More insane conspiracy theory from Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky of Bristol University

I’ve made a hobby over the years of debunking conspiracy theories for my fellow “old hippies”. That’s what got me interested in ACGW. Normally, I find shaky science and lack of accurate data on the side of the theorists that are crying conspiracy. This time, the more I looked into it, the more questionable the whole case for CACGW began to look. This one is definitely different from your run-of-the-mill JFK, 911 and HAARP conspiracies. No other subject has so much scientific data and observation disputing the popular (therefore ‘correct’) societal perception.

“exonerated by nine investigations in two countries”

Exonerated of what? Certainly not acting unprofessionally, certainly of not behaving in despicable ways. Ok yes exonerated of not committing a felony. Whoopee!.
Nine investigations indicates there was alot of smoke, an awful lot of smoke, even if the instituions concluded fire did not cause the smoke.
The institutions had their own reputations to protect and their feeble investigations were conducted in order protect the reputation of not only themselves but climate science in general. So a bunch of dishonest, immature, insecure lowlifes act like a$$holes and spit on integrity in science but that’s ok because they were exonerated.
Thank you dumb as board Lewandowsky for that wonderful insight.

The link to the paper is broken?

I agree with Lew about this claim:
“whereby evidence against a conspiratorial belief is re-interpreted as evidence for that belief”
The evidence against Climategate being a conspiracy were the several investigations, the actual effect of which was to expand the scope of the conspiracy. It now includes university administrators.
What I find astonishing is how the Crown and her not-quite-broken-away Colonies are willing to PAY a man to declare the obvious as if it is some big and recent discovery.
However, William F. Buckley on a radio program was once asked about a vast left wing conspiracy (VLWC) in media. He said it wasn’t a conspiracy in an organized sense, no presiding official, but looked like a conspiracy simply because journalists usually go to the same schools, have the same professors, study the same materials, and most fundamentally are writing about the acts of other people — intrusive, judgemental and therefore inherently left-wing. But not a conspiracy.
What I see is MANY small conspiracies under one very large umbrella, and that umbrella is socialism. It is more like a jellyfish, a cooperative colony rather than controlled by a central nervous system. Useful idiots in large numbers believe in “hope and change” without once considering what exactly she is hoping for or what exactly ought to change, and into what it should become.
http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2014/09/23/climate-movement-drops-mask-admits-communist-agenda/?singlepage=true
“Believe nothing until it has been officially denied” (1956) Claud Cockburn. Widely repeated and probably older than Claud Cockburn’s recitation of it.

What a tragedy that Stephan Lewandowsky left Australia. He was the pre-eminent poster on climate change on our national broadcaster ABC. He told us wonderful things all a bit loopy. Still I miss him, there was no better laugh than a Lew’d thread about how we were all going to burn or drown or starve or get taxed into extinction. Bring him back home we miss him.

He’s a “cognitive psychologist”. In other words, academic BS in its purest form. He is so banal, he is like mildew, He feeds on life, on truth.
there are so many levels of abstraction with this guy, probably a world record. He goes back to Climategate. ” whereby evidence against a conspiratorial belief is re-interpreted as evidence for that belief”
whereby? who uses that word?
He is like one of those ponces who wore powdered wigs centuries ago. Sucking up to power while using fancy words.

And now the far less important issue of Lewandowsky.
I see a lot of attempts to attribute people’s beliefs to psychological and/or circumstantial factors. Often it is used to try to imply that the belief is not true.
This is, of course, a logical error. Perhaps the reason I believe the world is round is because I have invested in a globe manufacturer, or perhaps because I am a total loony. But the reason for my belief does not affect the truth of the belief. That truth is determined by the correspondence between the content of the belief and the shape of the earth.
Further, use of this attribution degrades the possibility of rational debate, since, with sufficient ingenuity, one can cook up a motivation for just about any belief.
“You are religious because you fear death and want a divine daddy to take care of you.”
“You are an atheist because you want to indulge your evil impulses and don’t like that idea of divine judgement.”
“You believe in man-made global warming because you are a crypto-Marxist wanting to impose the dreaded socialism on everyone.”
“You are sceptical about man-made global warming because you are a paid shill of Big Oil.”
And so on. We could produce such claims about pedantry in punctuation, fracking, medical marijuana, and most other issues. (Try it yourself. Dream up a non-rational motivation for Lewandowsky holding the views he does hold.)
But, when we do this, we are implicitly denying the rationality of those we disagree with. We are saying that the non-rational motivations outweigh their rationality.
And they can equally well deny our rationality.
And when we have done that, we have rejected the possibility of rational debate. Our only recourse then is to another logcal fallacy: argumentum ad baculum.

It’s amazing what some people will do to earn a salary

This is not a particularly good rejoinder to Lewandowsky. It is true that there are conspiracy ‘theories’ (actually, pseudo-theories) which are unfalsifiable because they can explain away any attempt at falsification. For example, if the government held an open inquiry into September 11th, and it concluded that the original, official explanation was the best one, conspiracy pseudo-theorists would call it a whitewash. Most readers here would be contemptuous of that conclusion. So it is reasonable to question automatically dissing official inquiries into Climategate as whitewashes. I happen to think they WERE whitewashes, but this has to be explained by carefully dissecting them. The basic logic of Lewandowsky’s argument isn’t fallacious.