Occam's Razor sez Eric Worrall is a science denier

Anthony's took the day off so he allowed one of the nuttier nutters to run the nuthouse at wattsupwiththat.  Eric Worrall has posted an article at WUWT (archived here).

Eric is arguing that Occam's Razor disproves the greenhouse effect.

Oh Eric didn't say that in so many words, but applying Occam's Razor to his simple thought processes suggests that is the case.  For example, this is the crux of Eric's argument:

... if we reject the principle of Occam’s Razor, we open the door to accepting theories of arbitrary, ultimately infinite complexity. A theory created by researchers who do not accept the principle of Occam’s Razor cannot be falsified, because the theory can always be tweaked in arbitrary ways to avoid falsification.

So why does applying the principle of Occam’s Razor force us to reject the theory that anthropogenic CO2 is the main driver of contemporary climate change? The reason is that nature has produced periods of warming similar to the recent warming, without any significant contribution from Anthropogenic CO2.

So we have two competing hypothesis for what is driving contemporary climate change:-

1. Observed natural variation, which has produced periods of warming statistically indistinguishable from the warming which ended in 1998.
2. Observed natural variation + an unproven assumption that Anthropogenic CO2 is now the main driver of Climate Change.

Eric just made it up out of thin air that there are "two competing hypothesis".  There aren't.  Science shows that CO2 is a greenhouse gas and that when it's increasing like it is now, then Earth will get hotter, like it does now.  He is also wrong about his notion that a theory "can always be tweaked in arbitrary ways to avoid falsification".  There is a limit to how much a theory can be modified in the light of new evidence.  If the basis of a theory is completely wrong, the entire theory will eventually break down and be discarded.

Eric concludes:

Clearly the second hypothesis fails the test of Occam’s Razor. In the absence of compelling evidence that anthropogenic CO2 has overridden natural variation, we have to accept hypothesis 1 – that observed climate change is the result of natural variation.

Now there are a few things wrong with that logic.  First it doesn't follow that CO2 must "over-ride natural variation" for all the rise in temperature to be attributable to natural variation.  All that is needed is to show that natural variation does not account for all the changes to climate.

Secondly, climate change is much more than a rise in global surface temperature.  There are what is known as fingerprints of climate change, which indicate the cause.  One of these is the temperature change in the stratosphere compared to the troposphere.  Both are measured.  Because the stratosphere is cooling, it shows that the warming troposphere is caused by the build up of greenhouse gases.  Eric doesn't mention that inconvenient fact, probably because it conflicts with his own hypothesis. As Eric says, the simplest explanation is the most likely.  I'll add the caveat that whatever the explanation, it has to fit with the evidence.

Thirdly, we don't "have to" accept anything but the evidence that supports the theory.  We have a choice.  We can choose to be like Eric and other deniers of science and reject the science and take pot luck about the consequences of that decision.  Or we can accept the evidence and the associated explanation and make informed decisions.

Lastly, there is evidence that CO2 is increasing.  It's been measured.  Toward the end of the video below, you'll see just how much CO2 has built up over the past 800,000 years:

And, of course, scientists have been able to work out and explain quite clearly what has contributed to global warming and by how much. Click the chart to enlarge it.

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Fig. TS7.1

The simplest explanation

Occam's razor suggests a hypothesis when it comes to Eric Worrall, based on his article and his history.  I know he's read HotWhopper and I know he's been visiting lots of different climate blogs, those that write about science as well as those that reject science and/or promote pseudo-science.: He actively rejects science.

The reason for him actively rejecting science could be any and quite possibly all of the following:

1. He wants to curry favour with the denialati.
2. He suffers motivated reasoning because of his ideology.
3. He doesn't understand science.

Supporting evidence is that Eric Worrall has even looked to stock market indicators instead of science to argue the world is about to cool.

From the WUWT comments

johnmarshall says:

March 22, 2014 at 4:23 am
I go along with that. Good post many thanks.

Village Idiot points out the idiocy using a simple logical fallacy and responds to Martin (who tried to bring science into the mix):

March 22, 2014 at 1:03 am
Martin: You’ve entirely missed the point of the good Professors piece. Bringing stuff like data, facts and physical laws into the mix, just making it more complex.

Let me try to again explain the simple beauty of the argument:

It’s been as hot or hotter as it is now during the last millions of years (without human emissions) therefore humans have no influence on climate now.

Try a bit harder. It’s really just a matter of faith ;-)

Roy complains that there needs to be a grade school primer sent to him personally, because he's incapable of doing his own research using Google, and says:

March 22, 2014 at 2:19 am
Have supporters of the consensus ever claimed that natural variation is properly understood? If not their claim that the science is settled was clearly bogus from the start – and they knew it.
On the other hand, if they really do think that natural variation is understood have they published an explanation of it anywhere on the web that could be understood by a lay person?

Frederick Davies says:

March 22, 2014 at 2:36 am
Great (and more importantly, clear) post.
FD

lgl asks Eric and inconvenient question and says:

March 22, 2014 at 2:39 am
Fine, but what is the ‘simplest explanation’ for the 1880-1998 rise? 

cedarhill says he's not about to let facts get in the way of his science denial, or something:

March 22, 2014 at 3:09 am
Facts are not a deterrent in the warmist political campaign. After all, how many Americans under the age of 30 are not aware the Earth circles the Sun? Regardless, facts and logic are still fun things.

AlecM is a greenhouse effect denier who makes up his own "physics" and says:

March 22, 2014 at 4:09 am
No truly professional engineer or physicist agrees with the central premise of the ‘enhanced greenhouse effect’, the assumption that the Earth’s surface emits to the atmosphere net real IR energy as if it were a black body in radiative equilibrium with absolute zero.

This juvenile mistake, predicting three times intrinsic CO2 warming, is from incorrect physics taught in Meteorology and Climate Science. It is our era’s equivalent of the 18th Century’s ‘Phlogiston’, also debunked when real scientists did real experiments. The analogy is apposite because Phlogiston was supposed to be a 5th Greek Humour, emitted from heated bodies!  

Anthony Watts arrives late at the APS climate party ... and gets it wrong

I see that Anthony Watts has only just discovered that the American Physical Society is reviewing its climate policy statement.  He wrote excitedly (archived here):

That noise you can hear in the distance is the sound of John Cook’s, Dana Nuccitelli’s, and Joe Romm’s heads exploding

Lindzen, Christy and Curry appointed to APS climate statement review panel

He earlier wrote, quoting Simon of Australian Climate Madness, that:

The American Physical Society, which previously issued a highly alarmist statement regarding climate change, is to review it, and has appointed three climate realists to the panel of six. 

...before slightly amending it to insert the word "[address]" after "climate realists".


Anyway, Lindzen, Christy and Curry did attend a workshop of the APS sub-committee back in early January.  As well as the contrarians, the sub-committee invited three more highly regarded and serious climate scientists (Ben Santer, Isaac Held and William Collins).  Goodness knows why they had Richard, John and Judith along.

Lindzen, Christy and Curry aren't on the sub-committee and I don't hold great hopes that the sub-committee will end up with a sensible climate policy. If you read the transcript of the January workshop it's clear that the Sub-Committee members themselves know zilch about climate science.  You'd think that out of all the members of the APS they could find some climate experts to prepare a draft statement.

By the way, this is another example of Anthony either forgetting or not reading stuff he's already posted on his blog before, too. And he doesn't read Judith Curry's blog or Rabett Run either, both of whom wrote about this a month ago.

Eli's post is a must read.  He starts off scathingly:

The American Physical Society had done it again.  In a surprisingly repetitive fit of Dunning Kruger they have assembled a subcommittee to guide the Panel on Public Affairs (POPA) in a review of the APS statement on Climate Change which is composed of nuclear physicists and others who know nothing about climate relevant physics.

From the WUWT comments

Even though the sub-committee has a lot of learning ahead of it when it comes to climate science, I wonder if WUWT is going to be a repeat of Richard Muller's temperature reconstruction - where they all cried "hurrah" anticipating a finding that earth had cooled or something - only to turn on him when his analysis was completed.  I mean how likely is it that the APS would reverse its current policy position?

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.

If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

Terry Comeau says:

March 20, 2014 at 7:53 am
What I would give to sit in on the meetings of the panel. The alarmists on that panel must be panic stricken. Three people with such impressive scientific credentials to actually put real questions of science and integrity to their blatant and exceedingly flimsy eco-activistic pseudo-scientific constructs. How on earth can they try to maintain their house of cards under those circumstances? The gig is up and they must see it coming like a light in a train tunnel, and there isn’t a damned thing they can do to avoid it. Wow. Break out the popcorn.

Ken Hall says:

March 20, 2014 at 8:01 am
AT LAST!!! An authorititive and august scientific institution actually using a scientific approach to investigating the merits, or lack thereof, of the CAGW hypothesis. fully balanced and fully in public, without hiding anything. About effin time!

To overtly mangle metaphors, once this domino falls it should creat a crack in the dam of CAGW alarmism which should spread through all the other authorititive and august scientific institutions, including the Royal Society. Once this happens, real science may prevail and we may see a return to sanity in science and politics. It is early days yet, but fingers crossed.

John Whitman says:

March 20, 2014 at 10:29 am
It does not get any better than this for it finally shows a reasonable good level of openness and transparency in climate science assessment. The review panel has high level personnel who are very critical of the processes that supported the controversial aspects of climate science used for the IPCC reports.

This APS process is a prototype that the The Royal Society, the IPCC, the NAS, AAAS, AGU and the US Congress should emulate.
John 

Let's wait to see how this plays out.  The American Physical Society has a reputation to uphold after all.  It could well be that WUWT will suffer a series of head explosions, not John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli or Joe Romm.

Recursive furies, hurt feelings or confected outrage

Update: I've been getting a few visitors from ClimateAudit so I had a peep.  Not satisfied with his previous rants and false accusations of "fake" and "scam" when he failed his attempt at stats, one of the most unethical people in the blogosphere, Steve McIntyre, is manufacturing yet another conspiracy theory out of emails - ha!  It looks as if he's hoping to take centre stage in another cognitive science paper! (Archived here) I won't bother unpacking his diatribe. Suffice to say when you look past Steve's rhetoric at the content and break it down, his analysis is all bluster and ethics free.  He doesn't have a leg to stand on.

---

Today Stephan Lewandowsky announced that his Recursive Fury paper is being retracted by a journal.

Why?  It was not because of any problem with the paper itself from a scientific or ethical perspective.  In fact, the journal did an investigation and "did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study".

No, it was because a "small number" of deniers harassed the journal.  The journal made a vague reference to "legal context" and insufficient clarity of same.  In other words, it caved when bombarded with complaints from a small number of deniers (see below).

On its website page showing the abstract, there is this statement, which has been there for some time - here is the link.

This article, first published by Frontiers on 18 March 2013, has been the subject of complaints. Given the nature of some of these complaints, Frontiers has provisionally removed the link to the article while these issues are investigated, which is being done as swiftly as possible and which Frontiers management considers the most responsible course of action. The article has not been retracted or withdrawn. Further information will be provided as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

(The journal needs to hire a webmaster, it keeps messing up the page.  Compare the earlier archive here and the "fix", archived here.)


I finally found the retraction notice on another page here, which states:

Retraction of the Original Research Article: Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer and Michael Marriott Front. Psychol. | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073

In the light of a small number of complaints received following publication of the original research article cited above, Frontiers carried out a detailed investigation of the academic, ethical and legal aspects of the work. This investigation did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study. It did, however, determine that the legal context is insufficiently clear and therefore Frontiers wishes to retract the published article. The authors understand this decision, while they stand by their article and regret the limitations on academic freedom which can be caused by legal factors.

As Stephan Lewandowsky writes:

The authors were involved in drafting the retraction statement and sanction its content: We understand the journal’s position even though we do not agree with it. 

Stepping away from the Grand Vision

Frontiers in Psychology is an open access journal that says:

Our grand vision is to build an Open Science platform that empowers researchers in their daily work and where everybody has equal opportunity to seek, share and generate knowledge.

By all accounts the journal could be viewed as taking a step backwards from that "grand vision" by caving into people who object to research.  I can appreciate that it's not a large publishing house and doesn't want to risk a lengthy (or any) legal battle.  On the other hand, it doesn't set a good precedent.  Deniers may well take it into their heads to employ similar tactics against any paper for any reason or no reason at all.  I expect IOP got loads of complaints about the 97% paper - we know that Richard Tol did his best to discredit that - although his best wasn't worth a cracker.  That paper ended up at the top of the list of IOP papers for 2013.

The Recursive Fury has been viewed almost 40,000 times in total - even though the full text version was taken down some time ago.  Compare that with a well-cited article (81) published in the same journal the previous year, about video action games, perception and cognition, which has had less than 22,000 views in total.  Or this one, which also got lots of citations (51) which has less than 1,400 views in total.  You'd think the journal would want to hang onto papers that attract the public's attention.


You can download the paper now at the University of Western Australia's website - or if you prefer, you can get the paper as it stood "after rigorous peer review" from the journal's own website.

...but perhaps impacting the goal

The journal website has a goal to increase the impact of articles and their authors:

We are the first – and only – platform that combines open-access publishing with research networking, with the goal to increase the reach of publications and ultimately the impact of articles and their authors.

This action has made a bit of an impact in the deniosphere and it will be interesting to see the impact it has on the journal's authors and potential authors.  Whether the action has had an impact on the authors of Recursive Fury has yet to be seen.  If anything it will probably lead to more publicity for the paper, which will also be publicity for the paper's authors.  I don't know if this will "increase the reach of publications" of Frontiers in Psychology, but it will most like increase the reach of publications by Professor Lewandowsky and his colleagues.  And this publication in particular.

Deniers squeak and squeal "defamation" and threaten legal action

Recursive Fury is being furiously discussed all over the deniosphere.  Anthony Watts has written about it (archived here) - to add to the 25 plus WUWT recursively furious protest articles on Professor Lewandowky and his work.

Graham Readfearn has written about it from a different angle.  He obtained by FOI request the swag of furious emails and other correspondence sent to the University of Western Australia, where Professor Lewandowsky used to work.  It won't be any surprise to inhabitants of climate blogs to see that deniers are big fat sooks and have double standards as well as being conspiracy nutters. They will write arguably libelous articles against scientists ad infinitum but as soon as the spotlight is shone on their antics they scream blue murder. Even, in some cases, threatening legal action.  I guess they think government institutions aren't all bad after all.

At WUWT, Anthony wrote (archived here):

We are all scratching our heads at the “threat of libel” narrative. As far as I know,  nobody in the climate skeptic community has instigated a libel lawsuit or even gotten a lawyer involved over the Lew paper. Mostly we just laugh about it. 

You'd think dour old Anthony Watts spent all his time "laughing".  A google search of Lewandowsky at WUWT yields 5,850 results!

Anthony doesn't know very much in any case. As Graham Readfearn wrote:

In FOI documents another climate sceptic blogger forwards a complaint they had made to the Frontiers journal. The complaint said: “I have sought legal advice which has confirmed that, as long as a reasonable number of blog readers are aware of my true identity and professional reputation (which is the case), I could potentially have a defamation action against the authors and publishers of this paper for an outright lie that was told about me.”

Later in the letter, the blogger added: “I hope that you will see that this was a clear case of quote falsification, academic misconduct and defamation and that the paper will now be permanently withdrawn.”

Graham also wrote about how Steven McIntyre made up stuff, including falsely accusing the scientists of not get ethics approval (which they did).  Steven is prone to conspiracy ideation quite often, for example, the first thought that enters his mind when he can't access a website is that people are deliberately blocking his ip address! He's also very quick to falsely accuse scientists of faking and scamming.

The University of Western Australia didn't cave

The University of Western Australia is standing by the paper.  It's probably a lot bigger than the Frontiers in Psychology journal and almost certainly has more expertise in law.  Here is what Stephan Lewandowsky wrote, including a quote from the University's legal counsel:

Given its popularity, and given that approximately 29,300 viewers did not complain about our work, it would be a shame to deprive the public of access to this article. Because the work was conducted in Australia, I consulted with the University of Western Australia’s chief lawyer, Kim Heitman, who replied as follows:

“I’m entirely comfortable with you publishing the paper on the UWA web site. You and the University can easily be sued for any sorts of hurt feelings or confected outrage, and I’d be quite comfortable processing such a phony legal action as an insurance matter.”
— Kimberley Heitman, B.Juris, LLB, MACS, CT, General Counsel, University of Western Australia

Update: Dana Nuccitelli has a well-written piece about this at the Guardian.

Update 2: John Timmer has an article about this at ArsTechnica.  Plus there are some interesting tweets including this one.

Update 3: Michael Halpern has a good article about this at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

From the WUWT comments

Despite all the articles on WUWT about the Recursive Fury paper and the Moon Landing paper, there are a lot of deniers who don't know anything about either.  There are also a few WUWT commenters who are angling for a place in the follow-up to Recursive Fury, though not as many as there were when the Moon Landing paper was published. Here are some comments:


Cold in Wisconsin doesn't know what s/he is talking about but says something irrelevant anyway:

March 20, 2014 at 6:37 pm
I do think that using information for research without informing the subjects is questionable. Call it a poll or something else, but what’s to keep people from being non-serious with their answers when the intentions of the question have to be obvious? Also, how can you tell that your subjects are randomly chosen and representative when you use blogs as your population? Really to represent that type of material as Academic research is kind of laughable. I’m not sure that a high school class couldn’t improve on that scheme.

rogerknights is a conspiracy theorist who opts for "nefarious intent" (see the Recursive Fury paper) and says:

March 20, 2014 at 7:05 pm
It looks to me as though this libel-threat is a cover story to enable a face-saving distancing from the poo-paper.

Mac the Knife seems to think that Professor Lewandowsky is a climate scientist and says:

March 20, 2014 at 7:39 pm
Since when are climate pscientists qualified to conduct psychology research? Are psychologists equally qualified to conduct climate research? Is psychology required course work for climate pscientists????

It may be more appropriate and enlightening for theologists to conduct research on the climate pscientists and their true believers, m’thinks…

kcom says:

March 20, 2014 at 8:49 pm
The paper is actually published in full (as far as I can tell) on the US government’s NIH (National Institute of Health) website:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3600613/

It gives all the appearance of having been there for a year, showing the March 18, 2013 publication date of the original paper.

I'm not sure why Fabi made this comment in this particular thread, but I think it's cute and wonder if the penny dropped about the difference between the fake Oregon Petition and the much heralded Cook13 paper when s/he says:

March 20, 2014 at 9:13 pm
Something I noticed above and it relates to the much-abused 97% figure. As referenced (correctly), it claims that 97% of climate ‘papers’… How ‘papers’ got translated to ‘scientists’ is beyond me. Not that I ever liked the 97% figure to begin with, but it should also be argued that it is research paper abstracts, and certainly not scientists.

Whereas conspiracy theorising Barry Woods theorises some more and says:

March 21, 2014 at 2:47 am
Ben was tipped off about that Skeptical Science web page, being in the google cache..

Was it a Skeptical Science insider, was it their hacker, or was there a more simple explanation to who tipped Ben Off about it…….

I wonder why SkS withdrew it, the page said embargoed to the 20th March, I wonder what happened (now the 21st) 

Barry Woods is claiming some credit for harassing the journal and says (excerpt):

March 21, 2014 at 3:00 am
I complained to Frontiers about the ethical conducts and conflicts of interest and vested interest of the authors. I requested my name to be removed from the paper. Because one of the authors Marriott, (Watching the Deniers blog) had been writing over a dozen articles attacking the critics of LOG12 during the research period (ie not neutral as claimed) and more particularly, had personally attacked me, naming me (and others) on his blog Watching the Deniers.. and as such I said this compromised the paper.

Here's a link to the article that Barry took exception to.  It's nothing to do with the Recursive Fury paper. Barry wrote a dumb article at WUWT protesting the findings of Doran and Zimmerman's survey of scientists about global warming.  I wonder why Barry thinks that it's okay for him to attempt to blog-refute Doran and Zimmerman but it's not okay for someone else to blog-refute Barry's "arguments".


jauntycyclist hasn't bothered to read any science and is waiting for someone to read it to him or her.  jauntycyclist also has strange ideas about the study of psychology and says (excerpt):

March 21, 2014 at 3:50 am
i don’t see people inventing conspiracy or in a fury. I just see people waiting for proof to claims co2 is the main driver of temps and will result in catastrophic change.

if people want to talk psychology then the word cult comes to mind? Patrick Moore uses the term cult.

En Passant queries whether it really is just "harmful fun":

March 21, 2014 at 4:46 am
Stop laughing as this is not funny. Every week these clowns collect a paycheck, many of them paid by we taxpayers.
Still think it is just harmful fun?

---

Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer and Michael Marriott-Hubble (2013) "Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation" Available at UWA

Dunning and Kruger in the Cenozoic Era at WUWT - very uplifting :)

Anthony Watts has a new article on his blog today (archived here).  It's about a paper in Nature about some research estimating the amount of CO2 released by tectonic activity, I suppose you'd call it.  When mountains are formed and fresh rock is exposed the scientists postulated that there was more chemical reactions going on than previously thought, releasing CO2.  The work was done by Mark A. Torres, A. Joshua West & Gaojun Li.

As usual, Anthony didn't link to the paper or press release itself but it wasn't hard to find either.  The paper has a dry title: Sulphide oxidation and carbonate dissolution as a source of CO2 over geological timescales.

Some science media outlets jazzed up the research up with a catchy headline, which Anthony borrowed (and no sign of a "claim"):

The Goldilocks principle: New hypothesis explains earth's continued habitability

Goldilocks & the 3 bears minus Goldilocks.
Robert Southey 1837

The Goldilocks principle was invoked because the paper was about how CO2 keeps the earth "not too hot and not too cold" - though it isn't always "just right" for everyone and everything, is it.


Anyway, the scientists worked out that over the Cenozoic era, marine analysis suggests there was extensive weathering of silicates when mountains were popping up all over the world, but there wasn't enough CO2 released from volcanic eruptions to balance the books.  They reckoned that "The resulting imbalance would have depleted the atmosphere of all CO2 within a few million years7."

So they put on their thinking caps and had a close look at some mountains in Peru.  They figured that there was CO2 being released from fresh rock exposed during tectonic activity.  The way I read their research, what they are saying is that when there's a lot of tectonic activity there was both more CO2 absorbed by weathering as well as more CO2 released by chemical reactions.

This is all on geological time scales, needless to say.  We're not talking in time frames of decades - this is the slow carbon cycle over thousands to millions of years.  That's for the CO2 absorption by silicate weathering and the release by chemical activity.  If volcanoes are big enough they can affect CO2 on much shorter time frames.

From the University of Southern California:

Torres and West studied rocks taken from the Andes mountain range in Peru and found that weathering processes affecting rocks released far more carbon than previously estimated, which motivated them to consider the global implications of CO2 release during mountain formation. ...

...Like many other large mountain ranges, such as the great Himalayas, the Andes began to form during the Cenozoic period, which began about 60 million years ago and happened to coincide with a major perturbation in the cycling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Using marine records of the long-term carbon cycle, Torres, West and Li reconstructed the balance between CO2 release and uptake caused by the uplift of large mountain ranges and found that the release of CO2 release by rock weathering may have played a large, but thus far unrecognized, role in regulating the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last roughly 60 million years.

(If you go to the USC website, I suggest use Firefox or IE, not Chrome. It's not Chrome-friendly.  But the USC has the full press release.  Other sites have only got a short version.)

Here's a link to one of NASA's Earth Observatory articles - on the slow carbon cycle and more.

From the WUWT comments

Anthony didn't have anything to add to his copied press release.  The rabble, they are another story. Get a load of this comment from devijvers, who is crying out for someone to call Poe when s/he strums a variation on the "scientists don't know nuffin'" theme:

March 20, 2014 at 1:10 am
The CO2 cycle:
Ocean plant life syncs to the bottom, becomes part of the sediment and eventually becomes rock. This is how CO2 is sequestered in rock.The tectonic conveyor belt slowly takes the ocean floor to the subduction zones, melting the rock by means of magma.The CO2 now mixed in magma is ejected by volcanoes. Wheatering of the newly formed rocks releases CO2.
This article is pure nonsense. More CO2 needs to be released by the wheatering than is used for the wheatering, otherwise we would have ran out long time ago. Where did these people get their degrees?

Matthijs seems to think we could end up like Venus in the blink of an eye - or maybe like Mars and says:

March 20, 2014 at 1:16 am
Another one that claims nature is in balance.
It is not.
It is a chaotic system that will flow from state to state depending on events that occur.
No way of telling what the next state is.

AleaJactaEst has it all figured out.  Scientists can pack up and go home:

March 20, 2014 at 1:17 am
…”While human-made atmospheric carbon dioxide increases are currently driving significant changes in the Earth’s climate….” and what would those be then?
The Earth has and will continue to go through several oxidising and reducing cycles (Devonian Permian e.g.) base solely on land mass accretion and subduction whose engine is the deep mantle plumes, the heat of which is derived from radioactive decay. The rest of our surface cycles are simply reactions, not balances, to the aforementioned cycles.

Paul Pierett calls on scientists to lend authority to his argument that scientists don't know nuffin' - (yeah, he's a bit mixed up) - but he's yours, most sincerely, if you'll take him:

March 20, 2014 at 1:29 am
I think they are close but have the cart before the horse. They still blame man. Too, not too many look beyond man for command and control of CO2 levels and there is the fail point.
Let’s begin with Milankovitch Cycles and Sunspot Cycles for the cause in geological cycles. From there gain and understanding of Topography shifts North and South of the Equator As the Earth emerges from and Ice Age and Returns again with mini-ice ages in the middle.
The Glaciers, Polar Ice Caps store the excess CO2 and releases them in the Ocean exchange as the Earth warms up and Topography expands and is allowed to expand. For example, when Lord Monckton testified before Congress a couple of years ago, the woman tree ring scientist testified that the tree line in the Sierra was higher for tree stumps were at a much higher elevation than at the present tree line. Thus, less Glaciers and Polar Ice mass released more CO2 to the Oceans and more provided for Topography at higher elevations and Latitudes.
As for the Pyrite, adjustments were made as much for the Volcanoes over time which we saw with Mt. Pinatubo.
Most Sincerely
Paul Pierett 

Talking of being mixed up.  A prize for anyone who can figure out what is going on in Mike Alger's little brain when he says:

March 20, 2014 at 1:39 am
Once again there is an overriding paradigm assumption that it is CO2 that is the main driver of the climatic system throughout geologic history…an assumption that I think is flawed in its very core. Even the warmists admit that the direct contribution of another doubling of CO2 is probably at most 1degree C…it’s the feedbacks that cause the catastrophic warming they are so worried about. But the feedbacks aren’t caused directly by CO2, they are caused by the slight warming the CO2 allegedly causes. So why focus on what controls the CO2 throughout geologic history? Instead focus on what causes the warming and cooling, which probably has much more to do with CO2 concentrations than the other way around.

My oh my, and I've hardly skipped over any comments.  Dunning and Kruger would have a field day at WUWT today.  Okay, just one more.  This time from our good friend, Leo Geiger, who is no doubt destined for the WUWT bin sooner rather than later:

Leo Geiger says:

March 20, 2014 at 3:36 am
I wonder what the criteria is for deciding whether or not published research needs to be introduced here with the word “Claim:” added as a prefix in the title? This one avoids that particular characterization.

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Mark A. Torres, A. Joshua West & Gaojun Li. "Sulphide oxidation and carbonate dissolution as a source of CO2 over geological timescales." Nature 507, 346–349 (20 March 2014) doi:10.1038/nature13030

How Professor Michael Mann started a climate movement - by email...if only we could find it...

Anthony Watts has just discovered something that happened more than four months ago (archived here). There was an amicus brief filed by the Reporters' Committee in the Virginia emails case.  The Reporters' Committee want the court to narrow a definition.  A quick scan suggests they aren't necessarily wanting access to Michael Mann's personal emails, they are just concerned that the decision was worded in a way that may have implications for future FOIA requests and their "freedom" to delve into other people's emails.

The secret email winging its way to the climate movement!

The edifice of science crumbles under an email...eh what?

Anyway, no point in my speculating about that case.  It'll run its course soon enough. What got me was the fact that deniers at WUWT still seem to think that two hundred years of climate science is going to come undone because of one person's emails stored on a server somewhere between nine and fifteen years ago.  Do they honestly think that there is only one climate scientist in the world?  Do they seriously think that the whole edifice of earth, ocean and atmospheric science - paleoclimatology, geology, atmospheric physics, ocean chemistry, ecology, biology, cloud microphysics and the multitude of knowledge accumulated since the early nineteenth century is going to be turned on its head by some right wing lobby group getting access to a bunch of old emails?

Let's see.  Here are some comments.

The climate "movement" ...eh what?

First a ponderous pronouncement from Anthony Watts:

IMHO, the Mann’s days are numbered as a hero of the climate movement.

In those few words, Anthony Watts has both created a "hero" and tried to cut him down. He's also created a "movement".  I don't know what sort of weird lies between those ears - but really - now a study of earth sciences is a "movement"?  WTF!

Thing is, it's deniers who made Michael Mann a "hero" or perhaps their anti-hero.   They protested the temperature of the past and the present.  They couldn't accept that humans have changed the climate and we're still doing it, with a vengeance.  Oddly, most of them don't realise that there is more and more evidence by lots of quite independent teams of scientists that have refined and supported the findings of that early reconstruction.

In fact greenhouse effect denier and Anthony fanboi, dbstealey, takes all the credit on behalf of Anthony and WUWT and says:

March 17, 2014 at 8:21 pm
Anthony and WUWT have a lot to do with this.
If relentless pressure was not kept up, Mann might have skated…
Kudos to Anthony and all the contributors who helped bring this about.
Everyone deserves credit. With sunshine, the truth will emerge.

Nick Adams lives a very boring dull life and can't comprehend anyone standing up for a principle. He trots out "a trojan horse" like all those despicable people who try to justify an unjustifiable invasion of privacy and says:

March 17, 2014 at 8:01 pm
A man with nothing to hide never tries this hard to hide it.

myrightpenguin is one who has woken up to the fact that Professor Mann isn't the only climate scientist in the world and says he's already fingered the next target for deniers.  What he doesn't seem to realise is just how much science is lined up.  You can guess who that is, most probably, because it was the Number One most protested paper last year.  myrightpenguin is nevertheless deluded:

March 18, 2014 at 12:09 am
Mann may be disposable because of a series of papers inc. Marcott et al., so even if he is thrown under the bus the alarmists and MSM may still say there is a hockey stick regardless. There needs to be readiness for this, including education regarding the issue of splicing datasets with completely different resolutions, something that wouldn’t stand a chance of getting past peer review in scientific fields uncorrupted by special interests.

When deniers have nothing else to offer they unimaginatively call on Nazis. True to form, nicholas tesdorf says:

March 17, 2014 at 9:52 pm
Could this trial turn out to be the Warmistas’ Stalingrad. Before Stalingrad, the Nazis never had a defeat: after Stalingrad, they never had a victory.

Oh, and you'll enjoy this one.  Out of 220,000 stolen emails the deniers found.....nothing!  Anthony loses his cool with dp when he says:

March 17, 2014 at 11:30 pm
Climategate III is mute because nobody with the password has a pair, to draw a phrase from the current post. Too bad it wasn’t given to me as if that had happened the world would have it now. That is an advantage granted those of us who have no expectation of seeing another birthday. Never misunderestimate the fearlessness of motivated senior citizens. There are some jobs nobody else can get done.

REPLY: Hey, “dp” you can have the right to complain about “nobody with the password has a pair” here when you put your own name to your words. Otherwise kindly STFU. Basically there’s nothing new in CG III that hadn’t already been covered in CGI/II. Megabytes of mundane stuff, much like NSA flypaper. The important stuff has been extracted. Dumping the whole file on the net won’t help anybody. Tough noogies if you don’t like the situation but that’s the reality. – Anthony

I'll leave you with the unholy reverend from the Cornwall Alliance, as richardscourtney makes a now-rare appearance at WUWT.  Just some excerpts, you can read the godless mess here:

the ‘war’ to stop the AGW-scare ... WW2...H1tler never had a defeat before the battle of El Alamein...Montgomery won the Second Battle of El Alamein...defend against the AGW scare...Battle of Stalingrad...advance of H1tler’s forces...military might of the Naz1s...AGW-scare...the ‘Kursk’ of the AGW-scare: the ‘bunker’ of the CRU at UEA...etc etc

It's time to visit Alice's Restaurant again, isn't it :)

I mean, if three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. ... And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may think it's a 

...wait for it....

they may think it's a movement.

Read more: Arlo Guthrie - Alice's Restaurant Massacre Lyrics | MetroLyrics

.

Is Cliff Mass taking the piss?

Cliff Mass has a blog post (archived here) that he begins with:

A week ago I was on  a state legislative panel about the regional implications of global climate change and some climate policy folks on the panel described a range of unpleasant local effects of increasing greenhouse gases:  coastal inundation from rising sea level, droughts, an increase in severe storms, serious flooding on local rivers, extreme precipitation, insect infestations killing  forests,  heat waves, and ocean acidification killing local shellfish, among others.   

Cliff doesn't say which state.  There were several clues by which one can narrow down the state legislative panel.  For example, the parts about rising sea levels, droughts, extreme precipitation and insect infestations. My guess is that the state legislature was on the west coast of the USA - Washington, Oregon or California.  Cliff hails from Washington State but there were no panels held on climate change there that I could find. I don't have time to look up all the different jurisdictions.  It doesn't really matter except I would have liked to have checked what Cliff reported against what was actually presented - and by whom.

Update: Dan McShane in the comments has provided a link to the presentations - click here. Sou.

Never mind, we'll make do with what we have.  Cliff continued:

The list was biblical in length and severity.  All that was missing were the frogs and boils.

I think what Cliff is implying here is that the predictions couldn't come true because they suggest climate change will have serious consequences.  Perhaps Cliff doesn't think that the consequences of a 2, 4, 6 or more degree rise in average global temperature will be serious. Or, more likely, his mind cannot cope with the severity of the risk so he makes light of it.  It's a natural human reaction but not one you'd expect from a meteorologist who, during his studies, should have learnt at least a little bit about what shapes climate.

Cliff went on to say how people's eyes glazed over "as the endless list of disasters were described. "  Instead of pondering how to wake the audience up to the reality of climate change, I reckon Cliff joined in with glazed eyes of his own.

There's a difference between "in" and "by" with provisos...

Cliff said that "climate policy advocates" (surely by now all legislatures have a policy on climate change) provided "extraordinarily specific predictions--such as the snow pack being reduced by 35% in a certain year."

Now that would surprise me.

Perhaps not only were Cliff's eyes glazed but his ears weren't working too well either.   I suppose the person could have said that.  However I consider it more likely that the climate experts were predicting that the snow pack would be reduced by 35% (on average) by a certain year, not "in a certain year".  And with provisos, such as those relating to the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere. At least that's how all the projections I've seen are expressed.  And the scientists showing what's ahead of us also point out that in future there will continue to be natural variation such that there can still be a heavy snow year as well as a virtually no snow year.

[Update: I didn't see any mention of a "35%" in the presentations nor any suggestion of a 35% in a particular year.  There are projections along the lines I indicated above - by particular years for given scenarios as well as the amount by which snow has declined already. Sou.]

Glazed, rolling eyeballs falling out of sockets can be very distracting

The reason I suggest that Cliff's ear's had stopped working was because he indicated that by this stage not only were the audiences' eyes glazed over but there was "substantial" rolling of eyeballs.  Glazed rolling eyeballs would take some getting used to.  It would be safe to say if Cliff were suffering such a malady it would distract him from listening.  Even if he were merely watching such an impressive display he would be seriously distracted and likely didn't hear what the speakers actually spoke.  He did say he was busy worrying that some eyeballs might fall out of their sockets.  Cliff might not be skilled at multi-tasking.

Lurching backwards playing Pharaoh

You can tell Cliff's mind was wandering because after this he lurched backwards into some yarns from the Old Testament.  I think he was intimating that he was a Pharaoh, or that the elected representatives were Pharoahs or something and should act like the Pharaoh of old who took no notice of Moses' prophecies.

He said that Pharaoh's advisers advised that Moses' prophecies could happen with natural variation. Maybe Cliff is playing one of Pharaoh's advisers. Which reminds me of the talk given by Sophie Lewis last week, where she told us that it was virtually impossible for Australia to have had a year like last year without the extra greenhouse gases in the air.  Her experiments suggested that the chances of 2013 happening without AGW were at most one year in the past 13,000 years.  That's long odds.

Taking the piss...

Now I might be reading Cliff's blog all wrong.  Americans aren't known for subtlety but it could be that he is sending a subtle message to his fellow scientists that they need to present the science in a less boring way.  In a way that won't glaze eyes, roll eyeballs or cause eyeballs to fall from their very sockets.

Cliff didn't make any positive suggestion except to hint that if scientists grew their hair, sprouted a handsome beard, wore a flowing robe and carried a staff it would probably only make things worse.  Pharaoic advisers would continue to poo poo the science and make light of the risks.  To illustrate his point, Cliff put up this image of Charlton Heston dressed up as Moses with the caption:

Not successful in getting action using threats of environmental disaster to promote change.

Not even Charlton Heston dressed in flowing robes and waving a big stick would impress climate science deniers!

Whatever his message, Cliff ended his blog article with a comment that was too subtle for me to decipher.  He wrote:

"And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth"

Time to do the replenishing part. 

Maybe that was Cliff's subtle way of letting us know he was "taking the piss".


If you want to join in Cliff's religious discussion, you can do so on his blog.  If you prefer, you can speculate on his article, his message or his motives in the comments here :)

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Taking the piss: mocking the listener by telling them a tall tale to test their gullibility.  Often but not always in a friendly, light-hearted way. Does not involve urinating (to piss). Does not (necessarily) involve imbibing alcohol (a piss-up).

WUWT denier is horrified by opinions about climate

A denier on WUWT called Eric Worrall, who finally got turfed from Watching the Deniers, a very tolerant website, is horrified.   This is the same Eric Worrall who persistently expressed his opinion that climate science is like eugenics in the 1930s.

Eric is horrified (archived here) that someone would write:

“What we need now is to become comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means. We actually need more opinions, appearing more often and expressed more noisily than ever before.”

The person who wrote the above is Dr Rod Lamberts, deputy director of the Australian National Centre for Public Awareness of Science (CPAS) at the ANU, a founding partner of the Ångstrom Group, and a former national president of the Australian Science Communicators.  It was part of an article he wrote for The Conversation.

In that same article, Rod Lamberts also wrote:

At best, presenting people with facts to counter their beliefs makes them ignore you; at worst, it drives them further away. How much more evidence do you need than the singular failure of scientific facts to convince deniers that humans are buggering up the climate?

What delighted Eric Worrall was that Rod Lamberts criticised Tim Flannery.  Rod wrote:

A colleague of mine recently received an invitation to a Climate Council event. The invitation featured this Tim Flannery quote: “An opinion is useless, what we need are more facts."

My first thought was that my colleague was taking the piss. Tim Flannery is an experienced science communicator, but that phrase made my jaw drop. It was apparently meant in earnest, but it’s wildly off the mark.

The quote is ludicrously, appallingly, almost dangerously naïve. It epitomises the reasons we are still “debating” climate science and being overwhelmed by climate skeptics/deniers/contrarians in the public space.

The Conversation article offers some food for thought into how to communicate the dangers we are hurtling toward with such nonchalance.  These same dangers that the Eric Worrall's and Anthony Watts of the world want us to hurtle towards faster and faster.

Rod Lambert is in no way suggesting that facts are not important or that we don't need more of them.  He argues:

Ultimately, we can only say “that’s not cricket” for so long. Eventually we have to stop tutting and accept that others aren’t even trying to play cricket – they’re boxing. We can decry climate deniers for their unfair, lowbrow tactics, but their tactics are getting them exactly what they want. Ours are not.

The continuing focus on gathering and presenting more and more scientific data to reinforce a position the vast majority already holds is not leading to the changes we need. Yes, scientists should keep monitoring, researching and reporting on the climate. But assuming that we want people to act according to the science, the focus must now be on influencing positive action.

The question is - will more "facts" make a difference.  We've got facts coming out our ears.  Here in Australia we've just had another "hottest year on record" and yet we elect a Prime Minister who has said the science behind climate change is "crap".  Tony Abbott's first attacks against our nation when entering office were to dismantle as much as he could of any offices that monitor climate and and mitigate climate change and shift to a new clean energy economy.  He's appointed climate science deniers not just to any important posts, but to positions of responsibility in relation to climate change.

So how to get the message out there?  How to persuade voters that putting people like Tony Abbott into arguably the most powerful position in the country is risky at best if not downright harmful.

My thinking is we need both.  The Climate Council has influence.  It gets airplay. When it broadcasts the fact that a hotter Australia is a more dangerous place to live, some people hear it - but is it enough?

As Rod Lambert says:

The biggest impediment to climate action these days is not because of the human frailties that science is hell-bent on resisting – those alleged failings of opinion, belief and emotion. Ironically, it’s exactly because we are still trying to suppress them that we are now stalled.

The Lie about Tim Flannery

Eric finishes up his WUWT article by resurrecting an old denier myth.  He claims that Tim Flannery once said it would never rain again.  He didn't.  It's little wonder that Eric Worrall and Anthony Watts don't link to anything supporting this wrong claim.  The closest they got was an article by Andrew Bolt repeating the lie with a teeny tiny cherry pick from a longer segment on youtube - see the transcript here.  He said in the interview with Lateline back in 2007, referring to the Big Drought:

So even the rain that falls isn't actually going to fill our dams and our river systems, and that's a real worry for the people in the bush. If that trend continues then I think we're going to have serious problems, particularly for irrigation.

And we did have serious problems.  Particularly for irrigation. That drought that Tim Flannery was referring to in 2007 didn't break until 2010!  The major dams that got perilously close to empty finally started to fill up again.  Only to be followed by those record-breaking floods that were so bad that they caused a dip in global sea levels.

Why are there still climate science deniers in Australia?

What is the bigger wonder than the Big Drought and the Big Flood and the Big Fires is that there are any climate science deniers left in Australia.  We are used to extremes of weather, but the extremes we've been seeing go beyond what we're used to.

I'm thinking that we need both facts and opinion.

We need the facts, like those reported by the Climate Council and RealClimate.org and ClimateProgress and SkepticalScience.com.

We also need strongly worded opinion, as is being advocated by Rod Lamberts to counteract the three word slogans of idiots like our Prime Minister and deniers at WUWT.


PS There's a new article by Victor Venema that is worth a read in this regard.  He is exploring why science deniers are not interested in facts. In "fact" they eschew facts for fiction.

From the WUWT comments

There are lots of opinions being expressed in the WUWT comments, mostly all worthless.

As Chris4692 says of Eric Worrall's opinion:

March 15, 2014 at 5:07 pm
If you have no facts, you have nothing else but opinions.

Robert of Ottawa's opinion is quite clear.  He says:

March 15, 2014 at 5:09 pm
Australia has a government that rejects the Warmista scare and is gradually dismantalling the state apparatus that propagates it. Hence the hysterical squeals of the Warmista pigs (those at the public trough)

PaulH needs a lesson in Strine and says:

March 15, 2014 at 5:15 pm
My first thought was that my colleague was taking the piss.
I have no idea what that means.

Latitude comes up with a novel opinion and is a very deep thinker:

March 15, 2014 at 5:19 pm
of course they can’t win it with facts…….

DirkH has about as much depth as Latitude and says:

March 15, 2014 at 5:37 pm
“What we need now is to become comfortable with the idea that the ends will justify the means. We actually need more opinions, appearing more often and expressed more noisily than ever before.”
Oh, I misunderstood him. What he means is, every warmist will now have to choose between being honest or being efficient. Now that’s a whole new approach. (sarc)

pottereaton is just another dumb fake sceptic who favours WUWT opinion over science and says:

March 15, 2014 at 6:03 pm
The problem with “consensus” climate science from the beginning is that it has been mostly opinions– i.e. speculation and conjecture– and not facts–i.e. solid data and verifiable hypotheses arrived at with scrupulous statistical methods.

Konrad must think there is somewhere hidden group of "sceptics" that haven't yet reared their heads.  Does anyone out there know of a "sceptic" that uses facts or has a case to argue?  Konrad says:

March 15, 2014 at 6:33 pm
“Facts won’t defeat the climate deniers – using their tactics will”
When when this fool finds someone who denies that planet has a variable climate he can use whatever tactic he likes.

If however, this propagandist twit Lamberts is referring to sceptics then he is on a hiding to nothing. After all the sceptics main tactic is to use facts to argue their case.

Of course, a lot of WUWT-ers twist Rod Lamberts' article to mean something quite different.  Like conspiracy theorist Chad Wozniak who says (excerpt):

March 15, 2014 at 5:32 pm
How typical of the AGW crowd – why tell the truth when lies serve your corrupt, perverse purposes better?

What Rod Lamberts is suggesting is that we don't merely quote dry scientific facts at people, we counter the deception of science deniers and show people what those facts mean for them personally and for our nations and for the world as a whole.

Anthony Watts falls in love with Alexa rankings - and bounces

For a fake sceptic who is constantly disputing numbers that have been provided by observers, checked by analysts, verified by scientists and fit with the theories - Anthony Watts is remarkably accepting of numbers that he likes, even though few if any experts in that field pay them any mind.

I'm talking about Anthony's love affair with Alexa. No, it's not a woman it's a webstats service now owned by Amazon.com.

More than 40% of WUWT visitors don't bother to read a full WUWT article!

Today Anthony has put up another chart, this time boasting of his bounce rate (archived here).  The bounce rate is the proportion of readers who visit a site without clicking through to another webpage on the same site.

Let me point out that to read an entire article on WUWT requires at least one extra click.  So if WUWT had a bounce rate of 40.90%, that means that 40.90% of his visitors don't even read one whole article.

On the other hand, a site like this one shows the most recent seven articles that you can read in full without clicking through once.  So if there was a bounce rate of 18.60% that would mean that even though readers could read seven articles in full and still be counted as a "bounce", 81.40% of visitors want more than just those seven articles.  That's assuming Alexa was close to being accurate.

[Correction: This assumes that everyone first arrives at WUWT and HotWhopper by landing on the home page, which ain't necessarily so as Collin points out below - he is such a spoil sport :D. Some people will arrive via a Google link to a specific article and some will get directly to an article by a link from Twitter or elsewhere.]

So let's see how they compare, according to Anthony's trusted Alexa.  HotWhopper's is archived here and WUWT is archived here:

Hmmm....WUWT's bounce rate doesn't look so good now, does it :)

BTW - for some weird reason, Alexa.com has always shown HotWhopper with an unbelievably low bounce rate.  On Google Analytics the bounce rate is quite respectable - varying each month between 55% and the low 60%s. That number can't be compared with the Alexa bounce rate but I figure it's pretty good. Particularly when more than 3/4 of visits are from people who've visited before so they are probably just catching up with recent articles and don't need to click through.  Here's a discussion of bounce rates.

Cherry-picking bounces

As an aside, when the Scottish Sceptic put up a web ranking, Anthony's second comment and his only request AFAIK, was to ask him to include yours truly or, as Anthony put it the lunatic fringe blog known as “hotwhopper".

In this latest article on WUWT, HotWhopper is noticeable for its absence.  Now why would that be, I wonder?  Surely Anthony isn't just limiting his list to websites with a higher bounce rate than WUWT! Talk about cherry-picking!

Given that Anthony seems to have left a few sites off his little list, lets add some back. Wunderground.com, with it's brilliant blogs has an Alexa rank of 606 - Anthony's blog isn't in the same league so I can understand why he left that off the list.  It's got a decent bounce rate too.  A bit better than WUWT at 39.4%.

Thinkprogress.org, which hosts climateprogress has an Alexa rank of 4184, a lot better than WUWT so I can understand why Anthony left that off the list, too, even though it's bounce rate is higher than that shown for WUWT.

Quality vs quantity

Anthony has to work hard to "compete" against real climate science websites, like realclimate.org, which despite only posting a few articles a month has maintained a strong web presence for many, many years.  Anthony has to put up at least three silly articles a day to attract his visitors.  Quantity wins over quality every time with the illiterati.  I notice that in the comments, someone unkindly drew attention to the fact that most WUWT readers, according to Alexa.com, don't rate highly education-wise.

Skepticalscience.com also continues to impress and doesn't have to put up three or more shoddy articles a day to attract a lot of visitors.  It has a respectable Alexa.com ranking FWIW and, though it has a higher bounce rate according to Alexa.com, it's articles are based on science (unlike WUWT) with hyperlinks to lots more information.

I've written before about how people who want to read about climate science have a zillion more choices than science deniers who want to read about pseudo-science.  So the number of hits on any pseudo-science or anti-science blog like WUWT would be barely a blip when compared to all the hits on science and climate science websites.

How to improve your Alexa ranking

One good way to improve your Alexa ranking, if it's important to you, is to write a blog article called "How to improve your Alexa ranking" - and/or get readers to install the Alexa toolbar, spyware and all, and then plead with them to visit your blog!

When Anthony Watts urged all his followers to install the Alexa toolbar last May, his rank suddenly improved a whole lot - going from a global rank of 30,000 to around 20,000 almost overnight and another 10,000 in a matter of weeks.  You can see this clearly in his Alexa web stats (archived here for posterity)

It's not as if Anthony needs to do this sort of thing to fake a jump in his readership.  His blog is very popular and gets lots of hits every day.  As he later found, his blog is right up there in popularity among wordpress blogs.  It's not just the 8% dismissives who go there, even normal people visit WUWT to see what the wacky deniers and climate conspiracy theorists and other utter nutters are up to.

Update: Last year, Victor Venema did an analysis showing that the uptick in WUWT's readership in May last year wasn't real.  It only showed up in Alexa, not any other webstat measure, and can therefore be attributed to Anthony's toolbar request.

From the master webmasters: Alexa is unreliable

Alexa isn't reliable for web stats.  What it does is measure the traffic of people who have the Alexa toolbar installed.  This is what Paul Stamatiou, designer at Twitter, wrote about Alexa rankings back in 2007, showing the big difference in Alexa rankings between two sites that had similar numbers of visitors.

John mentioned in a recent post that he received 266,641 page views from 127,614 unique visitors during the month of February. For February, I received 227,852 page views from 136,064 unique visitors. Does the Alexa graph below show that?

Source: Paul Stamatiou of Twitter

This is what people on the "#1 internet marketing forum since 1997", Warrior Forum, say about Alexa - and more here.  And this from one of the WarriorForum gurus. Anthony - eat your heart out. Warrior Forum has a global rank of 215 on Alexa :) (Lower is better.)


This is from another SEO blogger (SEO=search engine optimisation):

Besides the obvious issue that your rankings will be based only on those who actively participate with Alexa, there is also the issue that your competitors (or you) can easily purchase hits for Alexa for just a few dollars. I saw an ad on Fiverr offering to let people buy hits in packages of about 10,000 or so for Alexa to build rankings.

EricHammer could very well have had the WUWT herd in mind when he wrote that article. He goes on to write that Alexa ranking is "helpful" because of the "herd mentality issue":

No – I wouldn’t say Alexa is useless. It’s just not a very accurate measure of your site’s popularity amongst the Internet elite of the world. It is helpful to put up a high Alexa ranking because of the herd mentality issue – people like to visit sites they think are popular. So when you have a high Alexa ranking, they think your site is worth something.

Yes, that's right. If you want to boost your Alexa rankings, you can always pay for it. (I've got better things to spend my hard-earned money on.)

Climate blogger, Collin Maessen, wrote about this last year, with a follow up post using yours truly as an example just a few weeks ago.  (Collin works in IT I think, so he knows about such things.)

How to improve your Alexa ranking

After Collin's article and my mysterious drop in Alexa rankings even though Google Analytics showed HotWhopper was getting more readers by the week, I did a little experiment - I soon varied it from the experiment I wrote about here.  I installed the Alexa toolbar on a browser that I don't normally use and made sure I visited HotWhopper every day and opened a few pages.

This is what happened:

Alexa.com dropped my ranking while Google showed no particular change.  The Alexa ranking then dropped hugely  for no reason around the end of January, while Google Analytics was showing a big jump in visitors from December.

It was at this point that I installed the Alexa toolbar and opened a few HotWhopper pages every day.  You can see the results above.  The Alexa ranking for HotWhopper immediately stopped falling and started to improve again, quite markedly.

Now it might not be just my tiny number of clicks each day that caused the ranking to go back to what it was in October last year, but it's a mighty big coincidence.  The other thing is that visits to HW are quite a bit higher than they were back in October last year - so who knows what Alexa ranking HW will end up with, though it does look to be tapering off :)

A better comparison

I don't know if Anthony Watts is looking to sell his website or get more advertising revenue or if he is just looking for pats on the back.  Whatever, he's deluding himself if he's relying on Alexa rankings to compare his website with other climate websites.  It would be interesting if he used another comparison, like comparing how climate scientists rate his website alongside that of, say, realclimate.org or skepticalscience.com.  I have a feeling it would look something like this.