In the beginning of this month, the new paper of Cook et al (John Cook et al 2018 Environ. Res. Lett. 13 024018) was published. I was quite busy around that time, so it was only when I was finalizing my last post that I suddenly realized that I didn’t have a look at it yet. Time to finally read that paper.
The paper is titled “Deconstructing climate misinformation to identify reasoning errors” and there is also a video abstract in which the approach of the paper is explained in very simple terms. Although I am not that keen on watching videos, I gave it a try.
Screenshot of the abstract video Cook et al 2018 paper
Having read the paper in the meanwhile, the video illustrates perfectly the strength and the weakness of the paper.
Let us first look how the story goes.
A man and a woman are sitting at a terrace table, seemingly on a University campus. The woman reads (in a juicy aussie accent) from a newspaper that “there is a new report out on climate change”. The man responds with the puzzling claim:
I heard climate changed naturally in the past, so what is happening now must be natural.
The camera pans to the man sitting at the next table (John Cook) who intervenes by saying that this argument is “misinformation”. He moves his chair and joins the couple at their table, then introduces himself as a researcher in how to stop misinformation. He then explains the “inoculation” method (countering misinformation by explaining the techniques behind misinformation).
The fun doesn’t end there. Now Peter Ellerton (a co-author of the paper) joins the table, lecturing that they developed a strategy based on critical thinking methods to analyse “denialist” claims and then explains why the argument of the man is misinformation. He starts to write the structure of that argument on a napkin:
Premise 1: climate has changed naturally in the past
Premise 2: the climate is changing now
Conclusion: current climate change is natural.
However, the conclusion doesn’t follow the premises: just because the climate changed naturally in the past doesn’t mean it’s changing naturally now. There is a hidden assumption:
Premise 3: if something wasn’t a cause in the past, it can’t be a cause now.
Which now makes the argument logically valid, but since this premise is false, it will invalidate the argument.
Then the other co-author, David Kinkaed, joins in via a video link on a laptop on the table, explaining that a simple way to expose bad logic is to apply a parallel argument to show how ridiculous the argument really is (for example, because people died of cancer in the past, cigarettes can’t be the cause of any cancer now).
Okay, that is Logics 101 and the analysis of a logical fallacy is well explained.
The video abstract is a nice idea at such, though badly executed. It is also pretty low on substance: in what world is the chosen argument representative for “denialist” claims?!?! It is (over)simplified and lacking nuance. I wonder if there there are, ahem, denialists who actually make this simplified, unnuanced argument.
If this is the level of the “denialist” arguments that are debunked in the paper, then the paper promises to be fun to read…
Trust, yet verify 
They have knowingly misrepresented the sceptic argument.
Notice that they don’t provide any example of a sceptic making this argument, because they know that this is not the sceptic argument, it is a fabrication of their own.
Ben Pile wrote a long blogpost about it here:
https://cliscep.com/2018/02/09/the-consensus-enforcers-fallacy-fallacy/
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That was my initial thought also. I had the impression that they misrepresented skeptical arguments badly.
In the meanwhile, I had read the paper thoroughly and also found Barry’s discussion on twitter. Something in the reply from attp (combined with experiences I had on this blog) made me think it might be something different.
Still a wild guess from my side, I think they don’t even make an attempt to present actual “denialist” arguments, the authors just want to “inoculate” communicators, so they “become immune” to denialist arguments. I don’t think one would need the actual arguments in their methodology (and it probably would not even be wise to do so).
These are still fresh insights, so I could be horribly wrong on this. I still need to order my thoughts, but using that approach, the paper (and the list Cook compiled in the sks period) somehow make sense.
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Yes, John Cook and most of the people he associates with on this topic are dogmatic believers in global warming and their version of “inoculate” is just plain brainwashing, the sort used by cults, rife with circular arguments and practices to run the person’s mind around in circles between “facts” that must never be questions.
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