If it wasn’t enough that John Cook dresses himself up as a Nazi in his SkS uniform on his forum, now we have him caught in what looks to be identity theft of a well known scientist.
A WUWT reader writes via email:
I thought I might ask you for your comment on this before I rush to judge John cook.
The Reference Frame: Identity theft: the thief of Lubos_Motl turns out to be a well-known man
Specifically, I’m curious:
1) Why john would wish to post comments anywhere under any circumstances using another persons name?
2) How many other times has he done this?
3) Does he intend to do this again?
Thanks for your time.
This isn’t a brush away issue that he can ignore, as Dr. Lubos Motl found out yesterday, John Cook has been using the name of Dr. Lubos Motl to post comments that Dr. Motl has NOT written.
Dr. Motl writes:
Today, one hour ago, was the first time when I was seeing these pages but interestingly enough, you may find lots of things over there posted by Lubos_Motl. And this Lubos_Motl happens to use the e-mail address jc@sks… and the same IP addresses as another, less prolific participant of those discussions, John Cook! ;-)In the first thread – including comments about the possible influence of the Sun on the hockey stick and exchanges about a planned alarmists’ letter to Anthony Watts analyzing the meaning of the word “denier” – we read:
John Cook: … If a few more agree with the idea of this blog post (noting it won’t directly engage Watts or even mention him, it’ll be a general discussion post) and the direction I propose we go with the d-word issue, I’ll have a crack at writing it over the next day.
EDIT: sorry, accidentally posted this under my Lubos_Motl username, sorry for any confusion 🙁
…
Tim Curtis: would you please stop posting as Lubos Motl. There is reason to doubt his sanity, so I don’t like seeing his name. Further, it is his name, and therefore one you are not entitled to use.
…
Rob Honeycutt: John… You freak me out every time Lubos Motl’s name pops up!
…
John Cook: Sorry about the Lubos thing. Was posting some Lubos comments for the UWA experiment and forgot to log back in as John Cook.
For the record, if just one or two of you SkSers jumped over to the Technical Forum and posted some comments to the 4 Experiment Conditions, I’d get my 10 comments and wouldn’t have to log in as Lubos anymore. Only one or two more comments required to get the quota. Just some incentive for you 🙂
EDIT: one of the conditions now has 10 comments, so only 3 more threads (with 2 of them only requiring one more comment). So Lubos very close to being put to bed 🙂
EDIT: only one more thread to go…
Minutes before this September 26th, 2011 commitment, we were reading these comments in the other threads:
Lubos_Motl: Ocean acidification is a strong sign that humans are raising CO2 levels. But it’s also a grave environmental concern as the acidification is causing damage to coral reefs which are some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. Adding insult to injury, the increased CO2 causes warming which is causing further damage to the coral reefs through bleaching. Corals provide both evidence for man-made global warming and concern over its impacts.
Lubos_Motl: The past tells us much about what our future holds in store for us. In the past, when the Earth was warmer than it is now, sea levels were metres higher than current levels. So just on the sea level front alone, we can expect severe impacts on the vast majority of the human population living on coastlines. The past also describes these concerning feedback events, where warmer temperatures lead to further release of greenhouse gases. We’re already seeing this start to happen in the Arctic, with methane bubbling from the permafrost and methane clathrates. The past paints a vivid picture of our future and it’s a picture of great concern.
Well, you can figure out that these paragraphs were written by a scientifically illiterate imbecile rather than Luboš Motl – because you are a TRF reader – but what about others? In Parts 2–4 of the other thread, the same Lubos_Motl wrote lots of other things:
Lubos_Motl: Cherry picking: What this post fails to mention is other factors also affect climate. Urban heat island also causes nights to warm faster than days. Ozone depletion causes the stratosphere to cool. This supposed evidence is just cherry picking supporting evidence and hiding the rest.
…
The article also cites ocean warming as evidence, and yet ocean warming has stalled since 2003. As more than 90% of global warming is going into the oceans, which means ocean heat is the best measure for global warming, the conclusion is obvious – humans can’t be causing global warming because global warming isn’t happening!
…
Good point re cosmic rays. The simplistic argument that the sun can’t cause global warming only looks at one possible link between sun and climate – total solar irradiance. But the relationship between the sun and our climate is much more complicated than that, as the solar magnetic field modulates the amount of cosmic radiation hitting the earth. This affects cloud formation which also interacts with our climate in complicated ways, with lower clouds causing cooling and higher clouds causing warming. A prettily coloured graphic created for young children doesn’t even begin to capture the complexities of our climate system.
Lubos_Motl: It’s hilarious that this article cites Usoskin 2005. That paper concludes that over the last few decades, the correlation between sun and climate breaks down. Therefore, recent warming must have some other cause. This article’s own sources debunk its assertion that the sun is causing global warming!
…
The full truth about the percentage of CO2 is that over 99% of the atmosphere is oxygen and nitrogen, both gases which are not greenhouse gases. So the fact that CO2 is a small percentage is irrelevant to the strength of its greenhouse effect. It’s like holding an election in a town of 1000 people where only 10 people vote. They may only be a small number but each individual has a significant effect. It’s the same with CO2. Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it – what do measurements find? Both planes and satellites measure heat as it escapes to space and both find a big bite out of the outgoing heat, at precisely the wavelengths that CO2 absorbs heat. The greenhouse effect is an empirically observed fact.
Lubos_Motl: Good point re the co2 lag. Not only was co2 higher in the past, it also lags temperature, showing temperature drives co2, not the other way around. The ice core record is not kind to the warmist agenda.
…
Good point re the number of scientists. The alarmists like to boast about there being 2500 scientists who wrote the IPCC report. But the number of skeptic scientists is AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE greater than the number of alarmist scientists. Not only there is still a debate, the weight of opinion leans heavily towards the skeptic point of view. This article presents the compelling evidence that explains why.
…
John Cook: Note re Lubos Motl: I won’t use the name Lubos Motl or any of our names in the final webpage used in the experiment (so the last two comments by Rob and Steve won’t be used, I’m afraid).
Full story: http://motls.blogspot.com/2015/07/identity-theft-thief-of-lubosmotl-turns.html#more
To me, this is the most telling comment:
John Cook: Sorry about the Lubos thing. Was posting some Lubos comments for the UWA experiment and forgot to log back in as John Cook.
This is just unbelievable; “the UWA experiment”. Think about what this refers to: University of Western Australia. This is where Cook launched his career defaming climate skeptics by helping Stephan Lewandowsky in designing/running a gussied up poll that was never actually posted on climate skeptic websites, that purports to give answers by climate skeptics, to be used in a paper where it is claimed that climate skeptics are believers that “the moon landing was faked“. What sort of “experiment” was John Cook running by stealing the identity of Dr. Lubos Motl, and writing comments under his name?
Cook is a man who has co-authored two papers about how climate skeptics are not to be trusted because in essence, “they are crazy conspiracy theorists”. Yet, John Cook, now of the University of Queensland after leaving his connections at UWA, has so little moral integrity that he’ll post comments on his own website (the SkS forum, see below) as a skeptical scientist, such as Dr. Lubos Motl?
Who else has John Cook impersonated? Has he encouraged his team to do this? These are valid questions that need answers.
This may be actionable, not just to get his latest smear paper retracted, like the first one was, but legally actionable. And maybe it’s time, because quite frankly I’m getting tired of this crap coming from this band of zealots in Australia who seem to have no scruples or integrity. Identity theft of another scientist’s name to post fake comments is just beyond the pale.
This isn’t the first time Cook and crew has done something reprehensible like this. Readers may recall he and his team of moderator zealots have been caught changing user comments after the fact:
On “Skepticalscience” – Rewriting History
This is why Skeptical Science has it’s own special category on the links at WUWT’s sidebar:
Unreliable*
Skeptical Science – John Cook
* Due to (1) deletion, extension
and amending of user comments,
and (2) undated post-publication
revisions of article contents after
significant user commenting.
Then there’s all the questionable tactics Cook used to create a faked 97% consensus: Richard Tol’s Excellent Summary of the Flaws in Cook et al. (2013) – The Infamous 97% Consensus Paper
May I suggest Mr. Cook, that your next fake persona name be: What. A. Slimeball.
UPDATE: Since some commenters have run astray in their thinking, assuming incorrectly that this lab exercise was related to the “moon landing” and “fury” papers, perhaps this addition will help clarify the issue. I sometimes forget readers don’t keep up on the vagaries of the SkS underworld as much as I have.
These comments were from the SkS private “subscribers only” forum, where you had to be on the “inside” to be a part of it. So, these were not public comments like we see on WUWT, but rather a discussion with his network of sycophants helping with his “research”.
The point that needs to be driven home is that rather than getting real comments, he had his buddies (and himself) write faked up comments from their own perspective as “fake skeptics”, and then analyzed those for his research experiment. Whether the results of that experiment made it into any published research is unknown.
Essentially, he and his friends made up pre-biased data, by “assuming” they knew what a skeptic comment might look like, and that’s an issue of integrity. What we see is an attempt to ascertain if a few skeptical comments are influential enough to undo the “good” of an alarmist post. That’s where “noble cause corruption” is at work. It seems he wants to find excuses to explain why everyone should censor skeptics out of the conversation, something he’s actively pushing on CNN right now.
Therefore the important question is: did he get the required ethics approval to make up his own data for that lab exercise?
See:
http://www.research.uwa.edu.au/staff/human-research/approvals
The mendacity of creating commentary from your own group to use it to analyze and then label another group is truly mind boggling.
If readers are going to register complaints, they need to do so in this context, not from the standpoint of this being about public comments faked up by Cook, that remains to be determined, yet given the behavior, we would be correct to look for such instances. Readers should take care not to make complaints to universities that this incident shows that Cook faked public comments, as inaccurate complaints will be ignored and make it more difficult for other complaints to get a hearing. Until further details become available, it is probably best that readers hold off anyway.
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A link to this thread has also been emailed to Dr Dennis Jensen MP.
This man is a disgrace to all the honest, hard-working science guys at the IPCC who would never condone this kind of behaviour.
MODs I guess you should also replace these names with anons as you did below?
Identity theft?
I do not think so.
I know what the experiment was, some of the details are still on the Skeptical Science website.
It appears to be an experiment involving priming (if that is the correct term). Different types of comments were posted under a blog post, and readers were surveyed to see if comments affected their comprehension of the blog post.
No big deal.
I see Brandon Shollenberger has already covered what I posted, sorry about the duplication my bad. I came to a similar conclusion independently but I didn’t notice he had already posted it.
you are beneath contempt.
Mistake
What a silly cover up story.
If that were true they would use meaningless names. Or anonymous names. But he “randomly” chose Lubos Motl.
“Lubos Motl”, that happens to be the name of a real sceptic.
I suppose that it could have hit on a random name of a sceptic but that would make more sense if the sceptic was “John Smith”.
“Lubos Motl “is such an unlikely combination of letters to hit upon by chance.
But that’s what you’re claiming.
And that these random letters, “Lubos Motl”, were going to be re-ordered to something anonymous sometime later, honest.
You just hadn’t got around to that yet. But you were going to, for sure. In fact, come to think of it, you could have simply not used “Lubos Motl” in the first place. If only you had thought about it.
Very silly story.
Blatantly a falsehood..
Notice how he skedaddled as soon as Anthony challenged him? I think the questions will go unanswered at this point.
M Courtney.
“Blatantly a falsehood”
You just know of course.
I think the logic is clear.
He randomly picked a real name. But he was going to change it to a meaningless name later.
Then he just forgot.
I just know that your cover up is a very silly story. It obviously is.
And I note you don’t say it isn’t a falsehood.
This is how I understand what Cook’s experiment will be about. I am sorta just guessing — with little actual information.
Cook’s experiment seems to be about giving people a printed piece of “warmist science” to read followed by comments on that article. There will be four different sets of comments each attached to the same article. One set will have well known warmists proponents making favorable comments on the article. Another set will have the same well known warmists proponents making unfavorable comments on the article. Another set will be of well known “deniers” making favorable comments about the article. And the fourth set will be of the same well known “deniers” making unfavorable comments about the article.
People will receive only one set. Afterwards they will be asked questions about their understanding of the article.
Being that this is John Cook-the-books running this we can guess what his conclusion will be. Comprehension will be enhanced by favorable comments and diminished by unfavorable ones. Name recognition will also have an effect. “Surprisingly” he will find that negative comments by well known warmist proponents will have a much smaller negative effect than negative comments by will known “deniers”. (Please remember the test will be of comprehension of the science (what a joke) in the article — meaning what the article was about — not about agreement or disagreement with the article (though there is a 97% chance such questions will come at the end).
There is a good chance he will try to equalize his test subjects — half being self-identified warmists and half being self-identified skeptics. (He won’t use the term denier in assembling his groups.) Probably he will get his test subjects by exclusively advertising for them on warmists sites as he has been known to do in the past.
John Cook-the-books will then conclude that denier comments disrupt people’s ability to understand the “science” in the article.
We have found out that all comments will be written by John Cook-the-books cronies at Skeptical Science so we can expect that the comments made by “deniers” will reference faked moon landings.
!) If the university that will oversee this has any ethics left, the use of real names will not be permitted. I take that back. That decision will be not be based in ethics since they probably don’t have any left but on fear of being sued.
2) John Cook-the-books is “safe” and he will give the university the answers that it wants so for the rest he will receive a “Right On! and help with funding.
I am just guessing about all this, of course.
Eugene WR Gallun
This is the same UWA that blackballed Bjorn Lomborg from setting up a research centre.
It was going to be a great partnership –
http://www.news.uwa.edu.au/201504027455/events/new-economic-prioritisation-research-centre-uwa
Until the staff, students and twittersphere revolted –
http://www.uwastudentguild.com/bjorn-lomborg-has-no-place-at-uwa/
And the university backed out –
http://www.news.uwa.edu.au/201505087564/message-vice-chancellor-australian-consensus-centre
The place is a complete joke. It is not a university but a socialist collective.
We don’t know that. It is quite reasonable to assume that it was just John Cook and a few accomplices faking the twitterstorm.
They had a material interest in avoiding debate and are known to use such deceits.
UWA is actually of the Libertarian right, by the standards of the East Coast Unis. Sydney, Vic, la Trobe etc
If this story is true, then it must have consequences. This is not minor impropriety.
Here is another bit of work, perhaps not quite so evil, but bringing great discredit none the less. On 24th April 2015 The Conversation published an article by Matthew England. It contained a chart of “Ocean Heat Content” which everybody should inspect closely. There is at least one major problem which is self explanatory. Other serious problems flow from that, notably in the citation of others.
https://theconversation.com/the-climate-hiatus-doesnt-take-the-heat-off-global-warming-40686
My apologies for not reading it properly when it was news. But today’s news makes today seem a good day for highlighting it.
We should also be questioning the ethics of the “real” scientists who colluded with Cook
Another triumph for the University of Queensland and higher education in Australia. Paging the Minister of Education…
Val
Sometimes in things like this the Shadow Minister for Education is a better bet
Interestingly John Cook wrote a paper on identity theft:
OK, not that John Cook
The Post Modern CIimate Alarmism scientific method involving a new
post modern slant on falsification, namely ‘data / identity forging.’
Whoops. I gave somebody too much credit there. SkepticalScience used that chart almost as is on on 25 April 2012. And it does indeed resemble to a much greater degree than I anticipated Levitus et al 2012.
There are other problems with the chart, but the great untruth, which to my surprise is in all three, is that at various times between 1976 and about 1992 the oceans had zero heat content. Based on that, the chart tells us that in a ten year period towards the end, heat content rose by about 50%. Oh, what a tangled web we weave! And so many of us, too!
“Cook launched his career defaming climate skeptics by helping Stephan Lewandowsky in designing/running a gussied up poll that was never actually posted on climate skeptic websites.”
I’ve never seen any evidence that Cook helped Lew design his poll, and he specifically didn’t help him to run the poll, but hindered him, by promising to post the poll at SkS and then not doing so. (He did tweet it.) (See the FOI emails from Lew to blogowners in August 2010 obtained by Simon Turnill and now available at Climate Audit).
In the internal SkS “Treehut Files” Cook enthuses about an experiment he’s planning to launch false sceptic comments. He promises his fellow conspirators that he’ll inform them before launch.
Something’s missing from the story. I’d guess its private emails from the saner of his close collaborators telling him to stop.
[I accidentally posted this to an old blog entry at Bishop Hill, slightly edited and reposted here]
I think the most important facet of Cook’s identity theft is in the area of the UWA comment quotas. Based on these apparent comments, and the fact that Cook is admitting to posting as Lubos Motl, I find it highly probable that the Lewandowsky surveys that generated the Moon Hoax paper were based substantively on ginned up responses by Cook and possibly some of his friends who seem to know about his identity theft, but don’t object to the practice of sock puppetry, but only object to his using a real identifiable skeptic’s name. It’s possible and likely that Cook and his team posed as and pretended to be a skeptics for the purpose of those surveys! When Steve McIntyre brought up the issue of spoofed answers in his original analysis of the Moon Hoax paper, IIRC, Cook and Lewandowsky poo-poohed that notion, saying they had “controlled” for obviously faked responses based on IP address analysis. But did they control for their own faked survey answers, posted under sock puppet names and under the false Lubos Motl identity? Can we now be sure that they themselves weren’t posting some responses that were fake but “more plausible” sounding in their own minds? And what of their role as impartial judges of that question as experimental controllers of the analysis? This is beyond the pale. The Moon Hoax paper, the 97% paper, and any other papers based on John Cook controlled surveys must be retracted.
Ah, fanaticism, there’s no end to the interesting places it takes you…
Your (Motl’s) first quote can be found here
http://www.hi-izuru.org/forum/Technical%20Stuff/2011-09-21-BLOG%20EXPERIMENT%20CONDITION%201_%20warmist%20post,%20warmist%20comments.html
on a thread which starts:
“As the second part of our experiment on science blogging, we’ll be showing 4 conditions to lab participants at the Uni of W.A. The condition for this thread is Warmist Blog Post, Warmist Comments. So would be great if a handful of SkSers could post glowing, very warmist comments to our “How we know…” blog post – posted here in this forum thread. We need exactly 10 warmist comments…”
the link is to
http://www.skepticalscience.com/thread.php?t=2837
which is not available.
So there was an experiment at UWA using fake comments. Does anyone know how to obtain that “not available” SkS post?
Unless I’m mistaken, that link went to this thread. All the links like that went to threads in the Skeptical Science forum. The number at the end identified which thread was which. They just obviously don’t work with the forum being in a new location (and me not having a database setup with the information stored about which thread is which).
Quote: “So there was an experiment at UWA using fake comments. Does anyone know how to obtain that “not available” SkS post?”
Sure — just make up something. Anything….
I wonder how many of the papers judged to comprise the 97% were in fact written by sock-puppets to help achieve the headline figure?
Mr Cooke is a textbook example of what Alan Sokal calls: “post-modernist imposters”. “Charletan” is an older and equally applicable word.
I would like to suggest making this blog entry stay at the top of the main page for a week or so. But I don’t know if this is even possible now (haven’t seen it done in the last year or so).
+1
TAV here on this subject
https://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2015/07/23/john-cook-proprietor-of-sks-repeat-coauthor-of-dr-stephan-lewandowsky-caught-red-handed-impersonating-lubos-motl-for-purposes-of-a-university-of-australia-research-project/
The ends justify the means for such activists. Be they anti-capitlist pro-global warming like Catherine Porter in Seattle (look up her interview with Ezra Levant) or just plain pro-global warming like John Cook. To both, lying is part of the method of getting their message across and so its totally acceptable behavior.
“Clearly the skeptics are not clever enough to appreciate the sublime reasoning of the climate enlightened.”
Brandon_Shollenberger
[moderator note: this person posted a reasonable comment, but did so as “John_Cook”. The name was changed by the moderator to read “anon”. Please stop posting as “John Cook”.]
will do. Sorry, I thought it was funny.
So somebody posting a fake quote under my name in a public location is considered “a reasonable comment” by this site’s mods. Good to know. It’s not like the comments on this post were crazy enough already.
What upsets me most about these shenanigans is the differential treatment.
Never mind the posing as Nazis, the willful deceit in the papers and “research”, the verifiable lies and misrepresentations, the posing as other people online, the likes of Cook and Lewandowsky nevertheless end up showered with plaudits, grants, careers and so on.
Then on the other hand, we’ve seen a genuine scientist, Sir Tim Hunt, have his reputation completely and utterly trashed and he’s been put through the social media public square of flogging for…..nothing.
It turns out that his primary accusers were willfully deceptive and the worst of the lot, Connie St.Louis, an outright liar. And to beggar belief further, said accusers were all academics involved in journalism and/or journalistic ethics. Connie St. Louis is still in post at City University. And despite the facts now coming out, Tim Hunt is still now regarded as some kind of offensive “sexist” dinosaur and there’s no taking back the incredible stress he and his family went through over this affair.
What on earth has happened to academia that worms prosper and good people are punished so?
I believe this activity is called “sock puppeting”.
Anyone who has read Lubos’ blog would recognize his thick accent and unique style, since English is not his first language. The Cook quotes are so obviously fake…
That’s funny. I didn’t think you could hear an “accent” by reading what someone writes.
Och aye, Jimmy! Hae ye ne’er been tae bonny xxxxxxxxx (I leave you to guess the country).
I will say that Lubos’ insistence to even write with his accent is rather amusing.
The broader question is why anyone considers Skeptical Science an authority. From Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeptical_Science
For a critical look at its content, see this examination of its article about Professor Roger Pielke Sr in their “Climate Misinformer” section:
http://fabiusmaximus.com/2015/07/24/skeptical-science-looks-at-roger-pielke-sr-87604/
Score: ten shots, no hits. And this is their good work. Compared to the SkS page about Judith Curry (Prof of Atmospheric Science at GA Inst Tech), the Pielke Sr post looks like the Britannica.
stalin was great man.
David,
I too love Stalin snark (and even more so, Russian dark humor), Of course, Stalin wasn’t that interested in propaganda. He didn’t want anything said by opponents, but didn’t care if the State news was believable.
What we’re seeing now is highly effective political marketing by John Cook and his allies. To see this as science is a “category error.” it’s not. But it works.
Consider this example, the SkS hit piece on Roger Pielke Sr. The SkS post is brief and powerful. My rebuttal takes over 2,000 words and has only a fraction of the smear’s power. The SkS piece is endlessly repeated by activists and even scientists (who have no regard for the damage it does to their institution). Rebuttals are boring, and get little attention.
Smears are hot. Fact-checking is not.
TY
Desperation is now he name of the game. “Whatever it takes” uses
a policy of no scruples, no integrity, no scientific validity – plus the appearance of numerous, self-proclaimed ‘Nobel laureates’ popping up everywhere to enhance the MSM press release validity.
What is the definition of identity theft? Using someone else’s login? Or just plain fakery?