I have a letter in The Australian rebutting various aspects of John Cook's response to my critique of his "Consensus" paper. It's paywalled, so I can't see exactly what made print, but this is what I sent them.
Sir
Having no defence to my observation that the global warming consensus identified in his paper amounts to little more than the everyday observations that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that it will cause some warming, John Cook (article, 21 September) seeks to find solace in an opinion poll he conducted, in which he found that the vast majority of scientists rated their own papers as supporting the idea that mankind is causing most global warming.
Readers should note that Mr Cook is making a new claim – his original paper only spoke of claims about mankind causing some unspecified quantity of global warming and my observation that the consensus it reveals is a shallow one is therefore true.
One assumes that the reason he did not make the stronger claim in his paper is that his poll of scientists is not scientifically robust. Most sceptics would surely have ignored his request, and so the results are almost certainly biased.
Yours etc