Ah yes, the tired old you are irrelevant because are funded by big (coal, gas, oil, wood, propane, butane, electric, peat, Exxon-Mobil take your pick) gets turned into a peer reviewed paper. What will they think of next?
Ironically, this is published in the Journal of Business Ethics and is titled:
Astroturfing Global Warming: It Isn’t Always Greener on the Other Side of the Fence
Charles H. Cho, Martin L. Martens, Hakkyun Kim and Michelle Rodrigue
Abstract
Astroturf organizations are fake grassroots organizations usually sponsored by large corporations to support any arguments or claims in their favor, or to challenge and deny those against them. They constitute the corporate version of grassroots social movements. Serious ethical and societal concerns underline this astroturfing practice, especially if corporations are successful in influencing public opinion by undertaking a social movement approach. This study is motivated by this particular issue and examines the effectiveness of astroturf organizations in the global warming context, wherein large corporate polluters have an incentive to set up astroturf organizations to undermine the importance of human activities in climate change. We conduct an experiment to determine whether astroturf organizations have an impact on the level of user certainty about the causes of global warming. Results show that people who used astroturf websites became more uncertain about the causes of global warming and humans’ role in the phenomenon than people who used grassroots websites. Astroturf organizations are hence successful in promoting business interests over environmental protection. In addition to the multiple business ethics issues it raises, astroturfing poses a significant threat to the legitimacy of the grassroots movement.
Kid blogger Chris Mooney over at the Intersection Blog of Discover Magazine writes about it and says:
The website for each condition, respectively, consisted of a ‘‘Home page’’ with links to five other pages pertaining to global warming and the organization’s activities. In the grassroots condition, these were labeled as ‘‘About us,’’ ‘‘Key issues and solutions,’’ ‘‘Why act now?’’ ‘‘Get involved!’’ and ‘‘Contact us.’’ Similarly, in the astroturf condition, the pages links were labeled as ‘‘About us,’’ ‘‘Myths/facts,’’ ‘‘Climate science,’’ ‘‘Scientific references,’’ and ‘‘Contact us.’’ All of the content was based on information found on real-world grassroots and astroturf web-sites ….
A further manipulation consisted of disclosing information regarding the funding source that supported the organization. The organization’s name in all websites, regardless of the condition, was ‘‘Climate Clarity.’’ In each of the funding source conditions, all web pages within the condition specified who funds the organization (donations, Exxon Mobil or the Conservation Heritage Fund). The ‘‘no disclosure’’ condition did not have any information on funding sources anywhere within the web pages.
So, they setup fake websites to gather fake data. Nice. Not only that, they “borrowed” content from other websites to use on these “fake” websites, apparently without citation or attribution, lest that taint the results. Sounds like a job for John Mashey and “Deep Climate” aka Dave Clarke. I’m sure they’ll get right on the case like they did with Wegman.
So, this study seems perfect for a business ethics journal. Glad to see that the study of opposite views fits in to this trend recently published by Security Week.
Cybercriminals Creating 57,000 Fake Web Sites Every Week
I was going to do an analysis of the paper, but commenter Nullius in Verba did such a good job already I’ll just repost his comment from the Discover blog.
Nullius in Verba Says:
Mmm. So we have one website with “fluffy” headings like “why act now” and “get involved”, and another site with evidence-related headings like “climate science” and “scientific references”, and people were more persuaded by the one with the science. Why might that be, do you think?
I’m not quite sure what characteristic of astroturf sites this is supposed to be testing. If the only difference is whether funding sources were disclosed, it would indeed test the extent to which people were influenced by ad hominem considerations. But there also appear to be material differences in the content? Is the claim supposed to be that astroturf sites are more likely to use headings like “climate science”? This study does not, on the face of it, make any sense.
I’ve got an uneasy feeling that the difference was that “grassroots” was simply used to label pro-AGW and “astroturf” to label anti-AGW, and what this study is really showing is that giving them information on scepticism made people more doubtful of AGW. The “astroturf”/”grassroots” labelling would then be entirely misleading – propaganda dressed up as science in other words. There are of course many genuinely grassroots sceptical sources, and several prominent pro-AGW astroturf sites.
It would therefore be helpful to make it clearer what the distinction between “grassroots” and “astroturf” being tested actually was, and how it follows from the different types of authors. Because if they really did just label all sceptics as “astroturf”, this is even worse than the usual fare. I’m hoping it’s not true, and I’ve just misread the description. Did they in fact have both pro- and anti-AGW in both categories?
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Thanks for all of your efforts Anthony and Thanks to the full panoply of other grassroots scientists, mechanics, engineers, teachers, statisticians, farmers, builders, physicists, small business folks, geologists, etc., et.al. that make WUWT THE grassroots hub for all things science related! If this isn’t ‘grassroots’, I don’t know what is………
The GetUp! website and organisation fits the Astroturf model, being funded (despite what they say on their website), unions, foundations linked to George Soros, and the climate institute amongst others ………..
May I remind all interested party that “climate change” controversy is not a dispute, it’s a robbery.
We are being told, at the point of a government’s gun, to empty our pockets in the name of … whatever … for the sake of … whatever … just because the recipients of the money say … whatever.
This scheme is as old as humanity itself (probably older, some other animals cheat in the same way).
Don’t treat robbers as gentlemen, please.
So, the lying liars set up fake webpages to push their lies about humans destroying the environment and got busted at it. Good. Lying liars who lie about humans destroying the environment deserve to be dragged into court for stealing content from real people’s webpages for their lie pages.
What really annoys me about this whole topic is that energy companies have been some of the biggest proponents of AGW theory, whether out of a desire to stay in politicians’ good graces, plans on selling “alternative” technology, or anticipation of making a fortune on the artificial carbon markets. Using them as an anti-AGW Goldstein is truly cynical. They have much to answer for, but being against AGW is not one of them.
The problem with the AGW astroturfing (skepticalscience.com, realclimate.com) and most other forms of political disinformation connected with the climate change issue is that they assume they are addressing an audience of peasants with five or six years of primary school education, that people who do not have three university degrees do not have commonsense and powers of reasoning and analysis. They are not only the height of elitism and class hatred; they are futile and will never succeed in having people accept propaganda based on mistruths. It is only when your passion is the truth that you can convince people of your arguments. The first rule of the IPCC and all its hangers-on is: never admit you’re wrong. If you do that in any field of life, let alone science, you have zero credibility and integrity.
charles nelson says: “I always try to have a personal conversation with an actual person about Warmism on a daily basis.”
Good luck.
Recently, I bumped into a well-known local warmist in a cafe. After a tenth of a second, the conversation naturally drifted into climate science. In reply to a point that I made, the warmist said that no scientist had ever said such and such. I replied that David Evans had, at which point the warmist said “David Evans? We don’t like him.”. [Those exact words]. End of conversation.
“Astroturf organizations are fake grassroots organizations usually sponsored by large corporations to support any arguments or claims in their favor, or to challenge and deny those against them.” Isn’t that pretty much the same as RealClimate.org running on NASA servers, and being Authored and Edited by salaried Government employees?
Some people might think of the IPCC as an astroturf organization. Not me of course, other people might – and their position should be carefully considered.
Seriously, facts are what count in this debate.
Are the facts adding up to the proposition that global warming will be a significant problem. You know, other than the Arctic sea ice, there are only facts which say there will be minor amount of warming only.
I got into this debate in the first place because science is a great personal interest to me and all I originally saw in this particular field was astroturf science. Even today, it is continues to be even more like astroturf science and that continues to bug me to no end even today.
Dr. Dave says:
July 11, 2011 at 1:50 pm
R. Gates says:
July 11, 2011 at 1:36 pm
Seems to me I’ve seen a few “astroturf” books out there on the subject of climate as well…
________________________________________________________________________
Pity you never actually read them.
___
And what gave you the idea that I hadn’t?
______
hunter says:
July 11, 2011 at 4:00 pm
R. Gates,
It would seem you are indulging in something beneath your typical dignity when you imply there are a bunch of astroturf books out there.
_______
I suppose one man’s astroturf is another man’s indoor-outdoor carpeting…but yes, on the shelves at the books stores can be found astroturf books covering many sides of many issues, not just climate, and they often find their ways quickly to the dicount bins as I think most smart people can sniff out the sh*& amongst the turf pretty well.
They just published in the wrong journal. It was supposed to appeared in the ‘Business of Journalist Ethics’.
…to HAVE appeared in… oh never mind…
In Canada, when it’s Tides Canada, BC Hydro paid, Quebec or Ontario or BC Government climate awareness social environmental etc…, it’s legit grassroot; when it’s not advertising global warming, then it’s astroturf.
Erik Styles says:
July 11, 2011 at 3:15 pm
As people are probably realizing climate is not changing due to Co2 but probably due to natural causes
____
“People are realizing…”???
There are probably only a few thousand people in the world really qualified to look at the actual data with a trained and educated eye and draw any sort of conclusion at all. Finding the anthropogenic climate signal amongst all the other noise and forcings requires a highly educated individual. “People are realizing…” can only mean they are being pursuaded by others as the average person is in no position to realize whether or not there is a true anthropogenic signal amongst all the climate data.
Most universities have panels that review the design of these kinds of studies to ensure that they are “ethical”. What bemuses me, though I have not paid to read the article, is the apparent absence of determining what led the subjects to the conclusions that they reached, i.e., incresed skepticism.
On the surface, the experiment looks like a sophmoric pysch experiment. But, I am willing to be persuaded that the design was powerful and elegant – so if anybody gets access to a working paper copy I would appreciate it.
Lot’s of good points and good questions here. I’m trying to decide if I really want to pay to obtain a copy of the study. Without knowing a great deal more about their methodology and how they operationalized their varaibles, it would be pointless to say more than has already been said here. Who knows? Maybe they did something clever. On the other hand, there is the issue of informed consent.
Back in the late 60’s a sociology Ph.D. candidate by the name of Laud Humphreys (I’m not outing him, virtually every intro soc text book today discusses the case) conducted a study that ultimately got published under the title “Tearoom Trade” – a study of anonymous homosexual encounters in public rest rooms. The first part of his study was of the “participant observation” variety…. he acted as a “watch queen”, a lookout who alerted the other participants to possible interruptions like the police. It wasn’t enough to observe the interaction, however; Humphreys also need biographical information about the participants…. a commodity a little hard to obtain when the interaction in question is supposed to be anonymous. Humphreys solved his problem by collecting the license plate numbers of cars parked near the rest room and then having a friend in the police department run them through the DMV. A year later, he arranged interviews under the guise of another study. As far as I know none of Humphreys’ subjects were exposed and no harm to reputation, social standing or livelihood was done, but the duplicitous nature of his approach ignited a fire storm.
Today, every branch of the social sciences that I know of includes an “informed consent” clause in their code of professional ethics that requires social scientists to inform their research subjects that they are research subjects and to explain the purpose of the research to whatever extent is possible without compromising the validity of the research. Oh yeah, anonymity is to be guaranteed and no harm, of any sort, must come to the subjects. Most Universities and research institutes have a board or committee on human experimentation that must approve the research before it can be carried out. Given that the visitors and commenters on those blog sites were the subjects of an experiment and that experiment involved the manipulation and shaping of the subjects’ attitudes, beliefs and perceptions, I’d be very….. no make that extremely interested in learning how the subjects were informed and how their anonymity and well being were preserved by the experimenters. I Think we should also know which committee approved this research.
Here’s an open access version of the paper:
http://gin.confex.com/gin/2010/webprogram/Manuscript/Paper3041/Cho%20Martens%20Kim%20Rodrigue%20Astroturf%20Paper.pdf
Sorry:
incesed ==> increased
sophmoric ==>sophomoric
R. Gates says: July 11, 2011 at 5:19 pm
There are probably only a few thousand people in the world really qualified to look at the actual data with a trained and educated eye and draw any sort of conclusion at all. Finding the anthropogenic climate signal amongst all the other noise and forcings requires a highly educated individual.
Do you consider yourself to be one of these people? What about Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, John Christy, Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer?
R. Gates says:
July 11, 2011 at 5:19 pm
Finding the anthropogenic climate signal amongst all the other noise and forcings requires a highly educated individual.
Actually, all it requires is the proper mixture of Belief, funding, and lack of ethics. But, yes, “education” of a certain type, wherin thinking for oneself is verboten is probably pretty essential.
Just The Facts says:
July 11, 2011 at 5:43 pm
R. Gates says: July 11, 2011 at 5:19 pm
There are probably only a few thousand people in the world really qualified to look at the actual data with a trained and educated eye and draw any sort of conclusion at all. Finding the anthropogenic climate signal amongst all the other noise and forcings requires a highly educated individual.
Do you consider yourself to be one of these people? What about Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, John Christy, Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer?
_____
Certainly not myself and I can’t speak for anyone else’s credentials.
Of course there conclusions about astroturf sites can work in both directions, but its of course targetted at “big oil” funded skeptic sites – plus the real conclusion of the study is if you show people some contrary science they become less certain – that doesnt really require a study!
Behind a paywall…..
I’d like to see a list of the so called “astroturf” sites.
Bruce Cobb says:
July 11, 2011 at 5:44 pm
R. Gates says:
July 11, 2011 at 5:19 pm
Finding the anthropogenic climate signal amongst all the other noise and forcings requires a highly educated individual.
Actually, all it requires is the proper mixture of Belief, funding, and lack of ethics. But, yes, “education” of a certain type, wherin thinking for oneself is verboten is probably pretty essential.
_____
This is the problem with the level of “discussion” surrounding this issue. The vast majority of climate scientists are quite ethical, are trained to be skeptical, and being able to think for oneself is absolutely essential. To characterize them as something else is the stuff found on astroturf sites, and merits the same sort of regard.
Thanks for the open access Just the Facts.
Have downloaded and will review. Quick scroll, and I still don’t see the listing of “astroturf” websites.