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Aug312012
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Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Lewandowsky's data
Aug 31, 2012 Geoff Chambers has obtained Stephan Lewandowsky's survey data which can be seen as an attachment at the bottom of this post. Of course it's anonymised, so we are not going to get to the bottom of the question of the number of sceptics he approached, but you may be interested.
Reader Comments (106)
I'm not quite as sanguine as you Richard.
Some terrible things have been done by misguided "decent human beings".
I'm sure that the greens who campaigned for restrictions on DDT use came into that category - but many thousands have died as a result of their actions.
Similarly with corn ethanol.
Actually I agree with you Fg. The misguided can do a great deal of harm. What they won't do is conspire with the obviously evil. And sometimes (and this is a matter of judgment, obviously) the bad stuff continuing depends not just on false belief (madness of crowds, popular delusions and the rest) but outright deception. I think we're close to that point in the climate smearing game. Lewandowsky's survey represents a new low and it cannot all be accident. If Adam is as I hope of a good heart then he will not play ball. Or someone else will start to stand up, not for whole truth as I would see it, but for enough of the truth to put an end to the smear machine. And I think without the smear machine a great deal of the CAGW bubble will burst overnight.
Then as Jonathan Jones said in the pub in Oxford on Thursday night we will still have the decline in Arctic sea ice to explain. Something of genuine scientific interest. But the insanity will be over.
Richard - more backstoryy, comments were NOT appearing at the publically funded Talking Climate blog, until they were publically challenged on this on twitter....
and this also occured before the current story.
Adam was retweeting to George Monbiot, that he had run the moon landing/sceptics story a month ago (when George tweeted the Telegraph headline)
Adam didn't mention any of the concerns to George.
Barry, you did mention this at the pub on Thursday and it did slip my mind, sorry. It affects one's judgement of Adam Corner, for sure. But I continue to like the way he interacted once he opened the thread. But my argument doesn't depend just on Adam. All it takes is a few honest people and something as crass as Lewandowsky's survey and all the press coverage based on it falls apart.
There's confusion about what a "conspiracy" is. A bunch of academics preventing some papers from being published is a mafia, not a conspiracy. And the world is full of mafias of all sorts.
A "conspiracy" is a massive machination by thousands of people. Conspiracies are 99.999% of the time ridiculous nightmares concocted by mentally ill people, such as those convinced AGW skepticism is a well funded Big Oil effort.
So there's no need to justify oneself when stating eg that Jones et al ganged up together. The emails speak clearly about that.
Lew made up the "5 skeptical blogs" bit. That much we know. He even invented most or all of SkS involvement.
What would've prevented him then from fabricating responses, filling up gaps in the spreadsheet, and in general massaging the whole survey? There's even a suspicion multiple versions of the questions were used, and in his Gleickian effort Prof Lew might as well have "interpreted" answers to old versions in regard of the finally-published list.
Omnologos, the law doesn't agree about the meaning of conspiracy, nor does Dictionary.com, which has "an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot." Better I think to stick with that and to think more clearly about it - and a lot of other things.
omnologos
The surveys (there were definitely two, maybe more) were conducted by kwiksurveys, a commercial (?) organisation which provides the service free. So there’s an independent record somewhere of what happened. There’s a thread somewhere, possibly at Lucia’s, about the security aspect.To help follow the story as it develops, here are the threads I know of:
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2012/tweet-your-permission-for-lewandowsky-to-out-you/
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2012/multiple-ips-hide-my-ass-and-the-lewandowsky-survey/
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/08/lewandowsky-shows-skeptics-are-nutters-by-asking-alarmists-to-fill-out-survey/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/09/01/paging-dr-stephan-lewandowsky-show-your-invitation-list/
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/8/31/lewandowskys-data.html
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2012/8/29/lewandowskys-conspiracy-paper-goes-mainstream.html
http://www.skepticalscience.com/AGU-Fall-Meeting-sessions-social-media-misinformation-uncertainty.html#comments
http://talkingclimate.org/are-climate-sceptics-more-likely-to-be-conspiracy-theorists/
http://manicbeancounter.com/2012/06/07/australian-climate-science-opinion-survey-confirming-prejudices/
http://manicbeancounter.com/2012/07/30/lewandowsky-et-al-2012-motivated-rejection-of-science-part-1/
http://manicbeancounter.com/2012/07/30/lewandowsky-et-al-2012-motivated-rejection-of-science-part-2/
This is the first thorough analysis of the results I’ve seen
http://manicbeancounter.com/2012/09/01/lewandowsky-et-al-2012-motivated-rejection-of-science-part-3-data-analysis-of-the-conspiracy-theory-element/
Richard - I meant "conspiracy" in the sense associated with "conspiracy theorist".
Surely we cannot pretend mafias don't exist simply because 9/11 Truthers are out of their minds?
Sep 2, 2012 at 2:25 AM | geoffchambers
Thanks for that latest manicbeancounter link Geoff;
Now there's a guy who's done some real work here, the sort of stuff that someone needs to do on Lewandowsky. Personally I suspect Lewandowsky must have a lot of issues in his back catalogue too ;)
I couldn't be motivated to even begin to do that myself because of the one intial glaring fact that manicbeancounter himself sums up so succinctly:
This is the stand out point that has me scratching my head that anyone could accept this guy Lewandowsky as an honest broker on the time of day, let alone the climate subject.
Add that little nugget where Lewandowsky plops in his little weightless claim that he was rebuffed in his attempt to get his questionaire hosted in a forums where it could have honestly expected some chances of getting real sceptics response. That claim is a pseudo data point that only adds the effect to smear climate sceptics as a class of people.
Lewandowsky has done the equivalent of claiming to ask some blokes down the pub about something and then put some r2 numbers to their responses in a pseudo scientific way and this gets lauded as a "big result" by the natives!
I love it. This is the real cargo cult science that Feynman talked about it.
How can you say that Richard?
Adam has not only "played ball" with Lewandowsky's fraudulent and slanderous paper - he has picked the ball up, given it a quick polish and hand carried it into the net.
He was clearly given advance notice of both the paper and the deceptive spin the authors wanted to put on it - and he managed to get the whole package into the Guardian a month before the press release.
This was probably the only way that such a flawed paper was ever going to get onto the international stage - if they'd tried to run it past Revkin at NYT Dot Earth he would have torn it apart.
Which brings me to to nub of the matter. Adam Corner is clearly an intelligent individual and a specialist in the area this paper purports to cover. Every other intelligent reader, layman or academic, has quickly spotted the gross flaws and deceptions in it.
The only conclusion I can draw is that Adam closed his eyes to the flawed science and slanderous intent of the paper because it suited his activist agenda.
"Of good heart"............ I don't think so.
Maurizio
"9/11 Truthers are out of their minds"
That's a bit harsh, unless you've an explanation for Building 7.
I'm not too bothered whether you call it a mafia or conspiracy (although I appreciate the distinction) but once you accept that you need explosives to bring down high-rise buildings, difficult questions arise.
Omnologos, one problem is that we don't use 'mafias' in this general sense in English, except in fun. "I'm from the Cambridge mafia" - that kind of thing. There is a major problem, I agree with you, with the term conspiracy theorist. It's up to those who initiate use of it, such as Stephan Lewandowsky and the Daily Telegraph, to make clear exactly what they mean.
The Telegraph's use was typically unintelligent. In my comments on the earlier thread I pointed out that in a short piece it had managed to give seven examples:
1. the moon landing was faked
2. Princess Diana was murdered
3. there's no link between tobacco and lung cancer
4. there's no link between HIV and Aids
5. the CIA killed Martin Luther King
6. the United States allowed the September 11 attacks
7. SARS was produced in a laboratory as a biological weapon.
I'm not a believer in six of these. On 6, if someone was to write "the US government official report into 9-11 was inadequate" I would agree. But the wording provided here is, as usual, pathetic. Am I being asked if the whole of the US population allowed 9-11? Or every government employee? Or what?
We have to agree that in such areas there are 'conspiraloons', in Rachel North's telling phrase. Rachel is a survivor of the 7-7 attacks in London in 2005 who has had to deal with some incredibly insensitive, hate-filled criticism, accusing even her of being a shill for the establishment, when she along with many survivors has petitioned the authorities to be more open about what they did and didn't know and when.
Such horrible incidents are by their nature complex. What is always wrong is to label someone who disagrees with you on some detail a conspiracy theorist, purely as a way of smearing them and not having to discuss that detail. Better to say that one doesn't have time, because none of us does, not in all contested areas.
ManicB has by all accounts now looked at the detail of Lewandowsky. I want to add my strong appreciation for his introductory words:
This stuff is beneath contempt, as Pointman has rightly said. As we keep our cool others will begin to make the right deductions about where the truth lies about climate catastrophe, the policies we are told are needed to mitigate it and the many vested interests on the make in the process.
FG
"Adam closed his eyes to the flawed science"
Which he himself said he didn't want to discuss! QED.
Fg: why not let it go about Adam Corner. I read the thread and felt there was a little bit of hope there, compared to others. Unless you can see inside the heart of man, as God says to Samuel that only He can, we're both in same boat of not knowing. Let it go.
The reason is simple Richard - "it" won't let "me" go.
Like most people who incline to the political right, I'm basically a "leave me alone" sort of guy.
Just this last week I have been visited by a "recycling counsellor" who took pleasure in letting me know that my traditional approach of chucking all my rubbish in the same communal skip (rather than lovingly revisiting and sorting through it like a tramp seeking fag ends) will soon be illegal - and refusal to comply could eventually land me in jail.
In the very same week, my electrician has told me that I won't be able to replace any of the lovely twinkly candle bulbs in the chandeliers of the beautiful Georgian house I'm about to move into - 'cos they're "banned".
......... and just last week we discovered that our politcal leaders of all colours are quietly involving themselves in "green" businesses which will hugely enrich them at our expense.
None of this would matter, of course, if the underlying science was honest and had proved the need for these changes.
But you and I both know that dishonest science is being rammed down our throats by people with a political agenda, like Corner & Lewandowsky - and that's something that needs to be exposed.
Adam claimed i was smearing him.. so we will not let it go.
he has both a position of responsibility and authority in this field and a public 'outlet' in the Guardian.
now it would be amusing if Adams' boss (and co-author) Nick Pidegeon was one of the per reviewers of the Lewandowsky paper, or of course anybody else at Cardiff.. How Did Adam know about this paper, and publicise it in the Guardian, a month before the press release.....
Barry, these are very questions, as always.
very good, even :) But on the wider point, what does it matter in the bigger scheme of things if I'm right or wrong about Corner having more decency than, say, Gleick? (Someone like Gleick could not have stomached having such cogent sceptic commentary on his own blog, let alone replied with courtesy.) This is such a trivial point in the wider picture. But I do dislike the tendency on BH, below the line, to try to eradicate even slightly differing points of view. That's what I meant by let it go.
Richard. A number of critical Comments were only allowed below the line at the publically funded talking climates blog, because they were embarrassed into allowing them, via twitter
Previously on another article they even changed an article because of my comments, criticism, which I had to point out to them on Twitter. On the article itself my comments were nor allowed, nor any mention made that the article had changed.
The other 2 people running the blog are activists as well. Ex greenpeace Richard hawkins arrested along side Monbiots himself at a coal protest, and the legendary activist George Marshall. Who also deleted comments, not least on his How to Talk to a Climate Denier video and article.
When Michael Mann wanted to talk with Monbiots. Marshall gave Mann Monbiots email address. And Marshall's climatedenial blog, was on Realclimate's blogroll tom the very early days.
I treat most people as if they are acting on good faith. Some ate not, they are called activists, and they think anything goes. Gleick is way ahead in my estimations, than certain others.
Barry: respect once again for chasing so many hares and maintaining such an exemplary attitude.
I accept most of what you say but I'm not sure that the key distinction is between activist and other, though it's an important distinction. Adam may be an activist and may have rubbed shoulders with some untrustworthy characters. But that makes it all the more striking to me that, when forced into it (as I trust is fair interpretation from you), he could cope with the sceptic influx and deal with it with courtesy. That's the whole of my point here. What it says about his future behaviour none of us can say.
He had to. No choice. It is a PUBLICALLY funded blog
Barry, you said in your previous comment "they were embarrassed into allowing [critical comments], via twitter". I applaud your and others' tweets that led to the embarrassment, based partly on the fact that it's a publicly funded blog. I agree with you that it's highly appropriate that the critical comments were allowed. But there's no law surely that means Corner and his associates had no choice. You used robust persuasion, just as Andrew Montford has so well in other areas. Good for you - and perhaps just a little good too for those persuaded by your arguments.
Geoff - this might amuse you if you're reading.
I waded in to back up your posts at SkS and asked John Cook for proof that they posted the survey link in 2010 - as he now alleges - rather than 2011 which he originally claimed.
I realised later, I'd screwed up and added a year to both dates - quoting 2011/12 instead of 2010/11.
When I logged on to apologise and correct the post, I found that my entire post had disappeared without trace - the only evidence for it's existence being a reply from one of the locals telling me to "take my tinfoil hat off".
I just posted this, which I suspect will have a similar life expectancy:-
My post at SkS has already been deleted without trace together with all posts since the one following Geoff's last post - including the one accusing me of being a tinfoil hatter.
Mass deletions with no record or reason given.
I think we now know the answer to the question we've been asking John Cook.
Perhaps he'll have to start a new sub-section for "Cookie's Cock Ups"
In discussions of this kind, it’s worth distinguishing between morality in the abstract sense and the kind of human decency which makes you like someone you encounter, independently of whether they’ve done some naughty things you don’t approve of. Adam let us (all BH regulars, plus Ben Pile of Climate Resistance) express ourselves with force on “his” blog, and no-one from “his” side came to his aid. He did so, I think, because we established the ground rules for moderation on our first conversation when it was posted at talkingclimate. These rules continued to be followed by everyone in the thread to the second conversation posted on Barry’s blog at
http://unsettledclimate.org/2012/08/20/dr-adam-corner-talks-with-geoff-chambers-discussion-2/
This situation is precious. Independently of the truth of any of the points made by Barry or Foxgoose, I think it’s worth preserving.
When it comes to Lewandowsky, what counts is neither the abstract morality nor the likeableness or otherwise of the person. The only things that count are the rules of the University of Western Australia and the journal Psychological Science.
PS Just seen Foxgoose’s experience at SkS. Interesting.
Geoff, thanks for saying it that way.
Lewandowsky and his team did no fieldwork themselves, but got it done by the free service KwickSurveys.
Just a couple of weeks after Lewandowsky’s second attempt to reach out to us sceptics -via anew survey publicised at WatchingtheDeniers (!) What a loss to science.A Scott commenting at the Blackboard links to this news:
It also puts paid to any possible investigation into the source of responses to the current paper.
Cookie's sudden return to the good old days of history rewriting and denial is, of course, what one would expect if Lew's paper is a total scam
That's juicy stuff Geoff!
With all interested parties staying silent, we can honestly surmise Lew or one of his minions went on to destroy KwickSurveys with the aim of hiding the decline (in honesty levels).
After all, for them ANYTHING goes. Anything.
Lewandowsky seems to have little to no respect, for example, for skeptics, book authors, journalists or blogs.
Hear Lewandowsky "The peer-reviewed literature (Prof Stephan Lewandowsky)", Climate podcasts from the University of Western Australia, 13.12.2010:
Let us hope that editors will refrain in the future from unscientific "terms" like "climate deniers" (which was used in the abstract of the Lewandowsky/Oberauer/Gignac paper).
And let us hope that Lewandowsky will report his "method in sufficient detail for others to be able to replicate the experiment"!
In another podcast, "Climategate a year later" (Climate podcasts from the University of Western Australia, 11.02.2011), Lewandowsky seems to be happy to propagate a lie that was distributed mainly by the IPCC and afterwards by (all? the) enthusiasts and fans of the IPCC: He says HimalayaGate consists of "one IPCC error", and that it was a "typo"; but see, for instance, also IPCC's AR4 final text: "total [Himalayan glacier] area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035" (Who spotted that area error? The error seems to be inconvenient to people who say that no errors were found by "outsiders", bloggers, journalists...).
.... I wonder if ANY of the paper's peer reviewers aske dto see the data ...
Assuming that the paper makes it into the journal (in press?) I hope that an apropriate response to the journal can be made.
Here is an article in the German newspaper Die Zeit, entitled "Truth is a matter of opinion" (Wahrheit ist Ansichtssache, 03.03.2005), concerning a former paper by Lewandowsky. Editors of Die Zeit are regulars at the so-called Bilderberg Meetings (maybe there is a connection from their publisher, Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, to the journal Nature which is published also by that media concern). Die Zeit is an outlet, for example, for hardcore warmist scribbles, and seems to be in blind love with big government, bank bailouts, Mario Draghi's fantasies of ending the sovereignty of nations, ending the sovereignty of nations democracy/parliament...
Barry - an expert in a similar field has told me papers based on online surveys are usually treated as low-quality contributions if not marked as unacceptable altogether. If Lew's finds its way into print, am not sure the Editor of that journal will have enough wits to accept rebuttals.
Do we know for certain that it passed peer review?
Adam Corner described it in his Guardian piece as "new research to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science".
Maybe it's out for review right now - in which case the questions being raised might cause even the most enthusiastic "climate psychologists" to be a bit careful about putting their reputations on the line.
Which would be a very good thing.
If it disappears without trace, like Gergis et al - do you think Adam & the Graun will issue retractions?
(hollow laugh)
I don't know if this has been mentioned but thought I'd ref it here. This July article on the Psychological Science site says that the paper is going to published but no date is given. So I guess that means it has been accepted.
My emphasis above.
I get the feeling that most people have just read the title and ran away with a warm feeling that has sent them into the heights of gleeful smugness that has made them ignore the niggling actual details of the paper. Maybe that's what peer review consist of at this PS publication too? ;)
One of our national treasures, blogger Professor Bunyip, has been on Lewandowsky's case for some time:
http://www.google.com/search?as_q=lewandowsky&as_epq=&as_oq=&as_eq=&as_nlo=&as_nhi=&lr=&cr=&as_qdr=all&as_sitesearch=http%3A%2F%2Fbunyipitude.blogspot.com&as_occt=any&safe=images&tbs=&as_filetype=&as_rights=
Lewandowsky has written several articles for the ABC opinion website, The Drum, all in the same vein:
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stephan-lewandowsky-33172.html
He has consistently maintained that people who disagree with his view of the world are delusional. His take on the Climategate emails has to be read to be believed. He is not just a sub-standard academic, a partisan who pretends to be impartial, and someone who thinks that 'ethics' means doing whatever it takes to support your chosen cause.
He is the most classic case of projection (apart, perhaps, from his idol Michael Mann) going around the track at the moment.
Leopard: Yes, "does it send me into heights of gleeful smugness?" seems as good a heuristic as any for whether such papers pass pal review. Certainly the data can have had little to do with it in this case. Which brings me to the news about KwickSurveys and the reaction of Maurizio:
In order not to help out those seeking to paint us as paranoid perhaps it's better to put it as a why question. Why have none of the parties concerned with this paper not drawn this important and strange fact about the data to anyone who happens to have wanted to write about it? Like, say, the Guardian and Adam Corner. Why haven't we heard about it until another sceptic sleuth (thanks A Scott) noses around the site of KwickSurveys?
Perhaps because Lewandowsky had carefully kept all the data in question. But it's the kind of thing that we should have known about already. Like so much else.
I have posted up an analysis of Lewandowsky's link between laissez-faire beliefs and rejection of climate science. The data shows a strong link, but only due to a number of steps taken to bias the result.
The more significant reliable result is that climate alarmists hold views are more authoritarian, and against the best interests of, the vast majority of the people in Australia, the UK or the USA.
Yeah that KwickSurveys fubar just at the time of Lewanowsky publishing (or not?) his paper does add a suitable grassy knoll atmosphere! :)
I'm a fundamentalist bore when it comes to anything smelling of conspiracy theory (probably to my detriment sometimes) and just don't pay attention to even to ask a why question most the time. I only see a missed opportunity to see the original figures here.
Manicbeancounter has now issued part 4 of his analysis taking in the so-called "big result" that free-market ideology is a tendency of climate deniers.
It's another nice job that adds to the unpicking of the obscuration of Lewanowsky's "latent variable modelling" and the outright lie of his papers title.
One thing that struck me though on reading his latest analysis - and I don't know if I am suffering from a deadly combination of dyscalculia and dyslexia here - is the following observation I left on Manics' site (hope he doesn't mind me also putting here while it's in moderation there)
http://www.australianclimatemadness.com/2012/09/lewandowsky-data-shows-more-alarmists-believe-the-moon-landings-were-faked/
Has this been covered yet?
geoffchambers, that's brilliant work, comrade.
In Climate Wars parlance, what Lewandowsky did with this 'paper' is to commit an egregious war crime. He ignored even the most basic rule of engagement, by using the results of an online survey/s for what's supposed to be a scholarly paper. That's like shooting innocent men, women and children and then counting their numbers as 'terrorists killed in action'.
Geoff
Just read your latest exchanges on SkS.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/AGU-Fall-Meeting-sessions-social-media-misinformation-uncertainty.html
Tom Curtis (prodded by his missus) has obviously "turned" on this issue and shown some real integrity quote:-
Given the low number of "skeptical" respondents overall; these two scammed responses significantly affect the results regarding conspiracy theory ideation. Indeed, given the dubious interpretation of weakly agreed responses (see previous post), this paper has no data worth interpreting with regard to conspiracy theory ideation. It is my strong opinion that the paper should be have its publication delayed while undergoing a substantial rewrite. The rewrite should indicate explicitly why the responses regarding conspiracy theory ideation are in fact worthless, and concentrate solely on the result regarding free market beliefs (which has a strong enough a response to be salvageable). If this is not possible, it should simply be withdrawn.
A triumph for your diplomatic but unyielding persistence - well done!
I can't see the SkS/ Lewandowsky love affair lasting very much longer after this.
SkeptikalScience writer Tom Curtis at comments 35 and 37
http://www.skepticalscience.com/AGU-Fall-Meeting-sessions-social-media-misinformation-uncertainty.html#comments`
supports the analysis of manicbeancounter and everyone here.
Prepare yourselves for a statement from Lewandowsky of the form: “following comments by Skeptical Science writer Tom Curtis, this paper has been withdrawn for revision...”
Oh, the world is so unfair...
Foxgoose
Hey! If we're going to get a proper crosstalk act together, we need to do something about our timing.
Good...so we do have an alternative explanation now.
Simply, the SkS crew had their most awful weekend ever and no matter how they huffed, puffed (and comment-deleted) came to realise there was nothing worth defending in Lew's scam.
One up for honesty, truth and science, one down for conspiracy theories! 8-)
Leopard: the paper says that some responses were 'reverse-scored' so that they all actually point in the same direction (lower scores=more pro-free-market).
Yes, the thread at Sks makes fascinating reading as the liars tie themselves in knots.
People might want to take a copy in case it mysteriously disappears.
First we are told (#14) that "Skeptical Science and John Cook are not associated with Lewandowski's study."
Then we are told (#15) that they did host the survey in 2011.
Geoff points out that this doesn't make sense (#16), and Cook changes his story in #15 to 2010, despite the fact that Geoff says he has already searched the Wayback archive for the relevant period and it's not there.
Foxgoose asks for clarification (#22) and is referrred to back to Cook's muddled and false answer.
Geoff again points out the contradiction in #27 and #31 and asks why they would delete the survey.
That's an interesting theory - that Tom Curtis's comments may be designed to allow a Gergis-style climb-down.