2010 – First full year of AGW Observer

I made the first post of this blog in July 28, 2009, so the 2010 was the first full year of AGW Observer. What has happened here during the first year (and a half)?

161 posts and 567 comments have happened, but there’s more in the details:

Paperlists

The main attraction here has of course been the paperlists. The biological indicators of global warming was the subject of my first paperlist. When I was creating the paperlists at early stage I had no idea if they would be appreciated by many. I just made the lists because I had a need for them so I originally made them as a resource for myself. By now it is clear that the lists are quite widely appreciated.

It also became clear that I had no idea which lists would be popular. When looking at the evidence for the anthropogenic global warming, to me the most compelling evidence comes from the direct measurements from the atmosphere. Based on that, I thought that my lists on the observed changes in outgoing longwave radiation and in downward longwave radiation would be the most popular ones. Those two are relatively popular lists but clearly the most popular list so far has been the “Papers on laboratory measurements of CO2 absorption properties”.

I was quite surprised when I realised that the laboratory measurement list was by far the most popular of my lists. I originally thought of it as just a curiosity – just something to show that we also have done the basic science on these issues in labs too, while really looking at the OLR and DLR measurements with more interest. But it turned out that the laboratory studies were just what doctor ordered. This list is cited continuously and frequently in Internet discussions. In my blog statistics I can see when someone gives a link to my blog and I do click the links to see what kind of use my lists have. When following those links it becomes obvious that the laboratory paperlist is the most cited one, probably almost half of the citations are to this list.

Top ten lists at the moment are:

1. Papers on laboratory measurements of CO2 absorption properties
2. Papers on climate sensitivity estimates
3. Papers on the Milankovitch cycles and climate
4. Papers on water vapor feedback observations
5. Papers on changes in OLR due to GHG’s
6. Papers on the non-significant role of cosmic rays in climate
7. Papers on the theory of CO2 absorption properties
8. Papers on Earth’s radiation budget
9. Papers on global cloud cover trends
10. Papers on tropical troposphere hotspot

I thank all the scientists who made the studies and wrote the research articles for me so I could include them to my lists.

Other articles

I haven’t written many articles as I have concentrated more on the paperlists. Two of my articles clearly stand out as most popular:

1. Comments on Lindzen & Choi (2009)
2. Unchallenging Copenhagen Climate Challenge

Traffic providers

I’m very bad and lazy in advertising myself. Fortunately, many have been kind enough to give links to my site. My blog is included in the blogrolls of quite many blogs. Some people have also mentioned my blog in their articles. My blog is also every once in a while mentioned in online discussions. Many would deserve a mention by name here for being particularly active in linking to my blog, but as I’m probably not aware of everyone active in this sense, I’m just making these general statements. However, my statistics do show where I get most traffic, so I’ll provide a list of places bringing me most traffic:

1. Skeptical Science – John Cook has included links to my paperlists in several of his articles.
2. RealClimate – Here the traffic comes from the discussions.
3. Tiede – Finnish popular science magazine. The traffic comes from their discussion forum which unfortunately seems to be badly infected by climate change deniers and conspiracy theorists.
4. Tuukka Simonen’s blog – A fellow Finnish climate blogger who has my site in his blogroll.
5. Rabett Run – Eli Rabett was one of the people who noticed my site at very early phase.
6. Gaia – Kaj Luukko’s Finnish blog about climate and energy related issues. Kaj also writes with me in our group-blog, the Ilmastotieto.
7. CO2-raportti – Finnish news site that also publishes some of my articles. Here the traffic is originating from the discussions.
8. Doskonale Szare – Climate blog from Poland having my site in blogroll. It’s nice to see that I have readers from all over the world.
9. Only In It For The Gold – My site is in the blogroll.
10. Google reader.
11. Scienceblogs.com. As the previous entry wasn’t a single site as such, we’ll take a honorary 11th place here as well. This is actually several blogs collected under a single heading. Some traffic here is coming from discussions at Deltoid and Stoat, but most of it is from A Few Things Illconsidered who include my postings to their weekly news.

I thank everyone who has ever directed or at least tried to direct some traffic here.

Quite a lot of my traffic comes from search engines. Here’s the top ten traffic giving search words for my site:

1. “agw observer” (and also “agwobserver”)
2. “agw”
3. “1500 year climate cycle”
4. “temperature 100 meters below the earth’s surface”
5. “polar bear populations”
6. “co2 absorption”
7. “underground temperatures”
8. “ocean heat content”
9. “co2 absorption spectrum”
10. “stratosphere temperature”

AGW Observer as traffic provider

Of all the links I have provided in my site, here are the 10 most clicked ones:

1. http://www.skepticalscience.com/. It’s good that I can offer John some (but only some) of the traffic back he has directed here.
2. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TVR-4RBYD6J-3&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=a984bf14bb0c59800a34ee9583aebb4d. Let me first take the opportunity here to give feedback to ScienceDirect: Dear ScienceDirect, could you please do something for your article URL’s? I know that I can dig up some shortened versions of the links (the DOI link for example), but it would be so much easier if I could just copy/paste a nice short URL from the address bar of my browser. Other places providing science articles have no trouble in providing compact URL’s. Thanks. It was rather surprising to see this paper by Toth et al. being clicked so much as it doesn’t appear to be that important for the questions being discussed here.
3. http://rabett.blogspot.com/. Same comment as in 1.
4. http://deepclimate.org/. Deep Climate – this site really deserves the traffic.
5. http://www.realclimate.org/. Same comment as in 1.
6. http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/. I think for Deltoid I give more traffic than get.
7. http://tamino.wordpress.com/. Open Mind – great place to direct some traffic to.
8. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TVR-4YPPR9H-2&_user=10&_coverDate=03%2F27%2F2010&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1298837019&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=a9a61cd3459336a4642e863c62dd3bac. “Sorry, your request could not be processed because the format of the URL was incorrect. Contact the Help Desk if the problem persists. [SD-001] “. Ouch. I better check what this is about.
9. http://climatecrocks.com/. Climate Denial Crock of the Week – has my site in blogroll but it seems that I have (so far) given more traffic than gotten.
10. http://chriscolose.wordpress.com/. Climate Change – I really enjoy Chris Colose’s articles.

Other things

I wish everyone enjoyable year 2011!