More on the now infamous “moon landing denier“” statistical paper.
Question – how did this title for a scientific paper:
Understanding Statistical Trends
Turn into this?
NASA faked the moon landing|Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science
Easy. You get ethics approval from your university for the first and use it to push the second. According to UWA rules, Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky was required to obtain approval for his survey from the UWA Ethics Committee. He got that, the process took a week.
At Australian Climate Madness, Simon Turnill obtained information on this process through an FOI, request, which he details here. The FOI released email exchanges are available here.
Steve McIntyre writes about it:
The information showed that Lewandowsky used bait-and-switch. Lewandowsky had obtained approval for a project entitled “Understanding Statistical Trends”. The original proposal had nothing to do with his bizarre online conspiracy theory. Lewandowsky switched the proposal in August 2010.
In addition to Simon’s points, note that Lewandowsky stated the following in his ethics proposal:
Because I am interested in soliciting opinions also from those folks, I would like to withhold my name from the survey as I fear it might contaminate responding”
Nonetheless, Lewandowsky’s name was prominently displayed at some of the anti-skeptic blogs. Lewandowsky’s fears that the survey would be contaminated seem to have been justified.
What is even more interesting, is that when Lewandowsky asked the Ethics Committee for a change to the procedure, switching from a written passed around survey at UWA to one done on the Internet, that approval took only about 18 hours.
Lewandowsky was so surprised at the speed he wrote:
My question now is whether those last minute changes violated some required review procedures. The question is whether or not the changes were at the sole discretion of ethics committee chair Kate Kirk or if they required a wider review. If the latter, I’d FOI the results of that review.
Based on the timeline for the change approval, my suspicion is that Ms. Kirk just waived it through without really looking at it or consulting anyone else. That may or may not be procedurally kosher according to UWA ethics rules.
She seemed flippant in this exchange:
As advertised publicly in this other UWA online survey project:
For any ethical concerns regarding this research project please contact:
Kate Kirk (Kate.Kirk@uwa.edu.au, Ph:08 6488 3703).
I strongly advise any readers against sending hate mail, but instead ask how she allowed herself to be victimized by this apparent bait and switch by professor Lewandowsky and if that 18 hours from request to approval was mostly waiting for Ms. Kirk to read the email in her inbox, or if she actually sent it out to others for review.
Simon Turnhill deserves props for following this through. I advise visiting ACM and reading his full essay, leaving some thanks in the tip jar.
Regarding the comment of A Scott
A fundamental principle in these surveys is “informed consent”.
If originator of the research is witheld from the partipants, bacause that might
cause them to withhold consent, then one of the fundamental principles has
been violated.
btw, it may be that kate kirk (also kathryn kirk ) is no longer in her position at UWA, according to ACM:
Lewandowsky writes to Kate Kirk, an administrative officer in the Ethics office. She no longer appears in the online directory, but a Google cache provides the necessary information (here – 27 September 2012). The administrative officer in the Human Research Ethics Officer is now Dr Caixia Li. Kate Kirk was apparently still in that role within the last month given the cache date. I won’t speculate on the circumstances surrounding this. UPDATE: Kate Kirk appears on one HREO contact page but not another… odd. She still does not appear in the full staff directory.
http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/2012/10/lewandowsky-foi-substantial-last-minute-changes-to-project-waved-through-by-uwa-ethics-committee/
example: Kathryn Kirk
Requests for volunteers must be sent to Kathryn Kirk, at the Human Research Ethics Committee
http://www.is.uwa.edu.au/it-help/email/staff/maillists/student-news
Underneath the flab that all those billion$ built up and fed, there are probably some muscles being flexed. After all, it required some strength to carry all the adipose science this far.
manicbeancounter says:October 12, 2012 at 12:04 pm
“…… But most of all the misleading claim that scientists are custodians of vastly superior knowledge that is beyond the comprehension of lesser mortals….”
This is also an underlying theme in discussion on his blog comments, arguing that only someone skilled in the art can comprehend or indeed debate the scientific fundamentals of climate science.
And so he shows a major logical lapse (in his videos and discussions) by presenting the theories of AGW as an absolute fact. Surely he, a psychologist, cannot know possibly know or understand this science. The best he can do is to say; “Climate scientists state/believe/have modeled…..etc…” or perhaps “The accepted state of the science is… etc…”
It is terribly unscientific to just state as a fact something you profess to not comprehend.
By the way, what a marvelous field of science Lewandowsky operates in :
An on-line survey, collated into a single page spreadsheet, this data is then uploaded to a statistics program to do an upmarket version of a multivariate analysis, and Voila! – the basics of a publishable paper emerges!
If it were not for his excruciatingly convoluted writing style, the writing of the paper would take all of 45 minutes.
But then, if not for the obfuscation, I’d guess it would not get published.
A. Scott says at 7:07 and 7:09 pm “……. ”
Thanks for all the details! Given the organizations who funded Dr. Lewandowsky’s efforts I would be surprised if they plan on looking into the less than forthright modifications to the research effort.
I am looking forward to the ” 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.” paper.
Here in sunny CA we are a tad further along in our mitigation efforts then Australia as far as reducing our CO2 levels and the bills (think of it as debt) are coming due currently- hence I am interested in learning about the “factors that affect individual adaptive coping.”
I suffered watching the two videos and this man believes conspiracy people are behind the anti AGW movement. He then propounds his theory that all disbelievers are in a conspiracy against AGW. Thus he is a conspiracy believer, one can only conclude that he is a confused and deluded person. Freud would have fun talking to this man.
Man, those videos are really something: This man is one of the most unconvincing presenters I have ever seen. I’ll bet his friends are even now huddled together discussing methods to keep him away for a video camera.
This bait and switch is actually a pretty serious thing – one particular trial protocol has been presented to an ethics committee and was approved.
But, in the end, under the same code/reference number, an entirely different trial/survey was carried out:
Different methodology.
Different survey questions.
Different method of delivery of survey and resulting very different controls over quality of data.
Different target group.
Different hypothesis being tested.
Unless somewhere there is a lot more correspondence between the researcher and the ethics committee, the whole thing makes a complete mockery of the ethics approval, and perhaps other university approval and funding processes.
Whoever is running that place should be carrying out a very serious inquiry in the the matter.
I see Jim and others have already detailed the transgressions in procedure: Here is Jim’s well worded comment with the formatting fixed:
Jim says: October 12, 2012 at 8:58 pm
Any research without a proper ethics application cannot be published. The occasional Ph.D. thesis sometimes have to strip work out (and be totally gutted and therefore no PhD) by failure to get proper ethics clearance.
Ms Kirk should be advised that the UWA has totally failed in its compliance duties and at a minimum she should immediately advise the chair of the UWA ethics committee who should very quickly come back with a recommendation that the paper be withdrawn. The diligence applied by Ms Kirk in this matter was less than satisfactory so she may have some questions to answer.
There will probably be a signed declaration at the journal that the work had suitable ethics clearance. This probably constitutes serious misconduct and/or academic fraud. Signoffs regarding ethics are very serious documents.
If a funding body is named, then correspondence to the funding body that the named grant be withdrawn would be appropriate due to violations of NHMRC national guidelines.
In the scheme of things, the issue of whether agenda driven poor research was done incompetently pails into insignificance in comparison with an ethics application that does not properly describe, the intent and methodology of a research project involving human subjects.
There is of course one thing in Lewandowsky’s favour.
The administration officer of the UWA ethics office apparently approved
the revised survey. In some respects, UWA ethics office lack of process and
dilgence is more problematic that the revised Lewandowsky project proposal.
Whilst we’re are discussing this paper, I believe that it is pertinent to point out that Al Gore’s initial fortune was based on Tobacco Growing. I find it amazing how many time AGW skeptics are lumped together with those who consider that Tobacco Smoke does not cause cancer. I wonder what Al’s position is on this?