Watts up with that vs Google vs Climate Change

There's consternation at the climate conspiracy blog WattsUpWithThat.com (WUWT). Kip Hansen, a random denier dude, is ropeable. He's most upset because, in June this year, WUWT had a big drop in click-throughs from Google. A 30% drop, according to Kip (Google cache here :D).

Now this isn't about paid-for click-throughs (via Google AdWords). It's just about the freebie service that everyone gets. Here's his evidence that the Google algorithm is working better. Feel free to celebrate or commiserate.

Chart source: Wattsupwiththat.com

You probably noticed that, as climate science deniers tend to do with temperature charts, Kip's 30% measurement started at an unusually high point. (He may not have been able to get much earlier data because WUWT moved to a new server at the end of May this year and Anthony Watts might not have kept stats the same way on the old server. Who knows?)

Botched white and grey matter with Eric Worrall at WUWT

It's quiet on the denier front, so while waiting for the next climate conspiracy theory and logical fallacy, you can read about two more articles from Eric Worrall at WUWT. The first was how he is a bit wary of putting computers in people's brains (archived here, latest here). The second was about how some fossil-fuel-funded organisation in the USA is anti-environment (what's new?) (archived here).

Beyond crowd-sourcing

Eric got his notion about putting computers in people's brains from either misreading or extending an idea he got from the Daily Mail.  (He didn't dig any deeper.) His headline was:"Claim: Machine Human Hybrids will Solve Climate Change" under which Eric wrote:

The Daily Mail has claimed that the super intelligence of a new race of cybernetic enhanced humans will be able to solve wicked problems such as Climate Change.

Except that isn't what was written in the Daily Mail, or not if you interpret Eric's "cybernetic enhanced humans" like this. For all his IT expertise, Eric didn't understand what he copied and pasted. The first two lines of his copy and paste were:

‘Superintellingence’ of AI and humans working together could solve climate change and end wars, researchers claim

AI and humans working together - not "cybernetic enhanced humans" or "Machine human hybrids" - or not in the sense that Eric figured.

The Google Conspiracy - and a Google search engine customised for science deniers

A guest blogger, Ari Halperin, at WUWT has decided to create a new search tool especially for science deniers (archived here).  Ari behaves like a full-blown conspiracy theorist, which is par for the course at WUWT. He has all the right words on his blog "CO2 is plant food" mixed in with some that I haven't seen before.

Musicologists impersonating climate scientists

Ari says that climate scientists are imposters. They aren't really scientists, they are instead "journalists, historians, musicologists, copywriters, and professional activists".

How to add the author, time and comments link to the top of your Google blog - with a difference

This is an article, by request, about how to add the author, time of article and links to comments - to the top of your blog article. This is for Google blogs and bloggers only. Be aware that fiddling with a blog template can make it unusable, if you aren't careful. Make these or any changes to your blog at your own risk.

Worried by facts, quote-mining tides Anthony Watts over at WUWT

Anthony Watts is worried, because WUWT won't pass the fact test

In the comments, Chase Stoudt pointed out that Anthony Watts is worried about Google. In a paper in arXiv, a team of people from Google write how in future it might be possible to list results from Google search according to their factual content, putting disinformation sites (like WUWT) way down low:

The quality of web sources has been traditionally evaluated using exogenous signals such as the hyperlink structure of the graph. We propose a new approach that relies on endogenous signals, namely, the correctness of factual information provided by the source. A source that has few false facts is considered to be trustworthy.

Anthony told Fox News how this worried him a lot. He said: "“I worry about this issue greatly… My site gets a significant portion of its daily traffic from Google,”.