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Watts Up With That (WUWT for short) is a blog set up in 2006 by former broadcast weather presenter Anthony Watts which concentrates on the global warming controversy. The blog was reported by the Sunday Times in 2010 as receiving "more than two million readers each month". In 2010, The Times online blog named WUWT one of the top 30 science blogs, and in 2008 it won best science blog on Weblog Awards. Matt Ridley, writing in The Spectator, said of WUWT that is has "...metamorphosed from a gathering place for lonely nutters to a three-million-hits-per-month online newspaper on climate full of fascinating articles by physicists, geologists, economists and statisticians". Leo Hickman, in a blog for The Guardian, was less complimentary, describing Watt's approach as risking "polluting his legitimate scepticism about the scientific processes and methodologies underpinning climate science with his accompanying politicised commentary".

Involvement in "Climategate" controversy

This section needs expansion with: examples and additional citations. You can help by making an edit requestadding to it . (March 2010)

In late 2009, an archive containing emails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia was released to the public. The Guardian reported that WUWT was one of three blogs "sent links to the cache of CRU leaked material, via anonymous servers, on the same day, Tuesday 17 November".

In an interview with the Financial Times, Watts reported that his blog had become "busier than ever" after the incident and that traffic to the site had tripled. According to the same article, the total number of hits on the site since its launch had topped 37 million.

James Delingpole, writing in the Daily Telegraph blog, claimed that the name "Climategate" was first coined by the WUWT contributor "Bulldust".

Criticism

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In The Globe And Mail Jeet Heer wrote of WUWT and the blog Climate Audit (which takes a similarly sceptical view on the subject of man made global warming): "The sites' rising popularity, and the growing influence they appear to wield in shaping public debate, is deeply worrying to the scientific community".

The decision to nominate WUWT as best science blog was criticised by Kevin Grandia in The Huffington Post in 2009.

References

1. Richard Dawkins' pro-am clash in the boffins' blogosphere
2. "Eureka's Top 30 Science Blogs".
3. "The 2008 Weblog Awards Winners".
4. "Will the Real Science Please Stand Up? -- Global Warming Denier Site Set to be Crowned the "Best Science Blog"".
5. "The global warming guerrillas".
6. Hickman, Leo (24 February 2010). "Academic attempts to take the hot air out of climate science debate". Environment Blog. guardian.co.uk. {{cite web}}: line feed character in |work= at position 13 (help)
7. Detectives question climate change scientist over email leaks
8. "E-mail leaks that clouded climate issue".
9. "Politicising and scare tactics cloud the issue".
10. "Climategate: how the 'greatest scientific scandal of our generation' got its name".
11. Jeet Heer (19 February 2010). "Climategate's guerrilla warriors: pesky foes or careful watchdogs?". The Globe and Mail.
12. Will the Real Science Please Stand Up? -- Global Warming Denier Site Set to be Crowned the "Best Science Blog"

Contributors

• Bob Tisdale
• Roy Spencer
• David W. Schnare
• Jerome Ravetz

External links

surfacestations.org

• Political weblogs
• American blogs
• Science blogs