queensland

In today’s post, I’m going to present a narrative of Richard Tol’s efforts to obtain rater ID and timestamps from the University of Queensland. See pdf here. While there have been a number of references to these efforts, few readers and commenters will (or can reasonably) spend the time to pull the threads together.

For over a year, John Cook and the University of Queensland have repeatedly refused Richard Tol’s requests for information on rater ID and timestamps for the SKS ratings for Cook et al 2013. Recently there have been two events that shed new light on the dispute. First, in mid-May Brandon Shollenberger located the requested information online without password protection, which he placed online a few days ago.

As many readers are aware, John Cook of SKS refused to provide complete data on his 97% Consensus Project (flatly refusing date-stamp and anonymized rater identification.) Ironically, Cook left the data lying around the internet (to borrow a phrase from Phil Jones).