Yes, why DOES John Cook of 'SkepticalScience' and the 97% have to use identity theft in his 'research'?

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.

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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.