[12][13] Watts assisted with the setup of a radio program for his high school in Indiana,[14] and later attended electrical engineering and meteorology classes at Purdue University, but did not graduate or receive a degree.

[17] Watts has been the chief meteorologist for KPAY, a Fox News affiliate based in Chico, California since 2004,[2] and the director and president of IntelliWeather Inc, a subsidiary of ItWorks,[16] since 2000.

[4][5][20] He believes that global warming is occurring, but that it is not as bad as has been reported, and that carbon dioxide plays a much smaller part than the Sun in causing climatic change.

[20] Columbia Journalism School writer Curtis Brainard has written that "scientists have repeatedly criticized [Watts] for misleading readers on subjects such as the reliability of the U.S. surface temperature record.

[41] The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged throughout the investigations,[43][44] however, the reports may have decreased public confidence in climate scientists and the IPCC, and conclusively altered the Copenhagen negotiations that year.

[53] To the very limited extent that there was any measurement bias, it was in the opposite direction of what Watts expected: stations that were considered poorly situated reported slightly cooler temperatures.

[54][55] Watts was co-author with climatologists John Nielsen-Gammon, John Christy and Roger A. Pielke, Sr. on a paper with Souleymane Fall as lead author, which found that mean temperature trends were nearly identical between poorly sited and well-sited stations, but poor siting led to a difference in estimated diurnal temperature range.

[56] In March 2011, Watts visited the Berkeley Earth Temperature project (BEST), and said "I'm prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.

[58] The New York Times published a summary of further draft results from BEST, including an announcement from Muller that their study now showed that humans "are almost entirely the cause" of the warming.

Shortly afterwards, Watts announced his own team's draft paper which said that previously reported temperature rises had been "spuriously doubled", and made the serious accusation that NOAA had inflated the rate by erroneous adjustments to the data.

He agreed with criticisms including the point that Watts had failed to correct for time of observation bias, and noted that independent satellite temperature measurements were closer to the NOAA figures.

[12] Watts says that he approached Heartland in 2011 to ask for help finding a donor to set up a website devoted to presenting NOAA's data as graphs that are easily accessible to the public.