Over at Discover Magazine Intersection Blog, Chris Mooney is defending the paper I critiqued a couple of days ago as if it contains some actual solid science. He’s griping that I didn’t read the full paper (which was pay-walled), and thus my critique is invalid. What Mooney doesn’t realize is that he’s committed the same mistake as the authors of the paper, who clearly don’t understand what a “website” is or is not in the context of its connection to broad human interaction.
One only has to read the abstract though, to realize this paper isn’t about science at all, but about politics. here is is:
ASTROTURFING GLOBAL WARMING:
IT ISN’T ALWAYS GREEN ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FENCE
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, which proactively connect people locally with the aim to foster pro-social and pro-environmental issues. Serious ethical and societal concerns underline the astroturfing practice, especially if corporations are successful in influencing public opinion by borrowing a social movement approach. This study is motivated by this very 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’ websites impact the level of user certainty about the causes of global warming. Results show that people who used astroturf websites became more uncertain about the existence of global warming and humans’ role in the phenomenon than people who used the grassroots website. Astroturf organizations are hence successful in their promotion of business interests over environmental protection. Aside from the multiple business ethics issues it raises, the astroturfing strategy poses a significant threat to the legitimacy of the grassroots movement.
From my perspective, this reads more like an opinion piece than a scientific abstract. So with Springerlink asking $34.95 for something that reads like an article on HuffPo, why would anyone bother? I sure didn’t, because unlike Mooney, I’m not paid to blog, I don’t have a budget. If I subscribed to every journal that issues press releases without the benefit of the actual paper, I’d be in the poor house. The issuance of press releases making PR claims while the peer reviewed paper is held hostage for money has long been a sore point for me and others, especially when public funding is involved. It smacks of elitism and leaves the general public out of the loop.
Fortunately though, reader and regular contributor “Just the Facts” found a copy of the paper elsewhere and posted the link to it in comments. Here it is:
Here’s an open access version of the paper:
I had a look later in the day at the full paper, and it reinforced the impression that I got from the abstract that this isn’t a science paper, but just another political hit piece disguised as one.
Here’s a few points from the paper that led me to that conclusion:
This investigation is motivated largely by the denialism, and more specifically the astroturfing, phenomenon described above.
As discussed above, this case of faking a grassroots
movement is called astroturfing. Hoggan and Littlemore (2009) simply define an astroturf group as a “fake grassroots organization animated by a clever public relations campaign and a huge budget” (p. 36). A commonly cited example of astroturfing activities often mentioned in the general media is the alleged large-scale campaign and funding support from ExxonMobil Corporation toward creating and funding “think tanks” that spread false information about global warming and climate change science
(Greenpeace USA, 2007).
The citations for the second paragraph are:
Hoggan, J. and Littlemore, R. (2009). Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming. Vancouver, BC: Greystone Books.
Greenpeace USA. (2007). ExxonMobil’s Continued Funding of Global Warming Denial Industry. Available at http://www.greenpeace.org.
Gosh, for a second there I thought it was an IPCC publication. So, with references like that, Chris Mooney’s employer DeSmog Blog, (which is run by James Hoggan’s PR outfit in Canada) one really can’t take this as science when it is so tightly interwoven with politically motivated and paid for flak.
So, knowing that, I thought nothing more of the paper since I first posted on it, until Mr. Mooney decided he had to defend it today. His defense is that the fake (as I called them) “websites” weren’t actually online for the public to see, and thus “no harm done”.
He writes (and continue from there to DeSmog Blog):
The fake web sites were not on-line in a way that permitted viewing by the general public. They only existed within the computer system used for the experiment. The only people who saw the web sites and answered the survey questions were the participants recruited for the study.
In other words, an Intranet. Wikipedia delineates that as:
An intranet can be understood as a private analog of the Internet.
Note the abstract of the paper states:
We conduct an experiment to determine whether astroturf organizations’ websites impact the level of user certainty about the causes of global warming.
Note the word “website”, which appears 56 times in the full paper. The word “Internet” appears once, in the bibliography, and the word “Intranet” does not appear in the paper at all. Why wouldn’t they mention that the study was conducted on a private Intranet and not on the World Wide Web?
And way back on page 15, once you get past all the wordy opinion about denial, Exxon-Mobil, astroturfing, and the like, we find the experimental procedure:
The experimental task and questionnaire were completed in a lab setting creating a realistic environment for viewing website disclosures and allowing individuals to complete the experiment on their own time in a natural context (Bryant, Hunton and
Stone, 2004).
The experimental task first consisted of answering a series of questions about opinions, knowledge and concern levels on various social issues (homelessness, racism, fair trade, and global warming). To disguise the purpose of the experiment,
participants were told that the purpose of the research was a marketing experiment about effective website design for social issues. Participants were told they would be randomly assigned to view a website related to one of these social issues. The next step was to visit a given website and read some information related to global warming issues contained within the various links of the assigned website. These websites were designed expressly for the experiment and were based on an extensive review of real-world grassroots and astroturf websites relative to the types of global warming-related information commonly provided by these two types of websites. This provided a high level of internal validity, while keeping the task externally valid as well.
Well I don’t know about you, but if you want to learn about something in the wild, you generally study it the in wild. What we have here are manufactured, “fake” websites, running on an Intranet (apparently, according to Mooney’s query of the authors). And generally, when I hear about a study on websites as applied to real websites viewed on the world wide web, I expect the study would be about real world websites, not one limited to a lab fishbowl.
As I see it, this would be like doing Jane Goodall like studies of wild chimpanzees based on chimp-robots made to look like chimpanzees, confined in the lab, and studying how they interact with students who are told they aren’t actual chimpanzees, but disguised as marketing salesmen.
In other words, they didn’t study websites in the wild , but copied wild ones and manufactured “tame” ones of their own design that never left the lab. Even Chris Mooney at one time understood what that “wild” aspect of the Internet means, though it appears he has forgotten since writing this about the Internet in his book Unscientific America on page 115:
So Mooney “gets it” about the wild nature of the Internet, and he more than anyone should understand that you don’t study fake manufactured websites on an Intranet and then use that data to draw conclusions about the Internet at large, for the same reason animal behavior scientists don’t study animals in the zoo to get a clue about what they actually do in the wild.
The Internet is dynamic, changing every minute, with many websites like this in the study changing hourly. The authors make no mention of trying to reproduce that dynamic to get a representative sample.
So in a nutshell, the paper
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
Is mostly political hokum, and given the level of rhetoric used in the peer reviewed paper, I have serious doubts that the researchers were capable of separating their own political bias when it came to creating those Intranet websites used in the study. I think confirmation and other biases loom large in this. The funding source was not disclosed either.
Further, Chris Mooney’s defense of the paper is most likely rooted in the fact that his current employer, DeSmog Blog aka Hoggan and Associates is heavily cited in the paper.
I will apologize to Chris Mooney though for calling him a “kid blogger” based on that youthful photo he uses. It just seemed so much more cuddly (he looks amiable and likable in it) than calling him a schill blogger.
Mooney has written before that; because high scientific literacy is assocciated with skepticism, knowledge is dangerous for the planet. Now he is boasting of a clearly political piece which implies people who actually do some research on global warming are more likely to be skeptics, to back up a similar point. How does this guy not connect the dots? People who do some digging into global warming find out it is nonsense.
Hey, it’s a model. Isn’t that what Climatology is all about?
I think I look pretty young for 29, too. But Anthony doesn’t call me a “kid”, just Dr. Something about those credentials…
Chris Mooney is a lightweight loop.
The Bear is ever-amazed that anyone pays any attention to him at all.
He has all the substance of mildly warm air and is as convincing as a wet kitten.
What they “prove” in the paper is that if you are subjected to critisism of global warming you tend to agree that the critisism is valid. Nothing else.
By the way, does anyone have a clue as to which if any astro-turf websites that exist to promote agw skeptisism?
And, if Mooney was worth the salt to rub in his wounds, he’d realize that the ABSTRACT must succinctly summarize the main point and conclusions of the paper. His assertion that you didn’t read the body (implying that it contained something new or different) is hogwash, because, if the body WERE different than the summary, it should never come close to passing peer review.
All Mooney has done is to re-discover the psychological effects of the “availabilty error” and “anchoring” first described by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahnemann in the early seventies.
Which could be summed up as “a strong disposition to make judgements or evaluations in the light of the first thing that comes to mind” (from “a mathematician reads the newspapers” by Prof. John Allen Paulos). Also in wikipedia.
So if you read something with a sceptical orientation and then answer questions immediately afterwards, then your answers are more likely to be sceptical.
Chris Mooney who?
In a world of proper peer-review, the ill-written sludge of Cho et al. would have never be accepted by any reputable journal.
The paper fails to explain which “astroturfing” websites were plagiarised. I for instance, before my more recent, small self-funded efforts (such as Impact of Climate Change, Say “Yes” to More Taxes, and the Friends of Carbon Dioxide) was exposed by a blogger as an astro-turfer earlier in the year.
My son, in his second year of high school, reviewed his high school’s AGW-indoctrination sessionsmasquerading as Science and History classes for his blog. His review, however, could not have been written by a real school-boy, claimed the critical blogger, because his review was too well-written as well as as being too incompetently written, because the name of my son, Alfred, is not the name of any modern boy, and because Alfred referred to Al Gore’s claim of a twenty-foot rise in sea-levels (quoting the teacher who was quoting Gore) though we’re supposed to use the metric system in Tasmania; also, when I attempted to provide evidence of my son’s existence (by, inter alia, supplying my telephone number so the critic could talk to me), he proved with impeccable logic, that I don’t exist either. It seems that, instead of calling me, he determined from my IP address, that my computer is not here in Battery Point but near a town wherein an organisation notorious for being opposed to wonderful environmental things is based; accordingly, he banned me from replying to comments which claimed that I was wickedly manipulating my unfortunate but fictitious son, or misappropriating his non-existing identity, without having the courage to respond to those comments.
Anyway, for aught I know, my sites could be used as examples of astro-turfing sites, and a competently written paper would reveal which sites are astro-turfing websites the proof of that determination.
That internet study is about as flawed as the AGW hypothesis’ catastrophic claims about Global temps is…..
Not to mention the fact that as you read it, it appears that only AGW believers and environmentalists can have “Grassroots” movements… all those “Other” people can only be “astroturf”….. Honestly, these people live in another universe.
It is irrelevant whether a site is a so called Astroturf or whatever. All that matters is how accurate or correct the enclosed information is. What is also missing from this ‘model’ is the test data.
Meanwhile, here is a clip from the The Fast Show – Indecisive Dave – World Cup Squad
Perhaps Chris Mooney thinks that most people are like indecisive Dave and can be persuaded by whatever sounds convincing, so it is vital that everyone remains ‘on message’ and there are no inconvenient truths.
If “Warmists” are reduced to merely discussing the psychology of “denialism” (behind a paywall to boot) then all is lost.
For them.
Or maybe this one:
If I understand this correctly, the experiment says it found evidence that when
people read opposing information about a topic, it influences their opinion.
Wow. Who would ever have guessed that? So, someone, (probably taxpayers)
paid good money to acquire this stunning revelation?
So, the result is that the blindingly obvious is indeed fact, and here, let’s throw in some childish name calling, and package the whole thing in a tired conspiracy theory.
Brilliant! No wonder the brethren of Klimate are losing the debate.
Its a poor piece of work with bad methodology , in other words a classic climate science paper , so you can see why Mooney likes it . To be honest for the AGW faithful if the ‘Team’ put out a paper claiming that due to AGW the Moon was turning into cheese the only question some of them would ask would be ‘what type? ‘
I strongly recommend anybody with an English major to stay away from a field, such as science, about which he’s got absolutely no qualifications at all.
Mooney would love some of these cancelbots… http://www.zark.com/pages2/az68/az68b.html Get rid of those pesky bloggers. 😉
In the interest of open science, it seems to me that these fake websites should be released to the public so that unbiased objective evaluations of their effects can be made and replicated.
J.Hansford says:
July 14, 2011 at 12:59 am
That internet study is about as flawed as the AGW hypothesis’ catastrophic claims about Global temps is…..
Not to mention the fact that as you read it, it appears that only AGW believers and environmentalists can have “Grassroots” movements… all those “Other” people can only be “astroturf”….. Honestly, these people live in another universe.
Exactly, and how much money in the way of grants from various government funded bodies finds it’s way into the coffers of Greenpeace, WWF etc. etc.? Are all these agencies websites considered astro-turf?
Actually this looks a lot like climate science.
The participants in this study were 151 undergraduate accounting students and 127 students from marketing classes (who where paid). All of them where attending a Canadian University.
They have then applied these results to people of all ages and experience located throughout the world in order to reach their conclusion.
Sounds a lot like what Mann does with bristlecone pines.
Anthony, Have a good and restful break. Don’t worry about analysis of astroturfing. The authors have forgotten that they produce no real wealth, but are happy to bite the hand that feeds them. They come from the “money grows on trees” mentality. End of story.
The chanting and frothing about “astroturf” is textbook projection and misdirection. The percentage of leftist blogs receiving NGO and political funding must be very high. The claimed right-leaning blogs’ corporate etc. funding and backing always turns out to be hand-waving innuendo, or trivial trickles compared to the accusers’ backing.
Never did the motes and logs analogy apply more precisely.
Anthony states, “Well I don’t know about you, but if you want to learn about something in the wild, you generally study it the in wild. What we have here are manufactured, “fake” websites, running on an Intranet…”
Well then Dear Mr Watts, they are well qualified to be climate scientists. I have rephrased the above sentance to apply it to the field of climate science…”Well I don’t know about you, but if you want to learn about something about the worlds climate, you generally study it the in the real world. What we have here is manufactured, “fake” ,climate running on an computer models.
You see Anthony, a tiger cannot change his stipes.
In the original post on this I challenged Gates to name which books were “astroturfing”. Just as the study in question does not reveal which sites are, according to them, corrupt, Mr Gates refused to list which books were likewise corrupt. Instead he made a claim that 90% were corrupt, using another “study” as flawed as this one. Their (Mr Gates, and this “study”) failure to name the sites and Books, as well as the failure to release their fake web sites content, shows they are nothing more then a propaganda arm for CAGW.
Many thanks Anthony for exposing such trash to the real internet.
As near as I can tell, the author’s of the paper have found that when people read information that runs counter to the CAGW dogma, those people become less likely to believe the official dogma.
Well, duh. This is news?