UQ’s Denial 101x : Putting the stink in distinction
Guest Post By Tony Thomas*
A keen student, I have just completed Week One of John Cook’s MOOC at Queensland University: “
Denial 101x – Making Sense of Climate Science Denial.”
A MOOC is a Massive Online Open Course, and Cook’s course has 13,000 students so far. He is a Climate Communication Fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University and author of the notorious 2013 study purporting to find a
97% climate consensus in the science literature.
One normally gets a buzz from study. But my brain needs a shower and scrub to feel clean again.
I was not intending to write about my studies so early, in case that got me prematurely expelled. But one week of it is enough.
For example, in case I forget elements of Cook’s denialist ideation, he provides an acronym FLICC. This covers Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking and Conspiracy theories.
Worse is in store. Cook says, “Next week’s interviews are equally exciting, as we speak to Phil Jones from the University of East Anglia…” Jones is the author of
“pretty awful emails” (his words) in Climategate. Other stars in the Cook course firmament will be Michael “Hockey-stick” Mann and sort-of historian Naomi “Merchants of Doubt” Oreskes, who in another
book fantasizes about how warming may kill your kittens and puppies in 2023.
Cook is clearly stung by FOI and other determined requests for the data on which his work is based. He complains in his course about deniers “accusing the scientific community of falsifying their data”, and of attacking the scientists themselves via emails and blogs, hacking their personal correspondence and excessive FOIs. Incredibly, the lavishly-funded Cook plays the victim card for himself and the team – at a time when scientists like
Willie Soon are being subjected to Joseph McCarthy-style attacks. Cook says:
“Perhaps the most damage to the integrity of science comes in the form of pressure being applied to academic journals and universities.
There’s a growing body of literature into the nature of complaints being received by academic institutions…The intent is to interfere with one of the basic principles of scientific work – the freedom to responsibly conduct research and accurately communicate the results.
The immediate consequence is that some academics are now facing what amounts to scientific censorship.”
He also claims – incredibly – that fear of denialist attacks is causing climate scientists “to underestimate the impacts of climate change, in order to avoid a hostile response.”
Cook begins the course by breezily defining “denial” as coming to a conclusion first, and then discounting any evidence that conflicts with your belief. [Like what Cook does, right, says Jo, who used to believe, but changed her mind.]
Ambitiously, Cook wants to ‘reclaim’ the word sceptic from the sceptics. [No chance, says Jo who wants to reclaim the word scientist from the unskeptical believers, who hide data, declines, and pander to a "consensus". - Jo] . . .