Countdown to What?

UPDATE: Watts has toned down his momentous hype.  He apparently has a healthy sense of self-importance that leads him to make grand pronouncements. That sound you hear is air deflating from the climate skeptic sphere.

Either Anthony Watts is in possession of big-time climate news or he’s over-dramatizing a piece of news that he thinks is big:

Something’s happened. From now until Sunday July 29th, around Noon PST, WUWT will be suspending publishing. At that time, there will be a major announcement that I’m sure will attract a broad global interest due to its controversial and unprecedented nature.

Whatever it is–proof of Sasquatch, the whereabouts of Jimmy Hoffa, or as many suspect, a new cache of climategate emails –Watts has created expectations for a revelatory disclosure that will rock the climate world.

What do you think it is? The clock is ticking…

UPDATE: Speculation has begun at Bishop Hill, Climate Audit, and Lucia’s.

31 Responses to “Countdown to What?”

  1. PDA says:

    Mann is Muller. Muller is Mann.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhYk75r33Vg

  2. Mary says:

    It has been discovered that the climate is actually run by a giant underground thermostat at Fort Knox. The Illuminati meet and turn the temperature up periodically to fake us out. Of course, the Rockefellers and Bill Gates do this to push vaccines and GMO foods on everyone because it changes disease patterns and affects agriculture. Agenda 21.5. Or something.

  3. Joshua says:

    My prediction is that in the real world, Anthony’s assignation of “unprecedented” is a rather typical overstatement.

    In effect, despite the “unprecedented” nature of Anthony’s announcement,  it will be same old, same old, in the junior high school cafeteria food fight that is the climate debate.

    It is clearly excellent PR on his part, however.

  4. Tom Fuller says:

    He’s been too long in the journalism game to cry wolf. I’m betting a product launch with an environmental element. Or he has something on Peter Gleick.

  5. Joshua says:

    He has an update up. Says it is related to a project he’s working on (one of the “many”). I guess it’s just coincidence that he might think a project he’s working on will be “unprecedented” and of global interest.

    My speculation of it being about “climategate” is apparently wrong.

  6. harrywr2 says:

    Anthony has since clarified. It appears he will be releasing something that has been a ‘work in progress’ for quite some time.It’s easy to forget that Anthony is something of an electronics wizz in the TV Weather Computing business…a ‘techie’ story on his latest electronics wizardry was released a week ago.http://www.sys-con.com/node/2314120

    His company, IntelliWeather, soon created some of the first-ever
    PC-based broadcast TV weather systems, and a decade later, he was
    supplying weather graphics and display solutions to CBS News as well as
    TV stations around the USA

    My tinfoil hat thinks that he is in the verge of releasing his temperature data visualization tool that Heartland found some funding for him to build.

  7. BBD says:

    We’ll see. I’m put in mind of the blurb on the back of my cherished copy of Tom’s book:

    When over a thousand emails were leaked from a prestigious climate research centre in England, it rocked the world of climate science and changed the fight over global warming forever.

    So it better be good then 🙂

  8. Keith Kloor says:

    Wow, what a letdown this must be for the climate skepticsphere. 

  9. Tom Fuller says:

    Yes, we did understate the impact of Climategate (not our book), but I think most would forgive us.

  10. MarkB says:

    “a healthy sense of self-importance…’ We’ve never seen that before in the world of climate change. If you’re going to go ad hominem, you should go for it and not be petty.

  11. steven mosher says:

    I’d change the word from forever to for now.

    in the end the fight doesn’t change

  12. Howard says:

    It’s got to be a true-green MLM product that targets the lucrative paranoid consumer left adrift in the wake of Art Bell’s retirement.  The shocking announcement hints that this will be the second coming of (a) John Galt (wet dream).   

  13. Tom Fuller says:

    #11, I’d change the pictures from black and white to color.

  14. Tom Scharf says:

    Watt’s will admit he hacked CRU personally and wrote the forged Heartland memo…and has a new paper on hockey stick ready for release. 

  15. Dan Moutal says:

    My guess, is that the <a href=”http://reason.com/blog/2012/07/27/hot-rumor-best-analysis-next-week-to-rep”>rumour</a> that BEST will show that global average temperature has increased by 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times has caused Watts to go into damage control.But 1.5 degrees Celsius!? That number is high enough to warrant plenty of skepticism if that is what BEST plans to announce next week.It seems more likely that the rumour just got a bit muddled and what BEST plans to announce is warming of 1.5 degrees <strong>Fahrenheit</strong> which is not far off from the 0.7 degrees Celsius of warming shown by the other data sets.That is my guess anyway.

  16. Steve Fitzpatrick says:

    Well, Anthony probably underestimated the influence his ‘suspension’ would have.  He will probably be more careful in the future.  Live and learn.

  17. Joshua says:

    “Well, Anthony probably underestimated the influence his “˜suspension’ would have.”

    Yes. Being such a modest guy, he probably underestimated his importance.It’s not like this is good PR, or anything like that. Simply posting that he was busy and posting would be light of a couple of days wouldn’t have sufficed. He had no choice but to post that he was going to come back to announce an unprecedented development that would be of global interest.

  18. RB says:

    “Anthony is something of an electronics wizz ..”Oh, OK, Anthony Watts throws his hands up and announces that Muller proved him wrong, WUWT will now be a live feed bearcam site.

  19. BBD says:

    RB

    Thanks for the link. And so the grubby fiasco continues: Watts, having already broken his promise to accept BEST even if the results contradicted his position, will have to do it again.

  20. willard says:

    Has he toned down? Damn, now I have to rebook all my vacation plans I cancelled yesterday.

  21. Harry Angstrom says:

    Probably some sort of compact free energy device.. individually signed and sealed by Anthony himself.

  22. RB says:

    Lindzen is retiring?That doesn’t sound vacation cancel-worthy either.

  23. Leo G says:

    Well from Mosh’s clue, maybe Anthony is retiring from this debate – no more gas. Or he has figured out how to move all of our world onto non carbon based energy at a very inexpensive cost – no gas.

  24. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz says:

    And at this late date you still have no clue.World Meteorological Organization standards show US temperature data exaggerated by at least two-fold leaving others to defend the quality of world data. Period.Hello borehole, or whatever it is you do here to keep the funds flowing.

  25. Joshua says:

    I feel so embarrassed.

    There I was skeptical of Anthony’s claim that his announcement would be of “global interest” and hat he would really be announcing something “unprecended.” 

    And he goes and shows me up. He actually did do something unprecended: He wrote a paper and will be submitting it to a publisher. I’ve never heard of anyone doing that before. In fact, I’m quire sure it has never happened.

    And sure enough, my phone has been ringing off the hook* with calls from friends from overseas saying to me “Did you hear about what Anthony Watts did? He wrote a paper. Isn’t that interesting?”

    At least I do feel somewhat comforted with the knowledge that I wasn’t alone. Certainly, along with my skepticism being misplaced, so was that of all those “skeptics” who line up at his site to express their “skepticism” about inflated claims in the climate debate. 

    *Do cell phones ring off the hook?

  26. Tom Fuller says:

    Commenter’s envy. Not a pretty thing. You should be happy! Commenting is so… responsibility-free… Write whatever you like… don’t have to put your name on it… No need to be jealous of people who actually, you know… hypothesize, test, analyze and report on science. I mean, how dull can you get?

  27. BBD says:

    Let’s see if the paper stands up to scrutiny before wasting any more time discussing any merits it may or may not possess.

  28. Eli Rabett says:

    The thing about Tony’s little project is what does a photo taken in 2008 tell you about what the state of something in 1980 or 1910 was.  Which is why Eli prefers the Climate Reference Network

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