Social psychologist Jose Duarte pulls no punches in describing Lewandowsky’s failures of science in the “Moon Hoax” paper and the later retracted “Fury” paper. And then goes on to describe failure in Cook’s 97% consensus paper. Excerpts follow.
in their abstract they say:
“Endorsement of free markets also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer.”
This is all false, and the paper should be retracted. It should’ve been retracted by the authors already.
…
Surprisingly, climate skeptics got mad about this paper, perhaps because > 97.8% of those who think climate science is a hoax reject the moon hoax idea in Lewandowsky’s own data, placing them squarely in the mainstream of humanity. So, Lewandowsky, Cook, Oberauer, and Marriott (2013) wrote a follow-up hit piece that was all about their critics. They wrote a paper that was about the critics of the first paper, the one we’ve just debunked. It wasn’t enough to lie about people and smear them as believing things they definitely do not believe. He needed to take another swipe. The journal, Frontiers in Psychology, wisely ended up retracting that paper, which is exactly what should happen to this fraud here.
…
This was an awful thing to do. It was damaging to innocent participants. It is unethical to do this to your participants. It is wildly unethical to invite people to participate in a study, and then do this to them. They are helping us. They are volunteering to participate in scientific research. They’ve take time out of their lives to help us out. And in return, we slander them? We tell the world that they believe things that they do not believe? What Lewandowsky and colleagues did here was despicable and fraudulent. Why would anyone participate in a social psychology study if this is what we do to them? Why would anyone participate in research if our goal is to marginalize them in public life, to lie about them, to say that they think the moon landing was a hoax, to say they don’t think HIV causes AIDS, to say they don’t believe smoking causes lung cancer – when none of those things are true. Do we hate our participants?
Read the whole thing here: http://www.joseduarte.com/blog/more-fraud (h/t Bishop Hill)
In another article, Duarte goes on to describe the failures of Cook and his “independent raters” in Cook’s 97% paper.
In social science, it’s common to use trained human raters to subjectively rate or score some variable — it can be children’s behavior on a playground, interviews of all kinds, and often written material, like participants’ accounts of a past emotional experience. And we have a number of analytical and statistical tools that go with such rating studies. But we would never use human raters who have an obvious bias with respect to the subject of their ratings, who desire a specific outcome for the study, and who would be able to deliver that outcome via their ratings. That’s completely nuts. It’s so egregious that I don’t think it even occurs to us as something to look out for. It never happens. At least I’ve never heard of it happening. There would be no point in running such a study, since it would be dismissed out of hand and lead to serious questions about your ethics.
But it’s happening in climate science. Sort of. These junk studies are being published in climate science journals, which are probably not well-equipped to evaluate what are ultimately social science studies (in method). And I assume the journals weren’t aware that these studies used political activists as raters.
Examples of the unbelievable bias and transparent motives of the raters’ in Cook, et al (2013) below. These are excerpts from an online forum where the raters collaborated with each other in their ratings: –
See more at: http://www.joseduarte.com/#sthash.gfz7am3K.dpuf
Thank you Jose Duarte.
It is heartening to see somebody outside of climate science finally call these spades a spade. Now if we can just instill some sense of moral responsibility to people in climate science who really should be speaking out about using science as a smear tactic, we’ll be gettin somewhere.
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Wow! Really trashed Lewendski et al. Hooray!
bernie1815 says:
“Duarte is a graduate student. The commentary, while pretty accurate and powerful, is in a blog post. Let’s see if he can get an article published in a reputable journal before ringing the bells.”
I agree with you Bernie. I’m concerned for this guy’s career, maybe even his physical safety.
Political Junkie:
You are correct, his status as a graduate student says nothing about the accuracy of his commentary. It does, however, have relevance for gauging whether his robust and rigorous criticism of the appallingly bad Lewandowsky and Cook papers, which I agree with, will garner any traction among other psychologists. Personally I doubt it. It would take a critique of someone like Kahneman to really bring Lewandowsky down.
It is amazing the extent of deception in the climate science community. Data tampering, rigged review, outright lies, refusal to share code or data, policy implementation without representation, agenda driven study results, funding impropriety, and on and on. We need a reset button as everyone is paying the price for this abhorrent behavior.
Incarceration is the only button that can bring this systemic fraud to an end.
I looked up some of the research programmes (and very laudible are many of them) for Bristol University and found that they have come up with yet another morphed definition of AGW. Now they call it ‘Global Change’.
To this end they have come up with:
Now, I would have thought that any university worth the salt would run a mile from ‘consensus’.
Going through the raters’ discussion on SkS I came across this comment by an “Andy S”:
“The danger, of course, is that we will also grade some iconic denier papers as neutral. We shouldn’t, naturally, change their ratings but we should at least be aware of their existence I suspect that a lot of denialist papers will be rated neutral, since they may have had to hedge their conclusions to get published. I haven’t looked at it again but I suspect that the McLean et al ENSO paper abstract would have to be rated neutral, whereas the authors trumpeted its denialist conclusion only in the press release, if I recall correctly. I’d guess that M&M’s papers and some of the cosmic ray and solar stuff will also be neutral. Remember that many deniers will claim that they don’t doubt AGW, just “CAGW”.”
Just look at the honesty here: “I suspect that a lot of denialist papers will be rated neutral, since they may have had to hedge their conclusions to get published”.
Don’t they feel *any* shame?
bernie says:
“Duarte is a graduate student. The commentary, while pretty accurate and powerful, is in a blog post. Let’s see if he can get an article published in a reputable journal before ringing the bells.”
I don’t have any figures, but at my psych grad shool the vast majority of papers published
were the work of grad students, even those that had the major professor’s name attached.
The link in the main post to the José Duarte blog is broken.
To me the major problem with Cook’s study was the fact that it was so stupidly designed and
obsolete. The study was supposedly to determine the opinion of climate scientists about global warming. That implies it should canvas their “current” beliefs, not beliefs they may have held in the past, in some paper they may have been involved with (perhaps before the “pause”).
And the strategy Cook chose almost looks as if it was designed to introduce human bias into the results. If you want to know a scientist’s beliefs about an issue, you do what everyone else (except Cook) would do : YOU ASK THEM. You don’t dig thru a bunch of published papers trying to read tea leaves and infer the answer to a question that the papers probably never even addressed. In court, such a claim as Cook’s study makes would be tossed out as “not best evidence” as well as “including answers likely to be obsolete.”
@Clovis
“That’s unscientific, un-American, and terrible epistemology”
But it makes for good eschatology if you are a Believer!
Grad students tend to graduate, eventually. If the meme sticks, a PhD is in the offing, and a good one, showing that there is a new form of psychological behaviour that needs to be categorized, named as a form of self-delusion and placed on the list of other delusions.
Willful ignorance is inadequate. L&C papers are perversions of social science. A random act would be an error, but systematic abuse is a syndrome. Perfect grist for a PhD’s mill.
arthur4563 says:
“If you want to know a scientist’s beliefs about an issue, you do what everyone else (except Cook) would do : YOU ASK THEM.”
I tried that once. I sent an e-mail to every State Climatologist in the USA at the time. (I believe it was about 36 states having State Climatologists at that time.) The e-mail asked a very straight forward question about global warming with multiple choice answers reflecting a variety of views including “not enough data to confidently determine”. I got exactly 3 replies. Two I would characterize as warmist and one lukewarmist if I recall correctly (it’s been a while). An 8% response rate is hardley enough to determing what State Climatologists think. The lack of response I suppose does say something. Perhaps there is a consensus among State Climatologists that they need to keep their mouth shut or tow the line if they want to keep their jobs.
“If you want to know a scientist’s beliefs about an issue, you do what everyone else (except Cook) would do : YOU ASK THEM.”
Maybe Cook was worried about what the scientists would say if he asked them. 🙂
bernie1815, you ought to look it up first:
From Duarte’s website:
Publications
“Now if we can just instill some sense of moral responsibility to people in climate science”
Good luck with that.
TheLastDemocrat says:
August 6, 2014 at 9:11 am
Freud to Jung upon their arrival in NYC in 1909:
Congratulations future Dr. Duarte.
BTW: How did Lewandowsky’s paper account for several Apollo-era astronauts being climate skeptics? Does Neil Armstrong believe the moon landings were faked?
This really says it all.
Yet it was not dismissed out of hand. It’s called an agenda and is part and parcel of Climastrology. It’s agenda driven, paid for, pal reviewed results. And that’s to put it mildly.
To those of us who have been saying this for years, naming names without compunction for Warmists’ bleats-and-squeaks, the sociopathology of AGW Catastrophism is simply Will James’ Anabaptists of Munster writ large (see “Varieties of religious Experience”).
In direct line from Paul Ehrlich to John (“seething maggots”) Holdren, Keith Farnish, Kentti Linkola, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, a certain mindset regards all industrial/scientific progress from c. 1725 as antithetical to nature’s “purity”… in no uncertain terms, these self-loathing ideologues hate Humanity and want you dead
The Lewandowsky and John Cook paper linked many of us to denial that smoking causes lung cancer. I know and insist smoking causes lung cancer. My only question is do climate change campaigners and the British Bias Corporation believe in their own propaganda. Of course not. The MASTERS OF HYPOCRISY are below.
Jeremy Grantham invests via his hedge fund in tobacco companies and he is a climate change funder and campaigner. He also invests in oil and coal companies via Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co. LLC
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/05/bob-wards-rat-snake-ploy/#comment-1583997
The BBC Pension fund, as at 31 March 2013, had investments in the following tobacco companies:
Altria Group
British American Tobacco
Imperial Tobacco
Reynolds American
—
Al Gore, the climate change campaigner, has been quoted in 1996 by the New York Times saying:
Earlier in the same article the New York Times said:
—
—
One of the founders of the wildlife and climate campaigning WWF is Dr. Anton Rupert. The now deceased Dr. Rupert made his fortune from the cigarette manufacturing company called Voorbrand, re-named Rembrandt, now consolidated into Rothmans.
Ref: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1508360/Anton-Rupert.html
ASU! Go Sun Devils
Wow. First redeeming thing to come from Tempe in some time.
(Torch- Graduate Class of ’94)
As long as 97% or more of climate scientists are okay with other climate scientists lying and using dishonest methods for the “cause,” I’m going to continue to treat everything they say with extreme skepticism. Trust has to be earned. And you can’t earn trust by using dishonest or shoddy methods or by supporting those who do.
Alec Rawls said
That is the whole thrust of leftist post-modernism, the claim that there is no such thing as truth, only power. They justify their own disregard for truth by saying that there is no such thing as truth and that all ANYBODY does is concoct ways of seeing things that best serve their own interests, then they at the same time turn around and pretend they aren’t doing this.
Quite so, Alec. The left rarely have any original thoughts of their own. So in their simple-minded naivety, they project their lack of any cognitive ability onto others. I have run into this so many times, that now I find it amusing.
TheLastDemocrat says:
August 6, 2014 at 9:11 am
Bystander Apathy
I had an instance of that very thing a couple of weeks ago. While in a store, a man outside was seen, through the window, to have fallen over and lay motionless on the ground. I remarked this to the other people and cashiers and they had seen it but did nothing. I actually had to force myself to go out and check on the guy. He awoke and knew his name – just a drunk
I call a spade a shovel just as I call John Cook evil.