Posted on 18 July 2017 by BaerbelW

Peak in published posts and an award

Together with Haydn Washington, John published the book "Climate Change Denial - Heads in the Sand". The book examines the phenomenon of climate change denial. It looks at the many techniques of literal denial, where 'skeptics' deny the evidence for man-made global warming. It exposes denial within governments, who make a lot of noise about climate change but fail to back it up with action. And it examines the denial within most of us, when we let denial prosper. This book explains the climate science and the social science behind denial.

John Hartz published the first SkS Weekly Digest in June, starting a series of blog posts which continues to this day (thanks, JH!). Shortly afterwards, John Cook introduced the Skeptical Science team with a post recalling the early years of SkS.

Introducing the team and how the website looked in June 2011

In a post highlighting SkS' 4th birthday in August, John mentioned that he started to work at the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland:

"The position is the Fellowship for Climate Change Science Communication (bit of a mouthful, I know) and will involve research, publishing and I imagine a helluva lot of climate communication. An exciting new phase of this wild adventure!"

In September we learned that our team won the Eureka prize for the advancement of climate change knowledge from the Australian museum. The Eureka Prizes, presented annually since 1990 by the Australian Museum, have been described as Australia’s “Oscars of Science”. The prizes recognise and reward excellence in the fields of scientific research & innovation, science leadership, school science and science journalism & communication.

The Debunking Handbook was published in November, has been translated into 11 languages since then and still gets downloaded several thousand times each month.

In December a few teammembers travelled to San Fransicso to meet for the first time at AGU's Fall Meeting where some of them were also presenting their research.

2011 was the peak year thus far with 584 published blog posts, written by 85 different authors. The most prolific ones were John Cook with 136, Dana Nuccitelli with 129 and John Hartz with 47 posts respectively. 33 rebuttals were added to the list.