Lewandowsky does “science” by taunts and attempted parody instead of answering questions

Stephan Lewandowsky is rattled. Not surprisingly. Right now, his blog has gone from a steady run of zero-to-three-comment-posts up to 200, and the skeptics are armed with cutting questions.

But the more he writes, the worse it gets. Skeptics have picked apart his methods, his data, his transparency, and his conclusions. His latest responses are childish taunts with variants of name-calling. What place does an unrelated smear have in a science debate? It’s an effort to distract people.

His paper, in press, has been shown to have a misleading headline, with worthless conclusions based on statistically insignificant number of responses, using a clumsy one-sided test — the aim of which was obvious to most readers. When asked for data he provided answers to 32 questions but still hides the results obtained to a quarter of his original survey, including the basic demographics. He changed the order of questions depending on the blog he sought replies from — effectively putting different versions of the survey up (see below for his explanation). He himself emailed or was named in emails to alarmist anti-skeptic bloggers, while he used an unknown assistant to email skeptical blogs. These non-standard methods were not described in his […]

Steve McIntyre finds Lewandowsky’s paper is a “landmark of junk science”

Steve McIntyre audited Stephan Lewandowsky’s data to weed out the obvious fake responses. That people would “game” the test was predictable given the clumsy nature of the survey, the one-sided nature of the conspiracies investigated, the virulently anti-skeptic sites where it was hosted, and the comments on the threads where it was announced. Obviously the survey hoped to show skeptics were nutters, and when it was posted in front of those who-hate-skeptics, readers obliged.

Steve McIntyre weighs in with a lengthy post, several original graphs, and concludes:

“Lewandowsky, like Gleick, probably fancies himself a hero of the Cause. But ironically. Lewandowsky’s paper will stand only as a landmark of junk science – fake results from faked responses.

As Tom Curtis observed, Lewandowsky has no moral alternative but to withdraw his paper.”

When the number of responses to conspiracies are graphed against the share that is “skeptical” of man-made global warming McIntyre reveals an interesting pattern. The “Oklahoma” point on the bottom right of the graph was the most popular conspiracy theory — but percentage-wise, “alarmists” were more likely to support this theory than so called “skeptics” were.

The line across the graph represents the proportion of the total responses which […]

Steve McIntyre on Lewandowsky (and Josh)

Steve McIntyre weighs in:

“As others have observed, the number of actual respondents purporting to believe in the various conspiracies was, in many cases, very small. Only 10 respondents purported to believe in Lewandowsky’s* signature Moon Landing conspiracy. These included a disproportionate number of scam responses. Indeed, probably all of these responses were scams.

However, Lewandowsky’s statistical analysis was unequal to the very low hurdle of identifying these scam responses. Lewandowsky applied a technique closely related to principal components to scam and non-scam data alike, homogenizing them into a conspiratorial ideation.”

Josh is so quick these days :- ) Thank you Josh. An excellent job.

* Correction: “Curtis’s” should have been Lewandowsky.

 

 

Josh is so quick these days :- ) Thank you Josh. An excellent job.

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Lewandowsky hopes we meant “Conspiracy” but we mean “Incompetence”

What can I say? Prof Lewandowsky, expert in conspiracies, thinks we are postulating a conspiracy — but the bad news for him is that we are postulating straight out incompetence, no conspiracy required.

How does Lewandowsky define “conspiracy”? However he wants.

I hate to say I told you so, but I did. Back in May 2010, before Lewandowsky posted his survey, he foresaw the results:

“This attribute of conspiracy theorising applies in full force to the actions of climate “sceptics” who operate outside the peer reviewed literature” [ABC Drum]”

and I foresaw what he would do with them:

“Lewandowsky uses the name-calling to “poison the well” against people who don’t even believe in a conspiracy [about man-made global warming], but happen to also be skeptical…Jo Nova May 2010“

Graham at OnLine Opinion (OLO) has posted Part II of a Fish rots from the Head and it’s quite something to see.

This post will look at the question of what is a conspiracy, and also what constitutes “conspiracist ideation”. The conclusion, just to save you reading to the bottom, is that Lewandowsky has no clear idea so adapts it to what fits his thesis. This is […]

10 conspiracy theorists makes a moon landing paper for Stephan Lewandowsky (Part II) PLUS all 40 questions

There were only ten positive responses.

There are many questions to be answered about this paper in “Psychological Science.“ Questions worth asking at all kinds of levels.

The authors, Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, C. E., drew conclusions about skeptics by largely surveying alarmist sites. They got hardly any positive responses, some of which may have been faked (who can tell?). Then with a tiny ten positive responses out of 1147, the authors drew inferences about a group of people which must number between one hundred thousand to one million or more individuals. Worse, of the ten who thought the moon landing was faked, only three or four were skeptics. In the UPDATE below note that there appear to be three different forms of the survey, a point that surely needs some explanation.

The headline of the study “NASA faked the moon landing—therefore (climate) science is a hoax: An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science” is drawn from only those ten responses. Do I need to say it’s a sample size too small to draw any conclusions? I shouldn’t. But this point alone should have been enough for the paper in its current form to fail review, yet […]

Lewandowsky – Shows “skeptics” are nutters by asking alarmists to fill out survey

I‘m putting on a conservative, understated hat. This could be the worst paper I have seen — an ad hom argument taken to its absurd extreme, rebadged as “science”.

Professorial fellow Stephan Lewandowsky thinks that skeptics who are “greatly involved” in the climate debate believe any kind of conspiracy theory, including that the moon landings never happened, that AIDS is not due to HIV, and that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. But he didn’t find this out by asking skeptics who are “greatly involved” in the climate debate or by reading their popular sites. He “discovered” this by asking 1,000 visitors to climate blogs. Which blogs? He expertly hunted down skeptics, wait for it… here:

Deltoid, Tamino Scot Mandia, Bickmore, A Few Things Ill Considered, Hot-Topic (NZ) Trunity (unconfirmed?) John Cook (through twitter, h/t Barry Woods at Climate Audit)

This is the point where the question has to be asked: Did Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac really think they would get away with it? Did none of the reviewers at “Psychological Science“ think to ask if the “sampling” of alarmist blogs would affect the results?

The paper is titled:

“NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (Climate) Science is […]

Lewandowsky bitten by a hoax

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky may not understand much about the climate, but he is a professor of psychology — so satire, humor, and hoaxes ought to be right up his alley, right? He’s realized he fell for the brilliant Alene Composta (a master satirist) replying to her and even sending her fake request for advice to fellow blogger John Cook (who fell for it too).

Alene ticked all the headline stereotypical victim-leftie boxes, her interests included “christine milne”, “organic gardening” and “batik hangings” and lets face it, “Composta” is a red flag, rather. So she wrote to Lewandowsky begging for advice in dealing with monster commenters from Bolt and Blair, and notably pointed to him surviving my scorn and ridicule:

I recently began blogging, especially about climate change, and after a month my site was noticed. Noticed by the wrong people, sadly. Readers of Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt have swamped my site with genuinely abusive comments, many relating to my disability, which I find very hurtful.

So my question to you is this: How do you deal with monsters like this?

I have read and savoured every column you have published at Unleashed, and I have read the hateful comments […]

Lewandowsky: the ABC parades a witchdoctor again

Once more the ABC is posting logical failures, confused non-evidence, and baseless thinking. This time Professorial Fellow Stephan Lewandowsky also tries to talk about economic cost benefits, without analyzing either costs or benefits, and doesn’t seem to know the difference between a free market and a fixed one. Why do they bother?

Lewandowsky says we should act — despite the supposed “lack of certainty”. Given that there are multiple studies and empirical evidence that suggests carbon has no catastrophic effect, what he is effectively saying is we should ignore the observations and be obedient to the Gods of “science” instead. It harks straight from our stone age tribal era.

Right from the outset, let’s be clear, that for all Lewandowsky’s bluster about the scientific evidence, he has never once posted any reference showing observational evidence that the touted positive feedback written into the models-of-doom has any basis in fact. As usual, he points to the Biblical “Consensus”, even though we’ve pointed out the basics of science (that consensus is an unscientific, illogical argument from authority, and is baseless in science). When the government has poured in billions to “find” a consensus, it would be flat out shocking if they couldn’t […]

New study of consensus entrails shows 67% of papers don’t accept Man-made-climate-catastrophe

By Jo Nova

A new paper tries to clean up the chicken entrail decrees of Mark Lynas (and earlier of John Cook) and concludes that their methodology is so bad, a 99.85% consensus could just as easily have been 32%.

All the papers in between 32 and 99% were neutral on the cause of man-made climate catastrophes, but Lynas et al bundled them in with the believer pack and made hay in the global media. This was even though many of the “neutral” papers showed results that didn’t fit the consensus. But who cares about results eh? If an abstract was neutral, it was therefore a “sign” the authors believed — like reading their tea leaves, or laying out the entrails. (Either that or it was a sign scientists who question the dogma get sacked, lose funding, and get uninvited to laboratory barbeques, but, shh! We won’t mention that.) So Lynas assumes that as long as a scientist doesn’t specifically say they disagree, they de facto endorse the “consensus”.

Why do people who call themselves scientists even talk about a “consensus”?

Obviously if believers had evidence, they’d talk about that instead.

Dentelski et al do an admirable job of pointing […]

Democrat admits climate dogma loses to skeptics, asks YouTube to block them instead

If only they had overwhelming evidence they could post YouTubes that were popular

As Steve Milloy says “Not only are we winning the debate… we are forcing our opponents to show who the actual would-be-dictators are. “

Here’s Dem Kathy Castor writing to the YouTube CEO to ask him to stop YouTube suggesting skeptical videos as “up next” or earning advertising money.

To Sundar Pichai,

CEO, Google, CA

[snip intro]

As we all work together to solve this crisis [climate change], we must also eliminate barriers to action, including those as pervasive and harmful as climate denial and climate misinformation.

That’s why I urge you to ensure that Youtube is not incentivising video’s by removing them immediately from the platform’s recommended algorithm; Add ‘climate misinformation’ to the platforms list of borderline content; Stop monetizing videos that promote harmful misinformation and falsehoods about the causes and effects of the climate crisis; Take steps to correct the record for millions of users who have been exposed to climate misinformation on YouTube.

Please respond by Friday February 7, to describe any efforts you plan to take in order to address these important issues.

[…]

On Facebook Greta looks 16, but secretly identifies as two grown men

On Facebook no one knows you are a puppet — until a bug reveals who edits your posts. Such a bug happened on Thursday and by Friday people on 4chan had pointed out that Greta’s facebook posts were being done by her father and some guy in India called Adarsh Prathap.

thanks to Michael Smith News. h/t AndyG, Dennis

Greta’s handler, Adarsh Prathap

GraniteGrok (or someone else?) revealed Adarsh is a UN climate official.

There is nothing either wrong or surprising about this. Only an idiot would believe (then or still) that she is writing her public remarks for delivery to social media or the UN. She’s a Muppet. A child trafficked in socialist environmental doomsaying. A prop. But who the heck is Adarsh Prathap?

According to LinkedIn, he is a Global Regional Coordinator at Youth Engaged in Wetlands. Principal Investigator of Revive Vellayani Project. And a big fan of the UN. Youth Engaged in Wetlands is “an international youth team committed to the conservation, protection, and wise-use of wetlands. YEW provides a global platform for young people to enable and empower them to help protect promote our wetlands.”

He’s a Green […]

“The Conversation” gives up conversing, admits defeat on climate, bans all skeptical scientists from commenting!

What kind of conversation only has one side? Paid propaganda.

The Conversation is a site established** by your taxpayer dollars, in countries where 50 – 60% of the entire population don’t agree with the IPCC’s dominant mantra. Yet no matter how qualified you are, no matter how good your argument, your evidence and your data, you, we, half the population, is now banned. The editor Misha Ketchell has officially blocked unbelievers, and thus effectively admitted that they can’t reply to skeptics, and that skeptics are posing too many questions they can’t answer. They’ve been deleting skeptical comments for years, so it’s good that they finally have the honesty to admit it.

The irony of a site called “The Conversation” which won’t allow a conversation is perfect Owellian Newspeak. Let’s just call it The Conversion from now on (thanks Travis) — the mission is to help converts keep the faith. Yesterday they published hatemail from Tim Flannery calling scientists who disagreed, deniers who are “predatory threats” to his own children. Today they’re banning half the population.

If only they had evidence they wouldn’t need to ban people:

….

The poor snowflake believers of the Windmills-change-the-weather religion can’t cope with hearing […]

John Cook, we’ll believe you when you stop doing what you complain we’re doing

John Cook tries to attack skeptics for their savage jokes about cold spells. Go for it John, we’ll believe you when you when you stop publishing stories about single hot days and tell PhD’s they shouldn’t harp on about random noise like heat waves:

Forecast: flurries of shivering climate-change deniers

When a cold spell struck the east coast recently, US President Donald Trump tweeted “Wouldn’t be bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right now!”

The argument he is sarcastically implying and often makes—that global warming isn’t happening because it’s cold outside—possesses an obvious logical flaw. [No kidding]. It’s like arguing that the sun no longer exists when it gets dark at night. Of course, Trump didn’t invent this argument—it’s commonly brought up on denier blogs and social media threads whenever the weather turns cold.

This type of fallacious reasoning is not just common on believer blogs, it’s their bread and butter.

Trump was being sarcastic. Skeptics are making jokes — but what excuse can anyone make for paid PhD’s who are serious?

Let’s swap the hot’s and cold’s of Cooks own words (mine bolded):

The argument PhD’s seriously […]

Ross Cameron you have been Deleted — how the Delete-People-Tactic destroys discussion

UPDATE: People are still angry over this on Twitter.Sign the petition. Unpermitted words have a Weapons-Grade power over useful words at a rate of a billion to one

Speak a Forbidden Term and your entire career can be neutralized instantly. It doesn’t matter how many other useful ideas or contributions you make. Any breach unleashes a tidal wave of unrighteous indignation. Then the honest players fold like daffodils in a breeze and leap to carry out the judgement of twitter mobs. Why do good people help the Lynch Mob every time?

The permitted word list is defined by the PC mob, it changes at random, and post hoc, and only applies to people who threaten collectivist power. Eminent scientists can be called “deniers” as if they are mental morons, they can be likened to pedophiles, asbestos-pushers and Hitler, and that’s not only OK, those people get lavish taxpayer funded careers and prizes. (Not mentioning any names Stephan Lewandowsky and Robyn Williams.)

Freedom of Speech is under threat — we have to stand up to this

Tuesday, Ross Cameron said the four forbidden words “slanty-eyed, yellow-skinned“. Rude, yes, dynamite, no. They were better left unsaid, and potentially offensive, but not a […]

Sydney May: Plimer, Nova (How to Destroy a Grid), others at *huge* Liberty Conf. Book now!

A huge conference is building in Sydney. Quick, join in, you can get a 10% discount with the code Nova18.

I’ll be there for the first time having great fun explaining how to burn billions and ruin reliable electricity — which was a big hit here in Perth.

How to destroy a perfectly good electricity grid in three easy steps

The World is watching Australia. Despite being handicapped with abundant resources, we’ve turned ourselves into an international spectacle with rampant blackouts, flying squads of diesel generators, and the highest electricity prices in the world. An achievement like this does not come easily.

The grand experiment unfolds around us, as the nation discovers why “free” energy isn’t free, why storage is deceptively expensive, yet baseload is deceptively cheap.

Discover the Joy of Blackouts!

There is an amazing line up of speakers this year on May 25-27 in Sydney. A building full of sane people!

See the feisty, fabulous Ian Plimer, and Nick Minchin (former Senator, skeptic, who starred in the ABC documentary and invited David and me onto it). Not to miss Sinclair Davidson from Catalaxy, Graeme Young from Online Opinion (remember his great […]

Modern Astrology in NY Times: Justin Gillis says Eclipses show all Scientists are always right about everything

Verily. Eclipses do weird things to people.

Justin Gillis, writer for The New York Times used the recent eclipse to sell something I’d call Sciencemagic. Essentially, if some Scientists™ can calculate orbital mechanics to a fine art, it follows, ipso nonfacto, that all people who use the same job title are also always right.

“Should You Trust Climate Science? Maybe the Eclipse Is a Clue”

Thanks to the work of scientists, people will know exactly what time to expect the eclipse. In less entertaining but more important ways, we respond to scientific predictions all the time, even though we have no independent capacity to verify the calculations. We tend to trust scientists.

If Scientists™ say that solar panels will stop malaria, then buy some! Save lives in Ghana. (What are you waiting for?)

The implications stretch far. Clearly, we can chuck out the whole research thing (labs, who needs em?) Why test predictions, if Scientists™ are 100% accurate? We’ve been wasting money. We don’t need more large hadron colliders, we just need to survey more particle physicists.

This idea that job titles have a kind of truth-telling power is not much different to astrology where truth […]

Australian chief scientist says Trump is like Stalin, totally missing left’s war on science

Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist, is blind to the rampant censorship that’s been going on for 30 years:

Australia’s chief scientist has slammed Donald Trump’s attempt to censor environmental data, saying the US president’s behaviour was comparable to the manipulation of science by the Soviet Union.

Speaking at a scientific roundtable in Canberra on Monday, Alan Finkel warned science was “literally under attack” in the United States and urged his colleagues to keep giving “frank and fearless” advice despite the political opposition.

“The Trump administration has mandated that scientific data published by the United States Environmental Protection Agency from last week going forward has to undergo review by political appointees before that data can be published on the EPA website or elsewhere,” he said.

Governments have been attacking science for decades

The real Soviet style censorship works by cutting funding to inconvenient research, giving awards and grants to namecalling activists, and funding incompetent psychologists who pump out sympathetic press releases that smear researchers who find the “wrong” result. It works by supporting a demonising culture that means honest scientists face exile, insults, threats to be sacked, evicted, blackballed, terminated, punished, vilified and bullied, not […]

The Conversation — cleansing skeptical thoughts — Read the banned comments here

The Fake Conversation where Bill’s informative, polite comments are removed, but the replies are left there.

Last week Bill Johnston posted a detailed, comprehensive analysis of Sydney Observatory thermometer record here that shows that most of the warming recorded there is due to buildings and freeways. But photo’s and graphs are “denier” stuff, and The Conversation is so afraid some its readers might see those historic photos they ban links to Bill’s work and joannenova.com.au. Apparently when the Bureau of Meteorology discusses “Australia’s hottest decade” it is off topic to discuss the condition of their thermometers.

Bill Johnston was happy to defend his work in comments at The Conversation, but Blair Trewin, who wrote the post itself, was entirely absent. Cory Zanoni had to close the dangerous thread. He removed scores of comments, but left replies to Bill Johnston intact. Some “conversation”.

At least 46 of Bill Johnston’s comments were deleted from Australia’s climate in 2016 – a year of two halves as El Niño unwound and 19 deleted from Australian climate politics in 2017: a guide for the perplexed. As Bill says: They obviously want to stay perplexed; uninformed; scary-cats, without a paddle for their leaky canoe.

[…]

Major win: NASA was neutered, turned into political PR machine, and Trump is going to fix that

Trump is going to slash funds for NASA’s politicized climate program

In the last 20 years NASA has been turned from a space agency to one that ignores satellite data in favour of doing statistical tricks with badly placed ground thermometers and relies on Russia to do things in space.

Former NASA stars have been protesting for year at the dismal standards in NASA climate research. The same guys who walked on the moon, worked on the Apollo missions, and ran the shuttle program were fed up with NASA’s excellent brand name being exploited by junk scientists to do political promotions. Under Obama NASA was told to do three things –– inspire kids, help international relationships and help Muslim nations “feel good”. So much for space exploration and science.

Obama slashed former President George W. Bush’s Constellation program, designed to take humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars, by leaking information to the press and threatening to veto the projects. NASA astronauts now rely on Russia to reach space, and NASA has been forced by the Obama administration to delay the Mars mission until 2030.

Apollo 11 Launch. Photo. 1969.

That’s about to […]

Brian Cox thinks 17,000 employees at NASA always produce perfect graphs. NASA employees disagree. Who to believe?

The key moment making headlines from the Q&A “Science Weak” episode — Brian Cox shows a temperature graph. Malcolm Roberts said the GISS temperature data has been “manipulated”. The Particle Physics Genius’ reply was argument from incredulity: gushing, gratuitous astonishment spread over six attempts to form a complete sentence:

By who? NASA? The people the… Hang on a minute. No, no, see this is quite serious. But can I just – just one thing. NASA, NASA… The people that landed men on the moon?

In a blink of reductio ad absurbum, Cox sweeps aside a potentially useful discussion about thermometers near car-parks, airports, skyscrapers, and mysterious 1,200 km homogenized smoothing. In its place he gives cheap theatrical tricks. Follow his thought to its logical conclusion — everything that NASA does (or presumably will ever do) must be 100% correct. NASA becomes an apostle of the holy order. He treats the brand name as untouchable, but NASA is not just Neil Armstrong and a Big Step, it’s an agency with 17,000 employees. But hey, none of them have ever produced a manipulated graph.

Since experts matter (so Cox tells us) let’s ask the experts — like say, Buzz Aldrin, […]