ESSAY: The shoddy science of sceptic-bashing LOG12 paper by Lewandowsky attempts to turn rational criticism into a psychological illness.
“As the influence of environmental thinking has increased its hold over the political establishment, the failure to win the public support that might create the basis for decisive action to save the planet has also increasingly been blamed on climate sceptics operating on the internet.
On this view, bloggers have thwarted international and domestic action to prevent climate change. Accordingly, the nature of the blogosphere and the workings of the minds of climate sceptics have become the focus of academic research, just as the mechanics of the climate system have been the subject of climate scientists. But this attempt to form a pathological view of a complex debate says much more about the researchers than the objects of their study.”
http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13716/
h/t to Ken G
For reference:
Political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union
In the twentieth century, systematic political abuse of psychiatry took place in the Soviet Union.[1] Psychiatry was used as a tool during the reign of Leonid Brezhnev to eliminate political opponents (“dissidents”) who openly expressed views that contradicted official dogma.[2] The term “philosophical intoxication” was widely used to diagnose mental disorders in cases where people disagreed with leaders and criticized them using the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin.
more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry_in_the_Soviet_Union
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Down here, “to float a log” has a certain meaning.
It pertains very well to Lewindopey’s papers.
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The inventor of the internet hoist on his own petard!
Even if I “thwarted”, my mind should best not “become the focus of academic research”, cus I don’t like to be an “objects”.
Or, did just miss the whole point ?
And I should feel outraged, again.
If Lewandowsky is searching for psychological illness in the climate debate, he need look no further than the closest mirror.
Pathological Altruism is form of mental illness. Judge for yourself, the description of the pathology fits Gleick, Hansen and Mann like a glove.
http://books.google.com/books?id=FPtwdmXtjmoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=pathological+altruism&hl=en&sa=X&ei=oHTCUceLIYmCqQHJiID4DQ&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA
This IMO verges on an incitement to violence.
If climate extremists actually come to believe that the future of the world hinges on silencing a handful of prominent skeptical bloggers, some lunatic might decide to take matters into their own hands.
After spending a significant amount of time studying the climate debate and coming to the conclusion that there is insufficient scientific evidence for a CO2 forcing multiplier. I have to wonder who is doing science and who is doing politics. It seems more and more evident as I look at various websites that the kooks are mostly made up of extremists on both ends but where the skeptical kooks are mostly harmless, the AGW crowd is down right dangerous in terms of blind followership and willingness to fudge science (climategate et all) for the cause.
Much of the general public is waking up without assistance. There are billions of people on the planet, they don’t all visit skeptics’ blogs.
What Lew and Co hate about skeptics on the Internet is that they present excellent essays by scientists, science and data, and welcome debate.
Lew and Co throw names around and float the concept of illnesses simply because that’s what they are paid to do. I think they thought the general public would back them and start the move to insist silencing the skeptics. Alas, that is not what they got.
People are more aware than the CAGW crowd want them to be. When the anger comes, it won’t be directed at skeptics. If I was a climate scientist pushing for extremes, I’d be packing my bags now.
Lewdowsky is talking about “saving the planet.”
What arrogant predictable hogwash.
The best case for the Chicken Littles is that if there were any significant agw it would be a bit of warming, which would do some good, and in other cases require some adaptation. Nothing major, no saving the world needed. But the “best case” for the warmists is not the case that is reality. What would be good is if someone would put together a paid-media campaign (ads) that cuts through the leftist MSM fog and changes public opinion, and thus saves the world from the scourge of the agw fiction. Oh, and this campaign would probably be self-supporting, because an effective would garner a huge amount donations $ from conservatives. Just an idea for a project for a very motivated type.
Yes, agw fiction. What could I say now to support that it’s a fiction? I’ll take my earlier hotair comment regarding sea level, and replay it. It just shows that the never ending predictions of doom over decades from the fear mongers have all failed miserably, and so the whole theory and “religion” is bogus, and take my word for it based on stories of so many people that have seen a particular shore line decades ago and see it now… the sea level is the just the same, despite any “adjusted” data. My short hotair comment:
“Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.” -Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC
“Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000…” -Noel Brown, ex UNEP Director, 1988
“[in 2008] the West Side Highway [and so much of Manhattan, NY] will be under water…” -James Hansen, 1988, NASA
>
Now where’s the sea??
Just exactly where it was in 1988. No change! Don’t believe any of the same fear mongering bs about sea level that the doomsayers continue to regurgitate year after year. The sea will remain the same!
Instead of telling us ad nauseam how irrational we are to reject “the evidence”, why not just, oh, you know, GIVE US THE EVIDENCE!!!!
Musings of the drones……
Correct me if I am wrong, But I think we covered this some time ago:
“We show how the prevailing majority opinion in a population can be rapidly reversed by a small fraction p of randomly distributed committed agents who consistently proselytize the opposing opinion and are immune to influence. Specifically, we show that when the committed fraction grows beyond a critical value pc ≈ 10%, there is a dramatic decrease in the time Tc taken for the entire population to adopt the committed opinion.
“Human behavior is profoundly affected by the influenceability of individuals and the social networks that link them together.
“Commonly used models for this process include the thresholdmodel [8] and the Bass model [9]. A key feature in both thesemodels is that once an individual adopts the newstate, his state remains unchanged at all subsequent times.”
PHYSICAL REVIEW E 84, 011130 (2011)
Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities
J. Xie, S. Sreenivasan, G. Korniss, W. Zhang, C. Lim, and B. K. Szymanski
I just realized that I can no longer search WUWT! Or I would have provided the link to where this was discussed.
Alternatively, the paper is at:
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1102.3931.pdf
Probably on of the most unscientific, non-representative,ideological pieces of misinformed rubbish I have ever read. How can Lewandowsky seriously believe that this is scientific?
Apologies, of course I should have realised that science has no place in anything associated with AGW!
WHAT LYSENKO SPAWNED
The use of vague terminology on the unsuspecting public indicates a pathological condition.
Carbon Footprint? Do they really mean Carbon Dioxide Footprint?
Climate Change? Do they really mean Man-Made Climate Changes?
These psychological nuances in terminology are used by psychopaths.
When the science is clearly bad, the models are obviously highly flawed, it is a government funded gravy train and the proponents are not responsible for their actions and are motivated by financial self-interest, then most intelligent individuals are going to say that something is wrong here.
Lewandowsky, it is as simple as that. Moreover climate change is natural – the reasoning for the refusal by alarmists to acknowledge the effect of natural climate cycles is what you should be ‘researching’.
It won’t take many more winters and springs like we have been having and the the debate will be objectively lost by the warmistas. At this point, though, they have lost the political will to do much damage, just look at Germany building coal fired power plants again.
Ever notice how “Lysenko” is hiding in “Lewandowsky”?
Lewser is in full possession of his own marbles. The green pixies told him so.
Donald Stokes’s Quadrant plots scientists on a 2-dimensional graph with axes pertaining to what degree they seek fundamental understanding and to what extent they planned to use their research.
In the top left (high understanding, low use) we find Newton and Bohr, top right (high and high) there is Pasteur. Bottom right (low fundamental understanding, high intent to use the research (Edison).
Lewandowsky belongs in the bottom left corner (no fundamental insights and no means of using what he has ‘discovered’ beyond feathering his own nest and feeding his ego) a.k.a totally worthless.
In the twentieth century, systematic political abuse of psychiatry took place in the Soviet Union.[1] Psychiatry was used as a tool during the reign of Leonid Brezhnev to eliminate political opponents (“dissidents”) who openly expressed views that contradicted official dogma.[2] The term “philosophical intoxication” was widely used to diagnose mental disorders in cases where people disagreed with leaders and criticized them using the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin.
First two sentences in this Wikipedia paragraph are true. The last one shows, again, how people who grew up in the West totally misunderstand what was going on in the USSR.
It had almost nothing to do with “the writings of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Vladimir Lenin,” to which even “leaders” themselves gave no more than a lip service. Political abuse of psychiatry was just a tool of oppression, used by the gangsters-in-power against anybody who said or did anything undesirable; practical things, not ideological or philosophical, were given the most attention.
Protesting the corruption, refusing to serve in the Soviet Army, refusing to sign a letter supporting Nelson Mandela, refusing to pay your 1 ruble into the legal fund of Angela Davis, going against some crazy government’s project (like turning great Siberian rivers to Central Asian deserts by using nuclear explosions), telling political jokes in public, not attending a street rally on May 1st, expressing doubts in the sanity of senile Kremlin rulers, refusing to join Young Communists Union (Komsomol), or even simply expressing an outrage at not being able to find anything edible in the food store — would get you threatened with a seclusion in a mental hospital. If you persisted in being different, and did not shut up, they would diagnose you as mentally ill and “treat” you with special “medications” until you really became mentally ill.
One of my childhood friends ended up this way, and I barely escaped the same fate. In the society of slaves, if you are different (not a happy slave), you are not normal, therefore mentally ill. It is that simple. Marx, Engels, and Lenin are just names that have nothing to do with the substance of the problem. These names could easily be Keynes, Hansen, and Obama, as far as we are now concerned, the U.S. being almost indistinguishable from Venezuela these days.
The title of this posting “The pathologising of denialism” (or climate sceptisism if you like) reminds me of an article by Phillipa Martyr who sums up Gramscian Marxism in Quadrant: I liked it so I kept it
“How is the Green movement ‘watermelonish’? Because it uses tactics of social engineering that were pioneered by socialism over a hundred years ago and refined throughout a century of totalitarianism. You take an innocuous term like ‘sustainability’ and make sure that what you mean by ‘sustainable’ is completely different from everyone else’s idea, and you thus happily recruit people who would in fact be diametrically opposed to you if they had the faintest idea what you were really talking about. You infiltrate and eventually control what Delingpole calls the ‘heavy weaponry’ of the cultural wars: the schools, the universities, the media, the publishing companies. Eventually, as one of his questioners put it, you oversee the pathologising of ‘denialism’, so that those who disagree with the prevailing wisdom are marginalised and branded as mentally unstable.”
http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2012/04/philippa-martyr
Thon Brocket @ur momisugly 11:22
“Ever notice how “Lysenko” is hiding in “Lewandowsky”?”
Yes, if you take “Lysenko” away you are left with “WADW”. Could stand for something like “What” “A” “D…..” “W……”. (make up your own last two words)
Anagram of “Stephan Lewandowsky” = “What Lysenko Spawned”
Definition of DISSIDENT
: disagreeing especially with an established religious or political system, organization, or belief
(Webster)
Maybe that would be a better term to use than sceptic. The msm would love it.
This fits in with my interpretation that alarmist warmism fits nicely into Pareto’s concept of “the circulation of the elites.” I.e., it is a grab for power by institutionalized science (see the endorsements of warmism by the world’s scientific academies) in particular and by the academy in general and (still more generally) by those who identify with it and give great weight to its consensus.
But wait–this is a conspiracy theory!
(Not really; as a WUWTer said, no conspiracy is needed when a carrot will suffice. The carrot in this case being identification with “my team.”)