So much happening in LewWorld, so little time. I’ve decided to simply aggregate all of the posts on Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky into one news item.
First my own observation. Yesterday, Lewandowsky wrote this:
I have several phone conversations scheduled for tomorrow, Monday, W.A. time, with the ethics committee at my university. I will report on the outcome as soon as a decision has been finalized.
No news, and it is 4AM Tuesday in Australia as of this writing. I wonder what the ethics committee said? Maybe they pointed out more ethics issues than Dr. Lewandowsky expected?
UPDATE: On Climate Audit, it is reported by Dave S in comments:
Lewandowsky just wrote Roy Spencer as follows:
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2012 03:01:19 +0800
Subject: survey contact
Dear Dr Spencer:
Please find enclosed correspondence from my research assistant dating back to 2010. He contacted you at the time to ask whether you would post a link to one of my research projects on your blog.
There appears to be considerable public interest in the identity of the bloggers whom I contacted for my project in 2010, and I am therefore pleased that my university has today affirmed that there are no ethical issues involved in releasing their identity.
I will post the relevant information on my blog shortly.
Kind regards,
While we are the subject of ethics, I find it curious that in the same essay he’s linked climate skeptics to a racist rapper who wanted to dedicate a week to killing white people:
If even Mr. Bolt is concerned about anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, then we have arrived at a Sister Souljah moment for climate denial.
Lubos Motl says about this:
So at various points, they’re linked to anti-Semitism, a black rapper named Sister Souljah who wanted to kill several whites every other week to compensate for the fact that blacks kill each other, to moonlanding conspiracy theories, and so on.
When you have nothing substantive to bolster your defense of the indefensible, I guess all that’s left is the race card. Stay classy Lew. In other news…
Steve McIntyre tears apart the survey, labeling it appropriately:
“Lewandowsky, like Gleick, probably fancies himself a hero of the Cause. But ironically. Lewandowsky’s paper will stand only as a landmark of junk science – fake results from faked responses.
As Tom Curtis observed, Lewandowsky has no moral alternative but to withdraw his paper.”
And it turns out Pielke Jr. was contacted as the Third Skeptic.
In the Climate Conversation Group » Personal message to Stephan Lewandowsky
They note the curious autoresponder message in Lewandowsky’s email:
[auto-reply from Stephan Lewandowsky] Note that although I endeavour to keep all email correspondence private and confidential, this does not apply to messages that are of an abusive nature.
No matter if the good doctor makes abusive racial comparisons though. Here’s more news via Tom Nelson:
Steve McIntyre checks the data behind Professor Stephan Lewandosky’s bizarre peer-reviewed paper claiming sceptics tend to believe the moon landings were faked. Truth is, turns out what was faked were responses to Lewandowsky’s sloppy survey – and the paper should be withdrawn:
The “smoking-doesn’t-cause-cancer-conspiracy” is a signature of a fake response…The points that are on the top left of the graph are the more outlandish conspiracies, especially the “smoking” point which ranks right at the top. In my opinion this is a signature point. Skeptics don’t believe that conspiracy, but alarmists have been trained to think skeptics do. The high rank there is the “Oreskes Effect”.
After 120,000 comments on this blog, I can’t recall a single skeptic who thinks smoking doesn’t cause cancer, nor do I remember reading a comment on it on any other skeptic blog, nor have I even heard a hint of it in an email. But the two issues are often tied in alarmist propaganda..
Frequently people like Naomi Oreskes claim Fred Singer and others have doubted that smoking causes cancer, something which is an outright misrepresentation (see my point #3 here). Singer wrote about the statistical failures of the passive smoking case, which is scientifically entirely different from the well documented link between smoking and cancer. Given that this dishonest material is circulated widely on alarmist blogs, it’s likely that all 11 of those responding “yes” to that conspiracy question are the fakers, dutifully ticking off the boxes they have been trained to tick.
======================================================
I agree. For the record, both of my parents were heavy smokers, but suffered major smoking related health issues, and both died prematurely of them.
Myself, I’m a victim of the issue not only because of the loss of my parents, but due to the smoky household I grew up in. See this WebMD article:
Secondhand Smoke Raises Kids’ Ear Infection Risk
Study Shows Higher Risk of Middle Ear Infection for Children in Homes Where Parents Smoke
As a small child, I got many ear infections (and I still do). This resulted in me being treated with Tetracycline, which has been known to cause hearing loss and now discontinued from general use due to that and teeth yellowing (which I also have). My hearing loss affected me greatly through my childhood and teens, caused me all sorts of problems in college (before the Americans with Disabilities Act required accommodations), and ultimately led me to my career path of TV Meteorology where I didn’t have to listen, but talk the camera.
So if anyone wants to label me as some sort of “denier” about the health effects of smoking, let’s step outside this blog and have a conversation about that.
==============================================================
UPDATE2: Lewandowsky lists the 5 skeptic bloggers he contacted:
Shortly thereafter, the first of the 5 bloggers, Mr McIntyre, found his misplaced email.
This leaves us with 4 bloggers whose identity had to remain confidential until now.
I am pleased to report that I received advice from executives of the University of Western Australia earlier today, that no legal or privacy issues or matters of research ethics prevent publication of the names of those bloggers.
So here they are:
- Dr Roger Pielke Jr (he replied to the initial contact)
- Mr Marc Morano (of Climatedepot; he replied to the initial contact)
- Dr Roy Spencer (no reply)
- Mr Robert Ferguson (of the Science and Public Policy Institute, no reply)
===============================================================
Of course, having failed to communicate effectively, he went ahead and did a paper with one sided results.
UPDATE3: Lewandowsky Censors Discussion of Fake Data « Climate Audit
Rather than answer the question, Lewandowsky, the author of a paper entitled “NASA faked the moon landing|Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science”, deleted the question
It seems Lewandowsky can’t tolerate the word “fake” when it comes to the data. below is the second before and after:
Original comment:
Edited comment:
I don’t think they understand how fragile their survey was and how easy it was to create fake responses. Instead, they assume they are accusing Lewandowsky of dishonesty, where the accusation actually lies in the realm of incompetence.
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Steve C sez: “Show me a grassroots oranisation today, I’ll show you a compromised, astroturf organisation tomorrow.”
Yes. But go read the Sunstein article, and look at the other things I mentioned.
The difference is: we everyday citizens are either too unintelligent or too psychologically limited to govern ourselves; therefore we need government to correct many things, such as filling our heads with “correct” knowledge regarding global warming, and government having an overt role of correcting misguided issue-groups.
That is different from FBI (or whomever) infiltrating groups – either in the official but secret capacity, or in the abovetopsecret way – to maintain some knowledge and thus some chance of control of threats to domestic tranquility.
Stephen Pruett:
re you reply to my comment.
Please think about my walking in the forest or along the country road analogy.
The mechanism of death on the country road is being hit by a truck and there are no trucks in the forest. So, does walking along the road “cause” you to be hit by a truck? (The law says not if the truck’s driver was drunk.)
This issue of determining causality not only confounds the survey question, it is also a basic issue in many scientific issues including the science of AGW.
Richard
Is it just me, or are there a bevy of trolls trying to insinuate that WUWT bloggers here actually think along the lines that Lew tried to fake, by repeating such nonsense?
Sorry guys, the tone just got smeared with it.
Please move along and spread it elsewhere.
This is all just a silly joke. Nothing to get excited about. It is kind of disconcerting though that he would actually take the time to write it up as a journal article.
I just read thelastdemocrat’s comment and I must say that I completely agree with the comment that we shouldn’t burden the next generation with guilt over the way we have ‘polluted’ our environment. Our PM is very fond of the key message of ‘carbon pollution’. Every time she says it I cringe because children growing up now are going to think that a key component of life on this planet (CO2) is pollution.
My wife recently went to a hairdresser who was advocating removal of all CO2 from the atmosphere. When my wife pointed out to her that plants actually require CO2 to grow she was stunned. She actually thought that CO2 was such a pollutant that it was bad for the environment.
thelastdemocrat – Some more good points, and yes, I generally read CS (and others) on sight anyhow. I think what we’re looking at is The Paradox of Democracy – the requirement that the populace who vote are fully informed about what they’re voting on, and capable of balancing the pros and cons so as to come to a rational conclusion.
Until some point (sometime around Galileo), it was allegedly possible for one intelligent person to have the whole of known science at their fingertips to help them assess what was likely to be the most useful path to study a topic. Now, there’s so much of everything that not even an expert in the field can manage that, whatever the field. What chance does poor old Joe Public stand?
The modern problem is that, with so many facts and factoids swirling around everything, what the public thinks it knows is more determined by which ‘side’ can make the glitziest TV presentation, or hire the better-known ‘celebrities’ As for whether ‘various people with similar interests taking a similar position on something’ is equivalent to ‘a conspiracy to do that something’, well, the internet has given us that useful word ‘meh’. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them’ says it for me. (Matt 7:16)
I do know whereof I speak. When I was much younger and more innocent, I took a Philosophy degree, to try and understand the underpinnings of science better and perhaps get a few pointers on the ‘Eternal Verities’. Naïvely, I expected answers. Three years later, I left Uni with my head spinning with vastly more questions but no answers at all. Now, at sixtysomething, it’s more like terminal confusion!
So, yeah. I really do appreciate that nothing is ever that simple. Fascinating to talk about, though.
On a completely different topic: I’ve noticed lately that now, we get comments here from ‘more soylent green!’ fairly often, but we never see the original ‘soylent green’ anymore. Has ‘more’ eaten>/i> him?
Here are the first page questions from at least 2 of the surveys (h/t tlitb Bishop Hill):
and:
This pretty clearly shows us there was no randomization or worries about order effect. They kept questions grouped similarly and simply moved them around in blocks.
There were exactly 6 questions in the “free market” group and only 5 questions in “am I happy” group … and room for only 6 or so questions on the first page. The lack of a 6th question on the one page pretty much proves the questions were not truly randomized but were kept in their order with their orig groups. Basically no value I can see to this – no attempt to address order effect.
Paul, Latimer, and others, don’t fall into the trap of conflating arguments about smoking with those about exposure to secondary smoke and smoking bans. This is a trick that the tobacco control industry uses to discredit those questioning the science behind secondhand smoke exposure and smoking bans. There are VERY FEW who question the smoking/cancer link. There are FAR MORE who question the degree of threat from secondhand smoke and the need for smoking bans.
Note what Ray points out at 1:09pm: base nonsmokers’ risk of less than .4%, meaning that, according to the EPA Report figures of a 19% increase, an entire 40 year lifetime of workplace exposure in the heavy smoking workplace environments of the 1950s through ’70s would lead to one extra lung cancer per thousand workers. And there are many, myself included, who contend that the EPA had no right to juggle the statistical standards and remove studies in order to achieve a number even that high. I believe that in well-ventilated/filtrated bars and restaurants today the figure would likely be on the order of 1% of that: 1 extra lung cancer per four million worker-years of exposure. (For those with anecdotes about exposed nonsmokers with lung cancers, remember: even the EPA Report would hold that most of those instances had nothing to do with their smoke exposure.)
I found Barry Woods’ entry on censorship above interesting because of the debate I linked to above at
http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/2012/09/09/a-hive-of-scum-and-villainy-wtd-versus-the-smoking-trolls/
Barry’s quote about the excuse for censoring/shutting-down debate on climate was “Discussion of this topic is becoming a little too heated.” I think the moderator there was a bit more colorful in describing those of us questioning the tobacco control industry’s “science” … how many of the folks here at WTD have been treated to “scum,” “villainy,” “apologists,” (not to mention “murderers,” “child abusers,” “drug peddlers,” etc on other boards) as a matter of normal discourse because of their views on climate science?
– MJM
Stephen Pruett says:
September 10, 2012 at 4:17 pm
“and given enough time, these products will cause mutations of DNA, which will produce cancer in a significant percentage of people. The probability of one mutation in one cell is probably reasonably high, but the probability of 3 and usually more (6-7) mutations of exactly the right type in the same cell, which is required to cause cancer, is much lower, so most people do not develop cancer. However, in those who do, most cases were directly caused by constituents of smoke, which are metabolized to reactive intermediates which cause mutations which lead to cancer. ”
I would like to point out, not to stir up a controversy but purely as information, that most accidental changes in the DNA are single-strand defects. Repair enzymes can repair most of them; by replacing the broken amino acid with the right counterpart to the intact partner amino acid. Single strand defects happen all the time; once a second a C14 atom in some DNA strand in the human body turns into Nitrogen by radioactive decay whether you’re a smoker or not. Nearly all of these defects get repaired.
If a single strand defect happens during cell division, this repair mechanism obviously is out of luck. So I would suppose that most unrepaired defects are caused during division.
A good idea is to avoid cell division when possible. Stay in bed, don’t move, so that your body doesn’t have to replace tissue all the time. Avoid sport at all costs. 😉
Nobody yet to take the re-created survey read this 😉
I think many are possibly missing Steve’s point about the “Smoking causes cancer” question and the comment about “fake responses” to it …
We all know smoking can and very often does cause cancer. In fact that there is a high likelihood of it for many people. That means that the rational response to this question is “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” depending on your experience and beliefs.
Because this is such a well known general fact it is unlikely anyone would disagree with the statement. Some may legitimately disagree somewhat with the blanket statement “Smoking causes cancer,” as it does not in every case. Those people would take advantage of the range of available response choices and answer “Agree” or a few might answer “Neutral”
A very few might take question at direct face value, and select “disagree” but most would choose the nuanced answer “Agree” or maybe “neutral” – which is less than “Strongly Agree”
It would be very rare for anyone to purposely choose “Strongly Disagree” in the real world.
Because of that, and that it is extremely unlikely anyone would normally choose “Strongly Disagree” … any answer of “Strongly Disagree” should be reviewed as suspect.
The ratios for that question actually show a “Disagree” should be suspect as well. Any survey that includes a “Disagree” or for sure one that includes “Strongly Disagree” as answer to this question would need serious review.
The question itself is not really the problem … certainly it could have said “Smoking can cause cancer, making it easy for all to likely strongly agree, but its present wording is accommodated with the “Agree” or “Neutral” choices. The question is a good quality control.
At the risk of being accused of discussing results while survey was running 😉 I’ll carefully say Steve McIntyre’s conclusions are well supported after reviewing “a lot of” returns in the re-created survey.
Lewandowsky’s email to Roy Spencer says that “(his research assistant) contacted you at the time to ask whether you would post a link to one of my research projects on your blog”. Not a new observation, but there doesn’t appear to have been any reference to Lewandowsky in the original contact (the same goes for at least some of the other approaches to ‘sceptic’ blogs).
It use to be “GIGO” – Garbage in, Garbage out. But with the proliferation of all these fake surveys (having no basis in any scientific statistical sampling methods), I guess we have a new acronym now – MIMO – Moron in, Moronic out.
It may be nothing at all, or at least very little, but a few lines from Pielke Jr.’s correspondence with Lewandowsky’s colleague Hanich, found in this Andrew Bolt article, may speak volumes (they do to me) about how the ridiculous and meretricious ‘survey’ was actually conducted and manipulated:
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/lewandowsky_was_warned_his_survey_was_no_good/
Hanich:
“You have raised a very valid point. We are aware of methodological issues, one of which is dealing with repeated replies.
When we published the surveys, we had two options:
a) Use the provision offered by the hosting company to block repeated replies using IP addresses. This, however, will block legitimate use of the same computer, such as in our laboratory, where numerous participants use the same PCs. ”
I have an image of many grad and doctoral students, along with the post-docs and junior faculty, busy for days on end, repeatedly ‘taking the survey’ and brown-nosing their seniors. I wonder …..
@A.Scott says:
September 11, 2012 at 2:47 am
Actually the order of the questions greatly affects the answers to the following questions. Pollsters know this and when they want a particular response, they order the questions accordingly.
Subtle changes in wording will also influence answers, but it appears that the questions in this Perfessor Lew’s survey are identical, so this should not be an issue here. We also know that the answers can be shaped by the choices presented.
Let me see if I understand Professor Lewandowsky correctly by pretending that I’m going to write a similar paper.
I want to write a paper about the thinking involved with Issue X. Specifically, I want to write about the thinking involved with people who are Pro-X.
So, I send a survey request to people that run Pro-X blogs, but none of them are willing to participate.
So, I send the survey to people that run Anti-X blogs, collect data, and make claims about Pro-X thinking.
Forget ethics violations. Quite simply, this guy is neither logical or smart enough to be a university professor.
What if I asked, “Does the failure to wear a seatbelt cause death?”
Isn’t it reasonable to assume that some people would answer “Strongly Disagree” because it’s not the failure to wear the seatbelt that actually causes death?
Could I then conclude that these crazy people ignore massive amounts of data and refuse to believe that wearing a seatbelt can help save your life in the event of a highway collision?
I notice that “A. Scott” never uses a first name. Is he/she trying to hide his/her gender? Does he/she think that his/her gender would influence results? Is it true? Just askin’…
For anyone still in doubt that this Lewandowsky/Cook “climate deniers are loony conspiracists” meme matters, here is a sampling of the resulting propaganda being churned out right now online:
Those with conspiracy beliefs apt to deny global warming, too
And study that showed evidence of this sparks talk about — yep — another conspiracy
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48947384/ns/technology_and_science-science/
Climate Reality @ClimateReality
Research links climate science denial to conspiracy theories — but skeptics smell a conspiracy http://ow.ly/dxBIX
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/09/06/803521/research-links-climate-science-denial-to-conspiracy-theories-but-skeptics-smell-a-conspiracy/
Katharine Hayhoe @KHayhoe
Climate denier bloggers scramble to deny they are just another manifestation of garden-variety conspiracy theorists http://bit.ly/RIc7d6
John Cook @skepticscience
More from Stephan Lewandowsky at @stworg on paper linking climate denial with conspiracy ideation http://bit.ly/OyKap7
8 Sep Huffington Post Huffington Post @HuffingtonPost
Conspiracy theories abound on climate change study http://huff.to/TuVFmL
Climate denier bloggers sniff out new conspiracy
Moon landing faked ∴ climate science faked ∴ study of conspiracy believers faked
By Richard Chirgwin
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/07/recursive_denail_fury/
Voting irregularities detected in the climate prat of the year award.
http://thepointman.wordpress.com/2012/08/10/announcing-the-inaugural-climate-prat-of-the-year-award/
Pointman
I don’t know – you decide
😉
I have suggested to the editors of Psychological Science via their website form that they ought to re-assess the Lewandowsky et al (2012). I even referred them to some of the relevant CA, WUWT, and JoNova links. Blogs may not be their cup of tea (yet) but they could learn a lot. At least regulars here would have known better than to let that egregious paper slip through unchallenged. Psychological Science has retracted multiple papers in the recent past, which is why I alluded to not needing to retract another one (assuming they may still be able to have the pending Lew paper withdrawn and re-written before a formal retraction). Here is what I said:
http://pss.sagepub.com/feedback
Just to be sure your editors are aware that the
forthcoming Lewandowsky et al (2012) is fatally flawed,
from the tendentious and unjustified title to the
shoddy collection and analysis of online survey data.
Surely your journal does not need another embarrassing
retraction of a paper, so why not at least have it re-
written and re-submitted to more rigorous peer review?
The title is entirely unjustified by the actual
contents of the paper. Some of the more obvious
problems of the paper have been discussed at these
blogs:
http://climateaudit.org/2012/09/08/lewandowsky-scam/
http://climateaudit.org/2012/09/10/lewandowsky-censors-
discussion-of-fake-data/
http://climateaudit.org/2012/09/10/the-third-skeptic/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/10/the-daily-lew/
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/09/steve-mcintyre-finds-
lewandowskys-paper-is-a-landmark-of-junk-science/
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/09/10-conspiracy-
theorists-makes-a-moon-landing-paper-for-stefan-
lewandowsky-part-ii-and-all-40-questions/
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/09/lewandowsky-science-
by-taunts-and-smears/
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/09/lewandowsky-hopes-we-
meant-conspiracy-but-we-mean-incompetnce/
Stephan Lewandowsky’s vita is here:
http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/documents/SLvita.pdf
Most of his papers are about memory. Did he recently discover that climate grants are much bigger? Here are the climate related items listed:
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.
Lewandowsky, S. (2010, September). The Psychology of Climate Change.
Keynote address presented at the Climate Science Communication
workshop of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
workshop, Melbourne.
Lewandowsky, S. (2011). Popular consensus: Climate change set to continue.
Psychological Science, 22, 460-463.
Lewandowsky, S. & Gignac, G. (2011, February). Anatomy of the Rejection of
Climate Science: Ideology and Conspiratorial Thinking. Paper presented
at the Australasian Mathematical Psychology Meeting, Melbourne.
Lewandowsky, S. (2010, September). The Psychology of Climate Change.
Keynote address presented at the Climate Science Communication
workshop of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
workshop, Melbourne.
*********************************
There’s a problem here. The work listed in his vita appears to be of a much higher quality than his current survey. There is no doubt that he should know better. Perhaps he is the victim of identity theft and someone else is behind this survey and the unprofessional treatment of Steve McIntyre’s attempts to help. What other explanations are there? blackmail? mid-life crisis? brain tumor? joined a cult and was brainwashed? or just sold out?
Just think. If all the Lews, Manniquins, Hansens “et al” would just shut up, we’d have to come up with our own jokes.
But this time, they’d be funny!
Having read a few more comments, there is a link with many of them to do with the cause of cancer. My previous comment above (2.19am) answers many of them, because ANYTHING which damages the body MAY cause cancer, this then manifests itself when the body tries to mend itself without the proper materials, not ‘knowing’ when to stop the repair, and then running into uncontrollable growth of tumors etc. If you have an inquiring mind read a bit about it and then decide.
Steve T