JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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Robin Williams is supposedly one of Australia’s top science communicators. He, and the ABC, continue to support ad hominems, name-calling, and are running scared of a real scientific debate. Williams will not allow skeptics to explain their views on his show, except in comments on stories, and then apparently, even that was too much, and a raging thread (for the Science Show) mysteriously disappeared for days when it got too hot. BobFJ has been dedicated in tracking it, and keeping the pressure on the anti-science pronouncements of Williams et al. Here we have all the fun of the so called “Science” Show meeting the author of Un-Skeptical-Science, with half-truths and irrelevancies broadcast across the continent thanks to the taxpayers of Australia. — JoNova
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Guest Post by Bob Fernley-Jones (aka Bob_FJ)
In addition to regular readers of Jo Nova, those familiar with John Cook’s misleadingly titled website “Skeptical Science” may be shocked by what follows. Some will also likely recall Jo’s article; Robyn Williams shreds the tenets of science. It largely covered the awful Robyn Williams interview of Bob Ward of 2/Oct/2010, and resulted in strong ridicule of the ABC going viral around the world. Well, lo [...]
It’s taken 21 months, four professors, and three associate/assistant professors, and THIS is the best they could come up with? The printed version listed no author (the pdf has been updated with John Cooks name*) yet wears the logo of the University of Western Australia (UWA), which will embarrass that university as word spreads of the intellectual weakness of their “Guide“.
Did UWA commission this piece of rather inept, qualitative “feel-good” science and clumsy reasoning? Stephan Lewandowsky invited John Cook to speak at UWA and “offer assistance“.
The booklet uses a mislabeled graph with a deceptive scale, won’t show the damning graphs it supposedly debunks, assumes positive feedback occurs despite the weight of empirical evidence against it (Douglass, Spencer, Lindzen), and repeats irrelevant information even though The Skeptics Handbook describes why rising sea levels and glaciers and ice sheets can’t possibly tell us what causes the warming. It misleadingly discusses a different fingerprint — one that isn’t the key point and isn’t disputed by skeptics. Cause and effect are mixed up, and naturally there are strawmen arguments to unnecessarily destroy for the spectacle of being seen to do something. To top it off, Cook still thinks a measurement is [...]
The line blurs between peer-reviewed-science and peer-reviewed-public-relations.
The Big-Scare-Campaign needed an answer to the missing hot-spot question. They needed to find the “hot spot”, or failing that, at the very least provide a “hot spot” type graph that would answer the critics; something that passed for a scientific answer that might fool journalists and bloggers. The failure to find the projected hot spot is so damning, and so obviously not what the models predicted, that there is a veritable industry of people working hard to find a reason why the weather balloon results must be wrong. Steven Sherwood creatively even resorted to throwing out the thermometer readings entirely and using wind shear instead. (If only we’d known! All those years and we didn’t need the thermometers?)
In Robust Tropospheric Warming Revealed by Iteratively Homogenized Radiosonde Data (March 2008) Sherwood et al combine both windshear and temperature data to reconsider the radiosondes yet again. The Scientific Guide to The Skeptics Handbook and others use the graph from the top left corner of this paper (Fig 1 here) to suggest that the hot spot is not missing, or that the “fingerprint” was found. Sure enough, it’s a cute graph. Looks “hot”, right?
[...]
John Cook might be skeptical about skeptics, but when it comes to government funded committee reports, not so much.
The author of “skeptical science” has finally decided to try to point out things he thinks are flaws in The Skeptics Handbook. Instead, he misquotes me, shies away from actually displaying the damning graphs I use, gets a bit confused about the difference between a law and a measurement, unwittingly disagrees with his own heroes, and misunderstands the climate models he bases his faith on. Not so “skeptical” eh John? He’s put together a page of half-truths and sloppy errors and only took 21 months to do it. Watch how I use direct quotes from him, the same references, and the same graphs, and trump each point he tries to make. His unskeptical faith in a theory means he accepts some bizarre caveats while trying to whitewash the empirical findings.
In the end, John Cook trusts the scientists who collect grants funded by the fear-of-a-crisis and who want more of his money, but he’s skeptical of unfunded scientists who ask him to look at the evidence and tell him to keep his own cash.
These two graphs are not the same [...]
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