Anthony Watts' Watts Up With That? blog is hosted by Wordpress, a blog host
that works best for bloggers who post a few articles each week. Anthony and his crew post
several articles per day, and trying to hunt down old articles is a bit
frustrating. There is a search mechanism, but that seems limited to keywords
in the original article. You can also look at a day's posts, but that's
an inefficient way to browse through old articles.
People making comments have no hints as to how to format them. There used
to be the barest of hints below the comment box, but it was a poor list, even wrong
in places, and no longer displays. See the bottom of this document for better guidance.
WUWT Navigation Bars
Every so often, please take a break from reading the recent posts and comments
to check the two navigation bars.
The top bar (with labels from "Home" to "WUWT stuff" goes to permanent
posts that are updated frequently, sometimes automatically, sometimes
manually. The most important label is "Resource Pages". When you hover the
cursor over it, a submenu appears listing the the various domains WUWT covers.
The most popular of these is the Sea Ice
Reference Page. Many readers like to follow the progression of Arctic sea
ice extent each summer because of the frequent handwringing from Al Gore and
the NSIDC about how soon we'll have an ice free Arctic. Given that we've
only had good data for this since polar satellites started returning images
of ice cover, no one can make authoritative predictions for the current season,
let alone the next.
The right side nav bar is a potpourri of information and links to internal
and external sites. The search box searches the content WUWT posts but not
the comments. It's a good way to hunt down some post on a subject you
remember reading about. Some links go to Anthony's business, Weather Shop (please buy stuff there!),
some have current images of a subject and a link to more information.
Anthony's lists of other blogs is unique in that he links to blogs that are
major detractors of WUWT, most of which disparage WUWT but don't link to it.
Everything else is pretty much self explanatory. It changes frequently
enough so a periodic check is worthwhile to see what's new and what you've
forgotten about.
WUWT Tables of Contents
Two series of ToCs are available:
Monthly - This is good to check if you know
approximately when something happened and want to look for relevant posts.
Even better, this is a good way to see what else was happening then.
Categories - This is good to check if you
are interested in particular topics. Even better, if you are looking for
topics to be interested in, check out the list.
You can also use the right side nav bar to find the same information
displayed as WordPress see fit. This includes some text at the beginning
of each post. My pages only have the title, and everything is in a single
web page. They both have their merits.
WUWT Classics
Here are some posts that deserve to used as reference works, not
just as comment-du-jour. The real reference is usually elsewhere, but
a lot of us heard it first here.
2008 Jan 28: Warming Trend: PDO And Solar Correlate Better Than CO2
This is Anthony's summary of work by Joe D'Aleo. It predates my "obsessive"
involvement on WUWT by a few weeks, that happened in large part to hearing
about this from Joe directly. This convinced me that CO2 wasn't dominant
and with the negative PDO in place things were about to turn interesting. Latest update 2010 Sep 30: AMO+PDO=
temperature variation - one graph says it all The comments raise a number
of concerns about looking at correlations between time-smoothed series, and
the new paper leaves out the CO2 test, so it's not as striking as before.
2008 Jun 2: Livingston and Penn paper: "Sunspots may vanish by 2015".
By my reckoning, this is the most fascinating material I've read on WUWT.
Now in mid-2010 the data is pretty much tracking predictions some four
years after the paper was written. Latest update 2010 Sep 18: Sun's
magnetics remain in a funk: sunspots may be on their way out. This reports
on a new paper Long-term Evolution of Sunspot Magnetic Fields. An updated estimate of the majority of sunspots
becoming invisible is 2021-2022, but I and others think some of the delay is
due to some events already being invisible and hence aren't included in the
average, and that leads to an apparently slower decline.
2009 Jun 14: The Thermostat Hypothesis
This revisits the well observed and understood phenomenon of daily tropical
thunderstorms from the novel viewpoint that they keep the Earth from
overheating.
2009 Nov 19: Breaking News Story: CRU has apparently been hacked - hundreds of files released
I remember where I was when the story broke. I was on my computer surfing
the web. Duh. I think I stayed up until 0300 that night.
1,616 comments to this post! Update 2011 Nov 22: Climategate 2.0
emails - They're real and they're spectacular! A second round of leaked
messages, greater in number than the first, provide more confirmation and
insights on subversion of science that is rife in the climate research field.
There are "only" 1,264 comments to this post, but many more posts and Emails
are referenced in the subsequent days and weeks by 50 updates. Latest update 2012 Jan 6: See Over
250 noteworthy Climategate 2.0 emails for another starting point that will
keep you busy and make your blood boil.
2010 Jun 4: Under the Volcano, Over the Volcano
Willis Eschenbach's description of how CO2 measurements at Mauna Loa are made
and the steps they take to exclude measurements with recent CO2 releases from
local volcanic and anthropogenic sources.
2010 Jul 9: Aliens Cause Global Warming: A Caltech Lecture by Michael Crichton
This is a superb lecture about what distinguishes science from wishful thinking; the
hazards of consensus science; and how science hasn't learned from the past. Latest update 2011 Aug 18: On the other hand, this alternative view, a peer reviewed
paper, that the media blew out of proportion is a Bizarre,
craptastic theory from the Guardian, Penn State, and NASA: "ET will kill us
because global warming will tip them off that we are a bad species". I'm
including it mainly because NASA's name is attached to the story. This was
not sponsored by NASA, but a co-author is a post-doc affiliated with NASA.
The useful lesson is that peer-reviewed journals have a much lower bar to
accepting papers with alarmist elements than papers with much more
work behind them that conclude the climate is not as sensitive to CO₂ as
some claim.
2011 Apr 29: Friday Funny - science safety run amok
This started out as a rant about "a chemistry kit with no chemicals."
Disappointing, despicable, disheartening to be sure, but certainly not worthy
of being listed here.
However, WUWT Nation is full of people who've learned chemistry the fun
way, from 1960's chemical sets to making their own rocket fuel. They (we!)
hijacked the thread to reminisce about all the chemistry that society (and Homeland
Security) frown upon today. Enjoy! BTW, the link goes to the first comment,
if you want to read about depressing chemistry sets, you'll have to scroll up.
2011 Aug 24: Andrea Rossi's E-cat fusion device on target.
I generally do not go out of my way to create controversy, but by far the most
controversial topic I've posted on was about Cold Fusion, or LENR (Low Energy
Nuclear Reaction). This is a field that hasn't had the decency to collapse
like polywater did, but it's also been a field where no one could build
something simple like a residential water heater. That may have changed with
an invention by Andrea Rossi involving hydrogen-nickel fusion and that seemed
worthy of a WUWT post. This is the best of the three, and is plenty
controversial. Most of mainstream physics refuses to accept any of this, with
good reason, but some other, older(!) physicists leave the door open or
support Rossi's work. One told me "it's painfully clear that you don't have a
clue that you don't have a clue," So do take all this with healthy
skepticism. Latest update 2011 Oct 28: If you believe Rossi, his demonstration of a
system that can produce 1 Mw of heated water resulted in a sale to the US
military (and a repeat order of a dozen more). The discussion following my
post Test
of Rossi's 1 MW E-Cat fusion system apparently successful resulted in the
topic being banned until there is an adequate third party review of Rossi's
claims. It may take a while, he is working on producing a million
residential water heaters by the end of 2012.
2011 Aug 24: CERN
Experiment Confirms Cosmic Rays Influence Cloud Seeds The CERN CLOUD
experiment is a test of Henrik Svensmark's hypothesis that incoming cosmic
rays can help trigger cloud formation clean maritime saturated air. This post
is from Nigel Calder who is quite bitter about some of the political delays
that led to it taking 14 years from hypothesis to CERN experiment and then not
acknowledging Svensmark's work. Nevertheless, the cosmic ray influence may be
an extremely important phenomenon as it provides a means for a small signal to
have a significant influence on Earth.
2011 Sep 15: WUWT's answer to Al Gore's 24 hour Climate Reality Project
The CRP was a 24 hour event repeating Al Gore's new presentation, once per time
zone in a particular language of that time zone. Meanwhile, WUWT readers were
being treated to a new post each hour with a cartoon by Josh preceeding
the details. The result is a very good introduction to Climate science and where
Al Gore gets it wrong.
2011 Oct 18: Replicating
Al Gore's Climate 101 video experiment shows that his "high school physics"
could never work as advertised Good science is repeatable. Videos
purporting to demonstrate good science may not be repeatable. I don't know
where Anthony found the time, but he decided to repeat this experiment, even
to the point of buying the same equipment and props. His effort wound up
documenting all the stagecraft fakery and exposed the video as propaganda, not
science.
2011 Dec 7: In China, there are no hockey sticks
Given the bad reputation of tree ring studies by critiques of any such
research that involves Michael Mann, this study needs a good skeptical review
itself. However, in many ways it's a simpler study target, so may stand up to
that review. On the plus side, it demonstrates the Medieval Warm Period and
the Little Ice Age, so that's a good sign. It's impressive for both the long
(2,485 year) record and the projection that calls for steady cooling from 2006
to 2068. That provides support for some other claims, e.g. Nils
Axel Mörner: Arctic Environment by the Middle of this Century
Guest poster Willis Eschenbach always comes up with fascinating posts.
Even his autobiographical posts are remarkable. He's collected
An
Index to Willis's Writings up to May 2011 and deserves this special entry
here.
Titles and Links for the Last Two Weeks
Information here (and in the monthly and category pages) is collected soon
after midnight Pacific time (which is WUWT time, at least as far as dates go).
The "Recent" column is the number of comments made yesterday and may be most
useful for finding older posts that are still active for some reason.
Sometimes those reasons are an interesting exchange of information and
collaboration. Sometimes it's just two pig-headed bores who don't know when
to stop. Sometimes you can't tell the difference!
Neither WUWT nor WordPress provide much documentation for the HTML formatting
permitted in comments. There are only a few commands that are useful, and
a few more that are pretty much useless.
A typical HTML formatting command has start and end pieces and has general
form of <name>text to be formatted</name>. A common mistake
is to forget the ending. Until WordPress gets a preview function, we have
to live with it.
N.B. WordPress handles some formatting very differently than web browsers
do. A post of
mine shows these and less useful commands in action at WUWT.
A URL by itself (with a space on either side) is often adequate
in WordPress, e.g. See http://wermenh.com
blockquote (indent text)
My text <blockquote>quoted text</blockquote> More of my text
My text
quoted text
More of my text
Quoted text can be many paragraphs long.
WordPress italicizes quoted text (and the <i> command enters normal text).
strike
This is <strike>text with strike</strike>
This is text with strike
pre ("preformatted" - use for monospace display)
<pre>These lines are bracketed<br>with <pre> and </pre>
These lines are bracketed with <pre> and </pre>
Preformatted text, generally done right. Use it when you have a table
or something else that will look best in monospace. Each space is
displayed, something that <code> (next) doesn't do.
code (use for monospace display)
<code>Wordpress handles this very differently</code>
These are used for section headers in long web pages, so may
not be all that useful or welcome on WUWT.
h2
<h2>Header size 2</h2>
Header size 2
h3
<h3>Header size 3</h3>
Header size 3
h4
<h4>Header size 4</h4>
Header size 4
h5
<h5>Header size 5</h5>
Header size 5
h6
<h6>Header size 6</h6>
Header size 6
Special characters in comments
Those of us who remember acceptance of ASCII-68 (a specification released
in 1968) are often not clever enough to figure out all the nuances of
today's international character sets. Besides, most keyboards lack the
keys for those characters, and that's the real problem. Even if you
use a non-ASCII but useful character like ° (as in 23°C) some
optical character recognition software or cut and paste operation is likely
to change it to 23oC or worse, 230C.
Nevertheless, there are very useful characters that are most reliably entered
as HTML character entities:
Type this
To get
Notes
&
&
Ampersand
<
<
Less than sign Left angle bracket
°
°
Degree (Use with C and F, but not K (kelvins))
⁰ ¹ ² ³ ⁴
⁰ ¹ ² ³ ⁴
Superscripts (use 8304, 185, 178-179, 8308-8313 for digits 0-9)
₀ ₁ ₂ ₃
₀ ₁ ₂ ₃
Subscripts (use 8320-8329 for digits 0-9)
£
£
British pound
ñ
ñ
For La Niña & El Niño
µ
µ
Mu, micro
±
±
Plus or minus
Like a space, with no special
processing (i.e. word wrapping or multiple space discarding)
>
>
Greater than sign
Right angle bracket Generally not needed
Climate Audit Assistant
Another approach to dealing with this is a Firefox add-on that replaces the
edit window with a better one that has buttons for formatting text.
It's a two piece install, see
the web page for details. It coexists okay with the "It's all Text" extension
that lets you send the text in a text edit window to your regular editor.