Time to celebrate, & Oops! The price of success

Meet other skeptics and celebrate!

With the ongoing battle for logic and reason, it’s easy to forget that saving Australia from an ETS, and slowing the train-wreck in Copenhagen were major successes. Even though the battle to save Peter Spencer is still very much on our minds, it’s time to celebrate.

It’s not often humanity collectively “misses a bullet…”

I’m happy to post contacts in different cities around the world to help connect people who live near each other. If you are willing to be a central point coordinator for your region and to post some contact details please use the thread below to organize events in your area. I’ll update this post with any events or contacts that are generated. Even if it’s just Friday afternoon drinks after work. There is strength in numbers.

See below for: Germany, France, and Australia

Behind the scenes there is a very healthy skeptical community in Perth Australia, and we are planning to meet in the next few weeks, purely for drinks and a shared meal. To express an interest and find out details you’ll need to email me: joanne AT joannenova.com.au. (We’d love to hear from you but please keep emails brief!)

Oops! The price of success

Graph: Gigabytes of traffic on site in 2009 Web traffic rose to massive record for this site in December, and I’m not complaining, but I was not expecting the site costs for December to rise to $678! I thought electrons were cheaper than that. Because this site stores many images and large documents for downloading, like the Handbooks and the Timeline there are a vast number of gigabytes being stored and also transferred. According to my web manager for all his accounts: “the next highest account’s bandwidth for a month is generally a max of 10 G.” We hit 280G.

Any contributions to help cover these costs would be most gratefully accepted. Thanks to all the people who have generously helped already.

It’s time to rearrange the way I store and link to images and audio, and possibly to accept more paid offers to write! (For those who are interested – Coding Horror has sharp commentary and I’ll look at AmazonS3 or Photobucket).

Site Handy Hints

I’m working to make the site as user friendly as possible. In case you haven’t noticed it there’s a new Navigation section up at the top of the right hand column with an INDEX, ARCHIVES and links to sources. I’ll be adding a “New-Here?” post soon, as well as moving the Guide for Comments where people find answers about gravatars, comment buttons, html and policies etc.

UPDATE3: So far these people below have volunteered to be local contacts for people in their region. (I’ll be updating regularly).

Contacts for social skeptical gatherings

Australia

Sydney

Jim (0417) 285 884: every Thursday evening at Club Five Dock, 66 Great North Road, Five Dock from around 7pm.

Join Jim & Mike for dinner at Club Five Dock. Phone Jim in advance so he can reserve a table. He says: “I’m given to understand, good company, good tucker & the odd ale (or wine) to help stimulate conversation!”

Brisbane

Ruth Bonnett, canmor AT tpg.com.au, Ph (07) 3831 8430 (0407) 580 028

Melbourne

Mike D climategate777 AT gmail.com

Perth

Anne-Kit Littler alittler55 AT gmail.com

France

La Garde Freinet

Ed Hoskins, edhoskins AT me.com

Pyrenées Orientales

Geoff Chambers, Perpignan, gmchambers AT orange.fr

Germany –

Pierre Gosselin
Asternweg 1
49605 Quakenbrück, Germany
E-mail: pierre.gosselin AT t-online.de

Posted on January 5th, 2010 under Global Warming • Tags: Site Statistics, Site Traffic, Social Events for Skeptics. • Print This Post • Email This Post • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback

Tel:
January 5th, 2010 at 9:09 pm

http://www.linode.com/

Note the pricing: the smallest option at $20 per month (yankee money, gets cheaper every month) offers 200GB per month transfer (they seem to count data both ways). I’ve used them and the uptime is not quite 100% but very close. They also offer DNS hosting included in the package and a decent set of management tools.

I note that you are hosting in Australia, very patriotic, I’m proud of you, get ready to be hurt bad on price even google refuses to host in Australia and that has got to tell you something.

Like or Dislike: 2 0

Gibbo:
January 5th, 2010 at 9:39 pm

Definitely check out S3

Like or Dislike: 0 0

P Gosselin:
January 5th, 2010 at 10:40 pm

Congratulations!
I’m an American living in Germany, and your site has become one of my favourites.
I stop by every day.
Now here’s something from the German daily DIE WELT about Australia:
It says Australia has just had the hottest decade ever. The chart shown is for 2009.
http://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/umwelt/article5735502/Heissestes-Jahrzehnt-der-Geschichte-in-Australien.html#xmsg_comment

LB:
January 5th, 2010 at 10:47 pm

AGW is slowly dying of skepticaemia.

Well-loved. Like or Dislike: 13 0

BJM:
January 5th, 2010 at 11:20 pm

We in Australia, I believe, have the highest telephony and Internet price structures outside of the Ukraine. Then again where in the world do you pay a monthly fee for a ‘tap’ (gas, electricity, water) in which one does not choose to use, nor want the said service but is forced through a monthly ’surcharge’ to pay.
As it stands, at least here in the State of Victoria, you have no choice. A ‘collective’ mentality type of thing, with payola and bandits thrown in.
Oh Yes, Progressives and Carpet Baggers, – ‘we spend your hard earned money, because we want to tell you, what you should think’.
Remember, a lot of them were at Copenhagen, spending our hard earned money via our taxes.
‘We’ll spend, but never produce – others will do that for us.’.

Billy Blake:
January 5th, 2010 at 11:29 pm

The “Buy me some Chocolate” gag (which I liked fyi) made me think that donations weren’t really a necessity on this site. Hmm… you may need to change that to: This site costs money to run and your donations can help keep it going. Or something like that.

I recently purchased the domain name http://www.bobcarter.info until 2012 to make it easier for people to access Dr Carters site – his old address is a squigley iinet one.

Anyhow, cool I will keep the need for donations in mind when my pay comes in next week. All the best JN.

Mike Goad:
January 6th, 2010 at 1:30 am

I’ve donated my $20 US and hope that others will step up and do the same.

(Obviously, this site is not being backed by Exxon-Mobile )

Like or Dislike: 4 0

Joanne Nova:
January 6th, 2010 at 2:22 am

Thanks Pierre. I’ve updated the post to include your details. I hear that it’s not a good idea to use your email addresses in their pure form on wordpress, so to save you from some spam I write it out…AT…

Like or Dislike: 1 0

Alfred T Mahan:
January 6th, 2010 at 3:28 am

You may have James Delingpole of the UK’s Daily Telegraph to thank for the extra traffic – I found you through a reference on his blog before Christmas and have read avidly ever since (well, all of a month now). I guess I’m not alone as JD’s reader numbers have shot up since Climategate. Anyway I’ve sent £20 to help you keep up the good work.

pat:
January 6th, 2010 at 6:03 am

it has taken the Fin Times to add some facts to the story…and some good quotes…enjoy…

Financial Times: Australian hunger striker fights farming ban
The clearing ban, which covers 109m ha of private property across the country, has allowed the developed world’s heaviest carbon emitter on a per capita basis to meet its climate change goals, despite a sharp rise in emissions from the country’s energy and industrial sectors. It has provided Australia with 87.5m tonnes of carbon abatements…

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e19c7c64-fa1b-11de-beed-00144feab49a.html

Tel:
January 6th, 2010 at 6:37 am

We in Australia, I believe, have the highest telephony and Internet price structures outside of the Ukraine.

Thing is, when Australians like myself buy hosting in Texas for sites that are primarily visited by other Australians it increases the load on the international cables and makes the situation worse. However, I would still recommend that other Australians also host offshore because the price difference (especially for high traffic sites) is huge.

Just in comparison, the top of the line internode business web hosting in Australia is $50 per month for a whole 10GB of transfer (that’s twice the price for 1/20 of the data volume). There’s at least 10 major data centers in Sydney, at least 10 in Melbourne and quite a few in Perth so there is competition in the market. We also have a reasonably wide range of ISPs in this country and plenty of Engineers who can build such things.

If you go to the Macquarie Telecom business hosting page they say:

Our managed and flexible solutions are custom designed and priced to effectively meet each business’s technical requirements, and are suitable for customers with a budget of greater than $1000 per month. Contact us now for a no obligation discussion about your business requirements.

That’s not a misprint, $1k per month is just considered entry point for any business service in Australia. For the same money at linode I could have a cluster of big servers spread over multiple physical locations. I have no idea why the difference is so large but as each new industry comes along Australia prices herself out of the market, so here it is again.

Oh yeah, and we are spending some billions of government dollars on network infrastructure entirely oriented toward faster download speeds for consumers to sit at home and watch movies on the net. Upload speeds for hosting don’t even get a mention, traffic quotas don’t get consideration, I doubt there’s anyone in our government who understands the concept that for person A to be downloading, then server B must upload the same data. I doubt they understand that affordable hosting in this country would be a great boon to our local business and we could develop productive industry around that (possibly even offering services to overseas companies).

We keep falling back to mining, agriculture and tourism. When the family farmers are out of business and Monsanto owns all our arable land then no doubt agriculture will also be ruled out and all that money will go straight overseas.

Like or Dislike: 7 0

Its time to stop the BS! « TWAWKI:
January 6th, 2010 at 7:04 am

[...] No time to be skeptical about success, [...]

twawki:
January 6th, 2010 at 7:09 am

Wordpress is quite reasonable in terms of cost and you can get a cheap ISP package to simply get them to redirect to wordpress. My current ISP however has said if I want to upgrade (want more features) itll cost me $50/m for only of a fraction of the services I can get O/S for $6 a month – its crazy.

Greg:
January 6th, 2010 at 7:12 am

Celebrations? Let’s celebrate that we might be seeing some cracks in the holy thesis of Global Warming.

Hosting: I’ve heard some good things about RackSpace and I know some heavily used blogs use them. http://www.rackspace.com/index.php

I think their costs are a lot lower than what you’re paying.

You might also want to look into a couple of affiliate links to books on Amazon.com that you strongly recommend (if any.)

Mohib:
January 6th, 2010 at 8:08 am

Another hockey stick! Seems like that’s about all that Team AGW is good for … creating hockey sticks: either their own or on all the sites trying to explain their original hokey stuff. See here for example:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/01/a-new-month-new-year-new-decade-new-record/

If Team AGW hadn’t created the first hockey stick, none of these hockey sticks would exist either, nor any skeptic sites too for that matter.

They’re just keeping more and more people busy (and I bet that would show another hockey stick)!

Ashleigh:
January 6th, 2010 at 8:49 am

I use Quadrahosting out of the USA, it costs about A$20 / month (less to pay 12 months up front).

Then I found http://www.enetica.com.au/ – where the prices seem very reasonable, the disk quotas a 10x more than I get at Quadra, and there are no data transfer limits! For less money!

I haven’t migrated over there yet, but I’m seriously considering it when my current plans expire.

Ashleigh:
January 6th, 2010 at 8:50 am

Oops. Forgot – hosting services like this – you install your own copy of wordpress and go. Its a piece of cake to set up.

Migrating an existing wordpress site (and the back end SQL database) to a new service is possible, though a somewhat painful business [this being the voice of experience!].

Thumbnail:
January 6th, 2010 at 9:33 am

Ruth Bonnett
Brisbane Australia

canmor at tpg dot com dot au

I believed Al Gore until someone gently nudged me to read material that had not been made available via the media.

I was at the rally in Canberra, proud to stand beside the farmers. The bullwhips were great!

Allen Ford:
January 6th, 2010 at 11:55 am

Oh, no! Not another GW sceptic denier flat earther blog stats hockey stick graph.

Like or Dislike: 1 1

Roy Hogue:
January 6th, 2010 at 12:21 pm

Jo,

I wish I could get to Perth to help you all celebrate.

May 2010 be just as successful as 2009!!!!

janama:
January 6th, 2010 at 1:30 pm

Yes Allen Ford:
you warmists have hogged the microphone for years and years, now it’s our turn and believe me we sing a much better song because it’s based on fact, not belief.

janama:
January 6th, 2010 at 2:53 pm

the Finacial Times UK has picked up on Spencer’s story.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/e19c7c64-fa1b-11de-beed-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1

Craig Lawton:
January 6th, 2010 at 3:09 pm

Maybe get your PDFs out on torrent network?

Allen Ford:
January 6th, 2010 at 3:25 pm

janama: “you warmists have hogged the microphone for years and years, now it’s our turn and believe me we sing a much better song because it’s based on fact, not belief. ”

I am not a warmist. It was a joke, Joyce!

Like or Dislike: 3 0

Henrique Dmyterko:
January 6th, 2010 at 3:48 pm

Dear Joanne,

Greetings from Brazil!

I’ve just donated US$20.00, a rather small contribution to your great job.
Please, whenever you can, take some time to check our website’s skeptic section:http://www.midiaamais.com.br/ambientalismo

Best wishes,
Henrique Dmyterko
M@M Columnist & Translations Editor

Joanne Nova:
January 6th, 2010 at 5:56 pm

For people in Sydney Australia

Contact Jim 0417 285 884, and meet on Thursday evenings at Club Five Dock, 66 Great North Road, Five Dock from around 7pm.

janama:
January 6th, 2010 at 6:51 pm

oh – ok Allen

Henrique Dmyterko:
January 6th, 2010 at 8:01 pm

Dear Joanne,
Sorry, but it seems I have to post our URL again: http://www.midiaamais.com.br

It’s all in Portuguese, so it may be useful to some of your readers. There one can find more than 30 columns regarding the AGW scam, the Portuguese version of the Skeptics Handbook (by fakeclimate.com), as well as tanslated versions of Melanie Phillips’ blogposts on this subject.

Thanks,

Henrique Dmyterko
Brazil

Paul Keating:
January 6th, 2010 at 8:49 pm

Dear, your host’s plan AC-2000 allows 100 gig bandwidth for $88au per month

$88au x 3 for 300 gig = $264au

That’s a nice saving of $414au

PS: GST was my idea, but “never never GST” Johnny W Howard

Jimmy (another Geologist):
January 7th, 2010 at 2:47 am

Good idea. Are there any other Jo Nova fans here in Pattaya, Thailand? As if we need an excuse to meet up for a beer, eh?

I like LB’s “skepticaemia” (at January 5th, 2010 at 10:47 pm).

There’ll be some chocolate dollars going into the pot from me.

Lawrie:
January 7th, 2010 at 8:34 am

As with most disasters people feel alone. Jo’s site is making a great contribution to knowledge as well as democracy which I believe are synonomous. Rudd and others by stifling one have destroyed the other. It may take bullwhips, Thumbnail, but the web will be the real downfall of all despots over time.

I note Andrew Bolt went on hols for a month and what a month. He was tracking over a million hits but Jo has stolen a march.

Suhit Anantula:
January 7th, 2010 at 9:53 am

Hi Jo:

You do a great job.

Can I suggest a easy and cheap solution. You are already on wordpress so it is easy.

Just move to http://www.wordpress.com. It has less features but the cost is minimal. You pay $10 for connecting to your website address, and about $30 a year for hosting extra files and no cost for bandwidth usage.

The big guys from CNN and Giga OM network are on them.

Cheers
Suhit

BTW, just to add, my site http://www.worldisgreen.com is on wordpress.com and has been for many years now.

hro001:
January 7th, 2010 at 1:38 pm

Speaking of your success (which is very much deserved), while you have not been specifically named, I’m sure you will be pleased to know that one of Pachauri’s puppets, Bob Ward, has evidently observed (in the U.K. Guardian, no less):

“extraordinary efforts by powerful lobbies, in the US and Australia in particular, [...] opposed to the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.”[emphasis mine -hro]

For all this (and more!) pls see:

Pachauri predicts and protests poverty & “powerful lobbies”

Joanne Nova:
January 7th, 2010 at 5:10 pm

The latest update of contacts.

Ruth Bonnett canmor AT tpg.com.au Ph (07) 3831 8430 (0407) 580 028

Ed Hoskins La Garde Freinet edhoskins AT me.com

Jimmy (another Geologist):
January 8th, 2010 at 11:22 am

Don’t spend it all on chocolate, Jo. Have a beer on me as well.

Cheers!

Mark D.:
January 8th, 2010 at 2:31 pm

Jo, please allow me to help in the US. The email people can use is

mdex(at)prairietech.net

I will help coordinate meetings across the USA.

Mark D.:
January 8th, 2010 at 2:32 pm

I forgot to add (in the spirit of the (time to celebrate) theme

CHEERS!

Bernd Felsche:
January 9th, 2010 at 10:08 pm

Heads up: As Climategate Becomes Pressgate, Questions for the Media at bigjournalism.com

P.S.: Any more details of a meeting in Perth?

Roy Hogue:
January 10th, 2010 at 1:06 am

Bernd Felsche,

Interesting to note that they always hide behind the “10 year old emails” as meaning nothing. Yet the most poisonous ones are so recent as to still be smoking.

Anne-Kit Littler:
January 10th, 2010 at 3:49 am

Bernd, it will be either Monday 18th or Wednesday 19th January – venue to be announced, and date confirmed once we have a venue.

Let Joanne know your email address if she hasn’t already got it, and you will be kept up to date.

Sorry, that should be Wednesday 20th, of course – it’s past my bedtime ….

C.W. Schoneveld:
January 10th, 2010 at 4:56 am

Sorry. All your efforts will be in vain, because man-made global warming is real. All the pal-reviewed literature says so!

geoff chambers:
January 12th, 2010 at 8:28 am

This is SO un-English, but I’ve posted a link at
http://www.climate-resistance.org/2010/01/spiking-copenhagen.html
and will do the same at the few French and Italian sceptic blogs I know. Don’t expect too much. We Brits don’t travel hundreds of miles to share a few beers with people we agree with. The whole point of moving abroad is to get away from each other. But please print my email. I’m in Perpignan, Pyrenées Orientales.

ChristianS:
January 13th, 2010 at 12:17 am

I am keen to meet up with skeptics in Dublin, Ireland. Any takers?