Skeptical Science

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Skeptical Science
Skepticalscience.jpg
Type of site
Blog
Available in English, Czech, Finnish, Spanish, German, Danish, Icelandic, Polish, Portuguese, Japanese, Dutch, Chinese, French, Italian, Thai, Slovak, Russian, Hebrew, Slovene, Norwegian
Created byJohn Cook
URL skepticalscience.com
Launched25 June 2007

Skeptical Science (occasionally abbreviated SkS) is a climate science blog and information resource created in 2007 by Australian former cartoonist and web developer, John Cook, [1] [2] [3] who received a PhD degree in cognitive science in 2016. [4] In addition to publishing articles on current events relating to climate science and climate policy, the site maintains a database of articles analyzing the merit of arguments put forth by those who oppose the mainstream scientific opinion on climate change.

Contents

Concept

John Cook CSICon 2018 Taking on Fake News About Climate Change John Cook CSICon 2018 Taking On Fake News About Climate Change.jpg
John Cook CSICon 2018 Taking on Fake News About Climate Change

After reading a 2007 speech by then US Senator Jim Inhofe, who maintains that global warming is a hoax, John Cook created Skeptical Science as an internet resource to counter common arguments by climate change deniers. [3] The site hosts various articles addressing the merit of common objections to the scientific consensus on global warming, such as the claim that solar activity (rather than greenhouse gases) is responsible for most 20th and 21st century global warming, or that global warming is natural and/or not harmful to humans. Each article, referred to as an "argument", presents a quotation from a prominent figure who made a direct claim regarding global warming, and follows with a summary of "what the science says".

Rather than fully qualifying each claim, the site focuses on challenging it by citing counterexamples for why it is incorrect, and structuring the examples into a rebuttal of the original claim. The site primarily gains the content for these articles from peer reviewed scientific papers. [5] Many articles have been translated into other languages, and are split into up to three levels of technical depth. [3]

The Skeptical Science home page also features blog posts by regular and guest contributors, which may be new rebuttals of a certain argument or simply the blogger's view on a relevant climate news item. [6] Like the rebuttals, the blog entries tend to hold a consistent tone that the scientific opinion on anthropogenic global warming is generally accurate. [7]

Skeptical Science app on the Android operating system SkS Android.png
Skeptical Science app on the Android operating system
Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand book cover Climate Change Denial - Heads in the Sand - text only.jpg
Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand book cover

In 2010, along with software development company Shine Technologies, Skeptical Science launched a free smartphone application that includes condensed summaries of most rebuttals featured on the site. [8] [9]

Projects

In addition to uncategorized blog posts, the site has published many multi-week features that serve to give a more in-depth analysis of a particular topic. Topics which have received special attention include a feature describing "climate 'myths" promoted by many US politicians, a feature examining the accuracy of past predictions made by scientists studying global warming, as well as individual features to evaluate the claims made by the most prominent individuals who reject evidence that supports human-caused global warming, [10] including Richard Lindzen, [11] John Christy, [12] and Christopher Monckton. [13]

In 2010, a comprehensive report called The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism was made available from Skeptical Science. [14] Written by Cook and other authors, the report draws from various rebuttals published and summarizes the evidence for global warming and the flaws in many of the objections to the scientific consensus on climate change. [15]

In May 2013, Cook and other contributors published a paper in Environmental Research Letters (ERL) examining the scientific consensus on global warming in peer reviewed papers published between 1991–2011. [16] The paper was widely cited across hundreds of newspapers, magazines, blog posts, and scientific papers. [17] It also ranked as the 11th most-discussed scientific paper of 2013. [18] The paper was awarded the 'Best article of 2013' prize by the editorial board of ERL. [19]

In 2013, Skeptical Science established a sister website – The Consensus Project. [20] This website promoted public awareness of the reported high degree of scientific consensus around global warming, in contrast with a public perception of still widespread debate; this has been called the Consensus Gap, [21] which is also delineated in the Gateway Belief Model. The website was created pro-bono by design and advertising firm SJI Associates.

In 2013, Skeptical Science released a 'software widget' to highlight the accumulation of heat within the Earth's climate systems. The widget counts up the added heat from a user definable start date using several different real-world scales of measurement – Hiroshima bombs of equivalent heat, Hurricane Sandy's, 6.0 Richter scale earthquakes, 'Big Ben's full of dynamite or millions of lightning bolts. [22] An associated website, 4hiroshimas.info, [23] provides background information including references to the scientific papers the count is based on.

In 2015, Skeptical Science launched a massive open online course on EdX called "Making Sense of Climate Science Denial". [24]

Reception and motivation

Skeptical Science has become a resource about climate change, and praised for its straightforwardness. [25] Marine biologist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg has described it as "the most prominent knowledge-based website dealing with climate change in the world", [26] and The Washington Post has praised it as the "most prominent and detailed" website to counter arguments by global warming deniers. [27] In September 2011, the site won the 2011 Eureka Prize from the Australian Museum in the category of Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge. [28]

Cook is trained as a solar physicist and says he is motivated by his Christian beliefs. [29] He is one of a number of Christians publicly arguing for scientific findings on anthropogenic global warming, and is an evangelical Christian. [30]

Funding

Skeptical Science is not affiliated with any political, business, or charitable entities. [31] The site does not contain banner ads and is funded entirely by Cook himself [3]

In November 2020, Skeptical Science was registered as a nonprofit organization, and officially recognized in March 2021 as a 501(c)3 nonprofit, tax-exempt organization by the IRS. [32]

See also

Related Research Articles

Richard Siegmund Lindzen is an American atmospheric physicist known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photochemistry. He is the author of more than 200 scientific papers. From 1972 to 1982, he served as the Gordon McKay Professor of Dynamic Meteorology at Harvard University. In 1983, he was appointed as the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he would remain until his retirement in 2013. Lindzen has disputed the scientific consensus on climate change and criticizes what he has called "climate alarmism".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scientific consensus on climate change</span> Evaluation of climate change by the scientific community

There is a strong scientific consensus that the Earth has been consistently warming since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and the rate of recent warming is largely unprecedented. This warming is mainly caused by the rapid increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) since 1750 from human activities such as fossil fuel combustion, cement production, and land use changes such as deforestation, with a significant supporting role from the other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide. This human role in climate change is now considered "unequivocal" and "incontrovertible".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roy Spencer (meteorologist)</span>

Roy Warren Spencer is an American meteorologist. He is a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, and the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite. He has served as senior scientist for climate studies at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. He is known for his satellite-based temperature monitoring work, for which he was awarded the American Meteorological Society's Special Award. Spencer disagrees with the scientific consensus that most global warming in the past 50 years is the result of human activity, instead believing that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have caused some warming, but that influence is small compared to natural variations in global average cloud cover.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">George C. Marshall Institute</span> Former American nonprofit conservative think tank

The George C. Marshall Institute (GMI) was a nonprofit conservative think tank in the United States. It was established in 1984 with a focus on science and public policy issues and had an initial focus in defense policy. Starting in the late 1980s, the institute advocated for views in line with environmental skepticism, most notably climate change denial. The think tank received extensive financial support from the fossil fuel industry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert M. Carter</span>

Robert Merlin Carter was an English palaeontologist, stratigrapher and marine geologist. He was professor and head of the School of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Australia from 1981 to 1998, and was prominent in promoting climate change denial.

Friends of Science(FoS) is a non-profit advocacy organization based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. The organization rejects the established scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for the currently observed global warming. Rather, they propose that "the Sun is the main direct and indirect driver of climate change," not human activity. They argued against the Kyoto Protocol. The society was founded in 2002 and launched its website in October of that year. They are largely funded by the fossil fuel industry.

<i>The Great Global Warming Swindle</i> British TV series or programme

The Great Global Warming Swindle is a 2007 British polemical documentary film directed by Martin Durkin. The film denies the scientific consensus about the reality and causes of climate change, justifying this by suggesting that climatology is influenced by funding and political factors. The program was formally criticised by Ofcom, the UK broadcasting regulatory agency, which ruled the film failed to uphold due impartiality and upheld complaints of misrepresentation made by David King, who appeared in the film.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Delingpole</span> English writer (born 1965)

James Mark Court Delingpole is an English writer, journalist, and columnist who has written for a number of publications, including the Daily Mail, the Daily Express, The Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Spectator. He is a former executive editor for Breitbart London, and has published several novels and four political books. He describes himself as a libertarian conservative. He has frequently published articles promoting climate change denial and expressing opposition to wind power.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climate change denial</span> Denial of the scientific consensus on climate change

Climate change denial is a form of science denial characterized by rejecting, refusing to acknowledge, disputing, or fighting the scientific consensus on climate change. Those promoting denial commonly use rhetorical tactics to give the appearance of a scientific controversy where there is none. Climate change denial includes unreasonable doubts about the extent to which climate change is caused by humans, its effects on nature and human society, and the potential of adaptation to global warming by human actions. To a lesser extent, climate change denial can also be implicit when people accept the science but fail to reconcile it with their belief or action. Several studies have analyzed these positions as forms of denialism, pseudoscience, or propaganda.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Anthony Watts (blogger)</span> American blogger (born 1958)

Willard Anthony Watts is an American blogger who runs Watts Up With That?, a climate change denial blog that opposes the scientific consensus on climate change. A former television meteorologist and current radio meteorologist, he is also founder of the Surface Stations project, a volunteer initiative to document the condition of U.S. weather stations. The Heartland Institute helped fund some of Watts' projects, including publishing a report on the Surface Stations project, and invited him to be a paid speaker at its International Conference on Climate Change from 2008 to 2014.

<i>The Deniers</i> 2008 book by Lawrence Solomon

The Deniers is a 2008 book by Lawrence Solomon, a Canadian environmentalist and writer. Subtitled "The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud," the book draws attention to a number of scientists and others who, according to Solomon, have advanced arguments against what he calls the "alarmist" view of global warming, as presented by Al Gore, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the mainstream media, and others. The book is based on a series of columns Solomon wrote for Canada's National Post. It has been criticized for misquoting the scientists it featured.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Climatic Research Unit documents</span>

Climatic Research Unit documents including thousands of e-mails and other computer files were stolen from a server at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in a hacking incident in November 2009. The documents were redistributed first through several blogs of global warming deniers, who alleged that the documents indicated misconduct by leading climate scientists. A series of investigations rejected these allegations, while concluding that CRU scientists should have been more open with distributing data and methods on request. Precisely six committees investigated the allegations and published reports, finding no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct. The scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity remained unchanged by the end of the investigations.

Watts Up With That? (WUWT) is a blog promoting climate change denial that was created by Anthony Watts in 2006.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judith Curry</span> American climatologist (born c. 1953)

Judith A. Curry is an American climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research interests include hurricanes, remote sensing, atmospheric modeling, polar climates, air-sea interactions, climate models, and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for atmospheric research. She was a member of the National Research Council's Climate Research Committee, published over a hundred scientific papers, and co-edited several major works. Curry retired from academia in 2017 at age 63, coinciding with her public climate change skepticism.

<i>The Hockey Stick Illusion</i> 2010 book by Andrew Montford

The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science is a book written by Andrew Montford and published by Stacey International in 2010, which promotes climate change denial.

Timothy Francis Ball was a British-born Canadian public speaker and writer who was a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Winnipeg from 1971 until his retirement in 1996. Subsequently Ball became active in promoting rejection of the scientific consensus on global warming, giving public talks and writing opinion pieces and letters to the editor for Canadian newspapers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Stephan Lewandowsky</span> Australian psychologist

Stephan Lewandowsky is an Australian psychologist. He has worked in both the United States and Australia, and is currently based at the University of Bristol, UK, where he is the chair of cognitive psychology at the School of Psychological Science. His research, which originally pertained to computer simulations of people's decision-making processes, recently has focused on the public's understanding of science and why people often embrace beliefs that are sharply at odds with scientific evidence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James L. Powell</span> American geologist and writer (born 1936)

James Lawrence Powell is an American geologist, writer, former college president and museum director. He chaired the geology department at Oberlin College later serving as its provost and president. Powell also served as president of Franklin & Marshall College as well as Reed College. Following his positions in higher education, Powell presided over the Franklin Institute and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

<i>Climate Change Denial</i> 2011 book by Haydn Washington and John Cook

Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand is a 2011 non-fiction book about climate-change denial, coauthored by Haydn Washington and John Cook, with a foreword by Naomi Oreskes. Washington had a background in environmental science prior to authoring the work; Cook, educated in physics, founded (2007) the website Skeptical Science, which compiles peer-reviewed evidence of global warming. The book was first published in hardcover and paperback formats in 2011 by Earthscan, a division of Routledge.

References

  1. "About Skeptical Science". 13 December 2007. Archived from the original on 13 December 2007. Retrieved 28 March 2020.
  2. "Sev". 11 October 2007. Archived from the original on 11 October 2007. Retrieved 28 March 2020.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Bud Ward (2 December 2010). "Skeptical Science Founder John Cook; Climate Science from 'Basic … to Advanced'". The Yale Forum. Archived from the original on 6 December 2010.
  4. George Mason University, Center for Climate change communication John Cook
  5. Cook, John (28 April 2011). "How climate change deniers led me to set up Skeptical Science website". The Guardian . London.
  6. Vaidyanathan, Gayathri; ClimateWire. "How to Determine the Scientific Consensus on Global Warming". Scientific American. Retrieved 2 April 2020.
  7. Liu, Dennis W. C. (2012). "Science Denial and the Science Classroom". CBE: Life Sciences Education. 11 (2): 129–134. doi:10.1187/cbe.12-03-0029. ISSN   1931-7913. PMC   3366896 . PMID   22665586.
  8. Emami, Gazelle (17 February 2010). "Skeptical Science iPhone App: Knocking Out Climate Skepticism, One Argument at a Time". HuffPost .
  9. Mark Johnson (11 February 2010). "Shine builds Skeptical Science iPhone App". Shine Technologies. Archived from the original on 14 February 2010.
  10. "Skepticalscience.com … A Valuable 'App'". Yale Climate Connections. 8 April 2010.
  11. "A disservice to the scientific method: climate scientists take on Richard Lindzen". Carbon Brief: Clear on Climate. 4 April 2012.
  12. Romm, Joe (17 July 2014). "Quoting John Christy on Climate Change Is Like Quoting Dick Cheney on Iraq". Think Progress.
  13. Cook, John (28 April 2011). "How climate change deniers led me to set up Skeptical Science website". The Guardian.
  14. Kieran Mulvaney (31 December 2010). "For New Year's Resolution: Climate Change Perspective". Discovery Channel News .
  15. Matthew McDermott (27 December 2010). "Human-Caused Climate Change Based on Consensus of Evidence, Not Just Consensus of Scientists". TreeHugger .
  16. Cook, J.; Nuccitelli, D.; Green, S. A.; Richardson, M.; Winkler, B. R.; Painting, R.; Way, R.; Jacobs, P.; Skuce, A. (2013). "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature" (PDF). Environmental Research Letters . 8 (2): 024024. Bibcode:2013ERL.....8b4024C. doi: 10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024 .
  17. "Media Coverage of The Consensus Project". Skeptical Science.
  18. "Which academic research caught the public imagination in 2013?". Altmetric . 31 December 2013.
  19. "Skeptical Science consensus paper voted ERL's best article of 2013". Skeptical Science. 21 April 2014.
  20. John Cook (16 May 2013). "Skeptical Science Study Finds 97% Consensus on Human-Caused Global Warming in the Peer-Reviewed Literature". The Consensus Project.
  21. Climate Commission. "Closing the Consensus Gap". Climate Commission . Archived from the original on 16 September 2014. Retrieved 16 September 2014.
  22. John Cook & Bob Lacatena (25 November 2013). "4 Hiroshima bombs per second: a widget to raise awareness about global warming". Skeptical Science.
  23. Bob Lacatena (25 November 2013). "4 Hiroshimas". Skeptical Science.
  24. UQx Denial 101x Making Sense of Climate Science Denial" Course and videos on Youtube
  25. Andrew Revkin (24 March 2010). "A Physics Maven's Take on Skeptical Science". The New York Times .
  26. "What scientists are saying about Skeptical Science". Skeptical Science. 9 May 2011.
  27. Andrew Freedman (8 November 2010). "Scientists launch climate science counterattacks". The Washington Post .
  28. Katie McMurray (10 September 2011). "Debunking Climate Lies No Longer Hit and Myth". Australian Museum . Archived from the original on 14 July 2012.
  29. Graham Wayne (25 August 2010). "Why would a solar physicist embrace the non-rationality of religion?". The Guardian . London.
  30. Neela Banerjee (5 January 2011). "Scientist proves conservatism and belief in climate change aren't incompatible". Los Angeles Times .
  31. Cook, John. "About Skeptical Science". Skeptical Science.
  32. "Skeptical Science to expand impact as 501(c)(3) non-profit". Skeptical Science. Retrieved 28 June 2021.