Posted on 18 July 2017 by BaerbelW

From 1 blogger to a big team

In February, a Skeptical Science page was started on Facebook and the rebuttals became readily available as an iPhone app created pro bono by Shine Technologies: Skeptical Science now an iPhone app. A couple of months later, the app became available for Android.

In May 2010 John received an email from Dr. Jan Dash, (ex-theoretical physicist, author of a book including climate risk management, and editor of the Climate Portal) who suggested to make the by then available short summaries of rebuttals even shorter. John was skeptical that it was possible to boil entire debunkings to a single one-liner but suggested that Jan was welcome to try (assuming that this was the last he'd ever hear of the idea). Instead, Jan took the initiative and wrote one-liners for each available argument within a week(!) thus laying the groundwork for what has been available on the arguments' page since then.

During the summer of 2010, John mulled over another suggestion he had received to create plain English versions of the rebuttals. As he had been basically the sole author for SkS up to then, this for sure looked like a very daunting job. But realising the obvious advantages of easier to grasp explanations, he gave in to the temptation and published a call for help with this task in August: Communicating climate science in plain English. Just about two weeks after this announcement, the first of many basic rebuttal versions was published: Plain English climate science - now live at Skeptical Science!

In hindsight, this turned out to be THE pivotal moment for Skeptical Science, the point in time when a blog maintained by one author morphed into a team effort with volunteers from all around the globe, quickly connecting via a new private forum for authors to collaboratively condense the existing rebuttals into what became the basic versions. In some cases, where digging deeper into the topic seemed warrented, advanced versions with lots of technical details were written as well.

Creation of the basic rebuttal versions lead to another big collaborative effort: the writing, proofreading and eventual publication of The Scientific Guide to Global Warming Skepticism in December. It has been translated into 18 languages since then.

And another valuable resource became available during December: The graphics pages.

The first graphics available on our resoucre page as it looked like in December 2010.

The change from a one-author-blog to a team effort is very visible in the number of posts created during the year (352) with John contributing 168 and 60(!) other authors providing the rest. The number of published rebuttals increased by 62 and each new basic version was also published as its own blog post.