Watts Up With That

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Anthony Watts 2010

Watts Up With That (abbreviated WUWT ) is a blog started in November 2006 by Anthony Watts , a former TV weather commentator and a Fellow of the Heartland Institute since 2019. It is one of the most popular blogs on the organized climate denial scene .

reception

The blog had 2,010, according to The Sunday Times more than 2 million readers per month and in 2010 by the Science Blog Eureka the daily newspaper The Times counted as one of the more entertaining climate skeptic blogs to their 30 popular science blogs. WUWT also received audience prizes determined through Internet elections, such as the 2011 Bloggies as the best science blog and several times as the best science blog at the Weblog Awards.

In the Spectator, Matt Ridley expressed his appreciation for WUWT, saying the blog had “gone from being a gathering place for lonely weirdos to a 3 million pagehits-per-month online climate magazine full of fascinating articles by physicists, geologists, economists and statisticians transformed. "

In 2009, the blog was one of the first websites to receive and discuss emails and documents about the hacking incident at the University of East Anglia's climate research center . The blog played a major role in the emerging scandal.

The Australian cognitive scientist John Cook, who specializes in global warming, criticized contradicting statements about the causes of climate change.

A study published in 2013 deals with the conspiracy theory of climate-skeptical blogs. Among other things, she found conspiracy-theoretical thinking in WUWT and far-reaching contradictions to scientific findings, such as HIV and AIDS , smoking and cancer, as well as the human influence on climate change.

The climatologist Judith Curry points in 2010 in a report published even in WUWT essay entitled recovering confidence for the important role of blogs in the climate debate and the demand it collected for more transparency and open discussion and exposure of data.

In 2009, George Monbiot , environmental activist and columnist for The Guardian newspaper , described WUWT as "highly partial and unreliable. David Suzuki recommends the Skeptical Science website instead for research on climate change." There are many credible sources of information, but blog sites like this one Weatherman Anthony Watts is not one of them. "

In a specialist paper on the use of images and graphics in climate-skeptical media, Watts Up With That was one of four sources examined. The authors found misleading images and obsolete graphics in the blog posts, for example from a work by Eigil Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen from 1991 on an alleged connection between the length of the sunspot cycle and global temperature. The work was still in 2011 at Watts Up With That to prove that solar activity was a major cause of current global warming, although it had long since been refuted by one of the authors himself, among others.

A 2017 scientific paper on blogs from the climate denial scene came to the conclusion that WUWT would ignore the overwhelming burden of proof about the endangerment of polar bears and the decline in Arctic sea ​​ice caused by climate change and deny both consequences. The authors see this as the strategy of wanting to implicitly sow doubts about other consequences of climate change in a kind of domino effect by denying individual climate change impacts, to which attention can be drawn particularly easily.

Project for the US weather stations

One of the blog's projects launched in 2007 is Surfacestations.org . Volunteers take photos of US weather stations, the photos and data on the stations are collected in an online database and assessed with regard to the choice of location. Watts considers the choice of location to be important because many stations may display falsified values ​​due to urbanization and settlement construction in the area. An evaluation of this data in 2009 by Menne et al. showed that the temperature trends of the stations assessed as “good” in the project were in good agreement with the US temperature trends available to date.

A study from 2010, in which Watts himself participated, examines the influence of the choice of location for the US measuring stations evaluated in Surfacestation.org on the basis of five location classes. She found an underestimation of the maximum and overestimation of the minimum daytime temperatures that increased with an unfavorable choice of location. The upward and downward deviations largely canceled each other out for the average temperatures. Only for one of the five classes, namely the poorly positioned (6.2% of the stations), there was a statistically significant deviation in the trend of the daily temperature fluctuation range (difference between minimum and maximum in the daily course ). Overall, however, the choice of location had no significant influence on the trends in average temperatures.

Authors

  • Basil Copeland
  • Steve Goddard
  • John Goetz
  • Indur Goklany
  • Jeff Id
  • Bill Illis
  • Evan Jones
  • Frank Lansner
  • Denise Norris
  • Bob Tisdale
  • Anthony Watts

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Riley E. Dunlap, Aaron M. McCright: Organized Climate Change Denial. In: John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard, David Schlosberg (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. Oxford University Press 2011, pp. 144-160, p. 153.
  2. ^ Richard Dawkins 'pro-am clash in the boffins' blogosphere
  3. ↑ Eureka's Top 30 Science Blogs. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on February 5, 2010 ; Retrieved April 8, 2013 .
  4. ↑ Anthony Watts: WUWT - Voted Best Science Blog in the 2011 Bloggies . WHUT. Retrieved October 22, 2013.
  5. ^ The global warming guerrillas . Archived from the original on June 5, 2011. Retrieved March 8, 2011.
  6. ↑ Michael Odenwald: Climate change The sun and the dear Christ child . In: Focus . September 24, 2010 ( focus.de [accessed December 17, 2010]).
  7. ^ S Lewandowsky, K Oberauer, G Gignac: NASA faked the moon landing - Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science . In: Psychological Science . March 2013, doi : 10.1177 / 0956797612457686 .
  8. ^ Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, Michael Marriott: Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation . In: Front. Psychol. Doi : 10.3389 / fpsyg.2013.00073 ( shapingtomorrowsworld.org [PDF]).
  9. ↑ Amy Turner: Richard Dawkins 'pro-am clash in the boffins' blogosphere . The Sunday Times , February 28, 2010 (Judith Curry: Essay )
  10. ↑ George Monbiot: How to disprove Christopher Booker in 26 seconds . In: The Guardian , May 15, 2009. Retrieved April 11, 2010. 
  11. ↑ David Suzuki: Climate change denial isn't about science, or even skepticism . ( April 21, 2012 memento on WebCite ) Carman Valley Leader . March 8, 2012.
  12. ↑ Birgit Schneider, Thomas Nocke, Georg Feulner: Twist and Shout: Images and Graphs in Skeptical Climate Media . In: Birgit Schneider and Thomas Nocke (eds.): Image Politics of Climate Change . Transcript Verlag, 2014, ISBN 978-3-8376-2610-0 .
  13. ↑ Jeffrey A. Harvey et al. a .: Internet Blogs, Polar Bears, and Climate-Change Denial by Proxy . In: BioScience . November 2017, doi : 10.1093 / biosci / bix133 .
  14. ^ Matthew J. Menne, Claude N. Williams, Jr., and Michael A. Palecki: On the reliability of the US Surface Temperature Record . In: Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres . tape 115 , D11, 2010 ( ofdan.ca [PDF; accessed on December 17, 2010]).
  15. ↑ Souleymane Fall, Anthony Watts, John Nielsen-Gammon Evan Jones, Dev Niyogi, John R. Christy and Roger A. Pielke Sr .: Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the US Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends . In: Journal of Geophysical Research . tape 116 , 2011, doi : 10.1029 / 2010JD015146 ( pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com [PDF; 953 kB ]).