Skeptical Science’s John Cook Attacks Skeptics For Doing What He Does Regularly

by Joanne Nova

Jan 29, 2019

Reading Time: 6 mins read

John Cook tries to attack skeptics for their savage jokes about cold spells. Go for it, John: we’ll believe you when you when you stop publishing stories about single hot days and tell Ph.D.’s they shouldn’t harp on about random noise like heat waves:

Forecast: flurries of shivering climate-change deniers

When a cold spell struck the east coast recently, US President Donald Trump tweeted “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”

The argument he is sarcastically implying and often makes—that global warming isn’t happening because it’s cold outside—possesses an obvious logical flaw. [No kidding]. It’s like arguing that the sun no longer exists when it gets dark at night.

Of course, Trump didn’t invent this argument—it’s commonly brought up on denier blogs and social media threads whenever the weather turns cold.

This type of fallacious reasoning is not just common on believer blogs, it’s their bread and butter.

Trump was being sarcastic. Skeptics are making jokes — but what excuse can anyone make for paid Ph.D.’s who are serious?

Let’s swap the hot’s and cold’s of Cooks own words (mine bolded):

The argument that PhD’s seriously imply and often make—that global warming is happening because it’s hot, flooding, extreme, drought-stricken, rainy, windy, wavy or otherwise not exactly average outside—possesses an obvious logical flaw. It’s like arguing that any weather we get must be caused by our coal plants because we can’t think what else might have caused it.

Worse, it’s like saying that every bushfire, bleached reef and reckless fish is evidence that your car is changing the climate.

Believers are, after all, the true stars in this world of turning random noise and spurious correlation into pretend evidence. It’s not just something they do anymore, it’s their main strategy.

After telling us for years that weather is not climate all the half baked evidence they had fallen apart.

The ice core result came out backward. The hot spot went missing. The temperature trends slowed. The seas didn’t accelerate and Antarctica ignored them.

All they have left now is relentless Pavlovian hammering of the “hottest X years of the last ten years”. That, and the agitprop linking every change in local beach sand, migrating crocodiles and jellyfish plagues to fossil fuel emissions.

Perhaps Cook is worried that skeptics might get serious about doing what alarmists do, and beat them at their own game.

Maybe Cook recognizes the hypocrisy (but only a bit):

But climate deniers don’t hold a monopoly on mistaking weather for climate. It’s human nature. Psychologically, our brains are structured to react to our immediate surroundings, and we’re more susceptible to experiential learning than scientific data. To demonstrate our immunity to abstract statistics, let me explain with some abstract statistics.

Daily weather drives climate attitudes. A number of scientific studies have explored how daily weather influences our attitudes toward climate change. One 2013 study published in Weather, Climate, and Society, for instance, examined a series of surveys measuring people’s agreement with the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming. One of the factors influencing climate attitudes was the temperature on the day of the survey and the previous day. On unseasonably warm days, people were more likely to agree with the scientific consensus that humans were causing global warming. On unusually cold days, not so much.

But instead of advising alarmists to use good reasoning he says they use the fallacies:

Communication strategies that highlight local climate impacts have the potential to help people better understand how global warming is already affecting their lives.

None of the unvalidated, unaudited climate models is able to predict any local impact with any skill.

Changes on the Sun could have caused all the warming we’ve had since 1680 and the climate modelers wouldn’t have a clue.

When climate models include solar magnetic solar wind and changing UV and infrared they might start working. Til then, Lotto!

Dear John Cook, learn how to reason. Waving sticks at every random weather event and claiming correlation is causation is what witchdoctors do.