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.

WUWT 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 images are links to internal reference pages, some of those, like the ENSO meter, are kept current so are doubly useful. Anthony's lists of other blogs and writings is unique in some go 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

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 date, title, number of comments, and everything is in a single web page. They both have their merits.

The list below has the posts for the last two weeks and are a good way to see which posts have active discussions.

WUWT Classics

• 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 15: Reference: 450 skeptical peer reviewed papers
  

• 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 Mar 27: Earth Hour in North Korea a stunning success
  The nighttime satellite photo says it all. Definitely a solution we don't want to emulate.

• 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. An older report, recently dusted off, is Mann's "hockey stick" claims of the MWP and LIA being local were refuted years before it was published. I think the title should have been In Japan, there are no hockey sticks as the papers have similar data.

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

Daily summary	Total WUWT views to date
Title	Comments	Recent
WUWT index page for 2020 Dec 15	435,906,144
WA “Solves” the Solar Energy Duck Curve by Raising Evening Electricity Prices	17	0
Politicizing Business: From CSR to ESG	15	0
Climate Activist Aussie Politicians Leap to Rescue Vital Coal Power Plants	62	0
Claim: Arctic Ocean–climate change is flooding the remote north with light – and new species	52	0
The Case Against Sabotaging Biden’s Paris Agreement Plans	148	0
Aussie Resources Minister: UN Climate Emergency Demand an “Inconsequential “Grand Statement”	43	0

Formatting in comments

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.

Name	Sample	Result	Notes
b (bold)	This is <b>bold</b> text	This is bold text	Command strong does the same
i (italics)	This is <i>italicized</i> text	This is italicized text	Command em (emphasize) does the same
a (anchor)	See <a href=http://wermenh.com>My home page</a>	See My home page	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 &lt;pre> and &lt;/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>	Wordpress handles this very differently	See http://wattsupwiththat.com/resources/#comment-65319 to see what this really does.
iframe	<iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/yaBNjTtCxd4" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>		Useful for including Youtube videos, see below.

The following commands appear to work only in replies to comments or in block quotes. There seems to be no explanation of why or how WordPress does this. I assume it's a bug, I assume they meant to prevent these commands from passing through at all. It may be that they let almost anything else through too. Oh my, these only work for me if I'm logged into my WordPress account (they don't work if I use my FaceBook account). It may be they work only because I have the ability to post new articles.

Bottom line: don't expect the following to work....

Name	Sample	Result	Notes
u (underline)	This is <u>underlined</u> text	This is underlined text	Why, WordPress, why?
hr (horizontal rule)	<hr>This has hr commands before and after the text<hr>	This has hr commands before and after the text	There's no ending command. You're expected to use <hr /> commands.
h1	<h1>Header size 1</h1>	Header size 1	These are used for section headers in long web pages, so may not be all that useful or welcome on WUWT. On my browser they display large blue sans-serif text.
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	Levels 4, 5, and 6 all seem to do the same thing. They display small black text, subsequent text is normal size and hence bigger. In a reply, the header is in a serif font, in a block quote, it's a sans serif font like the rest of the quote.
h5	<h5>Header size 5</h5>	Header size 5
h6	<h6>Header size 6</h6>	Header size 6

Youtube videos

<iframe width="560" height="315"
        src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/yaBNjTtCxd4"
        frameborder="0" allowfullscreen>
</iframe>

You can change the size of the frame to display by selecting one in the "Video size" menu below, I suggest not copying the width and height attributes, WordPress should choose a large size.

Copy and paste the HTML into your comment and it WordPress will generate something like:

Special characters in comments

Nevertheless, there are very useful characters that are most reliably entered as HTML character entities:

Type this	To get	Notes
&	&	Ampersand
&lt;	<	Less than sign Left angle bracket
&bull;	•	Bullet
&deg;	°	Degree (Use with C and F, but not K (kelvins))
&#8304; &#185; &#178; &#179; &#8308;	⁰ ¹ ² ³ ⁴	Superscripts (use 8304, 185, 178-179, 8308-8313 for digits 0-9)
&#8320; &#8321; &#8322; &#8323;	₀ ₁ ₂ ₃	Subscripts (use 8320-8329 for digits 0-9)
&pound;	£	British pound
&ntilde;	ñ	For La Niña & El Niño
&micro;	µ	Mu, micro
&plusmn;	±	Plus or minus
&times;	×	Times
&divide;	÷	Divide
&ne;	≠	Not equals
&nbsp;		Like a space, with no special processing (i.e. word wrapping or multiple space discarding)
&gt;	>	Greater than sign Right angle bracket N.B. this is generally not needed

Linking to past comments

The "#<label>" at the end of the URL tells a browser where to start the page view. It reads the page from the Web, searches for the label and starts the page view there. As noted above, Wordpress will create a link for you, you don't need to add an <a> command around it.

Climate Audit Assistant

Contact Ric Werme or return to his home page.

Written 2009 Dec 5, last updated 2019 Jun 17.