FarleyR
It was brave of you to mention your scepticism about 9/11 at the end there. I’m old enough to remember the first Kennedy assassination. Serious questions about the crime and the investigation were aired at great length in serious newspapers. The horror of 9/11 prevented this from happening. The principle was established that some subjects were just too serious to be subjected to investigative journalism.

That is the real link between 9/11 and global warming, not the trivial and predictable fact that people who are sceptical about one thing are more likely to be sceptical of another.

The Landowsky article is so bad one doesn’t know where to begin. He says this:

Researchers in history and sociology frequently cite the “manufacture of doubt" by vested interests and political groups ....Oreskes and Conway documented that a small number of organizations and individuals have been instrumental in those contrarian activities ..

and follows up with this:

Another variable that has been associated with the rejection of science is conspiratorial thinking, or conspiracist ideation, defined here as the attempt to explain a significant political or social event as a secret plot by powerful individuals or organizations

So, according to Landowsky, WE are conspiracy theorists, while THEY are researchers who document how “a small number of organizations and individuals have been instrumental in ... contrarian activities”. I’ll try and summon up strength to read the rest, and to read the comments on the Corner article in the Graun. There’s still a day or so left for commenting there. I hope someone’s trying, though I‘d understand if they didn’t. Perhaps they’re trying to wear us down by making us lose the will to live?

Shub
The on-line questionaire was posted between August and October 2010 on 8 blogs. I’ll try and follow up Barry’s research by searching likely candidates between those dates.

Of the 1377 responses to the Lewandowsky survey, (all from blogs with what the article calls a “pro-science science stance” [sic]) 71 were eliminated as coming from a duplicated IP number, and 161 responses “were eliminated because the respondent's age was implausible (< 10 or > 95) or values for the consensus items were outside the 0-100 range, or because responses were incomplete”. So 17% of respondents were manifestly p*ssing about. What proportion of the rest were doing the same, but entered a believable age (eg 10 or 95)? What proportion of the sample were “skeptics”? I can see no raw numbers in the paper at all. Does anyone know where the supplementary information can be had, or how to tease out some basic information from the tediously predictable (and predictably opaque to non-specialists) statistics? It would bes so easy for a small proportion of the Tamino (eg) faithful to filll in spoof answers. No conspiracy needed.
This article is so offensive, it really should be demolished.

The Lewandowsky survey was put up at Tamino’s here:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/08/28/survey-says/#comments
Here are a few of the comments:

-I got as far as question 2. and decided not to continue.
-You missed the long series of questions about various conspiracy theories. Those were fun!

The survey leads leads to an ad. Not even any info on my IQ. But I know that I did really well.

I guess they’re trying to use those survey questions to identify the nuts haha…

Yeah, those conspiracy theory questions were pretty funny, but does anyone think that hardcore deniers are going to be fooled by such a transparent attempt to paint them as paranoids? Also, here are two words that, when put together, ought to make anyone critical of this research: “online” and “survey”.

Paul Matthews listed all the blogs used in Lewandowsky’s survey in a comment at
http://notrickszone.com/2012/07/29/australian-psychologists-claim-climate-science-skeptics-are-the-moon-landing-conspiracy-theorists/

I can’t find the link at Skeptical Science. Comments were minimal and uninteresting at most sites, except at
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2010/08/29/survey-on-attitudes-towards-cl/
From which I extract the following:

It has the usual failing of such questionnaires, but stands a fair chance of demonstrating whether or not the instinctive classification of deniers is valid. The main weakness is not the design, however, it’s the administration. This online survey format is very insecure. I could easily script a bot to take it a hundred times or more with responses designed to skew the results.

I agree with Tony; at first, I thought the survey was bogus. Of course, I haven’t seen the thinking behind the survey so I cannot comment with much authority, but some of the questioned seem rather ill-posed. And why no 5-point Likert scale? The whole online survey format is also methodologically suspect.

I would have thought that inviting Deltoid readers to participate in a questionnaire of this sort is likely to produce statistically skewed results since it likely to encounter a preponderance of respondents who are “pro-science” rather than “skeptical of science”.

The survey is a tedious and transparent piece of agit-prop, designed, no doubt, at a UWA struggle meeting.

I think the “conspiracy theory” section is too heavy-handed to be useful. There’s no chance that people won’t figure out what the survey is looking for here, and everyone knows that “conspiracy theory!!” is pejorative. So I suspect that a lot of people who actually do think that climate scientists are rigging the data will hide their beliefs, even in an anonymous survey, because they’re worried that they’re going to be painted as conspiracy theorists. Maybe with good reason, maybe not.

I’ve been trawling through John Cook’s private emails trying to find the invitation to take part in the Lewandowsky survey at Skeptical Science and I came upon this::

2010-11-25
First up, I met with Steve Lewandowsky and some other cognitive scientists who are interested in the phenomenon of science blogging and how it's being used to educate and communicate science. In particular, they wanted to test the impact of blog comments on how people processed information. Did a blog post with all negative comments have a different impact on how people retain information compared to a blog post with all positive comments? So we sat down and designed an experiment to run on SkS to see if this has a discernible effect on blogs. Later I asked Steve, isn't there a risk that there is no effect and it will all be a big waste of time? He said this was the risk every time you planned an experiment. So will be interesting to see how this pans out.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, but it sounds to me as if Austalia’s top science blogger and the psychology professor are planning to make up comments on a thread...

omnologos: Don't apologise. I frequently make the same point over and over and over again...

It seems Skeptical Science did’t take part in the survey, because 2 June 2011 (6 months after the fieldwork) John Cook says:

What's interesting is Steve Lewandowsky has done some research showing there is a high correlation between conspiracy theorists and climate deniers. This is a theme that could be explored further.

The two conspirators seem to have carried out their plan to plant false comments on SkS threads, however. 30 July 2011 Cook says:

thanks for bringing up that research by Eckar (coauthored by Steve Lewandowsky who I'm doing the current SkS science blog experiment with).

Cook and Lewandowsky are a right couple of scallywags. Here’s Coook again (8 February 2012):

...Or even more interesting (although I might struggle to get ethics approval), let loose our denier bot on warmist blogs, let it respond to the science based arguments with denial and see what happens. I must be hanging around Steve Lewandowsky too much, he loves poking ants nests with a stick because that idea is very appealing to me.
And I know what you're thinking - I won't let loose a denier bot on the SkS comment threads without warning you all first :-)

Adam Corner’s recent Guardian article on Lewandowsky’s research is now up at
http://talkingclimate.org/are-climate-sceptics-more-likely-to-be-conspiracy-theorists/
with some perceptive comments - all from BH regulars. The tone and intellectual level is rather different from that of comments to the same article at the Guardian. Funny, that.
It’s amusing to see the government sponsored talkingclimate turned into a branch of Bishop Hill.

Foxgoose
I see talkingclimate let your “circlejerk” comment through, but the one above is in moderation.

On the face of it, Adam would appear to have told a direct untruth and misrepresented himself to an important group of decision makers and I think, if we are to continue constructive dialogue here between the opposing sides of the climate debate, he should explain his position.

Maybe he should, maybe he shouldn’t. Maybe he’ll just say “Why should I talk to you?” and ban you, which would be a pity.
Compare what we’ve got at talkingclimate with what happened on the thread to the same article at the Graun. Intelligent, reasoned criticism from some of the finest minds at BH (ok, not “some of”). No trolls. It’s a New Found Land. Do we try and parley with the natives or massacre them?
I appreciate your “They don’t like it up ‘em” attitude, but there’s a time and a place. When I’m invited to tea by a rich maiden aunt, I adopt my best manners and don’t ask about the source of her private income.