Anthony Watts can't get enough conspiracy theories at WUWT

There's another article protesting the moon-landing paper - the initial reaction to which spawned a wealth of material for further research. Some right wing journalist in the Sydney Morning Herald wrote some nonsense about the paper that he either didn't read or didn't understand. It brought out some beaut conspiracy theories from Anthony Watts' conspiratorial "believers" (archived here).

Honestly, you'd think Anthony had learnt his lesson many times over by now. Every time he protests that academic research into conspiracy theories and climate science denial are linked, he brings out a heap more conspiracy theories from his clan. It's not just motivated rejection of climate science, WUWT has motivated rejection of cognitive science. (Perhaps Anthony just wanted his readers to post their conspiracy theories under an "on topic" article.)

Irony alert! More conspiracy plots discovered at WUWT and elsewhere...

Irony meter blows up.

The irony meter is overheating today.

Anthony Watts decided to whistle up all his conspiracy theorists today (archived here). He's found some grad student blogger called José Duarte who's been ranting and raving against Cook13 on any denier blog he can find (to uncritical acclaim by Judith Curry and critical derision by others). On his blog, after deciding that scientists (citizen or otherwise) aren't competent to read scientific abstracts, he wrote (archived here):

There's a much better method for finding out what scientists think — ask them. Not just about their abstracts, which you already rated – you're still adding unnecessary layers of complexity and bias there. Direct surveys of scientists, with more useful questions, is a much more valid method than having ragtag teams of unqualified political activists divine the meanings of thousands of abstracts. 

Ha ha. Guess what, those nefarious plotting "unqualified political activists" did ask them. But that's not what José wants. He doesn't want to confuse the results of a study looking at what the science says by examining what the science says. That would add unnecessary layers of complexity. Say that again? (Best not.)

José's also been writing nonsense about Lewandowsky13, the "moon landing" paper, about how people who think climate science is a hoax don't necessarily think that HIV causes AIDS - or do think that, or something or the other. He's a bit of a nutter. Full of conspiracy ideation himself. And very emotional about it too. He's flinging all the usual accusations using words like fraud and scam. Which is funny, because Anthony Watts has just written two articles bemoaning the fact that climate change tugs at the emotions. After flinging around wild accusations, claiming that the paper was a scam and a lie, José himself tells a lie of his own by implication. He wrote (archived here):

Why would anyone participate in our 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?

Thing is that the paper didn't find that every science denier thinks all those things. Not every conspiracy theorist thinks those things. Not every right winger thinks those things. What the paper found was the thinking those things was a predictor of science denial. This is what the paper found, from the abstract:

Paralleling previous work, we find that endorsement of a laissez-faire conception of free-market economics predicts rejection of climate science (r≈.80 between latent constructs). Endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer. We additionally show that endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin-Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing) predicts rejection of climate science as well as the rejection of other scientific findings, above and beyond endorsement of laissez-faire free markets. This provides empirical confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science.

José fits the bill. He is obviously prone to conspiracist ideation, which he dresses up using words like "scam" and "fraud". (In much the same way as Steve McIntyre did.) He clearly places himself at the extreme end of the right wing ideology spectrum. And I'm guessing from his strong reaction to Cook13 that he also rejects climate science. I wonder what other science he rejects. I wonder what other conspiracy theories he subscribes to?

On the topic of conspiracy theories, sometimes I check out who's been discussing HotWhopper. Guess what I found. John Reece wrote: :

"...The AGW scam is the greatest hoax in the history of the world. What could be more fascinating as a focus for one's attention?..."

Followed shortly afterwards with this. John Reece wrote:

"...Anyone who sees (in what I post) evidence of a conspiracy theory mindset is projecting in the psychological sense ― a phenomenon with which I am quite familiar, having worked for an entire career as a professional colleague of psychiatrists and psychologists in a community mental health center..."

Similarly at WUWT, in response to Anthony's call for all his readers to come up with their best conspiracy theories.

ossqss thinks there is deception in the climate science community and says:

August 6, 2014 at 10:26 am
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.

Alec Rawls is a long time conspiracy theorist who I've written about before. He claims scientists deploy "scurrilous strategems" and goes further. He's doing what John Reece did above. He's projecting (excerpts):

August 6, 2014 at 9:13 am
As any real scientist should be, Duarte is flabbergasted to witness the scurrilous stratagems deployed by the relentlessly dishonest Lewandowski, Cook et al.. Those of us who have for years been the targets of eco-alarmist slander cannot muster the same surprise, but our years of familiarity can help to answer the questions Mr. Duarte has about the etiology of this perversion.

...These leftists always assume that the correlation between right-left ideology and skeptic-believer views on climate are because people on the right compromise scientific thinking in favor of politically preferred conclusions. The reason they jump to that conclusion is because they are always projecting. Leftists think that everyone engages in “motivated cognition” because that is what THEY do.  ...

...The leftist mind is a truly foul and perverted thing....

Alan Robertson speaks about nefarious plots and says:

August 6, 2014 at 10:05 am
It was only a matter of time until someone within the social sciences community spoke against the farcical works of Lewandowsky. Now that Oreskes has inextricably linked her name to Lewandowsky, the scions of Harvard are surely plotting their next move… 

MattN decides that at least two scientists are charlatans and says:

August 6, 2014 at 9:42 am
Lewandowsky and Cook are just two more in a long line of charlatans bleating out the party line, albeit with unusual attitude and arrogance. 

john robertson reckons that science is dangerous to personal liberty and destructive to civil society and says:

August 6, 2014 at 8:44 am
Possibly too little too late.
Climatology is drowning in Lew Paper and the byproducts associated with it.
Social Science is about to get lumped in with “Climate Science”.
As dangerous pseudo sciencey rubbish that is dangerous to personal liberty and destructive to civil society.
Just another front, a cover for the statist do-gooder power hungry people haters. 

There's a bonus, too. I've often noticed that most deniers at WUWT don't click links. It took more than two hours and 32 comments before someone remarked that the main link to the origins of Anthony Watts' copy and paste was broken! MattS finally says:

August 6, 2014 at 10:38 am
The link in the main post to the José Duarte blog is broken.

And they don't bother reading the papers they complain about, either. If arthur4563 had bothered to read Cook13's scientific consensus paper he'd have known that asking the scientists was exactly what the researchers did. And guess what. 97% of them said their papers endorsed the fact that humans are causing global warming. But arthur4563 is a science denier and science deniers as a general rule don't bother with papers in scientific journals. He says:

August 6, 2014 at 10:42 am
To me the major problem with Cook’s sudy 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.” 

The other problem with arthur4563's comment was that the Cook13 study wasn't about personal opinions. It was about the science.


Perhaps the most irony-filled comment comes from Anthony Watts himself, smearer extraordinaire, morally bankrupt blogger, who wrote:

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.

---

Cook, John, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A. Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce. "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature." Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 2 (2013): 024024. doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

Lewandowsky, Stephan, Klaus Oberauer, and Gilles E. Gignac. "NASA faked the moon landing—therefore,(climate) science is a hoax an anatomy of the motivated rejection of science." Psychological science 24, no. 5 (2013): 622-633. doi: 10.1177/0956797612457686

Unbalanced Antagonism: The UWA Vice-Chancellor stands up to a "vexatious" blogger

Update (9 April 2014)

Professor Ugo Bardi resigns in protest :

"I am taking the strongest action I can take, that is I am resigning from "Chief Specialty Editor" of Frontiers in protest against the behavior of the journal in the "Recursive Fury" case. I sent to the editors a letter today, stating my intention to resign."

---

Addendum - I've added an addendum on "psychological disorders".

---

...or "Go Jump", Stephen McIntyre!

At WUWT Anthony Watts posted a teaser at WUWT (archived here), which was the first bit of an article by Steve McIntyre from ClimateAudit (archived here, updated here).  Steve's nose is out of joint because he couldn't get personal details (ie IP addresses) of people who responded to the "moon landing" survey conducted by Stephan Lewandowsky of UWA and colleagues.

Steve McIntyre is a Canadian blogger who is or used to be involved in mining companies. He spends a lot of time trying to prove all the scientists are wrong.  His main tools are rhetoric, hyperbole, MS Excel, R and a perpetual sense of aggrievement that few outside of the denier blogosphere will give him the time of day.  He has no scientific expertise in climate or any relevant qualifications - and it shows. His personal qualities of obsessive compulsiveness, innate paranoia, general ungraciousness, tendency to deceive when it suits him, a reputation for shifting from request to harassment, and generally unlikeable cyber-personality fit him well for the role he's chosen at this late stage in his life.

Steve got a response from UWA, which he isn't shy about sharing, so I see no need to be reluctant to post the letter either.

Here it is.  It's from the Vice-Chancellor himself as posted by Steve McIntyre (archived here).

Dear Mr McIntyre,

I refer to your series of emails to University officers including Professor Maybery and myself (which you have copied to other recipients including the Australian Research Council) in which you request access to Professor Lewandowsky’s data.

I am aware that you have made inflammatory statements on your weblog “Climate Audit” under the heading “Lewandowsky Ghost-wrote Conclusions of UWA Ethics Investigation into “Hoax”” including attacks on the character and professionalism of University staff. It is apparent that your antagonism towards Professor Lewandowsky’s research is so unbalanced that there is no useful purpose to be served in corresponding with you further. I regard your continued correspondence to be vexatious and there will be no further response to your requests for data.

Yours faithfully,
Professor Paul Johnson,
Vice-Chancellor

About bloody time, is all I can say.  No, I don't mean that Professor Johnson should have replied sooner.  I mean it's about bloody time someone other than the harassed researchers themselves told Steve McIntyre where to go.  And I'm proud to say it was the Vice-Chancellor of an Australian university that told him to go jump in no uncertain terms.

Of course I don't know if the Vice-Chancellor of the University of East Anglia has ever put him straight or any of the other Vice-Chancellors or Rectors or whoever is the Person-in-Charge of different universities in the world.  Whether they have or they haven't, Steve has now made public a letter than I hope will be produced and waved in front of every single one of them if one of their academic or general staff ever gets approached by The Auditor or one of his followers doing his bidding.

If you think that the Vice-Chancellor's response was a bit over-the-top, it's not.  Just have a gander at this. Steve is obsessed, frustrated because he isn't able to understand the stats. He accuses Professor Lewandowsky of fraud and fakery in multiple articles.  He even dreams up conspiracy theories of his own.  And while you read through his litany of articles note that he doesn't put up multiple dumb articles every day like Anthony Watts.  He posts maybe two or three a week on average - and that's in a prolific month.

Notice how Steve focuses almost solely on Professor Lewandowsky and ignores the fact that the moon landing paper had two other authors, including Prof. Dr Klaus Oberauer and A/Prof Gilles Gignac.  I expect that Stephan Lewandowsky and Klaus Oberauer are more than sufficiently able to apply statistical analysis to their research.  Still, they brought Gilles Gignac on board.  Gilles is an expert in psychometric analysis.  He's worked for commercial organisations as well as his academic research.

Here are just a few of the articles by Steve McIntyre:

Anatomy of the Lewandowsky Scam (a large part of this article was a long complaint about how people use the word "deniers" when referring to people who deny science, as in "climate science deniers".)

Trying (Unsuccessfully) to Replicate Lewandowsky - where he confesses that the statistics used by the researchers (and common in cognitive science) is beyond him.  He can't treat the data like he does core tops.  In this one he even says "My guess is that SEM either does not permit “robust” techniques or that Lewandowsky didnt know how to use them."  But there is more to statistics than Steve knows or understands.  Steve is trying to learn some new statistics but doesn't have what it takes and as far as I can tell, he's never bothered to learn in all the time he's had since. (See here and  here for discussions of the stats. And here's a short introduction to Exploratory Factor Analysis if you're interested.)

I did a search for "exploratory factor analysis" on climate audit and didn't see anywhere that Steve McIntyre used the term, though I found a page where some other people drew it to his attention (which he seems to have ignored). Which leads into where Steve accuses Professor Lewandowsky of being a conspiracy theorist:

Conspiracy-Theorist Lewandowsky Tries to Manufacture Doubt

Lewandowsky’s Fake Correlation - another article in which Steve accuses fakery and shows his incompetence at stats.

More Deception in the Lewandowsky Data As well as the title, this article is significant for being the only mention of a "replicate" survey conducted at WUWT, which Steve didn't analyse properly and which was subsequently buried.  AFAIK it never ever saw the light of day from that point onward.

Oh, that's just a small number of the multiple articles by Steve McIntyre accusing Professor Lewandowsky of all sorts of nefarious actions (refer to "Recursive Furies" to see subscribing nefarious intent can be a marker of conspiracy ideation :D)  And how Steve liberally spatters his headlines and articles with words such as "scam", "fake", "deception" and "fraudulent".  There are loads more where that came from - and more and still more and there's even a fourth page of them.


The letter from the University of Western Australia Vice-Chancellor will not help Steve McIntyre next time he decides to host and foster a harassment campaign against climate scientists (or cognitive scientists or climate philosophers).


PS Steve has said he's trying to get someone else to surreptitiously get data for him to misconstrue.  Guess who else put up his hand. None other than Eric "eugenics" Worrall!

Addendum on psychological disorders

I noticed in his email to the Head of the School of Psychology at UWA (which Steve signed with "regards"!), that Steve McIntyre states that in the Recursive Fury paper, the authors, or to be precise, that one of the authors (Stephan Lewandowsky - not sure how Steve figured which author wrote what):

"purported to diagnose that I have psychological disorders".  

I looked for any mention of Steve in that paper and I didn't see anywhere that alleged he had "psychological disorders".  All I found was one reference in the text (to McI) and his name in Table 3, listing four separate hypotheses on his blog, which between them could be classified as NI=nefarious intent; NS=nihilistic skepticism; PV=persecuted victim; MbW=must be wrong; NoA=no accident; and UCT=unreflexive counterfactual thinking.

I didn't see anything in the paper that states that evidence of conspiracy ideation means a person has "psychological disorders".  The words "psychological disorder" were not used in the paper. There was this sentence that could indicate where conspiracist ideation rates in terms of "psychological disorder"

We suggest that conspiracist ideation, like most other psychological constructs (e.g., extraversion), represents a continuum that finds expression to varying extents in theories of varying scope.

Does this mean that Steve thinks all extraverts have a psychological disorder?

Perhaps Steve's comment is more evidence of PV=persecuted victim with a hint of MbW=must be wrong.     Then again I CbW=could be wrong, because I'm not an expert in cognitive science.

Added by Sou 30 March 2014.

From the WUWT comments

The usual moans and lies from WUWT.

Lil Fella from OZ says ... er what?:

March 28, 2014 at 5:45 pm
Let’s close ranks!

Velcro tells a big fat lie and says:

March 28, 2014 at 6:25 pm
Never expect a university with ivy on the walls to ever change or admit its errors. No wonder UWA is now the last ranked university in WA

No it's not ranked last. It's ranked first.  There are five universities in Western Australia - Curtin, Edith Cowan, Murdoch, University of Notre Dame and the University of Western Australia.  Of these, only one is ranked among the top 200 universities in the world and that's the University of Western Australia, on The Times Higher Education World University Rankings.  It ranks 7th in Australia on this world ranking.


Ric Werme says "I'll show you, Professor Lewandowsky" - ha ha ha ha ha

March 28, 2014 at 6:17 pm
That does it, I’m voting for Lewandowsky as ‘Climate Duplicitist of the Year’ award. Perhaps there should be a team category too.

hunter is a master orator - not! and says:

March 28, 2014 at 6:16 pm
That is how guilty arrogant babies respond after being called out.

bushbunny points out that UWA is not all bad :) - except he's wrong AFAIK, and says:

March 28, 2014 at 6:35 pm
Didn’t Tim Flannery also work there once? Why don’t you check that out.

Boxing Day Special: NASA faked the moon landing - a Christmas gift from WUWT

As a Christmas special, Anthony Watts paraded out Christopher Monckton, who wrote how his religion frowns on lies while proceeding to tell lie after lie after lie.  He spent much of the article wrongly accusing climate and other earth system scientists all around the world of fraud, deception, being on the take, profiteering and being socialists. (And using a verb as an adjective in the process.) Lots of bedazzled WUWTers bowed their heads and chanted homage to the lord (Monckton), while atheistic WUWTers chastised him for bringing religion to WUWT and socialist WUWTers objected to Monckton's suggestion that socialism is immoral. (Archived here - and updated here in case anyone wants to waste time wading through 342 comments just to learn about the myriad weird and illogical non-reasons people come up with to justify their rejection of science. Or to collect more evidence of just how nutty Christopher Monckton is - eg his comments about how species could not have evolved and his illogical comments trying to justify his claims that climate science is a hoax.)

Then Anthony gave us some insight into how the Watts family spends its leisure time.  Anthony wrote an article saying how his children are off playing their favourite game - find the money.  Yes, quite literally.  He hides coins around the house and says it keeps his children amused for hours looking for them. He gave instructions so his readers so they could teach their children how to play 'find the money'.  He even posted a number of snapshots showing how to hide the coins in plain sight. Very educational and intellectually stimulating, eh? (Archived here.)

After that Anthony gave his readers an article about the Apollo 8 moon mission, with what is known as the Genesis or Christmas Eve broadcast - passages from Genesis that were recited by the astronauts, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and William Anders. (Archived here - updated archive here.)

Anthony included this historic shot taken by the astronauts as they orbited the moon.  His article contained no swipes at climate scientists or anyone else, which made a nice change.

Earthrise
Credit: NASA

In the comments several people joined in an argument about whether or not the moon rotates.  Some said it did and some said it didn't.

Gerald Kelleher says (excerpt):

December 25, 2013 at 12:30 am
This is one wonderful insane world because when people can force themselves to believe the moon spins when clearly it doesn’t then forget interpreting climate !...

...For goodness sake give the world a magnificent Christmas present this year and deal decisively with this issue because if you can’t get rid of the mindnumbing idea that the moon spins as it orbits the Earth then what can be said of getting rid of the notion that humans can control the Earth’s temperature.

Gareth Phillips says (excerpt):

December 25, 2013 at 2:58 am...The mon does not actually spin or rotate on it’s own axis, it’s can’t if it keeps the same face to the earth....

Here is what we would see over time if the moon wasn't in a synchronous rotation with Earth.  That is, if its speed of rotation was longer or shorter than the time it takes to go around Earth.

Update

There's more from Gerald Kelleher, who is a very confused bloke but doesn't know it.  He not only asserts that all the world except he is wrong and that the moon doesn't rotate, he hasn't grasped the difference between sidereal and solar days.  He says (excerpts - archived here):

December 25, 2013 at 2:09 pm
People who believe that the moon spins are a troubled people and always have been that way despite its persistence as mainstream policy and it comes from the same group who will announce to the world that all the effects within a 24 hour cycle such as daily temperature rises and falls are not due to the rotation of the Earth by virtue that they insist that there are more rotations of the Earth in a year than there are days -

” It is a fact not generally known that,owing to the difference between solar and sidereal time,the Earth rotates upon its axis once more often than there are days in the year” NASA /Harvard

It is an intractable problem for the necessary intellectual and interpretative talent is not available at the present time to square away the 24 hour AM/PM system with the Lat/Long system which keeps the Earth turning at a rate of 15 degrees per hour is being obscured by a bunch of cretins who can’t seemingly begin with the fact that when you wake up tomorrow you not only wake up to another day but also another rotation of the planet and they never,ever fall out of step.

All I can see are bluffers with a lot of voodoo thrown in. People think the ‘climate issue’ is the problem but it is much,much bigger than that – it is a uniquely human problem that started a few centuries ago.

In a later comment, Gerald maintains that NASA is wrong on another score or, more properly, a variation of the moon rotating score - writing (excerpt):

...For $17 billion the wider public has an organization that once landed men on the moon yet has the population believes the far side of the moon receives sunlight due to rotation -(December 25, 2013 at 2:57 pm)

We've got a couple of live ones! NASA faked the moon landing...

The comments section housed other gems.  Or perhaps I should refer to them as lumps of coal for Christmas. After all,  WUWT readers don't like to think that climate deniers like them also number people who think that NASA faked the moon landing. You could say it's a Christmas gift from Anthony Watts to Stephan Lewandowsky et al (Archived here.)


Dorian Sabaz says:

December 25, 2013 at 4:21 am
Here is a question for all to consider….

Why are there no photos of the Earth from the Moon surface?

You’d think after thousands of years of looking at the Moon from the Earth, that when finally Man stands on the surface of the Moon the first thing any astronaunt would do, is take a photo of Mother Earth…no?

That photo you show above is only from an automated probe going to the Moon. Where are the photos of the Earth from the Moon?

Afterall, from the surface of the Moon, the Earth would look about four times larger as that of the Moon seen on the Earth. It would be very spectacular, considering there would also be no atmosphere too, just black sky. And much of the time the Sun would be in opposition, that is, the Earth would be between the Moon and the Sun, it would make it perfectly large, clear and beautiful.

BUT NO. THERE ARE NO PHOTOS OF THE EARTH FROM THE LUNAR SURFACE.
WHY?

Oh…before you point out that single ridiculous photo of the Earth in the back drop of the lunar lander (the only supposedly photo of the Earth), take a very close look at where the Earth is, the Moon does not rotate on its axis with respect to the Earth, thus it is always facing the same way, that photo shows the Earth as if it rising, and that can not be, the Earth must be straight up. Use common sense. The Earth can never rise or set on the Moon.

So where are the photos? After the greatest adventure of Mankind, it seems EVERY SINGLE ASTRONAUNT forgot to take a photo of the Earth FROM THE MOON’S LUNAR SURFACE.

Now isn’t that interesting.

bruce1337 says:

December 25, 2013 at 8:36 am
Just for the record: Here’s another one who doesn’t buy the manned moon landings anymore. While there’s a mountain of inconsistencies to discuss, this is probably neither the time nor place to do it. Just this one teaser: 44 years of technological progress, and modern heavy lift vehicles still don’t come anywhere close to the Saturn V’s capabilities. cAGW isn’t the only grand deception of the TV era…

To finish, here is another comment from WUWT.  Alan Robertson says (my bold italics):

December 25, 2013 at 7:28 am
Hello, Dorian. It’s a pity that you chose to run from the conversation. However, there is a positive aspect resulting from your unfortunate statements.

You are serving as a prime example of how people will not be shaken from their mistaken beliefs, no matter how much truthful information is given to them.

Thank you, Merry Christmas.

That could apply to 98.4% of people who comment at WUWT, although they'd have to leave WUWT if they were interested "truthful information" about climate.".