A couple of days ago NoTricksZone turned 5. The first post was published on April 2, 2010.
This blog was inspired by Donna Laframboise of No Frakking Consensus after I had been part of a group of volunteers who helped her check the literature on which the conclusions of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report were based on. Those results rocked the IPCC.
The beginnings of NoTricksZone were humble, and my expectations were to perhaps reach a few hundred readers per day after a year or so. I didn’t even have any social media buttons. Yet within a few weeks traffic started coming in, in large part thanks to the big sites like Marc Morano Climate Depot, Anthony Watts WUWT and Tom Nelson who linked to NTZ stories. A year later the site reached 1 million views. Now, 5 years later, the 10 million views has been surpassed. Not bad for something that is a hobby on the side for me.
I’m also proud of having been mentioned by Justin Gillis in The New York Times, getting a link at Drudge, being on the Who’s Who List of Climate denialists” and having worked helped out Dr Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt’s climate science critical book Die kalte Sonne (The Neglected Sun), which shook the German climate science establishment.
The main idea behind this blog is to get stories from Germany and Europe that the world would otherwise never hear about out to the broader public. The progress of Germany’s Energiewende is an important issue and other countries worldwide need to get all the information about it before they uncritically accept its rosy, utopian promises. Germany’s Energiewende arguably has become a debacle of immense dimensions. See the side bar under Alternative Energies.
The German Energiewende has even reached my home state of Vermont, and the consequences are catastrophic to the scenic region where I was born and raised. Entire mountain tops have been permanently blasted, disfigured and deforested to make way for industrial wind turbines that now stand more as monuments to a pathological obsession with a computer-generated fictitious climate Armageddon than they do as a real solution. The damage in northern Vermont is irreversible. It’s going to take the ice sheets of the next ice age (that was the scare 40 years ago) to grind off the scars left behind by Vermont’s green eco-madness.
My hope is that others will take a more serious, unemotional look at the real situation in Germany (as well as Spain and Great Britain) and not repeat the German blunders.
The focus of NoTricksZone is also to keep readers up-to-date on what is going on at the prestigious German institutes such as the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology or the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Both are highly influential, but in my view highly irresponsible for having adopted a dangerously ideological position that is completely foreign to the discipline of science. Today they are practicing activist-science in its purest and most virulent form.
NoTricksZone will also continue providing stories brought up by EIKE, DkS and Science Skeptical and many other German sites. The main focus of NoTricksZone will be to continue writing about climate news in Germany and Europe so that people can get stories and insights that they might not otherwise see.
Also thanks to the guest writers who contributed, namely Ed Caryl (I know I’m missing a person or two here, so please forgive me) and all the readers for dropping by regularly. Readers are always welcome to contribute as guest writers.
As a final note, this blog is strictly voluntary and has not received any money at all from Big Oil and industry – not a penny. But of course antagonists are more than welcome to waste their time looking for any links.
It feels like an eternity!
Congratulations.
Will there be cake at the celebrations?
Wish that I could be there.
Now for my gratuitous plug of a web site that should have been launched 3 days ago but got stuck in dry dock for about 30 hours. The Consternation is provided for the purpose of pressure relief; of entertainment in a world increasingly obsessed with turning the “Stupid” dial to 11.
Well done Pierre. Your blog is one of my favourites. Very pleased to have been able to read and share some thoughts with you and some others. Best wishes for the future and keep up the good work.
Congratulations, Pierre. You are still #1 on my list. Perhaps Donna is #2, meaning that you have something in common. If you were paid by Big Something, your blog would have been much more glossy.
Congratulations; keep up the good work. I drop-by a couple of times every day. …Sorry to hear about the lack of support from Big Oil.
Maybe George Soros would be open to supporting NTZ 🙂
you are not funded by big oil but…you do give money to big oil…
so…people must put their mouths where their money is…
if you disagree with big oil funding whatever then…stop buying gas, travelling by plane or whatever use fossil fuel ..big oil will have no money to fund what you don’t like… easy.
Keep it going as long as you can. This blog has some special qualities.
Twitter seems to be locking on to climate sceptics to silence them so I guess the virtual world will be increasingly silencing dissenting voices.
That would prove to be futile. Should the US-dominated West manage to clamp down on freedom of speech in the Internet, there would emerge an alternative – in no time at all. The backers of that alternative would exploit this as a huge propaganda win. So I don’t think the powers that be will even try in earnest.
Also, warmism is a spent force even for the Western oligarchs.
Twitter seems to have had a glitch that was used by some as a function. Likely, this will be tweaked by the twitter team and tucked in a trunk.
Thanks!
Congratulations on the 5th birthday of NoTricksZone. I want to thank Pierre for giving me an outlet for my frustrations. I know my articles don’t fit with Pierre’s goal of news from Germany, but my goal is to bring up climate facts and ideas for general discussion. I hope my input has been of interest. Thank all of you.
Thanks Ed. I’m glad for your contributions. Doesn’t hurt at all to have variety.
Ed, I enjoy your articles and am glad there is a place where they can be seen and discussed. Your recent article where you “changed your mind” is a good indicator that you are not a fanatic (See Winston Churchill quotes).
No. I’m really trying to figure out what is going on!!
It seems that I have been looking at this site from close to your start. Can not remember how I got here but I feel it may have been from Climategate.nl (which used to have some good technical articles). I rank your site above WUWT
You really should have these in your blog roll http://joannenova.com.au/ and http://claesjohnson.blogspot.com.au/ (not sure how the .au gets into the address of Prof Claes Joohnson who lives in Sweden but it works for me)
Thanks! That’s very kind. But I think I have a quite a ways up to go before I reach WUWT.
Congratulations, Pierre! I have learned so much from your posts, not only about what is real about climate (and what is not), but also the basics of that good science is.
Straightforward, well-written, understandable articles with solid information and good illustrations.
May you enjoy many more years of success!
Thanks, Bob!
Thanks Pierre.
You provide a service of importance as indicated by the numbers.
It also seems many in Germany are paying attention.
This should give you a good feeling.
Happy birthday to NTZ and congratulations to you!
From the Great State of Washington.
Dry-side John
Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag
Congratulations, Pierre. Keep up the good work!
Pierre, I really appreciate the news from the energy experiment in Germany and Europe. I often refer to what is going on in Germany as a cautionary tale to where the US is heading. It is unfortunate that so many Germans have to suffer to provide this example. You do us a service by exposing what is happening so some good can come from this.
Thanks, Pierre!
Most Germans love the windmills to bits. They live in cities far away from them. When they see the rising cost of electricity they blame it on evil greedy corporations.
I am not talking hypthetically. I talk to such people, they get extremely touchy when you mention the subsidies, their immediate comeback is “nuclear energy also gets subsidized.”; like a trained monkey, which they are; the training done by the state media.
These people are complete morons. They make up 50% of the population. They vote SPD and Greens.
Pierre, thanks for the work .. well done and keep it up. Happy Birthday NTZ. And Dirk, no, not all germans love windmills. And some even do not vote for the greens and the social democrats. But not enough i think …
Last week i saw that ruinous sight at the Soonwald Mts. near Ellern again – meanwhile a place where people go for a visit to see how NOT to do it. But as long as we have the german angst there is not much hope i fear.
Cheers!
Congratulations, Pierre. I think you’re doing an excellent job in keeping us up to date on Germany’s climate madness, and it’s much appreciated. For a Brit who has grown up thinking of the Germans as a people generally skilled in assessing scientific and technical matters and pretty efficient operators, it’s quite an eye-opener to see them so easily keeping up with the pack in the Global Green Handicap.
As long as you want to keep NTZ going, I’ll be somewhere in those millions of hits!
I´m pretty sure DirkH is absolutely right, to my dismay.
So much more important are sourecebased informations that can be shared.
Thank you for that and congratulations, Pierre!
Well done Pierre.
Well done Pierre, you are doing a great job here
Some two – three years have passed since NTZ came into my sight. I want to thank you for the pleasure of reading you.
Norway, where I live, is going the same way as in your state. Something must have happened to their heads.
Here, Germany is promoted as the number one to lead energy policy in a prosperous direction contrary to facts. Nothing seems to awaken people to reality so far.
Wish your all the best for many coming years.
Well done Pierre keep up the good work; you still haven’t help me buy my merc. :))
Well done on reaching 5yrs. Thank you for providing so many articles for us to read. Keep going 🙂
Well done Pierre from South Australia.
This is one of the first sites I read every morning (JoNova, Bishophill).
I particularly look forward to news on the Energiewende as I live in the State run by people as smart as sod who’ve overloaded us with wind farms.
Recently there have been signs of a rethink, long overdue but surely helped along by the accurate information you have so untiringly supplied.
Thanks for your efforts.
Happy Blog-Birthday, Pierre. You are doing a phantastic job! Thanks for all the hard work. In recognition of your work, maybe the german weather service could name one of the coming cold waves “Pierre” (-;
Good Idea! And may it be a huge snowstorm. Thanks!
Warmest congratulations Pierre. I have been dropping by since that time or nearly so (IIRC) and your effect upon the climate wars has been powerful.
Hopefully as the AMO really hits its cooling phase, and Arctic sea ice expands, that the warmists will start to give in. The trailing off of the solar cycle will add further disheartenment to their crazy cause I think, but that is several years away yet.
hmm.. auto-mod just caught my totally benign post 🙁
Anyway.. congrats, Pierre.
The Warmists will never give up until the gumment stops funding their junk science.
Yep, well done, from a rather soggy Newcastle.
Want some coal?? We have plenty 🙂
http://www.thegwpf.com/india-to-double-coal-production-by-2020/
And a nice celebration coming up next weekend, called Steamfest, highlighting the role of coal in the development of the area.
http://www.steamfest.com.au/
Congratulation Pierre on a job well done and more power to you for the future. I look in at least once daily for your unique English language window on what’s really going on in the German chapter of the corrupt climate science establishment. The scientific articles published on NTZ are also of great interest.
Your concern at the pointless desecration of your home state of Vermont is something that no doubt many of us who follow NTZ, will identify with. How long the corruption of science to suit vested political and financial interests continues is anybodies guess but exposing the lies and deception underpinning the scam, as you do so ably, surely must be part of the remedy.
Well done Pierre. There is a special quality to the articles you post and the comments they receive! Keep Going!
Congratulations! Your blog deserves the success that it enjoys.
congratulations. I like the concept, of providing Geramn climate news to an english speaking auditory.
Thanks :), nice to hear a compliment from someone who disagrees on other things. Compliments are often too rare in this debate.
Congratulations Pierre. You provide a sane commentary on Europe difficult for us Down Under to find elsewhere. Always of interest. Well done!
As a fellow participant in Donna’s seminal survey – and in Peter Bobroff’s equally damning computer-generated results – I add my voice of congrats to you for the light that you bravely shed on the antics of what has come to be known as the “Green Blob”.
May you continue go and grow from strength to strength.
Thanks, Hilary
I visit here daily to keep up with events/news/research from the continent. Then I read GWPF for primarily UK news. Then to JoNova for the down-under events. WUWT provides NA information. Thanks for what you do. From a Western Canadian who appreciates all these efforts.
Congratulations and happy birthday Pierre from the socialist asylum of Scotland.
The fish wifie (Nichola Sturgeon) who is the head nurse at the moment is a great admirer of the desecration of the nation being carried out in Germany.
She hopes to surpass your lunacy pretty soon. Our lovely nation cries out for deliverance from the destruction of its famed Bens and Glens.
Keep up the good work Pierre.
Congratulations Pierre; the blog is a point of reason in an increasingly ideological driven world and just like wine it will further improve in the coming years. Thanks
Congratulations on 5 years of invaluable information. Not sure when I first viewed your site, ever since that first time I’ve made it a must see. Thanks!!!
Just to echo all the well deserved praise above.The British media is remarkably insular and your blog is a breath of fresh air.
Keep going if you can.
Easter Greetings from Wales to you and your family.
Congratulations on a job well done!
Pierre, Just remember that Anthony Watts from WUWT is a full-time blogger whereas you have more than one iron in the fire. You are doing well man, and are succeeding in your objective, giving the rest of the world a peep into the German mindset re global warming, climate change or whatever it is called now.
How you manage to juggle all the balls is amazing.
Thanks! But I wouldn’t underestimate Anthony’s irons. Also I’m not in this to compete against other bloggers, but rather to supplement and contribute.
“Just remember that Anthony Watts from WUWT is a full-time blogger”
Has he closed down his company? Did I miss something?
Warmest congratulations on 5 years – and the amazingly great figure of 10 MILLION visits!!
And many thanks for all your hard work – it’s SO important that this information is available to the many many people who want to learn THE TRUTH!
I was very interested to learn that you were inspired by Donna LaFramboise, who’s also doing tremendously great work.
It was reading her work that made me realise that one of the great strengths of the scientific process is that anyone can judge whether a certain activity is genuinely scientific or not: if the people claiming to be scientists LIE – about anything – then they’re NOT scientists.
Science is the search for TRUTH – on which our technological civilisation is built.
So the warmists’ claim that “only climate scientists can comment” is utter nonsense: ANYONE can recognise that lies are lies and are not scientific!
And Donna and supporters have exposed hundreds, thousands of lies published by the IPCC – who are clearly a bunch of crooks and dupes.
Of course other well-known unscientific tactics as defamation of your opponent – “ad hominem” attacks – are equally easy for anyone to recognise: “denier” is a particularly blatant, unscientific word.
I greatly appreciate being able to follow this Energiewende folly, er .. business, and other central European goings-on that I don’t often run into on the other skeptical blogs that I look at. This blog has managed to fill a special (and significant) niche in the AGW landscape. Congratulations – and thanks!