Hey guys. Today's post is an interesting one. As you guys may know, I've been accused of hacking Skeptical Science on occasion, and while it isn't true, I have had a history of finding things they post in publicly accessible locations which they would like nobody to see.

I've done that again. This time, I found a "CONFIDENTIAL" manuscript (archived here) the Skeptical Science group has apparently submitted for publication with a scientific journal. I don't know if the manuscript has been accepted, rejected or is still under review, but the fact they posted it in a publicly accessible location when it was supposed to be kept confidential is rather amusing.

I also found a copy of John Cook's PhD thesis (archived here), which I find incredibly lackluster. If it can earn him a PhD, then I don't think PhDs mean much of anything. I imagine he'll update it and improve it before actually submitting it, but I can't imagine any way in which it could be made not to... well, suck. And that's not just because he's wrong in a lot of what he says in it. Even if I agreed with his conclusions, I'd still say it was unimpressive.

In any event, this latest discovery has given me the motivation and material to finish an eBook I've been wanting to publish for a while now. You can find it here:

It's a bit more personal than the last two eBooks I wrote, as I was directly involved in much of what it discusses, but I'd like to think I found a good balance to keep it from just being a mini-biography. I hope you'll agree. If you don't want to risk 99 cents to find out, you can download a free PDF copy here

Now like my last two eBooks, this one is ~10,000 words long, so it shouldn't take too long to get through. Unlike the last two, it doesn't really cover any technical subjects so it should be easier to follow (though I'd like to think the others were easy enough to follow). It also doesn't cover everything as there are tons of topics and points I'd have liked to discuss but only so much room. I'd like to think I hit the most important points though.

Of course, with me having only recently discovered the latest paper by the Skeptical Science group, this eBook doesn't cover all the issues it might have. Because of that, I highly recommend people check out the paper themselves. The author list alone should prove it will be interesting:

John Cook1,2,3, Naomi Oreskes4, Peter T. Doran5, William R. L. Anderegg6,7, Bart Verheggen8, Ed W. Maibach9, J. Stuart Carlton10, Stephan Lewandowsky11,2, Andrew G. Skuce13, Sarah A. Green12, Dana Nuccitelli3, Peter Jacobs9, Mark Richardson14, Bärbel Winkler3, Rob Painting3, Ken Rice15

The normal Cook et al group is there, but so are people like Ken Rice, also known as the blogger Anders and Stephan Lewandowsky, famous for finding global warming skeptics are conspiracy nuts by taking basically no data and just assuming the lack of data proved his preconceived beliefs.

But what makes this paper truly remarkable is what these people say. For instance, while the Skeptical Science group had previously portrayed their consensus findings as being based on people having only read the title and abstracts for various papers, this paper now admits:

During the rating process of C13, raters were presented only with the paper title and abstract to base their rating on. Tol (2015) queries what steps were taken to prevent raters from gathering additional information. While there was no practical way of preventing such an outcome, raters conducted further investigation by perusing the full paper on only a few occasions, usually to clarify ambiguous abstract language.

The raters cheated. They looked at information they weren't supposed to look at when doing their ratings. They openly discussed having done so in their forums, with neither John Cook nor any other author of the paper speaking up to say it was wrong. And then, for years, they pretended this never happened.

But now, they insist everything is okay because the raters only cheated a few times. They offer no evidence for this claim, and it would be completely impossible to know the claim is true. Even so, they want to publish this under with expectation people should just trust them.

Similarly, they both acknowledge and distort another issue:

Raters had access to a private discussion forum which was used to design the study, distribute rating guidelines and organise analysis and writing of the paper. As stated in C13: "some subjectivity is inherent in the abstract rating process. While criteria for determining ratings were defined prior to the rating period, some clarifications and amendments were required as specific situations presented themselves". These "specific situations" were raised in the forum.

The raters didn't just talk to one another about clarifications and amendments. That's an obvious misrepresentation anyone who actually read what they said to one another in their forums would know is false. On a number of occasions, raters simply asked one another how they would rate papers, not saying a word about wanting any standards or guidelines clarified.

But even with that distortion in place, this admission is huge. The original Skeptical Science consensus paper stressed that the raters were independent of one another. That's a huge stretch given they were all members of the same activist group, were mostly friends with one another and were in direct communication with one another. It's an impossible stretch, however, once you admit they were talking to one another about how to perform the ratings they were supposedly doing independently.

What's perhaps most interesting, however, is Table 1 of this new paper. It lists a number of papers supposedly finding a consensus on global warming, and in it, there is a column for "Definition of consensus." This would have been a perfect opportunity to highlight and contrast the various definitions of the global warming consensus, explicitly stating what Cook et al had found. It doesn't. Instead of giving any explicit definition, they just copy the rating categories:

1. Explicitly states that humans are

the primary cause of recent global

warming

2. Explicitly states humans are

causing global warming

3. Implies humans are causing global

warming.

4a. Does not address or mention the

cause of global warming

4b. Expresses position that human’s

role on recent global warming is

uncertain/undefined

5. Implies humans have had a

minimal impact on global warming

without saying so explicitly

6. Explicitly minimizes or rejects that

humans are causing global warming

7. Explicitly states that humans are

causing less than half of global

warming

Intentionally not explaining what consensus definition you get when you combine these categories. This is interesting mostly because if one looks at the rest of Table 1, they see no other paper gets a 97% consensus without using a weak definition or arbitrarily limiting what portions of its results to use. Instead, you get values as low as 40% or as high as 93%. In many ways, this paper shows there is no meaningful 97% consensus.

Of course, its authors would never say so. They'll try to spin everything they find to support their consensus message, even if that means trying to excuse what were basically lies about the methodology of papers. Cook's PhD thesis is perhaps worse, with it repeating a number of falsehoods and even re-using at least one quote he knows fully well has been fabricated.

But to be honest, the thing I find most fascinating is I found these documents in the exact same way I found the Skeptical Science consensus paper's data. The Skeptical Science group called me a criminal who had hacked into their server to get that data. If what I did then was hacking, why would they still allow anyone to do it and find new material? Why are they posting "CONFIDENTIAL" material in publicly accessible locations then handing out the URL to that material?

It's mind-boggling. I'm sure some people will claim I've "hacked" Skeptical Science again, but come on! It's been over a year since I described exactly how I found the secret material last time. Why can I still find more secret material in the exact same way?! That the consensus message is being crafted by people this incompetent is dumbfounding.

Anyway, feel free to give my new eBook a look and tell me what you think. It's fine even if you want to tell me it is complete garbage. I think most writers tell themselves the same thing plenty of times about most things they write.