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5960 stories have been posted and 120,259 members listed. When we monitored origins of contact, we were getting hits from 25 different countries but especially, the US, UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Europe.

Icecap is a one man band with one valued part time contributor. We run far short of the top climate science web site, Watts Up With That. Deservedly so. Anthony Watts and his team do an excellent job and many authors contribute meaningful content. The comments section, something I could not manage alone because unfortunately it requires full time moderation makes a huge difference. Only Anthony, Climate Audit and Judith Curry’s site really allow free commenting. Anthony has passed the 106 million mark this month.

Climate realist blogs and skeptics are accused by the clueless alarmists and their toadies of being lavishly supported by big oil and big government. I can assure you, we barely recover enough from small very much appreciated donations to cover the costs of maintaining the servers and internet to keep these sites going. We both have outside businesses that pay our personal bills and sometimes subsidize the sites. Gleickgate proved the hypocrisy of the left and the alarmist community. While ignoring climategate as a crime, they treated Gleick as a martyr for the cause and Heartland as a villain. They criticiize the Koch brothers who unlike so many leftist foundations give their money to many different and worthwhile causes. The $200,000 initially reported turned out to be $20,000 given not for climate but for health care. Only 1/4th of the Heartland’s small budget goes to climate and most was spent on international conferences to which scientists from both sides of the issue were invited.

Anthony Watts posted a story yesterday that sums up very well how I and other skeptics must feel at times.

UPDATE: 3/17/12 Thanks to everyone for all the support, kind words, and well wishes. Today I found myself taking another long nap, and I awoke feeling much better than yesterday. Stress is an insidious thing, and until it catches up with you, you don’t realize what impact it has.  - Anthony

It has been an exhausting month since Fakegate hit the scene, and tonight when I came home from work, I crashed hard, taking a nap. I even missed dinner. My children tried to wake me up apparently to no avail. At the moment I feel like I have a hangover.

Behind the scenes, I’m dealing with a lot of things related to WUWT and the legal fight building with the Pacific Institute and Gleick, plus other things. Today for example I’m wrestling with starting the blog all over again on another platform because my wordpress.com free hosting keeps messing under the hood with the production code and they’d broken something yet again (some readers can’t comment any more thanks to a new security feature) just after we got the mess with adwords fixed last week. So yeah, I’m pretty toasted all in all at the moment. Then I read this comment from a reader on the DeSmog Blog headed back to obscurity thread.

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Ally E. says:

March 16, 2012 at 2:10 pm

I found WUWT barely a month before Fakegate happened. Prior to finding this site, I was a head-in-the-sand kind of person. I knew the whole fry-and-die alarmism was wrong, the claims were getting very stupid, as was the panic.

Getting fed up with ever increasing nonsense scare tactics, I pushed back from news outlets. I didn’t want to hear anymore. I also felt very alone. It was Ian Plimer’s “How to get expelled from school” that opened my eyes to the growing fight back to rational thinking. I bought the book (and there were only two left on the shelf, so I know it’s popular) and read it in a day.

Encouraged, I got online and found WUWT and others. I cannot express how wonderful it felt to learn that REAL scientists out there are practicing REAL science and presenting it properly.

Point is, for those years I had my head in the sand, I didn’t know just what a tangled mess this had all become. I didn’t know what a horrible world was developing right under our noses.

I come here every day. This is my home page. I love the science, I love the way it is presented and I love reading the comments and thoughts from so many very intelligent people. But I also devour any news on the political front. I crave and seek out every snippet of good news, and believe me, this is good news.

Anthony, I want to see these dastards go down. I came in at a most exciting time and I want to watch every step of the alarmists fall from grace. Thank you for providing the whole picture, the wide picture, science, politics and all.

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Thanks, Ally. That made my week.

Thanks Anthony and Ally, you illustrate why we both continue this effort.  Anthony and to some degree Icecap have made a difference. Thank you all for your loyalty and support over the years.

This post I wrote years ago sums up why our job won’t be easy. It will take the cycle 24 cooling that should accelerate with both oceans cold to unequivocally falsify the AGW theory and depose the profiteers and polically driven phonies. The media has not reported on the 15 years of lack of warming (Trenberth’s travesty) and falling sea levels or lack of ocean warming.

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Don’t expect them to go down easy. They will try and find reasons why man is responsible (e.g China’s burning of coal) and why their efforts and their gravy trains of grants should continue. Just this week we had Andrew Weaver arguing the record snows and cold in Alaska and four straight banner year for skiing at Whistler was due to global warming and Jeff Masters who named his company after Ayers and Dorn’s radical weather underground, who last few years claimed the cold and snow was due to diminished arctic ice and colder winter might continue, was arguing in this warm winter and recent record warm March temperatures that this was not the same climate of his father. Masters of course is wrong on both counts. His father likely grew up in the crazy decades of the 1940s to 1970s when cold, snow, heat and drought, floods, tornadoes and hurricanes were always in the news. Cold PDO, warm AMO and in the 1960s and 1970s reduced solar drives those extremes. We are exactly in the climate of his father and my father (whose years extended back through the dust bowl and heat and cold extremes of the 1930s) and could become like the years that Charles Dickens wrote about in the early 1800s if the solar cycles head like many solar scientists feel. 

By the way the strong warm push north into Canada is the counter of the strong cold push south in the west all the way into Mexico. This is how weather normally works. Usually when the cold is pushing well south in the east, they sunning on the beaches and surfing in the water of California.


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