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Willard Anthony Watts
Anthony Watts speaking in Gold Coast, Australia, June 2010
Born1958 (age 65–66)
NationalityAmerican
WebsiteWatts Up With That?
SurfaceStations.org

Willard Anthony Watts (born 1958) is an American blogger who runs Watts Up With That?, a website that scientists and scholoars have characterized as supporting climate change denialism. A former meteorologist, he is president of IntelliWeather Inc. and directs the Surface Stations Project, a volunteer initiative to document the set up and maintenance of weather stations across the United States.

Career

Anthony Watts began his broadcast meteorology career in 1978 as an on-air meteorologist for WLFI-TV in Lafayette, Indiana. He attended classes at Purdue University but did not graduate, and has stated that he is not a degreed climate scientist. He joined KHSL-TV, a CBS affiliate based in Chico, California in 1987. He stopped using his first name "Willard" to avoid confusion with NBC's The Today Show weatherman Willard Scott. Watts temporarily resigned from KHSL in 2001 but was able to negotiate more personal time to use for his private business, ITWorks. In 2002 he left KHSL to devote his full-time to ITWorks. He returned to KHSL part-time in 2004. Watts has been the chief meteorologist for KPAY-AM, a Fox News affiliate based in Chico, California since 2002. In 2002, Watts won a Chico News & Review "Readers' Best Of" award for "Best Local Personality".

Watts has been the director and president of IntelliWeather Inc. since 2000, and the managing member of Zev2Go LLC, an electric vehicle company since 2008. Innovative Tech Works, Weathershop and ITWorks are all alternate business names for IntelliWeather.

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.

In 2010, Watts went on a speaking tour to 18 locations around Australia.

View of climate change

Watts has expressed a skeptical view of anthropogenic CO2-driven global warming. He believes it plays a much smaller part than the sun in causing climatic change. He has said that in 1990 he had "been fully engaged in the belief that CO2 was indeed the root cause of the global warming problem," but that he later changed his thinking after learning more about the science and "found it to be lacking." Watts more recently expressed his position as: "Now I'm in the camp of we have some global warming. No doubt about it, but it may not be as bad as we originally thought because there are other contributing factors." He further avers that what most bothers him about scientists and others who claim global warming is serious, is that, "They want to change policy. They want to apply taxes and these kinds of things may not be the actual solution for making a change to our society." Watts is a signatory to The Heartland Institute's Manhattan Declaration which calls on world leaders to "reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change" and abandon "all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2". In spite of his climate change skepticism, Watts says that he is "green in many ways", mainly to get the United States "disengaged from Middle East Oil."

Watts Up With That?

Watts established the blog, Watts Up With That? (WUWT) in 2006. The blog focuses on the global warming controversy, and in particular on Watts's skepticism about the role of humans in global warming. Scientists and scholars have characterized WUWT as a climate change denialism website. While Watts identifies himself as a skeptic, the WUWT blog has been criticized for posts which have a denialistic tone that misappropriates scientific skepticism. Fred Pearce has described WUWT as the "world's most viewed climate website". In 2008, WUWT won an internet voting-based Wizbang Weblog Award for the "Best Science Blog". The Wizbang Weblog Awards are billed as the conservative response to the Bloggies, which are also internet voting-based, and which WUWT has also won. In 2011, 2012 and 2013, WUWT took first place in the Bloggies Best Science Weblog category, and in 2013 won overall best blog, beating Pintester, The Bloggers, Cowardly Feminist, People I Want to Punch in the Throat and Marriage Confessions.

Watts's blog has been criticized for inaccuracy. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot described WUWT as "highly partisan and untrustworthy". Leo Hickman, at The Guardian's Environment Blog, also criticized Watts's blog, stating that Watts "risks polluting his legitimate scepticism about the scientific processes and methodologies underpinning climate science with his accompanying politicised commentary." Canadian environmental activist David Suzuki prefers other sources for climate information: "There are many credible sources of information, and they aren't blog sites run by weathermen like Anthony Watts".

Surface Stations project

In 2007, Watts launched the Surface Stations project, in which volunteers set out to take photographs of surface weather stations forming part of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network, looking for aspects of siting or condition of the stations. Watts said "The reliability of the whole surface temperature record is called into question". In March 2009 The Heartland Institute published a paper 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. Using pictures and other information from over 650 volunteers participating through his website, Watts showed 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.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) investigated the matter. While acknowledging the suboptimal conditions of many stations, NOAA concluded that the overall effect was insubstantial. To the very limited extent that there was any measurement bias, it was in the opposite direction of what Watt expected: stations that were considered poorly situated reported slightly cooler temperatures due to instrument artifacts. Watts was co-author with climatologists (including John Nielsen-Gammon, John Christy and Roger A. Pielke, Sr.) on a paper with Souleymane Fall as lead author, which found that overall 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, between minimum at night and maximum during the day. The poorly sited stations led to an overestimate of trends in minimum temperatures, balanced by a similar underestimate of maximum temperature trends, so that the overall mean temperature trends were nearly identical across site classifications.

In 2012 the Berkeley Earth Science Temperature project (BEST) released a paper confirming previous results that surface temperature is rising. Richard Muller, founder of BEST, directly addressed Watts' concern about the condition of weather stations, saying, "we discovered that station quality does not affect the results. Even poor stations reflect temperature changes accurately."

Affiliation 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 been featured as a speaker at Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change, for which he acknowledges receiving payment.

Documents obtained from the Heartland Institute and made public in February 2012 reveal that the Institute had agreed to help Watts raise $88,000 to set up a website, "devoted to accessing the new temperature data from NOAA's web site and converting them into easy-to-understand graphs that can be easily found and understood by weathermen and the general interested public." The documents state that $44,000 had already been pledged by an anonymous donor, and the Institute would seek to raise the rest. Watts explained the funding by stating, "Heartland simply helped me find a donor for funding a special project having to do with presenting some new NOAA surface data in a public friendly graphical form, something NOAA themselves is not doing, but should be. I approached them in the fall of 2011 asking for help, on this project not the other way around." and added, "They do not regularly fund me nor my WUWT website, I take no salary from them of any kind."

See also

Selected publications

Articles

Peer-Reviewed Papers

Notes

  1. ^ Sources include:

References

  1. "School board shakeup". Chico News & Review. October 31, 2002. Retrieved 2012-07-08.
  2. Nerlich, Brigitte (November 2010). "'Climategate': paradoxical metaphors and political paralysis". Environmental Values. 19 (4): 419–442. Climate scepticism in the sense of climate denialism or contrarianism is not a new phenomenon, but it has recently been very much in the media spotlight. When, in November 2009, emails by climate scientists were published on the internet without their authors' consent, a debate began in which climate sceptic bloggers used an extended network of metaphors to contest (climate) science...Anthony Watts first broke the story of the emails on his (award winning) blog Watts Up With That.
  3. ^ Mann, Michael (1 October 2013). The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Columbia University Press. p. 27. 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 climateaudit as the leading climate change denial blog. Cite error: The named reference "hockey" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  4. Manne, Robert (August 2012). "A dark victory: How vested interests defeated climate science". The Monthly: 22–29. 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.
  5. Elshof, Leo (2011). "Can education overcome climate change inactivism?". Journal for Activist Science and Technology Education. 3 (1). It is important for students to have structured learning opportunities to find and analyze how these tactics are employed by climate denial organizations and blogs like...'Watts up with That' and others.
  6. ^ Liu, Dennis W. C. (2012). "Science Denial and the Science Classroom". Life Sciences Education. 11 (2): 131. doi:10.1187/cbe.12-03-0029. Unfortunately, the tone of some of their blog posts sound denialistic. Watts's blog, for example, has a posting reacting to Nordhaus's response to the Wall Street Journal editorial...
  7. Dunlap, Riley E.; McCright, Aaron M. (2011). Dryzek, John S.; Norgaard, Richard B.; Schlosberg, David (eds.). The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society. Oxford University Press. p. 153. ISBN 0199566607. 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.
  8. Farmer, G. Thomas; Cook, John (2013). Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis: Volume 1-The Physical Climate. Springer Science & Business Media. This creates pockets of denial that can become significant sources of misinformation. One of the highest trafficked climate blogs is wattsupwiththat.com, a website that publishes climate misinformation on a daily basis.
  9. Watts, Anthony. "About | Watts Up With That?". Watts Up With That?.
  10. Black, Richard (15 February 2012). "Openness: A Heartland-warming tale". BBC News.
  11. ^ Scherffius, Andrew; et al. (4 April 2013). "High School Students Debate Climate Change: Adapt or Geoengineer?". Scientific American. {{cite magazine}}: Explicit use of et al. in: |author= (help)
  12. Steigerwald, Bill (April 22, 2009). "Talking Climate Change With Anthony Watts". SitNews. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  13. ^ "Anthony Watts, Meteorologist". KHSL-TV. Archived from the original on March 6, 2001. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  14. Watts, Anthony. "About Anthony". Watts Up With That. Archived from the original on 17 October 2014. Retrieved 1 February 2015.
  15. Grant, John (2011). Denying Science: Conspiracy Theories, Media Distortions, and the War Against Reality. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1616143991. ...there's no record of him having graduated, however, and he's been reticent in discussing this.
  16. ^ Tuchinsky, Evan (December 6, 2007). "Watts, me worry?". Chico News & Review. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  17. Michels, Spencer (September 17, 2012). "Climate Change Skeptic Says Global Warming Crowd Oversells Its Message". PBS Newshour. Retrieved 2013-05-14.
  18. ^ Watts, Anthony (2009). Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable? (PDF). Heartland Institute. ISBN 978-1-934791-29-5. Retrieved 2009-11-24.
  19. Gascoyne, Tom (September 6, 2001). "Forecast: Less Anthony Watts?". Chico News & Review. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  20. Smith, Laura (January 31, 2002). "Forecast: No more Watts for KHSL". Chico News & Review. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  21. Angel, Devanie (June 17, 2004). "Everybody's business". Chico News & Review. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  22. "Anthony Watts: Chief Meteorologist". KPAY-AM. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  23. "KPAY 1290: Contact". KPAY-AM. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  24. "Feature Story Readers' Best of Chico 2002". News & Review. 2002-09-19. Retrieved August 8, 2012.
  25. "ZEV2GO, LLC". Secretary of State of Nevada. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  26. "Zev2Go YouTube Page". YouTube. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  27. "IntelliWeather". Better Business Bureau. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  28. "Chico Unified School District: Board of Education". Chico Unified School District. Archived from the original on April 25, 2003. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  29. "November 5, 2002 General Election Results". Butte County Election Office. Retrieved 2002-07-09.
  30. "November 7, 2006 General Election Results". Butte County Election Office. Retrieved 2002-07-09.
  31. Indar, Josh (March 16, 2006). "One out, one in, one on". Chico News & Review. Retrieved 2009-10-13.
  32. AAP (June 10, 2010). "Climate sceptic to tour". The Weekly Times. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  33. Watts, Anthony. "About Anthony". WattsUpWithThat. ... I have a skeptical view of certain climate issues ...
  34. "Climate Skeptics Stay Unswayed". New York Times date= October 21, 2011. ... one of those skeptics, Anthony Watts, had written ... {{cite web}}: Missing pipe in: |publisher= (help)
  35. Michels, Spencer (September 17, 2012). "Climate Change Skeptic Says Global Warming Crowd Oversells Its Message". PBS. ... one of the nation's most read climate skeptics
  36. Lott, Maxim (January 10, 2013). "Hottest year ever? Skeptics question revisions to climate data". Fox News. Climate change skeptics such as blogger and meteorologist Anthony Watts ...
  37. Kintisch, Eli (April 6, 2011). "Q&A With Richard Muller: A Physicist and His Surprising Climate Data". Science Magazine. ... prominent skeptic blogger Anthony Watts, a bête noire for most climate scientists ...
  38. Anthony Watts. It's the Sun, stupid, wattsupwiththat.com, April 6, 2007.
  39. Ryan Olson, Archived 2007-09-27 at the Wayback Machine, Chico Enterprise Record, 2007.
  40. Watts, Anthony (March 27, 2008). "Gore to throw insults on 60 minutes". Watts Up With That?. Retrieved 2009-02-06.
  41. Michaels, Spencer. "Climate Change Skeptic Says Global Warming Crowd Oversells Its Message". PBS NewsHour. Retrieved 11/7/12. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help)
  42. Anthony Watts. The 31,000 who say "no convincing evidence" for human induced climate change wattsupwiththat.com, May 19, 2008.
  43. ^ Pearce, Fred (2010). The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth about Global Warming. Guardian Books. p. XVI. ISBN 0852652291.
  44. Anthony Watts. Pipe Dream or Viable Energy? wattsupwiththat.com, October 19, 2007.
  45. "The 2008 Weblog Awards - Best Science Blog". Wizbang. 2008. Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  46. Madrigal, Alexis (2007-11-09). "Dueling Sites Top Conservative Run Weblog Awards". Wired.
  47. George Monbiot (15 May 2009). "How to disprove Christopher Booker in 26 seconds". The Guardian. Retrieved 11 April 2010.
  48. Leo Hickman (24 February 2010). Academic attempts to take the hot air out of climate science debate "Academic attempts to take the hot air out of climate science debate". The Guardian. Retrieved 3 April 2010. {{cite news}}: Check |url= value (help)
  49. Suzuki, David. Climate change denial isn’t about science, or even skepticism, Carman Valley Leader. March 8, 2012.
  50. Olson, Ryan (June 29, 2007). "Watts' up? Spotlight shines on local weatherman's latest research". Oroville Mercury-Register. Archived from the original on July 5, 2007.
  51. ^ Henson, Robert (2 May 2011). The Rough Guide to Climate Change. Penguin.
  52. Fall, Souleymane (2011). "Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends" (PDF). Journal of Geophysical Research. 116 (D14120). Bibcode:2011JGRD..11614120F. doi:10.1029/2010JD015146. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  53. Donald, Ros (3 August 2012). "'There's plenty of room for scepticism' – climate study author Richard Muller". The Guardian.
  54. ^ Gascoyne, Tom (February 23, 2012). "Leaked documents hit home Climate-change scandal has a local connection". Chico News & Review. Retrieved August 8, 2012.
  55. "2012 Fundraising Plan" (PDF). The Heartland Institute. January 15, 2012. Retrieved 2012-07-15.
  56. Hickman, Leo (February 15, 2012). "Climate sceptics – who gets paid what?". The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-02-15.
  57. Watts, Anthony (February 15, 2012). "Some notes on the Heartland Leak". Watts Up With That?. Retrieved 2012-02-23.
  58. ^ Hickman, Leo (February 15, 2012). "Leaked Heartland Institute documents pull back curtain on climate scepticism". The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-08-10.
  59. Burleigh, Nina (February 17, 2012). "Secret papers turn up heat on global-warming deniers". Salon. Retrieved 2012-08-10.
  60. Goldenberg, Suzanne (February 14, 2012). "Leak exposes how Heartland Institute works to undermine climate science". The Guardian. Retrieved 2012-08-10.

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