Anthony Watts (blogger)

Willard Anthony Watts (born 1958) is an American blogger who runs ''Watts Up With That?'', a popular 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 has invited him to be a paid speaker at its International Conference on Climate Change from 2008 to 2014.

Education and career

Watts assisted with the setup of a radio program for his high school in Indiana, and later attended electrical engineering and meteorology classes at Purdue University, but did not graduate or receive a degree.: "Anthony Watts is a TV journalist, a weather presenter who studied Electrical Engineering and Meteorology at Purdue University; there's no record of his having graduated, however, and he's been reticent in discussing this. After a career in local television, in 2004 he moved to radio, joining the FOX News affiliate KPAY in Chico, California." In 1978, Watts began his broadcasting career as an on-air meteorologist for WLFI-TV in Lafayette, Indiana.

He joined KHSL-TV, a CBS affiliate based in Chico, California in 1987, and founded a company named ItWorks the same year. He stopped using his first name "Willard" to avoid confusion with NBC's ''Today'' weatherman Willard Scott. In 2002, he left KHSL to focus on ITWorks full-time. Watts has been the chief meteorologist for KPAY, a Fox News affiliate based in Chico, California since 2004, and the director and president of IntelliWeather Inc, a subsidiary of ItWorks, since 2000.

Watts was a member of the Chico, California school board from 2002 to 2006. In 2006, he was briefly a candidate for county supervisor, to represent Chico on the Butte County Board of Supervisors, but withdrew his candidacy due to family and workload concerns.

Climate change opinion and activities

Watts rejects the scientific consensus on climate change.: "Anthony Watts is an extremely popular blogger, drawing hundreds of comments per post and well over half a million visitors per month. Yet his blog contains highly questionable information–presented very "scientifically" of course, replete with charts and graphs–but all directed toward the end of making the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming seem faulty (in fact, it's extremely robust) He believes that global warming is occurring, but that it is not as bad as has been reported, and that carbon dioxide plays a much smaller part than the sun in causing climatic change.Anthony Watts
It's the Sun, stupid
wattsupwiththat.com, April 6, 2007. Watts has written that variations in solar irradiance, the sun's magnetic field and solar wind are driving changes to the climate, contrary to the scientific consensus that the primary cause of climate change is an increase in greenhouse gasses, including carbon dioxide.:Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks...This conclusion is based on a substantial array of scientific evidence, including recent work, and is consistent with the conclusions of recent assessments by the SGCRP the PCC and other assessments of the state of scientific knowledge on climate change...Most of the warming over the last several decades can be attributes to human activities that release carbon dioxide (CO₂), and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere. The burning of fossil fuels–coal, oil, and natural gas–for energy is the single largest human driver of climate change Climate models have been used to examine the role of the sun in recent warming,: "Numerous experiments have been conducted using climate models to determine the likely causes of the 20th-century climate change. These experiments indicate that models cannot reproduce the rapid warming observed in recent decades when they only take into account variations in solar output and volcanic activity." and data collected on solar irradiance and ozone depletion, as well as comparisons of temperature readings at different levels of the atmosphere have shown that the sun is not a significant factor driving climate change.: "It is ''extremely unlikely'' (<5%) that the global pattern of warming observed during the past half century can be explained without external forcing. These changes took place over a time period when non-anthropogenic forcing factors (i.e., the sum of solar and volcanic forcing) would be ''likely'' to have produced cooling, not warming."

Watts is a signatory to the Leipzig Declaration as well as the Manhattan Declaration, which calls for the immediate halt to any tax funded attempts to counteract climate change or reduce CO₂ emissions, and suggests the consensus among climate scientists is "false". Watts says he advocates for alternative energy sources and for the United States to "disengage from Middle East Oil."

In 2010, Watts went on a speaking tour to 18 locations around Australia. In 2014, Watts began the Open Atmospheric Society.

Climate change blogging

Watts established ''Watts Up With That?'' (WUWT) in 2006. The blog features material disputing the scientific consensus on climate change, including assertions that the human role in global warming is insignificant and carbon dioxide is not a driving force of warming. It hosts several guest bloggers, such as Christopher Monckton and Fred Singer, in addition to Watts. It is among the most prominent climate change denial blogs,: "One of the highest trafficked climate blogs is wattsupwiththat.com, a website that publishes climate misinformation on a daily basis.": "In recent years these conservative media outlets have been supplemented (and to some degree supplanted) by the conservative blogosphere, and numerous blogs now constitute a vital element of the denial machine...the most popular North American blogs are run by a retired TV meteorologist (wattsupwiththat.com)...Having this powerful, pervasive, and multifaceted media apparatus at its service provides the denial machine with a highly effective means of spreading its message.": "More importantly, it was becoming clear that the most effective denialist media weapon was not the newspapers or television but the internet. A number of influential websites, like Watts Up With That?, Climate Skeptic and Climate Depot, were established." and is described by climatologist Michael E. Mann as the most popular, having surpassed Climate Audit.: "Since then, a number of other amateur climate change denial bloggers have arrived on the scene. Most prominent among them is Anthony Watts, a meteorologist...and founder of the site "Watts Up with That?" which has overtaken climate audit as the leading climate change denial blog." In 2010, it received more than half a million views per month. Columbia Journalism School writer Curtis Brainard has written that "scientists have repeatedly criticized attsfor misleading readers on subjects such as the reliability of the U.S. surface temperature record."

In 2009, Watts was involved in popularizing the Climatic Research Unit email controversy,: "Watts is best known for his very heavily trafficked blog ''Watts Up With That?'', began in 2006, which provides not just a megaphone for himself but a rallying ground for other AGW deniers, notably Christopher Monckton. The blog played an important role in the Climategate fiasco, through its dissemination of the hacked CRU emails.": "In 2009, an unknown party acquired a large cache of private emails between climate scientists...and published them online. Cherry-picking quotes in order to make the scientists appear as though they were discussing data manipulation, bloggers such as Watts whipped up a pseudo-scandal that reverberated for years despite the fact that a series of nine investigations in the U.S. and the U.K. cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing. wherein emails of several climatologists were published by a hacker. Watts argued that the emails showed the scientists were manipulating data, and while a series of independent investigations cleared the scientists of any wrongdoing,The eight major investigations covered by secondary sources include
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee
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United States Environmental Protection Agency
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(US) public accusations resulting from the event continued for years. The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged throughout the investigations, however, the reports may have decreased public confidence in climate scientists and the IPCC, and conclusively altered the Copenhagen negotiations that year.: "Having this powerful, pervasive and multifaceted media apparatus at its service provides the denial machine with a highly effective means of spreading its message, as reflected quite recently by its success in turning a tiny and highly unrepresentative sample of thirteen years worth of personal e-mails hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia into a major scandal that has generated a decline in public belief in climate change and trust in climate scientists...despite the fact that several investigations have concluded that the e-mails neither demonstrate unethical behavior nor undermine climate science."

Surface Stations project

In 2007, Watts launched the Surface Stations project, encouraging volunteers to take photographs of weather stations in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network to record their condition.: "A few critics continued to seek confirmation of their denial of the warming data on air temperatures from weather stations and satellites. In particular, former TV weatherman Anthony Watts established a popular website that mobilized people to report continental U.S. weather stations that were poorly located, such as near the exhaust of air conditioners.": "Watts also started the Web site SurfaceStations.org, which purports to identify poorly sited meteorological stations in the United States in an effort to demonstrate that the instrumental record of warming temperatures is hopelessly compromised by instrumental measurement biases." By 2009, around 650 volunteers had reported on around 70% of the 1,221 stations, and suggested most were below "good or best" reliability. In March 2009 The Heartland Institute published an illustrated report authored by Watts, in which he argued that the surface temperature record in the United States was inaccurate and that the actual temperature was lower than reported. Watts presented pictures from volunteers participating through his website to show that many surface weather stations were situated near artificial heat sources such as pavement and air conditioners, but did not show any comparison of the data from these sites and the data from well situated stations.: "With the assistance of the Heartland Institute, Watts published a glossy, very official-looking report about the project... absent from that report, however, was any direct comparison showing what the surface temperature record looks like both with and without the sites that Watts deemed unworthy. Scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) went ahead and calculated it themselves, producing versions of the continental U.S. average temperature curve both with and without the records in question...Eliminating the "suspect" data made virtually no difference at all; in fact, the small bias that was found was of the opposite sign. The "corrected" record showed slightly more warming!"

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) investigated the matter. While acknowledging the suboptimal conditions of many stations, NOAA concluded in 2010 that any bias had been nearly eliminated by their models, which compared stations over regions and time. To the very limited extent that there was any measurement bias, it was in the opposite direction of what Watts expected: stations that were considered poorly situated reported slightly cooler temperatures.

Watts was co-author with climatologists John Nielsen-Gammon, John Christy and Roger A. Pielke, Sr. on a paper with Souleymane Fall as lead author, which found that mean temperature trends were nearly identical between poorly sited and well-sited stations, but poor siting led to a difference in estimated diurnal temperature range. The poorly positioned stations led to an overestimate of trends in minimum temperatures, balanced by a similar underestimate of maximum temperature trends. This meant that the mean temperature trends were nearly identical across the stations.

BEST project, alleged doubling of trend by NOAA

In March 2011 Watts visited the Berkeley Earth Temperature project (BEST), and said "I'm prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong." In October the project released data and a draft of their paper which produced results supporting the existing scientific consensus. Watts said that its methodology was flawed, complaining that the BEST study analyzed a larger period than his own research, and that it was not yet peer reviewed. Richard A. Muller, founder of BEST, later said their study directly addressed Watts' concern about the condition of weather stations; "we discovered that station quality does not affect the results. Even poor stations reflected temperature changes accurately.": "We have done an initial study of the station selection issue...we see a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups. We have also studied station quality. Many U.S. stations have low quality rankings according to a study led by Anthony Watts. However, we find that the warming seen in the "poor" stations is virtually indistinguishable from that seen in the "good" stations."

Around 22 July 2012, Watts heard that the BEST project was about to release further material, and decided to release a paper he and Evan Jones had been working on for about a year. ''The New York Times'' published a summary of further draft results from BEST, including an announcement from Muller that their study now showed that humans "are almost entirely the cause" of the warming. Shortly afterwards, Watts announced his own team's draft paper which said that previously reported temperature rises had been "spuriously doubled", and made the serious accusation that NOAA had inflated the rate by erroneous adjustments to the data. Climate scientists and other bloggers quickly found flaws in the paper. Steve McIntyre, whom Watts had named as a co-author, stressed that his involvement had been "very last minute and limited". He agreed with criticisms including the point that Watts had failed to correct for time of observation bias, and noted that independent satellite temperature measurements were closer to the NOAA figures.

In 2012 BEST released its series of peer-reviewed papers confirming previous results that the surface temperature is rising.

Connection with Heartland Institute

The Heartland Institute published Watts' preliminary report on weather station data, titled ''Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?'' Watts has appeared as a paid speaker at the International Conference on Climate Change the Heartland Institute have sponsored since 2008.

Watts says that he approached Heartland in 2011 to ask for help finding a donor to set up a website devoted to presenting NOAA's data as graphs that are easily accessible to the public.
Documents obtained from the Heartland Institute in February 2012 revealed that the Institute had agreed to help Watts raise $88,000 for his project. The documents state that $44,000 had already been pledged by an anonymous donor, and the Institute would seek to raise the rest. Watts has written that, aside from the help in funding this project, the Heartland Institute does not pay him a regular salary or fund his blog.

Notes

References

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External links

Watts Up With That? blog

SurfaceStations.org

{{DEFAULTSORT:Watts, Anthony
1958 births
American television meteorologists
Environmental bloggers
Heartland Institute
Living people
People from Chico, California