Tuesday, December 23, 2008
Notice to all media
Who says that (relatively) new blogs cannot get huge? If I were a mainstream newspaper struggling to survive, I would carefully study Anthony Watts' excellent blog Watts Up With That? and consider the reasons for its explosive growth in traffic. Watts, whose blog features climate news and science out of step with the dominant narrative, has built his prodigious traffic because he questions the official story and is moderate in tone, principled in his arguments, and accessible in his writing. Instead of, well, the opposite. His "Surface Stations" project, in which he uses his audience to catalog by photograph and other investigation the condition of the hundreds of temperature sensors scattered around the United States, is exactly the sort of work that mainstream media might have done back in the day, but which now is better handled by the blogosphere.
Congratulations, Anthony. Everybody else out there, start reading Watts Up With That?
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Tue Dec 23, 02:01:00 PM:
"Given that there is now no possible cherry pick that the denialists can now use to make it look like Arctic sea ice is increasing, I predict that they will start talking about Antarctic sea ice."
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/12/the_australians_war_on_science_29.php#more
Of course that's already happened with TH's repost from Watts, on Dec. 20th:
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2008/12/the_australians_war_on_science_29.php#more
My comment about Watts that I added to the post at the time:
"But it's very smart to switch the anecdotes away from the Arctic ice, as that hasn't been going well at all in the last month:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png
The smart delayist tactic: avoid discussing any recent evidence that's one more example of an obvious ongoing trend, and seize on minor deviations from the trend instead."
By 
Chris, at
Tue Dec 23, 06:44:00 PM:
Brian, Can you please just tell us how you feel about the growth of viewers of Mr.Watt's site? Opposing points a view are always interesting if you don't get a head ache just trying to figure them out.
By , at
Fri Dec 26, 02:19:00 PM:
Chris - I'm not sure how interested anyone would be in my opinion about Watts popularity, but I assume TH is reposting Watts' best stuff here, and what he reposts here is trivial, distracting from the main issue, or easily refuted, so I'd guess it's quite unfortunate that people believe Watts has much anything useful to offer.
BTW I screwed up the above link to the TH Dec 20th post - it's here:
http://tigerhawk.blogspot.com/2008/12/sea-ice-watch.html
