Tuesday
Feb052013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill So you don't have to
Feb 5, 2013 Climate: Sceptics Ben Pile glances at Lewandowsky's new "paper" so you don't have to.
Ultimately, ‘research’ of this kind will bring the academy down with it, because drawing attention to, and publishing Lewandowsky’s work means demonstrating to the world the fact that quite often, academic researchers are as petty-minded, ‘idologically-motivated’, and pig ignorant as the worst of online commentary.
More so, I would have thought. And all paid for by you, gentle reader.
Reader Comments (61)
Geoff Chambers
I'd be less inclined to think peer review publishing in this neck of the social sciences carries that much weight when it comes to politics. It's too easy to take the mickey out of it. Clinical and experimental psych maybe, but not in this little back water.
There's a little fan club, but like other marginalised minorities they feed on the attention they can get from their extreme pronouncements. Adolescents do this too, but in there case its part of growing up.
Mod
should obviously be "in their case its part of growing up" in the above - can you fix?
@Bernd Felsche
Distressing, isn't it. I'm a graduate of UEA/ENV. My major was Earth Science, and I take pride that it was a rigourous degree. I'm not happy about what has happened since I left. I also spent 10 years working for the CSIRO Division of Exploration and Mining. I worked with Industry on the Exploration side. Great stuff, but it seems that the CSIRO has pissed its reputation up the wall in the same way as UEA.
On the same day the CSIRO DEM "let me (and nine other technical staff) go", they took on three publicists. Presumably that was to tell the world about the research they would like to do, if they had the staff. Oh, that and the new un-heatable and un-coolable glass white elephant at Bentley.
HAS
It is indeed, and we did, interminably, including at Skeptical Science at at Lewandowsky’s own University blog. But that didn’t stop them coming back with this.By the time this story is laid to rest, it will seem to the outside world like a pointless quarrel between two bunches of obsessive nutters. But one bunch will have their views (of us) enshrined in the peer reviewed literature, and the other won’t. When, in 2050, the official climate historian writes “in the early 21st century, denialist hysteria reached a peak of insanity (see Lewandowsky et al, 2013)” no-one will look back to see what really happened.
Geoff @11:10,
I think you may be being a bit pessimistic there. On the one hand, it is far from obvious that the peer-reviewed literature will still exist in the same form in 50 years as it does now - especially new start-up ventures like the "Frontiers In" series of open-access journals such as the one this new paper has appeared in. (I'd caution people like Shevva @9:05 AM, however, that this journal is at the more prestige end of the new open-access market, where authors pay to get their paper published, and it is then openly readable by anyone who cares to. Lew certainly seems to get to publish in quite good journals).
Next, it is not clear that blog discussions will be lost forever - I'd imagine that people will come up with ways to preserve the material from more valuable blogs.
Finally, you may be right that the 'official' climate historian writes something like that, depending on how AGW evolves. However, enterprising historians of all types nowadays know that the truth on a particular topic is not always confined to the establishment sources. This is already true now for historians of science: they know that some of the more interesting stories about how science has evolved do not feature in the published literature, but in things like memoirs, and other more personal records. Sometimes, some of these stories do get out into the open, and scientists love them. A couple of examples: First, the shenanigans that occurred when a famous chemist published a paper presenting an analysis involving negative rate constants (a big no-no), and someone else tried to publish a paper saying this was silly. Next, the case of the Harvard professor who thought he should have received two Nobel prizes rather than just the one - see the Heading 'Controversy' on this Wikipedia page. So whatever happens I'm sure the backstory will not disappear completely.
This thread has sensibly gone quite, but if I may just use our host's hospitality to ensure a record I have just posted the following comment on a L. post at Shaping Tomorrow's World blog (where I tend to get snipped):
As I noted over at Bishop Hill LOG12 didn't find "evidence for the involvement of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of scientific propositions" because of its failure on methodological grounds (previously discussed on this blog). I further noted that this failure is surprising given the apparent standing of the authors (although I noted that the one author of LOG12 with any background in methodology stopped putting his name to the posts over here).
These issues raised in respect of LOG12 received no acknowledgement from the authors, so hardly surprising then that reasonable people started to ask if the authors might have other motives than scholarship for their publishing adventures.
This much more plausible hypothesis for the blogosphere's response received no attention in the latest attempt.
This thread has sensibly gone quiet
Should stop commenting late at night.
Interesting development. The pdf of the paper has now been pulled from the journal website though the abstract is still there.
See post at WUWT.
No explanation for this is provided by the journal. I wonder if the paper has been withdrawn or perhaps it is "on hold''. Remember Gergis et al?
Feb 7, 2013 at 9:05 AM | Paul Matthews
That is a nice piece by Jeff Condon. Simply details how a single data point used by Lewandowsky had previously and patiently been explained to him as being false yet he still reuses it!
What better evidence of the utter bad faith and contempt that Lewandowsky has for his subject mice?
I'd spotted that reference and shrugged at the speciousness not thinking to mention – it is amazing to think how one can get overwhelmed by the amount of awful bad faith in L's crap that you can just let stuff like this by? I think I kinda knew that Jeff would pick up on it but I am surprised that this latest journal seems to have responded in a more honest way then the weasel way the other one did.
The worst thing about Lewandowsky is that, rather than being kicked out of UWA for destroying its academic standards (I assume that it had some), he has become a prominent, often-cited, person in Australian debate, and is the "go-to" man of the ABC, Australia's national broadcaster, on many issues. Yes, we all know he's a bad joke, but Australia at large doesn't. He has no grounds for changing his preposterous work, he's a success locally.
Just catching up on this thread and saw Geoff's question "who is Brandon Schollenberger". He is a frequent commenter at Lucia's Blackboard and Steve McIntyre's Climate Audit, who I gather is young (20s) but seems to have some expertise in statistics.
However the main reason I'm piping up here is to mention Lucia's Blackboard as I think people who don't spend time there might be missing out. Although it goes through slow patches it's been quite entertaining recently, for example the comments thread for this post, which a lot of the commenters were having none of:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2013/a-defense-of-the-ncdc-and-of-basic-civility/