The University of Queensland is offering a new course called “Making Sense of Climate Science Denial” as part of the Massive Online Open Courseware (MOOC) programme at EdX. This is a non-profit programme started by Harvard and MIT. The class, which starts in March 2015 and is taught by John Cook of Skeptical Science, promises to teach students how to think critically about climate change myths and the psychology of misinformation.
As expected, sceptic blogger JoNova takes the course description and tries to disprove it point by point, mostly by relying on people’s lack of knowledge about the topic to make bold, unproven claims that are at best only partially true. In response to the course description’s mention of the 97 percent consensus, JoNova says in a dramatic way that “in the wider scientific community, there is so much disagreement that sceptics outnumber believers, scientific associations have had revolts about climate change, and scientists have left their failing institutions.” The cherry-picked examples are not enough to discredit the IPCC’s (and its many contributors’) assessment, which states clearly that “Human influence on the climate system is clear” and that humans are responsible for most of the recent warming.