Watts up with that Anthony's major announcement?

About his project unrelated to health, FOIA, politics, society

Update Saturday: Wow, the last paragraph in Wikipedia contains what I consider the most likely answer to the mystery:

According to the Heartland Institute 2012 fundraising plan document, they agreed to help Watts raise $88,000 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."

LM: BTW the Guardian plans to publish a significant news at the same moment: it may be the same thing.

Update Sunday: It was related to NOAA but it turned out to be a paper claiming that NOAA incorrectly doubled the late 20th century warming trend in the U.S. See James Delingpole's summary that I found more comprehensible than Anthony Watts' press release.

Well, it's fine but yes, I am disappointed. I wouldn't agree that this has a global importance; the U.S. is 2% of the globe, after all. Also, it's just another paper claiming something about those matters. Let me admit that its importance may be a bit inflated because Anthony is still excited about publishing a paper somewhere.

The world's most visited climate blog, Watts Up With That, just interrupted the publishing of new posts for two days. An inner circle of the Earth's 11 climate skeptics including your humble correspondent was informed about the interruption by e-mail at the same moment.



We are told to expect a major announcement of an unprecedented and controversial event on Sunday around 9 pm (Pilsner Summer Time: I suspect Anthony also meant noon Pacific Daylight Time and not Pacific Standard Time), one that led Anthony to cancel vacation plans, will arguably attract the attention of the whole planet, overshadow the Olympic games, reconstruct or destroy the United Nations, and perhaps even delay the war in Iran.

And believe me, Anthony generally doesn't like much hype and big words (similarly tome) so this is either his unprecedented hype that may turn out to be a dud or a really big story.

Anthony also told us he wouldn't respond to our e-mails before Sunday so I honestly don't know what it is and I can't find out (I guess). Moreover, the symmetric position of my e-mail inside the list suggests that other people in the list such as Steve McIntyre don't know what's going on, either. If you try to Google search for anthony watts major announcement, you will quickly get stuck in a TRF infinite loop, too. ;-) Three more speculative threads are hosted by Bishop Hill, Steve McIntyre, and Suyts.




So we may only speculate what the announcement is going to be. Is it a new energy-efficient server, the kind of stories that we could see on Anthony's Facebook wall most recently?

Or Climategate III (with a bombshell that doesn't make it just another fading sequel which contradicts Anthony's word "unprecedented")? A hockey team member confessed he was FOIA, the Climategate whistleblower?

An error in an irrelevant table written down by an assistant to James Hansen or his grandkids has been found? Anthony Watts is an alarmist who has pretended to be a skeptic and he will boast he has duped the real skeptics? ;-) Or is he selling the WUWT domain to George Soros and Real Climate?

A new pound of black asphalt was added to a U.S. weather station, making it darker and warmer? Has Anthony measured the climate sensitivity to be 50 degrees Celsius per doubling? Or does he have a proof that CO2 is cooling the planet?

Has Mann filed a lawsuit against WUWT for its being a climate heretic website that realizes that Mann's work is a pile of garbage? Is Watts being blackmailed by an armed thug hired by Al Gore? Has Rajendra Pachauri together with Joe Romm hacked WUWT? Maybe the article about the interruption was written by them and on Sunday, they will post "climate change is real, that's the big story". :-) A mass resignation in scientific societies? Has CERN proved that the climate is changing due to the Higgs boson?

The evil Big Oil corporations have finally sent billions to Anthony's bank account so that he can distribute it to other evil skeptical bloggers who may finally begin to attack the climate scientists?

Is the climate Armageddon coming this Sunday? Has a group of hawkish climate skeptics pretending to be doves – led by Anthony – kidnapped the U.S. Olympic team and demand the cancellation of the IPCC etc.? Or, as WUWT reader Matt suggested, is Watts running for the U.S. presidency as an independent?

You may offer your own explanations. I have no idea about the character, sign, or severity of the message. We will see on Sunday.

Off-topic: Higgs

Things were much clearer with Matt Strassler's quiz asking his readers when the first 125 GeV Higgs boson was produced by the humans without their realizing they had done so.

All thermonuclear bombs and colliders before the 1980s had vastly insufficient energies (below 1 GeV in the former case) and SpS at CERN in the early 1980s which discovered the W-bosons and Z-bosons still had insufficient luminosities (chances of a Higgs were of order 1% over there). So it "probably" had to be the Tevatron in 1988 or 1989. Sensible. No one noticed the particle in the 1980s but the production of the Higgs boson still managed to ignite the fall of communism: I must answer this thing when I am asked about the practical applications of the Higgs boson again. ;-)

Incidentally, by accident, the Higgs boson could have also been produced much earlier than that.

And I would also like to stress that the question whether a Higgs boson existed during a particle collision doesn't actually have a sharp answer. Only the final states may be predicted and all the intermediate histories contribute to the probability amplitude and interfere with each other.

So both Higgs-ful histories as well as Higgs-less histories contribute to the probability of a particular final state and we may only see the particular random events "encouraged" both by Higgs-ful and Higgs-less histories. Still, this problem is a bit academic because the actual events had the energy-momentum of the final product so accurately aligned with the Higgs boson mass (the width and therefore uncertainty of the Higgs mass is well below 1 GeV) that you may be "de facto sure" that the collision may be blamed upon the Higgs boson if the reconstructed mass agreed within the width.