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Willard Anthony Watts is a former radio and TV weatherman and notable
global warming (AGW) denier. He claims to have subscribed to AGW years ago before he saw the light and became a denier. He also claims that he is otherwise an environmentalist. This makes him something of an AGW concern troll. He is the proprietor of the Watts Up With That (geddit?) blog,
usually shortened to WUWT or, as it is sometimes affectionately nicknamed, LOLWUWT or WTFUWT. In the wake of Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit fame co- winning the 2007 Best Science Blog prize, the contest yet again made a
mockery of itself by giving Watts the same award in 2008. He also runs
Surface Stations, a database of pictures and data on weather stations.
Although Watts has made appearances on both Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity's shows, he is among the less nutty of the prominent deniers, concentrating instead on statistical bullshitting. This usually involves him pulling out
some regional proxy data and using it to stand in for global
reconstructions of temperature and saying, "Look, it's cold somewhere!" Intuitively, Anthony Watts could not bring himself to accept the documented increase in the U.S. surface temperature record. There had to be a problem
with the instrumentation or book keeping - somewhere. Watts explained his
story to radio presenter Glenn Beck. At first he speculated that the composition of new weather shelter paint had interfered with the measuring system:
Well, Glenn, I kind of stumbled into this. This was a project started
on serendipity. I started out looking at paint. You may call seeing some of
the early weather shelters that are housing the thermometers. They look
like chicken coops on stilts that are white with slots and so forth.
Anyway, to make a long story short, the weather bureau designed them back
in the 1800s and they lasted until now, some of them still in use. They
changed the paint in '79. A long time ago I had a conversation with the
state climatologist of California about them and we wondered if the change
in paint-the original spec was the old Tom Sawyer whitewash because they
were designed in the 1890s and they changed the paint check in 1979 to
latex-so I wanted to do an experiment about finding out whether that paint
made a difference. ... And then I went to another station in Marysville, California at the fire station and it was a new design and I discovered
that the fire chief parked his vehicle, radiator end, right next to the
sensor within about two feet of the sensor. ... So my project changed from looking at paint to looking at stations all around the country.
The Surface Stations Project
Ironically, Watts has done more to strengthen the scientific evidence for
AGW than refute it (guess he really is an environmentalist). A conservative think tank, the Heartland Institute, published his "academic" work based on
the Surface Stations data claiming that NOAA's weather stations did not
meet regulatory code and had collected unreliable data that exaggerated
maximum temperatures. Watts' data, however, was collected by volunteers
using only microsite data. When the data was reviewed in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres, the authors found that the stations
Watts flagged as unreliable were indeed unreliable...in the opposite
direction. They had actually underestimated the maximum temperatures. Good catch, Anthony!
In 2011 Watts was back again, claiming to have new "research" that would
prove the unreliability of the weather stations and shake the very
foundations of AGW theory. In fact, when the paper was finally released, it came to essentially the same conclusion as the aforementioned Journal of Geophysical Research study: minimum temperatures at a number of stations
were biased slightly upward and maximum temperatures biased slightly
downward, thus canceling out the bias when averaged.
Watts is a former radio and TV weatherman, but as is typical of media weathercasters he has no academic training in the physics of climate or
related disciplines. Surprise, surprise.
BESTed
In March of 2011, Anthony Watts appeared to stake his entire stance on the reliability of surface temperature data on a single upcoming study: the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST), an independent temperature record to be constructed using over 39,000 unique stations. On March 6th,
Watts said on his blog:
... I'm prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves
my premise wrong. I'm taking this bold step because the method has promise.
So let's not pay attention to the little yippers who want to tear it down before they even see the results.
However, when BEST's results confirmed the reliability of preexisting
surface temperature records, Watts backpedaled. Apparently, he was only willing to stake his claims on an independent study if it came to the conclusion he wanted.
This is where Judith Curry comes in. She was the only climatologist who
worked on the BEST project and has a long history of making statements
against mainstream AGW science--which she proceeded to do again after BEST finished its results. She said that BEST's results were "way oversimplistic
and not at all convincing in my opinion." When PBS did a show about Richard Muller being, as he has put it himself, a "converted skeptic" on the basis
of BEST, she said, "Centering this show on the faux conversion of Richard Muller set this story down a certain path that turned out to be
unfortunate." This essay was endorsed by WUWT.
Lately Watts has degenerated into boringness, repeating the same tired arguments and making Al Gore jokes on LOLWUWT.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Anthony_Watts
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