Via GMU press release:
We are delighted to announce that John Cook, PhD will be joining our team as a Research Assistant Professor, beginning January 2017.
Initially trained as a physicist, John recently completed his PhD in psychology at the University of Western Australia. His doctoral research focused on the negative influences of misinformation on climate literacy, and how to neutralize those influences.
Despite his newly minted PhD, John has been a towering figure in the field of climate communication for the past decade. In 2007, he created Skeptical Science – a website/app devoted to explaining climate science and rebutting global warming misinformation. Skeptical Science is widely seen by climate scientists and other climate educators as an invaluable educational resource. For his efforts, John has received numerous prestigious awards including a 2012 Eureka Prize for Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge (Australian Museum), a 2013 Peter Rawlinson Conservation Award (Australian Conservation Foundation) and a 2016 Friend of the Planet Award (National Center for Science Education).
John has also published five books on climate change and/or science misinformation – including The Debunking Handbook (with Stephen Lewandowsky) that has been downloaded over ½ million times from Skeptical Science – and dozens of scientific articles. His research paper titled Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming (Environmental Research Letters, 2013) – that definitively demonstrated that 97% of climate scientists are convinced that human-caused climate is happening – is the most-ever-downloaded paper from that journal, or any journal published by the Institute of Physics. Not bad for a social scientist!
In 2015, John developed and taught a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) through The University of Queensland titled Denial 101x: Making Sense of Climate Science Denial. This course – which uses an innovative pedagogical technique called misconception-based learning – has attracted over 25,000 students from 167 nations. John is currently teaching the course for a 2nd time to 1,873 students from 114 nations.
Given the innovation and rigor of John’s climate communication research – and his total commitment to helping stabilize the earth’s climate – we are fortunate indeed to be welcoming him to America, and to have him join the 4C team.
Oh boy, looks like Cook will be Cooking up some new crazy campaigns to try to minimize those people who have an opinion different than he does.
Some background on GMU and the RICO20:
George Mason professors call for RICO probe of ‘climate change deniers’
Jagdish Shukla’s #RICO20 blunder may have opened the ‘largest science scandal in US history’
More on the George Mason Centre for Climate Change Communication and its founder Ed Maibach, here:
Propaganda from The Public Purse
http://sppiblog.org/news/propaganda-from-the-public-purse
Research Assistant Professor, does that mean that John gets to troll the internet all day?
Maybe he’ll grace us with his presence!
At some point, universities have to be recognized by the consumers as over-priced opinion platforms. It’s getting worse over time.
You have got to be kidding me.
I thought George Mason had standards. Clearly, I was wrong.
Yeah, well. Things change.
As a GMU Alumnus, I am quite disappointed in this action.
You should write and let them know. Joe. Be sure to mention that any donations from you will dry up until GMU re-institutes the standard of dispassionate unprejudiced scholarship.
Well handsome dude, Walter E. Williams, will forgive you for having to confess.
G
@Patrick Guinness Frank- Oh, I do let them know. Every time they ask me for money, I give them my opinion.
Not that it matters- they soaked me enough already, time for another mark- I mean -student.
Cook is evidently exactly of the right standard for the department he is joining.
Look on the bright side — at least this will make Australian skeptics happy …
It’s not about the money though.
Maybe, maybe not. Note the date his new job starts, Jan 2017, after the elections.
If Hillary does not win something will come up, he will have a change of heart etc.
At GMU he is under our roof, subject to our laws. Mr Cook meet Mr Smith and Mr Subpoena…
michael
I can think of few who are more qualified and experienced to write a paper on misinformation in climate literacy than John Cook.
It’s illustrative to recognize how the climate crusade is championed by mostly dishonest nitwits.
Every fringe cause has their iconic morons.
But the climate crusaders Cook, Romm, McKibben, Oreskes etc are really quite a collection of lying lunatic lefties.
Hmmmm…..If much of what the US’s “Founding Fathers” said and tried to do is dismissed in “Higher Education” because they were humans who didn’t always live up to the ideals they expressed in their personal lives (such as in the Declaration of Independence and “All Men are created equal…” because Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner), how can a PC University give a job to someone who proudly put up a picture of himself dressed as a Nazi SS Officer?
Gunga Din September 19, 2016 at 12:21 pm
Ah, maybe its not as widely known as we would expect. Hmm, once its splashed across the college websites it will be fun to see the little darlings run off to their safe spaces with their hands over their ears.
michael
You haven’t been to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello lately. They don’t refer to “slaves”, they were all “enslaved workers”. Get it? That puts the onus on Thomas Jefferson as the “enslaver”.
You can take the tour of the slave housing and are supposed to feel terrible, I guess. What I saw was quarters that seemed nicer than where Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky, and Davey Crockett was born in Tennessee. Looks to me like Jefferson’s “enslaved workers” were better off than dirt poor freemen. There is a very PC 21st Century condescension toward Jefferson because he was too busy helping create a completely new country, and apparently was not Superman, as he neglected to end slavery in his spare time.
Beautiful Mansion, lovely grounds, but stay away if you don’t want to wretch at the PC crapola. Go to Mt. Vernon instead, where George Washington is still a hero Founding Father. Better hurry though.
Washington mostly gets a pass on that front, since he arranged for his slaves to be freed after both him and his wife had died. He had also intended for the Mount Vernon plantation to be divided up into plots to provide those former slaves a livelihood, but his wishes in that regard went largely unhonored.
Why is it these control-freak fascist types are always short little twerps? Is Little-man syndrome behind it all?
Ad Hominem much?
It’s important to understand the psychological root causes of compulsive Climate Liars like Cook.
That’s not understanding a psychological root cause, that’s just making fun of how a person looks. Perhaps the root cause is because people made fun of how he looks, especially from the veil of anonymity.
I suspect that my recent comment is in moderation because I used the “N@z@” and the $$ words.
I’m sure it will be cleared.
But in case it went directly to the “bit bin” or wherever auto deletions go, I’m calling it to your attention.
I forgot to add ” Mods “.
MODS, Thanks.
[Ask not for whom the mods toil, lest they troll for you … (Hangingway, 1936. As Modified.) .mod]
John Cook……………………………………………………………………mmmmmmmm.
Another Educated Idiot come to enlighten us.
He got his PHD in propaganda.
These people are really getting desperate .
I guess, we are too stupid to grasp the pearls they cast at our feet.
I’m wondering what rock these “Climate Stabilization Committee” members plan on hiding under when the expected slight but inevitable global cooling begins over the next couple of years. For a good diversion and some refreshing insight, I recommend the futuristic sci-fi short story series Time Protectors.
“His doctoral research focused on the negative influences of misinformation on climate literacy, and how to neutralize those influences.”
Well, if anyone in the entire world is most qualified to speak on misinformation and how it influences people, it is he. He is the Grand Poobah of misinformation.
When I woke up this morning the air in Virginia felt horrible, kind of greasy with a distinct slimy sewer suffocating touch.
Now, I understand!
George Mason’s department of idiocy has decided to try for a CAGW implosion by adding vacuous dead weights to their team.
Only, the political and prosecutorial scene in Virginia is different than Australia.
Logging in under false identities, (hacking) is frowned on here.
Skepticalscience apparently lacks understanding of the proper relation of TSI (a forcing akin to power) to temperature (an indication of energy) as shown in the graph at https://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming.htm where they are plotted together. TSI is a forcing so its time-integral is the only meaningful comparison to temperature.
The SS graph is as nonsensical as plotting your speedometer reading on the same graph as your odometer reading. The time-integral of TSI should be compared to temperature the same as the time-integral of the speedometer reading is the odometer reading.
To use a baseball metaphor: not much bench strength on the warmist side is there?
Another place to cook the books!
This scam is so bizarre it would be laughable, except for what it’s costing taxpayers, and it’s anti-science dogma which threatens (at least) western civilization. ISIS should love these folks.
No joy in Warmville.
“His doctoral research focused on the negative influences of misinformation on climate literacy” that definitely is an area he would be expert in. You cant make this stuff up.
To somebody from outside the inner sanctum like me the world of academia seems increasingly slimy and self serving.
We are living in an alternate universe, where up has been defined as down and down is up. The king of climate science misinformation reigns from a position purporting to bust myths and explain authentic climate science.
At his site, he has something like 193 myths that us deniers use that he is supposedly busting with his version of science. I could probably type non stop for the next 24 hours exposing his delusional versions of science.
I’ll pick out one of my favorites, since I forecast global crop yields(production estimates) for a living, mainly using the effects of weather(as an operational meteorologist for 34 years) but dialing in all inputs that contribute……..including CO2 levels.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-plant-food.htm
Almost the entire explanation is clearly garbage. Much of it theoretical garbage.
This is actually how plants responded to elevated CO2 in hundreds of studies:
http://www.co2science.org/data/plant_growth/dry/dry_subject.php
This is how crops have been responding in the real world. The past 2 years…….that have featured the hottest global temperatures ever……….also featured the biggest crops ever for corn and soybeans in the worlds most fertile crop producing region:
http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/CropProd/CropProd-09-12-2016.txt
Is this despite the global warming/climate change?
No, it’s been, in part BECAUSE OF IT and the increase in CO2. Our weather and climate during the past 4 decades has been the best for life and crop growing since the Medieval Warm Period, ~1,000 years ago………that was warmer than this in most places(despite what Cook claims).
He also makes this delusional statement:
“earth will see an increase in deserts and other arid lands, reducing the area available for crops”
If anything, global warming will allow agriculture to expand to higher latitudes, like it did during the Medieval Warm Period. One only has to look at the planet greening up, including deserts to show how silly his statement is:
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth
To go along with his broken, theoretical climate and plant science, Cook has a picture of a soybean plant being eaten up by Japanese Beetles………..as if farmers in the future will no longer be able to spray for pests, which will devour their crops.
None of this is happening, in fact, it’s been almost the complete opposite of everything he has stated.
Fortunately for John Cook, his junk plant science/agronomy, fairy tale weather explanations and exaggerated climate projections don’t have to be applied in the real world, where one must have accountability.
Instead, he gets promoted. It’s the alternate universe………where up is down and down is up.
Eric Blair, who wrote as George Orwell, had that sort of mindset down pat in “1984” . War is peace…..
And what’s wrong with that list of myths?
https://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php?f=percentage
There are a lot on there which are plainly myths to anyone with any science background and quoting them in discussion on climate is a sure way to get your argument dismissed…
this:
https://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-increase-is-natural-not-human-caused.htm
or this:
https://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warming.htm
for example.
If you can’t present a skeptic, evidence based point of view which contradicts what’s in that list, then you can’t expect to be taken seriously when you use the argument…
Griff
September 20, 2016 at 2:22 am
If you can’t present a skeptic, evidence based point of view which contradicts what’s in that list, then you can’t expect to be taken seriously when you use the argument…
The biggest Myth propagated by the CO2-Climate Change Propaganda Op. is that its *CO2-Critical* Hypotheses involved are *not* Scientifically/Empirically Falsified by their Record of [100%] Prediction Failure in the Real World, aka, “evidence based”.
Griff,
Climate models for far into the future projections ,(2100,3100) are perfect examples of pseudoscience and not worth the paper it is written on. They are not testable,thus junk.
Try reading up on the Scientific Method,which destroys your claims easily since the method says you MUST be able to test the hypothesis in real time:
” I. The scientific method has four steps
1. Observation and description of a phenomenon or group of phenomena.
2. Formulation of an hypothesis to explain the phenomena. In physics, the hypothesis often takes the form of a causal mechanism or a mathematical relation.
3. Use of the hypothesis to predict the existence of other phenomena, or to predict quantitatively the results of new observations.
4. Performance of experimental tests of the predictions by several independent experimenters and properly performed experiments.
If the experiments bear out the hypothesis it may come to be regarded as a theory or law of nature (more on the concepts of hypothesis, model, theory and law below). If the experiments do not bear out the hypothesis, it must be rejected or modified. What is key in the description of the scientific method just given is the predictive power (the ability to get more out of the theory than you put in; see Barrow, 1991) of the hypothesis or theory, as tested by experiment. It is often said in science that theories can never be proved, only disproved. There is always the possibility that a new observation or a new experiment will conflict with a long-standing theory.”
http://teacher.nsrl.rochester.edu/phy_labs/appendixe/appendixe.html
Utterly fails the third and fourth steps.
Griff,
Your linked list of “mythis” says that it’s a myth that CO2 was higher in the past.
That’s not a myth, Griff.
Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
Well…..congrats on getting yourselves a bad “RAP”
hope the rest of your sheets are better… 😉
“John [Lewandowsky’s sidekick] recently completed his PhD in psychology at the University of Western Australia …”.
=======================================
Climate change™ ‘science’ and psychology are natural bedfellows:
“Psychology isn’t science. Why can we definitively say that? Because psychology often does not meet the five basic requirements for a field to be considered scientifically rigorous: clearly defined terminology, quantifiability, highly controlled experimental conditions, reproducibility and, finally, predictability and testability …”:
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jul/13/news/la-ol-blowback-pscyhology-science-20120713
In an odd way, this is cheering news!