Haydn Washington
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Type of site
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Blog |
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| Available in | English, Czech, Finnish, Spanish, German, Danish, Icelandic, Polish, Portuguese, Japanese, Dutch, Chinese, French, Italian, Thai, Slovak, Russian, Hebrew, Slovene, Norwegian |
| Created by | John Cook |
| Slogan(s) | Getting skeptical about global warming skepticism |
| Website | skepticalscience |
| Launched | 25 June 2007 |
Skeptical Science (occasionally abbreviated SkS) is a climate science blog and information resource created in 2007 by Australian cognitive scientist John Cook. In addition to publishing articles on current events relating to climate science and climate policy, the site maintains a large database of articles analyzing the merit of arguments commonly put forth by those who oppose the mainstream scientific opinion on climate change.
After reading a 2007 speech by US Senator James Inhofe who claimed that global warming is a hoax, John Cook created Skeptical Science to be an internet resource that examined the scientific support of the most common arguments against mainstream scientific opinion. The site currently maintains over 160 articles addressing the merit of common criticisms of the scientific consensus on global warming, such as the claim that solar activity (rather than greenhouse gases) is responsible for most 20th and 21st century global warming, or that global warming is natural and/or not harmful to humans. Each article, referred to as an "argument", first presents a quotation from a prominent figure who made a direct claim regarding global warming, then follows with a summary of "what the science says".
Rather than fully qualifying each claim, the site focuses mainly on challenging it by citing counterexamples for why it is incorrect, and structuring these examples into an overall rebuttal of the original claim. The site primarily gains the content for these articles from relevant peer reviewed scientific papers. Many articles have been translated into several languages, and are split into up to three levels of technical depth. Rather than active advertising or media relationships, Cook has focused on structuring the site primarily for optimization in search engine results.
The home page of the site also features blog posts by a number of regular and guest contributors, which may be new rebuttals of a certain argument or simply the blogger's view on a relevant climate news item. Like the rebuttals, the blog entries tend to hold a consistent tone that the scientific opinion on anthropogenic global warming is generally accurate.
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