Type of site | Blog |
---|---|
Created by | Anthony Watts |
URL | wattsupwiththat |
Launched | November 17, 2006 |
Watts Up With That? (WUWT) is a blog [1] promoting climate change denial [7] that was created by Anthony Watts in 2006. [2] [3]
The blog predominantly discusses climate issues with a focus on anthropogenic climate change, generally accommodating beliefs that are in opposition to the scientific consensus on climate change. Contributors include Christopher Monckton and Fred Singer as guest authors. [8] In November 2009, the blog was one of the first websites to publish emails and documents from the Climatic Research Unit controversy, and a driving force behind its coverage. [8]
In the early months of 2010, it was reported the site might be "the most read climate blog in the world," [9] and in 2013 Michael E. Mann referred to it as the leading climate change denial blog. [3]
Watts Up With That features material disputing the scientific consensus on climate change, including claims the human role in global warming is insignificant and carbon dioxide is not a driving force of warming. [10] It has hosted several contributors, such as Christopher Monckton and Fred Singer, in addition to Watts. [11] It is among the most prominent climate change denial blogs, [5] [6] [4] [12] and is described by climatologist Michael E. Mann as the most popular, having surpassed Climate Audit. [3] Columbia Journalism School writer Curtis Brainard has written that "scientists have repeatedly criticized [Watts] for misleading readers on subjects such as the reliability of the U.S. surface temperature record." [1]
In 2007 WUWT readers alerted Stephen McIntyre to a discrepancy in temperature records published by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) based on data from United States Historical Climate Network. [13] In August 2007, McIntyre notified GISS about the problematic numbers, which GISS acknowledged and promptly corrected. The change did not affect global temperature trends, but did have the marginal effect of changing the hottest year on record for the contiguous United States to 1934, rather than 1998 as had previously been shown. [14] In a formal acknowledgement, GISS stated that the minor data processing error had only affected the years after 2000, and noted that the contiguous United States represents only 1.6% of the Earth's surface. The result was a statistical tie between the years 1934, 1998 and 2005 as the warmest years to date for these U.S. states, with 1934 warmest by only around 0.01 °C which was well within the margin of uncertainty. [15]
In 2009, Watts Up With That was involved in popularizing the Climatic Research Unit email controversy, [11] [16] wherein emails of several climatologists were published by a hacker. The story was initially broken on WUWT and two other blogs when the hacker posted a link to a Russian server containing emails and documents from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, and subsequently reproduced on the WUWT blog. Because of WUWT's high traffic count, this was the catalyst which broke the story to the media. [17] The term "Climategate" was originally coined by a commenter in a post on WUWT. [18]
Watts argued that the emails showed the scientists were manipulating data, and while a series of independent investigations cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing, [19] public accusations resulting from the event continued for years. [16] The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged throughout the investigations, [20] [21] however, the reports may have decreased public confidence in climate scientists and the IPCC, and conclusively altered the Copenhagen negotiations that year. [22] [23]
In a 2010 interview with the Financial Times , Watts said that his blog had become "busier than ever" after the incident and that traffic to the site had tripled. [24]
According to Alexa internet statistical analysis, What's Up With That? is ranked No. 14,882 in the U.S. and No. 40,090 world-wide. [25] It is reported to receive between half a million and 2 million visits per month between 2010 and 2014. [9] [26] [27] It was described by climatologist Michael E. Mann in The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars as "the leading climate change denial blog," [3] [4] [5] [6] having surpassed Climate Audit in popularity.
Watts's blog has been criticized for inaccuracy. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot described WUWT as "highly partisan and untrustworthy". [28] Leo Hickman, at The Guardian's Environment Blog, also criticized Watts's blog, stating that Watts "risks polluting his legitimate scepticism about the scientific processes and methodologies underpinning climate science with his accompanying politicised commentary." [29]
Between 2008 and 2013, WUWT asked its readers to vote in several internet voting-based awards, and it won "best science blog" and "best blog" from the Bloggies [30] and the conservative Wizbang Weblog Awards. In 2013, Leo Hickman wrote in The Guardian Environment Blog that 13 of the 17 blogs nominated for the Science or Technology category for the Bloggies "were either run by climate sceptics, or popular with climate sceptics". The Bloggies founder acknowledged in 2013 that "climate sceptic" bloggers had influenced voting. He said "Unfortunately, I have no good solution for it, since they follow proper voting procedures and legitimate science blogs don't want to make an effort to compete." [31] He discontinued the science category in 2014. [32] WUWT did not win "Best Topical Weblog of the Year" 2014 as Watts claimed, but did enter the Hall of Fame that year. [32]
Two days passed before links to the stolen data were suddenly posted to two other conservative blogs: The Air Vent and Watts Up With That. Within hours of the breaking news, commenters on Watts Up With That coined the phrase "climategate" and even began to call for its strategic deployment as a framing device. Soon thereafter, a prominent conservative blogger in the United Kingdom ran a headline referring to the incident as "climategate," and Twitter users began to follow suit
In fact, nothing in the stolen material undermines the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and that humans are to blame
Michael Evan Mann is an American climatologist and geophysicist. He is the director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania. Mann has contributed to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change and to isolate climate signals from noisy data.
The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) is a component of the University of East Anglia and is one of the leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change.
Stephen McIntyre is a Canadian mining exploration company director, a former minerals prospector and semi-retired mining consultant whose work has included statistical analysis. He is the founder and editor of Climate Audit, a blog which analyses and discusses climate data. He is a critic of the temperature record of the past 1000 years and the data quality of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He has made statistical critiques, with economist Ross McKitrick, of the hockey stick graph which shows that the increase in late 20th century global temperatures is unprecedented in the past 1,000 years.
Gavin A. Schmidt is a British climatologist, climate modeler and Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, and co-founder of the climate science blog RealClimate.
Climate Audit is a blog founded in 2005 by Steve McIntyre.
James Mark Court Delingpole is an English writer, journalist, and columnist who has written for a number of publications, including the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Spectator. He is a former executive editor for Breitbart London, and has published several novels and four political books. He describes himself as a libertarian conservative. He has frequently published articles promoting climate change denial and expressing opposition to wind power.
Climate change denial is a form of science denial characterized by rejecting, refusing to acknowledge, disputing, or fighting the scientific consensus on climate change. Those promoting denial commonly use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of a scientific controversy where there is none. Climate change denial includes unreasonable doubts about the extent to which climate change is caused by humans, its effects on nature and human society, and the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions. To a lesser extent, climate change denial can also be implicit when people accept the science but fail to reconcile it with their belief or action. Several studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism, pseudoscience, or propaganda.
Willard Anthony Watts is an American blogger who runs Watts Up With That?, a climate change denial blog that opposes the scientific consensus on climate change. A former television meteorologist and current radio meteorologist, he is also founder of the Surface Stations project, a volunteer initiative to document the condition of U.S. weather stations. The Heartland Institute helped fund some of Watts' projects, including publishing a report on the Surface Stations project, and invited him to be a paid speaker at its International Conference on Climate Change from 2008 to 2014.
Vincent Richard Gray was a New Zealand chemist, and a founder of the climate change denial organization New Zealand Climate Science Coalition.
The Climatic Research Unit email controversy began in November 2009 with the hacking of a server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) by an external attacker, copying thousands of emails and computer files to various internet locations several weeks before the Copenhagen Summit on climate change.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is a charitable organisation in the United Kingdom whose aims are to challenge what it calls "extremely damaging and harmful policies" envisaged by governments to mitigate anthropogenic global warming. The GWPF, and some of its prominent members individually, have been characterised as practising and promoting climate change denial.
The Real Global Warming Disaster is a 2009 book by English journalist and author Christopher Booker in which he asserts that global warming cannot be attributed to humans, and then alleges how the scientific opinion on climate change was formulated.
Climatic Research Unit documents including thousands of e-mails and other computer files were stolen from a server at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in a hacking incident in November 2009. The documents were redistributed first through several blogs of global warming deniers, who alleged that the documents indicated misconduct by leading climate scientists. A series of investigations rejected these allegations, while concluding that CRU scientists should have been more open with distributing data and methods on request. Precisely six committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct. The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged by the end of the investigations.
Judith A. Curry is an American climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include hurricanes, remote sensing, atmospheric modeling, polar climates, air-sea interactions, climate models, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for atmospheric research. She was a member of the National Research Council's Climate Research Committee, published over a hundred scientific papers, and co-edited several major works. Curry retired from academia in 2017 at age 63, coinciding with her public climate change skepticism.
Andrew William Montford is a British writer and editor who is the owner of the Bishop Hill blog. He is the author of The Hockey Stick Illusion (2010).
The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science is a book written by Andrew Montford and published by Stacey International in 2010, which promotes climate change denial.
Berkeley Earth is a Berkeley, California-based independent 501(c)(3) non-profit focused on land temperature data analysis for climate science. Berkeley Earth was founded in early 2010 to address the major concerns from outside the scientific community regarding global warming and the instrumental temperature record. The project's stated aim was a "transparent approach, based on data analysis." In February 2013, Berkeley Earth became an independent non-profit. In August 2013, Berkeley Earth was granted 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status by the US government. The primary product is air temperatures over land, but they also produce a global dataset resulting from a merge of their land data with HadSST.
Marc Morano is a former Republican political aide who founded and runs the website ClimateDepot.com. ClimateDepot is a project of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a US non-profit organisation that promotes climate change denial.
The history of climate change policy and politics refers to the continuing history of political actions, policies, trends, controversies and activist efforts as they pertain to the issue of climate change. Climate change emerged as a political issue in the 1970s, when activist and formal efforts sought to address environmental crises on a global scale. International policy regarding climate change has focused on cooperation and the establishment of international guidelines to address global warming. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is a largely accepted international agreement that has continuously developed to meet new challenges. Domestic policy on climate change has focused on both establishing internal measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and incorporating international guidelines into domestic law.