The good news is that March seems to have set a record in traffic, with more than 150,000 unique visitors and about 300,000 visits.  I probably had some 1.4 million page views.

I use two hedges “probably” and some” because Webstats — especially page views — are, of course, notoriously hard to quantify and different software gives you different numbers.  I use Google analytics Urchin 6 for page views, which is supposed to be pretty accurate .

The bad news is that the anti-scientific denialist website, WattsUpWithThat, from retired TV weatherman Anthony Watts, just noted, “Another record month at WUWT“:

This month was 1,478,801 page views. This is up significantly from both January (1,324,097) and February (1,168,852).

I see no trace of intentional humor in Watts’ statement, but it is unintentionally quite ironic.  Watts, of course, spends a great deal of time attacking NASA for supposedly asserting a false precision in its temperature data.  NASA’s data, however, has many independent checks — and is supported by vast quantities of observations on global warming (see, for instance, “World’s Glaciers Shrink for 18th Year” and “AGU 2008: Two trillion tons of land ice lost since 2003“).

It is absurd to publish one’s page views to 7 significant digits without caveats — even 2 is stretching it.  Yes, the fact that your web stats program shows an increase in page views from month to month is reasonable evidence they may in fact be rising — but of course the fact that your temperature stations show an increase from year to year are apparently not any evidence that temperatures are rising, even if confirmed by multiple independent sources.

Interestingly, there is one independent source that suggests Watts’ page views and mine are in fact the same (and hence possibly around 1.4 million).  If you go to the Web traffic ranking and comparison site Alexa, go to page views, and type in wattsupwiththat.com, you’ll get this graph:

So at best I am just negating the disinformation Watts is spreading.  Sigh.  And lest there be any doubt, WattsUpWithThat is in fact an extremist anti-scientific denialist website, as his recent posts make clear.

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A day late for an April fool’s joke, George Will returned Thursday to Fred Hiatt’s editorial pages at the Washington Post to attack climate science and lightbulbs. He repeats a variant of his lie about the U.N. World Meteorological Organization’s temperature record, writing that “according to statistics published by the World Meteorological Organization [WMO], there has not been a warmer year on record than 1998.”

In a marked improvement from his previous lie-filled columns, this misleading claim now includes a link to the WMO’s latest publication about the status of global climate (2007), which states:

– The size of the uncertainties is such that the global average temperature for 2007 is statistically indistinguishable from each of the nine warmest years on record.

— January 2007 was the warmest January since global surface records were instituted.

– The linear warming trend over the past 50 years (0.13°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the past 100 years.

– Global averaged sea level continued to rise through 2006 and 2007.

– At the end of the melt season, the Arctic sea ice extent was 39 per cent below the long-term average from 1979 to 2000 and 23 per cent below the previous record set in 2005.

– Since 1960, the thermal expansion of the oceans and the melting of glaciers and ice caps are the largest contributions to sea-level rise. There has also been an increasing contribution from surface melt from the Greenland ice sheet over this period. These contributions are directly related to recent climate change.

Furthermore, the WMO recorded the “record-breaking temperature anomalies throughout the world,” “severe to extreme drought,” “extreme flooding,” a “new worldwide record rainfall,” and “unusual sea-surface temperature patterns”:

Significant climate anomalies and events in 2007. Click to enlarge. Chart: WMO. Data: NOAA.

While the Washington Post takes right-wing oil money to syndicate George Will’s lies in carbon-based newsprint across the nation, the World Wide Web has responded.

This column, Media Matters notes, comes less than two weeks after Fred Hiatt published a letter from the WMO Secretary-General calling Will’s “no recorded global warming for more than a decade” claim “a misrepresentation of the data and of scientific knowledge.”

“I’m all for newspapers giving their columnists latitude,” Jon Chait opines, “but at some point I wonder if some very basic, low level of factual knowledge ought to be required to propound upon a topic in their pages.”

Turning up the heat, Joe Romm calls for Hiatt to be fired, and Matt Yglesias argues that “anyone working at The Washington Post or in conservative journalism who has a shred of intellectual conscience has a duty to stand up to this kind of nonsense.”

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Congress now has several opportunities to further our understanding of the nexus between water and energy use and to promote water conservation efforts that can also achieve significant energy savings. A recently introduced energy and water bill combined with financial incentives in the omnibus energy bill due later this year could help the entire country enjoy the savings some states are already seeing from reductions in water use–with a potential for job creation through water-efficient home retrofits.

In California, Santa Clara County’s experience underscores this important but often overlooked link. Beginning in the early 1990s, the Santa Clara Valley Water District got serious about water conservation. The district, which serves some 1.8 million residents and includes Silicon Valley and the city of San Jose, developed programs that encouraged residents, businesses, industries, and agricultural producers to use water more efficiently.

The results have been impressive: a savings of 370,000 acre-feet of water in 13 years. (A typical household uses one acre-foot of water per year).

But perhaps even more significant have been the energy savings and reductions in greenhouse gas emissions: 1.42 billion kilowatt hours of electricity and 335 million kg of carbon dioxide, which is equal to taking 72,000 cars off the road for a year.

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