John Cook found a "simply clever" albeit not quite ethical (and legal?) way to raise his IQ by 60 points



Steve McIntyre has informed me about some amusing discussions in 2011 and I simply can't resist to brag about them ;-) especially because this incident says quite something about the integrity of the climate doomsayers (more precisely about the non-existence of it).



John Cook is the founder of one of the world's most famous "Sky Is Falling" websites about global warming, SkepticalScience.COM. The name of the web wants to express the point that the climate skeptics shouldn't even be allowed to use the term "skeptics". They only deserve expletives while the "true skeptics" are the champions of panic such as Cook himself. He is a typical example of the alarmist "grassroots movement" who has no relevant education (his top academic achievement is to have been a "former student" – in other words, a dropout) and no significant intelligence but whose persistent activism – in combination with the pathologically corrupt atmosphere in many institutions that favor "a certain kind of views" – has allowed him to become something like an "honorary scientist" and to have earned a huge amount of money, too.



Sometimes in 2010, he began with his "essay debunking skeptics' 100 or so talking points" which I decided to reply to at one moment. It was largely a waste of time but it's true that the TRF blog post I just linked to has collected 13,000 views, significantly above the TRF average. You find a dozen of additional TRF blog posts with his name.









For example, in August 2011, I mentioned his highly surprising success in the "Eureka Award" for science communicators:



John Cook, a prolific hardcore crackpot and one of the numerous tiny Internet-based stalking appendices of your humble correspondent, will share AUD $240,000 for his climate propaganda:



Eureka moment for leading climate change communicator



This guy has no clue about the climate science or atmospheric physics but he has gained some notoriety for...



John Cook: ... If a few more agree with the idea of this blog post (noting it won't directly engage Watts or even mention him, it'll be a general discussion post) and the direction I propose we go with the d-word issue, I'll have a crack at writing it over the next day.



EDIT: sorry, accidentally posted this under my Lubos_Motl username, sorry for any confusion :-(

...

Tim Curtis: would you please stop posting as Lubos Motl. There is reason to doubt his sanity, so I don't like seeing his name. Further, it is his name, and therefore one you are not entitled to use.

...

Rob Honeycutt [a co-author of John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Stephan Lewandowsky, and others]: John... You freak me out every time Lubos Motl's name pops up!

...

John Cook: Sorry about the Lubos thing. Was posting some Lubos comments for the UWA experiment and forgot to log back in as John Cook.



For the record, if just one or two of you SkSers jumped over to the Technical Forum and posted some comments to the 4 Experiment Conditions, I'd get my 10 comments and wouldn't have to log in as Lubos anymore. Only one or two more comments required to get the quota. Just some incentive for you :-)



EDIT: one of the conditions now has 10 comments, so only 3 more threads (with 2 of them only requiring one more comment). So Lubos very close to being put to bed :-)



EDIT: only one more thread to go...



Lubos_Motl: Ocean acidification is a strong sign that humans are raising CO2 levels. But it's also a grave environmental concern as the acidification is causing damage to coral reefs which are some of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. Adding insult to injury, the increased CO2 causes warming which is causing further damage to the coral reefs through bleaching. Corals provide both evidence for man-made global warming and concern over its impacts.

Lubos_Motl: The past tells us much about what our future holds in store for us. In the past, when the Earth was warmer than it is now, sea levels were metres higher than current levels. So just on the sea level front alone, we can expect severe impacts on the vast majority of the human population living on coastlines. The past also describes these concerning feedback events, where warmer temperatures lead to further release of greenhouse gases. We're already seeing this start to happen in the Arctic, with methane bubbling from the permafrost and methane clathrates. The past paints a vivid picture of our future and it's a picture of great concern.



Lubos_Motl: Cherry picking: What this post fails to mention is other factors also affect climate. Urban heat island also causes nights to warm faster than days. Ozone depletion causes the stratosphere to cool. This supposed evidence is just cherry picking supporting evidence and hiding the rest.

...

The article also cites ocean warming as evidence, and yet ocean warming has stalled since 2003. As more than 90% of global warming is going into the oceans, which means ocean heat is the best measure for global warming, the conclusion is obvious - humans can't be causing global warming because global warming isn't happening!

...

Good point re cosmic rays. The simplistic argument that the sun can't cause global warming only looks at one possible link between sun and climate - total solar irradiance. But the relationship between the sun and our climate is much more complicated than that, as the solar magnetic field modulates the amount of cosmic radiation hitting the earth. This affects cloud formation which also interacts with our climate in complicated ways, with lower clouds causing cooling and higher clouds causing warming. A prettily coloured graphic created for young children doesn't even begin to capture the complexities of our climate system.

Lubos_Motl: It's hilarious that this article cites Usoskin 2005. That paper concludes that over the last few decades, the correlation between sun and climate breaks down. Therefore, recent warming must have some other cause. This article's own sources debunk its assertion that the sun is causing global warming!

...

The full truth about the percentage of CO2 is that over 99% of the atmosphere is oxygen and nitrogen, both gases which are not greenhouse gases. So the fact that CO2 is a small percentage is irrelevant to the strength of its greenhouse effect. It's like holding an election in a town of 1000 people where only 10 people vote. They may only be a small number but each individual has a significant effect. It's the same with CO2. Of course, you don't have to take my word for it - what do measurements find? Both planes and satellites measure heat as it escapes to space and both find a big bite out of the outgoing heat, at precisely the wavelengths that CO2 absorbs heat. The greenhouse effect is an empirically observed fact.

Lubos_Motl: Good point re the co2 lag. Not only was co2 higher in the past, it also lags temperature, showing temperature drives co2, not the other way around. The ice core record is not kind to the warmist agenda.

...

Good point re the number of scientists. The alarmists like to boast about there being 2500 scientists who wrote the IPCC report. But the number of skeptic scientists is AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE greater than the number of alarmist scientists. Not only there is still a debate, the weight of opinion leans heavily towards the skeptic point of view. This article presents the compelling evidence that explains why.

...

John Cook: Note re Lubos Motl: I won't use the name Lubos Motl or any of our names in the final webpage used in the experiment (so the last two comments by Rob and Steve won't be used, I'm afraid).



I mentioned that he was a stalking appendix of your humble correspondent but when I was writing that sentence, I didn't realize how literally true this statement of mine was!At the end of September 2011, just when he was sharing those $240,000 for spreading the "information about the climate change", he was discussing things with his fellow climate warriors at the Skeptical Science Forums, a website affiliated with his SkepticalScience.COM. The website was "closed" and only accessible to the community of Cook's friends, not publicly available at that moment, but its content became available to search engines later; the server linked to below contains a precise, bit-wise copy of the pages that Cook et al. had created. Steve sent me five interesting examples of the forum pages:Today, one hour ago, was the first time when I was seeing these pages but interestingly enough, you may find lots of things over there posted by Lubos_Motl. And this Lubos_Motl happens to use the e-mail address jc@sks... and the same IP addresses as another, less prolific participant of those discussions, John Cook! ;-)Interestingly, you may find 33 pages with Motl on that server. Most of them try very hard to be unflattering towards me but I admit that their fascination with your humble correspondent flatters me, anyway. Motl is Poptech with brain Motl (with Lindzen) made Phil Jones admit that there was no warming since 1995 – this is actually mostly true . And Motl is the hacker who created the ClimateGate – happy to see this idea, whether it's true or not; I was disappointed by the fellow skeptics that no one has had proposed this idea before Honeycutt, Cook et al. The detective was disappointed for a similar reason. ;-)In the first thread from the blockquote 10 lines above – a page consisting of comments about the possible influence of the Sun on the hockey stick and exchanges about a planned alarmists' letter to Anthony Watts analyzing the meaning of the word "denier" – we read:Could we please learn what was the "UWA [The University of Western Australia] experiment" with the people such as myself? How was my name (used without my permission) helpful for this experiment and for the "quotas"? Which other names have been used in this way? By the way, UWA happens to be the university where Stephan Lewandowsky works. He has authored several papers claiming that skeptics believe in staged moonlanding and similar things. Have Cook's fake identities been used in some of these "UWA experiments"?Minutes before this September 26th, 2011 commitment, we were reading these comments in the other threads:Well, you can figure out that these paragraphs were written by a scientifically illiterate person rather than Luboš Motl – because you are a TRF reader (these topics have been sensibly and repeatedly covered on this blog) – but what about others? In Parts 2–4 of the other thread, the same Lubos_Motl wrote lots of other things:It's rather likely that this list isn't complete. Not bad, I have authored many more texts than I could ever realize! You may see that John Cook literally believed that Lubos Motl was one of "his or their names"! What were the other "our names"? How have these names been used?Because John Cook has committed identity theft, won various grants and prizes, and his wrongdoing has been revealed, I demand all the funds – like his share of those $240,000 in 2011 – to be sent back where they belong, namely to my account. ;-) It's just some $240,000 and you will increase your chance that you won't spend the rest of your life in prison, despite your being a fraudster, and a very incompetent one.Thank you very much, crook and kook Cook!More seriously, this really goes beyond the usual – somewhat vague – accusations of distortions, bias, and misconduct in the alarmists' texts and research. The immoral character of this usage of other people's names for "UWA experiments" must be transparent to every schoolkid. There is nothing debatable about it.And while John Cook would have zero influence in a sane meritocratic world, we didn't really cherry-pick him in order to make the climate movement look worse than it actually is. John Cook indeed is one of the symbols of climate alarmism – and perhaps the world's #1 driver of the movement among the younger generations. For example, he is a co-author of a (totally bogus) study about the "97% consensus" that was enthusiastically linked to by climate activists across the world, including the president of the United States of America . Barack Obama had over 30 million Twitter followers which made Cook very happy (these days, Obama has over 60 million). Doesn't anyone feel uncomfortable when the most powerful politician in the world builds his multi-trillion policies on research by an individual who has demonstrably exploited identity theft and fabrication of sociological data in closely related, if not the same, "research" and "experiments"?And the rest of you: Think twice before you trust anything that a climate alarmist tells you. Your deep skepticism must start when he or she says "hello" or when he or she is introduced by his or her name. Taking any statement by a climate alarmist at face value may be as foolish as an interaction with the Nigerian e-mail scams – and much more costly.User names may be fake but everything you hear from these people are carefully crafted lies. You should always appreciate that everything they tell you could have been optimized by several climate warriors and dozens of their sockpuppets at a similar (temporarily?) secret forum. Climate alarmism is a big industry, a mass production of lies, insults, and tools to hurt innocent people, honest scientists, and the global economy.