I‘m putting on a conservative, understated hat. This could be the worst paper I have seen — an ad hom argument taken to its absurd extreme, rebadged as “science”.
Professorial fellow Stephan Lewandowsky thinks that skeptics who are “greatly involved” in the climate debate believe any kind of conspiracy theory, including that the moon landings never happened, that AIDS is not due to HIV, and that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. But he didn’t find this out by asking skeptics who are “greatly involved” in the climate debate or by reading their popular sites. He “discovered” this by asking 1,000 visitors to climate blogs. Which blogs? He expertly hunted down skeptics, wait for it… here:
- Deltoid,
- Tamino
- Scot Mandia,
- Bickmore,
- A Few Things Ill Considered,
- Hot-Topic (NZ)
- Trunity (unconfirmed?)
- John Cook (through twitter, h/t Barry Woods at Climate Audit)
This is the point where the question has to be asked: Did Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac really think they would get away with it? Did none of the reviewers at “Psychological Science“ think to ask if the “sampling” of alarmist blogs would affect the results?
The paper is titled:
“NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax:
An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science”
Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, C. E. (in press) Psychological Science
Faked the Moon landing? Not only do skeptics agree that the moon landing was real, two skeptics actually went to the moon and took photos (that’ll be Harrison Schmidt and Buzz Aldrin). Since many guys with years of top NASA service are skeptics too why doesn’t Lewandowsky ask them if they faked it? This is where cumulative nonsense takes us: the golden path to cosmic inanity.
Given that the survey audience was mostly alarmist (see the blog list above), and the survey’s intent was clear to commenters on those sites (see their comments below), its possible the team has “discovered” that some alarmist readers are prepared to fake the answers that they’d really like to see. The survey was so transparently designed to link climate skeptics with “conspiracy nutters” it would hardly be surprising if a percentage of alarmists readers of those blogs understood what was required, and dutifully performed.
Commenters could see what the survey was “getting at”:
pointer | August 30, 2010 at 11:42 am
Yeah, those conspiracy theory questions were pretty funny, but does anyone think that hardcore deniers are going to be fooled by such a transparent attempt to paint them as paranoids?
Also, here are two words that, when put together, ought to make anyone critical of this research: “online” and “survey”.
————————————————————-
Eh, it was pretty easy to figure out what they were looking at. Perceived SES vs. support of “free market” ideology vs. subscription to conspiracy theories vs. acceptance of well formed scientific consensus.
————————————————————-
“i am looking forward to the results of this one. but i fear very few denialists will take it.”
—————————————————————
Dan August 31, 2010, 6:52 pm
… I think the “conspiracy theory” section is too heavy-handed to be useful. There’s no chance that people won’t figure out what the survey is looking for here, and everyone knows that “conspiracy theory!!” is pejorative.
————————————————————-
I would have thought that inviting Deltoid readers to participate in a questionnaire of this sort is likely to produce statistically skewed results since it likely to encounter a preponderance of respondents who are “pro-science” rather than “skeptical of science”.
————————————————————-
If he really wanted to know what skeptics thought, surely he would have asked skeptical bloggers?
UPDATED: Lewandowsky claimed he asked 5 skeptical bloggers to host the survey, but he refused to name them for weeks after that claim was made in the mainstream media. He claimed there were “privacy” and “ethics” concerns about naming the blogs he had chosen for his research, and had emailed for his work. This seemed a thin excuse given that they were emails sent on his behalf of work paid by taxpayers. Privacy? I don’t think so. Lewandowsky taunted skeptics, but didn’t help them find those emails by giving out any identifying phrases, or giving skeptics the name of the assistant who sent them. What you see (below) are skeptics responding to my request to look for emails about a survey from Lewandowsky. Naturally, no one could find them, since they were sent by Charles Hanich (a research assistant not named on the paper). Strangely, they approached 8 alarmist bloggers and ran the survey before even emailing a skeptic. Lewandowsky used a research assistant to send a single email to the five skeptics, with little follow up. Not surprisingly he hardly got any response.
People who run high traffic sites receive hundreds of emails a day, including spam survey’s. Most didn’t even notice the email. After skeptics had found four of the five without his help (eventually), then Lewandowsky finally named the “five” (which doesn’t include Junkscience which did host the survey) and does include SPPI.
I’m adding in the names of skeptics who confirm they were not asked to host this survey.
Tally so far: skeptics asked = 5 confirmed; not asked = 25.
The emails were sent from an unnamed assistant on Sept 6 2010 to ClimateAudit, Roger Pielke Jnr, Roy Spencer,
and then belatedly to JunkScience, Marc Morano. on Sept 23rd, 2010.
Stephan claims he asked five skeptical sites “who all refused to promote it”, but I hear he has so far refused to reveal which blogs turned him down. He didn’t ask me, nor Jeff at The Air Vent, not Benny Peiser of GWPF, Tom Nelson, not Viv Forbes of CarbonSense and he didn’t ask Anthony Watts.
UPDATE: Adept at the game of not asking the right people, Stephan also did not ask Simon at Australian Climate Madness, Jennifer Marohasy, David Stockwell at Niche Modeling, Donna La Framboise, Steve Goreham at ClimateScienceAmerica, Lucia Lilegren — The Blackboard, ‘Luboš Motl’ at The Reference Frame, or, and this truly defies belief, how could he not send the link to Marc Morano of Climate Depot, the man who posts every insult aimed at skeptics for all the world to see?
UPDATE #2: The mystery grows. Stephan Lewandowsky could only afford 5 emails to skeptics — but so far we can’t find the sites he must have carefully chosen. Roger Pielke Snr knows nothing of the survey, Bob Ferguson of the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) wasn’t asked, Craig Idso of CO2Science and Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) weren’t either.
“Nope, it doesn’t look like I was contacted. Good thing…as an ex-NASA employee, I’m prohibited from discussing the moon “landings” . 😉 “
*UPDATE #12: Roy Spencer finds the email from “Hanich” on Sept 6th. It’s the same url link as Pielke Jnr (http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=HKMKNH_7ea60912 )
UPDATE #13: Marc Morano finds an email on Sept 23rd, 2010. http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=HKMKNI_9a13984
Skeptics have figured out the five blogs who were “approached” with no thanks to Lewandowsky who belatedly said “search on Sept 23rd”, for an email from his assistant whom he did not name who had sent out 3 emails on Sept 6th.
It’s as if Stephan did not want to know what real skeptics think?
But it was aimed at skeptical blogs…
In the press release he tells us who this research was focused on:
Researchers from The University of Western Australia have examined what motivates people who are greatly involved in the climate debate to reject scientific evidence. (my bolding)
Who else is “greatly involved” in the climate debate and “rejects science”? Obviously he means the leading skeptics and those who agree with them. Equally obviously he doesn’t mean science in the same way that Bohr, Newton and Maxwell did. They would turn in their graves at the idea that a consensus of experts was evidence. He means rejecting Lewandowsky-Science, which is his consensus-fallacy-view-of-the-world. (Dear Stephan, please name the evidence that “deniers” deny?)
Lewandowsky et al discuss “bloggers” and their influence and found that:
…”free-market ideology was an overwhelmingly strong determinant of the rejection of climate science. It also predicted the rejection of the link between tobacco and lung cancer and between HIV and AIDS. Conspiratorial thinking was a lesser but still significant determinant of the rejection of all scientific propositions examined, from climate to lung cancer.”
Somehow the “professorial fellow” apparently didn’t read the comments, or think of the possibility that what he really surveyed was 1,000 alarmists who pretended to respond as skeptics. Or if he did think of it, I can’t find a mention of that in the paper. He describes the sites listed above as “diverse”. This, below, is the only discussion of “audience” in the paper. He thinks those sites have “diverse” audiences.
Participants
Visitors to climate blogs voluntarily completed an online questionnaire between
August and October 2010 (N = 1377). Links were posted on 8 blogs (with a pro-science
science stance but with a diverse audience); a further 5 \skeptic” (or \skeptic”-leaning)
blogs were approached but none posted the link.
This study has been picked up by journalists who ought to have been asking a few scientific questions about it, instead of lapping it up: The Guardian by Adam Corner last month, and The Telegraph yesterday.
It is noted at Bishop Hill and Lubos Motl even has his own “poll” running. Thomas Richard at The Examiner discusses the failures of the only survey question he can find.
Ultimately the answer about planetary thermodynamics is not going to be found in “evidence” from internet surveys.
REFERENCE:
(If you could call it that)
Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, C. E. (in press). NASA faked the moon landing—therefore (climate) science is a hoax: An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science.. Psychological Science.
Hat tip to Barry Woods, Foxgoose, Lionell, Graham, Geoff Chambers and another reader from afar. I will have plenty more to say on this.
UPDATED: The post was rearranged to position the updates into the narrative, and the summary of the events was added to explain the original post. (Oct 6, 2012).
————————————–
PART I (this page) Lewandowsky – Shows “skeptics” are nutters by asking alarmists to fill out survey
PART II 10 conspiracy theorists makes a moon landing paper for Stephan Lewandowsky (Part II) PLUS all 40 questions
PART III Lewandowsky hopes we meant “Conspiracy” but we mean “Incompetence”
Lewandowsky’s paper recycles all the old lame lefty laments:
[ARROGANT BLIND ASSUMPTION THAT ALL THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE POINTS TO CAGW – CHECK]
[ONE-SIDED DENIAL TO NOT NOTE THE REVERSE – CHECK (in that communist ideology is an overwhelmingly strong determinant of the acceptance of climate science)]
[DEMONISE AND DENIGRATE OPPONENTS – CHECK]
[SHUT DOWN ANY PUBLIC DEBATE – CHECK]:
[IRRELEVANT STRAWMAN ARGUMENT – CHECK]
01
Regretfully, Lewandowsky actually believes he is right.
However, this ABC News Flash suggests Czech President Václav Klaus was right instead: AGW is about establishing a tyrannical world government [1] and Americans won’t get a chance to elect an honest President in the 2012 election:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/08/mitt-romneys-rules-met-by-boos-in-tampa/
See: http://omanuel.wordpress.com/about/#comment-818 and http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/honesty-in-politics/
Regretfully, Lewandowsky and fellow AGW believers still think they are saving the world while undercutting constitutional limits on government.
What a sad, sad day for science and constitutional government.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
http://www.omatumr.com
01
[1] Vaclav Klaus, Blue Planet in Green Shackles (Competitive Enterprise Institute, 2007) 100 pages: http://tinyurl.com/5z4j6g
From 1960 until 22 Nov 1963, Americans had a brief reprieve from the 1945 plans to form a one world government:
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/honesty-in-politics/#comment-76979
01
Despite establishment efforts to silence those calling for a return to constitutional limits on government, the Campaign Manager for Representative Ron Paul, John Tate, has assured me “the Ron Paul R3VOLUTION is not coming to end !”
This environmentalist, PhD scientist is absolutely convinced that
We cannot restore integrity to government science, unless . . .
We first restore constitutional limits on government.
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
http://www.omatumr.com
00
If Lewandowsky et al. are academicians and full of self
They may benefit by carefully reflection on Climategate.
The lesson from Climategate: World leaders and leaders of
The scientific community are not different from the rest of us.
We will be humbly connected to RTG (Reality, Truth, God) or
We will be selfishly connected to the false illusion of control.
SORRY, NO EXCEPTIONS
Even for academicians
– Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
http://www.omatumr.com
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/
00
As an Australian, I would just like to apologise to the world for Stephan Lewandowski, an asterisk in the attempted hijacking of science by political activists in the early decades of the 21st century.
10
Tom
Hi
I thought he was originally from the USA?
KK
00
I think you’re right, Keith, on reflection. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to simply point out the University of Western Australia’s ground-breaking leadership in providing a megaphone for subversive political zealots dedicated to attacking the West’s intellectual foundations.
00
[snip. No. That is not ok. — Jo]
00
[snip – Keith – lets not expand. I’ve snipped Gai. – Jo]
00
Let’s turn this around for Stephan.
What kind of cognitive flaw does one have to possess to accept the official explanation for every world event in every significant detail, even if the internal logic of that particular “sanctioned” chain of events does not make sense or is inconsistent with observations or known facts? And what defect allows one to defer to authority even if that authority tells you to do something against your worldly understanding, compromises your principles or endangers the livelihood and viability of the ones you love? What form of mental deficiency allows you to be a tool to those with nefarious ideologies or stand idly by while injustices or untruths are enacted, lacking the courage of your convictions to oppose them?
I’ll tell you, Stephan, a COWARD and a FOOL. Obviously he has never heard of Edmund Burke!
00
The Question:
“What kind of cognitive flaw does one have to possess”
Winston, the answer, as always with this topic is Money. In the form of a regular salary plus expenses.
and:
“And what defect allows one to defer to authority even if that authority”
Again the answer is Money.
And lastly:
“What form of mental deficiency allows you to be a tool to those ”
Yes indeedy, Money again.
KK
In this life all we need is some Money and likemynded company.
00
Maybe we should do a survey on this site ourselves, and ask our respondents to answer the following deep psychological question: ” How can otherwise sane and intelligent people like Lewandowsky become so politically desperate they end up resorting to patent silliness in support of their argument, unable to recognise their folly from within their fog of certitude? “
10
Winston @2 “What kind of cognitive flaw does one have to possess to accept the official explanation..”
Merely that which finally gripped the eponymous hero of 1984, one Mr. W. Smith, viz. that our benovolent Big Brother (Sister?) is always right. The double-plus ungood works of Dr Lewandowsky are style manuals for the Minsitry of Truth.
00
Lewandowsky is a weapons’-grade dork……
00
And a first class, gold plated, turbocharged, nitro-boosted idiot…
00
Weapons grade Balonium is the correct phrase. from A Clone of My Own, Futurama, Series 2.
00
… and a blight on the University of WA.
00
I agree. I started studying engineering at UWA but moved “over east” as they say in the West. Glad I did. Lewandowsky is an embarrassment to UWA IMHO. He needs to see a shrink, frankly ( he is not a clinical psychologist I am told). This latest trash just demonstrates that “peer review” is now the fools gold standard of academic quality assurance.
10
“This latest trash just demonstrates that “peer review” is now the fools gold standard of academic quality assurance.”
Well it does rather depend on the quality of one’s peers.
Gratuitously contrived examples of research such as this can tend to feed obscure self reinforcing cliques of bampottery.
Scientific work might benefit from outside scrutiny , at least to validate it in terms of logic & reasoning.
00
I think UWA has blighted itself!
00
Maybe the title of his paper refers to his own rejection of Science.
00
Greetings.
I am European and this is my first post here.
It might be slightly off topic but I have just heard that the Australian Governmenet contemplates (has decided ?) to join the European ETS (European Trading Scheme).
I readily admit that I have no clue what kind of Government you have all those 20 000 km far from here but I always somehow thought that given your coal, uranium and deserts, there would be no crazy Greens in Australia.
Now ETS (the carbon indulgences) is a work of hardcore lunatic watermelons (green outside, red inside) which we have in quite a supply in Europe.
So I found this blog and there is no notice about this craziness.
So it might be that what I heard was wrong. Can you confirm ?
Because if it is true, I have to welcome you in joining us on the sinking boat 🙂
00
Greetings, Tomas. For a first-time poster, you have given us what may be the best description of the ETS yet – “carbon indulgences”. Love it.
Time for someone to nail 96 theses on the door of the Church of Climatology
00
Welcome to the asylum……
00
Hi Tomas, and welcome to the best Climate blog in Australia. I am from New Zealand, which introduced an ETS about 3 years ago. As turnrdoutnice says, “Welcome to the asylum”. A lot has been written in this blog about the ETS – follow the tag references here:
http://joannenova.com.au/tag/emissions-trading-scheme/
And here is a similar tag thread on the best New Zealand climate blog:
http://www.climateconversation.wordshine.co.nz/tag/ets/
00
To answer your question, European Greens see Australian Greens as crazy. That’s how far off the deep end they are.
The only reason we have this idiotic policy is because of an electoral accident caused directly by the PM lying to the public before the last election, by promising specifically not to introduce a carbon tax. That saved enough votes for them to squeak in over the line in a minority government with the Greens help.
The overall problem is one of unrepresentative electorates. In European terms, it’s like giving Corsica the same amount of votes as Germany. So a small population of weirdos gets to inflict their policies on the rest. The rest being the mainstream people, who are quite happy to dig up iron ore, coal and uranium and sell it to the highest bidder.
00
While Corsica has given much to the world, including Napoleon and indeed has acquired some infamy for providing gangsters.
They we’re fiercely independent and have given those who would seek to dominate them many headaches, from France to the Romans Asterix in Corsica capturing the l’Esprit Corse.
Today Corsica is a veritable paradise in the Mediteranean, with beaches worthy of more tropical climes.
00
Tomas M,
I live in Tasmania and the Greens were INVENTED here I am very sorry to say. Tasmania is actually a kind of cross subsidised political petrie dish with a disproportionate public sector economy so you can imagine the sort of weird stuff that thrives here and then spreads ( unfortunately it stopped being a prison colony over 150 years ago so no intellectual export controls). As I write they enjoy about the same primary vote in State politics as our erstwhile long established centre-left party, the Australian Labor Party so they can be dangerous.
We are not called the antipodes for nothing.
You have my humble apology because 20 years ago, when I was “young and naive” (the Aussies will get the joke) I voted for the slithering, cowardly loons.
00
This whole business is appalling.
Psychology is not about what we are thinking.
It is about how our brains function and how our responses change with experience.
To focus on the psychology of Climate change implies that the topic is absolutely and 100% above controversy in its detail.
It is an arguable fact that Man cannot add to or influence climate change by the use of CO2 producing fossil fuels.
How any University can sponsor papers like this of very low academic standard is beyond me.
Amazing KK
00
Psychology Journals are exactly the right place for magical climate studies to be published.
Their both pseudo-scientific BS!
00
[…] 2: Jo Nova says it could be the worst paper she has ever seen: an ad hom argument taken to its absurd extreme, rebadged as […]
00
Should not Psychological Science be advised that if they publish such obvious rubbish their reputation as a genuine “scientific” journal will be in tatters? – and a copy to the UWA that their Psychology Department needs purging of these people who know nothing about basic physics.
00
Sorry this is o/t. But Michael Smith has much more documentation and more of the facts on the Gillard AWU scandal.
Unbelievable to think that this gormless fool is now PM of Australia.
http://www.michaelsmithnews.com/
00
The FACT that only pro-cAGW were surveyed, and he found conspiracy nutters etc etc .. shows where the conspiracy nutters etc etc really hang out.
00
“Researchers from The University of Western Australia (UWA) have examined what motivates people who are greatly involved in the climate debate to reject scientific evidence”
And this statement PROVES he was only aiming to interview the cAGW bletheren in the first place.
00
That was my conclusion, too.
00
I have written over and over again that climate science is now a social science pretending to be natural science to gain implementation via public policy and education initiatives. One adopted by statute, regulation, or a change in a student or adult’s internal mindset, the model has served its purpose. It changed human behavior.
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/bio.php?u=22 shows just how much Lewandowsky’s agenda is to create new values and new ways of thinking to change the nature of the future. It is classic systems thinking. Values are what Senge and Scharmer call the Blind Spot that impels human behavior unconsciously. I wrote about it here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/second-order-change-why-reform-is-a-misnomer-for-the-real-common-core/ including that the mental change and new ways of thinking is to get that altered future of social engineering around the UN view of Sustainability.
That is what second order change is. A revolutionary actual Transformation socially, politically, and economically. Climate science modelling, like education theories and pedagogy, is just a tool to get the change. It doesn’t have to be true to serve its purpose. To change reality in an envisioned future.
I found all the references to laissez-faire free markets very telling since in the end this is all about hostility to capitalism or economic freedom and individuality or personal freedom. Lewandowsky’s work gets at both. The Sustainability push attacks economic freedom and the means of production and consumption. As a psychology prof he pushes theories as being Best Practices when their known effect is to disrupt abstract thinking and ground thinking in emotion, not reason or logic.
A twofer as Insurrectionist Change Agents go.
00
Science need to be better defined to stop fraudsters from using the term to legitimise themselves.
Proper terminology.
Science:- Investigations conducted using the scientific method in an controlled environment.(I’e chemistry, physics ect.)
Semi-science:- Investigations carried out using the scientific method in a non controlled environment. (medicine, meteorology ect.)
Pseudo-science:- Does not employ Scientific method. (Psychology, Economics, Climate modelling)
All scientist as sceptical of all theories. If you are not a sceptic then you are not a scientist.
00
Psychology can and does employ scientific methodology in research. Obviously, not in all research, but then I’ve watched physicists with a straight face tell us Japan was about to be wiped out by it’s nuclear reactors and disaster was imminent. A PhD, peer-reviewed physicist. There are charlatans everywhere. Modelling is useful if you are not using it as a crystal ball. Sadly, that is not the case in climate research. Also, there’s a whole pile of quantum physics that relies entirely on math and inferred information. Should that go in pseudo-science too?
10
That this paper was even published demonstrates the depth to which psychology as a science has sunk.
It would also seem that UWA has too much money if it can afford to indulge this nonsense.
10
In summary, they study the climate by staying in their office and pretending their computers are the real climate, AND they study CAGW scepticism by staying in their corner of the blogosphere and pretending warmists can emulate skeptics.
What will we discover next? That the typical warmist gets drunk on Claytons and is married to a RealDoll?
00
Gee I thought there was a study done last year in the US that found that on the whole skeptics were smarter than their alamist cousins.
I guess Stephan didn’t use that as a referance.
00
That could be correct.
Being able to think for oneself is a key to scepticism of any form. People who can think for themselves probably like the idea of free-market economies so that they can take advantage of every opportunity.
Ergo it follws that the two go together.
00
Jo,
The only conspiracy is the push by scientists that WE ALL must take them at their word and NOT look at how they came up with the conclusions that they are pushing…considering that many receive government grants to keep the consensus as peer-reviewers to garbage science.
00
He didn’t ask me to promote the survey at my blog or answer the questions.
00
Thanks Jennifer, I’ve added that into the update.
UPDATE: Adept at the game of not asking the right people, Stephan also did not ask Simon at Australian Climate Madness, Jennifer Marohasy, David Stockwell at Niche Modeling, Donna La Framboise, Steve Goreham at ClimateScienceAmerica, Lucia Lilegren — The Blackboard, ’Luboš Motl’ at The Reference Frame, or, and this truly defies belief, how could he not send the link to Marc Morano of Climate Depot, the man who posts every insult aimed at skeptics for all the world to see?
UPDATE #2: The mystery grows. Stephan Lewandowsky could only afford 5 emails to skeptics — but so far we can’t find the sites he must have carefully chosen. Roger Pielke Snr knows nothing of the survey, Bob Fergusson of the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) wasn’t asked, Craig Idso of CO2Science and Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) weren’t either.
UPDATE #3: Roger Pielke Jnr was likewise not given the opportunity to host a link, and Roy Spencer gets a gold star from me for this. 😀
“Nope, it doesn’t look like I was contacted. Good thing…as an ex-NASA employee, I’m prohibited from discussing the moon “landings” . 😉 “
00
If a group of climate change ‘deniers’ who argue “NASA faked the moon landing — therefore (Climate) Science is a hoax” are demonstrating “motivated rejection of science”, wouldn’t a more cogent demonstration of such motivated rejection of science be a group of climate change activists who fake the existence of a group of ‘deniers’ in order to use a logically fallacious argument against others who believe that scientific method should apply to all climate change theories?
10
Add me to the “not asked” total Jo.
Pointman
00
Lewandowsky did not contact me ‘n my quiet little corner of the blogosphere either. OTOH, his credibility gap – and that of his “survey” – seems to be growing by leaps and bounds!
00
1. Do you like BBQ’s?
2. Do you Slip, Slap, Slop?
3. Do you know/are you a Sheila?
My quick internet survey proves all Ozzys are Sheila loving, BBQ eating, sun lovers.
Where’s my grant UWA?
10
I had a thought for this paper to be considered correct does the good prof. have to re-assess his survey?
If you replace denier\sceptic with Warmer\believer to correctly identify the people that completed the survey then make it valid?
00
When you are on the back foot you do silly things. Lewandowsky is no exception.
00
It shows that he understand that what he is pushing is baloney but does it for PROPAGANDA purposes.
When a person with a college education writes such a one sided “survey” that defies a good college education background you have to think that he is doing it to galvanize the losing side of the non debate otherwise the alternative is to face REALITY head one and live with it.
To me this is an indication that they KNOW they have lost the science debate because they have abandoned it for political propaganda instead where only the weak minded will wallow in it.
00
I once thought there might be something behind psychology (apart from statistics) but now I will be reconsidering. It’s tough when they can’t even get the statistics right.
“Psychological Science” may have some living-down to do to regain some respectability. A study of end-of-world cults, conducted by a researcher with no axe to grind, might be more respectable.
00
The professor is a looney.
I have an idea for another survey that would seek to find:
The percentage of warmists that regularly need psychological care as compared to the number of skeptics needing the same.
00
Would that work? My impression of psychiatry is that psychological disorders are defined by a departure from what is statistically normal. If warmism is the majority opinion then skeptics can still be tagged with climate denial disorder even if the skeptics are really absolutely correct.
If the psychological argument is more about a rational reasoning defect then we need only point out who uses absence of evidence as evidence of absence and completely ignores the costs of prevention when trying to justify the Precautionary Principle.
All mental illness begins with a departure from reality, so again we must ask, what real evidence do deniers deny?
00
Psychiatry is the treatment of mental illness, and a psychiatrist must first become a qualified medical doctor. A psychologist does a 3 year degree. I only knew one bloke at Uni who did psychology, and after graduation he worked as a reporter for the ABC, then became a buddhist monk in Thailand.
Lewandowsky may have reacted to the news that he didn’t make the finalists in Pointman’s poll for Climate Prat of the Year. Is this an attempt at getting late inclusion?
P.S. Julia is way back in the pack, and my preferred candidate Tim Flummery is lagging in the poll. Come on Aussies, vote now and prove we have the World winner.
00
The cruelest cut, he didn’t even get nominated …
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/announcing-the-inaugural-climate-prat-of-the-year-award/
Pointman
00
Pointman – love the post. It was so difficult chosing which to vote for in Climate Prat of the Year. My only concern is that the alarmist blogs might not be represented in the voting. In that respect you may be as guilty as Lewandowsky of arriving at a biased online survey result.
Hope this doesn’t disturb your night rest too much…
00
I think it’s part of a grand strategy – the next phase in the PR war.
First they tried to smear skeptics by calling them “deniers” and linking them with anti-semitic holocaust deniers. The effect has worn off, and now the public no longer reacts with horror to the term ‘denier’.
So it’s time to come up with some new smear-by-adjective assaults. The wicked skeptics have now been shown to be violently opposed to handing out HIV retrovirals, particularly to sub-saharan Africans… They’ll be the tin-foil-hat wearing, social outcasts who get all frothy at the mouth when they ask you why the American flag on the moon cast a shadow in the wrong direction… They’ll be haters of the Queen who will swear black and blue that Liz got MI5 to take Di out.
This has nothing to do with explaining why some people form the views that they do. This was produced solely to provide ammunition in the PR wars.
And so let the new names be hurled…
00
So, do we start calling the warmists Lewey’s of Lewlews?
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Lewnies
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The fact that the alarmists have switched to blaming climate realism on psychological stereotypes, is an implicit admission that they can’t get the hokey science past us. This sort of learned psychobabble propaganda has a long and disgraceful history.
“All those erudite people and their studies, research and papers, lent a spurious legitimacy and authority to the whole thing and having laid that essential groundwork, facilitated what inevitably followed.”
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/05/25/the-real-bastards/
Pointman
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Good writeup Pointman.
Long and disgraceful history, but you know the method is effective. The tragedy is that the stories fade quickly after a generation. There is no way to teach the real palpable fear that the people endured at the time. One can teach the history but only that generation LIVED and FELT it. This more than any reason why those not willing to learn history are destined to repeat it.
From your link:
I’ve read that these scenes of horror were so bad for the “drivers” of these trucks, that they would prop the accelerator pedal revving the engine to speed up the “process”. That idea was wrong however because the Carbon Monoxide buildup was not as fast as the heat buildup inside and the “scientific design” was changed to an even more horrific last minutes on earth for the ones that didn’t fit the Nazi Superior Race ideal.
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They’ve had to change their attack propaganda, because the realists are too good at debunking each new alarmist “paper”, eg Shakun et al, Gergis et al.
It’s a two-pronged strategy.
1. Lard on negative psychological studies of climate realists. Essentially, it’s an attempt to marginalise us by bogus papers equating us to UFO nutters, crop circle affectionados etc etc
2. Take lots of polls with loaded qustions and carefully selected sample groupings. “What is new about the campaign, is that they’ve had to manufacture the scare using a poll rather than basing it on their interpretation of some new research paper’s findings. What does it mean? To my mind, it means they’ve given up trying to push the flawed science, because as the Shakun case illustrates quite graphically, the skeptic blogosphere can not only take down shaky papers but also garner more publicity by doing so. They’ve essentially ceded the field to us in that area and have had to resort to pure propaganda, without even the fig leaf of any science.”
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/lies-damn-lies-and-polls/
It’s also a losing strategy.
Pointman
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Absolutely correct, Pointman.
To expand on that further, the blogosphere has now supplanted peer review processes which have failed to be sufficiently objective or erudite. Bad papers are shredded in the blog sites within a week or two, pulled apart and flaws exposed. This is how science should be, so I would argue that the blog world of JoNova, WUWT, etc are providing an excellent service to give climate science the rigor and strength and accountability it requires to be a “hard” science. That traditional peer review has failed to be as vigorous is exactly why this phenomenon has occurred, creating an objectivity vacuum that someone had to fill. Lewandowsky and the like are ultimately resentful of being held to account, and now are trying to find ways of discrediting their critics. Can’t even do a good job of that, IMHO.
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First step on this structure 8 stages of Genocide
When they insist on the identification and public marking of CAGW sceptics then we know that we are in real trouble.
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ExWarmist, thanks for that link.
Something about the “prevention” methods as described smells to me. An example is: “Hate radio must be shut down” which may permit government to step on free speech using fraudulent claims of hate speech as the excuse. There are more that bother me but we don’t need to explore that now.
I agree: when they want to mark us, we are in deep trouble. Probably some of them already do.
If we can raise an FOI to force them to release information they have gathered about IP addresses of skeptics visiting warmist sites, THAT would be valuable.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.
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Agreed.
(1)Effective diagnosis and (2) effective prescription of a cure are two entirely different functions which may be very applicable to the link that I linked too.
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I did my own survey and found that 93.2% of all warmists in CAGW believe home hydroponics is that pathway to greater enlightenment.
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What an utterly servile piece of pseudo-science out of Australian academia. Part of the concerted demonization of free-thinking, i.e., any speculation at all that things are not always as they are presented to us by the masters of the domain. Lewandowsky and his ilk are pitiful in their intellectual and emotional puerility. In a more enlightened society they would not be qualified to teach at secondary school level.
This is an attempt to shame those skeptics who fear to be associated with “conspiracy theorists,” when in fact most of the conspiracy theories he refers to explicitly or implicitly are close to the truth in most cases. Even the king of the bogeymen of conspiracy theories — that the moon landing was staged — is not a theory but an obvious truth. Anyone with the scientific nous to see through the AGW fraud should have figured this out. Only the stigma associated with not believing prevents more people from waking up to this most notorious example of mass hypnosis. But just as many have broken the spell of catastrophic AGW, more and more people will come to realize that the moon landing was a perverse mise-en-scéne.
I appreciate that many readers may still be buying into the moon landing. Fair enough! The big lies are the easiest to believe, and we do like to believe. I can only suggest you open your mind more. But from my perspective, it’s tragically ironic that Lewandowsky is damning climate deniers by associating them with people who are actually seeing the truth and rejecting lies. How twisted!
The power, if any, in studies like the one cited here depends entirely on the sense of shame felt by being associated with “conspiracy theories.” For this reason, I feel it’s important to resist such attempts at smearing by calling them out for the cheap psychological trick that they are (as Jo so admirably does), rather than cringing or protesting one’s “seriousness” by denouncing other less “respectable” conspiracies.
What I would like to see from a real psychologist (if any exist) is a study on how the media and academia use emotional manipulations like that of Lewandowsky and so many other regime gatekeepers to enforce political correctness. I wonder if such a study would get funded. 🙂
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I hope you’re trolling.
———————
REPLY: I think the /sarc tag went invisible… – Jo
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I don’t think Gulab is trolling nor indulging in sarcasm. Conspiracies have occurred in the past and certainly will occur in the future. People who think they have identified one will always be treated as nutters – the only riposte left to conspirators and their apologists. And associating sceptics of CAGW with conspiracy theorists is just throwing up one more of the sort of red herrings we are used to.
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Hi Gul
Liked the action plan in the last para.
KK
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waiting on the US Open Tennis to start, so here’s a bit of conspiracy theorising, beginning with Adam Corner who unashamedly published lewandowsky et al in the Guardian:
9 July: Guardian: Adam Corner: Communicating climate change: where next?
With public interest waning and climate change not going away how can the gap between scientific and social consensus on climate change be bridged?
(Adam Corner is a research associate at Cardiff University and policy advisor to the Climate Outreach and Information Network. His interests include the psychology of communicating climate change)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/blog/communicating-climate-change-where-next
Guardian doesn’t say what he’s researching but, as Adam links to his own piece at New Scientist, we find out…surprise surprise…it is psychology:
15 Dec 2011: New Scientist: Adam Corner: Climate change drops off ‘hot topic’ list
(Adam Corner is a research associate at the School of Psychology, Cardiff University, UK. His research interests include the communication of climate change)
The survey’s authors suggest that the lingering effects of the 2009 Climategate affair – the release by climate sceptics of private emails between climate researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) – has knocked people’s trust in climate science.
To those who observed the deafening silence that greeted the release of yet more of the hacked UEA emails last month, this is a curious explanation. It has become a media truism that the fallout from Climategate dented public confidence in climate science. But the few polls that have asked directly about it, which the BSA did not, have painted a more nuanced picture. A US study in 2010, found that Climategate primarily influenced those who were already sceptical…
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21289-climate-change-drops-off-hot-topic-list.html
Adam knows too well the “deafening silence” was the “silence” of the MSM. Adam prefers the ridiculous Yale poll (which he links to) –
Dec 2011: Yale: Americans’ Global Warming Beliefs and Attitudes in November 2011
http://environment.yale.edu/climate/publications/ClimateBeliefsNovember2011
– to the BSA survey he thinks he has “debunked” in the excerpt from New Scientist.
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If this is a genuine paper and he is a genuine PhD then I think it his qualifications should be revoked. How can anyone write a paper on such subjective subject, with loaded questions and from completely biased sample.
I think it is time to start lobbying the university about this because if this is representative of the University as a whole, then it should have it’s funding reviewed urgently.
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and adam is an advisor to:
Climate Outreach and Information Network: Trustees, Patrons and Advisory Board
We are currently looking to expand COIN’s Board of Trustees
Kate Lonsdale
Kate’s work for the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) currently focuses on adaptation to climate change in organisations. Previously she was a Lead Author on a technical paper for the United Nations Development Programme’s Adaptation Policy Framework and has recently managed a 2-year project investigating the social implications of catastrophic sea-level rise in the Thames Estuary…
Kate has been an active member of the Local Agenda 21 team of Oxford City Council, now ‘Building Alternatives’ through which she was been trained in the facilitation and design of inclusive meetings and events. She has recently completed a post-graduate diploma in ’Change Agent Skills and Strategies’ at Surrey University…
Advisory Board
George Monbiot. Radical Invesigative Author and Columnist…
Dr Rajat Gupta. Journalist, Broadcaster and Visiting Fellow of Green College, Oxford
His doctoral study developed an innovative GIS-based domestic energy, carbon-counting and carbon-reduction model (DECoRuM), the working of which has been widely published in academic journals and newspapers alike. DECoRuM is now being developed as a toolkit for carbon emission reduction planning for use by UK local authorities…
Rajat is an able computer modeller and has been a judge on a number of international design competitions. He has been awarded research grants from the European Commission, Energy Saving Trust, Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors Education Trust, Pilkington Energy Efficiency Trust and South East Proof of Concept fund…
David Ballard. Director, Bath Consultancy Group
David has a strong background in business having spent his early career in increasingly senior roles in Finance, Strategy and Marketing with the Royal Mail, Esso Europe Inc. and THORN EMI…
Since 1998, David has devoted his professional life to the challenge of sustainable development, with a particular interest in human responses to issues such as climate change…
Susan Ballard
Following a successful career as a BBC Programme Maker, and a high-profile climate change web project for Oxford University, Susan became Owner and Co-Director of Alexander Ballard Ltd in 2006.
This consultancy helps Business and the Public Sector to improve their strategic response to climate change using the Performance Acceleration Climate Tool (PACT) developed with Hampshire County Council and their partners in the European Spatial Planning and Adaptation to Climate Events (ESPACE) consortium…
Susan has now moved from managing communications for a low carbon technology project at Bath University to a new part-time role based at the Natural Environment Research Council where she is keen to get the latest scientific findings on environmental change embedded in policy.
Susan continues to advise, train and coach senior scientists and government departments in communication…
Dr Elizabeth Fisher
Lecturer in environmental law and fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford…
Eka Morgan
Radio journalist and environmental consultant. For five years editor of Friends of the Earth International’s magazine “Link”…
Dr Anna Lawrence
Academic working with the Oxford based Environmental Change Institute…
Patrons
The Rt. Hon. Michael Meacher MP: UK Minister for the Environment 1997-2003
Penney Poyzer: Community activist, campaigner for lifestyle change and presenter of BBC2 series “No Waste Like Home”
http://coinet.org.uk/about-us/governance/trustees-patrons-and-advisory-board
do i detect a conspiracy?
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Scary
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Calling this paper the worst scientific paper ever really misses the point as to what this paper represents. The scientific method is a destructive process. You develope a hypothesis and then you design experiments that attempt to disprove the hypothesis. It’s the hypothesis survives the assault, you might have something. If you really have something, chances are other people will test that hypothesis to prove its wrong and a good hypothesis will survive that assault as well.
Science by consensus on the other hand takes that hypothesis and works diligently to find evidence that is consistent to support it. Experiments are not designed to upset the apple cart. Clearly, the survey referenced in this paper was designed so support rather than enlighten. So while the paper may be the antithesis of the scientific method that most hard sciences have been based on for the last century or so, it seems like a fine example of consensus science or post normal science.
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That’s clarity.
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“Links were posted on 8 blogs (with a pro-science science stance but with a diverse audience);……….”
The irony is in the admission.
So the ‘diverse audience’ needed to represent conspiracy nutters is found where there is a gathering of ‘Chicken Littles’ displaying varying degrees of irrationality based on exaggerated prophecies and manipulated logic.
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As a young man I was acutely aware of my academic and intellectual shortcomings. University professors were, I assumed, beyond the realms of any understanding on my part. I was right it turned out but not in the way I that I expected. Some of them are a bit short of grey matter, or assume everyone else is.
My questions are, how does someone like Lewandowsky get a job? How does he keep it? And how does he get published? I know that he is only a psychologist so the bar is set pretty low but wow!
Jo please reassure me that Australian universities are not all like the one saddled with this idiot.
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Andy, it’s worse than that. This uni (Uni of Western Australia) is my old alma mater, it recently ranked in the top 100 universities world wide. It has no climate science division, but Oreskes is a “prof at large”. It’s getting embarrassing to admit I did science there… but it’s supposedly one of the top universities in Australia.
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I studied Engineering at UWA and knew that there was insanity on the other (East) side of the oval. It was always with some trepidation that I wandered over to the East, driven by the need for sustainance and to make use of the faciltiies of the (“evil, right-wing”) University Computer Club hosted in the student guild building.
On the right (West) side, there were Engineering, Mathematics and Physics with an infant Computer “Science” arrangement piggy-backed off Physics. Chemistry “lived” on the South side of the oval.
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Let’s balance that with me being a UWA grad and Brooksey too if I’m not mistaken.
As we are both physics grads I note that we do take a certain superiority over others on the western side of James Oval in terms of critical understanding of pure science.
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Engineering isn’t pure science. It’s organized pragmatism in the face of uncertainty.
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Brookes did physics?
You must be mistaken.
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Eh Matt, physics, a pure & noble discipline. Meanwhile those yellow shirted engineers were trying to get by on the minimum possible amount of study, and the maximum possible amount of alcohol.
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Well Brooksey… why waste energy and time trying to do more than what is necessary to get the job done? Most Engineers weren’t looking towards a job as public servants. 😉
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JB Says,
Sounds efficient to me…
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Just a reminder for Brookes and MattB — it’s the engineers who build the roads, bridges, machinery and even the buildings you leaches live and work in, not the scientists.
In simple words, I’m fed up with your superior attitude.
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Say what? It sure isn’t evident. The best I can say for the both of you is that you show no critical thinking ability at all. In case you haven’t noticed, science isn’t useful just for its own sake. You have to be able to something useful with it. Neither one of you does that as far as anyone could tell from what you say here. You’re just an affront to common sense and good judgment.
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I am wondering how long it took to find people who both believed the moon landing was fake and believed global warming was false. Honestly, the conspiracy people are not all skeptics on climate change. Many are true believers. Add in the people who believe the government is trying to poison us with chemicals and GMO foods and the groups get more intwined. The idea that conspiracy theorists are all “climate deniers” is not true. Likewise, not all that believe we landed on the moon question AGW. It’s probably most amazing here that such a specific group of bloggers were actually found and used for the so-called study. This is “sampling” at it’s finest!
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If I could be sure about what you were saying I would give it a tick.
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I’m saying it was quite a feat to find conspiracy theorists who also hate climate change scientists and then only sample those blogs. The implication is that conspiracy people all are deniers, too. That is no where near true. Yet the sample was apparently completely homogenous for those people. How many blogs did he go through to get his wonder sample?
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The pairing that I find strange, and I have come across it, are those people who insist that 9/11 was an inside job and that every government word on it is a lie, and yet also insist that every government word on CAGW is also true.
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It was a pretty crappy survey and the results were not legitimate. One analysis I saw said that only 0.9% thought the moon landings were fake. Another pointed out that there were often just a few people as outliers who voted strongly for the conspiracies. So they were either the random nut or a handful of eco-green-warmists who wanted to try to skew the results by pretending to be crackpots.
So it did not take long at all to find a few of either.
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Jo,
I see there’s some uncertainty regarding the targeted sites.
I’ve been in touch with Lewandowsky. He confirmed the sites were:
http://www.skepticalscience.com
http://tamino.wordpress.com
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com
http://www.trunity.net/uuuno/blogs/
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/
http://profmandia.wordpress.com/
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/
http://hot-topic.co.nz/
He has also given me a copy of his raw data. If anyone else wants a copy, and Lewandowsky suddenly clams up if you ask for it, my email address is on my blog. Feel free to drop me a line.
—————————
Thank you Katabasis. I’ll be in touch. 🙂 Jo
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After examining the Lewandwosky paper in detail for several hours, I am unable to consider ANYTHING Lewandowsky offers as being the clear, unadulterated, unvarnished, and complete truth. Thus I find even your reported list needing objective and independent validation before it is accepted as the list he used.
However, he did say in his paper that an undefined list of skeptic blogs failed or refused to respond to the survey. If so, the results narrow to a scientific vanishing point. The primary information leaking out of that singularity is his prejudices, biases, and values which are on display elsewhere in this blog thread.
The bottom line is, at best, his conclusions apply specifically and only to the 1000 plus respondents and then only to their specific responses. In my opinion, that makes it a trivial scientific result closely approaching the limit of zero scientific value and with no generality whatsoever.
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Couldn’t agree more Lionell.
It’s one of the most appalling pieces of academic misconduct I’ve ever seen in my life and it is the kind of thing that is really putting me off a career in academia when I complete my PhD.
That’s especially the case given I’ve seen the usual cheerleaders at the Guardian (UK) et al have all uncritically gobbled it up and I’m already seeing the “fake but true” defence from some people that we witnessed in the Gleick case.
To top it all off these same people have the gall to tell us sceptics that we’re the anti-science lot.
It makes me wonder if there really is any hope left for our academic and media institutions?
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Katabasis,
Any chance of using your contact with Lewandowsky to find out who the 5 ‘skeptical site’ are that he claims he asked to run the survey?
Surprising that he himself hasn’t come out to name them, as he must be aware of what Jo has written here about his ‘study’…
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I did a Google search for the survey at Tamino’s site and only found a few references to a couple posts by Lewandowsky that had nothing to do with a survey. Details at WUWT.
I’d be very skeptical of any claim by Lewandowsky. Oh, we knew that already, huh?
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Ah – it was posted without attribution. Barry Woods has a list at
http://www.bishop-hill.net/discussion/post/1904675 :
http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/2010/08/counting-your-attitudes/
http://profmandia.wordpress.com/2010/08/29/opinion-survey-regarding-climate-change/
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/08/29/survey-on-attitudes-towards-cl/
http://hot-topic.co.nz/questionnaire/
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/survey-says/
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/take-a-survey/
still looking for Skeptical Science link and this one.
http://www.trunity.net/uuuno/blogs/
though SkS one will be more interesting as Lewandowsky writes thereand has co-authered a book debunking deniers !!
can anyone go hunting?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/
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And I see the links are up in the top of the post….
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There are also some communications between John Cook (of “sceptical” science fame) and lewandowsky that could really do with wider exposure. Apologies for the lack of a direct link to the individual comments:
Pop over to this page and scroll down. Read the contributions from Geoff chambers at Jul 30, 2012 at 3:42 PM and Jul 30, 2012 at 5:09 PM respectively:
http://www.bishop-hill.net/discussion/post/1904675
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The 5.09 comment is an absolute classic of Hall Of Fame in the Realms of Stupid level, IMO. Lewandowsky suggests to Cook, if I am reading it right, that he should, as an experiment send a “denier bot” to comment at SkS to discuss some conspiracy theory in the thread, but only after he forewarned John of course. So, in one fell swoop, Lewandowsky admits that it here exists alarmists pretending to be “deniers” on alarmist websites like SkS as a propaganda strawman tactic, while also admitting that their arguments are so weak that they need to be forewarned (perhaps given a script would help?) just in case they might not know how to respond without putting their foot in it. It’s absolutely priceless! Out of the mouths of babes……
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Neither Cook or Lewandowsky will engage in direct discussion with sceptics; I have tried many times at pro-AGW sites like The Drum and The Conversation; with Cook my impression is that he just does not know enough and knows that, with Lewandowsky the governing motivation seems to be hubris; he is a genuinely arrogant man, or at least comes across that way.
He is also a consummate self-promoter who is succeeding in getting the Lewandowsky brand out there; see for example his list of publications at The Conversation.
This latest effort by Lewandowsky at ‘proving’ “Deniers” are nuts is, as Jo notes, extraordinarily hamfisted and puerile; but such is the media capitulation when ‘academics’ like Lewandowsky come knocking that Lewandowsky’s nutty qualities are ignored.
I think Lewandowsky is a very dangerous man.
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All that chat above about UWA and James Oval has made me all wistful & homesick, well for Steve’s anyway ( the locals will get that). I was there doing engineering in the early 70’s so that stuff was a bit of a flashback.
Speaking of flashbacks and noting your “dangerous man” comment , it struck me at lunchtime that Lewandowsky (and Manne and Hamilton etc) are to Climate Science ( I mean the real thing not the post modernist, sliced, diced and deconstructed stuff a la Mann et al) what Timothy Leary was to mental health.
At this point I Googled Timothy Leary and on his Wikipaedia entry it says:-
“was an American psychologist and writer, known for his advocacy of psychedelic drugs. During a time when drugs such as LSD and psilocybin were legal, Leary conducted experiments at Harvard University under the Harvard Psilocybin Project, resulting in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. Both studies produced useful data, but Leary and his associate Richard Alpert were fired from the university.”
A psychologist and writer ?! Timothy Leary and Stephan Lewandowsky are both PSYCHOLOGISTS ? OMG, who’d a thunk it? Wow, man this is getting spooky. (Tip:- If you do one of Lewandowsky’s questionnaires, DO NOT accept the free Kool Ade.)
But there was at least a glimmer of rationality even with Timothy Leary that Lewandowsky seems to have completely missed out on when it comes to “THE CONSENSUS ON CLIMATE SCIENCE”. It is encapsulated in another of Leary’s bon mots, namely “think for yourself and question authority”. Sage advice, eh Stephan? Sounds a bit like skepticism as a default world view.
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The CAGW faithful needs only to do a simple thing (as all who inhabit this site know): provide the unequivocal evidence that rebuts the null hypothesis the human CO2 emissions do not cause climate change…or global warming…or whatever the current term du jour is.
Why do they so struggle with this?
I live in unfettered anticipation for that moment when all becomes clear. Just a couple of key seminal papers that they consider deal clinchers, disprove the null hypothesis and turn the world on its head.
Provide me with the references please.
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It would be quite funny if he asked Buzz Aldrin if he participated in faking the moon landings. Buzz has a history of punching people in the mouth when they do that.
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pal reviewed?
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I took the questionnaire. More than that, I copied the questions, posting them here. I have also posted my own summary and comments, prior to knowing of the paper, here. See if you think the comments are valid.
My own analysis is in two parts.
1. Lewandowsky starts by accepting the validity of science is from beliefs of scientists.
Sound familiar? Go back four days to Jo’s comments on Manne.
2. I have also briefly summarized some of the issues I have found. For instance, failing to report all the results (such as the relationship between views on climate and GM foods);or the relative numbers answering who were “climate skeptics”, or whether part-answered questionnaires were included.
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First 99%, then 97%, now only 90% of scientists agree with CAGW?
Assuming statistics like this have any veracity (which they don’t), why have 10% of scientists changed their minds? And does this mean they subscribe to the idea that smoking doesn’t cause cancer?
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Manic, I think you have captured a different survey. The one Lewandowsky has written up above was done in August 2010 (see dates on the urls for Deltoid etc). It appears he has done another, and this time will announce how all conservatives are inherently inferior beings and reach scientific conclusions because they “vote” right. They’ll have an inherent distrust of authority, and or an inflexible mind, sticking to rules for rules sake, not wanting change. He’ll discover some conservative ideation and lament that those brains will never respond to evidence.
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August 2010?
The Skeptical community was nearly in infancy then. Why is this even news today?
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Stupidity is always topical.
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Jo, I will pursue this question with the research assistant involved. There might be alternative explanations.
The link to the survey I took (now defunct) is http://uwa.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_0UtxttVraAorKNS
There is also an ethics committee
Secretary, Human Research Ethics Committee, Registrar’s Office, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009 (telephone number +61 8 6488-3703)
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I linked to this survey from http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/take-this-test-please-uni-of-wa-survey-on-science-and-values/
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This is a different survey. It looks like the work of a junior. Even Lewandowsky would never commit the howler which Manic has noticed of giving all the questions on corporations the same “sign”.
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Jo,
I realize that I have a different survey, though there is a strong commonality. As to its being used in another survey, I doubt it.
Like Geoff Chambers, I have received Lewandowsky’s raw data from Katabasis. I will post some results later.
The first check is to look at the skew of skeptics to “Pro-science” alarmists. The last column is headed CO2 Consensus and has a score of 0 to 100. There are 32 scoring 20 or less – “deniers” in Lewandowsky’s terms, as against 979 scoring over 80. The “agnostics” (scoring 21-80) are a further 134.
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Hmm, NASA faked basic physics therefore it must have faked the moon landing..
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OT I know but have a look at
this article about Germany’s back flip on Wind and Solar – apparently building 23 new coal power stations to cover the lack of power from Wind and Solar, and to avoid being dependent upon foreign energy markets…
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The scientific methodology in this survey appears to be on par with that found in typical ‘climate science’ surveys and research papers.
I say “appears”, as I cannot find the survey, as all links lead nowhere.
If I was an alarmist, I would be truly embarrassed by this, as it exposes the length the CAGW cult will go to smear sceptics using the time proven argument of: “Yah boo sucks to you!”
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I have enjoyed reading all these comments very much.Climate Change is Natural and CO2 is Life anything else is just so much crap,cheers
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Actually when you look at the two pre-requisites, the choice of sites makes sense.
With the pre-requisites being ‘greatly involved’ and ‘reject scientific evidence’
The second prerequisite narrows the field to the sites chosen.
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I will add climate-skeptic.com to the list of skeptical bloggers who were not contacted about the study — though I am a small fry, I am pretty easy to find given my URL.
By the way, the article mentions 9/11 truthers only in passing. This is probably not an accident. I would bet just about any amount of money that 9/11 conspiracy theorists are over-represented among climate alarmists.
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this absurd “makes Carbon-Market Theory Real” headline was running all nite on the virtually incomprehensible bloomberg business channel…it’s probably still there…
29 Aug: Bloomberg: Matthew Carr: Australia EU Link Makes Carbon-Market Theory Real, Marcu Says
The proposed linking of the European Union and Australian greenhouse-gas-reduction programs will demonstrate to policy makers across the world that carbon markets can help address climate change, said Andrei Marcu.
“Those who say there is no urgency are being contradicted on the ground,” Marcu, head of the Centre for European Policy Studies’ Carbon Market Forum in Brussels, said today in an interview from United Nations climate talks in Bangkok. “This is a very good signal. This is not theory any more.”…
The two regions will start a partial link of their carbon markets by July 2015, allowing Australian companies to purchase European allowances immediately for future compliance, hedging the risk that carbon permits will rise, Martijn Wilder, a partner at the law firm Baker & McKenzie LLP in Sydney, said yesterday by phone.
“The timing of the government’s announcement is particularly opportunistic,” given low EU carbon prices and the high Australian dollar, Wilder said…
Australia may link with carbon programs in China, South Korea and New Zealand, which could also provide the nation with supply, Wilder said…
***The EU-Australia linkage is being proposed as the UN considers establishing rules that seek to oversee carbon markets around the world…
The UN rules, alongside the linking proposed by Australia and the EU are needed to help keep carbon markets from becoming too disconnected from each other, Marcu said.
“Once the cookie crumbles, it’s very hard to put it back together,” he said…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-29/australia-eu-link-makes-carbon-market-theory-real-marcu-says.html
so first our Govt makes the deal, and then the UN gets to make up the new rules?
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[…] Lewandowsky – Shows “skeptics” are nutters by asking alarmists to fill out survey […]
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Since Lewadndowsy et al published in Psychological Science, they could argue that they weren’t claiming that their paper could be judged by the usual standards of science. ‘Psychological Science’ is a cute name, but it’s a self-contradiction.
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I think the word is oxymoron.
And when dealing with psychologists, it is traditional to emphasise the final syllable.
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I blame the ‘post normal’ institution who awarded Lewandowsky a degree, they should be out of jobs, now and forever.
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Oh come on now guys, [snip] ED
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Yes Jesus Saves,
Everything you are told on the TV and radio is correct. Governmentstaint keep secrets and tell lies. History books are 100% correct. Corruption never occurs. Scientists are never wrong.
Sarcasm off.
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BULL SHIT !!!
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If [snip] ED
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Please link to any such comments in this blog which reveal such a “rich vein”. Only comments, please, which specifically promote theories of Obama’s birth certificate fraud, 9-11 inside job and faked moon landings.
Otherwise, go troll somewhere else.
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JS,
You seem to have totally missed the point here.
‘Worshiping’ anyone as a spiritual leader has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with ‘the science’….and everything to do with our mamalian herd tendencies…and related to religious zeal.
Shooting messengers has absolutely nothing to do with ‘the science’ either 🙂
Maybe you need to take off your blinkers and re read Jo’s piece with an open mind and also with reference to the survey she is commenting on?
Then come back and comment on ‘the message’ not ‘the mesengers’.
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The basic flaw is that Lewandowsky et al have confused the definition of ‘scientist’ with the definition of ‘science’.
Scientists are just people who study science.
Most of the scientists are employees who are doing their best to fulfil their job descriptions and the ‘terms of reference’ in their reporting/research.
No different to any other proffesional employee.
Some of them are really good at their job.
This guy appears to have sold his soul to his job.
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30 Aug: Business Spectator: Origin drops forestry deal amid carbon worries
Origin Energy has quit $133 million worth of options for forestry projects in Australia amid fears that the price of carbon will plunge, according to The Australian Financial Review.
The federal government’s move to abandon plans for a carbon price floor threatens to make it cheaper for carbon emitters to buy carbon units on the market instead of investing in carbon sinks like forests.
However, Origin denied that its decision to walk away from its 2013 contract with carbon sink developer Carbon Conscious was at all related to the government’s announcement…
“It has something to do with market sentiment and uncertainty around the carbon price,” he (Carbon Conscious director of business development Dan Stevens)said, according to the AFR.
http://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Origin-drops-forestry-deal-amid-carbon-worries-pd20120829-XMQX7?opendocument&src=rss
hope this means my energy company, Origin, will now cut the price of electricity even further than they did after their exorbitant price increases were criticised by the Qld Premier.
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Good luck with that Pat 🙂
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Greatly involved and rejecting science? Isn’t that the province of “The Team”?
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If Hansen had been heading up NASA in the 1960s they wouldn’t have needed to fake the moon landings.
They would simply have filmed Armstrong in a lab walking down some steps. The background image of the lab would then have undergone a ‘justifiable statistical adjustment’ to look just like the surface of the moon. Later ‘adjustments’ would show that in fact Armstrong also walked on Mars, Jupiter and the Sun.
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And then the people who thought the landings were fake would be called deniers! Lewis Carroll, you genius! You could see the future! We live in a 21st Century Wonderland! Jo, are you Alice? Michael Mann and Gavin Scmidt are Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, that is obvious but who is the Mad Hatter? Is Naomi Oreskes the Queen of Hearts? Oh me, Oh my, look at the time.
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Who is the Mad Hatter; that’d be Judith Curry, mad but strangly sane…
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Overture, Hit Play
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30 Aug: Reuters Point Carbon: Commodities at Close
EUROPEAN CARBON PERMITS
European Union carbon for December declined 3.8 percent to 7.68 euros ($9.63) on the ICE Futures Europe exchange in London…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-08-29/oil-falls-after-hurricane-isaac-hits-land-commodities-at-close.html
Optimism fades as EUAs fall 4 pct on profit taking, macro woes
Aug 29 (Reuters Point Carbon) – European carbon prices fell for a second day on Wednesday, shedding a further 4 percent after they hit a two-month high in the previous session, as optimism over an EU-Australia market link was replaced by technical selling and worries about the global economy….
http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/1.1969905?&ref=searchlist
Hungarian permits swamp New Zealand carbon market
Aug 29 (Reuters Point Carbon) – Cheap carbon permits from Hungary last year flooded New Zealand’s CO2 market accounting for 20 percent of emission permit usage, according to data from national registries…
http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/1.1969761?&ref=searchlist
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The only reasons I can think of for such a “paper” are:
1. Desperation –for his side of the debate.
2. Time to fill the “publish or perish” quota for the year.
3. Must keep his ego over inflated.
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Yes, this paper has a Gleickian sense of desperation to it.
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Or a big favour to a friend grabbing him by a sensitive part.
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Brace yourselves for impact everybody.
Over at ABC The Drum with link to the BAC’s “Religeon and Ethics” page we have
….. drum roll……
“The church and the ethics of climate change” by Clive Hamilton
To paraphrase the immortal John Wayne doing Hamlet, is this a pincer movement I see before me?
A few titbits to get your juices flowing..
“True sceptics are, of course, to be found among climate scientists themselves. …… Denial, on the other hand, is a well-defined syndrome. … denialism has some or all of five characteristic elements:
the identification of conspiracies;
the use of fake experts and front organizations;
cherry-picking data from the scientific literature to support one’s case;
creating impossible expectations of what research can show; and,
deploying misrepresentation and logical fallacies.
Each of these is deployed by the climate science denial movement.”
LOL. I’m ready for lunch now, gotta go.
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Being a student of the particular brand of amphigory which Hamilton specialises in I would like to read this piece but can’t seem to locate it; link anyone?
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In the category religion..
http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2012/08/29/3578983.htm
Picked up by serious devotees:
http://transitionbrockville.com/2012/08/29/the-church-and-the-ethics-of-climate-change/
http://eradicatingecocideincanada.org/2012/08/the-church-and-the-ethics-of-climate-change/
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Off topic, but Clive Hamilton has written a delusional piece at The Drum. He includes a statement that
Also mentions the Richard Muller was a CAGW sceptic then wasn’t narrative. The amount of errors in it is unbelievable. You would think someone would provide him with a fact checker if he is incapable of doing it himself. Plus the usual dishonest “climate change sceptic” term is used.
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Yep, that “climate-sensitivity” must be why the first recorded outbreak of dengue fever was in philadelphia during the Little Ice Age (1780), and why malaria was once common in Siberia, Canada, and England. Maybe the climate was more tropical in the far north back then?
Then, of course, there’s the fact that dengue is 10 times more common 10 miles south of the US-Mexico border than 10 miles north of it — maybe it’s some kind of “international climate border”?
Warmists will say anything they think they can get away with — not the kind of people you can have an honest debate with. They say stupid things because the media lets them get away with it and makes it easy for them to ignore the contempt they engender in thinking people.
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“Off Topic”, Chad and BobC?
I thought the topic was “Complete Raving Loony CAGW Proponents on the Fringes Flail About Again with Complete and Utter Incoherent Drivel”
Lunch was good today and this is my dessert. (see #56 above)
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One of the things that always jumps off the page at me are phrases like “estimates that …”, and “mainly from …”, especially when associated with “real numbers” of deaths, or a finite list of diseases.
We need to start a list of these phrases and the debunking thereof.
Jo, is it possible to have a permanent list on a side page somewhere?
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Harrison H. Schmitt, the 12th man on the moon, writes: (extract)
Read the rest and the (herein elided) references at the link to the article.
Perhaps Lewandoofski et al were hoping that all those who’ve walked on the moon are dead by now; or at least beyond scepticism.
If Lewanddofski et al prove anything with their tripe, it’s that psychology is a pseudo-science, along with astrology, the readings of entrails and other tools of soothsayers.
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Astrology might be a pseudo science, but they are annoyingly accurate when it comes to personality traits and relationship compatibilities. For me, I’d trust an astrologer a 100 times more often than Michael Mann, Phil Jones ect.
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How hard does Lewadndowsy have to work to prove he’s an idiot? I would have been perfectly satisfied with his efforts so far — this “survey” seems overkill. It runs the risk of convincing even warmists that he’s an idiot.
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Ah! all the “faux” indignation!
A snippet from a Clive Hamilton article on the ABC web
What a wonderful summation, an insight into the reality of those who choose to reject science for their own idealogical idiocy!
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Silly;
This is the kind of argument people use when they have no facts to support them. If you want to know the distance to the Moon, it isn’t necessary to poll scientists and denigrate those who disagree — the datum can be measured. So far, no one has supplied any measurements showing that CO2 has any detectable effect on the climate. Models of such effects have failed to show any predictive skill whatsoever, leaving irrational believers of Human-caused Apocalypse reduced to calling names. Grow up — get a brain.
Here in this blog, we rank data and facts above psychological arguments, argument from self-proclaimed authority, and stupid lists like you link above (that apparently serve as a substitute for thinking, in your case). That you have apparently been unable to figure this out for the length of time you’ve been dropping comments here (sort of like pigeon droppings) doesn’t say much for your ability to think analytically.
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Bob
The good thing about pigeon droppings is that they are so small and readily dry up they they are not much trouble.
In the old days, yes again. we had to deal with bigger problems like horse-shit in the streets from the bread vans.
Now that’s a problem.
No wonder I have such a good immune system.
KK
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KK Says…
When I was much younger and playing cricket, I felt something land on the top of my shoulder, and without thinking, I just rolled my shoulder up, and tried to knock it off with my cheek. I can tell you, it was not small, and it had not ‘readily dryed up’…
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Hi Ex
Messy. Was that a punishment from the UN for being a skeptic?
Sounds like you are the sort of person who carries a sh#t on their shoulder?
KK
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re:
CO2 mightn’t have a direct impact but the indirect impacts of AGW are the measured long-term unnatural warming trend and that has climate consequences. Your comment is pendatic at best, specious more likely. BTW, if you want droppings go the movement that contributes most to the scientific dung heap viz: Galileo
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“if you want droppings go the movement that contributes most”
or wait for the next dopey donkey to drop in.
Load of horse poop then….(pity its more the consistency of diarrhoea)
The garden love moldy horse poop almost as much as it loves CO2 !
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“CO2 mightn’t have a direct impact but the indirect impacts of AGW are the measured long-term unnatural warming trend and that has climate consequences.” Says silly.
When then silly, are the direct impacts caused by the believers running around in circles causing enormous amount of heat, or is it just the hot air expelled when they sing from the hymn book.
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The NeighSayer said:
Causality Fail. It can’t have an indirect impact if it doesn’t have a direct impact.
Epic history fail. Compare fastest recent 30-year warming rate of 1978-2007 to prior 30-year rates of warming such as 1912-1942 in HADSST2, and 1691-1720 in CET, and compare world absolute GAT of today to estimates by multiple proxies of the MWP. Today is not outside the natural range in either absolute temperature or rate of warming.
Have you read, understood, and accepted your logical error and factual error? Clomp your hoof once for No and twice for Yes.
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Silly, a new paper has been published which shows that the Walker is not weakening, as predicted by AGW exponents [Tanaka et al. [2005], Vecchi et al. [2006], Vecchi and Soden [2007], Power and Smith [2007]], but strengthening as a response to ENSO cycles.
Not one prediction of AGW has come true and the extent of problematic data manipulation, over-reliance on modelling and faux moral principles such as the precautionary principle, gaia, and unscientific basis such as authority and consensus has revealed your dogma of choice, AGW, not only has feet of clay but not feet at all.
Time to get those hoofs reshod filly.
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You’ve demonstrated Sillyfilly’s point perfectly Bob, well done!
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“measured long-term
unnatural warming trend”… out of the little ice age.Helped along but urban thermometers and cagw bletheren “adjustments”
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Ah yes! that supposed global phenomena, aligned with the absolute absurdity of your assertion on the temperature measures. You must be a fan of Easterbrook and his ilk.
You might want to look at this for a dose of reality.
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Your dose of reality comes from ‘proxies’ silly. whereas, according to findings come from the Europe’s Space Administration ESA’s ice-measuring satellite, CryoSat, over the last two years Antarctica’s ice sheet has increased in height.
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Yep, talking heads presenting models and “adjusted” data — your kind of “reality” all right.
Here’s a long term temperature record (from that notorious “denier” organization, NOAA) of the Greenland ice cap (GISP2 ice core data).
Note that absolutely nothing about Greenland’s current warming spell is “unprecedented ” or “unnatural” — in fact, it is kind of wimpy compared to even the historical past.
The only way to find “unprecedented” current warming is to use “creative adjustments” of multiple records, themselves “adjusted”. No proxy of temperature at a single location shows anything that could honestly be labeled “unprecedented”. (For example, here’s a temperature proxy of the Sargasso Sea.)
************************
It’s a miracle! No one part of the Earth has experienced “unprecedented” warming — but through the miracle of “creative data combination and adjustment” the entire Earth has! Those Climate “scientists” sure know how to create “global warming” in a computer.
\sarc
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Bit of a mixed message here.
One MFitz accuses me of using proxies, then BobC uses proxies to make an argument. By the way BobC, one NH ice core record does not a global phenomenum make. Look at all the proxies (at the AGU link) then come back with something that has some relevance.
Otherwise Hamilton would be correct in this:
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Precisely my point, silly: In order to make a global temperature record that disagrees with all the local records, you have to get very creative in selecting, combining, and “adjusting” the data.
(You also have to be pretty dumb to simply accept that as reasonable)
Try it yourself — find some (unadjusted, of course) that show that there has been any “unprecedented” warming over the last hundred years (compared to the last several thousand).
Then come back and explain to us how, when “unprecedented” warming has not occured at any specific location it has occured globally.
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yep, the world has been the same temperature for 1,000,000,000 year.. no ice ages, no ups and downs.. just flat temperature.. according to the Mannians.
nothing drove the farmers from Greenland, nothing caused the Thames to freeze…. never happened.
The MWP did not exist, neither did the RWP. and if the Mannians have their way with the data, the Holocene Optimum (note the word) will also disappear.
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yep, the world has been the same temperature for 1,000,000,000 year.. no ice ages, no ups and downs.. just flat temperature.. according to the Mannians.
nothing drove the farmers from Greenland, nothing caused the Thames to freeze…. never happened.
The MWP did not exist, neither did the RWP. and if the Mannians have their way with the data, the Holocene Optimum (note the word) will also disappear.
Any paper or whatever that references Mann, should be totally ignored until he comes clean with full data, methods, etc etc. That includes coming from the AGU and the IPCC.
He has already been proved totally wrong with his statistical treatment, and that is with what little he has provided. I wonder how long he can keep stalling with Soros’s funding behind him.
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That Deltoid thread is interesting for showing the fresh comment of respondents as well as the fact that they are as sceptical about it as Jo is.
Did anyone here take the bait… I mean survey?
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Judging on my comment in the Deltoid thread it appears I may well have done the survey.
Bot surely a simple survey looking for a corrolation in attitudes has some validity. Maybe not to draw the conclusions they have done maybe.
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Correlation in attitudes?
Seriously?
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what do you mean Debbie? I mean you could do a study to see if there was a correlation in attitudes between a range of things. YOu could go on lefties and dangers of baby-formula, attitudes to cloth nappies, concerns about GM foods and attitudes to climate change. It is interesting to see where people group. I’m not ashamed to admit that it is highly likely that I (as most people) jump to conclusions based upon a general life view.
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Matt… simple surveys are rarely very good surveys and to sort out whether responses are honest and accurate is even more difficult. The comments in this thread show some worrying aspects of the survey content.
I have to agree with Jo, but maybe not for the same reasons; drawing responses from bloggers and blog groupies in this way makes me very sceptical that any useful conclusions can be made from the various correlations.
As a reader, writer and editor of scientific papers, I had nonetheless never read actual psychology papers and I am astounded at the very brief methods section. Methods are boring but they are central. They must include all new methods or reference those that have been described elsewhere. Methods are never supplementary material. So where is the list of questions? Where is the time-frame of the survey? It is highly relevant to know the wording and order of each question.
The stats might be OK but where are they not properly justified or referenced.
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Sorry very unclear above: “this thread” refers to the deltoid thread not the one you are now viewing. The “worrying” thing is that many of the posters are giving very considered negative criticisms that have nothing to do with their positions re CAGW, and also suggest that these people know something about surveys and stats.
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I was more commenting on the validity of doing some sort of survey in to attidudes. Many comments in this thread (and I mean the one you are reading now) indicate an opinion that the entire concept is absurd, as opposed to having specific issues with the specific survey.
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Is this study in itself a logical fallacy?
It says that a person who believes A (against popular opinion) and also believes B, C and D, (against popular opinion) must therefore be wrong about A.
In effect it is tantamount to saying that only popularly held views are correct.
History tells us otherwise!
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.
Well said,
Also they use analogy of linking one or two other statements or beliefs!
Lewandowsky would class me a mass murderer if I drink OJ before dawn!
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It does not say that though does it… what it does is correlates opinion about climate science with opinion on a range of other issues (mostly conspiracy type theories).
My gut feeling is that amongst people who support consipracy theories in general then there would be a high level of rejection of climate science. I’d have doubted it went the other way.
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Your gut feeling?
Seriously?
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What’s up your a$$ today Debbie?
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You Matt obviously,
This is pure GOLD from you
Ok so lets go through the theories
1, Moon landings
2, JFK
3, 911
4, Rosewell
5, Saddam had nukes
6, Nth Korea sunk a Sth Korean ship with a torpedo made in Germany
7, Iran has got nukes………..somewhere
8, The Isrealis DID NOT attack the USS Liberty
Lets complete this list of all the weird and whacky theories we can think of and then get people here to vote on what they believe this way we can test your faith.
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Crakar if you read my post I explicitly said that I “doubted it went the other way”… “the other way” being precisely what your survey would measure.
I guess if you did survey with the people on this blog then you WOULD have a higher % of conspiracy theory nutters than you would in the general population.
You’d also need some “general population” data to baseline against.
FYI I have never even heard of your conspiracy theories 6 and 8… which suggests something Crackar…
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Matt,
What does attitudes have to do with the veracity of any branch of science?
What would a ‘correlation’ with conspiracy type theories achieve?
When you got your results, what would you do with them?
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Debbie…. it is a psychological study in a psychology journal! Attitudes are worth surveying, no? Is it unworthy of study whether holding position A on Topic B is commonly related to holding position C on topic D?
What would you do with them? Who knows he may have found there was zero correlation?
Entire fields of market research are based on this kind of stuff.
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MattB,
So you have never heard of 6 and 8 and yet you claim 6 and 8 would figure prominently in the minds of a skeptic, is it possible for someone to be so far removed from reality?
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Having a bit more thought on this topic Matt you may be right in a way, look at it this way a warmbot like yourself does not have the capacity for critical thought, you cannot look at things objectively, weigh up the pros and cons, so you tend to look for a higher authority to tell you what to think.
A sceptic on the other hand possesses these qualities, for example a warmbot will accept that the Moon landings were real because they were told they were however a sceptic will accept that the Moon landings were real because the Apollo 11 astronauts left laser reflectors on teh surface so we could accurately measure the distance between it and the Earth (in fact they still do this today).
A warmbot will accept the magic bullet theory because the government told them so however a sceptic will look at the testimony from the passengers in the car that stated there was two bullets.
I could go on however Matt the destinction between you and i is that i look at the evidence of each theory in isolation whilst you wait to be told what to believe.
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“So you have never heard of 6 and 8 and yet you claim 6 and 8 would figure prominently in the minds of a skeptic”
Lies.
Could you please explain how you got to this conclusion, by listing the evidence in this thread? Or are you just admitting to being a liar? A Goose? A buffoon? A moron? An asshole? All of the above?
Lets get it straight… I do NOT think (or claim) that 6 or 8 would figure prominently in the minds of a skeptic. I DO think that people who side with the consipiracy for the sake of conspiracy probably are skeptical about AGW.
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Because sceptics, in general, tend to be more widely read. Sceptics therefore tend to read news reports from both sides of any dispute. I have no problem with Crakar’s list.
In his comment at 6.2.1.1.5, he was merely picking up on your generalisation.
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I miss Kevin Moore
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Yes we all do GA
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Isaac Newton believed in Astrology and Alchemy.
Quick! Purge Classical Mechanics from the physics textbooks — it must be false, if Newton developed it.
The point you seem to be missing MattB, is that Lewandowsky is attempting to use these associations to prove something (AGW) he has no actual proof for. It is just as fallacious as all his other attempts at “logic”.
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Precisely Bob C.
Matt seems to think that climate has something to do with market research.
What is the product he thinks needs selling that would require this type of research?
And what would be the relevance to the ‘science’ ?
The ‘attitude’ looks suspiciously similar to a concept known as ‘confirmation bias’.
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On reflection Debbie it appears you are [Snip]. At least this thread is evidence.
[Matt, you know the rule about being polite as well as anybody -Fly]
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I think what it says is that the deaf dumb and blind sheeple who have faithfully and without scrutiny accepted everything they have been told in the past will naturally believe everyhing they are told now about CAGW faithfully and without scrutiny.
God bless the SHEEPLE who make all kinds of deception and corruption possible. And god bless the WOLVES IN SHEEPS CLOTHING who manipulate the SHEEPLE For their OWN BENEFIT.
God bless the SHEEPLE who view a study like this as confirming Anything at all about planetary thermodynamics.
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And god bless the naive optimism of good and honest people who assume (incorrectly) that politicians and governments never tell lies or keep secrets.
I guess those who were paranoid about labor dishonestly introducing a carbon tax (you know those “hysterical and wild allegations”) were “conspiracy theorists” too? No?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xT4RUHccAqM&feature=youtube_gdata_player
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Yes, thanks.
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Replying to this to point out a date anomaly in the post I am replying to but also so anyone scrolling down to the bottom gets to see me.
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Yes all of the times are supposedly AEST, but now the site is hosted elsewhere, who knows?
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look above… maybe this indicates a time zone on another planet?
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This is unconscionable.
Yes, AGW sceptical websites do have quite a few commenters who display an American industrial-strength paranoia about socialists, Marxists, leftists, and “liberals” (whatever they are), but that is hardly proof that AGW scepticism is product of their mental imbalance.
They are commenting, not writing the serious, science-based posts. Let Lewandowsky work on those posts, instead.
Psychology is not yet a science, in spite of the best efforts of academic psychologists, but this stuff is just total junk. Psychological Science should be ashamed of publishing such stuff.
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I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but…..I think Lewandosky is not a psychologist, in fact he is really a strange fruit, a water melon in disguise. With such a poorly sourced paper he is only interested one thing, far left politics. This is all part of the Marxist socialist agenda they have planned for Australia under Gillard and ultimately what the UN wants for the world!
(sarc)
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Quote from D.Mamet
He knew Lewandowsky?
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Boy did Lewandowsky really blow this poll.
The GMO – Frankenfood hating, pro-Organic types are generally greenie environmentalist CAGW believers as are the distrusting vaccines and big Pharma – herbal medicine only types.
The Chemtrail believers are also likely to belong to the above groups of greenie environmentalists but can go both ways.
The “9/11 twin towers was a cover-up to derail the investigation into Enron” conspiracy therorists are more likely to also be suspicious of CAGW.
The first two groups distrust Corporations. The last group distrusts the government. Their distrust of media information is rooted in two entirely different paradigms.
The fact that I, a chemist can pick this distinction up just from crusing the internet shows just how rotten this study is.
Maybe I should write a rebuttal paper. All you have to do is go to AboveTopSecret.com – Conspiracy Theories, UFOs, Paranormal … to do the poll. Heck they are ALREADY set-up for doing polls and their polls are a lot better constructed then this piece of Bovine Feces.
Note to Jo: you should ask The “Skeptic Overlord” at ATS if he was approached. If Lewandowsky did not approach ATS he really missed the boat.
Heck, here is an even better idea Jo, construct an unbias poll and have ATS run it for you if they will and have WUWT also run the same poll. It would be fun to see the results. (snicker)
This is what ATS says about themselves:
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I somehow don’t think so.
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I don’t know how far the Psychology Department is from the Earth Science Department on the UWA campus, but my guess it’s only a short bike ride, So maybe Professor Lewandowsky can get on his bike to interview Flat-Earth and Man-Did-Not-Land-On-The-Moon believer (NOT) Professor Cliff Ollier, Honorary Research Fellow, Adjunct and Honorary Staff (Earth and Environment)about his views on “Man Made Global Warming”.
One of Ollier’s articles on the subject is found in Quadrant here
Below is an extract from that article:
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Lewandoofski only wants to risk getting answers that confirm his beliefs.
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I haven’t been on campus at UWA for a while but I think it is over by the Earthian Science Department.
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One of My favourite pics on the subject at hand , says it all really
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Just a thought – I wonder if the pathway to becoming an astronaut in the days of the moon landings resulted in a greater pool of conservatives being available? If only they could take Lewendowsky’s survey! I did hear that 53% of moon landing astronauts believe they were actually in a large shed in Nebraska, and of those who think they really went 23% got Elvis’ signature while they were there. (yes yes I know Elvis was actually still alive but give me some leeway here).
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You think the NASA pathway might have filtered out some voting groups?
Yes, of course. Astronauts all had to know how to add up.
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Zing!
Not only that – they had to use reason and critical thinking, rather than emotion and feeling.
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Those Astronauts also had a sense of proportion and when to trust their instruments because they understood that the human mind can become easily disoriented by preconceived notions resulting in their own death.
An ability to do arithmetic was of course essential: The most complex computer on board was the guidance computer. And there was no general-purpose calculator fitted.
The effect of a higher flux density of cosmic rays meant that only “hardened” devices could be carried. It shouldn’t surprise that the Apollo missions carried about as much computing power as a digital watch; and less total electronic complexity than a mobile “smart”phone.
The “pocket calculator” of choice was the slide rule.
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Lewendowsky’s survey!
You cannot even spell your hero`s name correctly!
And you expect us to believe anything you say?
Next….
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great contribution bro’
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I was more thinking that a lot of these guys were Air Force Pilots.
Aldrin – tick
Glenn – tick
Armstrong – tick
So I’m merely suggesting that a significant proportion of NASA astronauts in the days of the moon landings were military people. Just being a straight up scientist was way down the list.
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And not only that, they had to have been successful test pilots, and have flown faster than the speed of sound, and close to the edge of the atmosphere (will as high as those planes could reach).
Any experiments that were done were from “The Recipe Book”, with the results being analysed back on the ground by the real scientists.
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Look I’m not questioning that these guys were the cream of the cream of test pilots, and eminently capable… but they were pilots THEN scientists (if at all). I can see no real reason to think that a moon landing astronaut would be in any position to speak with any real authority on climate by virtue of them having been on the moon or on space.
I’m also thinking of the kind of family/personal politics that lead to a military career in the 60s. Of course it is generalising but I’m thinking pretty conservative, flag loving team USA types.
My garble of stats re: elvis etc were just a bit of humour btw.
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That’s a fair comment Matt, but think about what’s involved in becoming an astronaut (let alone being chosen to go to the moon), what mindset, discipline, logical thinking, problem solving expertise etc are required (think Apollo 13 and the work they did in areas they were not experts in to get home safely).
These people are the best of the best in working their way through in the tiniest of detail in many subjects.
They’re not just joystick jockeys.
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Mattb:
Phillip K Chapman
Royal Australian Air Force Reserve from 1953 to 1955
Bachelor of Science in physics and mathematics 1956,
Master of Science in aeronautics and astronautics in 1964
Doctorate of Science in instrumentation in 1967
selected as a scientist-astronaut by NASA in August 1967
Ulrich Walter
1972-1973 Served as a volunteer with the German Federal Armed Forces.
1973-1974 Lieutenant and instructor at the Army Air-Defense School, Rendsburg, Germany.
1980-1985 Member of the academic staff at the University of Cologne in the field of Solid State Physics.
1985 Doctoral Thesis at the University of Cologne in the field of Solid State Physics.
1985-1986 Post-doctoral position at Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago, Illinois.
1986-1987 Post-doctoral position at the University of California at Berkley, California.
1987 Nominated as a German Science Astronaut.
Harrison Schmitt
B.S. degree in geology from the California Institute of Technology in 1957
Ph.D. in geology from Harvard University in 1964
Joined NASA as a member in June 1965
After selection spent his first year at Air Force UPT learning to become a jet pilot
Buzz Aldrin
Aldrin declined a full scholarship offer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and went to the United States Military Academy at West Point
BS degree in mechanical engineering.1951
Served as a jet fighter pilot during the Korean War.
doctor of science degree in astronautics 1963
After the requirement for having been a test pilot was dropped He was selected as an Astronaut in October 1963
Not one of them a test pilot intially , although You could possibly argue that having flown/operated one of a kind spacecraft They would quailify as one afterwards . I`m curious as to why You feel that being a test pilot or indeed a military pilot somehow devalues their academic qualifications ?
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Obviously, if Lewandowsky’s logic is to be believed, these astronauts were picked from the lowest IQ section of the American population. You know the types, those that have red necks and drink moonshine whiskey.
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That’s why they call it moonshine, isn’t it?
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Speaking of characteristics of “skeptics”, I do think that “skeptics” in general tend towards conspiracy theories, and tend to have “whacky” ideas. There exist, as commentors on this blog, some Einstein “skeptics”. And their pattern of “skepticism” is similar to climate “skepticsm”.
Of course the CEC are the high priests in this sort of thing. I once watched/read something where they talked about Newton and Hooke hijacking the work of Kepler. And for them, the British royal family is behind just about everything.
But of course we alarmists also fall prey to conspiracy theories at times. I myself believe that somewhere in a bunker is a command centre that feeds stories to “skeptical” blogs, or at the very least dictates tactics. But its a conspiracy, so it can’t be true…
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“I myself believe that somewhere in a bunker is a command centre that feeds stories to “skeptical” blogs”
They even feed movies to skeptic blogs John Brookes.
The boy who cried wolf
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“I do think that “skeptics” in general tend towards conspiracy theories”
BS.. as usual.. You really have got NO IDEA, have you !!!
(Jethro Tull song ) !!!
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There you go confusing cause with effect again JB.
While conspiracy theorists can indeed appear to have skeptic tendencies many are just paranoid & the converse doesnt follow. Conspiracy theorists convince themselves of ulterior explanations for things , while healthy skepticism allows for the possibility of many explanations for observed behaviour, rather than just taking the first word of authority on everything. Nullius in verbor ( owtte).
Isn’t inferring the converse just another logical fallacy ?
Just because I cannt think of the Latin expression for it , doesn’t mean it isn’t.
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JB…
What is skeptical about this….
1 – Despite human CO2 emissions exploding, no meaningful temp. rise!
2 – Despite Extreme Green emissions exploding, no meaningful temp. rise 🙂
3 – Despite JB emitting a large volume of CO2 due to computer use, no meaningful temp. rise.
Any response f$%&head!
I am not a skeptic JB, I am a realist!
I am also not funded from the Government. You must be!
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1 – Patently untrue.
2 – meaningless
3 – also meaningless
And gratuitous obscenity thrown in, to boot.
*I* am sceptical, and I note that you have swallowed propaganda that is clearly beyond rational belief.
10
I`m skeptical of your decency as a human being.
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Very confusing comment John — you’re likely being sarcastic.
Lord May, former President of the Royal Society, did a very nice job of defining Affirmers, Deniers, and Skeptics in his Science as Organized Skepticism address. He essentially points out that all Scientists are Skeptics but the skepticism is only valuable before a consensus is reached. I happen to disagree with the consensus notion due to the number of Scientists who don’t support the IPCC report conclusions.
The authors of the absurd survey apparently don’t understand the terms they’re using.
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Then Lord May has no idea of what science is about. If that was the real definition then we would all still be serfs on feudal estates living short brutal lives.
Consensus has ZERO to do with science only data matters and reproducible verifiable results.
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I can see where May may be coming from – for an honest consensus.
.
But where a consensus is just contrived to achieve an end, where the consensus is taken for evidence in itself, then it loses any indicative value it may have had.
.
A consensus is evidence of nothing, but that there’ s a consensus.
.
Of course we canny expect everyone whose untrained in hard science, in logic or in the classics to appreciate that.
Hence many politicians, journalists, sociologists and even novice scientists are such suckers for it.
.
A consensus isn’t necessarily a fallacy as such, though believing that it proves anything else is where faith in a consensus falls down.
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Dr Dr Lewandowsky,
over the past 30 years I’ve been subjected to a wide variety of IQ and personality tests by professional psychologists. I’ve consistently rated on the 99th percentile for “general intelligence”, obtained the lowest possible percentile score (essentially zero) for “intuition and “sensing” and >99th percentile for “critical thinking”.
So how do you explain my extreme scepticism of AGW (and science in general) when your profession (psychology) considers me to be one of the most rational human beings on the planet?
Yours Sincerely,
B. Anabender
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Mr Anabender,
Rationality has nothing to do with this green madness.
Just ask Oreskes, Steffen, Hamilton, Flannery, Combet and our own PM.
It has everything to do with money, power and the control of the masses.
By the way, I hope you did not call your daughter Ivana! 🙂
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Just so I can annoy some more warmists:
No Engineer who sees the IPCC ‘Energy Budget’ accepts it’s correct. Under self-admitted Trotskyite activist Paul Nurse, the Royal Society has become a Marxist propaganda outlet for the new Lysenkoism.
The case of Watson of UK’s DEFRA: this chemist and past senior IPCC bureaucrat hasn’t apparently worked at the bench since getting his PhD and has become a full time paid activist for this junk science.
He recently warned of 5 K temperature rise yet experimental data show CO2-AGW is zero when you have >~10% RH: http://notrickszone.com/2012/08/07/epic-warmist-fail-modtran-doubling-co2-will-do-nothing-to-increase-long-wave-radiation-from-sky/
The IPCC incorrectly sums warming for each GHG assuming no such interaction and that GHG IR absorption at TOA proves an atmospheric GHE. That’s no proof: GHGs ‘self-absorb’. The above data show that water vapour self absorbs by ~5% RH.
The real GHE must therefore be because thermal IR from GHGs turns off emission in those wavelengths at the surface, reducing emissivity hence the rise in temperature. The water interaction must operates by adsorbed molecules on the surface or as liquid. The latter explains the IR spectrum for clouds – no CO2 emission bands possible from the droplets.
This completely overturns the IPCC’s case: no-one can offer a counter-argument [the IPCC case is laughably amateur].
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I’m an engineer.
00
What breed of engineer?
00
Wasn’t Casey Jones of the IPCC also an Engineer.
00
It’s nitty-gritty stuff like this that will kill off ‘renewables’.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/9506945/Dark-clouds-gather-over-Chinas-once-booming-solar-industry.html
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The Lewandowsky paper has just been falsified!
Using modern methods of EOF (Empirical Orthogonal Functions) and projecting the results in a creative way on a compactified manifold, Prof Dr Motl has just published a paper falsifying the Lewandowsky’s results.
(See full paper here : http://motls.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/where-can-you-find-out-whether-climate.html#more)
It is impossible to summarize the vast and complex insights of this rigorously constructed rebuttal but the r statistics and p values would bring to tears even the most callous of you.
Thus we will just mention that the main finding of this rebuttal is that CAGW believers are crackpots and conspiracy theorists in a crushing majority of 3/4 whereas this category represents only 3% of the skeptics.
Prof Dr Motl informed me in a private communication that his paper suggests that CAGW believers are zoophiles too.
I will dare to quote his own words “It is worse than we previously thought”.
So while Prof Dr Motl applied for a grant for his new ground breaking paper which will be called “Sexual behaviour and beliefs in climate change”, rumour wants it that Lewandowsky threw a tantrum because he didn’t find this Nobel Prize ripe research domain first.
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30 Aug: Australian: Matthew Denholm: Antarctic ice sheds light on big dry
EASTERN Australia is experiencing its driest period since the Middle Ages, according to a study that overturns the nation’s understanding of average rainfall.
Scientists at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre have used ice cores, drilled into the east Antarctic ice, to provide a record of the climate during the past 1000 years…
The resulting confidence in the correlation between low salt-ice concentrations in east Antarctica and rainfall in eastern Australia allowed the scientists to calculate a rainfall record stretching back to the year 1000. This data suggests rainfall in eastern Australia since 1920 is below the average of the past 1000 years.
The last similarly dry period was from AD1000 to 1260, in particular between 1160 and 1260, the year Kublai Khan became ruler of the Mongol Empire.
“In the context of the last 1000 years, it (eastern Australia) is a lot drier than normal,” Dr Vance told The Australian. “But we can see that there has been another dry period as well (ending in 1260).”…
“It is a leap — it is a proxy record, in that it tells us something about what really happened,” she said. “It is not an exact record like an instrumental record, but it is a significant finding. This (salts in Antarctic ice) is significantly related to rainfall in Australia.”
It was not possible to draw any definitive conclusions as to what caused the big dry that ended in 1260, or the present extended dominance of El Nino.
“We are pretty sure reduced rainfall is the result of increased or more frequent El Ninos during both periods, compared to the last 1000 years,” Dr Vance said. “The cause of those El Ninos is up for grabs.” While rising temperatures may be driving the present period of El Nino dominance, less was known about the period from 1160 to 1260…
Published in the Journal of Climate, the study is the work of the Hobart-based ACE CRC, Australian Antarctic Division and Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/health-science/antarctic-ice-sheds-light-on-big-dry/story-e6frg8y6-1226461149921
From ABC – not a single word (in a very short piece) about AD1000 to 1260 or AD 1160 to 1260, in fact more an attempt to isolate the recent hundred years as something unprecedented:
30 Aug: ABC: Antarctic ice confirms we’ve had a dry spell – for a century
http://www.abc.net.au/rural/news/content/201208/s3579257.htm
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Dear Steph. As a confirmed skeptic on CAGW morphing into climate change and now climate extremism, I categorically deny any link between climate and lung cancer as you put it, but I’ll keep my fingers crossed Big Climate can definitely demonstrate the link to us all. I await all your final conclusions with bated breath.
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Many thanks to Katabasis for Lewandowsky’s raw data. I’ve just opened an Excel document for the first time in my life, and after squinting at it for half an hour, can say positively that there was no concerted effort to falsify the survey. How do I know? Simply by adding up the raw figures. The total number of respondents who believe that the moon landings were faked is 6. The total believing that the US government deliberately spread AIDS is 3. Out of a sample of 1145. I can’t tell how many are defined as sceptics because there are 5 climate related questions and I don’t know exactly how Lewandowsky split his sample between sceptics and non-sceptics. But his claim is based on answers by three, four, five, six people out of 1000+ . I suggest he withdraw his paper.
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I’m posting tentative findings as I come across them at
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/discussion/post/1904675?currentPage=2
since everyone’s asleep here.
It looks as if the codes in the cells (if you have the raw data provided by Katabasis) are as follows:
1 strongly disagree
2 disagree
3 don’t know
4 agree + strongly agree
00
Apologies, I got that wrong. DR at BishopHIll has put me right. There are about 150 – 250 sceptics in the sample, enough to do the significance tests. It’s still a lousy way of getting hold of a representative sample, though, and there’s absolutely no guarantee that it hasn’t been skewed by a few dozen jokers.
00
Hi geoff
“There are about 150 – 250 sceptics in the sample”
I wonder what stringent criteria were used to determine who qualifies as a “sceptic?
KK
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Sure, it’s not like the warmists have ever dressed up a fellow warmists in skeptic garb and documented “conversions” back to warmists.
The public are meant to think:
“O geez look even the skeptics are coming around to the side of common sense”
“O geez look all the skeptics are nutty conspiracy theorists”.
All of this bullshit masquerading as science only exists to affect a shift in public perceptions.
Can anybody spell:
Propaganda?
00
Alright, the paper is supposed to be a study of us skeptics.
*
Mr. L is a shrink, so who’s to say that all of this, including our reactions here aren’t part of an even bigger study.
*
Oh, that is probably suggestive of a conspiracy isn’t it………
*
Mr. L may be more crafty that I first thought……………
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ISTM that; in practice, it’s about how some believers perceive “skeptics” to think. Look at how the “experiment” was done. Why else survey populations dominated by believers seeking confirmation of beliefs?
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I think we can officially declare the poor professor insane.
These are the core presuppositions of Lewdowski’s arument(*cough* model). Free market ideology equals the rejection of scientific evidence equals the belief in conspiracy theories. EI; if you believe in liberty you are a conspiracy theorist. Ergo, you are a nut job and should be locked up, put away, sedated because your superiors know what is best for you.
The moon landing was the bait. Observe the switch.
Bingo! Now the confirmation.
“…because we want identify and remove opponents to the institution of a global technocracy!” You have been warned. If you belive in free markets, you are on the hit list.
Are you getting the message yet?
Lulz! He forot to reference Watt’s surface station paper!
Let me sum it up for you cause you are obviously not getting the message. Your government/corporate mainstream media propaganda has failed. No amount of supply is going to ease our demand. If I’m hungry I don’t care how much candy you have. I want a good square meal, not your junk. Everyone on this blog, with the exception of the outliars, are witness to the government/corporate propaganda machine at work every time the work climate is mentioned on television and in the papers. Your “corrective information” will always “backfire” because we know your game. We are sickened and disusted by it!
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So, Ben Franklin was an anti-science nut job (because of his ardent support of freedom – in markets and everything else) — who knew? He sure covered it up well by publishing his many scientific discoveries and engineering advances.
Or maybe Lewandowsky is the nut job — still trying to push the (extremely) falsified idea that Collectivism is somehow “scientific”, instead of what it has historically been shown to be — a way for some to amass totalitarian power over others at the expense of poverty, misery and death for the masses.
The man seems to wear his stupidity like a badge of honor.
00
> The man seems to wear his stupidity like a badge of honor.
Indeed.
A… Red Badge of Honour.
00
Perhaps we should refer to him as Comrade General Lewdowski in future?
No, not a good idea, it would insult some very capable people.
00
Well I suppose we are all entitled to our own opinions. My opinion is that all alarmists suffer with Munchhausen’s syndrome and serious attention deficit disorder and really really need their mummies. But I am not a psychologist so it is just my opinion … seems to be fairly accurate though. Any physiologists/psychiatrists got any input ?
00
Professor Judith Curry is now discussing the keynote presentation by USA’s NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco at the International Coral Reef Symposium in Cairns, Australia.
http://judithcurry.com/2012/08/30/activate-your-science/
My blunt comment expresses a growing opinion here:
“That is absolutely self-deceptive nonsense !
They can either address the observations and data summarized here [1-4], or look forward to unemployment when their paymasters are booted from office for supporting deception with public funds.”
References:
[1] “Is the Sun a pulsar?” Nature 270, 159-160 (1977) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v270/n5633/abs/270159a0.html
[2] ”The sun’s origin, composition and source of energy”, in Lunar and Planetary Science XXIX, 1041 (2001) http://www.omatumr.com/lpsc.prn.pdf
[3] “Super-fluidity in the solar interior: Implications for solar eruptions and climate”, Journal of Fusion Energy 21, 193-198 (2002) http://www.springerlink.com/content/r2352635vv166363/
http://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/0501441
[4] “Neutron repulsion,” The Apeiron Journal 19, 123-150 (2012) http://tinyurl.com/7t5ojrn
– Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
http://www.omatumr.com
http://omanuel.wordpress.com/
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Talk about air of academic authenticity … This is what puts the ‘… aemia’ into acadaemic.
It doesn’t matter how you dress it up. Applying academic methods to nonsensical propositions, they are still nonsense or a turd is still a turd.
Is it the availability of grants that begets this sort of self indulgent rubbish ?
00
Says it all – Psychological Science.
I’m very skeptical of Psychological Science.
IMO lots of opinion, couched in pseudoscience language, and generalized for the entire population.
00
The paper is so primitive it isn’t even wrong. It’s amazing how it passed peer review and was published.
00
We need to get an FOI request out requiring him to name the five skeptical sites he approached.
00
[…] Check out what this astounding ******* Stephen Lewandowsky, did. […]
00
If it took them 2 years to publish the results. Why would anyone take the authors or survey results seriously? Also, they failed to include any related response statistics and site participant demographics.
00
At one time, psychological research was done much the same as all science research. They used double-blind tests and very thorough surveys. Randomized samples were important, as were the number of participants. So was repeatability. I have a degree in chemistry and psychology and back in the dark ages before the 90’s, the two disciplines were very similar. I had to study statistics with both–though the calculus based stats were only for science majors. The psych ones were somewhat watered down. It was the psych stat class where I was given the book “How to Lie with Statistics” to show us what NOT to do (unless you were personal injury lawyer or advertiser (sarcasm)). All the same rules of research applied to both. Now, most disciplines in science seem happy with “may be”, “could be” and “suggests”. Those were terms that applied to philosophy in the past. It’s just an over-all degrading of science into something that is easily manipulated and fed to the public, who love scare tactics and apocalyptic predictions. Psychology was once a science, just like climate research was.
00
Jo, A mention here
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2012/08/a-truly-bad-study.html
00
All the levity is missing the point. Lewandowsky has perpetrated something truly terrible here, in a vicious attempt to smear as nutters and falsely label skeptics, who can count astronauts, physicists, engineers, Nobel laureates and yes, climate scientists amongst their number.
Is blatant political propaganda now an acceptable substitute for proper research in “scientific” journals? How did the editor of Psychological Science even think for one moment that this travesty was fit to publish, much less go ahead and publish it? It is frankly scary that such tactics, reminiscent of the darkest days of the 20th century, are reappearing. What next, re-education camps (or worse) for subhuman “deniers”?
00
one might also like to consider whether psychology can be considered a ‘science’.
00
for lewandowsky’s sake, i hope he has a big backer, for example:
Gates Foundation awards 1.7 million to inspire supply chain innovation
Raja Rao, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Earlier this year, 17 different proposals on how to optimize immunization
systems were each awarded $100,000 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
through its Grand Challenges Explorations initiative. Raja Rao gives an overview of each proposal.
An anti-vaccine surveillance and alert system
Seth Kalichman of the http://www.uconn.edu/ in the USA will establish an
Internet-based global monitoring and rapid alert system for finding,
analysing, and counteracting communication campaigns containing
misinformation regarding vaccines to support global immunization efforts…
http://www.technet21.org/index.php/issue-166/gates-foundation-awards-17-million-to-inspire-supply-chain-innovation.html
according to Wikipedia, Seth C. Kalichman is a clinical community psychologist and professor of social psychology at the University of Connecticut, and the author of Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy, an examination of AIDS denialism. he also has a blog http://denyingaids.blogspot.com.au/
more to come…
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final comment below the following was posted two years ago, which probably
helps to date this piece:
NewHumanist.org: Seth Kalichman: How to spot an AIDS denialist
Rogues, pseudoscientists, snake oil peddlers – Seth Kalichman reveals the
sinister tactics used by those who deny the link between HIV and AIDS
All denialism is defined by rhetorical tactics designed to give the
impression of a legitimate debate among experts when in fact there is none.
Holocaust deniers claim that historians disagree about the evidence for Nazi
mass gassings and systematic murder of Jews. Global warming denialists say
that climatologists are torn by the evidence about climate change. 9/11
“Truth Seekers”, as clever a piece of branding as “pro-life”, say the
collapse of the Twin Towers resulted from controlled demolition. Vaccine
hysterics tell us that the science is split on whether vaccinations cause
autism. And AIDS denialists say that scientists are in disagreement about
whether HIV causes AIDS…
http://newhumanist.org.uk/2165/how-to-spot-an-aids-denialist
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May 2009: Scienceblogs: Mark Hoofnagle: Denying AIDS – A book by Seth
Kalichman
To
this day, when I read about HIV/AIDS denialists, and the the 330,000 people
who have died as a result of HIV/AIDS denialism, I see red. I think violent,
bloody thoughts…
To this I would reply that the HIV/AIDS denialists like Duesberg are worse
than holocaust deniers. Holocaust deniers are anti-semitic bigots and
horrible people sure, but the HIV/AIDS denialists are responsible for an
ongoing campaign of death. Because people like Duesberg have convinced
morons like Thabo Mbeki of their pseudoscience, hundreds of thousands of
people are dead…
Kalichman’s book is well-written, timely, thoroughly researched, and to his
great credit he uses my definition of denialism. Ha! How could I help but
love this book? The fact that he pursues denialism from a psychological
angle, and interacts directly with the critical denialists behind this story
make it a profoundly important study and resource in understanding not just
HIV/AIDS denialism, but all forms of denialist pseudoscience…
He has some good suggestions of intellectual shortcuts to avoid BS that I’m
sure most of my readers are familiar with. He also recognizes the diverse
ideological radicalism which contributes to the formation of these ideas.
Whether it’s anti-medical cranks, environmental cranks, libertarian cranks,
they tend to come to the topic of HIV/AIDS with an ideological axe to grind,
rather than truly caring for the victims of the disease. Thus I think their
moral position deteriorates further, they use the death of millions and
ongoing illness and death of innocent men, women and children to further
their bigotry against modern medicine, or to promote their toxin paranoia,
or their politics…
http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2009/05/26/denying-aids-a-book-by-seth/
about the author of the above:
Wikipedia: Mark Hoofnagle
Mark Hoofnagle is an American medical doctor, physiologist and blogger. He was one of the originators of the concept of “denialism”, especially in relation to global warming. His interest in denialism concerns the use of denialist tactics to confuse public understanding of scientific knowledge. Hoofnagle runs the website denialism.com as well as the denialism blog at ScienceBlogs…
Hoofnagle has a M.D. and Ph.D. in physiology from the University of Virginia, and is now a general surgery resident…
Global Warming Denialism
Hoofnagle, said by authors Pascal Diethelm and Martin McKee to be one of the developers of the concept of denialism, defines denialism as the employment of rhetorical arguments to give the appearance of legitimate debate where there is none, an approach that has the ultimate goal of rejecting a proposition on which a scientific consensus exists…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Hoofnagle
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This “denialist” tag get placed around anyone like a burning tyre, the moment they criticize something that involves international funding streams.
There is no doubt that Aids funding gets rorted…. That people in Africa with symptoms as vague as diarrhea and fever are then given government or internationally funded AIDS medications etc, just to promote the funding stream to their areas.
Many of these Critics, who you are branding “HIV denialists”, are not denying AIDS or HIV…. They are criticizing the Bureaucracy and efficacy of the health programs….. But they get attacked as “Deniers”.
I remember the catastrophism of the 80’s and 90’s about the AIDS epidemic….. Since then I can see that mostly AIDS rates have not even come close to those prior claims….. and it appears to be mainly an African “epidemic”, which is curious considering that African rates are higher than introveinous drug users?…. I am not skeptical of HIV, I am a critic of those who manage aid money for HIV health initiatives etc.
… But of course that makes me a skeptic, which makes me a denialist….. To which I respond. At least I am not Gullible to those who would rort the figures in third world countries merely to get funding. To which your response is… “That never happens. There is no, and never will be, any rorting of the system.”……………So who is the denier now?
00
Lies, damned lies, and statistics!
…the ICC … the Inquisition of the Church of Climatology.
Any resistance to “the globe is warming and it’s mankind’s fault”
is provably “… a dangerous heresy” because there’s “a consensus …”
Yeah, right. Shades of 1615, when the planets were were not just in ruts but
epicyclic ruts, at that.
00
apologies if the format of my posts just now are virtually unreadable. something going on with my settings perhaps, so i’ll try to deal with it.
however, i wanted to make the point that lewandowsky is not the first and is not alone…
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[…] offered in the comments at Jo Nova’s blog to provide the raw data for the […]
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Question for Jo (or an Ozzie):
Is the University government funded or private?
I know the manmade global warming people are for the most part government funded and it is in their best interest to publish the right results to keep the funding flowing.
Wondering if this one is an attempt to sidle up to the money trough by the author for a mouthful or eight. Or if was an attempt to publish something that would help his friends in the manmade global warming community. If I were a real cynic, I would also wonder if the Gillard administration was setting the stage to treat skeptics like the old Soviets treated dissidents (adjusting tinfoil hat as I type). Cheers –
00
format prob was my prob with IE zoom in overdrive, and i now see it didn’t really affect my posts…
00
Like Geoff Chambers, I too acquired the raw data from Katabasis.
I have done a number of pivot tables of the beliefs in various conspiracy theories against the rating people gave of agreement with the CO2 consensus on a scale of 0-100.
My preliminary results are as follows.
1. 86% of respondents gave an agreement of 80 or more with the CO2 consensus. Not surprising given that the blogs are all militantly pro-consensus.
2. Belief in conspiracy theories does not significantly differ according to agreement with the CO2 Consensus or not.
3. As such rather than skeptics being anti-science, it would appear that a number of blogs are home to people who – how shall I put this – are unable or unwilling to see that there could be alternative points of view.
Having re-read the original paper, there is nothing in that paper that contradicts these conclusions.
00
Manicbeancounter
Can I suggest that you or you and Geoff together put your analysis down in an email to the editor and/or the publisher of the Journal and ask them how they allowed the paper to be published or don’t they care about the journal’s reputation ?
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Ross,
Our analysis results are at the early stages, and many more people need to contribute. I especially await Jo’s analysis, which is always far more articulate than my own.
However, it would seem proper analysis of the data will probably lead to the opposite conclusion that Lewandowsky claims. It is not the skeptics who support conspiracy theories, but the people who regularly frequent blogs such as Tamino’s or John Cook’s Skepticalscience. You only have to read the postings and the comments to see why the readers hold these views. What is more, there is evidence that the top climate scientists (who recommend these blogs) hold similar conspiracy-type views of the world, especially in terms of “skeptic” funding and “big oil” subverting the political process.
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“… the people who regularly frequent blogs such as Tamino’s or John Cook’s Skepticalscience”.
Yet there’s no evidence that SkepticalScience was involved, and some evidence that they weren’t. There’s no post about the survey between Aug -Oct 2010. Lewandowsky suggested they might have deleted the link, but there’s nothing on wayback machine either. Cook in his private internal e-mails mentions Lewandowsky frequently; discussions with him on how to use SkS’s visitor list (which Cook had handily annotated, identifying sceptics); discussions on planting sceptic bots; but nothing on the survey. Then in June 2011 he mentions (on an internal thread) that Lewandowsky has done some research on scepticism and conspiracy theory, with no indication of SkS involvement.
So it looks as though SkS wasn’t used. In which case, how did he get 1100+ people to fill in a long tedious (that’s what Tamino readers said) questionnaire on seven low-traffic sites?
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Perhaps in the time-honoured “tradition” of those of the “trust me, I’m a climate scientist” ilk, he created a grid, then infilled from the nearest “response” site 😉 This might also explain why Lewandowski’s “conclusions” took two years to get from “research” to publication!
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So according to Lewendowsky….. All “Science” is the Hypothesis of AGW!… And that the critics or skeptics of this hypothesis are, according to Lewendowsky, “Anti-Science”.
One would have thought that it would be standard practice for any scientist to be skeptical of a hypothesis and to hold its premise to the utmost scientific rigor… Which is that Anthropogenic sources of CO2 are increasing global temperature significantly.
The skeptics point to the observations and simply say that the facts don’t comply with the Hypothesis…. It’s the facts that are the “deniers”, us skeptics are just th’ poor messengers….;-)
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“any scientist to be skeptical of a hypothesis and to hold its premise to the utmost scientific rigor”
Lewendowsky isn’t even a real scientist’s rear end !! or even the air that ushers from said orifice.
he is a psychiatrist, and thus deals mostly in the imaginary.
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Confirmation bias – he went looking for the answer he wanted in a way designed to ensure he got it.
Does the journal Psychological Science not do any peer review? This paper should have been rejected for publication on its face. Shame om them.
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Jo, Excellent work on your part. It is very clear to me that Lewandowsky is a deeply dishonest charlatan. If that were not bad enough, he is also incredibly lazy and/or insufferably arrogant and has not bothered to hide his footprints in this comedy he has attempted to foist off on the gullible as ‘science’.
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100% of conspiracy theorists are skeptics but very few skeptics are conspiracy theorists.
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Wrong
Take a wander through ATS http://ask.abovetopsecret.com/
and put in the search box:
global warming is not only not a hoax: 1,370 resuling threads pages.
look at “global warming is a hoax” About 2,620 results including the 1370 from above.
Heck you could mine ATS for the individuals who think “global warming is a hoax” vs those who do not and then see what their opinions are on the other conspiracy theories. No need to do double blind or anything else all the data is right there since the subjects run the gamut. No worry that anyone is rigging the experiment either.
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That was my thought, too. Why not just check the sites? Conspiracy theorists and climate skeptics are usually pretty clear about what they believe. Why use a survey?
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Been having a little fun over at the SMH where a Green posted the following bemoaning the level of the political debate in this country:
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/gags-gone-but-public-debate-is-still-a-joke-20120830-253c1.html
I actually agree wholeheartedly with the first two paragraphs, but I came unstuck at paras 3 and 4 and refused to read further. Clearly the double standard of seeking to silence sceptics in the media on the one hand, and bemoaning Howard attempting to “silence dissent” on the other was not contradictory to the author. I pointed this out and it has led to some vigorous debate.
Poster QED is trying desperately to prove me wrong, but his/her arguments are weak at best. Interesting to see the ole 97% of scientists believe stat trotted out … amongst other fables.
I would like to comment on Lewandowsky, but the whole thing beggars belief. At what point willl UWA be so painfully embarrassed of this non-science* (or nonsense, you pick) that they take action? And what about the people on the ARC panel that gave Lewandowsky funding for such tripe? Couldn’t they have used the money for something vaguely useful, like gender studies or something?
* Perhapsnow people will believe me when I say that 80-90% of the papers I read for my PhD (which I know … I didn’t finish …) were cr@p. The ridiculous competition to generate publications for research funding points (or whatever they call it) means there is a lot of incremental, trivial, repetitive, unoriginal “research” out there. Lewandowsky is at least original … no one else would have been so obtuse as to venture into this ridiculous realm of study. Credit where’s it’s due I guess 9.9 (that’s rolled eyes for the uninitiated).
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The very fact that they STILL trot out that bogus 97% result shows an incredible lack of any learning capability AT ALL !!!
You would make more progress explaining the truth to a large dollop of wet horse poo !!!
Whoops, a bit personal..
Let’s make it a large dollop of wet cement
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Q. What do you call a humanities graduate with an IQ of 110?
A. Professor
Q. What do you call a physicist with an IQ of 110?
A. Nothing. They don’t exist.
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Not necessarily a good example. It is suggested that Richard Feynman, probably one of the more notable theoretical physicists of recent times, had an IQ of circa 125*. This means that I, and probably several other bloggers here, have tested with higher IQs than Feynman.
Unfortunately IQ tests don’t tell you much except how good someone is at doing IQ tests.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Feynman
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Herre’s what theoretical physicist Dr. Stephen D. H. Hsu has to say on the matter.
http://www.creativitypost.com/conversations/a_polymath_physicist_on_richard_feynmans_low_iq_and_finding_another_ei
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Reminds me of an old joke (slightly modified here):
The Labor Government panelwere keen to fill the Climate Commissioner Job. There were three applicants that applied. The first applicant was a very smart mathematical astrophysicist, also with experience in ocean circulation effects on climate change; the second applicant,an equally smart meteorological statistician with experience in modeling of land, sea and satellite temperature data sets; and, thirdly, a humanities post-graduate in Dinosaurs.
The astrophysicist was first to front the panel.
“How much is 50 plus 50 ?” , they asked.
“100” he replied without hesitation.
“Thank you”, they dismissed him.
Next the statistician.
“How much is 50 plus 50?”
“On the average, 100 with 95 % confidence” replied the statistician.
“Thank you”, they dismissed him.
Next the Dinosaur expert.
“How much is 50 plus 50?”
“What would you like it to be?” answered the Paleontologist.
The Government panel, consisting of lawyers and ex-unionists, quickly conferred and decided,
“he’s our man” and instantly hired the the Dinosaur expert.
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Henry Ergas points out some issues with the lack of a price floor in the CO2 tax (these have been raised by Ross Greenwood in the monring on Channel 9 as well – a segment well worth watching just before the hour):
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/combets-cut-price-carbon-caper-blows-25-billion-budget-black-hole/story-fn7078da-1226460245704
Couple that with the plummetting iron ore price and sustained high exchange rate (which is killing Australian dollar mining revenues) and it paints a grim picture for a Rainbow Coalition government still musing about that mythological creature called the “surplus.”
Add to that the new spending policies ($4 billion for dental anyone?) being trotted out by Labor and you can only assume they are wilfully sabotaging the economy, knowing full well that the next (Liberal-led) Government will be unpopular for having to unwind the plans in an effort to save the economy.
Anyone that thinks we are a long way off being another failed state might want to think again. As mauldin says, perhaps Australia’s luck is running out:
http://www.investorsinsight.com/blogs/john_mauldins_outside_the_box/archive/2012/08/27/australia-running-out-of-luck-down-under.aspx
I don’t necessarily agree with the severity of some of the possible scenarios painted in that article, but the general arguments are valid. Having said that, a full scale meltdown in Europe cascading through to the US, Japan and China will completely scuttle Australia as well. Our economy is a lot less robust than it was when the GFC hit.
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Well the Euro as a currency is producing a financial crisi in Europe, especially Germany where the people will (traditionally) sit on their money if they sense an ill wind. That means that China is losing substantial market potential which reduces their demand for raw materials, depressing the price and Australia’s exports.
I hinted at that in other fora after my holiday in Europe in 2007, already sensing that there was an unsustainable economic bubble being blown for the benefit of speculators and legitimised gamblers in the various markets. The propensity of especially the “renewable energy” market to suck up real money and to burn it on fantasies was clear.
There has been no real recovery from the GFC in 2008. Confidence is still dashed. Not just in the USA and Europe as consumers, but also in Australia as a supplier to the factories of the world. China may have been hoping to dodge the bullet, strengthening its domestic market, but their economy is geared to exports and export prices.
Europe’s problem is one of politics: The EU wants total control of the economies of all member nations; at all levels of government. They even want to “balance the books” of local governments.) That is what the ESM will do when ratified. It moves sovereign power of the people of the nations to the EU bureaucracy. And that is the main reason why Germany’s Constitutional Court should decide that Germany’s ratification of the ESM to be unconstitutional (violates article 20) that places sovereign powers irrevocably with the people.
That decision is to be handed down on the 12th of September. On the 14th, there’s an “unofficial” meeting of Europe’s finance ministers/treasurers in Cyprus. But the EU has already shown that it will do whatever it takes to preserve the Euro; even if it bankrupts all the member nations.
Perhaps the people of the countries can persuade their respective ministers that it would be unwise to return from Cyprus if they agree to “much, much more of the same”.
I blogged on this crisis earlier. ISTM that the crisis managers are doing a top job at perpetuatiing the crisis.
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I guess we are on the same page then. I was shouted down by some here for suggesting we were headed into another (worse) recession/depression event* some time ago. Worse because we don’t have the reserves to blow this time around – they were largely blown in 2008. Uncharted waters lie ahead and Australia is not going to fare well. Irresponsible spending on the part of the Labor Rainbow Coalition has ensured that.
* Partly because I expected the downturn to come about a year earlier than it has. This is due to the highly irresponsible Euro-style “QE’s” of rthe last year.
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Well if your PM is hoping the right arm of your economy is going to keep you propt up she might have to rethink.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/kangaroo-metals-mine-fortescue-trying-raise-15-billion-20-banks-iron-prices-implode
It’s OK though as soon as the price of Iron Ore doubles and China starts to order triple they will be able to pay it back.
Not to worry though as some issues in Oz have been fixed, Unicorns have been spotted on the Nullarbor Plains eating cain toads, so the world is good.
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GFC Mk II is baked in.
Australia will wake up with a greek accent as we discover just how much crappy debt against crappy collateral we actually own.
And since we are not Iceland – I fully expect our Government to bend over backwards to bail out the banking sector and hand the bill to the taxpayers.
Bailout for the Australian banks will exceed $400B AUD.
Mark my words.
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@Bulldust: The QE’s have been provided courtesy of a deeper hole into which to fall. They just keep digging.
Perhaps you read an article on my blog about a year ago. I provided a caveat:
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Hi Guys,
You will find an excellent aggregator site on all things financial from a varied realist perspective at Zerohedge. Germain to the current comment is the following germany cornered
Central planners running amok in europe…
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The Lewandowsky raw data which Katabasis kindly gave me is now available at
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/8/31/lewandowskys-data.html
Explanation of how to interpret it is in my comment.
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Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, C. E can nickname me a sceptic if they like. It makes no differene to reality.
If I disbelieve some climate data, am I automatically labelled a sceptic? What if my disbelief is admitted to arise from an error, such as this one by our own Bureau of Meteorology:
Up until 1994 CLIMAT mean temperatures for Australia used (Tx+Tn)/2. In
1994, apparently as part of a shift to generating CLIMAT messages
automatically from what was then the new database (previously they were
calculated on-station), a change was made to calculating as the mean of
all available three-hourly observations (apparently without regard to
data completeness, which made for some interesting results in a couple
of months when one station wasn’t staffed overnight).
What was supposed to happen (once we noticed this problem in 2003 or
thereabouts) was that we were going to revert to (tx+Tn)/2, for
historical consistency, and resend values from the 1994-2003 period. I
have, however, discovered that the reversion never happened.
In a 2004 paper I found that using the mean of all three-hourly
observations rather than (Tx+Tn)/2 produced a bias of approximately
-0.15 C in mean temperatures averaged over Australia (at individual
stations the bias is quite station-specific, being a function of the
position of stations (and local sunrise/sunset times) within their time
zone.
……………………
We all make errors and hope we can correct them to be forgiven. When, as in climate science, there is error after error, the natural progression is to become a sceptic. Whay are’t you authors in this class by now? Do I infer that you have not read the primary climate change literature?
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Just carried out a quick churn analysis of the press release (from: http://www.news.uwa.edu.au/201208234950/research/what-motivates-rejection-climate-science)
Seems the Telegraph piece was a fairly substantial cut and paste from the press release (45% cut, 50% paste):
http://churnalism.com/alkl4/
Direct link to the Telegraph piece:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/9503044/Climate-change-deniers-are-either-extreme-free-marketeers-or-conspiracy-theorists.html
It’s no surprise that the Guardian piece didn’t get flagged by the churn engine because it was written almost a month before the press release was dated, however I’m now wondering how/why Adam Corner had such a detailed understanding of Lewandowsky’s piece – and clearly written from his POV rather than someone who may have actually gone through a draft of the paper almost a whole month before any press release.
Direct link to the Guardian piece:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/jul/27/climate-sceptics-conspiracy-theorists
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Adam Corner is another psychologist specialising in analysing climate scepticism.
His Guardian article on Lewandowsky’s research was reposted on his government-funded site
http://talkingclimate.org/are-climate-sceptics-more-likely-to-be-conspiracy-theorists/
It’s well worth looking at the comments there, (all from sceptics) and it’s also worth giving Adam credit for letting the highly critical comments through, and replying intelligently to them.
In a comment there I list a number of John Cook’s mentions of his pal Lewandowsky, taken from the leaked private internal mail system at Skeptical Science. Barry Woods gives a complete list of links to all the articles announcing the survey, and Foxgoose gives links to articles by Lewandowsky at Deltoid and DeSmog. (There were two articles by Lewandowsky at SkS during the data collection period (Aug -Oct 2010) – a bit like doing political polling while carrying a party banner! )
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One thing I find interesting is that from a comment on WUWT I see the survey for the paper was done in Aug-Oct 2010.
This means it has taken 2 years for the paper to be written, reviewed and put into the prepublication process. This seems to me to be a very long time for a paper based on a simple survey.
Given what we know about “pal review” and how it helps speed this process up , I wonder what went on.
( In know 2 years is not unusual for a serious scientific paper but this is nothing of the sort)
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Ultimately the answers will be found in “follow the money”. Grant’s for bullshit that engages the fringe, Physcology in this case, in the ‘big league’ of Government funding. As you (Jo Nova) have consistently pointed out – just show me the the one piece of instrumental evidence that supports your POV and I too will become an alarmist shill. We are all still waiting for just one of them to put forth their evidence. Err, no, we have Lewandowsky and his straw men – he’s convinced me (NOT).
Time we all stopped “playing the game” and start using the Lewandowsky/Mann/every grant hugger/ methodology to promote our cause. Lying f****n politicians making a fortune out of heading the committee that directs (CAGW) tax payer funds into their business interests or ‘academics’ trying to suck funds into their previously overlooked corner of the world – tis all about the money honey. 0.3 degC (over the 30 year average) = massive grants and months spent on tropical islands, -0.3 degC bellow means they all have to get a real job in the real world. Shocked if Lewandowsky chooses “the conference on a tropical island”.
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Lewandowsky makes it sooooooo easy for Jo to rip him up for toilet paper through his complete lack of even a hint of logic in almost everything he puts his long name to.
Is he really that stupid or is someone paying him to act stupid?
00
I believe that it is an excellent tactic to expose the poor work by people such as Lewandowsky and Oreskes. Keep the pressure up for as long as it takes. I’d like to see a whole website for each one, such as http://blackswhitewash.com
That seems to have worked, as Richard Black has now resigned (in disgrace I suspect)
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A website dedicated to ‘exposing’ an individual.
While one can see how it may indeed be effective, doesn’t it run the risk of being seen as just , well persecution. I’ve seen where warmists choose to pick on an individual and then attempt to destroy then , by persecution, distortions & lies.
Anyway, who has an appetite for such focus on a supposedly uninspiring individual ?
.
In the land of the fair go, I’m perfectly satisfied by the fair go that the likes of Lewandowsky & Oreskes get from time to time on Jo’s & Watts Bloggs.
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I was thinking that it would be useful to have all the discussions about the most obsessive warmists together in one place.
Lewandowsky and Oreskes spend much of their time telling untruths about sceptics. If you Google their names you’ll find hundreds of admiring warmist articles and websites and few sceptic articles. That’s because the latter are older posts in the larger sceptic blogs. It takes a while for newer posts to reach a high ranking. Having a static place for each name would allow people to more easily find the sceptic point of view.
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All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.
Arthur Schopenhauer
German philosopher (1788 – 1860)
00
Oh dear, my sides are aching. The warmers are actually starting to melt. Does this guy have even two neurons to rub together? He needs to be confined to a padded cell for his own good, before he hurts himself.
00
It’s interesting that people are insulted by the research and then insult the field of psychology with the same lame behaviour. Granted, there are parts of psychology that are not verifiable by scientific method, but it seems the practice here is to call all of psych not scientific, rather than those aspects that do not meet the criteria for science. How does that make this group any different that the guy who cherry-picked his group and applied it to all? If you dismiss an entire discipline off hand with few or no examples and no data to back it up, maybe you should apply for a job with Mr. Lewandowsky.
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Quite right Sheri. Lewandowsky’s piece is a disgrace to the field of Phsycology, as is the Journal that would publish it.
If its not typical or representative of the field then the appropriate professional institution should be taking steps to protect and restore credibility to the field.
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The link to Tallbloke in the main posting doesn’t work, coming up “not found” at:-
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/08/lewandowsky-shows-skeptics-are-nutters-by-asking-alarmists-to-fill-out-survey/tallbloke.wordpress.com/
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[…] Katabasis offered in the comments at Jo Nova’s blog to provide the raw data for the paper I took him up on the […]
00
The title of the paper is
NASA faked the moon landing:Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science
You would expect strong empirical support for the link between the two conspiracies.
Out of 175 responses from those who “reject the climate science” the responses were to the conspiracy theory:-
Strongly Reject 162
Weakly Reject 9
Weakly Accept 2
Strongly Accept 2
The last 2 just ticked 4 to every conspiracy theory – and said they were extreme sceptics. Something in Australia needs to contact the University Ehtics Committee, and also get the Journal to block publication. The claim that climate skeptics are conspiracy theorists has no evidence. Further, it is made with the intent of suppressing adverse criticism.
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Jo can add me to the list of skeptical climate bloggers who was not contacted by Lewandowsky. My note to Professor L, emailed earlier today (“permission-request to publicize any contact between us re your climate survey”):
Also posted on my blog:
http://errortheory.blogspot.com/2012/09/permission-request-for-eco-fraud.html
00
Brilliant! I love the legal implications….
(note to self: must check out http://errortheory.blogspot.com
00
The journal that is alleged to have the paper in print is under the auspices of the APS (Association of psychological “Science”)
They have an email webform here:
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/contact/index-new.cfm
Please add to my complaint to them.
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Did none of the reviewers at “Psychological Science“ think to ask if the “sampling” of alarmist blogs would affect the results?
Apparently said reviewers did not understand the importance of a balanced, bell-curve sample in such a study. Or they simply forgot. Otherwise, they naturally would have questioned the methodology involved, including who were the submitters of the poll, how was the poll disseminated, and what statistical techniques were employed in the formulation of conclusions. The reviewers’ conclusion, had they asked these questions, could only have been to reject the submitted paper.
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Wow.
Here’s another Lewandowsky linked project. I think everyone will enjoy this one! –
http://psychologyforasafeclimate.org/
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“This kind of deafening silence has …. been particularly noticeable when climate change is mentioned in normal social life. ”
.
Wouldn’t that rather be due to it just being too boring for a social setting.
You never bring it up socially, because it marks you out as a nutter , but no-one will say so as it isnt pc to express disbelief in such nonsense, so you just humour the victim and move on.
.
Is social life a problem for psychologists at UWA, or is it just for the rabid warmest types ?
00
Not if we can get the current paper withdrawn for two reasons.
First, the data does not show any valid link between climate change rejection and belief in NASA faking the Moon Landings. That is 45 out of 48 of those who dogmatically reject climate science, also emphatically reject the conspiracy theory. The two who score 4 are rogue results.
Second, the true result of the survey data is not that those who oppose climate science are nutters. Rather, it is that those who support climate science have views that are at odds to, and contrary to the best interests of, the vast majority. We have not got here the justification to silence the opposition, but giving them due weighting.
By the way Katabasis – thanks for the data you sent. Spent the whole weekend working on it. Hope you like the results.
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The strategy of asking leading questions to just the holders of one side of an arguement is straight from the Feminist textbook. It is called ‘Advocacy’ research.
Never mind finding the Truth; prove your false claim.
It started with ‘Professor’ Mary Koss’s famous 1 in 4 statistic for rape gleaned from asking only a self-selected unrepresentative group from Mz Magazine readers in 1974 (all feminists) and continued through the Office for the Status of Women in Australia’s deliberate interference in the ‘Women’s Safety Survey’ in 1996. There only self-selected women were interviewed and only by ‘authorised’ women. The resultant furore from the ABS eventually saw an Australian Safety Survey in 2006 which included one quarter of male resondents, but again only female interviewers. Despite the completely different results (the first conveniently replicated 1:4, except in Victoria’s 1:5 which was due possibly to the quality of Victoria’s air) and showed that men were far and aware more subject to violence from women than vice versa, the Government still spent $73 million on a TV Ad campaign portraying only men as violent to women. They didn’t care who was violent to men.
They still don’t. We still have the Australia says No to Violence against Women hysteria campaign.
Heck, the strategy works. Spend taxpayers money on a result and cognitive dissonance takes over. “We spent the money; we can’t admit to being wrong”
00
Good comment amfortas.
Remove PC from around our necks and bring back a functional system of justice for all events ; no matter how small.
Little things count.
KK
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I have posted up an analysis of Lewandowsky’s link between laissez-faire beliefs and rejection of climate science. The data shows a strong link, but only due to a number of steps taken to bias the result.
The more significant reliable result is that climate alarmists hold views are more authoritarian, and against the best interests of, the vast majority of the people in Australia, the UK or the USA.
10
As a graduate of the University of Washington (Seattle, WA, USA), I hope no international readers confuse that with the UWA mentioned in this article or other articles on JoNova’s blog.
00
Should the UWA be getting stigmatised at all. There are a number of good graduates from UWA on here. Donn’t we accept that every village has its idiots (UWA) included, only some get more attention than others ?
00
Lewandowsky’s post of today is interesting in what it leaves out.
He picks up on the minor point about the survey only being posted on 8 “pro-science” websites, but makes no reference to the consequence of such a move. At most, only 175 of the 1145 responses could be construed as rejecting the science. Nor does he mention that on the “NASA faked moon landing” survey, 93% of respondents gave the lowest score.
00
Forgot the link to his article.
00
From bishop hill, a Lewandowsky presentation was found by ROM here:
http://www.monash.edu.au/research/sustainability-institute/assets/documents/seminars/msi-seminar_10-09-23_lewandowsky_presentation.pdf
Includes the following on slide 21:
That slide is disgraceful, unprofessional and completely unacceptable.
(Actually, the whole presentation is shocking)
[Thanks Spence. This is noted. Action will be taken. — Jo ]
00
I’m confused. If someone believes that the moon landings were fake but also believes that Coke tastes better than dog urine, does this mean he’s wrong on both counts by definition?
00
The alarmists are desperate and don’t know it, or do know it but dare not face it.
If they were not so full of battle fury for their quackery they would see it was quackery.
They do not answer the skeptic case with reasoned science, and why is this? Clearly because they can not.
But this they can not admit.
So out they come with the ad hominem.
It does show their delusional fanaticism, and the trouble is that these kind never repudiate their zeal. It has become a life defining fixture.
Just like the Spanish Inquisition
But for the rest of us we can congratulate them for showing that all they have is name calling.
If it were not so serious it would be hilariously funny
00
Psychological projection
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Psychological projection or projection bias is a psychological defense mechanism where a person subconsciously denies his or her own attributes, thoughts, and emotions, which are then ascribed to the outside world, usually to other people. Thus, projection involves imagining or projecting the belief that others originate those feelings.
Projection reduces anxiety by allowing the expression of the unwanted unconscious impulses or desires without letting the conscious mind recognize them.
An example of this behavior might be blaming another for self failure. The mind may avoid the discomfort of consciously admitting personal faults by keeping those feelings unconscious, and by redirecting libidinal satisfaction by attaching, or “projecting,” those same faults onto another person or object.
The theory was developed by Sigmund Freud – in his letters to Wilhelm Fliess, ‘”Draft H” deals with projection as a mechanism of defence – and further refined by his daughter Anna Freud; for this reason, it is sometimes referred to as Freudian Projection.
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I would note that, as I have pointed out on climate change sights, we are now talking about marketing. I am going to hope no one here behaves as a climate scientist wannabe and picks apart my wording (which they did on the climate site, big surprise, not.) When you bypass the message and go to the messenger, this is about product sales. Product sales in NO way are interested in the truth or falsity of the product claims but only in the sale of the product. Jumping to a sales tactic indicates a complete lack of science. Science is about data, not selling the idea to the public. This moves into the “used car salesmen” territory (who also can be very rude when questioned too closely!).
Also, somewhere it was asked why a person who did not believe we landed on the moon and that 9/11 was Bush’s action would then believe the same government about climate change. The answer is that climate change often fits in with these people’s world view. They blame big business for destroying the planet and shaming them by showing success is possible. Thus, they vilify big business in the hopes of avoiding anyone noticing their failures. Climate change doctrine pushes us back 100 years or more, which means that success is living in a wooden hut you built yourself and eating berries and nuts you gathered. All forms of big business will be destroyed–their fondest dream. They believe that which fits into their view of the world.
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“which means that success is living in a wooden hut you built yourself and eating berries and nuts you gathered. All forms of big business will be destroyed–their fondest dream. They believe that which fits into their view of the world.”
In short “They” are Pagans. Nothing more. Nothing less. And that includes alarmist Climate “Scientists” who do not appear to realise the implications of their religious views for science and technology.
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Yes.
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REPOST:
H/T David;
[” There’s one I haven’t reported yet, required a bit of effort to do right and folks seem to have lost interest.
Basically, John Cook in cahoots with a Uni of Western Australia professor Steven Lewandowsky conducted some kind of denial social experiment using students as guinea pigs.
John Cook:
I’ve been conducting a psychological experiment with UWA cognitive scientists testing for the effects of blog comments on readers’ comprehension. The first stage of the experiment was live on SkS and we’ve analysed the data and found that for a warmist blog post, there was no difference in reader comprehension when the reader was exposed to all warmist comments or no comments. However, when the reader was exposed to all skeptic comments, their comprehension dropped.
So it’s officially been quantified – reading the comments threads on denier blogs will make you stupid.
(2011-09-21-Need a handful of comments from SkSers for our blogging experiment.html)
They exposed the students to examples of internet posts in one of 4 categories:
Warmist post, warmist comments
Warmist post, skeptic comments
Skeptic post, warmist comments
Skeptic post, skeptic comments
… and ummm, analysed something-or-rather, which isn’t too clear.
So how did they source these ‘internet posts’? They manufactured them themselves!
So get this, the tree-hutters were asked to add comments on the topic of climate change — pretending to be skeptics/deniers — and these were then used in a formal university experiment.
John Cook:
As the second part of our experiment on science blogging, we’ll be showing 4 conditions to lab participants at the Uni of W.A. The condition for this thread is Warmist Blog Post, Skeptic Comments. So would be great if a handful of SkSers could post scathing, very skeptic comments to our “How we know…” blog post – posted here in this forum thread. We need exactly 10 skeptic comments.
The 4 threads used to capture theses cases are:
2011-09-21-BLOG EXPERIMENT CONDITION 1_ warmist post, warmist comments.html
2011-09-21-BLOG EXPERIMENT CONDITION 2_ warmist post, skeptic comments.html
2011-09-21-BLOG EXPERIMENT CONDITION 3_ skeptic post, warmist comments.html
2011-09-21-BLOG EXPERIMENT CONDITION 4_ skeptic post, skeptic comments.html
(each contains a similar introduction as per JC’s quote above)
Do skeptics have a tendency to suffer Tourettes? They do seem to be trigger happy on the explanation mark key.
So why wouldn’t they just grab the real skeptic and warmist comments from his own blog? Oh would it be that he deletes all the skeptic comments? Or are they not crazy enough for his experiment? Or is he just too academically sloppy to provide real data? Take your pick.
And it gets worse.
After having exposed these experiment participants — i.e. real people — to manufactured data does he seek to make amends for any misunderstanding that might create?
Well he does have one concern…
John Cook:
Steve recommended we hand the participants who read the denier blog post a flyer as they leave, explaining what was wrong with the denier blog post (just to ensure we don’t convert too many into deniers). So that’s something I need to whip up shortly as the experiment will be run soon.
But on the topic of that manufactured data…
Glenn Tamblyn (someone gets it, bold is his):
Once your experiment is complete it might be good to actually do a post on it, showing all 4 versions and commenting prominantly that both warmist and skeptic comments were written by the same people
John Cook (hoodwinking people – What, Me Worry?) :
[title] Will definitely post about the experiment
Probably after it’s been accepted or published though, best not to pre-empt the peer-review process.
Not sure if I’ll post the actual article and comments – that will be something to ponder way down the track. Could have a bit of fun with it.
(2011-09-26-Blog Experiment.html)
No John, it’s not about posting details of the experiment on your blog which no one reads. He’s telling you it’s unethical to expose people to manufactured data which may influence their opinion
about major controversial topic and then not giving an ass about it.
Apr 2, 2012 at 7:05 AM | David ‘ ]
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/3/26/opengate-josh-158.html?currentPage=4#comments
This lost some of Davids’ formatting…follow the link…go to bottom of comments …find David April 2
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This is the reply I received from UWA in regards to my complaint about this paper, it’s pathetic.
Dear Glenn
Thank you for your recent contact regarding your concerns about the paper “NASA faced the moon landing-Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science” by Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, C. E. (in press, Psychological Science).
Your complaint was received and managed consistent with the University Policy on: Public Complaints. Information about the policy and the associated can be found at: http://www.complaints.uwa.edu.au/home/general#Whatis
As a member of the University Executive and the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), the matters were referred to me for consideration. I have completed my review and find that:
1. The focus of Professor Lewandowsky’s research relates directly to his interest and expertise in scepticism and the updating of memory. As such, the topic of this paper of is well within his remit and consistent with the University’s Code of Ethics and in particular the academic freedom of staff;
2. The research was undertaken in a manner compliant with the University’s strict Human Ethics approval;
3. A review of all correspondence to the blog sites was undertaken confirming the contact with blog sites;
4. In considering the release of the names of the blog sites that did not respond to Prof Lewandowsky’s initial request, it is noted that Prof Lewandowsky was concerned that he would breach research ethics by releasing the names. Following receipt of legal advice, Prof Lewandowsky has now released the names of the blog sites; and
5. The paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted in a high quality, international journal.
Academic freedom is recognised and protected by this University as essential to the proper conduct of teaching, research and scholarship. Freedom of intellectual thought and enquiry and the open exchange of ideas and evidence are a University core value. It is the University’s expectation that all academic and research staff are guided by a commitment to freedom of inquiry and exercise their traditional rights to examine social values and to criticise and challenge the belief structures of society in the spirit of a responsible and honest search for knowledge and its dissemination.
The University recognises your right to express your concern and I believe that we have appropriately considered the matters you have raised.
Regards
Professor Robyn Owens
Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research)
The University of Western Australia, M460
35 Stirling Highway, Crawley WA 6009
Phone: +61 8 6488 2460
Fax: +61 8 6488 1013
Email: dvcr@uwa.edu.au
CRICOS Provider number 00126G
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Gobsmacking! Not even the slightest hint of criticism or contrition regarding the deeply flawed methodology.
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re: September 22, 2012 at 2:58 pm
Thanks Glenn, I read this as “Thank you for your concern but the Uni stands by our professors even if their research is essentially gossip”.
I think we’d have more success charging him with bullying……..
P.S. did they really spell “faked” wrong?
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This saga rumbles on. The latest is a FOI release obtained by Simon Turnhill of AustralianClimateMadness.
One thing that is pertinent to this post, is that Lewandowsky received consent to conceal that he was behind the survey.
I have made two comments elsewhere that follow up of this.
At ClimateAudit
Also at STW blog
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