Dividing three categories by six isn’t dividing one by… sigh.
Look, you made your argument that John is a “deliberate” liar, you’ve explained it multiple times and I understood it the first time. But your argument isn’t proof of intent to deceive; the sentence can be understood as a conflation of facts, or a minor exaggeration based on his strong prior of a strong consensus (since you visit SSC I assume you know what a prior is.)
Yes, yes, I know it’s not “minor” to you. Your priors are different.
This can be understood by examining the scientific literature for theories that have a 100% consensus, e.g. general relativity or plate tectonics. If a scale like that of Cook 2013 is used to check papers on these issues, virtually all the papers will be in categories 3 or 4 because there would be no reason to say something like “we find solid evidence for plate tectonics” or even “we find continents have moved at an average rate of X over the last million years” since that sort of work was already done and later scientists retread the same ground only rarely. The late Andy Skuce showed this formally in a recent paper, but was saying basically the same thing within SkS in 2012.
So Cook, knowing a posteriori that there is a consensus, interpreted implicit endorsements as meaningful ones, because if you disagree with most of your peers that AGW is the primary cause, why would your paper talk about AGW without downplaying it in any way? That’s not my argument, it’s the way the authors of Cook 2013 thought. You can argue all you want that this is a flawed way of thinking, but what you can’t do is show that it’s intentionally dishonest, especially given the whole 96% thing.
The fact that the “lie” is in an obscure paper I might never have heard about if not for your efforts to publicize it, isn’t strong evidence of nefariousness. Nor is a sloppy comment by John Cook that misspelled your name and conflated David Henderson’s argument with yours.
As for category 4, Bedford/Cook make it clear that they excluded it. Whether or not they should have is a different topic.
Your case, in short, relies implicitly on there not being a consensus — on ignoring other data from the OP. (It was clear from your first reply that you largely ignored the OP because your criticism of Anderegg basically repeated that was in OP Footnote 3.)
Other
what’s the point of calculating the numbers for category 1 if you are not going to report them
Who says they calculated them? They were apparently reported four months later. Why the delay, I cannot say. I’ve been having a look at the discussion on the SkS internal forum for the last couple of hours… it spans hundreds of threads. So far as I’ve seen, the issue hasn’t come up as a topic of discussion and they almost always talked about “endorses” and “rejects” as a group.
You apparently think he is feeble minded.
To suggest John is feeble-minded based on one sentence would be an overly hasty generalization and perhaps the fundamental attribution error. My position is that he is a normal human and fallible.
