John Cook's Response to My Criticism

Looking down the comment section of another blog, I have just discovered a response by John Cook to my criticism. He writes:

As lead author of the Cook et al consensus paper, I can demonstrate how David Friendman ginned up a false contradiction by quoting me out of context. Here is the full line from the Bedford & Cook paper:

Of the 4,014 abstracts that expressed a position on the issue of human-induced climate change, Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97 % endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.

To generate the 'contradiction', Friedman omits the first portion of the sentence:

Cook et al. (2013) found that over 97 % endorsed the view that the Earth is warming up and human emissions of greenhouse gases are the main cause.

I agree entirely with the OP's assertion of checking what writers say and see what their statements are based on. In this case, Friedman's criticism is based on misrepresentation of my original text. I find it extraordinary that Friedman accuses me of a deliberate lie while misquoting my work (deliberately? You decide). It is also ironic that a theme of this post is checking writing for falsehoods while uncritically repeating his misrepresentation.

That would be a legitimate response if my criticism had been of the fact that his 97% figure ignored the roughly two-thirds of papers that took no position on AGW. But, as anyone reading this can easily check from my earlier post, that is not what I objected to. My objection was that the 97% figure lumped together categories 1-3, when only category 1 fitted Cook's "main cause." Categories 2 and 3 were papers saying or implying that human action was a cause—"contributed to" in the language of the example. Category 1 contained 64 papers, or 1.6%, not 97%.

So Cook has indignantly responded to a criticism I did not make, ignored the criticism I did make, and offered a defense entirely irrelevant to the criticism I made.

Which leaves me with a puzzle—is he a rogue or a fool? Is he trying to mislead careless readers who, by the time they have gotten to his response, have forgotten what my criticism was? Or is he so incapable of reading and understanding criticism that he confused the point about the two thirds who expressed no opinion, raised by David Henderson in his piece commenting on mine, with my argument—which David Henderson accurately reported? Is he somehow unaware of the trick he himself pulled by pooling the three categories and reporting only the sum? It seems hard to believe.

One piece of evidence in favor of the rogue theory is that he did not post his response here, as one comment following his suggested. On the other hand, one piece of evidence in favor of the alternative is that he offered a transparently fraudulent rebuttal to my argument instead of remaining prudently silent.

Which suggests that he thought his response was a legitimate one.