Lewandowsky’s Cleansing Program

Sep 15, 2012 – 1:05 PM

Conspiracy theorist Stephan Lewandowsky, in keeping with SkS style, has rewritten the history of his blog hosted by the University of Western Australia.

Tom Fuller, who does online commercial surveys for a living, has sharply criticized the Lewandowsky’s tainted methodology – a methodology that relied on fake data to yield fake results.

Over the past week or so, Fuller has commented frequently on Lewandowsky threads here, here, here and here.

Although Lewandowsky snipped some of Fuller’s comments, over the past week or so, all or part of about 50 comments were approved.

Today, Lewandowsky (who is being assisted by an SkS squadron) liquidated every single comment by Fuller on the entire blog, leaving rebuttals to Fuller in place without the protagonist. This is different from not approving the blog comments: it’s an after-the-fact cleansing of Fuller from the blog.

The University of Western Australia should hang its head in shame at Lewandowsky’s Gleickian antics.

Steve: According to a comment at Lewandowsky’s blog operated by the University of Western Australia, Lewandowsky’s moderation is being done by (presumably) members of the SkS squadron, who were merely trying to silence Fuller as a commenter on the blog, stating that their liquidation of the history of Fuller’s comments was an accidental by-product of silencing Fuller.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (162)

The Lewandowsky Census

Sep 14, 2012 – 4:37 PM

Anthony has posted up an online census of participants in the Lewandowsky survey. I urge any readers who participated in the Lewandowsky survey to identify themselves as Anthony’s thread using their regular internet handle.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (30)

The SkS “Link” to the Lewandowsky Survey

Sep 14, 2012 – 11:19 AM

Lewandowsky et al stated that “links were posted on 8 blogs (with a pro-science science stance but with a diverse audience”. Lewandowsky identified the eight blogs (in an email to Barry Woods) as: Skeptical Science, Tamino, Bickmore, the UU-UNO Clmate Change Task Force (trunity), Ill Considered, Mandia, Deltoid and Hot Topic.

The relevant posts at six of the blogs have been located, but the relevant post at SkS, either no longer exists or never existed. Today’s question: did John Cook destroy all evidence at the SkS site of the existence of his posting the Lewandowsky thread? if so, why? Or are the claims by Cook and Lewandowsky to have posted the link untrue?
Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Comments (143)

IPCC Refuses to Correct Errors

Sep 13, 2012 – 8:39 PM

Pielke Jr has an interesting post about more IPCC nonsense. He made four proposed error corrections to IPCC, all of which were refused. Which is the worst refusal is a bit of a beauty contest.

On balance, I think that my favorite is their reason for refusing to correct an inaccuracy in an IPCC press release. Their reason:

The January 25, 2010 IPCC statement is not part of an IPCC report, and the error correction protocol is therefore not relevant

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in IPCC, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments (24)

Lewandowsky’s Fake Results

Sep 13, 2012 – 9:46 AM

In addition to Lewandowsky using fake data, many of Lewandowsky’s results, including the result in his title, are fake as well. Lewandowsky’s claimed yesterday that their “results withstand skeptical scrutiny”, but this claim is untrue .
Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (51)

Lewandowsky’s Unreported Results

Sep 12, 2012 – 11:24 PM

Some information from sources at the University of Western Australia. On October 21, 2010, the following email was sent to the UWA staff mailing list:

UWA researcher Charles Hanich is seeking participants for a web-based survey of attitudes towards climate science (and other sciences) and skepticism. The survey carries no risks for participants. To participate in the survey please use this link:

http://www.kwiksurveys.com/online-survey.php?surveyID=HKLJIN_61fa37b2

Completion should take less than 10 minutes and all data will be analyzed anonymously and without monitoring or identifying individual responses.

Ref: RA/4/1/4007

[Notice approved by:
Human Research Ethics Committee,
Research Services, University of Western Australia ]

For some strange reason, the invitation is online at a web agggregator here. (I googled the survey id.)

Obvious questions:
What was the results of UWA staff who actually took the survey. Surely this would have made an interesting comparison group with the bloggers who are the target of the Moon-landing paper.

It would have been a logical comparison. Was it done and discarded? If so, why? If it wasn’t, why wasn’t it done?

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (48)

Lewandowsky: study “Useless” unless authors demonstrate “data integrity”

Sep 12, 2012 – 10:22 AM

Lewandowsky has stated that an online survey by an opponent was “useless” “without the authors demonstrating the integrity of their data” and that their study “should not have been published without the authors demonstrating the integrity of their data—I doubt that they could”. Words that apply even more forcibly to his own study. I guess it all depends on whose ox is being gored. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (87)

Lewandowsky Censors Discussion of Fake Data

Sep 10, 2012 – 4:04 PM

The key issue for Lewandowsky et al 2012 is its use of fake data, a problem squarely addressed by Tom Curtis of Skeptical Science and discussed at CA here.

I raised this issue in a comment at Lewandowsky’s blog here as follows:

Rather than answer the question, Lewandowsky, the author of a paper entitled “NASA faked the moon landing|Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science”, deleted the question:

The invoked policy of the blog states:

No profanity or inflammatory tone. Again, constructive discussion is difficult when overheated rhetoric or profanity is flying around

My comment did not contain “profanity or inflammatory tone”. It was a direct question about Lewandowsky’s use of fake data.

He should answer the question, not avoid.

UPDATE: I followed up as follows:

Comment didnt last long.

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (144)

The Third ‘Skeptic’

Sep 10, 2012 – 9:20 AM

In Lewandowsky’s original editorial about climate “skeptics”, as discussed yesterday, Lewandowsky characterized climate skeptics as “obsessively yelping” and marked by the following belief:

The further fact that the satellite data yield precisely the same result without any surface-based thermometers is of no relevance to climate “skeptics.”

A few days ago, Lucia wondered about the identity of the five ‘skeptic’ blogs to whom that Lewandowsky had sent out his survey.

As it turned out, no surveys had been sent to “skeptic” blogs by Lewandowsky nor any surveys referring to Lewandowsky (whose association with the survey had been prominently featured at Deltoid and Hot Topic.)

However, a Charles Hanich (who turns out to be an assistant to Lewandowsky) had sent me a link to the survey (which I disregarded). It was quickly determined that Junk Science had, in fact, posted a link to the survey (sent to them by Hanich) but with heavy caveats (contrary to Lewandowsky’s claim that no skeptic blogs had posted the link). Since Lewandowsky’s name was connected to the survey in announcements at Deltoid and Hot Topic, it seems evident that the survey was sent to anti-skeptic blogs under a different cover letter.

Yesterday, I was contacted by a third blogger who had also received (and responded to) Hanich’s letter. The blogger was not considered at Lucia’s thread as a candidate recipient. No one thought of him because he believes that increased CO2 causes temperature increases and that it is an important and relevant problem. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Comments (88)

Anatomy of the Lewandowsky Scam

Sep 8, 2012 – 6:06 PM

The recent article by Lewandowsky et al, “NASA faked the moon landing, Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science”, has attracted commentary at Jo Nova, Bishop Hill, WUWT, Lucia’s and Skeptical Science, as well as by Lewandowsky himself. The data was placed online at Bishop Hill here.

Tom Curtis of Skeptical Science observed that at least “10 of the respondents have a significant probability of being produced by people attempting to scam the survey” and that the “paper has no data worth interpreting with regard to conspiracy theory ideation”. The scam identified by Curtis was that these respondents were almost certainly warmists caricaturing skeptics. Their caricatures were grotesque: two respondents, claiming to be skeptics, purported to believe in every single conspiracy, no matter how wacko. That the US government was complicit in 9/11; that the Moon Landings were fake; that SARS and AIDS were government plots, etc etc.

As others have observed, the number of actual respondents purporting to believe in the various conspiracies was, in many cases, very small. Only 10 respondents purported to believe in Lewandowsky’s signature Moon Landing conspiracy. These included a disproportionate number of scam responses. Indeed, probably all of these responses were scams.

However, Lewandowsky’s statistical analysis was unequal to the very low hurdle of identifying these scam responses. Lewandowsky applied a technique closely related to principal components to scam and non-scam data alike, homogenizing them into a conspiratorial ideation.

In today’s post, I’ll extend Curtis’ analysis, identifying another “tell” that, in my opinion, can be used to identify scam responses that are not as overtly in-your-face grotesque as the scams already identified by Curtis. I’ll also consider whether the scam responses say something about the psychology of the scammers. Continue reading →

By Stephen McIntyre | Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Comments (170)