Climate Science Denial: A rational activity built on incoherence and conspiracy theories

Climate science denial is therefore perhaps best understood as a rational activity that replaces a coherent body of science with an incoherent and conspiracist body of pseudo-science for political reasons and with considerable political coherence and effectiveness.

That is the closing sentence of a new paper called: "The ‘Alice in Wonderland’ mechanics of the rejection of (climate) science: simulating coherence by conspiracism". Great title! The work is by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, Dr John Cook and Professor Elisabeth Lloyd. It's another wonderful read about the lack of coherence in the arguments put forward by climate science deniers as their reasons for rejecting mainstream science.

"Something must be wrong". Four words. "Something is wrong". Three words.

Do either of the above have any meaning on their own? Not really. However they do invite questions.

The Evolution of a 97% Conspiracy Theory - The Case of the Abstract IDs

Update: OMG! If you can believe it, even after all this, Richard Tol, in the comments below, is still indulging in a Recursive Fury of Gish gallops. He's taken the new (to him) facts and, instead of letting go of his wacky ideas as he should, he's gone and woven still more new conspiracy theories. (Has Richard not got any friends to have a quiet word in his ear? No-one who cares for him? How sad.)

[Sou 6:17 pm 31 March 2015 AEDT]

---

If you've been following this blog for the past few days, you'll have noticed the fine illustration of denier-weird in action, including a Gish gallop evolving live (here and here).

This article is more by way of a post-script. An extraordinarily long post-script. As you probably know, I don't normally repeat a theme over consecutive days. The reason I'm writing this up as a separate article is because it is a wonderful chance to see how a conspiratorial notion was developed over a few short hours, at the tail end of a Gish gallop.

It's a conspiracy. I just know it!

No need for fury: Ethics and internet research

After all the fuss about Recursive Fury, I did some reading on ethics as it relates to internet research. There is quite a bit of material available. Below is some of what I found. These are from international literature and I'm not claiming they would apply in all jurisdictions.

The short answer is, however, that if what I've read is any guide, there was no breach of ethics by the authors of Recursive Fury in preparing or writing the paper, and none by its publication. (I can't say the same for its withdrawal by Frontiers. I didn't research that aspect however the behaviour of the "Chief Editor" did not come across as very professional to say the least.)

No diagnosis

Complaints about Recursive Fury were largely centred on two themes.  Firstly, that the study "pathologised" people who made comments.  This took the form complaints such as:

• diagnosing people in absentia as having mental disorders, - claimed by Anthony Watts at WUWT
• naming people in a science paper as having a psychological affliction without their consent - a similar claim in the same WUWT article

Yet the paper itself contained no diagnoses of individuals, let alone one that attributed a "mental disorder" or "psychological affliction". (Not that I've noticed Anthony Watts being in absentia, nor would I think too many people would consent to having a psychological affliction.)

No human subjects

Another objection raised related to whether informed consent was necessary.  Whether or not informed consent is required from an ethical standpoint, the first condition is that the research relates to "human subjects".  The National Science Foundation has a policy: 45 CFR Part 690: Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects, in which it defines "Human Subject" as follows:

 (f) Human subject means a living individual about whom an investigator (whether professional or student) conducting research obtains 

(1) data through intervention or interaction with the individual, or

(2) identifiable private information.

Intervention includes both physical procedures by which data are gathered (for example, venipuncture) and manipulations of the subject or the subject's environment that are performed for research purposes.

Interaction includes communication or interpersonal contact between investigator and subject. 

"Private information" includes information about behavior that occurs in a context in which an individual can reasonably expect that no observation or recording is taking place, and information which has been provided for specific purposes by an individual and which the individual can reasonably expect will not be made public (for example, a medical record). Private information must be individually identifiable (i.e., the identity of the subject is or may readily be ascertained by the investigator or associated with the information) in order for obtaining the information to constitute research involving human subjects.

In the case of Recursive Fury, although some of the textual material came from the blogs of the researchers the comments arguably were not as a result of any such communication or interpersonal contact but rather were because of the publication of the "moon landing" paper, LOG12.  The research certainly did not meet the definition of "intervention". There was no venipuncture or any manipulation of the subject or the subjects' environment. Nor did it meet the definition of "private information".  The blogs from which the information was gathered were not merely public blogs, rather than private, they were much publicised public blogs and, according to Alexa rankings, were the more popular blogs in their sector of interest and, indeed, on the internet as a whole.  Blog owners did not require readers to log in.  There was no expectation of privacy. In addition, it is obvious from reading the blogs that many of the blog owners (and commenters) crave publicity, promoting new blog articles on Twitter for example.  One blog owner boasts of wide readership.

Therefore the complaint that prior consent was required fails before passing the first hurdle, that of "human subjects".

Waiving requirements

Given that the textual analysis did not involve human subjects as per the definition above, the following waiver does not apply.  Still it's worth reading.  This is from the same National Science Foundation policy:

(d) An IRB may approve a consent procedure which does not include, or which alters, some or all of the elements of informed consent set forth in this section, or waive the requirements to obtain informed consent provided the IRB finds and documents that: 

(1) The research involves no more than minimal risk to the subjects;

(2) The waiver or alteration will not adversely affect the rights and welfare of the subjects;  

(3) The research could not practicably be carried out without the waiver or alteration; and  

(4) Whenever appropriate, the subjects will be provided with additional pertinent information after participation.  

(e) The informed consent requirements in this policy are not intended to preempt any applicable federal, state, or local laws which require additional information to be disclosed in order for informed consent to be legally effective. 

(f) Nothing in this policy is intended to limit the authority of a physician to provide emergency medical care, to the extent the physician is permitted to do so under applicable federal, state, or local law. (Approved by the Office of Management and Budget under Control Number 9999-0020.)

A strong argument could be mounted that requirements (1) and (2) would have been met in this study and (3) would arguably apply as well. That's if the policy had applied to this research, which it didn't because the entire policy only relates to "human subjects".

Public vs Private

Here's a snippet from a paper by a PhD student in Sweden, which discusses the distinction between public and private in the context of internet research ethics (my paras and bold italics).

Without reducing the complexity of problems and previous arguments, it should be noted that the private/public distinction is a recurring theme in IRE [Internet Research Ethics] debates. More precisely, in online contexts, the boundaries between private and public appear blurred (Bromseth, 2002; Löfberg, 2003; Mann, 2003; Thorseth, 2003; Sveningsson Elm, 2009). This makes it difficult for researchers to assess the sensitivity of information and situations, It also makes it difficult to determine when research requires informed consent.

Attempts to solidify the private/public status of online phenomena have been made from various ontological and epistemological viewpoints, but arguments tend to follow one of two lines of reasoning: online phenomena can be considered public either

(1) if publicly accessible or

(2) if perceived as public by participants (Bromseth, 2002; Chen, Hall, & Johns, 2004; McKee & Porter, 2009; Sveningsson Elm, 2009).

According to the first argument, online phenomena are essentially public if they can be accessed by anyone with an open Internet connection. Moreover, public discourse must always be open for scholarly analysis and critique, and, in lack of restricted entrance, there is no need for consent or even anonymizing. The second and often counter-posed view holds that, though something may be accessible, the general public (including researchers) may not be the intended audience.

Researchers must therefore base their ethical decisions on a community’s purpose and participants’ expectations of privacy. Without taking consideration to personal privacy, researchers might instigate feelings of intrusion and exposure, or attract unwanted attention to online communities. My description of the above positions is, of course, a simplification.

In the context of the above, the material for Recursive Fury was public in that there was no restricted entrance nor was there any expectation of privacy on the part of people commenting.  Quite the contrary. An examination of comments shows that some of the same people posted their ideas on multiple public high profile blogs, indicating the the authors wanted as many people as possible to read them.  Indeed since Recursive Fury was published, some commenters have been posting their objections / conspiracy ideations on every site they can find which mentions the words "Lewandowsky" or "Recursive Fury".  (In some cases, so quick is their response that one might surmise they have a Google alert notification set up for these words.)

---

Rosenberg, A. "Virtual world research ethics and the private/public distinction." International journal of Internet research ethics 3, no. 12 (2010): 23-36.

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.

Lewandowsky, Stephan, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, and Michael Marriott. "Recursive fury: conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation." Frontiers in psychology 4 (2012): 73-73.

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.

Recursive furies, hurt feelings or confected outrage

Update: I've been getting a few visitors from ClimateAudit so I had a peep.  Not satisfied with his previous rants and false accusations of "fake" and "scam" when he failed his attempt at stats, one of the most unethical people in the blogosphere, Steve McIntyre, is manufacturing yet another conspiracy theory out of emails - ha!  It looks as if he's hoping to take centre stage in another cognitive science paper! (Archived here) I won't bother unpacking his diatribe. Suffice to say when you look past Steve's rhetoric at the content and break it down, his analysis is all bluster and ethics free.  He doesn't have a leg to stand on.

---

Today Stephan Lewandowsky announced that his Recursive Fury paper is being retracted by a journal.

Why?  It was not because of any problem with the paper itself from a scientific or ethical perspective.  In fact, the journal did an investigation and "did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study".

No, it was because a "small number" of deniers harassed the journal.  The journal made a vague reference to "legal context" and insufficient clarity of same.  In other words, it caved when bombarded with complaints from a small number of deniers (see below).

On its website page showing the abstract, there is this statement, which has been there for some time - here is the link.

This article, first published by Frontiers on 18 March 2013, has been the subject of complaints. Given the nature of some of these complaints, Frontiers has provisionally removed the link to the article while these issues are investigated, which is being done as swiftly as possible and which Frontiers management considers the most responsible course of action. The article has not been retracted or withdrawn. Further information will be provided as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

(The journal needs to hire a webmaster, it keeps messing up the page.  Compare the earlier archive here and the "fix", archived here.)


I finally found the retraction notice on another page here, which states:

Retraction of the Original Research Article: Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation by Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer and Michael Marriott Front. Psychol. | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073

In the light of a small number of complaints received following publication of the original research article cited above, Frontiers carried out a detailed investigation of the academic, ethical and legal aspects of the work. This investigation did not identify any issues with the academic and ethical aspects of the study. It did, however, determine that the legal context is insufficiently clear and therefore Frontiers wishes to retract the published article. The authors understand this decision, while they stand by their article and regret the limitations on academic freedom which can be caused by legal factors.

As Stephan Lewandowsky writes:

The authors were involved in drafting the retraction statement and sanction its content: We understand the journal’s position even though we do not agree with it. 

Stepping away from the Grand Vision

Frontiers in Psychology is an open access journal that says:

Our grand vision is to build an Open Science platform that empowers researchers in their daily work and where everybody has equal opportunity to seek, share and generate knowledge.

By all accounts the journal could be viewed as taking a step backwards from that "grand vision" by caving into people who object to research.  I can appreciate that it's not a large publishing house and doesn't want to risk a lengthy (or any) legal battle.  On the other hand, it doesn't set a good precedent.  Deniers may well take it into their heads to employ similar tactics against any paper for any reason or no reason at all.  I expect IOP got loads of complaints about the 97% paper - we know that Richard Tol did his best to discredit that - although his best wasn't worth a cracker.  That paper ended up at the top of the list of IOP papers for 2013.

The Recursive Fury has been viewed almost 40,000 times in total - even though the full text version was taken down some time ago.  Compare that with a well-cited article (81) published in the same journal the previous year, about video action games, perception and cognition, which has had less than 22,000 views in total.  Or this one, which also got lots of citations (51) which has less than 1,400 views in total.  You'd think the journal would want to hang onto papers that attract the public's attention.


You can download the paper now at the University of Western Australia's website - or if you prefer, you can get the paper as it stood "after rigorous peer review" from the journal's own website.

...but perhaps impacting the goal

The journal website has a goal to increase the impact of articles and their authors:

We are the first – and only – platform that combines open-access publishing with research networking, with the goal to increase the reach of publications and ultimately the impact of articles and their authors.

This action has made a bit of an impact in the deniosphere and it will be interesting to see the impact it has on the journal's authors and potential authors.  Whether the action has had an impact on the authors of Recursive Fury has yet to be seen.  If anything it will probably lead to more publicity for the paper, which will also be publicity for the paper's authors.  I don't know if this will "increase the reach of publications" of Frontiers in Psychology, but it will most like increase the reach of publications by Professor Lewandowsky and his colleagues.  And this publication in particular.

Deniers squeak and squeal "defamation" and threaten legal action

Recursive Fury is being furiously discussed all over the deniosphere.  Anthony Watts has written about it (archived here) - to add to the 25 plus WUWT recursively furious protest articles on Professor Lewandowky and his work.

Graham Readfearn has written about it from a different angle.  He obtained by FOI request the swag of furious emails and other correspondence sent to the University of Western Australia, where Professor Lewandowsky used to work.  It won't be any surprise to inhabitants of climate blogs to see that deniers are big fat sooks and have double standards as well as being conspiracy nutters. They will write arguably libelous articles against scientists ad infinitum but as soon as the spotlight is shone on their antics they scream blue murder. Even, in some cases, threatening legal action.  I guess they think government institutions aren't all bad after all.

At WUWT, Anthony wrote (archived here):

We are all scratching our heads at the “threat of libel” narrative. As far as I know,  nobody in the climate skeptic community has instigated a libel lawsuit or even gotten a lawyer involved over the Lew paper. Mostly we just laugh about it. 

You'd think dour old Anthony Watts spent all his time "laughing".  A google search of Lewandowsky at WUWT yields 5,850 results!

Anthony doesn't know very much in any case. As Graham Readfearn wrote:

In FOI documents another climate sceptic blogger forwards a complaint they had made to the Frontiers journal. The complaint said: “I have sought legal advice which has confirmed that, as long as a reasonable number of blog readers are aware of my true identity and professional reputation (which is the case), I could potentially have a defamation action against the authors and publishers of this paper for an outright lie that was told about me.”

Later in the letter, the blogger added: “I hope that you will see that this was a clear case of quote falsification, academic misconduct and defamation and that the paper will now be permanently withdrawn.”

Graham also wrote about how Steven McIntyre made up stuff, including falsely accusing the scientists of not get ethics approval (which they did).  Steven is prone to conspiracy ideation quite often, for example, the first thought that enters his mind when he can't access a website is that people are deliberately blocking his ip address! He's also very quick to falsely accuse scientists of faking and scamming.

The University of Western Australia didn't cave

The University of Western Australia is standing by the paper.  It's probably a lot bigger than the Frontiers in Psychology journal and almost certainly has more expertise in law.  Here is what Stephan Lewandowsky wrote, including a quote from the University's legal counsel:

Given its popularity, and given that approximately 29,300 viewers did not complain about our work, it would be a shame to deprive the public of access to this article. Because the work was conducted in Australia, I consulted with the University of Western Australia’s chief lawyer, Kim Heitman, who replied as follows:

“I’m entirely comfortable with you publishing the paper on the UWA web site. You and the University can easily be sued for any sorts of hurt feelings or confected outrage, and I’d be quite comfortable processing such a phony legal action as an insurance matter.”
— Kimberley Heitman, B.Juris, LLB, MACS, CT, General Counsel, University of Western Australia

Update: Dana Nuccitelli has a well-written piece about this at the Guardian.

Update 2: John Timmer has an article about this at ArsTechnica.  Plus there are some interesting tweets including this one.

Update 3: Michael Halpern has a good article about this at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

From the WUWT comments

Despite all the articles on WUWT about the Recursive Fury paper and the Moon Landing paper, there are a lot of deniers who don't know anything about either.  There are also a few WUWT commenters who are angling for a place in the follow-up to Recursive Fury, though not as many as there were when the Moon Landing paper was published. Here are some comments:


Cold in Wisconsin doesn't know what s/he is talking about but says something irrelevant anyway:

March 20, 2014 at 6:37 pm
I do think that using information for research without informing the subjects is questionable. Call it a poll or something else, but what’s to keep people from being non-serious with their answers when the intentions of the question have to be obvious? Also, how can you tell that your subjects are randomly chosen and representative when you use blogs as your population? Really to represent that type of material as Academic research is kind of laughable. I’m not sure that a high school class couldn’t improve on that scheme.

rogerknights is a conspiracy theorist who opts for "nefarious intent" (see the Recursive Fury paper) and says:

March 20, 2014 at 7:05 pm
It looks to me as though this libel-threat is a cover story to enable a face-saving distancing from the poo-paper.

Mac the Knife seems to think that Professor Lewandowsky is a climate scientist and says:

March 20, 2014 at 7:39 pm
Since when are climate pscientists qualified to conduct psychology research? Are psychologists equally qualified to conduct climate research? Is psychology required course work for climate pscientists????

It may be more appropriate and enlightening for theologists to conduct research on the climate pscientists and their true believers, m’thinks…

kcom says:

March 20, 2014 at 8:49 pm
The paper is actually published in full (as far as I can tell) on the US government’s NIH (National Institute of Health) website:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3600613/

It gives all the appearance of having been there for a year, showing the March 18, 2013 publication date of the original paper.

I'm not sure why Fabi made this comment in this particular thread, but I think it's cute and wonder if the penny dropped about the difference between the fake Oregon Petition and the much heralded Cook13 paper when s/he says:

March 20, 2014 at 9:13 pm
Something I noticed above and it relates to the much-abused 97% figure. As referenced (correctly), it claims that 97% of climate ‘papers’… How ‘papers’ got translated to ‘scientists’ is beyond me. Not that I ever liked the 97% figure to begin with, but it should also be argued that it is research paper abstracts, and certainly not scientists.

Whereas conspiracy theorising Barry Woods theorises some more and says:

March 21, 2014 at 2:47 am
Ben was tipped off about that Skeptical Science web page, being in the google cache..

Was it a Skeptical Science insider, was it their hacker, or was there a more simple explanation to who tipped Ben Off about it…….

I wonder why SkS withdrew it, the page said embargoed to the 20th March, I wonder what happened (now the 21st) 

Barry Woods is claiming some credit for harassing the journal and says (excerpt):

March 21, 2014 at 3:00 am
I complained to Frontiers about the ethical conducts and conflicts of interest and vested interest of the authors. I requested my name to be removed from the paper. Because one of the authors Marriott, (Watching the Deniers blog) had been writing over a dozen articles attacking the critics of LOG12 during the research period (ie not neutral as claimed) and more particularly, had personally attacked me, naming me (and others) on his blog Watching the Deniers.. and as such I said this compromised the paper.

Here's a link to the article that Barry took exception to.  It's nothing to do with the Recursive Fury paper. Barry wrote a dumb article at WUWT protesting the findings of Doran and Zimmerman's survey of scientists about global warming.  I wonder why Barry thinks that it's okay for him to attempt to blog-refute Doran and Zimmerman but it's not okay for someone else to blog-refute Barry's "arguments".


jauntycyclist hasn't bothered to read any science and is waiting for someone to read it to him or her.  jauntycyclist also has strange ideas about the study of psychology and says (excerpt):

March 21, 2014 at 3:50 am
i don’t see people inventing conspiracy or in a fury. I just see people waiting for proof to claims co2 is the main driver of temps and will result in catastrophic change.

if people want to talk psychology then the word cult comes to mind? Patrick Moore uses the term cult.

En Passant queries whether it really is just "harmful fun":

March 21, 2014 at 4:46 am
Stop laughing as this is not funny. Every week these clowns collect a paycheck, many of them paid by we taxpayers.
Still think it is just harmful fun?

---

Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer and Michael Marriott-Hubble (2013) "Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation" Available at UWA