After the marketing disaster of the century, 10:10 desperately needed to save some face. They had accidentally showed us their totalitarian desires and lost at least 20,000 members in a week. How embarrassing.
How do you hide that? In true PR form, you frame your membership numbers and “save” the members you lost: keep the thousands of people (or fakers) who have joined and then left your group on your tally. (Just don’t call it “current members”.)
On their new redesigned home page they say they have 110,340 worldwide …wait for it…”sign ups”.
But as far as the UK members go, what was once 94,910, is now still just 74,190.
Anthony Watts saved this image:
(Curiously the “people on board” tally is visible in Explorer, but only subliminally flickers in mozilla. If you can be bothered — and I’m not sure why you would — you can do a search to find a member and keep your eyes peeled on the tally point. Yep. It’s trivial bugs-in-browser games.)
Does “sign up’s” mean they count all who have ever joined, even the ones who left in protest?
We know that fake names appeared so does that 110k tally include Watts and Dellers, and Gobbels…?
It’s a PR War.
They will stoop to counting the people who pulled their names off the list as if they still support the cause, and who knows, maybe they count people who don’t even exist? They have no shame. It’s not about the data, it’s about the appearance of the data… (if the numbers don’t work for you, just use different numbers). More than anything, 10:10 don’t want to look like a sinking ship. Which they are.
They ought to be disbanded, and their last major sponsor (O2) ought to be ashamed.
PS: And what kind of carefully thought out major event makes for a 10:10:10 action? If you host a party in a giant bath in Budapest, that counts (and it’s presumably a cold bath right? Mmmmm) or how about a “zero carbon music festival” — I’m imagining the novel thrill of acoustic guitars and tamborines with no amps, no food, and a “crowd” of twelve people and no lighting.
UPDATE: From Comments
#5 Rereke Whaakaro
… if the numbers don’t work for you, just use different numbers …
They are merely “using a trick” to “hide the decline”. This is standard practice, and quite within the mandate of the IPCC guidelines which have been well established since four o’clock this morning. Whereas Anthony Watts’ observations are no more than internet images that have not been properly peer reviewed and published in a credible publication, and are therefore voodoo science that deserves to be thrown in the dust bin.