From Tom Nelson, it was too good not to repost, especially when Lewandowsky hands out moral lessons while being immoral himself with his labeling skeptics as “moon landing deniers” with a gussed up survey and statistical slight of hand that turned out to be a an academic scam used as a tool to dehumanize people that have legitimate doubts about the science.
Now that Lewandowsky has declared the AR5 draft leak issue “dishonourable” (something not even the IPCC itself said in their statement) I expect we won’t see any use of AR5 draft information by his mouthpiece pawns, John Cook and Dana Nuccitelli on “Skeptical Science”, because well, using that new “dishonourably” obtained information would be wrong according to Lew.
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a researcher of climate change denial at the Cognitive Science Laboratories at the University of Western Australia, said the premature leak of the report was “dishonourable.”
“Science is one of the most transparent endeavours humans have ever developed. However, for the transparency to be effective, preliminary documents ought to remain confidential until they have been improved and checked through peer review,” he said in an emailed comment.
“The leak of a draft report by a reviewer who has signed a statement of confidentiality is therefore regrettable and dishonourable.”
“However, what is worse than the leak itself is the distortion of the content of the draft chapter by some deniers (no, they are not skeptics),” he said.
Prof Lewandowsky said that the report’s statement that humans have caused global warming was a “virtual certainty” meant it’s authors had 99% confidence in that view.
“That’s up from ‘very high confidence’ (90% certain) in the last report published in 2007,” he said. [Hey Stephan: How, specifically, were those 90% and 99% numbers calculated? What, specifically, changed between 2007 and now that accounts for the alleged 90% reduction in uncertainty?]
“In other words, the scientific case has become even stronger and has now reached a level of confidence that is parallelled only by our confidence in some very basic laws of physics, such as gravity or thermodynamics.”
To claim otherwise by cherry-picking part of a sentence out of context is absurd, he said.
“Although it illustrates the standard approach by which climate deniers seek to confuse the public. Climate denial lost intellectual respectability decades ago, and all that deniers have left now is to misrepresent, distort, or malign the science and the scientific process.”
For the last few years, my new passion has been rock climbing…Most airlines [Wait, with the fate of my grandchildren allegedly hanging in the balance, this guy still takes unnecessary fuel-guzzling trips to climb on rocks?!] can handle that, whereas few take sailplanes as check-in luggage
So, an old psych prof knows the science involved?
Ovaltine, Professor?
SkS good for something – this is the relevant quote from AR5 beta:
Lewandoswky though finds the above too complicated (or inconvenient) so he reduces it down to:
So you see in the warped mind of Loondownsky:
– IPCC say Global Warming™ is due to humans.
– Skeptics say Global Warming™ isn’t happening (apparently?).
ipso facto, skeptics are science deniers, debate is over, we’re all doomed if we don’t sign the blank cheque.
“it is extremely likely that human activities (with very high confidence) have caused most (at least 50%) of the observed increase in global average temperatures since 1951.”
Referring , of course, to the GISS and Hadcrud “ADJUSTMENTS” (which are AT LEAST 50% of the calculated increase)
and a the accidental “LOSS” of remote temp stations of so that UHI effects are bought more into the calculation but still ignored. (there’s the rest of it !!)
So yep, I agree totally with their statement.
We can take a powerful lesson from our planetary neighbors, Mercury and Venus in this regard—the average distance of Mercury from the Sun is 36 million miles, and the average temperature is 355 degrees Fahrenheit. The average distance of Venus from the Sun is 67 million miles, and its average temperature is 900 degrees Fahrenheit.
So we have Venus at almost twice the distance from the Sun as Mercury, and its temperature is almost three times as hot, seemingly contradictory to common sense—how could that be possible?
It turns out that Venus’s atmosphere is 96% carbon dioxide, super efficient at those levels in capturing and preserving the Sun’s heat creating a greenhouse effect on steroids; and back here on Earth, we are spewing this gas into our atmosphere at the astounding rate of 15 to 30 billion metric tons per year, decade after decade; and as a result CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere has risen from 280 ppm (parts per million) in the preindustrial age to 390 ppm at present; a 40 percent increase.
[snip. “Denial”, “denialist”, and other similar pejoratives are not allowed here. Please read the Policy page. — mod.]
“Climate denial lost intellectual respectability decades ago.”
I didn’t know this crap was decades old.
By “climate denial,” one could assume he means “man-made climate change denial.” Don’t assume it; you must first assume he is rational.
“However, for the transparency to be effective, preliminary documents ought to remain confidential until they…” become final and can no longer be influenced by skeptical outsiders. (Fixed it.)
“Prof Lewandowsky said that the report’s statement that humans have caused global warming was a “virtual certainty” meant it’s authors had 99% confidence in that view.”
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Of course the key word here is “virtual.” In their view “virtual certainty” simply refers to the virtual reality of climate models. It has nothing to do with the real world.
“However, what is worse than the leak itself is the distortion of the content of the draft chapter by some deniers (no, they are not skeptics).”
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Lewandowsky’s certainty about skeptics being deniers is matched only by his confidence that humans have caused global warming. That tells you all you need to know. I’d love get his predictions on which stocks will do well in the coming year. Then I could get rich by noting his investment advise and doing the exact opposite.
Camburn says:
December 15, 2012 at 2:57 pm
“Prof Lewandowsky appears to have recieved [sic] his PhD in Australia. It is now well documented that there is an age group there that was educated on how not think critically.
They have been educated to answer to authority without question.
The nation has a chance yet, but is rapidly sinking into total oblivion.
Sad to watch…………sad to watch.”
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You have been too speculative on your pronouncements Camburn
Your generalisations do not altogether ring true although your “sad to watch” is true of Lewandowsky.
The following is from Lewandowsky’s web site:
“Brief biographical sketch
I completed my undergraduate studies at Washington College, Chestertown, MD, USA, in 1980. I then did my post-graduate training at the University of Toronto, earning a PhD in 1985. After various stints as a research fellow, I took up my first full-time academic post at the University of Oklahoma in 1990. I moved to the University of Western Australia in 1995, and I have been here ever since.”
Incidentally my Aussie qualifications B.Sc., M. App. Sc., PhD and I am probably of your “certain age group” but I certainly don’t “answer to authority without question”. And it’s not valid that I don’t think critically otherwise I would not read or contribute to WUWT. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. (lol).
Was his non-critical thinking therefore seeded in USA, Toronto perhaps or did he just escape to a country or even a State where AGW nonsense ideas in 1995 and now are more palatable?
Cheers.
joe arrigo,
Venus is not hot because of CO2. Search the archives here to understand. We have been over this too many times already. Just FYI, Mars’ atmosphere is almost pure CO2 too, and Mars is mighty cold.
Potty Training for Eco-dummies:
“Science is one of the most transparent endeavors humans have ever developed. However for transparency to remain effective….we must be allowed to bludgeon all critical ideas and individuals so that only the pre-selected meme is presented”….[the Old Speak translation]
Englishman John Crapper invented the modern water flush toilet, which soon lead to the two most popular slang terms “John” and “Crapper”. The Brits later nicknamed this the Loo, for which the great minds at the Cognitive Club at UWA, have now provided an Aussie spelling. If you consume Mann made IPCC garbage you might then have an AR5 leak issue….proceed to the Lew….you are not then forced to have transparency….instead, use the Lew paper….suddenly….ALEC RAWLS IS DISHONOURABLE ! ! !
Flush the Truth….you can now reinstall your figleaf….return to cognitives dissonance, pseudo science with its lucretive government rewards. AGW ignores the Laws of Thermodynamice, but Professor Rocky Lew is advised to pay special attention to the Laws of Gravity. There is no emperical evidence that rock climbers can paper over Newton.
The annoying part is that the press now turn to Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist, for comments on climate science, when the man himself has clearly indicated he thinks it should remain the realm of the ‘experts’, apparently thinking the average man is not suitably equipped to handle such complicated concepts:
Psychologists have not always been highly regarded; referencing this story (not sure if it was on WUWT before, but anyway, certainly relevant here):
joe arrigo,
So, I’ll repeat the facts again, just for you.
Over the same atmospheric pressures as those found in Earth’s atmosphere, the Venusian temperature is ALMOST EXACTLY WHAT IT SHOULD BE for its comparative distance from the Sun, despite the Venusian atmosphere being mostly CO2.
Now off you go and do some learning. Do not continue to live in ignorance. !!!
“preliminary documents ought to remain confidential until they have been improved and checked through peer review”
I suggest we know enough about the IPCC to make a judgement about their misuse of the principle of “peer review”. Their AR4 of 2007 is a complete disgrace. Of the 18,531 references cited by the “scientists”, 5,587 references were not peer-reviewed. Among the non-peer reviewed “items” are press releases, newspaper and magazine articles, discussion papers, MA and PhD theses, working papers, and advocacy literature published by environmental groups.
http://www.noconsensus.org/ipcc-audit/findings-main-page.php
Not only were these illustrious, authoratitive sources (all 5,587 of them) what the “scientists” relied upon to support their scaremongering, but they went to the added effort of hiding them among the other references. There was nothing to show that the non-peer reviewed illustrious, authoratitive sources differed from the peer reviewed sources – they were scattered, unmarked throughout the “real” references. Every chapter contained some of those pretend illustrious, authoratitive sources.
What is most disconcerting is that every one of the cabal of creators and editors of AR4 have put their name to this chicanery, and their puppeteers have stated they will repeat the subterfuge in AR5.
Lewandowski is the gift that keeps on giving. He is a parody of the locked-in leftist intellectual roaming the campuses of what was once known as the “free world’ pontificating nonsense about things he knows very little about.
He’s done more to cast doubt on the dubious science he celebrates than anyone who is not writing pre-ordained papers on the subject.
“joe arrigo says:
December 15, 2012 at 5:34 pm”
Oh dear, the Venus argument, again! Yes, the atmosphere of Venus is ~98% CO2, it is closer to the Sun, but the mass of the atmosphere on Venus is ~90 times the mass of the atmosphere of the Earth. That’s why Venus is hot. I’ll let you Google why Mars is so cold; hint, it has something to do with the mass of the atmosphere.
catweazle says
I wonder if anyone’s bothered to tell the poor fellow that there hasn’t been any stat sig warming since around 1997,
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Since this “15 years of no warming” from the CRU data set is so popular now, can I start a vote to have the collective WUWT send Phil Jones and the CRU guys an admission of fault and a big fat apology for sending so much spew his way.
Accompanied by a gracious thankyou for providing a dataset that proves what you guys said was right all along.
markx says:
December 15, 2012 at 7:08 pm
The annoying part is that the press now turn to Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist, for comments on climate science,
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Don’t be too annoyed. Having this freak as their spokesperson will only hasten the truth coming out in the non-press controlled real world. Post and e-mail the YouTube video everywhere.
Gerald Kelleher says:
December 15, 2012 at 12:45 pm
Thanks, Gerald. Poe was a very bright and perceptive chap, and his views were constantly dismissed on the grounds that he was an alcoholic (or drunk as they called them in those days). Then, as now, the ad hom was an easy way of disposing of the opposition. In fact, he had a remarkable creative and analytic brain which produced great insights on practical, theoretical and creative levels. Thanks for bringing him into the discussion.
I think the perfesser is getting a lot more attention around here than he deserves. And aren’t we spelling Lewinsky wrong?
” climate science is like gravity”
yeah, when you get really high concentrations of it , it distorts the fabric of time and space. CO2 molecules become paradoxically massive and absorb twice as much infra-red. This is called particle duality. Centuries become decades, then years, causing glaciers to melt hundreds of times quicker than in a normal universe.
All this was laid down by Einstein in his theory of general relativity. It’s a case of your reference frame.
The United Nations Framework on Climate Crap is what is known as a non-referential frame.
This basically means it has a lot of spin and can’t be used as a reference for anything at all.
” climate science is like gravity”
climate science attracts money, this money attracts more climate scientists. Eventually, when concentrations get high enough it reaches a critical mass and implodes, creating a financial blackhole surrounded by a climatological grant horizon. Any grant money in the vicinity gets inexorably sucked in and nothing useful can ever come out.
Is using physiological aggression illegal? I know you can be disbarred in civilized countries.
If Lew knows physiological aggression is or can be harmful, should he be made accountable?
If Lew knows physiological aggression is or can be harmful, should he also be made aware that intentional psychological focus of aggression can be a driver physiological aggression of both one’s self and others.
If Lew knows physiological aggression is or can be harmful, should he also be made aware that intentional psychological focus of aggression can be a driver of physiological aggression of both one’s self and others.