Among the Massive Online Open Courseware (MOOC) offerings at EdX — a non-profit initiative created by Harvard and MIT — there is a new class offered by The University of Queensland called, "Making Sense of Climate Science Denial." The class, which begins in March 2015 and is taught by Skeptical Science's John Cook, promises to teach potential students the critical thinking needed to identify the fallacies associated with climate change myths and the psychology of misinformation.
Predictably, denier blogger JoNova takes the course description and attempts to discredit it point-by-point, largely appealing to peoples' ignorance of the issue to make bold, unsubstantiated claims that at best represent partial truths. In response to the course description's mention of the 97 percent consensus, JoNova dramatically states that, actually, "in the wider scientific community there is so much controversy that skeptics outnumber believers, scientific associations have had revolts about climate change" and "scientists have quit their failing institutions." These cherry picked examples are completely insufficient to discredit the IPCC's assessment (and that of its manifold contributors), which states unequivocally that, "Human influence on the climate system is clear," and in fact that the majority of recent warming was caused by humans.
Perhaps a fitting first lesson for the MOOC students would be to deconstruct JoNova's fallacy-laden post.