This is also why you see the assumption among science deniers that people have at best “questionable motives” or at worst “nefarious intent.” Which largely explains the defamation you see on science denier blogs and websites. It doesn’t take much for science deniers to jump from assuming nefarious intent to assigning nefarious intent and screeching “fraud” and “fakery” (see ‘climategate‘ for the perfect example).
Continue reading Science Deniers Again Try To Discredit John Cook And Skeptical Science
Everyone at Skeptical Science spends a lot of their time reading the scientific literature and listening to experts. Without that we wouldn’t be able to write all the material that’s published on Skeptical Science. It’s a lot of work, especially when you do this with a critical eye. Our goal, after all, is to ensure that what we write reflects the scientific literature on the subject as accurately as possible.
The materials created by Skeptical Science are used by teachers, politicians, and of course by users on the internet to rebut climate myths. Thanks to this a lot of people have seen materials produced by us, even though they might not know that they have.
Tackling what scepticism is and explaining how to recognize pseudo-scepticism is one of the main driving forces for articles on Real Sceptic. A lot of the misinformation and incorrect scientific claims you’ll see originate from pseudo-sceptics, and knowing how to recognize them and their unsupported claims is important. Without the proper tools you’re vulnerable to the misinformation they spread.
For a while now I’ve been really busy with different projects so it took me some time to finally respond to Judith Curry’s blog post. She wrote a response to my Skeptical Science article The Skepticism In Skeptical Science that I published in June of last year.
I wrote that Skeptical Science article as there’s a significant group of science deniers that present themselves as sceptics; which they aren’t. Basically, what they do is take advantage of the different meanings and connotations surrounding the words “sceptic” and “scepticism.”
Continue reading Judith Curry: What Is Skepticism, Anyway?
During the AGU Fall Meeting I had the honor of working with Peter Sinclair of Climate Denial Crock of the Week and John Cook of Skeptical Science, interviewing an amazing line-up of scientists and science communicators. I’m floored by who we interviewed and could have a chat with. Everyone brought their A game which gave us some incredible footage (you can find all the videos in the AGU 2014 video archive, they’ll be added as they’re released).
A lot of this footage you’ll also see in the upcoming Massive Online Open Course (MOOC) from The University of Queensland. The Denial101x MOOC will launch in April 2015 on the EdX platform. Registration has opened so you can register for free.
John, Peter, and I managed to get some amazing scientists for this MOOC and our own productions:
Continue reading A Historic Series Of Interviews At The AGU 2014 Fall Meeting
The so-called sceptics like Anthony Watts often have some very interesting predictions and speculations about global warming and climate change. Especially the predictions they make when dealing with their opponents can get very strange. The latest example of this was when Anthony Watts noticed a new widget on the Skeptical Science website.
Not much information was present what this widget was about. It had some sort of outline in it and a countdown, but what it was counting down to wasn’t obvious at the time. When you clicked on the widget it directed you to a page full of silhouettes.
Continue reading Watts Up With 97 Hours Of Consensus
Last year Cook et al. released a paper that analysed the scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
What they did in that study was look at almost 12,000 abstracts from 1991 to 2011 that matched the search “global climate change” or “global warming.” What they found after analysing these abstracts is that among those that expressed a position on global warming, 97% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming. They also contacted 8,547 authors to ask if they could rate their own papers and received 1,200 responses. The results for this again found that 97% of the selected papers stated that humans are causing global warming.
Continue reading Richard Tol’s 97% Scientific Consensus Gremlins
Anyone familiar with Watts Up With That will have noticed that anything published on it that mentions Skeptical Science often displays a rather obvious dislike for Skeptical Science. Both for the Skeptical Science website and the people who are involved with it.
It shows with the language used and all the attacks on the materials created or used by Skeptical Science. Often it doesn’t really matter if it’s valid criticism as long as it in some way critiques or undermines what was released. Especially when it’s something that is easy to understand and helps with communicating the science behind global warming. Which showed with the attacks towards the Cook et al. paper that measured the scientific consensus on global warming in the scientific literature.
Science deniers never cease to amaze me with the tactics they use to discredit research and people. So they cannot win the debate on the science as it’s not on their side. This causes al kinds of interesting mental processes and conspiratorial thinking to deal with this disconnect from reality. Research by Smith and Leiserowitz shows that conspiratorial thinking is the number one response from climate science deniers towards global warming.
For a while now I’ve been really busy with different projects so it took me some time to finally respond to 
Last year 
Anyone familiar with Watts Up With That will have noticed that anything published on it that mentions Skeptical Science often displays a rather obvious dislike for Skeptical Science. Both for the Skeptical Science website and the people who are involved with it.