About Skeptical Science

Skeptical Science is a non-profit science education organization registered as a 501(c)(3) in the U.S., with the goal of raising public understanding of climate change. This is achieved through the publication of information and resources for educators, communicators, scientists, and the general public. A key feature of these resources is an encyclopedic list of evidence-based refutations of climate misinformation. Skeptical Science is considered an authoritative resource by the climate scientist community for rebutting climate misinformation, and is often listed by media sources alongside authoritative sources such as NASA and the IPCC.

Skeptical Science are proactive with public engagement activities, making their climate communication more accessible and engaging to the public. This includes development of smartphone apps, providing interactive access to climate science and critical thinking content. Team members regularly conduct presentations and workshops for various groups including scientific groups, students, and environmental NGOs. The team developed a Massive Open Online Course in collaboration with the University of Queensland and continues to provide support for this course, offering pupil interaction, moderation, and ongoing content curation.

The Skeptical Science community consists of a global community of volunteers. Volunteers write blog posts, maintain rebuttals, create graphics, or author useful software tools. Furthermore, they contribute by moderating the comments sections, editing and proofreading posts, sharing information with visitors, responding to emails, and providing technical support. Volunteers from all over the world have translated selected content into more than 20 different languages. All of this work is done in the volunteer contributors’ spare time and everybody helps as much as time allows and where their interests take them.

All original material published by Skeptical Science undergoes an internal peer-review process, via shared drafts of blog posts and rebuttals for others to comment on or for collaboration in the writing. Readers can suggest changes to published rebuttals through a Google-form which are then discussed internally and acted upon as requried.

There is no funding to maintain Skeptical Science other than user contributions to cover operational expenses.

About John Cook
Skeptical Science was created and maintained by John Cook, a research fellow at the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University. 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.

In 2013, he lead-authored an award-winning paper analyzing the scientific consensus on climate change that has been highlighted by President Obama and UK Prime Minister David Cameron. In 2015, he developed a Massive Open Online Course on climate science denial with the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland (see a full list of his scholarly publications).

John Cook has no affiliations with any political organisations or groups. Skeptical Science is strictly a labour of love. The design was created by John's talented web designer wife.