LewWorld is a busy place these days. Claims of conspiracy theory are supplemented with even more claims of conspiracy theory when some obvious flaws to data and methodology are pointed out, like faked responses. Faked responses abound in the Lewandowsky “moon landing” paper because there were not any adequate quality controls.
Further compromising the data integrity, yesterday Steve McIntyre discovered that Lewandowsky’s assistant, Charles Hanich offered the survey to staff and faculty at UWA, but there’s no mention of this in the peer reviewed paper, and no record of whether those results were excluded or not.
Here’s the announcement from UWA’s list server aggregator:
UWA researcher Charles Hanich is seeking participants for a web-based survey of attitudes towards climate science (and other sciences) and skepticism. The survey carries no risks for participants. To participate in the survey please use this link:
http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=HKLJIN_61fa37b2
Completion should take less than 10 minutes and all data will be analyzed anonymously and without monitoring or identifying individual responses.
Ref: RA/4/1/4007
[Notice approved by:
Human Research Ethics Committee,
Research Services, University of Western Australia ]
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.
They write:
We report a survey (N > 1100) of climate blog users to identify the variables underlying acceptance and rejection of climate science.
There’s no mention of surveying academic peers. Thus we don’t know if the survey data was polluted by peers at UWA who are/are not climate blog users.
What is interesting though is Lewandowsky’s and Hanich’s admission of the way they setup the Kwiksurvey participation rules. From the paper:
Following standard recommendations (Gosling, Vazire, Srivastava, & John, 2004), duplicate responses from any IP number were eliminated (N = 71).
An on Sept 13, 2010 Hanich replied to Dr. Roger Pielke Jr:
Subject: Re: Survey link post
Dear Roger,
I am sorry for not replying earlier. 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.
b) Not to block multiple replies and allow for the possibility of repeated replies when evaluating the data.
We chose option b), which was more practical in our situation.
I took the liberty of attaching an paper by Whitehead (2007) [SM – see here], addressing some of these issues.
Kind Regards,
Charles
What their method does is remove repeat respondents attempting to vote stuff the survey with identical responses, but it does nothing to exclude participation within your own organization (UWA) where departments might run network proxy portals to reduce bandwidth or to increase network IP availability. These typically present a single IP address.
Lucia discussed the IP issue, and the lack of quality control methodology here.
Without knowing how many respondents came from blogs, and how may came from UWA peers, it pretty much makes this survey and paper useless. Add it to the growing pile of fatal flaws that have been ignored in order to paint climate skeptics as “nutters”.
Tom Fuller summed it up pretty well in this comment at Lewandowsky’s blog:
thomaswfuller at 01:17 AM on 14 September, 2012The problem is that your mental model (perhaps you should think of it as a Mental Trap of Preconception) caught more warmists believing in conspiracies than skeptics.
More people on your side of the fence believe in conspiracies than do skeptics.
And, Steve McIntyre has shown today in Lewandowsky’s Fake Results that:
Removing the outliers (which removes the most grotesque fake responses, but not all of them), Lewandowsky’s signature conspiracies (MLK, Moon, MLK) – all of which have negligible adherence – are now disproportionally held by warmists.
The problem is (as demonstrated by the multiple taunting missives of the last week from him) Lewandowsky simply doesn’t care about errors, the vote stuffing by pals he invited, or how he’s seen by others. In his mind, since he has already attracted worldwide press attention before the paper has even been published, it’s a case of “mission accomplished” for him.
Even if the paper is retracted or rejected by the journal, it will still be used as a tool to bash climate sceptics, much like the now long debunked 97% of climate scientists myth.
Marc Morano sees it as a case of desperation.
Given the lack of journalistic curiosity these days, I doubt that much in the way of retraction/rejection of the paper in scientific circles will reach the public, but the myth of “skeptics believe the moon landing was faked” will live on even though it has no basis in reality or data. Our best defense is to vociferously complain and point out the multiple fatal flaws any time we see Lewandowsky cited.
The sad part is that Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky has demonstrated himself to be a psychological propagandist, and he’s accomplished what he set out to do, and fake data doesn’t matter to him. It is clearly another case of noble cause corruption where the end justified the means.
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The classic conspiracy theory: Big Oil pays for anti-global warming propaganda.
Precisely.
And worse, to avoid a scandal, his University will ignore the accusations or paint all over this with whitewash.
On an earlier post a fellow named “Ryan” worried that by leveling accusations we were threatening, and, “…We see this kind of thinking a lot from Team AGW and I don’t think we should stoop to the same kind of thinking.”
I don’t think we are threatening as much as responding to a threat, and think I did a fairly good job of expressing what the “threat” was by responding as follows:
You are expressing noble sentiments, Ryan, however this is not a situation where you can sit back with raised palms, deploring the uncivil behavior of others. To do that would be like calling yourself a pacifist for not raising a finger to help a woman or child as they were violated; it might fit the definition of “pacifist,” but it also fits the definition of “coward.”
What is the danger? Well, John Cook is meddling with free speech. And Lewandowsky is attempting to marginalize those who speak freely. That can be pretty dangerous, in any social setting, but especially when it becomes government policy.
Who is funding these two fellows, (and their cohorts, if there are any?) Is it the government, in any way, shape or form? If so, you ought be annoyed, if not alarmed, because it is your tax dollars that are going into meddling with your free speech.
I am not subscribing to any sort of conspiracy theory. However I do believe we need to stand up for our right to speak freely, share ideas freely, and come up with rational solutions freely, without facing the threat of marginalization or ostracism. “The price of Liberty is eternal vigilance.”
Calling Muir Russell. Whitewash needed.
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings and commented:
Lew — Poooo
Ha ha a ha …Looks like the Lew – Crew is hitting the “Rate This “?
Am not sure I was able to explain John Cook via Twitter last night that, if he manages all those servers for many people fighting AGW, then there is no accusation of conspiracy if somebody points out that simple truth.
REPLY: Especially if the article doesn’t even contain the word “conspiracy”. But since when has truth mattered to Cook or Lewandowsky? They’re on a mission from FUD. – Anthony
We’re gonna have to go right to … Lew-dicrous speed! Lew-dicrous speed? Sir we’ve never gone that fast before. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mk7VWcuVOf0
Dr Lewdicrousky, Professor of disanalogy and fallacious comparisons. If the University do nothing they are complicit in propagandist pseudo-science. Yet they will still do nothing allowing their reputation to decline. The “paper” should be used as an example of how not to do it.
Reminds me of a Thursday night grad school course some years back. The Prof came in one night and passed out a survey to all seven of us students. Five minutes later we were all done and the regular class went ahead as scheduled.
Six months later the Prof published a paper . . . “Recent research indicates that . . .
Seven grad students . . . such a fair and representative sample of the population at large.
this maybe of interest (has a good point about what about the fossil fuel denial machine conspiracy as well) found in the comments of WatchingtheDeniers (I get about a bit!)
—-
http://watchingthedeniers.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/watts-explains-why-lewandowsky-paper-on-conspiracy-theories-is-wrong-its-a-conspiracy-between-john-cook-and-the-prof/#comment-14459
W”ith regards the comment about Lewandowsky and Federal Government Funding, those interested may like to look at his University CV at http://websites.psychology.uwa.edu.au/labs/cogscience/documents/SLvita.pdf
Here Lewandowsky proudly details his $4.4 million in grants. Which includes $762,000 specifically related to Climate Research funding in the last year or two, and none of that includes the $6 million the Federal Government provided him and a few colleagues to found and run ‘The Conversation’ which provides a substantial forum for his ‘Climate Change position’. I have looked and I haven’s found an example of a skeptic who receives funding like that from any source. Yet if you want to talk conspiracy theories, Prof Lewandowsky is always claiming that skeptics are funded by ‘big oil’ or ‘fossil fuel’ but has never offered any evidence of that.”
Franziska Hollender should do her next case study on The Daily Loo series…
More results that are unaccounted for…Hanich also offered up the survey here… http://www.all-about-psychology.com/psychology-research-participants.html
“Stephan Lewandowsky & Charles Hanich from The University of Western Australia are recruiting participants for an online study which explores attitudes towards science. Participants will be asked to complete a survey consisting of around 40 questions which should take less than 10 minutes to complete.
This study has been approved by The University of Western Australia ethics committee.
For full details and/or to take part in this research, please Click Here.”
(Posted this at CA, too.)
“When we published the surveys, we had two options:”
Option 3 would be to trash-can the whole thing.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Very impressive work by the skeptical blog authors – Watts, McIntyre, Lucia, Nova, Pielke, Fuller, Motl, and others.
I’m thinking Lewandowsky and Hanich are kicking themselves for not asking for your advice before building this ball of snow and kicking it down the hill.
Some kind of coincidence that Katharine Hayhoe is spouting similar nonsense.
UNDENIABLE FACT OF LIFE: Kooks that are most likely to believe in Roswell UFO’s or faked moon landings or 9/11 as an inside job by Cheney and the Jews are the same leftist scum that peddle AGW. No IQ required to become a liberal, leftist, democratic socialist.
It is obvious Cook-Lewandowsky set up their survey to distract the public from the scientific issues the so called “skeptics” are attempting to make known to the general public. Cook and Lewandowsky have a clear agenda. Cook and Lewandowsky obviously sent their “cooked“ study to extreme warming fanatics who supplied the “cooked“ answers. The questions asked do you think men walked on the moon or do you think only a single gun man killed President Kennedy or do you think AIDS is caused by HIV were answered by the extreme AGW fanatics poising as “skeptics” to discredit the so called “skeptics”.
This driver for this embarrassing propaganda effort, is the science does not support the extreme warming paradigm so the extreme AGW supporters use a desperate ad hominem attack on the so called skeptics to hide the fact that the observations and analysis does not support the extreme AGW position.
I do not excuse the “ethical” communities that absolve those responsible from this type of obvious shenanigans. The extreme warming supporters create a strawman with incorrect statements and then address the strawman, rather than the observations and analysis that indicates the extreme AGW predictions are incorrect as the planet’s response to a change in forcing is to increase planetary clouds in the tropics.
It is interesting that the same type of shenanigans are carried through in the IPCC reports.
http://www.climatechangefacts.info/ClimateChangeDocuments/LandseaResignationLetterFromIPCC.htm
After some prolonged deliberation, I have decided to withdraw from participating in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns.
Shortly after Dr. Trenberth requested that I draft the Atlantic hurricane section for the AR4’s Observations chapter, Dr. Trenberth participated in a press conference organized by scientists at Harvard on the topic “Experts to warn global warming likely to continue spurring more outbreaks of intense hurricane activity” along with other media interviews on the topic. The result of this media interaction was widespread coverage that directly connected the very busy 2004 Atlantic hurricane season as being caused by anthropogenic greenhouse gas warming occurring today. Listening to and reading transcripts of this press conference and media interviews, it is apparent that Dr. Trenberth was being accurately quoted and summarized in such statements and was not being misrepresented in the media. These media sessions have potential to result in a widespread perception that global warming has made recent hurricane activity much more severe. I found it a bit perplexing that the participants in the Harvard press conference had come to the conclusion that global warming was impacting hurricane activity today. To my knowledge, none of the participants in that press conference had performed any research on hurricane variability, nor were they reporting on any new work in the field. All previous and current research in the area of hurricane variability has shown no reliable, long-term trend up in the frequency or intensity of tropical cyclones, either in the Atlantic or any other basin. The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record.
Moreover, the evidence is quite strong and supported by the most recent credible studies that any impact in the future from global warming upon hurricane will likely be quite small. The latest results from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (Knutson and Tuleya, Journal of Climate, 2004) suggest that by around 2080, hurricanes may have winds and rainfall about 5% more intense than today. It has been proposed that even this tiny change may be an exaggeration as to what may happen by the end of the 21st Century (Michaels, Knappenberger, and Landsea, Journal of Climate, 2005, submitted).
It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming. Given Dr. Trenberth’s role as the IPCC’s Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity. My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy.“
The science does not support extreme AGW. The planet is not warming in accordance with the IPCC predictions. The IPCC extreme AGW warming, general circulation models amplify CO2 warming (positive feedback). Analysis of top of the atmosphere radiation from satellite vs ocean surface temperature indicates the planet resists warming or cooling changes (negative feedback) by increasing or decreasing cloud cover in the tropics.
The extreme warming IPCC predictions of 1.5C to 5C warming for a doubling of CO2 require that the planet amplifies the CO2 warming which is positive feedback. If the planet’s feedback response to a change in force is negative a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will result in less than 1C warming with most of the warming occurring at high latitude regions of the planet which will cause the biosphere to expand.
There is no extreme AGW warming problem to solve.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/09/uah-global-temperature-update-for-august-2012-0-34-deg-c/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/06/uah-global-temperature-up-06c-not-much-change/
http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/236-Lindzen-Choi-2011.pdf
On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications
We estimate climate sensitivity from observations, using the deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the concurrent fluctuations in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) outgoing radiation from the ERBE (1985-1999) and CERES (2000-2008) satellite instruments. … ….We argue that feedbacks are largely concentrated in the tropics, and the tropical feedbacks can be adjusted to account for their impact on the globe as a whole. Indeed, we show that including all CERES data (not just from the tropics) leads to results similar to what are obtained for the tropics alone – though with more noise. We again find that the outgoing radiation resulting from SST fluctuations exceeds the zerofeedback response thus implying negative feedback. In contrast to this, the calculated TOA outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric models forced by the observed SST are less than the zerofeedback response, consistent with the positive feedbacks that characterize these models. The results imply that the models are exaggerating climate sensitivity…. However, warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1C (based on simple calculations where the radiation altitude and the Planck temperature depend on wavelength in accordance with the attenuation coefficients of wellmixed CO2 molecules; a doubling of any concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of CO2’s absorption on the amount of CO2) (IPCC, 2007)…. This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5C to 5C and even more for a doubling of CO2. Model predictions depend on the ‘feedback’ within models from the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds. Within all current climate models, water vapor increases with increasing temperature so as to further inhibit infrared cooling. Clouds also change so that their visible reflectivity decreases, causing increased solar absorption and warming of the earth….
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2012/04/11/a-new-global-warming-alarmist-tactic-real-temperature-measurements-dont-matter/
A New Global Warming Alarmist Tactic: Real Temperature Measurements Don’t Matter
What do you do if you are a global warming alarmist and real-world temperatures do not warm as much as your climate model predicted? Here’s one answer: you claim that your model’s propensity to predict more warming than has actually occurred shouldn’t prejudice your faith in the same model’s future predictions. Thus, anyone who points out the truth that your climate model has failed its real-world test remains a “science denier.”
This, clearly, is the difference between “climate science” and “science deniers.” Those who adhere to “climate science” wisely realize that defining a set of real-world parameters or observations by which we can test and potentially falsify a global warming theory is irrelevant and so nineteenth century. Modern climate science has gloriously progressed far beyond such irrelevant annoyances as the Scientific Method.
This helps to explain how they managed to find over a thousand responses to a survey that would have drawn very little interest due to the slanted nature of the questions.
I suspect, due to lack of response, they opened the survey to UWA staff who would have been sympathetically motivated to respond and suffer through the questions.
The other aspect that throws me, unless the survey electronically required that all questions be answered, its curious that all questions were answered as its very common to receive incomplete surveys.
The survey also appeared to requested response for age and gender which were not reported.
So to sum up – the paper shows more warmists believe in conspiracy theories than skeptics.
Maybe they should rename the paper “97% of warmists are nutters”
How about a survey to see how many warmists and skeptics believe in Creationism as the true factual origin of our Earth? IMHO, I think warmists are more likely to believe this way as the “science” they are already doing is so science deficient.
“The survey carries no risks for participants” — such as accidentally upholding institutionalised insanity?
This reminds me of the risks people face when their speeches are captured by the Russian state TV: the advice is to keep your mouth shut once you spot a camera aimed at you. A few hundred video frames showing lip motion can be mixed with an arbitrary soundtrack; combine that with anti-free speech laws and there’s a great personal risk.
A thought came to me similar to Einstein’s response that you only need one person to prove you wrong. So what if one or two or even a majority of people that believe a certain theory are “nuts”? Does that make the theory any more or less correct? A lot of people believe in gravity and they also believe in Bigfoot, alien abduction, etc. Does that mean gravity does not exist? Of course not. I’m sure a lot of “nuts” believe in AGW as well. But what does that mean?
Absolutely nothing.
Personally I don’t see what the fuss is about. All online surveys are garbage. Yes, all of them.
I wonder what Uri Simonsohn will say?
(see http://www.nature.com/news/uncertainty-shrouds-psychologist-s-resignation-1.10968)
John F. Hultquist says:
September 13, 2012 at 11:30 am
“I’m thinking Lewandowsky and Hanich are kicking themselves for not asking for your advice before building this ball of snow and kicking it down the hill.”
Lewandowsky and others who invent smears for The Cause want MSM coverage; they don’t give a iot for what is written in the blogs.
Where can we order the Lewandosky toilet paper with his face on it? Should I just use the Lew issue of Nature Magazine? Incompetence or dishonesty, so many questions.