Arguments
Humans aren’t rational. We don’t evaluate facts objectively; instead, we interpret them through our biases, experiences, and backgrounds. What’s more, we’re psychologically motivated to reject or distort information that threatens our identity or worldview – even if it’s scientifically valid. Add to that our modern media landscape where everyone has a different source of “truth” for world events, our ability to understand what is actually true is weaker than ever. How, then, can we combat misinformation when simply presenting the facts is no longer enough – and may even backfire?
In this episode, Nate is joined by John Cook, a researcher who has spent nearly two decades studying science communication and the psychology of misinformation. John shares his journey from creating the education website Skeptical Science in 2007 to his shocking discovery that his well-intentioned debunking efforts might have been counterproductive. He also discusses the “FLICC” framework – a set of five techniques (Fake experts, Logical fallacies, Impossible expectations, Cherry picking, and Conspiracy theories) that cut across all forms of misinformation, from the denial of global heating to vaccine hesitancy, and more. Additionally, John’s research reveals a counterintuitive truth: our tribal identities matter more than our political beliefs in determining what science we accept – yet our aversion to being tricked is bipartisan.
When it comes to reaching a shared understanding of the world, why does every conversation matter – regardless of whether it ends in agreement? When attacks on science have shifted from denying findings to attacking solutions and scientists themselves, are we fighting yesterday’s battle with outdated communication strategies? And while we can’t eliminate motivated reasoning (to which we’re all susceptible), how can we work around it by teaching people to recognize how they’re being misled, rather than just telling them what to believe?
About John Cook
John Cook is a Senior Research Fellow at the Melbourne Centre for Behaviour Change at the University of Melbourne. He is also affiliated with the Center for Climate Change Communication as adjunct faculty. In 2007, he founded Skeptical Science, a website which won the 2011 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for the Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge and 2016 Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education. John also created the game Cranky Uncle, combining critical thinking, cartoons, and gamification to build resilience against misinformation, and has worked with organizations such as Facebook, NASA, and UNICEF to develop evidence-based responses to misinformation.
John co-authored the college textbooks Climate Change: Examining the Facts with Weber State University professor Daniel Bedford. He was also a coauthor of the textbook Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis and the book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand. Additionally, in 2013, he published a paper analyzing the scientific consensus on climate change that has been highlighted by President Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron. He also developed a Massive Open Online Course in 2015 at the University of Queensland on climate science denial, that has received over 40,000 enrollments.
John's discussion of cherrypicking — one of the five FLICC techniques — resonated with me in a specific way. One of the most effective forms of cherrypicking in climate communication isn't the deliberate kind; it's the inadvertent kind. When we present the modern instrumental record of CO₂ and temperature in isolation — as most data visualizations do — we're unintentionally handing skeptics an opening. The data is hanging out in parameter space with no reference point, vulnerable to the response: "the climate has always been changing."
As an engineer and former experimental physicist, my instinct when evaluating any measurement is to overlay independent diagnostics. If they converge, you have something real. Applied to climate, that means placing three completely independent datasets on the same CO₂–temperature axes: the deep-time equilibrium relationship from Cenozoic reconstructions spanning 66 million years (Judd et al., Science 2024), glacial–interglacial variability from Antarctic ice cores covering the past 800,000 years, and the modern instrumental record since 1850. These datasets were developed by different scientific communities, using different methods, to answer different questions. When plotted together, they don't just approximately agree. They land on top of each other.
What this ensemble makes structurally harder is cherrypicking. To dismiss the composite, a skeptic must simultaneously discredit three independent lines of evidence — geological proxies, ice cores, and direct measurement — each developed without reference to the others. More importantly, the composite provides a direct visual answer to the "climate has always been changing" myth. Yes — and here are 66 million years of it on one plot. What it shows is that nowhere in that entire record does Earth evidence the specific combination of CO₂ concentration and global temperature that exists today. It is not the individual values that are unprecedented. It is the combination.
At the end of the episode, Nate asked John what individuals can do. His answer — that we each bring something different to the table — struck me as both honest and important. I'm not a climate scientist. But the instinct to overlay independent diagnostics, standard practice in experimental physics, turned out to be useful here.
For anyone interested, the most recent post developing these arguments is here: [link]
Dean:
One of the tremendous strengths of the contrarian position is the ability to engage in compartmentalization. The ability to almost completely isolate individual lines of evidence allows one to believe several conflicting and incompatible ideas. My favourite is global temperatures: completely unreliable and incapable of telling us anything - until a contrarian thinks the record shows cooling that "disproves global warming".
From the wisdom of Alice in Wonderland:
As you state, in science the stronger explanations are the ones that combine multiple lines of evidence and provide a small number of factors that explain a large number of observations. That requires looking at and combining multiple observations.
One example of reviewing many factors related to climate change is an old post here by Tom Curtis - Climate Change Cluedo: Anthropogenic CO2. By approaching the question like a murder mystery (the game Cluedo, or Clue), Tom brings together a series of lines of evidence ("clues") that tell us who the killer is.
Bob,
I appreciate you engaging.
However, I would really value specific reviews and comments of my efforts to tell the climate change story with one diagram. My diagram overlays the deep-time equilibrium relationship with glacial–interglacial data from the past 800,000 years and instrumental observations from the industrial era, along with a representative future scenario. Viewed together, these datasets place contemporary climate change within a broader Earth-system context. Skeptics and contrarians often cherrypick individual plots of CO2 or temperature or individual lines of evidence. It is harder when they are all plotted together on a common axes.
I have not seen this combination of datasets anywhere before and so I would really value reviews and feedback from the skeptical science community.
Here's the link again to my Substack post: [Link]
Just Dean :
All very well, lining up the scientific evidence ~ but you know that the deniers/contrarians are not actually interested in it. They prefer you to become exhausted playing whack-a-mole against them as they churn & recycle their insincere objections.
You could instead do an "end run" around their fake, pseudo-science objections. Provide a useful distraction ! My favorite is to say that the Global Warming topic is like a coin ~ it has two sides. One side of the coin is the climate science, against which no-one has found any really serious criticisms or objections.
[And then quickly say :- ] But the other, much more important side of the coin is the political side ~ being the decision on what practical measures should be used or not used in order to tackle the Warming problem which is facing us in the longer run. Should we do nothing at all about the rising temperatures? Should we all go and live in caves? Should we slowly bring in more solar & wind energy ~ or do it as fast as we can? Or put more research into nuclear fission or fusion [etcetera]?
Get them away from the science, and distract them onto the practicalities & solutions. (After all, they are really only interested in the politics.)
Eclectic@4:
Thank you for the thoughtful comment. You're right that the whack-a-mole dynamic is real and exhausting. My approach tries a different kind of end run — rather than arguing the science point by point, the diagram places three completely independent datasets on common axes and lets the convergence speak for itself. The goal is to make cherry-picking structurally difficult rather than rhetorically difficult. Whether it works is for readers to judge. I'd welcome your reaction if you have a chance to look at the full post.
Just Dean, the dashed black line in the diagram in justdean.substack.com/p/how-one-diagram-reveals-the-climate comes from geographic changes that drive both temperatuire and CO2. CO2 is an amplifier of temperature and temperature is an amplifier of CO2, but geography dictates global temperature. Prominent examples are Antarctica cooling with opening of Drake Passage www.researchgate.net/publication/256822123_Influence_of_the_opening_of_the_Drake_Passage_on_the_Cenozoic_Antarctic_Ice_Sheet_A_modeling_approach Arctic glaciation with closing of Isthmus of Panama: www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X05004048 There are others.
The steepness of the purple dots is due to the combination of CO2 and temperature mutual feedback added to albedo feedback from the forming and retreat of the continental ice sheets.
So we are left with the green and red lines. In the text they assert that CO2 stays high centuries after net zero (" even 700 years after emissions cease, roughly 85–99 percent of peak warming persists. Atmospheric CO₂ remains at more than half its peak value") I beat up the AI to get current numbers:
"Thus, the ocean absorbs ~9.2 Gt of CO₂ per year from the ~1,191 Gt excess currently in the atmosphere." or 0.77% per year. That 0.77% per year will drop as the excess atmospheric CO2 drops and the ocean saturates, but it suggests less than a century to drop to half, not multiple centuries. All hypothetical of course, but it also suggests we can start to see a drop before net zero.
Eric, thanks for a substantive comment — worth addressing carefully.
On the Judd curve and geography: The Drake Passage and Isthmus of Panama are real Cenozoic climate drivers, but they worked through changes in ocean circulation and CO₂ — moving the system along the CO₂-temperature relationship, not around it. The Judd curve is an empirical regression across all those drivers. Geography explains what drove the system to different positions on the curve, not why the curve doesn't exist.
On the Pleistocene slope: We agree. The essay says exactly what you said.
On CO₂ persistence: Your 0.77%/year figure uses current ocean uptake rates, which reflect today's disequilibrium under active emissions. After net-zero, two things change: the ocean warms, reducing its CO₂ absorption capacity; and as atmospheric CO₂ drops, the concentration gradient driving uptake weakens. The Zickfeld multi-century simulations account for these nonlinear dynamics explicitly — a constant-rate calculation is precisely what those models improve on. And even if CO₂ dropped faster than Zickfeld suggests, temperature would lag further behind due to ocean thermal inertia. CO₂ removal and temperature recovery are not the same timescale.
I've just published a substantially revised and expanded version of the essay that addresses these questions in more detail: justdean.substack.com/p/how-one-diagram-reveals-the-climate
Everyone, Here is the link to my updated essay, Today’s Combination of CO₂ and Temperature Is Unprecedented in 66 Million Years
Just Dean, thanks for the explanation and updated version of your essay. I signed up for a Science account and read through Judd 2024. They explain geography thusly:
My question to you is are they claiming that geography, which they simplify to a forcing, is solely a temperature effect in the context of equilibrium? We agree that geography drives the CO2 and temperature to different sections of the curve, but the key question is how. I may be mistaken but I believe your main claim is that ocean circulation and temperarture changes affecting CO2 are a key determinant of equilibrium, minus current manmade CO2 which you would consider similar to examples in Judd such as Siberian traps and PETM.
Do you believe that current ocean circulation is unimportant (or perhaps I should say non-consequential) for long term equilibrium given present day geography? Or perhaps as some suggest, deepwater formation will slow with global warming? If so then we can perhaps reach a point close to the Judd curve as the long term feedbacks add more sequestered CO2 to atmosphere overwhelming the slowing uptake.
However I believe we are currently in a cold geography evidenced by the million year ice age, reaching CO2 starvation levels during full glaciation. The primary measurement of cold geography is ocean temperature sustained by cold deepwater formation but warmed from above by manmade warming. AI tells me the ocean's warming rate is 2.2 mC per year or 0.22C per century. This affects sea level of course but also CO2 absorption modulated by vertical ocean temperature profile.
In short, it appears that Judd's simplified (perhaps oversimplified) view of geographic forcing treats that forcing as negative with present day geography. Do you believe that would preclude reaching the corresponding temperature on the Judd curve?
The issue is straightforward. You're treating CO₂ as a dependent variable from various sources and sinks, rather than as the forcing function that drives temperature. The radiative physics doesn't care how CO₂ got into the atmosphere. A molecule from volcanoes or the ocean and a molecule from a coal plant have identical greenhouse properties.
The ice age data illustrate this precisely. During glacial cycles, orbital forcing, ice-albedo feedback, and ocean circulation drove CO₂ and temperature through completely different cycles than today — yet those data points land on exactly the same CO₂-temperature relationship as the deep-time Cenozoic record. Different mechanisms, same curve. That's not a coincidence. That's the physics.
In this news release about the Science article, Tierney states this directly:
"Carbon dioxide is the dominant control on global temperatures across geological time. When CO₂ is low, the temperature is cold; when CO₂ is high, the temperature is warm.”
“We found that carbon dioxide and temperature are not only really closely related but related in the same way across 485 million years."
The slope of the modern instrumental record is much shallower than the Judd curve — not because the physics is different, but because the ocean's enormous thermal inertia means it absorbs heat slowly over decades to centuries. Nature moved CO₂ over millennia. We've done the equivalent in 175 years. The lag between the green trajectory and the equilibrium curve in the diagram is that difference in rates made visible.
Eric and everone, Here is the link to the news release article refered to in Comment 10, Study: Over nearly half a billion years, Earth's temperature has changed drastically, driven by carbon dioxide
Just Dean, at the risk of beating the dead horse a bit more, may I ask if you agree that radiative physics plus projected manmade CO2 produces the red dashed line in the diagram? If your answer is yes, then how do we reach the black dashed line, even if that requires millenia? My answer is yes dashed red line exrended linearly is where we end up, and reaching the black dashed line requires Pangea. Others will probably disagree with that, and note that other models show the dashed red line bending upwards in the long run.
I disagree with the control knob characterization. Sometimes exogenous CO2 is the cause of warming, like Siberian traps, PETM, and manmade today. Occasionally exogenous CO2 drawdown is the cause of cooling. An example is enhanced silicate weathering from tectonic uplift.
The rest of the time, CO2 is "merely" an amplifier of temperature changes by causes other than CO2 in both directions as the fast and slow feedbacks kick in.
Geography has long been recognized as the primary control knob for the earth's climate: www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1635493.pdf CO2 is an important but sporadically exogenous factor, but mostly an amplifier of geographic or solar or other forcing.
Eric, you seem to basing your premise on a paper from 1910?? You dont think maybe our understanding of climate has moved a bit since then? Not to mention geology eg we have since discovered plate tectonics. The paper argues "The great ocean basins are permanent features of the earth's surface and they have existed, where they now are, with moderate changes of outline, since the waters first gathered" - splorff! Periodic diastrophism? Not to mention being at least a decade before Milankovich did his calculations.