BH regulars Jonathan Jones and Ruth Dixon have published a much-needed response to Lewandowsky's "Conspiracist Ideation" paper. Appearing in the journal Psychological Science, their study seems to lay to rest the idea that the Lew paper was anything other than a smear-job.
This analysis highlights the fact that a skewed sample can easily mask a nonlinear relationship and lead to serious misinterpretation of modeled relationships (Berk, 1983; Groves, 2006; MacCallum & Mar, 1995). Techniques such as SEM should not be used as a “black box” without thorough initial exploration of the data set to check for nonlinearities (Bentler & Chou, 1987; Cumming, 2014). The curvilinear relationship identified in both the panel-survey data of Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer (2013) and the blogs-survey data of Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac (2013) suggests that both respondents convinced of anthropogenic climate change and respondents skeptical about such change were less likely to accept conspiracy theories than were those who were less decided about climate change.
There is an accompanying blog post by Jonathan and Ruth here, which alludes to the long and painful process of getting the paper published as well as linking to Lew's response. It also contains this summary of the Lew paper:
All the data really shows is that people who have no opinion about one fairly technical matter (conspiracy theories) also have no opinion about another fairly technical matter (climate change). Complex models mask this obvious (and trivial) finding.