scorned and outcast scientists, than the motive of an outside patron?
In any event my point was made, my vote was cast. If you want to celebrate WUWT as a darling of doubling down on the worst elements of fraudulent institutional climate science, go ahead.
What a coincidence! I just cited a companion post last week.
Thanks for pointing that out. Willis provided a pretty nice proof using the first law of thermodynamics. A person could also just appeal to the first law, as written to show the same, but mathematical proofs never convince disciples of their error. It turns out that a person can also form a roughly equivalent “elevator” proof of the error of N&Z using the second law of thermodynamics.
Violating both laws of thermodynamics ought to have someone confined to physics jail.
I need only gently point out that all gases within Earth’s atmosphere (or any other planetary atmosphere) thermally radiate energy isotropically . . . that is, in all directions. That, in turns, means some radiation is directed upward to higher levels or space, and some energy is directed downward to lower levels or the surface, the latter being the essential definition of “back-radiation”.
And I’m certain that I need to point out that the Stefan-Boltzmann law of thermal radiation from any substance having a temperature above absolute zero is correctly formulated as radiation being dependent on T^4, where T is the absolute temperature of the radiating substance.
Many people get confused with the shorthand convention used for calculating net radiation exchange having a dependency of (T1^4 – T2^4), with the mistaken impression that the hotter body, here T1, is somehow “aware” of the presence of a colder body, here T2, and thus adjusts its radiation accordingly. Nothing could be further from the truth.
So, bottom line: anyone asserting that “back-radiation” is a physical impossibility within an atmosphere does not understand basic physics.
You say:”…T1, is somehow “aware” of the presence of a colder body, here T2, and thus adjusts its radiation accordingly.”
If you are correct then how can the below be true?
From WE Steel Greenhouse:”This will warm the planetary surface until it reaches a temperature of 470 watts per square metre.”
Well, let’s see . . . how do I respond to such an idiotic post?
Let’s try the following:
1) I stated that “nothing could be further from the truth” than to assume that a body a T1 was somehow aware of a separate body (at temperature T2) that was radiating thermal energy.
2) Your incomplete statement referencing “WE Steel Greenhouse” (no link provided, of course) is totally inept because it cites a temperature in units of watts per square meter. ROTFLMAO!
mkelly, do you even realize the stupidity of what you post?
“mkelly, do you even realize the stupidity of what you post?”
It’s no more stupid than an MIT Thermodynamics prof stating that temperature is equal to average kinetic energy. I remember a couple of my fellow students making that same statement while in college. It’s a misstatement of the definition of temperature from the kinetic theory of gases. Obviously temperature, such as Kelvin, is not equal to energy, such as Joules. The units don’t match nor are they capable of being converted into each other.
I just love anecdotal stories.
I remember this dog I once had that . . .
The Thermostat Hypothesis
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/14/the-thermostat-hypothesis/
This is Willis’ masterpiece in terms of contribution to climate science.
Well researched, well written.
During the nascent weeks of the CoViD-1984 scare, one of the best articles that started me on the path of understanding the problem:
The Math of Epidemics
Apparently others liked it too with 560 comments.
The way C19 was handled here was amazing.
Howdy,
Just type in my ‘name upcountrywater
And you will find the best shared post, and a weather phenomenon that needs more looking at..
Oh, regarding your search engine another issue; lots of work need to be done to bring back thousands of pictures on most posts in here that are 10 to 15 years old, those pictures are now just electron dust..
I guess all thanks goes to WordPress for that..
upcountrywater ==> You seem to be referring to the oddity that when we try to look at older posts, some of the images don’t appear. I have found that if one clicks in the “space” and gets a menu drop down, it is possible to click “open in new tab”, it will come up…yes, WordPress.
There was a post I can’t find. I don’t remember enough of the title or how to phrase a search on WUWT or Google to find it.
It had to do with the California-type regulations the EPA has adopted that if a large amount of a chemical (in drinking water, the air, etc.) is harmful then any amount is harmful.
It addressed that the human body can deal with some levels with no ill effects. (I think it also got into that the human body requires some of chemicals would kill you at a high dose.)
Maybe that’s enough to jog someone’s memory and they’ll find it.
PS It may outside of goal of this new proposed reference, but if it will have a humor section that would include things like https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/29/new-branch-of-science-coined-on-wuwt/ , may I suggest it be named, “The Lighter Side of Hot Air”? 😎
Karl is full of ship!
BOMBSHELL – NOAA whistleblower says Karl et al. “pausebuster” paper was hyped, broke procedures • Watts Up With That?
Hide and recline!
McIntyre: The deleted data from the “Hide the Decline” trick • Watts Up With That?
WUWT TV!
Announcement: WUWT-TV to counter Al Gore’s ’24 Hours of Climate Reality’ with live webcast • Watts Up With That?
I’ve got to nominate Willis’ ‘Cooling The Hothouse’ post at https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/09/15/cooling-the-hothouse/.
His Figure 5, ‘Scatter Plot, CENOGRID Temperature vs. Log of Atmospheric CO2, 65 million years ago to present‘ totally destroys any claimed relationship between CO2 and temperature.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/23/butterfly-study-a-case-study-in-confirmation-bias/
I can’t identify “The” best post. Prior to 2010 there was a series of posts that reported the area of the planet that was heating faster than any other. By the end of about six months, the only areas that hadn’t been reported by climate scientists was a small area in South America. I think there was one other small area. It was hilarious that so many “scientists” identified places where the temps were rising the fastest as being almost everywhere. They either didn’t read anyone else’s papers or didn’t really believe and were making stuff up as a way of laughing at themselves.
I remember printing the articles and reading them to my co-workers at lunch. They were all believers. They eventually voiced the accusation that I was listening to an echo chamber (WUWT). I had to laugh. They were listening to the MSM. A recurring meme was that 97% of scientists agreed that CAGW was real. They couldn’t all be wrong. I eventually dropped them because they used that rationale for their beliefs as opposed to actually studying the subject for themselves.
Haven’t heard from them since 2011. Maybe they drowned in the rising oceans. Don’t miss them. The minimum degrees were B.S., but many M.S degrees as well, all in engineering and physics. A degree in STEM does not guarantee the ability to reason. I sometimes wonder if the “Logic” class I took in high school made a difference. It was wonderful for teaching me to look for logical fallacies – like argumentum ad populum and argumentum ab auctoritate. Actual dataneed not apply!
Regarding the “faster than any other” topic, I nominate these two:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/24/faster-than-everyplace-else/
“Faster than everyplace else…” 2010 July 24
https://wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/world-warming-2xfaster.mp4
‘Twice as fast as everyplace else…’ (the very clever October 2019 video update)
I know of that first 2010 post by Anthony because when doing a search through my GelbspanFiles post for number of the times I had links (107!) to WUWT at my blog, I had that video update link which shows a screencapture of Anthony’s 2010 post.
Both illustrate just how comically dumb the opposition is with their Clima-Change™ alarmism.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/11/more-gunsmoke-this-time-in-nepal/
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/07/himalayan-warming-pulling-another-thread-from-ipccs-fragile-tapestry/
So many authors … Willis, Anthony, Andy May, Eric Worrall, Javier Vinos, Dave Middleton and on and on. How could a person choose? I decided to ignore anything reposted from another source. So I just chose to find four articles I recalled distinctly that popped into my head — popped into my head must mean something. I used the search bar on this site to try to find them, but its a tough slog because comments per author are mixed with articles per author.
Willis has so many contributions that I can’t process them all, so I choose one of his oddities that covers a part of the world I am attached to for many reasons:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/06/01/animals-humans-and-the-climate/
An article on sea level by Kip Hansen that really illustrates what a thorny and many faced issue it is
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/12/07/miamis-vice/
One by Joe Born trying to better explain the essense of feedback, a topic that produces much conflict here — a remystifying that followed Nick’s demystifying, and others before him who mystified it in the first place:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/07/16/remystifying-feedback/
And the recent exhaustive study by Pat Frank that demonstrates too much certainty in Earth temperature measurements — something that I think that ranks in importance with Anthony’s site-originating studies on station siting quality
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/06/29/the-verdict-of-instrumental-methods/
Maybe, Kip, we should consider a best 100…
Kevin ==> Just the kind of thing we are looking for…AND, as the update states, we are looking for ALL OF THE BEST posts, every one of them.
Showing my age ! Catchiest title category “Venus envy” 13 years ago.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/08/venus-envy/
I remember that this went on and on about adiabatic heating on the surface of Venus. Was it due to CO2 alone or high density at the surface. Good discussion.
Keith, was that a, ahem, hard one to remember?
It has gotten really hard to arrive here by Google search.
That the search algorithm has been tweaked to ensure that outcome demonstrates that this site has had an impact.