I don’t like to use the word “fraud”, and I can’t recall if I’ve ever used it in a title. In this case it is warranted. Brandon Shollenberger writes of a new book,
The Climate Wars:How the Consensus is Enforced, that proves without a doubt that John Cook and his “Skeptical Science” team are nothing but a gang of “say anything” activists, and that the much repeated “97% consensus” is indeed nothing more than a manufactured outcome.
He writes via email:
I recently “hacked” Skeptical Science again to find CONFIDENTIAL material. By which I mean I download some PDF files from publicly accessible locations and found out one of them was a manuscript submitted for publication, which as a submitted manuscript was supposed to be kept CONFIDENTIAL. Instead, it was posted in a location anyone could access.
The paper is rather remarkable in that it admits several of the criticisms of the (in)famous Cook et al consensus paper, such as saying:
.
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.
.
Which acknowledges the raters on the project cheated and looked at material they weren’t supposed to look at (but insisting it is okay because the raters only cheated a few times, trust us). Similarly, the paper acknowledges the raters were not independent of one another like Cook et al claimed, but rather:
.
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.
.
But even this admission is a deception as anyone who looks at the forum would know fully well the discussions between raters were not merely to seek clarifications and amendments, but included raters straight up asking one another how they would rate various papers. There’s plenty more to be said about all this, and I wrote a
post about this, but I wrote a more thorough discussion in a new eBook I just published. I’ve been meaning to publish an eBook on this topic for some time, but prior to this latest discovery, I couldn’t find a way to write it properly. Now I think I have.
