What’s Watts Up To?

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Anthony Watts, the king of skeptic climate science bloggers, made the unusual announcement yesterday that 1) blogging had been suspended until Sunday and 2) that he had something “controversial and unprecedented” to tell us.

The rest of us many backbenchers and observers, always hungry for any bit of news supporting our views, are now left to speculate 2 days long.

Here’s what we know:

1. It’s not something bad for him or his family. That’s good to know.

2. It’s nothing legal, political or social in nature.

…has nothing to do with FOIA issues or other sorts of political or social theories…”

But here we note Anthony left out the descriptive “scientific” and “business” terms. This narrows down the possibilities considerably. So is it scientific or business? Here’s what he writes originally:


The key words to me here are global, controversial and unprecedented – especially telling is the word “controversial”. Well we know he tinkers around a lot and is inventive. But new products or innovation are rarely controversial, which therefore pretty much eliminates the possibility that it’s an exciting technical breakthrough, i.e. business-related.

And what we do not know:

Overall, that leaves that his “controversial and unprecedented” announcement is scientific in nature. Climate science today is controversial. Sounds to me like he has come up with hard results people aren’t going to like and someone big (like a renowned journal) has endorsed them.

Later he does seem to backpedal a bit on the implications of his announcement, writing that it has:

“…something to do with one of my many projects, it is still a ‘major announcement’ and it has important implications that I’m sure everyone will want to know about.”

Well, what is it that he has been working on for years that everyone will want to know about? Sounds a lot like it has something to do with his surface stations project, getting something published, or being appointed to an important position related to the subject. But surface stations have been pretty much covered and we know pretty much what there is to know about that.

So what’s left? There’s likely another topic he’s been researching and has not told us about yet, and has some surprising, hard results.

That’s my WAG. Next time, he should say nothing and just drop the bomb on us.

But now, until the bomb drops, we are left to speculate on what this “controversial and unprecedented” announcement of “global interest” could possibly be.


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16 responses to “What’s Watts Up To?”

  1. Mindert Eiting

    It’s always fun to speculate. So let’s do it for a few days. Of course, I do not hope this will be a canard and that Anthony has lost his sense of good judgment. The most plausible idea is that it has to do with the surface stations issue. Here I see two opposite roads. It may have to do with the BEST project, that warming is much more serious than we thought, and that Anthony has become St. Paul on his road to Damascus. In that case he better could leave the announcement to Muller. The other direction may have to do with my fascination, the fact that during 1970-99 the number of dropped stations equals 9434.

  2. Rich

    Could it be the password to all those zipped emails? Giving himself some time to go through them. It would explain why he has no time for anything else right now. If so, it means he has already uncovered enough to be a game changer.

  3. Harry Dale Huffman

    Anthony Watts has been a strong proponent for the “lukewarm” position, that there is a greenhouse effect, of increasing temperature with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), but that it amounts to only a 1°C/doubling of CO2 rather than the IPCC alarmist position of 3°C/doubling or more. In my view, the only news that would justify getting the world’s attention would be if he is ready to announce he was wrong, and that there is NO greenhouse effect at all. But I know the time is not right for any “lukewarmer” to suddenly see the light, when the simple, definitive evidence (of my Venus/Earth temperatures comparison) has been out for 20 months, and specifically and incompetently rejected by Watts over and over. So I don’t care what he has to say, until he can lead the way for other lukewarmers, and finally see that the basis for human-caused, runaway global warming–the greenhouse effect–is garbage, not good science. If he just wants to announce he has been given a new level of “official” attention, and thinks the wide world should be talking about it, that would be par for the course right now, and of course the wide world won’t think much of it, because it is already politically, not scientifically, polarized for and against the climate consensus. His personal good or bad fortune, if that is what it is, is irrelevant in the context of the incompetent climate science being foisted (with his “lukewarm” help) upon the world, and would be annoying to everyone but those who follow him dotingly.

  4. Niek Rodenburg

    Anthony is talking with Mitt Romney in London. Seems as if he will run for vice president.

  5. thebiggreenlie

    The European Union will declare BANKRUPTCY Monday morning!!!!

    1. DirkH

      No; Germany’s line of credit is not exhausted yet.

      1. Bernd Felsche
  6. Stephen Richards


    Totally agree. He gains nothing by this game of charades. Let’sn hope it’s worth the hype.

  7. Larry Sheldon

    I have good news! It is almost Sunday in the Pacific time zone.

  8. Mindert Eiting

    Nine hours to go. Stephen Rasey, yesterday at CA, citing a WUWT moderator: “What Anthony is going to publish tomorrow is not of the flashy fire-works variety, rather it is a tectonic sort of event.”

  9. DirkH

    Green activist from Sea shepherd jumps bail in Germany, disappears from country, bail was 250,000 EUR.

  10. Ric Werme

    According to none other than Andy Revkin in http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/28/converted-skeptic-humans-driving-recent-warming/ :

    If the Berkeley analysis turns out to have been rushed or its conclusions poorly supported, you’ll quickly see opponents of limits on greenhouse gases join Connolley’s “rubbish” chorus — and, once again, it’ll be clear that science alone is unlikely to break the political blockades over this issue. WattsUpWithThat blogger Anthony Watts, who criticized Muller last year as rushing flawed work, also appears poised to weigh in this afternoon.

    (That’s on a new Muller report being given to the press before peer review again. I don’t know if his first report has made it past peer review.)

    Anthony won’t join up with Connolley, perhaps he’s patched up his relationship with Muller? (That was a joke….)

    Revkin also notes:

    It appears that Muller has pushed to get the new findings submitted now because Tuesday is the deadline for journal submission for research to be considered in the next climate science report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

    I doubt today will involve the IPCC, but there are several fun speculations on that we could invent.

