Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts
Anthony Watts speaking in Gold Coast, Australia, June 2010
Nationality	American
Website
Watts Up With That? SurfaceStations.org

Anthony Watts is an American meteorologist^[1][2] (AMS seal holder, retired),^[3][4] editor of the blog, Watts Up With That? (WUWT),^[5] owner of the weather graphics company ItWorks, and founder of the SurfaceStations.org project that documents the siting of weather stations across the United States.

Career

Watts became a television meteorologist in 1987 when he joined WLFI-TV in Lafayette, Indiana and KHSL-TV, a CBS affiliate based in Chico, California.^[6] After working at KHSL for 17 years, he left in 2004 to become the radio meteorologist for KPAY-AM, a Fox News affiliate also based in Chico, California.^{[citation needed]} Watts also operates several companies that make weather graphics systems for use on television broadcasts.^[7]

In 2006, Watts was briefly a candidate for county supervisor, to represent Chico on the Butte County Board of Supervisors, but he withdrew his candidacy due to family and workload concerns.^[8]

In 2010, Watts went on a speaking tour arranged by the organization "Climate Sceptics" to 14 locations around Australia. In his talks, Watts presented his views that the temperature records used to support the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming were inaccurate.^[9]

View of climate change

Watts has a skeptical view of CO₂-driven global warming. 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."^[10] In spite of his climate change skepticism, Watts says that he is "green in many ways."^[11]

In 2006 Watts established the blog, Watts Up With That, described by Fred Pearce as the "world's most viewed climate website," which mainly posts about the global warming controversy.^[11] In 2008, his blog won the internet voting-based "Best Science Blog" Wizbang Weblog Award.^[12][13]

SurfaceStations.org

In 2007 Watts launched the SurfaceStations.org project, whose mission is to create a publicly available database of photographs of weather stations, along with their metadata, in response to what he described as "a massive failure of bureaucracy to perform something so simple as taking some photographs and making some measurements and notes of a few to a few dozen weather stations in each state". Watts informed radio and television host Glenn Beck that he began the undertaking, wondering if the composition of weather shelter paint had "made a difference" to thermometer readings and, consequently, the U.S. temperature record.^[14] The project relies on volunteers to gather the data.^[15] Volunteers estimate the siting, usage and other conditions of weather stations in NOAA's Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) and grade them for their compliance with the standards published in the organization's Climate Reference Network Site Handbook.^[15][16] By 2009, the project had documented over 860 stations using over 650 volunteers. In a report entitled Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?, published by the Heartland Institute, Watts concludes that "the errors in the [U.S. temperature] record exceed by a wide margin the purported rise in temperature [...] during the twentieth century."^[17]

Prompted by his work, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration issued a preliminary report that charted data from 70 stations that SurfaceStations.org identified as 'good' or 'best' against the rest of the dataset surveyed at that time, and concluded, "there is no indication from this analysis that poor station exposure has imparted a bias in the U.S. temperature trends."^[18] Watts issued a rebuttal in which he asserted that the preliminary analysis excluded new data on quality of surface stations, and criticized the use of homogenized data from the stations, which in his view accounts for the creation of two nearly identical graphs.^[19][20]

The Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres subsequently published a study by Menne et al. which examined the record of stations picked out by Watts' Surfacestations.org, and concluded that "In summary, we find no evidence that the CONUS average temperature trends are inflated due to poor station siting." ^[21][22] In fact, the analysis of unadjusted data from poorly sited stations did reveal a bias, however, it was not the expected bias. The poorly sited stations measured maximum temperatures on average lower than the well sited stations. The authors note:

"Results indicate that there is a mean bias associated with poor exposure sites relative to good exposure sites; however, this bias is consistent with previously documented changes associated with the widespread conversion to electronic sensors in the USHCN during the last 25 years. Moreover, the sign of the bias is counterintuitive to photographic documentation of poor exposure because associated instrument changes have led to an artificial negative (“cool”) bias in maximum temperatures and only a slight positive (“warm”) bias in minimum temperatures."^[21]

During 2011 and 2012, the Heartland Institute helped Watts raise two donations of $44,000 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.".^[23][24]

See also

• Surface temperature record

References

External links

• Watts Up With That?, Anthony Watts' blog.
• surfacestations.org, an online database of photographs and evaluations of weather stations, founded in 2007 by Anthony Watts.
• Watts being interviewed on Hannity's America
• Watts, Anthony (2009). Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?. Chicago, IL: The Heartland Institute. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/1-934791-26-6|1-934791-26-6]]. http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdf. 
• Surface Temperature Records: Policy Driven Deception?, by Joseph D’Aleo and A. Watts, Science and Public Policy Institute, January 27, 2010.