Willard Anthony Watts (born 1958) is an American blogger who runs Watts Up With That?, a climate change denial blog that opposes the scientific consensus on climate change. A former television meteorologist and current radio meteorologist, he is also founder of the Surface Stations project, a volunteer initiative to document the condition of U.S. weather stations. The Heartland Institute helped fund some of Watts' projects, including publishing a report on the Surface Stations project, and invited him to be a paid speaker at its International Conference on Climate Change from 2008 to 2014.
Education and career Watts assisted with the setup of a radio program for his high school in Indiana, and later attended electrical engineering and meteorology classes at Purdue University, but did not graduate or receive a degree.: "Anthony Watts is a TV journalist, a weather presenter who studied Electrical Engineering and Meteorology at Purdue University; there's no record of his having graduated, however, and he's been reticent in discussing this. After a career in local television, in 2004 he moved to radio, joining the FOX News affiliate KPAY in Chico, California." In 1978, Watts began his broadcasting career as an on-air meteorologist for WLFI-TV in Lafayette, Indiana.
He joined KHSL-TV, a CBS affiliate based in Chico, California, in 1987, and founded a company named ItWorks the same year. He stopped using his first name "Willard" to avoid confusion with NBC's Today weatherman Willard Scott. In 2002, he left KHSL to focus on ITWorks full-time. Watts has been the chief meteorologist for KPAY, a Fox News affiliate based in Chico, California since 2004, and the director and president of IntelliWeather Inc, a subsidiary of ItWorks, since 2000.
Watts was a member of the Chico, California school board from 2002 to 2006. In 2006, he was briefly a candidate for county supervisor, to represent Chico on the Butte County Board of Supervisors, but withdrew his candidacy due to family and workload concerns.
Climate change opinion and activities Watts rejects the scientific consensus on climate change.: "Anthony Watts is an extremely popular blogger, drawing hundreds of comments per post and well over half a million visitors per month. Yet his blog contains highly questionable information–presented very "scientifically" of course, replete with charts and graphs–but all directed toward the end of making the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming seem faulty (in fact, it's extremely robust) He believes that global warming is occurring, but that it is not as bad as has been reported, and that carbon dioxide plays a much smaller part than the Sun in causing climatic change.Anthony Watts. It's the Sun, stupid, wattsupwiththat.com, April 6, 2007.Ryan Olson,, Chico Enterprise Record, 2007. Watts has written that variations in solar irradiance, the Sun's magnetic field and solar wind are driving changes to the climate, contrary to the scientific consensus that the primary cause of climate change is an increase in greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide.:Climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks...This conclusion is based on a substantial array of scientific evidence, including recent work, and is consistent with the conclusions of recent assessments by the [USGCRP], the [IPCC], and other assessments of the state of scientific knowledge on climate change...Most of the warming over the last several decades can be attributes to human activities that release carbon dioxide (CO2), and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases (GHGs) into the atmosphere. The burning of fossil fuels–coal, oil, and natural gas–for energy is the single largest human driver of climate change Climate models have been used to examine the role of the Sun in recent warming,: "Numerous experiments have been conducted using climate models to determine the likely causes of the 20th-century climate change. These experiments indicate that models cannot reproduce the rapid warming observed in recent decades when they only take into account variations in solar output and volcanic activity." and data collected on solar irradiance and ozone depletion, as well as comparisons of temperature readings at different levels of the atmosphere: "Another fingerprint of human effects on climate has been identified by...studying the pattern of temperature changes from the surface up through the stratosphere. In all climate models, increases in carbon dioxide cause warming at the surface and in the troposphere, but lead to cooling of the stratosphere... models also calculate that the human-caused depletion of stratospheric ozone has had a strong cooling effect in the stratosphere. There is a good match between the...combined carbon dioxide and ozone changes and the observed pattern of tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling." have shown that the Sun is not a significant factor driving climate change.: "It is extremely unlikely (<5%) that the global pattern of warming observed during the past half century can be explained without external forcing. These changes took place over a time period when non-anthropogenic forcing factors (i.e., the sum of solar and volcanic forcing) would be likely to have produced cooling, not warming.": "When human influences are removed from the model experiments, results suggest that the surface of the Earth would actually have cooled slightly over the last 50 years. The clear message from fingerprint studies is that the observed warming over the last half-century cannot be explained by natural factors, and is instead caused primarily by human factors."
Watts is a signatory to the Leipzig Declaration as well as the Manhattan Declaration, which calls for the immediate halt to any tax funded attempts to counteract climate change or reduce CO2 emissions, and suggests the consensus among climate scientists is "false". Watts says he advocates for alternative energy sources and for the United States to "disengage from Middle East Oil."Anthony Watts. Pipe Dream or Viable Energy? wattsupwiththat.com, October 19, 2007.
In 2010, Watts went on a speaking tour to 18 locations around Australia. In 2014, Watts began the Open Atmospheric Society.
Climate change blogging
Watts established Watts Up With That? (WUWT) in 2006. The blog features material disputing the scientific consensus on climate change, including assertions that the human role in global warming is insignificant and carbon dioxide is not a driving force of warming.: "Despite the well-known facts under discussion, the original graph, based on a single outdated study published in 1991, continues to reappear again and again in climate skeptical media, trying to prove that the sun, not anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, is causing global warming. The original curve appears, for example, on Anthony Watts' climate skeptical blog "Watts Up With That?" in an article posted in 2011." It hosts several guest bloggers, such as Christopher Monckton and the late Fred Singer, in addition to Watts. It is among the most prominent climate change denial blogs,: "One of the highest trafficked climate blogs is wattsupwiththat.com, a website that publishes climate misinformation on a daily basis.": "In recent years these conservative media outlets have been supplemented (and to some degree supplanted) by the conservative blogosphere, and numerous blogs now constitute a vital element of the denial machine...the most popular North American blogs are run by a retired TV meteorologist (wattsupwiththat.com)...Having this powerful, pervasive, and multifaceted media apparatus at its service provides the denial machine with a highly effective means of spreading its message.": "More importantly, it was becoming clear that the most effective denialist media weapon was not the newspapers or television but the internet. A number of influential websites, like Watts Up With That?, Climate Skeptic and Climate Depot, were established.": "The most authoritative climate change skepticism web sites included Watts Up With That? and Climate Depot" and is described by climatologist Michael E. Mann as the most popular, having surpassed Climate Audit.: "Since then, a number of other amateur climate change denial bloggers have arrived on the scene. Most prominent among them is Anthony Watts, a meteorologist...and founder of the site "Watts Up with That?" which has overtaken climate audit as the leading climate change denial blog." In 2010, it received more than half a million views per month. Columbia Journalism School writer Curtis Brainard has written that "scientists have repeatedly criticized [Watts] for misleading readers on subjects such as the reliability of the U.S. surface temperature record.": "At the other end of the spectrum are influential sites for "climate skeptics", such as Watts Up With That?, a blog run by meteorologist Anthony Watts, whom scientists have repeatedly criticized for misleading readers on subjects such as the reliability of the U.S. surface temperature record."