UPDATE: After a cursory look at the percentages in the response to the Lewandowsky survey from the blogs he listed as participating, it seems the outcome doesn’t fit the title. See below.
====================================
From the “free the metadata” department, we have this gem. Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Western Australia’s Cognitive Science Department devised some sort of survey where he supposedly contacted skeptical climate blogs to ask we post a link to gather opinions for his survey. He says he contacted five and they all declined. Only one problem with that; none of the mainstream skeptical blogs appear to have any knowledge of being contacted. That includes WUWT and Climate Audit, among others.
I keep all my email, and I see no such contact or invitation. I’ve searched WUWT and found nothing in comments from him inviting to participate either. To be thorough, I also searched for any communications from his co-authors Klaus Oberauer and Gilles Gignac. I’ve found no invitation of any kind, but I did find that a commenter in the USA, PaulW left a note about it on WUWT here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/29/new-wuwt-sstenso-page-now-online/#comment-469869 But, he’s not affiliated with UWA or the authors, and it was purely a comment of curiosity. One of our moderators, D.B. Stealey took the survey (now deleted) after seeing the comment, and noted “Interesting questions.” but he didn’t note any invitation to post it on WUWT, nor did I.
Similar lack of confirmed invitations are being reported in other skeptical blogs, and the list is growing. But, for some reason, Dr. Lewandowsky refuses to divulge which skeptical blogs he contacted.
Jo Nova and Lucia Liljegren are asking some very pointed questions. Given the sheer lunacy on display in the paper…
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.
…I think Jo Nova nailed it with this line:
It’s as if Stephan did not want to know what real skeptics think?
Lucia asked Lewandowsky in a direct email about it and got this response:
Sorry, no, they likely replied to my requests under the presumption of privacy and I am therefore not releasing their names.
The blogs that did post the link (thereby publically identifying themselves, unlike those who declined) are:
%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/
“…they likely replied” That seems to me to be pretty weak data for a scientist. Either they replied requesting confidentiality or they didn’t, there’s no “likely” about it when gathering hard data.
Time to fess up, perfessor. Show the list and proof of contact and confirmation that they declined the invitation. You have my full and complete permission to release my name. Other skeptical bloggers have also granted permission on Lucia’s website, so there’s no reason to hold back now.
In comments at Lucia’s, Steve McIntyre notes:
The University of Western Australia has fairly standard academic misconduct policies.
http://www.research.uwa.edu.au…..guidelines
http://www.research.uwa.edu.au…..rch-policy
If Lewandowky’s claim about 5 skeptic blogs was fabricated, it appears to me that it would be misconduct under university policies. The person responsible for investigating complaints appears to be the Pro VIce Chancellor (Research) ,Robyn Owens, dvcr@uwa.edu.au.
She is in a position to get an answer, given Lewandowsky’s refusal to disclose the information.
In other news, the Lewandowsky survey data was put online at Bishop Hill. See it here.
Make of that data what you wish, but it seems to me that if you only ask questions of one side, as shown is the blog list above, you’ll get one-sided answers. That’s hardly science.
UPDATE: After looking at the survey data provided on the Bishop Hill blog here, it is beginning to look like the answers were skewed by participants at those blogs for what they think he wanted to hear, rather than a true sample.
For example: If you look at column R in the Excel spreadsheet, labeled CYMoon, which according to the paper in question:
Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, C. E. (in press). : An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science.. Psychological Science.
It says:
CYMoon The Apollo moon landings never happened and were
staged in a Hollywood studio. .742
That is the result of this question structure:
Unless otherwise noted, all items used a 4-point scale ranging from \Strongly Disagree’ (1) to \Strongly Agree” (4). Table section headings correspond to latent variable names in
Figure 2.
OK do a simple scan of the 1’s and 2’s in column R, which correspond to ‘Strongly Disagree’ and ‘Disagree’ and you get them as the majority, with a smattering of 3’s and 4’s. So I decided to use Excel’s function for counting occurances. =COUNTIF(R2:R1146,”1″, and =COUNTIF(R2:R1146,”2″ =COUNTIF(R2:R1146,”3″ =COUNTIF(R2:R1146,”4″
The (corrected, I had the 1 and 4 counts backwards originally, thanks Lucia) distribution of responses to the Moon Landing question are:
1067 Strongly Disagree
68 Disagree
4 Agree
6 Strongly agree
Total responses are 1145 (Rows R2 to R1146, top row R1 is title, so subtract 1 from 1146). Therefore 1067+68 = 1135 1135/1145 = 0.9912
Only 0.9% of respondents actually believe that the moon landings “never happened and were staged in a Hollywood film studio”. So what does that say about the title of the paper:
NASA faked the moon landing—therefore (climate) science is a hoax
I see a retraction for this paper in the very near future.
As a number of comments point out, this is the one of the most ridiculous survey methods I’ve seen. This ranks with Naomi Oreskis’ in incompetence. Given the virulent hate of many CAGW true believers on sites like Tamino’s did this idiot think that he was going to really get answers from there that were truthful? I guess he did because it fulfilled his preconceptions. They should demand his PH.D back for malpractice.
From Dr. Lewandowsky’s bio
http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/documents/SLvita.pdf
Competitive External Grants and Contracts
Australian Research Council (Linkage Grant, with Federal Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency). Creating a climate for change:
From cognition to consensus. (Ben Newell, Brett Hayes, Marilyn Brewer, Stephan Lewandowsky, Andy Pitman, Matthew England, Chris Mitchell), A$216,000 (plus matching contribution from DCCEE), 2012-2014.
National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility. What about me?
Factors affecting individual adaptive coping capacity across different population groups. (Kerrie Unsworth, Stephan Lewandowsky, David Morrison, Carmen Lawrence, Sally Russell, Kelly Fielding, Chris Clegg), A$330,000, 2011-2013.
The greatest compliment that can be paid to such a paper as this one, and papers like it, is to have it end up on
Retraction Watch:
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/
The website of record, naming and shaming, for scientific fraud.
Isn’t Psychological Science an oxymoron?
It is worse when you look at the data. Of the 1145 responses, only 175 were from skeptics. The paper does not mention this split, despite it being material to the findings.
On the belief in NASA faking the moon landings, 93% of respondents rejected it entirely – with no significant difference in levels of belief in climate change.
On the belief in 12 conspiracy theories (excluding the ones on “New World Order” and “Climate Change Conspiracy”, the average score (1 for reject to 4 for complete belief) the average score was 1.55 – with no significant difference in levels of belief in climate change.
I will post up more detailed results later at http://manicbeancounter.com/
The greatest compliment that this paper, and ones like it, can receive is to be is be listed on
Retraction Watch
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/
Its becoming very clear that the alarmists of this world can only win arguments by lying and in some cases even stealing and fabrication of their so called evidence.
Perhaps this will end up as a Gleick moment where he will have to come clean.
Seems once the “consensus” meme enters their brain, their neocortex area is the first casualty! All rational thought ceases and their dinosaur brain takes over! Flight, flee or faint! (or feint in their case!)
That’s Fight, flee or faint! Stumble fingers…
If I had the time, I’d devise a survey to post on skeptical leaning blogs that would indeed confirm (with the help of skeptics seeing the gist of the survey) my suspicion that most alarmists also believe:
1) Most people aren’t smart enough to make decisions.
2) Decisions should be differed to them, the elite.
3) That humans are a scourge that’s destroying the planet.
4) That most humans should be eliminated.
5) Their fantasy doomsday scenario is fact, such that all observations support it no matter how contradictory they may seem. (i.e.: “… is consistent with …”)
6) That consensus scientists can’t be wrong.
I’ll title the paper based on the results: “There’s a lot of people, therefore Anthropogenic Global Warming must be Catastrophic”.
My note to UWA’s academic misconduct officer:
David L says:
September 1, 2012 at 4:06 am
“…Speaking of which I wonder if Mythbusters could do a whole season digging into the CAGW claims.”
I doubt it. They are in the propaganda camp.
I used to watch them with great regularity until did a segment with Obama on the Archimedes Solar Ray myth. I haven’t watched them since.
From the abstract:
Paralleling previous work, we find that endorsement of a laissez-faire
conception of free-market economics predicts rejection of climate science (r ‘ :80 between
latent constructs).
&
The prominence of conspiracist ideation in science denial is not entirely surprising
because if an overwhelming scientific consensus cannot be accepted as the result of
researchers independently converging on the same evidence-based view, then its very
existence calls for an alternative explanation|a function readily fulfilled by the ideation
of a complex and secretive conspiracy among researchers (Diethelm & McKee, 2009;
McKee & Diethelm, 2010).
Yeah. OR, the convergence of researchers to the same view WRT climate science is a result of their rejection of a laissez-faire conception of free-market economics. No complex and secretive conspiracy required. Simple confirmation bias, of the sort demonstrated by the authors in this paper.
Note to Lewandowsky: I believe that CAGW is a political construct built upon a foundation of good science over-concluded and bad science elevated to unwarranted prominence by scientists who to varying degrees are allowing their personal politics to drive their research and how they interpret its results.
By the by, I also believe that astronauts landed on the moon, that HIV causes AIDS, and that smoking can be bad for one’s health. And contrary to the intentional slur by association that you perpetrate with your use of the term “denier” to reference skeptics of CAGW , I also believe that the Nazis committed genocide against a substantial proportion of Europe’s Jews, homosexuals, Roma, and other groups deemed “undesirable”.
I do believe in the Holocaust, and I also believe that the Nazis accomplished their genocide with the help of psychologists like Herr Doktor Robert Ritter, who provided an air of scientific justification to the designation and political marginalization of the “undesirables”. It is so much easier to hate someone, when a psychologist tells you they deserve it. Why, those guys actually believe that NASA faked the moon landing …
To appease the followers of Godwin, I’ll point out that abuse of the pseudoscience of psychology for political ends was also widespread amongst those promoting slavery in the antebellum US, and was also a factor in the subsequent continuation of racist policies post emancipation. And of course, there is the common communist practice of declaring political dissidents to be mentally ill to discredit their beliefs and render them subject to “psychiatric custody”.
One wonders though, if belief in the above referenced facts would be interpreted by you as accepting the consensus of historians, or as an example of conspiracy theory ideation. The wonderful political utility of the “science” of psychology being that you could conclude either, depending on present needs.
Kudos though, on the efficiency of this paper. It is at once an exposition of current
propagandadebiasing techniques as well as an example tool for implementing them.I think you got the 1 and 4 backwards on the Moon question.
REPLY: OK then assume that’s true, then that negates the premise of the paper, only .9% of the respondents think the moon landing was faked.
That kinda puts a kibosh on the title: “NASA faked the moon landing|Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science” – Anthony
From Jean S.
“Jean S (Comment #102471)
September 1st, 2012 at 4:31 am
The original survey is archived in the WayBack Machine. It appears that Lewandowsky may not have been the one who actually made the actual experiment but his assistant. The page also has an interesting text:
The Human Research Ethics Committee at the University of Western Australia requires that all participants are informed that, if they have any complaint regarding the manner in which a research project is conducted, it may be given to the researcher or, alternatively to the Secretary, Human Research Ethics Committee, Registrar’s Office, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009 (telephone number +61 8 6488-3703).
”
Since your moderator took the survey I strongly suggest that he write a letter of complaint to the research Ethics committee. He should keep his letter factual and professional.
he devoted his time which has value and the results and the paper are suspect.
Anthony, since you expend considerable time making this blog available you too would have standing to write a complaint. I would ask that the researcher be compelled to admit that he did not contact you given that his paper implies that he did contact skeptical blogs and they refused.
michaelspj says:
September 1, 2012 at 7:36 am (Edit)
I run World Climate Report and was never contacted.
##############
Please go to Lucia’s and tell her she is compiling a list.
Anthony you might consider a sticky post for a exhaustive list of those blogs not contacted.
Then compose a joint letter for all to sign.
Mail the editor and the ethics folks at his university.
Looking at the Excel spreadsheet, I do get the same numbers in the CYMoon column, i.e. 1067 x “1”, 68 x “2”, 4 x “3” and 6 x “4”. The scaling apparently is like this: “Unless otherwise noted, all items used a 4-point scale ranging from \Strongly Disagree’ (1) to \Strongly Agree” (4). Table section headings correspond to latent variable names in”
The question was “The Apollo moon landings never happened and were staged in a Hollywood film studio.”.
So, 1067 strongly disagreed with this statement, and 6 strongly agreed. This seems to indicate that most people believe that the Apollo moon landing really happened. What am I missing here?
REPLY: Nothing, my occasional dyslexia got in the way, and the 1 and 4 were reversed. Fixed now – Anthony
Survey research is only as valuable as the quality of its method. The shoddy and incomplete explanation of what what done and where it may be biased in this paper is cause for immediate rejection. The fancy statistics mean nothing.
Well Komrades, Dr Lewandowsky gets a red star for his work showing that belief in a Market based economy is clear evidence of a weak mind and that it leads to antisocial behaviour. These poor souls must be reeducated using the latest psychological techinques as soon as possible to eliminate such flawed thinking in society
http://www.shapingtomorrowsworld.org/Debunking-Handbook-now-freely-available-download.html
It appears Stealy may have official grounds to make a formal complaint. 🙂
So can we say he decided to “hide the decline” to participate?
Perhaps the Lewandowsky et al paper is an example of “Post Normal” science.
Anthony
How are the questions of Moon landing hoax and Global Warming skepticism even causally related? Nothing in this survey provides even a statistical correlation let alone a conceptual link between the two. All I hear are the grinding of academic axes that academics are not automatically given credence for everything they espouse without solid, testable evidence that backs them up.
REPLY: The answer lives in the mind of Lewandowsky I’m sure. – Anthony
Gary said: Survey research is only as valuable as the quality of its method. The shoddy and incomplete explanation of what what done and where it may be biased in this paper is cause for immediate rejection. The fancy statistics mean nothing. ..””
This is absolutely correct, anyone that has studied even the most basic of statistics will understand that the selection of the sample is the most critical part of any survey, if a sample is biased then the survey is invalidated. So if no skeptics agreed to do the survey it should have been cancelled. That would have been the scientifically honest thing to do, it is a non-paper.
What this researcher has done is an insult to statistics in pursuance of what can only be described as a personal attack on genuine skeptical scientists and lay people – there is no room in in any branch of science for people that are prepared to stoop to such desperate tactics. it is work like this that gives statistics a bad name.