The Lewandowsky story rumbles on, demonstrating an abilitity to generate new storylines that I'm sure few of us thought it ever could have.
Over at Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre reports that he has been unable to replicate Lewandowsky's results and, in the comments, reports some major concerns over Lew's statistical acumen.
I think that the Lewandowsky data set may have a chance of entering the robust regression textbooks.
OLS methods (of which a correlation matrix is an example) are VERY poor methods for this sort of data set. Lewandowsky may set a sort of incompetence landmark in this respect that will take many years to surpass.
...his discussion of correlations is beyond bizarre. He has so little understanding that it’s hard to know where to begin.
Meanwhile, statistician Matt Briggs has similar feelings:
Everything that could have been done wrong, was done wrong. Every bias that could have been manifested, was manifested. Every fallacy pertinent to the matter at hand was made. The conclusions, regurgitated from unnecessarily complicated statistical procedures, did not follow from the evidence gathered, which itself was suspect. In its way, then, the paper is a jewel, a gift to the future, a fundamental text to how easy it is to fool oneself.
The story is, even now, rumbling on. Lewandowsky has posted further thoughts in a new blog article, while Hilary Ostrov notes one of Lew's most active supporters now claiming that the paper's title, linking climate sceptics to the moon landings, was actually a joke. Beyond bizarre, indeed.