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shifted from denying findings to attacking solutions and scientists themselves, are we fighting yesterday’s battle with outdated communication strategies?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]