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
Not content with calling for our prosecution under RICO this cell brings in an international climate jackass. They are doubling down and challenging us to do something about it. Challenge accepted.
Btw the string of meaningless awards is an affront to any decent enlightened academy.
WOW. Hey! I just opened my new box of corn flakes, and there was a PHD!!! In climate science. Where’s my grant?
“enlightened academy.” You should not mix your oxymorons (emphasize on morons)
From the GMU press release: “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).”
Huh?
ROTFLMAO!
I am literally quaking in my boots.
I wonder if he’s still going to do cartoons
Or play dress up in his SS outfits
Granted it’s a weird look, but it isn’t an SS uniform.
Yes, but I didn’t wan’t the reply to get flagged using the “N” word.
” His doctoral research focused on the negative influences of misinformation on climate literacy, and how to neutralize those influences.”
Blimey! Must have a read sometime:)
Cheers
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
The clownishly duplicitous John Cook coming to the US?
Egad!
Krikey!
Two words:
Extreme.
Vetting.
Menicholas September 19, 2016 at 5:09 pm
three
Gitmo
michael
Who said global warming alarmism does not pay?
Looks like this University is a kernel of green neo totalitarian political activism.
Watch out.
Yay! 🙂
Lewandowsky – gone!
Cook – gone!
Does any country need a marsupial paleontologist for one of their university faculties?
Whenever i see a picture of Cook i think of the Rat Faced Boy.
Eugene WR Gallun
You mean this chap has a pouch ??
I guess you could keep your grass in one if you had one.
g
Ever notice there are never any photos showing John Cook’s tongue? The consensus “study” was about the most unscientific piece of %^&^$ ever published. It was so blatantly unscientific as to be laughable. ANY institution that would give such accolades and positions deserves no credibility and should attract NO students, unless they want to pay to be fed lies and propaganda.
The ONLY good thing is that it gets this %$^&^% out of Australia . Perhaps he is escaping before Senator Roberts has his backside hung out and dried. Parliament in Australia is starting to become a spectator sport-we are so looking forward to the likes of Flannery & co being humiliated.
Malcolm Roberts knows more than the lot of them put together on climate(since Turncoat had Denis Jensen disendorsed.) Luckily for Greg Hunt, they are in different chambers of Parliament, so Greg does not need to change all his underwear to brown. Also, look forward to the UN getting an unrelenting caning. Some new talent in the Senate is going to put a cat among the pidgeons.
So, grab a carbonated beverage and watch the senate debates. Watch One Nation demolish the Greens in particular.
Yes. Physics is a hard subject. Psychology, well … if one doesn’t mind being the “wife for a night (actually about 60 minutes and in many cases less)” then the D for Degree is granted.
Though very community minded John Cook to join the RICO20 now 21 to “carry the load” and “lesson the burden” when the trial and sentencing conclude.
John can walk with his head held high to Federal prison, though a minimum security one not like Chelsea Manning enjoys, and proclaim to the NYT “I helped to carry the load [whimper whimper]”.
Ha ha
The use of psychology to enforce certain political beliefs shows its value to mankind and how readily it is abused. They are now bringing in teams to research why their views are being ignored. They are alarmed as the public has moved on and as such, the climate movement is becoming irrelevant.
I have been painfully working on my John Cook-the-Books poem. In fact, after many months, I have only four “tentative” lines. The difficulty in writing a poem about John Cook-the-Books is the same as writing a poem about “slime” – the name says it all. What more can you add that is of interest? But i would like to share the four tentative lines that I do have. I think they help to explain John Cook-the-Books underlying intellectual philosophy.
JOHN COOK-THE-BOOKS
and the Art of Science
They’re Tweedledee and Tweedledum
Art and Science — the same in sum
Each for the other substitutes
Each the other reconstitutes
Hopefully more coming.
Eugene WR Gallun
under lewandosky’s desk
cookie doesn’t polish shoes.
no- it’s something quite grotesque-
he’s conducting Peer reviews
that’s how he got his phd
playing doctor with philosophy
for now the university
happily awards degrees
to leatherboys, who on their knees
present a thesis orally.
gnomish — there is a certain intriguing crudeness there.– Eugene WR Gallun
Wow. And a ream of effluent is unleashed.
Seems as is perhaps “sceptics” got confused and mislabeled themselves.
The correct word is “sociopaths”.
WUWT is just a vile place.
[???? .mod]
..Dear MOD, I think he meant ” Deplorables”…Liberal Trolls get easily confused nowadays….( It’s the Trump Effect) …..LOL
The 97% is and always was a psychological trick on the general public. It had nothing to do with Climate science.
Mann’s cartoon fiasco is pseudo-psychological nonsense to explain away the fallacies in his work.
Now Nuccitelli and the Grauniad are saying that the claim CO2 is good for plants is a “favorite Myth”. Yes, 3 decades of science on it, irrelevant apparently
Judge via reading the paper, not reflexively because you don’t like what Nuccitelli does/stands for ??
Surely not …. that would be science after all.
http://www.pnas.org/content/113/38/10589.full.pdf
Abstract:
“Global changes in climate, atmospheric composition, and pollutants
are altering ecosystems and the goods and services they provide.
Among approaches for predicting ecosystem responses, long-term
observations and manipulative experiments can be powerful
approaches for resolving single-factor and interactive effects of
global changes on key metrics such as net primary production
(NPP). Here we combine both approaches, developing multidimensional
response surfaces for NPP based on the longest-running,
best-replicated, most-multifactor global-change experiment at the
ecosystem scale—a 17-y study of California grassland exposed to
full-factorial warming, added precipitation, elevated CO2, and nitrogen
deposition. Single-factor and interactive effects were not
time-dependent, enabling us to analyze each year as a separate
realization of the experiment and extract NPP as a continuous
function of global-change factors. We found a ridge-shaped response
surface in which NPP is humped (unimodal) in response
to temperature and precipitation when CO2 and nitrogen are ambient,
with peak NPP rising under elevated CO2 or nitrogen but
also shifting to lower temperatures. Our results suggest that future
climate change will push this ecosystem away from conditions
that maximize NPP, but with large year-to-year variabilitity.”
Anthony,
I think you forgot the inverted commas around the work skeptic in the title of your post. Presumably you meant Climate “skeptic” basher…. You do need to be careful, or else people will think that you mean actual skeptics, rather than fake ones. I presume that you’d hate to be regarded as someone who spreads misinformation…..oh, hold on?
ha ha — take a physic
How can there be such a person as a “fake skeptic”? Someone who pretends to be skeptical of a hypothesis, but actually believes it is certainly true? No-one who understands the first thing about science could be capable of doing this. You need to read Karl Popper.
No, it’s the opposite:
It’s someone who pretends to be sceptical of the science but who actually has no intention of ever considering it credible.
Who was the idiot (I think involved with the Best study) who claimed to have been a skeptic all his career but the facts that he now had uncovered had convinced him global warming was real?
Then the other shoe dropped and he was revealed to have been a warmist all his career and had lied about previously being a skeptic for propaganda purposes.
Eugene WR Gallun
That was Richard Muller.
Ask Steven Mosher – he was on the study team that found the same thing that all other teams had when they reshearched Global temperatures – the connection with CO2 and the fact that the UHI effect played no part.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/the-best-is-yet-to-come-richard-muller-on-the-berkeley-earth-surface-temperature-project-whether-hes-a-skeptic-and-bests-climate-policy-ambitions
“The team collected all of the temperature data it could from around the world because, he says, other studies had “only used a fraction” of what was available.
Next, the team set about addressing concerns raised by skeptics and others about existing Earth surface temperature datasets and their findings. Muller elaborates “First, there were issues around [weather] station quality – [skeptic meteorologist and blogger Anthony] Watts showed that some of the stations had poor quality. We studied that in great detail. Fortunately, we discovered that station quality does not affect the results. Even poor stations reflect temperature changes accurately.”
“There were issues of data changes. Some of the prior groups had adjusted the data and lost all record of how they had adjusted it. So we went back to the raw data and used only that.”
“Then, there’s the urban heat island effect [the criticism that weather stations sited in urban areas give artificially high temperature readings]. That was something I think we studied in a clever and original way,” Muller says. This involved examining only the data from rural stations to see if the temperature rise was still there – and it was. “We got the same answer,” he says.”
Well, this is how they slime skeptics in general. Take Richard Lindzen in particular. He’ll give his presentation to anyone who will pay him a small honoria, flight and hotel. If an oil-linked organization (you can imagine how wide THAT net is) does it, he’s “in the pay of Big Oil”. However, the WWE-Greenpeace-Etc. doesn’t want to even hear any dissent, so don’t want him to present a few slides, in case they catch skeptic cooties or something. Same presentation. He doesn’t change a thing.
But they’ll go on bad mouthing him by insinuating that he knows the science, he’s just faking it for money.
@Toneb,
First, thanks for that example Muller’s double-talk. In that (2012) interview Muller says:
with peak NPP (ag production) rising under elevated CO2 …
So Muller admits that higher CO2 levels raise agricultural productivity? We already knew that here. That’s what NASA says, too. But good news doesn’t get the grants, so Muller adds:
Our results suggest that future climate change will push this ecosystem away from conditions that maximize NPP…
So more CO2 is bad, then? But that’s only according to Muller’s “results”, which are nothing more than another failed climate model guesstimate, and another example of Muller’s trademarked doubletalk.
If toneb can cherry-pick passages from his (very partisan and unscientific) link, so can we. Muller says:
“90 per cent of what’s said about climate change is nonsense… So there’s plenty of room for skepticism.” Tell that to John (97%) Cook.
The real problem is that the climate alarmist crowd never admits they were wrong, whether it’s claiming that the “pause” never happened, or that data was fabricated, or that or that the Climategate email dump exposed the perps as venal, money-grubbing backscratchers who unethically used public money to blacklist scientiswts who are skeptics of the “dangerous man-made global warming” scare.
Wake me when Muller, Mann, or any of their ilk admits that current observations of global temperature are well within past parameters. That’s a fact, and it debunks the “climate change” scare.
Miller adds:
There were issues of data changes. Some of the prior groups had adjusted the data and lost all record of how they had adjusted it. So we went back to the raw data and used only that.
The problem is that in a large fraction of cases, there is no raw data! As a newbie, toneb probably missed the Harry_Read_me file that emerged along with the Climategate emails. In that download programmer ‘Harry’ wrote:
“Who added those two series together? When? Why? Untraceable, except anecdotally.
But I am beginning to wish I could just blindly merge based on WMO code… the trouble is that then I’m continuing the approach that created these broken databases.
“Here, the expected 1990-2003 period is MISSING – so the correlations aren’t so hot! Yet the WMO codes and station names /locations are identical (or close). What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah – there is no ‘supposed’, I can make it up. So I have 🙂”
And:
“So with a somewhat cynical shrug, I added the nuclear option – to match every WMO possible, and turn the rest into new stations (er, CLIMAT excepted). In other words, what CRU usually do. It will allow bad databases to pass unnoticed, and good databases to become bad, but I really don’t think people care enough to fix ’em, and it’s the main reason the project is nearly a year late.”
They didn’t fabricate just a few months of bogus temperatures. They invented many years of fake numbers.
So when Muller and B.E.S.T. used a similar kind of ‘data’, what did they find? This:
This week BEST released the latest in a series of papers, confirming the project’s announcement last year that the Earth has warmed at the rate that previous studies suggested. This time BEST went further, also concluding that warming is most likely due to manmade greenhouse gas emissions. [My bold emphasis in italics]
When B.E.S.T. first announced its findings, their ‘data’ was published — but they withheld more recent data:
(Note that the B.E.S.T. data produces a graph (lower graph) showing that global T fluctuated by ≈2ºC in 2011! Why didn’t anyone else notice that huge downward spike?)
And: Muller dismisses the suggestion that Watts released his work to counter the new BEST study. “[Watts] didn’t even know about our work,” he says. Nonsense on both counts. Muller has been referenced here at least since 2009.
Muller adds that “transparency” raises the possibility of a conflict between scientific objectivity and advocacy. Wrong. It’s the lack of transparency that causes conflict. The interview ends with this unsolicited editorial comment:
But whether you like that or not, it appears BEST is here to stay.
With that I agree, but with a caveat: take away the public grant money. If that happened Muller and his daughter would find out right quick how soon B.E.S.T. goes by the wayside.
The ‘carbon’ scare is paid propaganda, no more and no less. With Muller they’ve found the perfect tap-dancer; the ideal chameleon. The really sad thing is, he’s the least bad of a bad lot.
Brandon Shollenberger’s book “The Climate Wars: how the consensus is enforced” gives a good account of the trickery by which John Cook and his team created the “97%” myth. They blurred the distinction between “CO2 causes warming” and “CO2 has caused most of the warming in the last 100 or so years”.
Didn’t think GMU could embarrass it self any further.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair,
That may be so, depending on the individual and the job.
However, we are talking of science – were kudos is to be gained by standing out from the crowd and finding something revelatory.
Nobel prizes?
And you also talk of the vast majority of Earth scientists, so it requiresthat honest men/women stay quiet and not get their Nobels.
Speaking of Nobel prizes, where are the Nobel prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Economic Science, even Psychology or Medicine? The Peace Prize given to Al Gore et al is pure utter BS worth no more than the one given to President Obama for getting elected. Period.
usurbrain,
Like many other formerly honest institutions, the Nobel Prize award has been corrupted by politics:
http://maggiesfarm.anotherdotcom.com/uploads/freenobel2.jpg
Now the Nobel “Peace” prize doesn’t mean a damn thing.
I’m interested they are making a ‘thing’ of having a guy with a psych degree joining them.
Clearly they have read the recent evidence that the more you educate someone in Science the more sceptical they become – so they will be chasing the propganda and programming side of things rather than Science.
Maniac smile
The whole Nobel process is now a complete joke.
You are all providing such rich and qualitative data for a follow-up study on the mindset of climate change derailers. None of you have anything of real substance, or consequence to share; it is really astounding. Get outside, breathe some!
The award of Nobel prizes to Yassir Arafat, Al Gore and Barrack Obama has totally destroyed the credibility of the Nobel Committee. Not to mention their support of the Global Warming scam.
As far as dubious Nobels, you forgot Jimmy Carter.
I did forget that loser