Tag: John Cook

The Climate Show #21: carbon, coal and Cook on BEST

Bad news on carbon emissions balanced by good news on solar photovoltaics, a Medicane bringing dramatic flash flooding to Italy and France, a scientist who thinks the Arctic could be effectively ice free in late summer in only four years, and the inside story on what the New Zealand election might mean for climate policy down under. John Cook joins us to talk about the new BEST temperature record (great gifs, Dana!), and in the solutions section Gareth and Glenn talk about solar powered airships, China’s plans to ban incandescent light bulbs, and a continent spanning €400bn solar thermal power plan for North Africa, Europe and the Middle East. All this and more as The Climate Show comes of age with its 21st show…

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John Cook Wins Eureka Prize

Our warm congratulations to John Cook, the creator of the widely respected SkepticalScience website, co-author of Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand,  and a regular on The Climate Show with Gareth and Glenn. He has won the NSW Government Eureka Prize for Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge. Here’s the statement put out by the University of Queensland (UQ):

UQ alumnus Mr John Cook, the creator of SkepticalScience.com and a new appointment to UQ’s Global Change Institute (GCI), won the NSW Government Eureka Prize for Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge.

The prize is awarded to an Australian individual, group or organisation for work that motivates action to reduce the impacts of climate change.

Mr Cook is Research Fellow in Climate Change Communication at the GCI and won the Eureka Prize for his work in communicating science to an online audience.

In his new position at UQ, Mr Cook will focus on the effective communication of the science around climate change and, working with the GCI team, enhance the delivery and use of evidence-based information by business, government and the wider community.

A longer statement from the Australian Museum can be found here.  I particularly liked this piece from a local newspaper which had interviewed John when he was shortlisted for the award:

The co-author of the book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand said his interest in climate change was also motivated by “social justice”.

“Once I started looking into the science about what climate change means I found the impacts of climate change has the greatest effect on the poorest developing countries, while they’re the countries that contribute to it the least,” Mr Cook said.

“That’s what made me so interested and passionate about the subject, the social justice element to it.”

Joe Romm at Climate Progress has described the award as richly deserved. We couldn’t agree more.

Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand

Climate Change Denial: Heads in the SandJohn Cook’s website Skeptical Science is held in high regard for its patient examination of the arguments put up by climate change deniers and its marshalling of the answers mainstream climate science provides. The result is quietly devastating as the scientific inadequacy of the deniers’ arguments becomes apparent.

Cook has now collaborated with environmental scientist Haydn Washington in a book which puts denial in all its forms under the spotlight of reason and challenges readers to recognise it for the delusion it is. Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand not only focuses on the deniers who claim that the science is wrong but also, as the subtitle indicates, conducts a telling examination of the full range of societal denial. Some denial is active and aggressive, but the persistent refusal of society to adequately face up to the reality of climate change is also a form of denial, one which the book addresses with urgency.

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