When I was first contacted by Skeptical Science proprietor John Cook about his request to have WUWT host a survey, I asked him several questions because I had misgivings about the design. He refused to answer my questions, and now I know why. In my opinion, he’s engaging in a fraudulent survey designed to be biased from the start. I find it ironic that Cook the cartoonist and his survey, is now succinctly summed up by another cartoonist.
Josh writes:
Lots of blogs helping John Cook out here, especially Lucia and Brandon over at The Blackboard where Brandon has just discovered that the survey of 12,000 papers, is, in fact, not a survey of 12,000 papers but a selection of papers based on John’s own idea of which should be chosen. Wow.
If any journal publishes the (whatever) John Cook serves up in a bowl from this survey, it will be the end of their credibility.
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None of these guys can be trusted.
“If any journal publishes the (whatever) John Cook serves up in a bowl from this survey, it will be the end of their credibility.”
Count on a number of alarmist sites and MSM doing just that. Like their hero Gleick, they consider Cook and his site to be an authority on the subject.
If the science and the facts were on their side; then why do they constantly have to “cook the books” so to speak.
BradProp1 says (May 6, 2013 at 9:28 am)
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Is there any other branch of science which has to have propagandists constantly trying to nail it to the dead parrot perch? Only the most pernicious pseudoscience has this mentality.
He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil”, Aphorism 146, 1886 (Ref)
Last time I looked, science has never advanced one iota by finding out what the layman
or experts believe. Surveys have zero relevance in the search for answers in a given scientific arena. Only those who have not the means for advancing the science would ever waste their time
creating them. The fact that Cook, or anybody, expects respondent attitudes to advance knowledge is prima facie evidence of incompetence.
Thanks, Josh. That’s perfect.
Isn’t this conspiracy ideation? /s
It reminds me of a comment Tom Lehrer makes
“Life is like a sewer what you get out of it depends on what you put into it”
I don’t think I want to see what is in John Cooks bowl thank you
James Bull
Cook doesn’t need scientific rigor for a Lewandowksy-style paper….. any ol’ turd will do, so long as he gets to say something about “skeptic cognition” as inferior to the scientists themselves and to his fellow Alarmists…… but how will he identify “skeptic” survey takers if they don’t self-identify in the comment space? I wrote that the survey is garbage…. will that qualify me as some kind of skeptic?
Perhaps Cook wants to study how the papers’ authors differ from the great unwashed in assessments of the meaning of the abstracts. In any case, there are severe peculiarities in how the 10 abstracts are served up for each survey-taker. As Brandon and others are discussing at Lucia’s, they seem to come from a much smaller subset of the 12,000 or so papers announced as part of the project. Only papers self-rated by an author seem to be eligible for this study (presumably the rate of response of paper authors to John Cook is far far below 100%, maybe 10 or 20% if he’s lucky). Will anything useful come out of this project? At least we all get a good laugh…..
Cook, Lewandowsky, Gleick, Oreskes, Doran & Zimmerman, Mann – the intellectual quality of peer-reviewed climate science shines through.
This survey is based on reviews of abstracts. I’m sure readers here can recall a number of papers that contradict the cagw meme, or parts of it, while still trotting out the party line in the abstract.
Watching Lucia and Brandon reverse-engineer the survey algorithm is like watching McIntyre and McKittrick reverse-engineer hockey sticks. They’re all doing it for the challenge. So who’s under who’s microscope?
Let me try that.
“Recent polling results show that when asked who should be required to enroll in Obamacare, send their children to public schools, disarm, pay twice as much for electricity, and quit eating meat, 85% of Americans responded “Only Congress and the White House.”
Now I just need to write the questions and ask Texans after 5PM when they get home from work, as opposed to Californians in the middle of the day on their fwee government cell phones which they got by clicking on a gmail ad.
Again, would you buy a second hand car of this person? “Would I lie to you?”
John Cook removed all my comments, which contained the results of all my investigations
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/04/29/the-climate-is-changing/
from his site.
What does that tell you about the man?
I didn’t realize you had to have gone to school on the ‘little bus’ to qualify for admission to the school of Climate Science. Some years ago they were all restricted to the school of Education.
Lew, Lew, skip to the Lew…
or, perhaps he’s looking at (for) (CAGW) team flakes?
Whatever it is, it probably has the same content as
most of the warmista’s papers….
Maybe he could use a hockey stick to unclog things?
You’ve hit the nail on the head (so to speak) Josh…
arthur4563 says:
May 6, 2013 at 9:45 am
“Surveys have zero relevance in the search for answers in a given scientific arena.”
This is precisely the problem. In the social pseudo-sciences, surveys are all they have. It was a social scientist who came up with the consensus of 97%. Lew is a social scientist and Cook is a… well cartoonist. In their ology 101s they took elementary stat manipulation of surveys and when they graduated, this is all they do. They believe this is precisely how science is done (believing theirs is a science). There was even a Nobel Prize given to a gangue of them (note it was a Peace Prize, not a scientific one). The fact that so many of them are dabbling in climate science is a measure of the status of climate science at this time. None of them are dabbling with Schroder’s equation, or Planck’s quantum theory (although these are apropos to a more fully developed climate science I would imagine).
I see what the problem is here. He has his socks on the wrong feet. The port (left) sock should be red, and the starboard (right) sock should be green. No wonder he has everything bass-ackwards.
Cook and friends are often deluded, but I doubt they would pretend that this survey advances any understanding of climate science per se. I think they are looking for any kind of sneers and smears they can concoct about “skeptic cognition” compared to the climate science mainstream and CAGW alarmists. Cook will slap together another Lew-style excrescence which purports to show what is wrong with “skeptics” about climate alarmism.
Jimmy Haigh. says: May 6, 2013 at 9:22 am
None of these guys can be trusted.
On the contrary, I think they can be trusted absolutely to let politics drive their stance, in the face of every single piece of empirical evidence.
The cartoon makes it look like he’s just “going through the motions”.
Sorry, I don’t have the time to understand this. Can someone give simplified analogy of what he is doing?
.
Might I suggest … that WUWT conduct a survey of their own? One with subtly loaded questions designed to show the gullibility of CAGW-believers? It would be fun to see how fast John Cook, etc refuses to take, or link to, OUR survey.
Actually, it would be fun just to design such a survey. Sort of a group effort, so to speak.