There are no such problems, and it is illustrative to examine how Mr. McIntyre manages to manufacture this erroneous impression.

Our explanation focuses on the factor analysis of the five “climate science” items as just one example, because this is the case where his re-“analysis” deviated most from our actual results.

The trick [my emphasis] is simple when you know a bit about exploratory factor analysis (EFA).

There’s that word again. “Trick.” Shall we call it “Stephan’s PsychoScience Trick?”

By not stating your methods clearly in this post, you have also opened yourself to accusations of dishonesty.

By using the wrong assumptions in constructing your analysis, you have also shown that you know nothing about how social scientists work, and probably should desist from your feeble attempts to audit them.

Also, in future, when you’re doing these audit posts, I suggest that you consider adopting an Introduction/Methods/Results/Conclusion framework. That will help you order your thoughts better, more clearly describe your process (avoiding accusations that you are using arbitrary or unclear methods) and give people with less skill in stats the ability to skip the hard parts and get to the conclusions.

I would have thought this system for presenting research results would be clear to you, but as it becomes increasingly apparent that you’re out of your depth with this stuff, I guess it would help you to revisit some of the basic principles that you should have learnt in your undergraduate days.

RomanM, your points about noise are largely irrelevant in the context of a non-substantial subset. And Lewandowsky’s paragraph was written in the context of his knowing how many people posted from the same IP address. Or are you seriously suggesting that a single individual submitted responses from more than 2 IP addresses? You imagine some hunched up, bitter little warmist travelling from library to library and filling in the survey on 100+ different PCs?

This comment is the clearest example yet of how ridiculous the position here is: you are saying that this article linking skeptics and a willingness to believe dubious conspiracy theories cannot be right because of a conspiracy of warmists to game the results, with no evidence. When the article finally gets published, please oh please do write a response letter to the same journal in which you outline this evidence-free conspiracy theory. It’ll really help to support the findings.

Your comments about “exactly replicated” are disingenuous. You know that “exactly replicated” in this context means producing the same structure, not the same numbers. Are you even capable of uttering a single sentence that doesn’t either deliberately misrepresent someone, or contain a conspiracy theory?