A new paper by Stephan Lewandowsky once again projects his own conspiracy ideation onto skeptics
Extract:
One known element of conspiratorial thinking is its ‘self-sealing’ quality (Keeley 1999, Bale 2007, Sunstein and Vermeule 2009), whereby evidence against a conspiratorial belief is re-interpreted as evidence for that belief. In the case of ‘climategate’, this self-sealing nature of conspiratorial belief became evident after the scientists in question were exonerated by nine investigations in two countries (including various parliamentary and government committees in the U.S. and U.K.; see table 1), when those exonerations were re-branded as a ‘whitewash.’ This ‘whitewash’ response can be illustrated by U.S. Representative Sensenbrennerʼs published response to the EPAʼs endangerment finding.
The paper:
Conspiratory fascination versus public interest: the case of ‘climategate‘
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/9/11/111004/article …
Basically, the gist of it is that being interested in Climategate, makes you a conspiracy theorist.
What a wackadoodle.
h/t to Barry Wood.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Why did it take only nine investigations in two countries to exonerate the climate gate scientists? Wouldn’t people have had more confidence in the outcome if it had been thirty-nine investigations in nine countries?
It wasn’t necessary in the other countries; they have no free press.
The hide-the-decline incident was not about cherry-picking data that you liked.
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temperatures to each series for the last 20 years (ie. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. ”
This was done because according to a previous email “But that explanation certainly can’t rectify why Keith’s data, which has similar properties to Phil’s data, differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s does from ours. ” No honest inquiry would find this acceptable behaviour for scientists. There was legitimate reason to doubt that the proxies showed unusual warming in the 20th century and fearing that “the sceptics would have a field day” is no excuse for hiding the evidence.
Science is not a debate that you must win even if you suspect that you are wrong. Society does expect its scientists to fess up even if they are the only ones to realise that they got it wrong, so not doing it is fraud.
Must live in a soundproof bubble, wrapped in a shagpile comfort blanket.
It’s quite funny that he himself brings up climategate again, while claiming that sceptics are obsessed by it.
He claims that skeptic blogs have a “continued and growing fascination” with climategate, which is obviously untrue. Here at WUWT there are 4 climategate articles in 2014, 2 in 2013, 16 in 2012, and 22 in Nov-Dec alone in 2011, following CG2.
More here.
From the paper:
Whilst I was initially amused by the points about “lack of interest by the mainstream media” – as if that meant ANYTHING (other than being another potential conspiracy theory…), I am latterly struck by a more fundamental logic bomb.
Climategate had such a short half-life and the public were so fundamentally disinterested in it that it led to the public thinking that “skepticism” is more prevalent than it really is. Eh?
Oh, and “skepticism” is defined as those who believe that “climate change is not happening”, which in the broadest sense is roughly nobody on here…
Now I appreciate this is hardly a scientific statement on the man and I’m hardly professionally qualified to cast an authoritative professional opinion but …….The man ain’t quite right….
We should club together to buy Lew a new shovel for Christmas; the one he’s been using to dig such a big conspiratorial hole must be worn out now – and he never learned the axiom about stopping digging.
Exonerated??? Charles Manson would be so lucky.
La Lewny takes self parody to new levels… again.
Although… when you think about it he may have a point .. the more I read through his stuff and especially watch his eye flicking videos the more I am utterly convinced that AGW must be a complete and utter fantasy that only a nut job would give credence to. Michael Mann doesn’t help either.
On behalf of they Bristolians (soon to be living in the EU green capital or something). . .
Sorry.
PS: Anthony probably noticed that Brizzle is, indeed, a ‘green’ city – lot of trees, and very nice it is too. Bristolian trees, almost certainly funded by the Koch Brothers, seem to be rather enjoying current climes, as are my girlfriend’s roses. They seem strangely unconcerned with Climategate . . .
PPS Didn’t Bristol University use to have a good reputation?
Sorry, really . . .
ChrisD in Bristol
This same dude probably thinks”big oil” is secretly behind skepticism. What a d-bag.
CAGW
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming. Isn’t happening.
Conspiracy – Anthropogenic Global Warming. Maybe, but sounds a bit nutty.
Church of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Now that’s more like it.
The ‘movement’ has all the qualities of a church.
A set of unshakeable beliefs not supported by evidence.
Confusion as to what evidence really looks like and how to interpret it.
Limited real knowledge of the subject of their beliefs.
Anger & confusion when confronted by those who don’t agree and are prepared to defend their position.
Support networks for members of the movement.
Branding of those who disagree as somehow morally deficient.
Treatment of those who disagree publicly as heretics.
Suggestion that prominent ‘deniers’ should be punished.
Lobbying for action to be taken to ward off a supposed enemy.
Appeal for taxes (tithes) to support their aims.
etc.
etc.
Funny how people will latch on to ideas, then at some point stop inspecting them for flaws.
Why do we keep giving this attention w*ore more attention? Leave us never speak of him again.
What I don’t understand about climategate is that several of the people involved (Mann, Jones, and Trenberth, at least) mentioned the “lack of warming”….
What lack of warming?
Perhaps we should revisit Climategate to remind everyone what was said and done in order to make this ‘conspiracy’. It is good in some ways that Lew has highlighted this as people forget quickly, so lets remind everyone.
Perhaps Lew could help by pointing out where the, lets say, Michael Mann ere ‘exonerated’ ?
Oddly despite the fact that these ‘investigations’ [were] a joke , they DID NOT say there was no issues and that one had done any wrong. While one said, they had done wrong but the FOI clock had been run down and so nothing could be done.
Or is taking into account the words of those ‘investigations’ part of the conspiracy that Lewandowsky ironically sees everywhere?
Let’s see. the ClimateGate e-mails expose a bunch of activists discussing ways to ensure that papers they disagree with can be suppressed. But if you believe that there is anything wrong with such activity you are a conspiracy theorists.
Do I have that right?
IMHO this inividual is getting far too much attention for someone who relies upon throwing badly managed and badly collected data into a stats package… Oh, joy, if we all could create publishable papers from such thin gruel!
It would be interesting to see in the future how history judges him.
Boy, he is mad about having “recursive fury” retracted from the psych journal.
I think the guy here on WUWT whom was a magician had it right on this paper. This paper is the red scarf trick.
Serious q – does the Lewn ever publish anything that isn’t about d@n!@r$? What did he do for a living before that gravy train? Does he have a specialty?
Another psychological ‘building block’ of the Green Reich. It’ll probably get him some TV interviews…
The funny part is that all of his points could be flipped around and applied to him, and the other Alarmists. Even his points on self-sealing and climategate. Climategate showed massive abuse of the system etc. etc., and it was re-interpreted as evidence for ACGW, using nine whitewash investigations.
I think it is important to keep very clear one’s intellectual distance from Oreskes’ mythological approach to creating con$piracies.
Unwisely, Mann and Lewandowsky did not keep their distance from her mythology.
Then we have the spectacle of the hapless Cook is being set up by Lewandowsky to be the comic foil for skeptics to use.
Of the four, I only pity Cook. And my pity for him doesn’t extend to his lack of scientific rigor; my pity is only for his poor choice of mythologizing intellects to associate with.
John
Would that be the Cook who like playing fancy dress in Photoshop?
or Qatar bidding for the World Cup.
Cook is a ‘fan-boy’ who loves being a ‘Team’ hanger on , he has no porblem at all with doing what ever it takes to further the ideas of his ‘heros’ so he gets a big ‘zero’ on the pity scale.
– – – – – – – –
M Courtney,
Oui. Mais oui, bien sûr.
Regards my pity for Cook – I have seen, in person and close up, some live discussions by each of the four individuals at several Fall AGU meetings in San Francisco. It was only Cook that struck me as pitiable to some extent in a strange way. It like he was intellectually lost in a strange world that is the myths of the others.
John
He is totally out of his depth , but he is also totally dishonest about it to , hence the need the lie about or change others words. He may not be the person pulling the trigger , but he is happy to be the person loading the gun.
– – – – – – – –
knr,
Your characterization of Cook is very similar to mine.
Yet, we differ on whether to some extent he is pitiable. His written words (in: blogs, tweets, other media, journals) do not invoke in me any pity for him. It is his live in person behavior which I observed fairly close up that invoked in me some feeling of pity for him. Is it an act? I did not sense it was acting.
John