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Anthony Watts

American television meteorologist

Willard Anthony Watts (born 1958) is a former broadcast meteorologist and prominent figure in the climate change denial movement. He is the editor of Watts Up With That?.

Anthony Watts in 2010

Quotes

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2000s

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  • The global warming crowd is using all the surface data, including cities like L.A. to support their claim, and the data is flawed because it's influenced by human development. It's about asphalt, not the atmosphere.
    • No proof on global warming, Chico Enterprise-Record, June 10, 2003.
  • I'm betting on the sun's increased activity in the last century, and that CO2 doesn't matter much because its effect is overwhelmed by everything else in our atmosphere that also acts as a greenhouse gas, mostly water vapor.
  • I'm comfortable with my position because I see clear evidence that climate change is driven mainly by the sun.
    • I'm comfortable with my position, Chico Enterprise-Record, August 10, 2006.
  • CO2 is far from being the biggest greenhouse gas. Chloroflourocarbons (CFC's) commonly used as refrigerants [are] far worse. Of naturally created GHG's, Methane is 23 times more effective at warming the atmosphere than CO2. Nitrous Oxide is even worse at 296. So far no emergency legislation has been authored to eliminate the effect of cows or dental surgeons.
  • The sun is still the number 1 factor in our energy balance. No matter how much people argue about CO2, they can't successfully explain the pre industrial revolution 900-1300AD Medieval Warming Period or the cold 1645-1715 AD Maunder Sunspot Minimum that coincided with European crop failure, famine and disease while linking it with our modern day issues with CO2 to climate change. Yet sunspots and solar cycles can and do explain both.
  • If both Mars and Earth are experiencing global warming, then maybe there is a larger phenomenon going on in the Solar System that is causing their global climates to change, like changes in the Sun.
  • It's all about the sun. Just take a look at the picture above and notice just how small earth is compared to the sun, or even a large solar flare. Anybody whom thinks the human race has more effect on our global energy balance than an active sun does is just deluding themselves.
  • As I've always said, the sun is the "Big Kahuna" of climate change on Earth. Everything else is secondary, even though man's opinion of his own self importance in the scheme of things often dictates otherwise.
  • [T]he folks who would have you believe that our climate is driven by increasing CO2 and nothing else, will continue to ignore the sun, as it serves their agenda to do so.
  • The UK's Channel 4 premiered a 75-minute film titled, The Great Global Warming Swindle. Through interviews with prize-winning climate experts and others, this masterful documentary explains the origins of global warming alarmism; factually addresses claims of manmade global climate change; exposes the motivations of organizations, scientists and activists sounding the alarm; and explains why it's been extremely difficult, if not downright career killing, for scientists to question global warming orthodoxy publicly. While presenting hard facts, it is artfully done, making it watchable for the layman and scientist alike.
    • Chico Enterprise-Record, March 23, 2007.
  • The emphasis this week seems to be on the sun, and the fact that maybe its really the sun which has been driving climate change after all. That's what I've been saying for years, because its just unrealistic to ignore the largest and single most important contributor to our planets energy balance and to only focus on made-made CO2 and nothing else.
  • So what's easier to believe as the cause of climate change? That a trace gas called CO2 that has increased on earth from about 280 PPM to 380 PPM in the last 100 years is the cause, or that the giant nuclear fireball a thousand times bigger than earth a mere 8 light-minutes away has been getting more active during the same period is the reason?
  • I have to think that because NASA chose to co-author this paper [LaDochy et al., 2007] with researchers at California State University, that some of the statewide "global warming as man-made problem bias" crept into the thinking for the purpose of this paper, i.e. "we need another study to show that its getting hotter so action is justified".
  • Our earth is warmed by a gigantic nuclear fireball, millions of times the mass of earth and a mere 8.5 light-minutes away. One hundred and nine Earths would be required to fit across the Sun's disk, and its interior could hold over 1.3 million Earths. ... You can't just ignore that kind of power. Though it seems some prefer to, since it muddles the results they seek.
  • James Carville used to remind Clinton during the '92 campaign that "its the economy, stupid". I say that on the subject of Global Warming: "its the SUN, stupid".
  • It's been warmer than today's climate in the past, much warmer. It has been colder than this climate in the past, much colder. We know this for a fact. We know that this happens with or without our activities. ... So why do we insist that we are the ones causing it when for over half a million years it happened several times and we’ve only had this supposedly evil earth killing CO2 belching technology a mere speck of that time? Because, many believe global warming is real and there are people in our political world who want the masses to hand over power over their lives to them, so they say "let us handle it". To make that transition easier, they trot out this false premise, that we are totally responsible for natural occurrences in the long span of our planetary history.
  • When we look at the Anthropogenic Global Warming argument, it seems on the surface that we are completely full of ourselves and yet at the same time terribly dubious, sometimes completely without hope, and utterly given to embracing our own fallibility as a cause célèbre. We show no faith in ourselves by accepting this idea that we’ve caused Global Warming and still none in the idea that we can stop it. These are hollow beliefs put forth to enrich the power of the few whom offer us the way to salvation.
  • Often we lose sight of our place in the universe, some never knew at all just how miniscule we humans are compared to everything else.
  • So we have three planets now with a warming trend; Earth, Mars, and Neptune. That's not an insignificant coincidence.
  • In my opinion, the premise of CO2 burial seems absurd not only because of the lack of supporting evidence for certain climate change, but also due to it's lack of foresight as to the effects of the burial scheme.
  • You know, for as much as we humans think we really have control over our planet, nature tends to remind us from time to time that we are just flyspecks in the vastness of space and energy.
  • Why would a committee award such a prestigious prize right on the heels of his documentary [An Inconvenient Truth] being proven inaccurate and prone to exaggerations?
  • To me, the fact that the suns magnetic field is linked more closely to earth now lends credence to theories like that of Henrik Svensmark, which points to an extraterrestrial driver of climate change, cosmic rays which form cloud nuclei in our atmosphere, modulated by solar variance.
  • The vanity held by many of us puny humans tends to bolster a belief that we control our own destiny within the universe, or are even masters of our own climate control. Recent events such as the PDO shift remind us that the slow but powerful forces of nature remain in control.
  • The Surface Stations site has been up two days now, and I’m getting hundreds of registrations across the country from people wanting to get involved in the grass roots effort to photograph, measure, catalog and contribute to the database of weather stations. I’m getting inquires from Congress, Policy think tanks, and bloggers worldwide... I’ve been invited to submit a research paper, and I’m having a lot of fun too. Now I know why I lost the school board election, it was to give me time to do this. Everything happens for a reason.
  • There's a tendency to view ourselves, our endeavors, and our accomplishments as the pinnacle. Yet, compared to whats in our solar system, whats in our galaxy, and whats in our universe, we are but a mere speck in the vastness of time, space, mass, and energy.
  • And finally we have this, this discovery that Earth's magnetic field can be ripped open and our atmosphere laid bare to the solar wind, much like Mars. Magnetism is underrated in the grand scheme of things, in my opinion. We'd do well to pay more attention to magnetic trends in our corner of the universe and what effects it has on Earthly climate.
  • Of course we all know that the human race has historically done better during warm periods. While we've seen a slight warming in the last century, we've also seen a worldwide improvement in the human condition. Warm – what's not to like?
  • That the climate has always changed. It has never been static. In the past it has seen extremes hotter and colder than what we experience today. So change is normal.
  • I would say that the polar ice has disappeared in the past. Certainly there seems to be evidence of past climate situations where we may have had virtually no or none during the summertime. In the immediate future, however, I don't think we are going to see that. In fact, we're going through a rebound right now.
  • Climate Change Reconsidered, the 2009 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), is the report on global warming the United Nations' climate panel should have written – but didn't.
  • This goes back to the reason why alarmists abandoned the "global warming" term in favor of climate change. They can play this bait and switch, showing changes in climate (which always exist) and then blaming them on CO2. But there is no mechanism ever proposed by anyone where CO2 can change the climate directly without going through the intermediate step of warming. If climate is changing but we are not seeing warming, then the change can't be due to CO2.

2010s

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  • I would say this boils down to a war between the haves and the have-nots. The haves are the people that are getting all the funding. They're getting millions and millions of dollars of funding. The skeptics, we get scraps, we do things on our own. I funded most of the project on my own. And so who should you trust? People that are being paid for an opinion, paid for an output, versus someone who is not being paid for an output, and I think that's the question.
  • The warming propaganda machine has lost its momentum and is desperate to get it back. They want to silence Lord Monckton and remove him from the field. To that end they'll say anything. ... Yet when granted a fair forum for debate, it is Monckton who triumphs.
  • Global warming had become essentially a business in its own right. There are NGOs, there are organizations, there are whole divisions of universities that have set up to study this, this factor, and so there's lots of money involved and then so I think that there's a tendency to want to keep that going and not really look at what might be different.
  • "Global warming" suggests a steady linear increase in temperature, but since that isn't happening, proponents have shifted to the more universal term "climate change," which can be liberally applied to just about anything observable in the atmosphere.

Quotes about Anthony Watts

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  • Watts has his critics who take issue with his stance on global warming. He acknowledges a warming trend, but believes humans have only had a slight impact. He points to the sun and the tremendous amount of energy it kicks out as having a far greater role in Earth's heating and cooling.
  • While many believe humans are leading contributors to global warming, Watts has theorized the sun may play a bigger role. He said the data deserves a second look, especially because of the large amount of money involved.
  • A careful, honest man of science, all [Anthony] Watts would say for sure was that his findings and all the strange cold-weather events of this winter prove only one thing so far -- that "Mother Nature is still in control of things, not us."
  • The indefatigable Anthony Watts, having noticed that the raw data for many individual stations in the GISS dataset had been "processed" so as to turn a century of actual cooling into a century of spurious warming, wondered whether the "processed" data itself had been altered over time with the aim of producing an ever-higher apparent (but bogus) rate of "global warming" over the 20th century. He found that this was indeed the case.
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