Tag Archives: John Cook

Is It Just Me?

I've mostly recovered from a recent illness, and I've working on a new post in line with what I've been discussing recently. I'm still a bit tired though. As such, rather than worry about technical discussions, I wanted to ask a question. John Cook is the proprietor of the Skeptical Science website. Here is a picture of him:

For the last few years, this picture has bugged me. Every time I saw a picture of Cook, I felt like I had seen it him somewhere before. Today, I finally realized why he seemed so familiar. It might be silly/crazy, but... doesn't he kind of look like Donny Osmond?

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This is Not Self-Plagiarism(?)

A little while back I wrote a post asking if something was an example of self-plagiarism. A person had had written a media article about a year ago. I noticed the text of that article had been copied near verbatim into a larger paper published in a scientific journal. I was uncertain if this would be considered self-plagiarism since the text originated in a non-journal article.

The obvious solution to me was to see what the journal had to say on self-plagiarism. I tried looking online to see what their policy was, but I couldn't find a clear answer. As such, I Contacted the journal to ask what their policy on self-plagiarism is in regard to matters like this. Today I'd like to review their ruling on the matter.
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Is This Self-Plagiarism?

Getting back to our discussion of the newest paper by Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook, I'd like to discuss something about the paper I have found troubling since day one. I didn't bring this up before because I wanted to contact the journal about it first. You see, the paper is titled:

The ‘Alice in Wonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism

I immediately recognized this title because it was similar to one I had seen before:

'Alice through the Looking Glass' mechanics: the rejection of (climate) science

This is the title for a media article Lewnandowsky published on October 23rd, 2015. Its text was copied nearly verbatim into the new paper. Today, I'd like to discuss whether or not that qualifies as self-plagiarism.
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Did John Cook Lie in His Doctoral Thesis?

I'm growing a bit tired of repeating the same point over and over in regard to the recent paper by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky (that they repeatdly call things contradictions even though they are not), so I decided it would be a good time to take a break and discuss something else that has been bugging me. You guys may remember this tweet:

Which wasn't actually written by Barack Obama or by anyone representing him. The group using his name for the Twitter account is Oragnizing for Action, a non-profit advocacy group which explicitly denies any affiliation with any government. When asked, "Is OFA affiliated in any way with the federal or any other government, or funded with taxpayer dollars," it says, "No."

Combined with the fact the account's profile says:

This account is run by Organizing for Action staff. Tweets from the President are signed -bo.

It should be clear President Obama had nothing to do with this tweet. Despite that, John Cook wrote this in his doctoral thesis:

Consequently, our study received a significant amount of media attention, including a number of tweets by President Obama (Cook, Bedford, & Mandia, 2014).

For today's post, I would like to discuss whether or not this was a lie.
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These Are Not Contradictions, Part Two

Yesterday's post focused on Table 1 of a recent paper by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky named "The ‘Alice in Wonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism." This came after a post focusing on Table 2 of the paper. These posts focused on these two tables because there are no other figures or tables in the paper, causing these two tables to have the largest visual impact.

It was suggested to me I was unfair in pointing out the authors offered absolutely no evidence anyone believes the contradictions in Table 1 exist, or even that the stated beliefs are contradictory. The reason is the authors did give seven examples in their text with arguments and sources to support them. There are seven of these examples, whereas Table 1 is described as:

Over one hundred incoherent pairs of arguments can be found in contrarian discourse. (See www.skepticalscience.com/contradictions.php). In this article, we have explored a representative sample in some detail. For further illustration we show several other incoherent arguments in Table 1. Each of the arguments in the table is subject to the same critical analysis as the examples in the preceding sections.

Table 1 had some 20 different examples listed, and the text discussing it referred to there being over 100 examples in total. That seemed the most relevant topic to discuss. After all, even if all seven points of contradiction discussed in the body of the paper were real, that is only seven points on which various global warming skeptics disagree. That's hardly "incoherent." You could find just as many points of disagreement on most scientific issues.

Still, it is worth discussing those seven examples. As such, I will do so in today's post.
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The (Socialist) Nazis Did It!

In our last post, we looked at how a recent paper by the proprietor of the Skeptical Science website, a man named John Cook (and two co-authors), claimed global warming skeptics hold "incoherent" beliefs by grossly misrepresenting and distorting a variety of quotes.

Specifically, Table 2 of the paper provided quotations from several different skeptics which supposedly showed those skeptics contradicting themselves. This was a key issue for the paper, which was titled "The ‘Alice in Wonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism" based on the well-known quote from the story Alice and Wonderland:

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

This is the key concept for the paper. It's entire concept rests on the idea skeptics hold "incoherent" beliefs because they are willing to and capable of holding contradictory beliefs at the same time. The evidence they offer to support this claim is bogus though. We can tell just by looking at Nazis.
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These Are Not Contradictions

As I discussed in the last post, a new paper titled, "The ‘Alice in Wonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism" with John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky has a number of problems, including the one where Cook falsely claimed his own work and the work of others shows there is a consensus global warming is a "global problem." Cook and his co-authors know fully well none of the work they cite shows anything of the sort.

Another issue I commented on is how the paper claims global warming "contrarians" have incoherent belief systems in which they are content to believe contradictory things. This concept is founded on a paper by Michael Wood in which he misused basic statistical tests to draw conclusions about groups of people he had 0 data for. Lewandowsky has also used this same bogus approach to statistics in papers to portray global warming skeptics are conspiracy nuts even when his subjects overwhelmingly said they didn't believe in the conspiracies he smeared them with.

A related issue to this is how these authors give specific examples of how "contrarians" supposedly contradict themselves. In the previous post, I pointed out one key problem to this - the paper cites arguments from different people. That two different "contrarians" might hold contradictory beliefs is completely uninformative. Even climate scientists hold contradictory beliefs. It's called disagreement. It's a normal part of life.

Given that, the only real basis for this paper's headline is the set of examples where an individual supposedly contradicts himself. I discussed the headline example used in the paper in that last post, but today, I'm going to discuss a few of the other ones the authors offer.
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A New Consensus Paper, at First Blush

Today I wasted $15. I had seen this tweet by Skeptical Science team member Andy Skuce:

So naturally, I took a look at the paper he's promoting. The paper begins with two quotes:

“CO2CO2 keeps our planet warm ....”
— Ian Plimer, Australian climate “skeptic”, Heaven & Earth, p. 411
“Temperature and CO2CO2 are not connected.”
— Ian Plimer, Australian climate “skeptic”, Heaven & Earth, p. 278

It makes hay of how these two quotes are contradictory and a perfect example of how "contrarians" will believe multiple, contradictory things at the same time. This is a commom meme people like Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook have been trying to spread, and There is history with them using completely bogus "evidence" to make their case.

Given that, I decided to check the quotations for myself. I needn't have bothered though. It turns out the issue here is exactly what you would likely expect. So you don't have to spend $15 yourself, I'll explain.
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Consensus Chart Craziness - Part 4

We've been discussing a strange chart from a recent paper published by John Cook of Skeptical Science and many others. The chart ostensibly shows the consensus on global warming increases with a person's expertise. To "prove" this claim, Cook et al assigned "expertise" levels to a variety of "consensus estimates" they took from various papers. You can see the results in the chart below, which I've added lines to to show each category:

4_13_scaling_example

As you can see, the "consensus estimates" are all plotted one next to the other, without concern for how the categories are spaced. The result is Category 4 doesn't exist in the chart, and Category 5 covers more than half of the chart. This creates a vastly distorted impression of the results.

But while that is a damning problem in and of itself, there is much more wrong with the chart and corresponding paper. One of the key issues we've been looking at in this series is how Cook et al arbitrarily chose which results from the studies it examined to report and which ones not to. Today I'd like to discuss one of the most severe cases of this. It deals with the paper Verheggent et al (2014).
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Consensus Chart Craziness - Part 3

Our last post continued examining a very strange chart from a recent paper by John Cook of Skeptical Science and many other people. The chart ostensibly shows the consensus on global warming increases with a person's expertise. To "prove" this claim, Cook et al assigned "expertise" levels to a variety of "consensus estimates" they took from various papers. You can see the results in the chart below, which I've added lines to to show each category:

4_13_scaling_example

As you can see, the "consensus estimates" are all plotted one next to the other, without concern for how the categories are spaced. The result is Category 4 doesn't exist in the chart, and Category 5 covers more than half of the chart. This creates a vastly distorted impression of the results which, if displayed properly, would look something like:

4_13_scaling_proper

The last post in this little series shows there is even more wrong with the chart. Cook et al openly state the "expertise" values they used were assigned in a subjective manner, with no objective criteria or formal guidelines. In effect, they just assigned whatever "expertise" level they felt like to each "consensus estimate" then plotted the results in a chart where they chose not to show the expertise levels they had chosen.

The arbitrary assignment of these "expertise" levels is an interesting topic which I intend to cover in more detail in a future post as a number of the decisions they made are rather bizarre, but for today, I'd like to discuss something else Cook et al did. Namely, I'd like to discuss how Cook et al arbitrarily chose to exclude some results while including others.
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