In November 2006, when I launched Watts Up With That?, the idea was simple enough: look at the data, check the instruments, and ask whether the conclusions being drawn actually followed from the evidence. It was never intended as a career in heresy. It was, at the time, a fairly normal scientific impulse steeped in curiosity.
Nearly twenty years later, that impulse requires a helmet.
As WUWT approaches its twentieth anniversary in 2026, it’s worth reflecting on how climate change went from being a hypothesis—one among many competing explanations for observed changes—to a full-fledged belief system, complete with sacred texts (IPCC reports), approved language, and the occasional excommunication.
The climate, meanwhile, has been far less dramatic.
2006–2008: When Thermometers Were Still Just Thermometers
Back in the mid-2000s, climate science still resembled…well, science. There were disagreements. There were debates. People argued about cloud feedbacks, solar influences, ocean cycles, and the reliability of historical temperature records without being accused of crimes against humanity.
Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth arrived in 2006 like a traveling roadshow of impending doom. Polar bears were stranded, seas were rising, and hurricanes were apparently lining up in formation. It was slick, emotional, and heavy on graphs that only went in one direction.
At the same time, a curious thing was happening on the ground. Actual thermometers—those stubbornly analog devices—were being placed next to heat sources, asphalt, and buildings. So WUWT did something radical: we took pictures.
This turned out to be surprisingly controversial, heretical even.
Apparently, photographing a thermometer next to an air conditioning exhaust was not “constructive engagement.” Who knew?
2009: Climategate—The Sound of Trust Hitting the Floor
Then came Climategate.
The emails were not hacked in the Hollywood sense; they were released, read, and promptly explained away. What they showed was not a grand conspiracy, but something far more human: groupthink, defensiveness, and an alarming willingness to manage perception instead of data.
“Hide the decline” entered the public lexicon, and suddenly climate scientists were explaining that it didn’t mean what it sounded like it meant. Which, coincidentally, is almost never a good sign.
For a brief moment, it looked like climate science might undergo a badly needed course correction. Transparency! Open data! Robust debate!
Instead, we got faux inquiries that investigated themselves and found themselves innocent.
Lesson learned: the problem was not the behavior—it was that outsiders noticed.
2010–2014: The Pause That Wasn’t There (Until It Was)
The next few years delivered an unexpected plot twist: the planet declined to follow the script.
Global temperatures flattened. Models predicted steady warming; observations did not comply. This became known as the “pause,” then the “hiatus,” then—after enough editorials—the “thing that never happened and you’re not allowed to mention.”
This was a golden age for climate creativity. Heat was hiding in the deep oceans, where it could not be measured but could still be blamed. Aerosols became the Swiss Army knife of explanations. Data adjustments proliferated.
When observations disagreed with models, the models were not questioned. The observations were “corrected.”
It was around this time that many of us realized the hierarchy had flipped. Models were now reality. Reality was negotiable.
2015: Paris—Promises, Promises
The Paris Agreement was hailed as a turning point. World leaders gathered to save the planet using pledges that were voluntary, unenforceable, and carefully worded to sound impressive while committing to very little.
It was a triumph of political theater.
No one asked how intermittent energy would power industrial societies. No one discussed grid stability. No one mentioned energy poverty. Those details were, apparently, unhelpful.
From this point on, climate policy became less about outcomes and more about optics. If emissions went up, the solution was more ambition. If costs rose, the solution was more commitment. Failure was proof that we simply hadn’t believed hard enough.
2018–2019: The Emergency Button Gets Stuck
Somewhere around 2018, the word “emergency” became mandatory.
We were told we had twelve years to save the planet. Then ten. Then five. The deadline kept moving, but always closer—like a cosmic treadmill.
Children were encouraged to panic. Adults were scolded for driving cars. Weather was promoted from background noise to moral indictment.
A heatwave? Climate change.
A flood? Climate change.
A cold snap? Climate change “disrupting the jet stream.”
Heads I win, tails you deny science.
2020–2022: When Everything Was an Emergency
The pandemic years revealed just how easily societies could be governed by emergency decree. Climate activism took careful notes.
Lockdowns briefly reduced emissions, proving once and for all that modern civilization could, in fact, be shut down—at great human cost—for minimal climatic benefit.
Energy policies, however, continued unabated. Reliable baseload was dismantled. Wind and solar were celebrated for theoretical capacity rather than actual performance.
When grids faltered and prices soared, we were told this was further proof of the need to double down.
It was around this time that “trust the science” quietly came to mean “do not ask questions.”
2023–2026: The Era of Unquestionable Certainty
Now, at the twenty-year mark, the climate narrative is polished, institutionalized, and remarkably immune to evidence.
Sea level rise continues at rates best appreciated with tide gauges and patience. Extreme weather remains stubbornly inconsistent with apocalyptic claims. Crop yields rise. Human adaptability refuses to cooperate with disaster models.
But none of that matters much anymore.
The climate scare no longer depends on predictions coming true—only on maintaining urgency. Models still overestimate warming, but the solution is always the same: adjust, attribute, and assert.
Dissent is not debated; it is diagnosed.
Twenty Years Later
After two decades of watching this unfold, I’ve learned that the most remarkable thing about the climate scare is not how much the climate has changed—but how much the rules of discussion have.
- In 2006, skepticism was part of science.
- In 2016, it is treated as a character flaw.
- In 2026, it seems like people might be listening to us.
WUWT has endured because it kept doing the unfashionable thing: looking at the data, pointing out inconsistencies, and occasionally raising an eyebrow when the emperor’s new model ran a little warm.
The climate will continue to change. It always has. The real question is whether society can rediscover the value of skepticism before policy built on perpetual emergency does lasting damage.
And if not—well, at least the models will still be very confident. /sarc
By the way, if you not seen it yet, check out our newly updated Failed Climate Predictions Timeline.
The crowd sourced Surface Station Survey was awesome.
It is almost 50 years that I make metrology of temperature as responsible of the Italian Standards below 0 °C. I am aware that it is one of the most difficult quantities to measure with REAL accuracy, often confused with precision or even with reproducibility. Consequently it is quite easy to confuse people with false science: this attitude got its maximum in the case of climate. It is metrologically IMPOSSIBLE for the GMST to be claimed having a precision of a few tenths of a °C: it is enough to recall that the WMO, since less of a decade, had stated that surface measurements cannot have an uncertainty lower than +– 1 °C (worse already a few decades previously) and only recently launced a vaste projet based on 4 classes of precision, where only Classes 1 and 2 can provide a precision of 0.2 °C: but so far only a very few stations got so far such a CERTIFICATION.
Finally you can find published papers of mine about the fact that MAPS are much better than the GMST for the real understanding of the surface temperature.
Thank you for your professional assessment of measuring temperatures. Several of us here attempt to preserve the treatment of measurements that you describe.
You will find several folks here, and in climate science generally, that insist statistical evaluation allows one to “discover” physical resolution that was not actually measured by using arithmetic averages.
Take 100 measurements. Add the numbers together. Divide by 90.
Voila! Instant warming! 😎
It was an honor to participate.
To Anthony Watts, while I do understand and respect the emotional/psychological intent of that analogy, I note IMHO that you executing on that impulse of yours should result in you being award a Nobel Prize for launching a world-wide platform where career scientists and citizen scientists alike can read about and openly discuss science in general—and more specifically “climate science” (such as it is)—in mostly-objective, mostly-non-censored terms. Your Web platform, WattsUpWithThat, is the equivalent of the US Constitution’s First Amendment for all of Earth . . . true scientific progress demands freedom of speech.
I agree with tmitsss that your groundbreaking work on UHI distortion of global atmospheric temperature measurements (surface station “surveys” being an essential feature as a reality check) has been and continues to be of extraordinary importance in tempering alarmist claims about global warming. But you and WUWT have exceeded that with your presentations of timely, well-written articles offered by authors, including WUWT editors, on a nearly-daily basis.
Here’s wishing you and “your crew” at WUWT another 20 or so years of continuing success on behalf of us “little folks” . . . whether or not those folks in Stockholm recognize your accomplishments or not.
“WUWT has endured because it kept doing the unfashionable thing: looking at the data, pointing out inconsistencies, and occasionally raising an eyebrow when the emperor’s new model ran a little warm.”
Among the “inconsistencies” is the astonishing revelation that a brief snow episode occurred in a year with a record annual anomaly, which we are invited to treat as a fatal blow to climate science.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/01/02/met-office-blowing-hot-cold/
The point was that the planet is not burning up and the oceans are not boiling. It may be slightly warmer in some locations- but nothing to panic over.
The UK can be warming quickly or slowly, that warming can be benign or concerning, and snowfall can still occur in any case. Paul Homewood does not make this distinction.
His framing suggests that snowfall during a warm year (even amid a mild, natural warming trend) somehow invalidates the climate narrative.
That’s the kind of “inconsistency” this site touts.
Then I suggest that you quit reading here.
No no. Keep reading, but please refrain from commenting. It’s really over. Climate Alarmism is toast. Stick a fork in it.
Your reading too much into it- I doubt he’s implying that a snow storm is invalidating anything and he doesn’t need that as he can offer considerable evidence. It’s more a matter of rubbing it in- that there’s nothing to worry about- but you’re hoping to find such inconsistencies so you can imply how ignorant the climate skeptics are.
My reply is not an over interpretation. It is a direct reading of the framing he chose. The post literally opens with:
“Two contrasting items on the Met Office News website today!”
and then juxtaposes the amber snow warning with the announcement that 2025 is likely to be the warmest year on record.
Yes it is.
No, I’m being serious.
He states it outright and constructs the juxtaposition.
It’s not just you (which is surprising since it usually is). The whole thing is really illogical.
That’s the problem. You and all the other psychotic warmunists have lost every last vestige of a sense of humor that you ever had, And that’s with giving you the benefit of the doubt that you had a sense of humor in the first place.
“No, I’m being serious” he whined. If CliSci predicted the end of snow……oh, well, don’t get distracted from the narrative.
So why do you think that he is contrasting the two news items to disparage the record temperature announcement?
Perhaps he was disparaging the news of snow?
Except be cannot be doubting that the Met Office s right about the snow as that is obviously better evidenced than the record breaking year.
It is unlikely to be the Met Office who are deliberately mocking themselves. So Paul Homewood cannot be pointing to that.
Perhaps it is you who is disparaging the high temperatures?
Or… I think you have made a failure of reading comprehension.
The reason that the two reports are being contrasted is to demonstrate the Weather is Not Climate.
And that Weather is important – it kills people as well as being very inconvenient when it snows,
But climate is trivial. At worst.
Another alarmist who only sees what it is told to see.
Having those you look down at you, laugh at you, really upsets what is left of your equilibrium.
Mr. Eldrosion: Looks like you were able to keep your swimsuit on for that pic, attaboy!
“Another alarmist who only sees what it is told to see.”
Indeed, Professor, and if only you could see something other than what you were told to see – in other words being just a bit less hypocritical – perhaps we could teach you the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Alas, it is not to be… shall we now laugh at you, too? Or would that upset your equilibrium?
Mr. Eldrosion: Mr. Homewood didn’t predict the end of snow in England, he is mocking that prediction. Homewood didn’t set the false climate narrative, he humbles it.
Nothing in the post says “I am mocking past predictions that snow would disappear.”
The inconsistency is blaming both warming and cooling on climate change, at the same time.
The consistency is your and every other climate alarmists’ strawmen.
A snowy day in January is not cooling.
Homewood is looking at a UK cold spell lasting a week or ten days. It is winter, January, so such spells are not unprecedented, though there have been none in recent years, and this is therefore a bit unusual by recent standardsl.
When there are similar warm spells in August they are proclaimed by Met Office, Guardian and BBC as due to, and a sign of, global warming and a general rise in UK temps.
When there is a cold spell, as now, its just another event, what you might expect in January.
The real fact about UK weather is that nothing much has happened to it over the last 100 years, and still is not. If last year was warm due to a warm summer and a mild winter, that is quite usual. If this year is cold due to a blocking high pressure system to the south west allowing cold air down from Scandinavia, that is normal too.
The point is, there are swings, its weather not climate, nothing is going on with the UK climate that gives any cause for alarm, and the Met Office etc needs to stop selectively trying to make mildly unusual events into signs of UK or global warming.
And the government needs to stop pretending that moving electricity generation to wind and solar is any sort of rational response either to global climate trends or to the flat-lining UK climate trend. It manages to be both impossible, ineffective if possible, and unaffordable in any case.
Homewood’s point is the difference in reaction. 35C in summer is panic stations, global warming, forecasts of annual heat crises from here on in. Freezing in January is just a normal cold episode. Can’t have it both ways. The UK needs to get real about what it means to live on an island with a large ocean to the west, the Arctic to the north, a content to the east, and the Sahara to the south east. With a fluctuating Jet Stream blowing over it. It means large swings, and neither the occasional hot or cold summers, or mild or cold winters, tell us anything about trends.
Still less about the need for or possibility of moving electricity generation to wind and solar.
The claim you’re now making (that warming isn’t alarming or that the contemporary UK climate is normal) does not rescue Paul Homewood’s original framing, which treated snowfall during a warm year as an internal contradiction. These are two different arguments.
Only in your mind. !
Paul’s framing was totally justified, you just can’t accept it.
A brief winter snow episode is logically incompatible with a record annual temperature anomaly? How do you justify that?
Fixed it for ya 🙂
posted in wrong place
Trolls can’t let go of a bone, even after it has been shown to be rubber.
But children are not going to know what snow is!
Living in the UK we are constantly reminded of how much colder it was all those years ago. I was a child in 1963 and it was fun getting all that snow even though many football matches were postponed because of the weather. I was a taxi driver in 2009-2011 and had to drive down roads that were completely covered in thick ice on the country lanes rivers and lakes were frozen up. The December to remember I remember having to drive behind snowploughs to get to destinations, I do not remember seeing a single snowplough during the 1960s it was something you would expect in the highlands of Scotland. I do not think that our weather in the UK has become warmer generally on the whole.
Personal experience can’t substitute for long term climate statistics.
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.70010
You mean the fact that we are currently at a point only a small bump above the coldest period in 10,000 years.
And still cooler than basically all that period. ?
Remember, Met Office data is a joke because of the manifest corruption of the whole measuring system.
It is most like no warmer now than it was in the 1930s and 40s.
Just made up “facts”.
Reality, even if you aren’t being told to believe it.
“Just made up “facts”.”
Yes, the Met Office & BBC do it all the time.
He’s a troll…don’t feed the trolls.
You mean long term statistics that show that the world was warmer during the Medieval, Roman, Egyptian and Minoan warm periods and much warmer during the Holocene Optimum. All without benefit of enhanced CO2.
Where did I mention CO2?
You didn’t mention CO2. Why is that, since it is the only aspect that modern climate alarmists say controls warming climate?
The fact of the matter is that European medieval people did not crawl under glaciers to die and spread artifacts and Vikings did not colonize Greenland with crops and grazing animals under the ice either.
That can only mean that something other than human released CO2 is also capable of warming the earth for long periods of time, since it was impossible for human released CO2 to do that during those periods.
You’ve ignored all the Buffalo, etc. farts!
And would we be better off if it had been getting colder the last 150 years? It’s one or the other, there’s no such thing as a static climate.
Nothing from the 103 invented stations? And it has been sunnier? And the sun doesn’t warm?
You make a fair point that one weather event neither proves nor disproves a narrative.
I can only assume you apply the same rigour in commenting on other sites that attribute a single event (hurricane, flood, etc.) to “climate change”. Or try to establish trends in those types of events that are not supported by the data.
Try making such a comment on the Grauiad and see if your contribution appears.
Eldrosion, surely you have some larger point to make, and some larger purpose in mind for making it, than the spit-ball comment you’ve made above. What is that larger point, and what is your larger purpose for making it?
He doesn’t have a larger point, he just wants to try to smear Paul Homewood.
How can you tell he has a larger point? Have you been peeking?
This is proof that we are still actually in what could technically be called an Ice Age.
The planet is still very much at a cool stage of the current interglacial.
Nowhere in the blog post does Paul Homewood mention that we are technically still in an ice age. In fact, his framing would imply that even if we were only just emerging from the depths of an ice age and happened to register a new record warm year, snowfall in the UK would somehow be incompatible with that.
Duhhhh, among most of the scientifically literate, especially those with a focus on Earth’s climate, it is well-known that Earth is currently in the Quaternary Ice Age that began about 2.6 million years ago.
Then too, I also observe that nowhere in his article (which had very little text),
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/01/02/met-office-blowing-hot-cold/ ,
did Paul Homewood mention that
— solar insolation at Earth TOA is about 1360 W/m^2
— that Earth’s spin axis is inclined at about 23.4° to the ecliptic
— that Earth’s surface gravity is about 9.8 m/sec^2.
/sarc
You keep talking about Paul Homewood who authored nothing in this blog post.
Do you have some reason to continue to post about his article here instead of there?
Let us know if you are confused about blog posting etiquette and I’m sure someone will help clue you in.
You make comments about anomalies but never discuss their uncertainties nor how the resolution that far exceeds what was actually measured is discovered.
Because I am analyzing the “logic” of the framing in the post, not the metrology of thermometers.
Logical inferences must use information derived from the real world. So yes, you are dealing with the metrology of thermometers which underlies the entire warming/cooling argument.
It never ceases to amaze me how juvenile most alarmists are.
Nobody ever claimed that this one snow storm disproved the climate warming scam. It was just pointed out how long it has been since some prognosticator had told us that snow was a thing of the past.
I’m wondering if you have stopped stomping your feet and holding your breath yet?
Nowhere in the post is the framing justified as “it’s been a long time since someone said snow would disappear.”
And it’s interesting that I’m being labeled an ‘alarmist.’ Nowhere in this thread have I commented on how serious the warming is. I’ve only pointed out that presenting snowfall during a warm year as an internal contradiction is a weak argument.
Mr. Eldrosion: The post is too brief and pithy to bother making a point well-known to all who follow this debate, that alarmists predicted the end of snow. You seem to have missed the memo, and spent this whole comment string demonstrating your naivete. Congrats, squid.
All this fabrication of intent and hostility just to avoid conceding a simple point. One has to wonder what makes conceding it so threatening.
Conceding to (i.e., agreeing with) a falsehood is neither ethical nor compatible with the Scientific Method. It is not so much “threatening” as it is just plain wrong.
Any reader is free to review this statement in your OP of January 4, 2026 6:30 am (reproduced verbatim here):
Among the “inconsistencies” is the astonishing revelation that a brief snow episode occurred in a year with a record annual anomaly, which we are invited to treat as a fatal blow to climate science.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/01/02/met-office-blowing-hot-cold/ “
Examining the referenced WUWT article authored by Paul Homewood reveals he never made any reference to treating his “A vs B” comparison as “as fatal blow to climate science”, let alone inviting others to do so.
However, I won’t digress to ask what causes you to find your trumped up and false allegation so “astonishing”. That is self-evident.
Mr. So: Excellent take-down of this chatty troll.
[comment deleted]
Mr. E: All this commentary from you, proving that you’re far out of your depth here. Many here “conceded” that one weather event doesn’t make climate, why are you threatened by admitting it? Simple points always score here, simpleton comments get taken apart. You seem to enjoy being deconstructed.
At least you dropped your false claim about mocking an alleged end of snow prediction.
Funny how this one, unable to see the obvious, now imagines that he’s read something not there. Readers have moved on, I’ll see this one down the pike.
All that article did was show two headline posted the same day.
“Two contrasting items on the Met Office News website today!”
There was no accompanying writeup.
You are initiating a flame war over this.
“There was no accompanying writeup.”
Exactly.
If there is no explanatory text, then the entire meaning of the post resides in the juxtaposition itself.
In other words, the post itself does none of what people here are now attributing to it (mocking past snow predictions, invoking ice age context, making claims about the absence of a climate emergency, etc.).
“In other words, the post itself does none of what people here are now attributing to it.”
Did you, or did you not, mean that statement to include your OP of January 4, 2026 6:30 am (reproduced verbatim here):
Among the “inconsistencies” is the astonishing revelation that a brief snow episode occurred in a year with a record annual anomaly, which we are invited to treat as a fatal blow to climate science.
A simple “Yes” or “No” answer will suffice.
Including you.
Here is 40 years of temp readings in Vermont
.
VERMONT GLOBAL WARMING IS MINIMAL In 40 YEARS; very little in summer, somewhat more in winter, based on 40 years of NOAA station data
.
https://willempost.substack.com/p/global-warming-in-vermont-very-little-7fd?r=1n3sit&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true
WILLEM POST
As a forester for exactly 50 years, just south of VT in western Wokeachusetts – I often worked in the woods when it was below zero F back in the 70s and 80s and hated every second of it. We definitely have less of that and I’m not gonna complain about it. From my own experience, I’d say there are more hot summer days too- but so what, the ecosystem in this region is doing great. My gardens, flower beds and half acre of manicured forest are doing great. Last summer was awesome for my 8 tomato plants- warm with just about the right amount of rain. Some previous years were either too wet resulting in fungus infections on the foliage or not warm enough- as they do like sunny, warm days. But this is New England, we’re used to drastically varying weather and don’t whine that it’s a climate emergency. It’s just the idiots in the state governments here that seem to believe it- mostly liars… er.. I mean lawyers and burro-crats of course. 🙂
I can’t find where hardiness zones in the US have changed at all. That’s a far better indication of *climate* than some mid-range temperature average that tells you nothing about what is actually happening. Diurnal temperature is a multimodal distribution. It’s average is meaningless. If it had anything to do with *climate* then Las Vegas and Miami would have similar climates.
The USDA’s current map is from 2023, see https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/
The Wayback Machine has older maps, see https://web.archive.org/web/20210316140113/https://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb/
Massachusetts is a good state to compare as some of the blue (zone 5b) changed to green (zone 6a).
Did the criteria for inclusion in each of the zones remain the same?
and then there is the science itself which doesn’t support the narrative that a minuscule amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, the vast majority of which is naturally occurring, somehow magically controls the climate-
As somebody said in the past, if there was a paper that has proven without contestation that human produced CO2 warms the planet we would all know the name of that paper. There isn’t, and we don’t.
Yes, if the Climate Alarmists had any evidence, we would all know about it.
What we know is Climate Alarmist don’t have any evidence to back up their CO2 claims. All they have is speculation, assumptions and unsubstantiated assertions, none of which are established facts.
That’s it.
Very nice article. Deserves a wider viewership.
Been quite a ride!
𝓚𝓲𝓵𝓵𝓳𝓪𝓻
say what?
𝖂𝖍𝖆𝖙?
what do you mean by “killjar” is a strange font? Is that your nickname?
It is. It derives from an entomology class. I was running around on river trips collecting specimens, and the other riverrats dubbed me “Killjar” after the apparatus common to that practice. As for the font, just seeing if they are supported here. ℕ𝕖𝕨 𝕥𝕠𝕪!
Thank you for your efforts throughout and for giving so many of us the opportunity to become involved in the debunking of an abuse of science.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
—Carl Sagan, astronomer and writer (1934-1996)
It goes even deeper than that, I think. It has become tribal symbolism, like gang tats.
𝕯𝖊𝖓𝖎𝖊𝖗!
“Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
And we see that playing out in politics around the world.
Dear Anthony,
Well done and very needed over the 20 years and now!
I also like and agree with your summary of this time!
There is one more thing that changed, two crytical blogs, climate audit and climate ETC, went a bit into hibernation, their work and input was very essential and IMHO the world desperately needs more like those, offering a deeper technical expertise than most posts and comments here (I do not mean to criticize in any way, I actually like and appreciate the mixture of topics and perspectives here!)
One thing I like to add,
We have been and still are discussing causes and the human contribution to global warming!
In my opinion climate change is a far more complex problem we could try to tackle once all “pre-topics” are known with good precision.
It might be worth noting that for far longer than 20 years the uncertainty of potential global warming factors remains very high making this topic unsuitable for reliable predictions.
Thanks Anthony, a great site. The twenty years have passed so quickly. In those years we have weathered at least three Climate based extinction events and here we all are now over 8 billion of us and record harvests to boot…..
Extinction is obviously not as terminal as we were all led to expect. 🙂
I decided it was time to get serious about learning about climate change in 2008. This was after the hand wringing over the impending ice age of the late 1970s. (It was a real concern despite what Naomi Oreskes says.) The extreme winter weather then still resonates, especially the awesome Northeast Blizzard of ’78 (as distinguished from the equally awesome but less documented Midwest Blizzard a couple weeks before).
It was after the first wide distribution of the Keeling Curve that just happened to coincide with the end of the 1940s to 1970s cooling and the start of the satellite record. James Hansen brought global warming to the US Senate’s attention (and to the rest of us in subsequent years). Michael Mann produced his hockey stick. In 2008 the PDO had flipped negative, a new sunspot cycle had just begun, so it was time dive in. I quickly got attached to WUWT, I soon learned that Stephen McIntyre pretty much single-handedly broke the hockey stick. Climategate was an amazing event – proof that shenanigans we suspected were going on really were going on.
WUWT itself was changing quickly. First Anthony’s curiosity about paint on Stevenson screens that expanded into the Surface Station Survey and the surprise that professional climate scientists didn’t appreciate citizen scientists brought a lot of scientists of all sorts who appreciated the scientific method. Climategate spawned a huge amount of interest among the general population at all the online climate blogs and forums. That soon faded – except at WUWT where Anthony’s artful moderation kept the dialog on a pretty even keel.
I’ve drifted away from some of the day to day stuff, distracted by abuses of child protective services and various FaceBook groups. Also, the pronounced warming of the 1990s settled down into the 2000-2005 pause. That led to backing off some of the hype, a 2.0° increase as the tipping point got reduced to 1.5° and timelines in predictions got pushed out the the end of the new century as arctic ice settled down and we sailed past the 350 ppm CO2 tipping point with no noticeable impact to our lifestyles.
One big impact on me is that there seems to be less interesting science going on – I’d have trouble pointing to much I’ve learned in the past decade. OTOH, politics are still running strong and WUWT has a lot more articles about Trump, Hochul, Greta, COP30, and “green” policies are on the WUWT home page today. Good science comes slowly, and there just hasn’t been as much as I’d like to see.
WUWT endures – and will endure. The next phase of life in general looks like climate change is going on to the back burner for a while. Ill-behaved countries, populations, etc are getting a lot of attention. There are some signs that we might get back to the realization that cheap energy is a key attribute in raising one’s standard of living, and that is tied to the cost of resources – I recently bought a new lead-acid battery for a UPS and was shocked last year at the price of copper wire at the hardware store last year – their prices represent the energy needed to mine and refine them.
One thing I hope to see is decoupling recent examples of extreme weather from global warming. We may indeed be seeing more extreme weather – I can point to things similar to the 1930s. That set the standard for extreme weather – but I don’t think we have any good explanation of what drove that. It certainly wasn’t CO2.
WUWT at 20 – who’da think it? There will be a WUWT at 30. I wonder what it will look like. I think I’ll still be around.
Thank you Anthony for all the hard work. Also Willis, Charles and all the others for their amazing contributions.
That is the reason WUWT has done so well. Lots of good content.
It’s hard to believe it has been 20 years. Time flies when you’re having fun! 🙂
Good content AND good and fair moderators enforcing a good and fair policy.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/policy/
There are certain immutable political rules, the most prominent being – Never let a good crisis go to waste, the second being – If there is not currently a good crisis, create one.
This is a wonderful summary of WUWT’s history & mission, in the broader context of Meteorology, as a worthy branch of true science.
The subversion of which provides a stark reminder that:
On the pages of WUWT, one often encounters expressions of dismay at the evident corruption of the scientists’ professed devotions. Hayek (in Road to Serfdom, ca. 1940) addressed this paradox in a somewhat archaic language but may yet retain its relevance in today’s world:
[A summary of the argument, but please refer to Hayek’s original reasoning:]
So much for a sympathetic reading of the susceptibility to power-worship.
More simply stated (by others), there is ‘A Spiritual War raging out there’, a battle fueled by the all-consuming lust [personal-professional-institutional] for ‘Power & Gain [Profit]’, and taking the form of ‘Secret Oaths [Omerta] & Combinations [Rackets]’.
Not for nothing is the ‘Legend of Doctor Faustus’ (Goethe) regarded as our civilization’s greatest tragedy.* This urge or temptation is everyday & never-ending.
Q.E.D. ‘quite enough dictated’
Wishing you all a Happy, Healthy & Prosperous-Productive New Year 2026 A.D.!
Anthony, just a note to thank you, as well as Charles the Moderator, the other moderators, and the guest authors who have kept this site alive and vibrant for twenty years. The efforts have been rewarded mostly with criticism, nasty personal attacks, and ad hominem arguments, but you have persevered and kept WUWT as a voice of sanity in a world of climate conformity.
Many folks don’t seem to understand what WUWT is. It is NOT a site promoting a particular point of view. WUWT doesn’t “promote” anything. Instead, it serves a very different purpose.
Many, perhaps most people, don’t understand what science is. Some say they rely on “the science”, as if such a thing existed. Others think that science is a subject. Some believe that a scientific “consensus” establishes truth.
In fact, science is a process, not a subject. And it is a most curious process, one that has brought infinite good to the world. The process works as follows:
Now, there are several important things to note about this process we call “science”:
Now, historically there were no “scientific journals”. New scientific ideas were circulated hand-to-hand or mailed between people who knew each other. But the process described above was how they judged the ideas. If someone could show the idea was wrong, it would be discarded.
Then along came the scientific journals. Historically, they started earlier, but they only became prevalent in the 20th century. Same idea. But they use “peer reviewers” to secretly judge the validity of the ideas.
And as you might imagine … this system is highly slanted towards whatever is currently believed. People whose continued employment depends on some idea being correct will only very rarely be honest enough to say that a new idea is worth publishing if that new idea will cost them their job …
Finally, in modern times, in some cases, we’ve gone back to the original, pre-peer-review method. And THAT is what WUWT is. It’s not a place that only publishes things that are 100% validated. There’s little point in that.
Instead, it is a place to expose new scientific ideas to the harsh glare of widespread publicity in the crowded public marketplace of new ideas.
People say “But WUWT publishes some things that are then shown to be false”, as though that were a bad thing.
That’s true, and it’s not a bad thing. It is a good and necessary thing. The more that incorrect ideas get exposed to critical review, the sooner they will be shown to be incorrect.
So Anthony, you have my profound thanks, not simply for bucking the tide, but for providing a forum for science in its purest form, a place where ideas are freely aired in order to be refuted or supported … and that is a far greater contribution than anything to do with the climate.
Well done, my friend, very well done indeed,
w.
Dittos * 42. You have all been quite wonderful. And we won! I’m still reeling. Champagne all around. KUTGW.
Anthony, you left out one important thing, global carbon emissions. With the exception of the banking crisis in 2009 and the 2020 pandemic, global carbon emissions increases by half a billion tons per year. In 2006 they were 29 billion tons and by the end of 3024 they were 38 billion tons. So 30 years of climate panic and UN ambition, an estimated $5-10 trillion spent, without any of the intended progress in emissions reductions.
Thanks Anthony. A very nice post.
DSL, or Digital Subscriber Line, came to my rural location in 2008, just in time for me to make a small contribution to the Surface Stations Project.
I second all the nice things that have been said in the prior comments.
Just now I took a look at the Wikipedia entry “Anthony Watts (blogger)”. If you need a respite from the news, the weather, or whatever, spend a few moments reading this (outdated) site. [This is the stuff that causes me never to contribute to “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.”]
I still remember what your local paper called you – a “screeching Mercury monkey”. Socrates said “When the debate is over, slander becomes the tool of the loser.” .
I think I first became aware of Anthony Watts when Steve Malloy cited your work on siting of weather stations in 2006. (Since I live in Tucson, I was especially drawn to your photos of a weather station on the UofA campus in a parking area, surrounded by concrete and asphalt and near an a/c exhaust.) I’m an old, anti-Gore engineer who has followed the climate discussion since the we’re all going to freeze days in the 1970s and ’80s. I worked in the nuclear power industry for 30y and if we handled data the way climate ‘scientists’ and government data collectors do, we’d all be in jail. WUWT is the one website I have opened nearly every day for many years. Thank you!
Sooner or later, the Democrats will be back in control of the federal government. It’s just the way things work in this country.
When that happens, when they control the Congress and the White House, they will double down on their efforts at suppressing contrary opinions about today’s mainstream climate science. When this happens, serious attempts will be made to shut down all contrarian voices, not only about climate science, but about energy policy in general.
Watts Up with That and its readership must be prepared to stand fast if and when the next round of free speech censorship begins.
That’s true. The solution to that problem is to not elect Democrats. They are nothing but trouble.
I’ve been lurking here since near the very start and commenting for longer than most. Here are my observations.
WUWT has been a great asset to the world for three reasons. And all three are mainly due to Anthony and the moderators with the support of the guest authors and (some) of the commenters below the line.
In my opinion the reasons WUWT matters most are these:
1) You demonstrated, apparently by accident, that academic Science had become an Arts subject. In the Sciences the author puts themselves out of the way to let the evidence speak for itself. In the Arts it is the author who matters. It is the authors opinion that makes the value (Hamlet has been read before but how does each new player interpret it?). There is no objective history, for instance – and that’s the point. By allowing free debate on the science you exposed the Art-ification of the sciences in the universities. I suspect that the Silicon Valley is doing its own fundamental research, rather than harvesting from academia, because of WUWT. You showed that academia was broken.
2) Climategate. Not sensationalised. You took your time to verify it (much to Briffa or whoever leaked it’s displeasure). And you saved the West from bankruptcy at Copenhagen by delivering the evidence clearly. History will thank you.
3) It set a precedent for not distinguishing between science from academia and elsewhere. It relied only on the soundness of the arguments and observations. OK. we had the CO2 will condense at the S Pole debate but that was easily dismissed. The long debates over Climate and the solar system (Svensmark) were far harder to decide – yet the debate was allowed to continue without judgment. For a time it looked like WUWT might be the template for the replacement to the peer review / journal cartel closed shop. The rise of the political side of WUWT showed that was not to be. but that change itself is a learning to be grasped eagerly.
And one other, lesser point that even Anthony forgot to mention in his article: WUWT beat the other websites. It got the numbers. When the “Team” set up their own website to promote their views, it was rebuffed in debate by sites like Cimate Audit, but it was beaten in communication by WUWT. And as those blogs were only set up as propaganda outlets, it was the communication that mattered.
Thank you for WUWT. Keep up the good work.
And think about how to keep it going for the next 100 years, when we are all long gone.
MCourtney: ” ….. For a time it looked like WUWT might be the template for the replacement to the peer review / journal cartel closed shop. The rise of the political side of WUWT showed that was not to be. but that change itself is a learning to be grasped eagerly.”
Honest and unfettered debates over energy policy issues are just as important as are the ongoing and never-ending debates over the true physics of the earth’s climate system.
Energy policy cannot be divorced from the politics of mainstream climate science. Moreover, energy policy cannot be divorced from the partisan politics of populist socialism (Zohran Mamdani, etc.) versus investor capitalism (Richard Greene, etc.) versus America First populism (Donald Trump, Peter Navarro, etc.)
Political conflicts over energy policy are certain to grow in number and in intensitty in the coming months as the 2026 mid-terms approach. Those conflicts will most certainly make their appearance in ever-increasing numbers here on WUWT.
True. As a climate / energy website, to ignore the politics would be negligent.
But that was the point. It could have been a science website – discussing the interpretation of observations without any policy implications – regardless of the politics.
Or perhaps, it could not be that. Perhaps, that just cannot be.
This why WUWT is an interesting learning experience.
It went 1st.
Heh. Not so easily dismissed. I remember it all too well! It turned out okay though, and I think many readers learned a lot about partial pressure of CO2 and water vapor. And other stuff.
Very nice Anthony, we all owe you a lot.
The apparently ‘pristine’ USCRN data are running warmer, at present, that the adjusted ClimDiv data over their shared period of measurement.
The very thing you based this whole, nonsensicle idea on is repudiated by the very data set you championed, and continue to champion on the side-panle of this site.
What’s up with that, Mr “Skeptik”?
Warmer Is Better. Fight the Ice. CO2 is good for you. Live it or live with it. You’re alone on an iceberg, Nail. Ta ta.
YOU are immune to evidence it is why you are constantly misunderstanding every article you try your silly warming is scary to human beings who started in a much warmer world than it is now.
The apparently ‘pristine’ USCRN data are running warmer
A general assertion like that needs proof. Where exactly is warming taking place in the CRN record? Is Tmin or Tmax the driver? Is summer or winter warming more. Details ARE IMPORTANT. The total is driven by the SUM OF THE PARTS.
Making a general statement about the whole, indicates that you have not spent the time to investigate the details so you can better understand the what and why of the issue. Without understanding your assertions are without value.
And as I’ve said before, when people noticed the only things increasing to affect their lives adversely were climate taxes, green product mandates and various environmental restrictions while weather and climate demonstrated their usual fluctuations, they quickly recognized the whole climate crisis narrative was just another scam. As a result, they’ve learned to ignore the doomsday predictions and become increasingly hostile to any suggestions that they should modify their lifestyles to save a planet that doesn’t need saving except from the climate fraudsters.
Big Thanks! to you Anthony. I’ve been kicking around WUWT not quite from the start but prior to Climategate. I was sitting here thinking about where I first hear of WUWT and it was definitely from listening to the Lars Larson show but don’t recall if the interview was with you or George Taylor and WUWT was brought up in regards to your surface station audit. I looked up your site right then but didn’t become a daily reader until Climategate broke.
George introduced me to WUWT during the Surface Station Project. He was an amazingly great guy. Sorely missed.
I first got wind of WUWT in a conversation on USENET.
I came over and looked, and have been here ever since.