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 Stephan Lewandowsky, Gilles Gignac, Klaus Oberauer
The scathing blog posts are popping up everywhere.
From William Briggs we get a sense of the historical importance of the Lewandowsky et al effort.
One day a terrific psychological study is going to be written on the madness and mass lunacy which arose after climate change swam into the public’s ken…
The cornerstone of this future pathological report may well be the peer-reviewed Psychological Science paper “NASA faked the moon landing—Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science” by Stephan Lewandowsky, Klaus Oberauer, and Gilles Gignac, perhaps the completest, most representative work of its odd era.
“Everything that could have been done wrong, was done wrong. Every bias that could have been manifested, was manifested. Every fallacy pertinent to the matter at hand was made. The conclusions, regurgitated from unnecessarily complicated statistical procedures, did not follow from the evidence gathered, which itself was suspect. In its way, then, the paper is a jewel, a gift to the future, a fundamental text to how easy it is to fool oneself. “
Steve McIntyre goes through the statistical tests, finds questionable practices, questions he can’t answer, and general failure paired with incompetence. Some people wonder in the comments if there is a point to doing this when the methodology and data are flawed beyond hope. While I doubt this analysis will tell us anything about skeptics, it may reveal something about warmists, and in particular the Dept of Psychology at UWA.
I wasn’t able to replicate Lewandowsky’s claim at all. I got explained variance of 43.5% in the first factor(versus Lewandowky’s 86%). I notice that the explained variance for two factors was 86%: maybe Lewandowsky got mixed up between one and two factors. If so, would such an error “matter”? In Team-world, we’ve seen that even using contaminated data upside down is held not to “matter”; perhaps the same holds in Lew-world, where we’ve already seen that use of fake and even fraudulent data is held not to “matter”.
There are several instances of similar outcomes. I won’t repeat them here. In comments Steve McIntyre finds more, and drops this gem:
Using my present best guess as to his calculation of latent variables, here is his Table 1 and my estimated correlation matrix. The two resemble one another except for conspiracy where the sign is reversed. OLS methods (of which a correlation matrix is an example) are VERY poor methods for this sort of data set. Lewandowsky may set a sort of incompetence landmark in this respect that will take many years to surpass.
It appears for all the world that Lewandowsky has replied, sort of, mentioning the SEM that McIntyre referred too, but without daring to link to him, or even mentioning Steve McIntyre’s name. Though Lewandowsky is too busy to post up all of the data he collected two years ago he has time to craft deep and insightful lines, like …”it is easily overlooked that data analysis is also a cognitive activity.” …. O’ Really?
He-who-shall-not-be-named has replied in comments on Lewandowsky’s blog.
stevemcintyre at 02:01 AM on 18 September, 2012
I’ve attempted to replicate the factor analysis results reported in the paper and have not been able to do so based on the information available.
Given the sketchy description of methodology in the paper, I suggest that you place the script for your results online. I’ve regularly done this and found that it both clarifies methodology for readers and adds to their interest.
Your assertion that “SEM permits computation of the error-free associations between constructs,” is a very bold statement in statistical terms and a script implementing that claim would definitely be worth sharing.
Tom Fuller, pro survey writer describes some of the flaws
Among other things Fuller describes the medicalization of dissent, a delicate topic if ever there was one, but so apt. Fuller has done over 1,000 surveys himself, and he lists five flaws, two of which I found particularly interesting:
4. Lewandowsky allowed multiple responses from the same IP address. This means that someone could spam the survey, entering time and again to influence the results. Would they? One of the sites that linked to Lewandowsky’s survey has as part of their secret tribe of activists a person who wrote, “...people like us have to build the greatest guerilla force in human history. Now. Because time is up…Someone needs to convene a council of war of the major environmental movements, blogs, institutes etc. In a smoke filled room (OK, an incense filled room) we need a conspiracy to save humanity” and another who wrote of skeptics, “Sometimes you just want to let loose and scream about how you want to take those motherfucking arseholes, those closed-minded bigotted genocidal pieces of regurgitated dog shit and do unspeakable violence to their bodies and souls for what they are doing to the safety of what and who we all hold dear.” So, yes, they would probably do so in support of their cause.
My thoughts about this are that if you, hypothetically, wanted to find a group of people who would feel motivated to fake up a survey to make skeptics look stupid, where else would you go but Deltoid, Skeptical Science or Tamino? (Not that I’m suggesting that was his aim, I’m just putting a perspective on how poor the choice of sites was.)
5. Lewandowsky discussed the objectives of the survey while the survey was open for responses, so those who wanted to prejudice the results knew they could do so. This alone amounts to research misconduct and is cause for throwing out the results of the survey as well as the paper based on it.
Lewandowsky’s inability to address any of these issues, despite writing a paper describing it and hyping it on a weblog with 8 blog posts in the past week, is evidence that he cannot address them. He simply decided before his research began that climate skeptics are conspiracy theorists and gamed a survey to produce the results he wanted.
Lewandowsky’s site Shaping Tomorrows World has deleted about 50 of Thomas Fullers comments. Strange — since we’re told the skeptics were proving the Lewandowsky hypothesis in droves, you’d think they’d want to leave all the samples of “denier” comments up for show?
Did you see That Survey in 2010? We want to know
Watts Up is looking at participation. See The Lewandowsky participation question: for everyone who did and didn’t notice the survey two years ago. Please help out with a comment. There are 898 responses, mostly of people who didn’t see the survey.
If you saw the survey two years ago, then please also add a comment at this WATTS UP page here. So far there are only 23 responses.
Replicating the Lewandowsky survey (Your chance to answer these questions)
The survey is titled “Climate Skeptics Views Survey” and it is hosted on SurveyMonkey.com. The data collection period is currently set to run until 5 October 2012 at 3:00PM ET (UTC 20:00). I will use the Oct 6th weekend to examine the initial data and plan to publish preliminary results the following week. Final results will be published sometime thereafter (it really depends on how much free time I have to finish the analysis and paper prep).
Your blog readers may access the survey at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/TZC6MNS or by clicking on the following to take the Climate Skeptics Views Survey. (UPDATE: Two skeptics had the same idea. This is not the same as the A Scott survey (password REPLICATE), I am talking behind the scenes to try to compile the two duplicate replicates).
You can also Vote on Watts Up: Has Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky usurped Dr. Michael Mann as the most irrationally emotive spokesman for climate alarmism?
Debate is fierce in the thread. Commenters are undecided, but Foxgoose takes a leaf from Shaping Tomorrows World. Those who have read Lewandowsky will appreciate it.
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9.6 out of 10 based on 63 ratings
When activists protest about “fossil fuel” subsidies, it is a case of extreme-wordsmithing. Like chinese-whispers, the truth gets turned 180 degrees. It takes a string of half truths stacked in a series to come up with something which is so completely counter to reality it is meaningless.
The reality is that governments around the world are paying billions each year to prop up an industry that is inefficient, uncompetitive and unproductive. It’s money that is desperately needed in health or in real medical and scientific research.
“More than US$70 billion of support is provided by governments to renewable energy production and consumption worldwide.”
[IEA (The International Energy Agency, which promotes “green energy” in it’s header)]
That’s an annual figure. And the plan seems to be even more subsidies. (I thought the plan was to make renewables competitive?)
Source: IEA Key Graphs
Could it be $200 billion?
This UN group has an even higher number. I don’t know exactly how they define “green stimulus” spending, perhaps it was a one-off:
[UNCTAD]
“Green government procurement will also be essential in the early stages of a transition to a green economy. In 2009, global green stimulus spending reached $200 billion.”
To put that in perspective, the combined profit of the largest five oil companies (BP, Conoco, Exxon, Chevron, Shell) was $140 billion.
To earn those government subsidies renewables produced about 1% of global energy, while those five companies produced 15 million barrels of oil a day.
But wait, aren’t fossil fuel subsidies even larger?
According to the IEA “Yes”, ten times larger! E’Gad. But something seems fishy about that, after all we know that every time we fill the tank at the bowser we personally subsidize the government and not the other way around. So let’s look more closely at what those subsidies mean. Everyone wants these evil fossil fuel subsidies to stop, it could provide half the answer to climate change (who knew subsidies to fuel companies were half responsible for floods, droughts, storms and sea levels rising?)
In Western nations, they mean “tax deductions” for fossil fuel companies. Where a subsidy for renewable energy is a handout from the government, a “subsidy” for fossil fuel company means the government lets them keep some of the money they earned.
Here’s how the SMH phrased it when discussing the situation in Australia:
The biggest fossil fuel incentives were in unclaimed revenue, including about $5 billion in fuel tax rebates for greenhouse-intensive industries.
More than $1.1 billion was spent on fringe benefits tax concessions for company cars.
Groups like Greenpeace and The Australian Conservation Foundation argue that really, Governments are helping fossil fuel companies far more than green ones. But while governments rewrite national economies to help “green” companies, about half of the help for fossil fuels is simply that the government didn’t take as much off them as it could. The net flow of money is still from Big-Fossil-Energy towards Big-Government. It takes a special kind of grand entitlement to call that a subsidy.
Indeed you could argue that fossil fuels subsidize the government. Exxon paid 17.6% tax (2008-1020 data). That may sound a lowish rate, but how does it compare to other companies in other sectors? If there is a “tax avoidance” issue, how is that unique to fossil fuels? Doesn’t every big company do their best? GE after all, earned $21 bn for renewables, and paid 0% tax.
National Geographic have done an excellent interactive map — here’s an image from it:
 In the National Geographic Map (not here) you can Source: National Geographic
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9.1 out of 10 based on 74 ratings
 When is a free market not free? When it doesn’t do what the bureaucrats wanted it to “freely do”. There is a message from this-pale-shadow-of-a-global-carbon-free-market and it’s telling us that carbon (dioxide) should be free, as in $0, no cost, no fee, no tax.
CDM’s (Clean Development Mechanisms) were set up in 1997 with Kyoto. It is separate from the EU market, and is one of the only “global” carbon markets.
Global carbon trading system has ‘essentially collapsed’
The UN clean development mechanism, designed to give poor countries access to green technologies, is in dire need of rescue
Fiona Harvey, environment correspondent
The world’s only global system of carbon trading, designed to give poor countries access to new green technologies, has “essentially collapsed”, jeopardising future flows of finance to the developing world.
Billions of dollars have been raised in the past seven years through the United Nations‘ system to set up greenhouse gas-cutting projects, such as windfarms and solar panels, in poor nations. But the failure of governments to provide firm guarantees to continue with the system beyond this year has raised serious concerns over whether it can survive.
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9.4 out of 10 based on 79 ratings
Stephan Lewandowsky, Gilles Gignac, Klaus Oberauer Stephen Lewandowsky’s paper, soon to be published in Psychological Science, appears to be drawn from one or two grants from the Australian Research Council that total nearly a million dollars (though it’s not entirely clear which grants apply to the paper).
“If you wonder, like I do, whether the Australian taxpayer gets value for money, ponder that somewhere a cancer researcher was denied funding in order for Lewandowsky to do his work”
One grant, which he shares with coauthor Dr Klaus Oberauer, was for $694,000 for research on “Keeping Memory Current: Updating and Discounting of Information“. Apparently it is of national benefit, because: “Basic research in psychology is of particular national benefit because the available national research funding is commensurate with the requirements of world-class research in psychology.” “World class” does not usually mean research based on a logical error with a sample too small to be statistically significant and using a self-selecting, unsecure, sample from sites that detest the research group. Aside from that, the sentence itself is circular bureaucratese-babble. What does it mean? Is he suggesting that research in basic psychology is useful because taxpayer funds are only given to world class research? Since when was government funding itself a guarantor of “world class”? The other grant, which he shares with co-author Dr Gilles Gignac, was for $244,000 and called “Categorization and Working Memory: Bridging two Pillars of Cognition.” Both of those two grants finished in 2011, so apparently do not provide funding for 2012.
Above this, he has received a grant of $765,000 to further study the role of intelligence in “expertise”. Hmm.
 UWA: Achieving International Excellence, or international notoriety? Who is responsible for the decision to fund this work?
If you wonder, like I do, whether the Australian taxpayer gets value for money, ponder that somewhere a cancer researcher was denied funding in order for Lewandowsky to do his work. Instead of helping people with motor neuron disease, say, or Parkinsons, our government directed money to the overtly politicized team to find reasons why people who speak against government-appointed experts (but not independent experts) are likely to be mentally deficient “conspiracy theorists”, even if they personally have never espoused the conspiracies named in the UWA media release. Surely this is government-funded denigration by association.
If you are concerned, it’s worth focusing on the Australian Research Council (ARC), which made the decision to fund Lewandowsky and UWA so generously (how much does an internet survey cost?). The man responsible for the ARC is Senator Chris Evans, Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills, Science and Research. He needs to justify why our funds are being used this way.
Why does the Australian Labor Party use taxpayer resources for name-calling professors to do incompetent research, to come up with conclusions that are not meaningful for public policy, and indeed which unfairly and flagrantly disparages the views of half the voting public?
Some flaws in Lewandowsky et al 2012:
- The entire work is based on a logical fallacy — argument from authority — but particularly, that experts paid by the government are 100% right, and independent scientists are 100% wrong or corrupt. Lewandowsky cannot name empirical evidence to support his base assumptions about a complex scientific phenomenon in an immature scientific field, and does not take into account that committees, associations, the “peer reviewed” scientific process are human activities dependent on imperfect human opinion and potentially corruptible. If his assumption is wrong, everything about his research is meaningless, yet he does not reference empirical climate evidence.
- His sample size is too small to be statistically meaningful. This single point on its own prevents any meaningful scientific conclusions about “conspiracy ideation”.
- His sampling method was likely to be scammed by fake responses, and if the responses that are likely to be fake are removed his conclusions would be entirely different. He did not take adequate precautions to stop fake responses, even though his conclusions are utterly dependent on them (see Steve McIntyres analysis). His use of vitriolic anti-skeptic sites made the fake responses nearly inevitable, and the nature of the fake responses (like a belief that smoking doesn’t cause cancer) matches misinformation on those anti-skeptic sites rather than any belief ever cited by real skeptics. His work fails by his own standards: He describes a different survey as worthless because they cannot verify the integrity of the data, but he cannot verify his own data.
- Lewandowsky has not reported 25% of the answers to his questions, nor the results of a version hosted by an internal UWA site, leaving open questions of “cherry picked” conclusions.
- He frequently uses unscientific name-calling that he has not justified either in English or scientific terms. What scientific observations do “deniers” deny, or do “deniers” simply deny that official government positions are 100% right?
- He defines “science” as a consensus conclusion which is counter to the scientific method, and breaks a basic tenet of science that conclusions are based on empirical evidence and not on opinions.
- Despite basing his conclusions on something called “Conspiracy Ideation” he is unable to define conspiracy scientifically, evidently defining a conspiracy as a theory that he personally does not agree with.
- A researcher with an equal but opposite personal bias could produce exactly the opposite conclusion (but without basing their work on a logical fallacy) by creating a self-selecting on-line survey that asks questions about green left conspiracies, posting it on anti-green sites, and with only a sample of 10 positive responses “show” that those who believe in man-made global warming did so because they held anti-free market philosophies, because they gullibly assumed that government funded work was always right, and because they believed in outlandish conspiracy theories that fossil fuel corporations were funding thousands of scientists. These conspiracy theorists denied conclusive documented evidence showing that funding for man-made global warming was 3,500 times larger than funding for skeptics of the theory and that large fossil fuel corporations were actively lobbying for carbon markets(see point 2) rather than against them.
In response to claims that the “faked data” neutralized his conclusions, Lewandowsky retroactively deleted references to it in comments on his publicly funded site, wrote attempted parody instead of an answer, and then finally claimed he was right because he could find at least three examples of people who say things that (without any investigation) appear to be nutty, despite evidence that some believers of man-made global warming espouse equally nutty things. The truth or not of a theory and influence of a group will not be decided by analyzing the fringe extreme. He cannot find a single leader of the skeptic movement who espouses any of the conspiracies he claims are important. There are no blog posts among the “greatly involved” climate skeptics about Diana being murdered, HIV being manufactured nor moon-landings being faked.
Is Psychology a Science?
If the field of psychology wants to be taken seriously as a science, where are the scientific psychologists speaking out against this poor paper with highly unscientific conclusions?
Is UWA “excellent”?
If UWA wants to be taken seriously as “achieving international excellence”, where are the UWA staff members who hold higher standards? Which scientists at UWA are prepared to speak up to say that Lewandowsky is not representative of the standards of their work?
The Bottom line:
This kind of unscientific poor standard work would not get attention or have any credibility if it were not funded by the Australian Government. According to his 28 page CV he claims to have been a part of $4.4m in grants.
Nice work if you can get it.
If we do not demand higher standards and turn off the tap filling this well of personal bias dressed as research, we’re letting good scientists down, we’re letting hard working tax-payers down, and we’re letting our children down.
See below for details of the funding…
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9.1 out of 10 based on 120 ratings
Yet more observations from the planet show that modelers misunderstand the water based part of the climate – on our water based planet.
Modelers thought that dry ground would decrease afternoon storms and rainfall over those frazzled parched lands (though I don’t remember many headlines predicting “More Drought means Fewer Storms” ). But observations show that storms are more likely to rain over dry soil. Why? Probably the dry soil heats up faster than moist areas thanks to the cooling effect of evaporation, and that in turn creates stronger thermals over dry land. Modelers assumed that wetter soils means more evaporation and thus more rain, but the moisture laden air is evidently coming from further away.
It’s another example of a point where climate modelers assume a positive feedback, yet the evidence suggests the feedback is negative. Once again water appears to be the dominant force with feedbacks (it does cover 70% of the surface). In a natural stable system the net feedbacks are likely to be negative. Positive feedbacks make the system less stable (and more scary and harder to predict.)
Climate change models misjudge drought: “A four-nation team led by Chris Taylor from Britain’s Centre for Ecology and Hydrology looked at images from weather satellites which track the development of storm clouds across the globe.”
“The data trawl covered six continents, looking at surface soil moisture and rainfall patterns on daily and three-hourly time steps, with a resolution of 50 to 100 kilometres, over a decade.
“It’s tempting to assume that moist soils lead to higher evaporation, which in turn stimulates more precipitation,” said Wouter Dorigo of the Vienna University of Technology, a co-author.
“This would imply that there is a positive feedback loop: moist soils lead to even more rain, whereas dry regions tend to remain dry… (But) these data show that convective precipitation is more likely over drier soils.”
 Click to enlarge Compare it to the model predictions:
 Click to enlarge
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9.3 out of 10 based on 52 ratings
From Charlie Dunmore, Reuters: E xclusive: EU to limit use of crop-based biofuels – draft law
Another green goodwill project (that just happens to be worth billions) is facing the bad news that the bureaucrats are fingering the axe. A leaked EU proposal to cut public subsidies to biofuels is quite a u-turn. Only three years ago the EU raved about biofuels.
The plans also include a promise to end all public subsidies for crop-based biofuels after the current legislation expires in 2020, effectively ensuring the decline of a European sector now estimated to be worth 17 billion euros ($21.7 billion) a year.
If you are wondering how serious they are, read this:
“The (European) Commission is of the view that in the period after 2020, biofuels should only be subsidized if they lead to substantial greenhouse gas savings… and are not produced from crops used for food and feed,” the draft said.
Well that’s it then isn’t it? If they actually have to reduce emissions that kills it off right there, but just to make sure, they must also not be taken from the mouths of people or animals.
Under the proposals, the use of biofuels made from crops such as rapeseed and wheat would be limited to 5 percent of total energy consumption in the EU transport sector in 2020.
Such a limit will throw into doubt the EU’s binding target to source 10 percent of road transport fuels from renewable sources by the end of the decade, the vast majority of which was expected to come from crop-based biofuels.
Call me a cynic, but I would think the state of the EU basket-case-economy could be forcing some people to do sensible things, though I’m heartened to see that at least they say they doing it because of the science. Someone has noticed that protecting ugly black coal deposits deep underground means sacrificing juicy verdant forests on the surface.
“… crop-based biodiesel has a worse carbon footprint than normal diesel. “
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9.6 out of 10 based on 74 ratings
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 paper.
It’s an unusual professional demeanor to write as a professor of science in a genre of attempted-parody. The dismissive, puerile efforts to mock those who are seriously dissecting his work are not contributing much to humankind’s knowledge. For a man too busy to answer questions vital to his work, why try his hand at comedy?
Shame about those public funds eh?
The man is supposed to be an expert on the topic of conspiracies, yet can’t define them scientifically, espouses conspiracies himself, and is blind to that because he thinks his conspiracies are proven facts. (Where are all those cheques from Big-oil that have more effect than the billions that are documented as vested interests for the case-for-alarm?) Furthermore, he made the unlikely claim that questions from skeptics about his methodology amounted to proof of “conspiratorial thinking” — despite there being no conspiracy or co-conspirators postulated, just his own incompetent work. If this is how the man defines “conspiracies”, no wonder he has so much trouble writing surveys on the topic. Skeptics asked which blogs he had contacted for his research. He behaved as if it were unreasonable to expect him to back up his statements, or provide emails done for publicly funded work.
UPDATE: A day after we skeptics figured out who four of the five bloggers were, and I updated the page here, Lewandowsky finally gives up the names still claiming (improbably) that he needed special approval to release emails that were never private, and never under an ethical question in the first place. He admonishes skeptics for “outing” his assistant, and says they should have searched their inbox instead — except they did, they searched under “Lewandowsky”, “Oberauer” and “Gignac” (as any rational person would). Lewandowsky still hasn’t explained why he personally contacted the anti-skeptic blogs, but not the key skeptical ones. Stephan claims skeptics do shoddy record keeping, yet he’s the one who didn’t bother searching the internet to find his own survey was hosted by junkscience.
It’s all about the perception
To keep face, and and some semblance of “winning”, he ignores the major flaws in his work, and posts somewhat triumphantly on minor points. The headline result in the paper was, after all, only from four responses from so-called “skeptics” on the moon landing conspiracy, some, or all of which were likely to be fake responses. If he had surveyed the audience he wrote the paper about (instead of asking those who virulently dislike the group in question), it goes without saying (or it ought to) that the results “might” be different.
Despite being a professor of psychology, Lewandowsky was baffled that this was an issue. He seems to think that results would be the same no matter what site the survey was hosted on:
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9.2 out of 10 based on 89 ratings
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 were “skeptics” (a bit over 20% of the total). So the proportion of “skeptics” who believed the 911 conspiracy — which falls on that line — was exactly the same as the proportion as alarmists who supported it.
 Figure 1. For all ‘skeptics’ disagreeing with CO2HasNegChange, showing count for each conspiracy against skeptic proportion. (Steve McIntyre graphs the number of responses to conspiracies against the share that is “skeptical” of man-made global warming. ) Graph: ClimateAudit The “smoking-doesn’t-cause-cancer-conspiracy” is a signature of a fake response
The points that are on the top left of the graph are the more outlandish conspiracies, especially the “smoking” point which ranks right at the top. In my opinion this is a signature point. Skeptics don’t believe that conspiracy, but alarmists have been trained to think skeptics do. The high rank there is the “Oreskes Effect”.
After 120,000 comments on this blog, I can’t recall a single skeptic who thinks smoking doesn’t cause cancer, nor do I remember reading a comment on it on any other skeptic blog, nor have I even heard a hint of it in an email. But the two issues are often tied in alarmist propaganda. Like here on un-SkepticalScience (“Skeptic arguments about cigarette smoke – sound familiar?”). This “denial-wiki” (“Major targets of denialism include the link between smoking and lung cancer”). See also here (“Smoking Causes Cancer; Carbon Pollution Causes Extreme Weather” ) wikipedia, here (“Climate change is the same as smoking….”) and here. Jim Hoggan (Mr DeSmog himself) said: Soon … these deniers will look as foolish as the scientists who once claimed that smoking did not cause cancer.
Frequently people like Naomi Oreskes claim Fred Singer and others have doubted that smoking causes cancer, something which is an outright misrepresentation (see my point #3 here). Singer wrote about the statistical failures of the passive smoking case, which is scientifically entirely different from the well documented link between smoking and cancer. Given that this dishonest material is circulated widely on alarmist blogs, it’s likely that all 11 of those responding “yes” to that conspiracy question are the fakers, dutifully ticking off the boxes they have been trained to tick.
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9.5 out of 10 based on 65 ratings
 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.
9.8 out of 10 based on 49 ratings
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 not science because he moves the goal posts to a spot where he will get a positive correlation. It more or less doesn’t matter where he kicks the ball, it will land in the goal because the goal will move to accommodate the ball.
The key point here is that some conspiracies are real, most are not. Those who believe all of them are nutters, but those who believe none are gullible patsy fools. So who has the wand of truth? Who decides what is “real”. As I said in May 2010 “Conspiracy Theorist” is his name-calling fairy dust.
Lewandowsky uses his Magic Fairy Debating Dust to preemptively stop discussions of climate science evidence. If anyone complains against any mainstream position on anything, he can define whatever it is as a “conspiracy theory”. Then his omnipotent powers as a cognitive scientist kick in. I quote: “The nature of conspiracy theories and their ultimate fate is reasonably well understood by cognitive scientists”.He who knows can foresee the ultimate fate of all conspiracy theories. A handy talent which could save us doing expensive Royal Commissions, or Supreme Courts, or heck, we could just use this talent to save us the bother of any courts or commissions or investigations at all.
So God and Lewandowsky, apparently, can always tell the difference between a whistle-blower and conspiracy theorist.
The Prof of Psychology chews through the English language, converting the normal use of the word “conspiracy” into something different:
Lewandowsky tries to define conspiracist ideation in terms of belief in “mad” ideas, such as that the moon landing was faked, but by doing this he ends up with a definition that is really only limited to belief in certain conspiracies, not a tendency to believe in conspiracies per se.
What’s the truth and what’s a false conspiracy? There is often no way to know. The conspiracies which made the list appear to be the ones Stephan “knows” are false:
… his first problem is that what he defines as a conspiracy (which in his terms seems to be something which people believe in, but which he doesn’t believe exists) is that there is no objective test of whether the conspiracy exists or not.
So he decides on a subjective basis what is a conspiracy, which means he has no scientific basis for his definition.
Graham makes the astute observations that some conspiracies were not included in the survey.
There is a conspiracy theory that global warming skeptics are funded by big oil. Lewandowsky excludes this from his list. His writings confirm that he believes in this conspiracy. Why isn’t it on the list? The fact that it isn’t indicates that he isn’t interested in “conspiracist ideation” in general, but only specific conspiracies.
Here’s the big money conspiracy Stephan didn’t ask about, that’s posted on hundreds of blogs. Here’s a typical example:
[Stolen documents that are] Revealing to the public the active, vicious, and well-funded campaign of denial that seeks to delay action against climate change likely constitutes a classic public good.
Who believes this baseless line about the big funds that no one can document? Stephan Lewandowsky (h/t Foxgoose). Any funds sent to Heartland are dwarfed by the money rolling through science, carbon trading and renewables. Who thinks that stealing documents through deception is OK, if it reveals 1% of his pet conspiracy? Professor Lewandowsky.
Who believes that corporate funded media could deceive large segments of the population?
…without vigorous competition and meaningful legal checks, there is no reason why a privately-owned media conglomerate could not create an Orwellian environment that deceives politicians and large segments of the public alike.
Stephan Lewandowsky The Conversation, 29 August 2011
Graham points out that if you only look for “big-government” type conspiracies, but leave out “big-corporate” ones, it’s hardly surprising when you find a link where people who don’t believe official government answers tend not to believe in the biggest big-government theory there is: man-made global warming.
If we looked for people who don’t trust the free market, we’d quite probably also find people who believe big-corporate conspiracies.
——————————————–
Don’t miss Part II of a Fish rots from the Head. Drop in, read it all, and thank Graham
——————————————-
PART I Lewandowsky – Shows “skeptics” are nutters by asking alarmists to fill out survey
PART II 10 conspiracy theorists makes a moon landing paper for Stephan Lewandowsky (Part II) PLUS all 40 questions
PART III here Lewandowsky hopes we meant “Conspiracy” but we mean “Incompetence”
PART IV Steve McIntyre finds Lewandowsky’s paper is a “landmark of junk science”
PART V Lewandowsky does “science” by taunts and attempted parody instead of answering questions
——————————————
REFERENCE:
(If you could call it that)
Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, C. E. (in press). NASA faked the moon landing—therefore (climate) science is a hoax: An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science.. Psychological Science.
9.4 out of 10 based on 81 ratings
The NZ court case of skeptics versus NIWA has come down against the skeptics.
The National Business Review does tabloid-style sensational namecalling in the headline (does it consider itself to be a proper newspaper?)
“Climate change deniers shot down in NIWA court challenge”
Judge Geoffrey Venning threw out claims by the NZ Climate Science Education Trust that the Crown Research Institute known as NIWA breached its statutory duties, were mistaken in fact, failed to consider mandatory considerations and acted unreasonably in publishing its work.
NIWA will be entitled to costs, which are yet to be set, as a result of the case, Justice Venning’s judgment says.
Why did the skeptics lose? According to the news report, it was not because NIWA provided good answers, or found the missing data, but because the skeptics didn’t have “authority” to question it.
Some evidence in the case was ruled inadmissible, including that of Terry Dunleavy, a former journalist who is a founding member of the trust and secretary of the associated NZ Climate Science Coalition.
Justice Venning says Dunleavy “has no applicable qualifications” and “his interest in the area does not sufficiently qualify him as an expert”.
He also questioned the credentials of Bob Dedekind, a computer modelling and statistical analyst whose “general expertise in basic statistical techniques does not extend to any particular specialised experience of qualifications in the specific field of applying statistical techniques in the field of climate science”.
Perhaps the judgement is quite different from what the NZ Business Review reported, but unless it is, the outcome had nothing to do with science, but everything to do with a logical fallacy.
What’s unnerving about this is that if “authority” is determined not by behavior, logic or quality of reasoning, but simply by government decree, then the court becomes a de facto arm of the government — because only people who are funded by the government (all “climate scientists” are funded by government) can give evidence that the court recognizes. Who can criticize and hold government or statutory authorities to proper standards? Not the citizens, for they are not “qualified”.
If non-experts protested unfairly at the NIWA results, surely NIWA would find it easy to explain why they were wrong, and a judge would be more than capable understanding, but if NIWA is not even expected to answer those questions then no justice has been done.
The credibility of NIWA staff ought to rest on their record rather than their titles. The unscientific behaviour of Jim Salinger and others is endorsed by the court, apparently, as long as they are paid by the government.
The courts are supposed to be independent of the government. When these two institutions are effectively working together we lose one of the major safeguards of democracy. All the more reason to fight to keep the free press, free. What else is left?
And again, we get the line that NIWA is OK, because it’s just as bad and incompetent as all the other agencies around the world which adjust data without detailed explanations, and which lose data ad hoc:
“I am satisfied that the methodology applied by NIWA was in accordance with internationally recognised and credible scientific methodology,” Justice Venning says.
This decision is all the more preposterous given that even the highly questionable Australian BOM obviously didn’t endorse the NIWA methods and after asking for an Australian BOM review, NIWA went to extraordinary lengths to hide that review. Did they hide that review, because it would have lent support to the very evidence the so-called “non-experts” put forward?
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9 out of 10 based on 60 ratings
Jinan Cao has been dissecting the nature of the greenhouse effect and a key calculation that I normally just accept without questioning. This will set a few pigeons loose, but it will be interesting to see where they land. The claims analyzed here are the oft repeated ones that the Earth’s greenhouse effect already warms us by 33°C and that a doubling of CO2 directly causes a 1.1°C rise (that’s with no feedbacks taken into account).
Jinan points out that these numbers, repeated as “fact”, are merely a result of misuse of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. If Earth is not a perfect black body, but has an emissivity of 0.7 (as satellites suggest), then the temperature of the planet’s surface without any greenhouse effect would not be -18°C, but more like 5°C. That would mean the entire warming due to the greenhouse effect is only around 10°C, not the more impressive 33°C that is usually claimed. It means the greenhouse effect is probably less important than implied.
The 1.1°C direct rise that is predicted from doubling CO2 without feedbacks would also need to be recalculated. This paper does not try to do that, but if Jinan is right, that figure would be significantly lower too. Jinan looks at how that figure was derived. David Evans has been helping review Jinan’s work and writes the introduction below. — Jo
 This is the official IPCC version of the Earths Energy Budget as shown in the IPCC AR4 in 2007. Introduction by Dr David Evans
The Stefan-Boltzmann equation describes how much radiation (energy) is given off by a body, such as a planet or a layer of air. It figures extensively in climate science, especially in simple calculations of where energy is flowing on average as the earth radiates heat into space as infrared radiation.
The Stefan-Boltzmann equation is used to obtain known nostrums of the climate debate, such as “it would be 33C cooler without greenhouse gases” and “the direct (no feedbacks) effect of doubling the CO2 levels is to raise the surface temperature by about 1.1C”. The equation is a standard one in physics. Its application to radiation from the earth can be done by any physicist or scientist; only a very rudimentary knowledge of climate science is required. (No mystical climate science secret knowledge relevant here; the laws of arithmetic and physics are sufficient.)
Jinan Cao clinically dissects several of these applications of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation and finds it has been sloppily applied. Do you think the errors in application by the climate science community work in the direction of understating, or overstating, the role of CO2? Jinan’s article, although technical, is not difficult.
This paper will ruffle a few feathers and deserves a fair hearing. It brings up valid points, and challenges the application of the SB equation that are, by everyone’s admission, somewhat unsatisfactory.
Today’s climate scientists will attempt to laugh off these criticisms by saying that their models are much more sophisticated and accurate than the crude 0-D models considered when applying the SB equation. (A 0-D model treats the earth as a point, with zero dimensions. A 1-D model takes account of one dimension, either height in the atmosphere or latitude. A 3-D model treats the earth as having latitude, longitude, and height.)
But there are two problems with this defense. The first is authority. We don’t know what goes on inside these models, so are we supposed to just take the word of their modelers, that they have got it right? The models are too opaque and not open to public scrutiny, so this amounts to argument by authority. As the motto of the Royal Society says, take the word of nobody. The second problem is that today’s climate science community have demonstrated a habit of exaggerating issues even as straightforward as death threats, so how might they handle issues as vital to their funding as the importance of greenhouse gases to our well-being?
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8.7 out of 10 based on 61 ratings
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 it didn’t.
Furthermore, the questions and the aim of the survey was so transparent (see below) that commenters on the sites where it was hosted openly discussed whether “deniers” (the obvious targets) would be fooled by them.
Graham from OnlineOpinion was so struck by the study he’s written a post titled: Fish rot from the head Part 1.
He uses this paper to ask questions about falling standards of Australian university academics. “If credentialled, well-funded and tenured tertiary institution staff are capable of dishing-up research which should fail an undergraduate, what chance have lower echelons.”
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky’s… latest project is a study entitled MOTIVATED REJECTION OF SCIENCE and sub-titled “NASA faked the moon landing|Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science”.
It could have been sub-titled “The man who polled his prejudices and mistook them for the facts”. Prof Lewandowsky’s paper is certainly motivated, but it is not scientific or competent.
Visit Online opinion to read his Part I analysis with graphs. It also includes links to the full screenshots of the survey — Graham was so astonished at the survey back in 2010, he kept the images. I’ve transcribed them below.
Graham and I both wonder why there were 40 42 questions in the original survey, but only 32 in the data tables of results. What happened to the demographics data and the other missing questions? It may mean nothing, but sometimes what is left out tells a story all of it’s own.
Questions 28 to 32 have also been removed. It was a mystery to me why they were in there in the first place as they ask how I feel about my life. That they play no part in the paper suggests that whatever theory was being investigated using them failed to pan out. If this is the case it is bad practice… not to report the failure.
Graham points out that there were two substantial findings in the paper: one on people who believe in free markets, and one for people who believe in conspiracies. There were between 80 – 244 respondents who felt strongly about a free market, and, depending on the conspiracy, there were between 3 and 289 who ticked “yes”. Graham adds up the numbers of people who agreed with the conspiracies mentioned in the press release: AIDS (9), Moon landing (10), Princess Diana (25), SARS (42) and Climate Change (134).
He will be publishing more on this, as will I.
Thanks to Australian Climate Madness, ManicBeanCounter (who has pivot tables), Lucia, and Anthony Watts
UPDATE Are there two or three different forms of the survey?
Geoff Chambers tells me that Leopard on the Bishop Hill thread has noted that Steve McIntyre is asking Lewandowsky why there are two or even three different forms of the survey? Why indeed?
Paul follows them up:
The Deltoid, Tamino, Mandia and Hot-Topic blogs were sent the survey number surveyID=HKMKNF_991e2415 on about August 29th. That survey is on the archive, and starts with 6 questions about free markets.
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9.1 out of 10 based on 60 ratings
Why do we need a carbon tax? A study by John Reilly candidly “explains” (albeit indirectly) why this is not and has never been about the environment. It’s all about power and money — specifically $1,500 billion dollars of it over 10 years. What better excuse to raise funds for politicians? They pretend to save the planet and use the funds to buy votes from people who don’t realize that they themselves pay for the “free” handouts — if not with their dollars, then with their jobs.
This is another piece of magic-pie economics:
A carbon tax would take pressure off Congress to find “tradeoffs” between closing the deficit gap and reviving the economy, according to John Reilly, an author of the study.
“Congress will face many difficult tradeoffs in stimulating the economy and job growth while reducing the deficit,” Reilly, the co-director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, said in a statement.
“But with the carbon tax there are virtually no serious tradeoffs. Our analysis shows the overall economy improves, taxes are lower and pollution emissions are reduced.
The study found that taxing carbon at $20 per ton would generate $1.5 trillion in revenue in a 10-year period. That could be used to reduce corporate and personal income taxes and maintain social services spending, all while reducing the deficit.”
So if there are no tradeoffs, why not make the price $40/ton? Why not $100? $1,000?
The report writers assume that governments would use the revenue to decrease other taxes, so it would not increase the size of government. But putting aside the fact that governments are all too willing to promise cuts they never deliver, it’s never good policy to make policy for the wrong reason. There are always perverse outcomes. If the US wants a flat tax, then do suggest one, but don’t make a monster out of a fertilizer-gas.
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9.6 out of 10 based on 56 ratings
Anna Rose is the head of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition. She visited us with Nick Minchin to film the doco “I can change your mind” and has produced a book called Madlands about the filming of the doco. Another author, David Mason Jones, has written a review and comes at this from a fairly neutral background. Anna’s approach, which is essentially an ad hom from beginning to end, punctuated with other fallacies, was evident when we met her, and sadly been amplified in her book. When they have no evidence, they attack the messenger. — Jo
[See our one-page version of this whole issue.]
Guest Post by David Mason-Jones
A review of ‘Madlands: a journey to change the mind of a climate sceptic’ by Anna Rose. Melbourne University Press. ISBN9780522861693
His site: www.journalist.com.au
Dare not peer into the forbidden room …
…. and dare not speak to the unspeakable people. Dare not test the nasty taboos and dare not open the Pandora’s box labelled ‘the nature of the scientific process’. Above all, do not admit the integrity of the people on the other side of the debate in which you are involved. Instead, smear and ridicule your opponents remorselessly before looking at their arguments.
These seem to be the guiding principles of Anna Rose’s somewhat less-than-intellectual approach in her book, ‘Madlands: a journey to change the mind of a climate sceptic.’ The approach Anna takes is to turn the sceptics we are about to meet into non-persons – or persons who are easy to hate, villains. The effect of doing this is to make it easy for the reader to dismiss their arguments with hardly a thought.
Anna carefully character assassinates all the sceptical people she is about to introduce. She then gives them a fairly cursory hearing, ignores their arguments, and responds with personal attack and ridicule, appealing to the twin arguments of authority and consensus all the way.
The adjectives Anna assigns to adherents of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis are; eminent, highly respected, thorough, forward thinking, moderate and polite, intellectual, diplomatic, world-renowned, progressives and mainstream. Sceptics are described with derogatory words and terms like; attack dogs, more than a touch arrogant, fringe, wackiest, plays dirty, bizarre, contrarian, nutty, abrasive, notorious, bullying, dishonourable tactics, gang, cyber bullying, sexist, curious (in a derogatory context), petulant, bitter, web of denial, ideological warriors, generating hate towards climate scientists, and warped world vision. This sets the scene for the tone of her work.
“In the inquisitions the inquisitors had to climb up into every last village, high in the mountains of France and Spain, to track down every last heretic…”
After you are only part way through the book, the set-piece use of these descriptors starts to wear thin. If you have an honest desire to read Anna’s point of view, it becomes harder and harder to do so objectively as you become aware that the writer is endlessly outlining her ‘good-versus-evil’ view of the debate.
Special vilification is reserved by Anna to demolish the character of Professor Richard Lindzen who she implies is just a nutty professor. In her terms, he is a ‘used to be’. Anna tries to malign him as an old man with the evil habit of smoking, and makes out that she even struggled to breathe. I do not know Professor Lindzen, and I have never been to his house, but I understand that while he is a smoker, he doesn’t smoke in the area where Anna was. [Editors note: Anna’s attack is a measure of Lindzens influence. This is all so irrelevant to anything that matters except to note how far some people will go to vilify their opponents. It tells us all something about Anna, that when I asked Nick Minchin if Lindzen was a smoker, Minchin said he didn’t know, and couldn’t recall any clues from visiting his house. Nick Minchin is a non-smoker too, he’d notice. In an email, Lindzen remarked to me that Anna seemed to be perfectly comfortable while enjoying his hospitality and that the ABC tapes would show that. Message to skeptics: video everything. It means the activists have to stay closer to the truth — Jo]. This shameless attempt to demonize Lindzen, based on his personal habits, has little to do with the question of whether or not he is raising valid scientific objections to the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis? Why can’t the scientific issue be discussed without maligning his personal habits? Should we all, like Anna, feel free to dismantle the credibility of other people, with whom we disagree, based on their personal habits? How far should this license go? Would Anna approve if people on either side of the debate extended her technique to other personal aspects such as; gender, age, race, sexual orientation, body shape, disability, religious affiliation or any other irrelevant characteristic? What are the intellectual processes Anna is trying to set up here?
[Editors note: Richard Lindzen is one of the top meteorologists in the world, with over 200 publications to his name, as well as awards, medals, prizes and is a member of the NAS, AAAS, AGU, AMS. He is The Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his work includes major contributions to our understanding of the Hadley Circulation, small scale gravity waves on the mesosphere, as well as atmospheric tides and oscillations in the tropical stratosphere. That he should face this kind of petty and personal attack is disgraceful. What kind of message does this send to younger, less secure scientists who doubt the IPCC dictat? There is more science, insight and good manners in one article of Richard Lindzen’s than in Anna Rose’s life’s work. – Jo]
Some pages after that she moves on to again to demolish another character. Before we even meet Marc in the book she is already maligning him. Maybe I’m not very widely read but I have not before heard of Marc Morano. I have never visited his blog and, at the time of writing this, still haven’t. So I had no preconceived ideas about him before I read what Anna had to say. After Anna’s onslaught, however, the attitude I had to Marc was that he must be a pretty bad person. This was irrational, I know, especially given the fact that I was already suspicious of her technique of character demolition. But it shows that character assassination works! It works even with the sceptical reader. It seems to be human nature to be swayed – at least in the first instance – by the rumors and insinuations made by others about someone you don’t even know.
[Editors note: I do know Marc Morano, who runs the excellent Climate Depot blog. He is ever the gentleman, polite, staunchly patriotic (without being over-the-top), has a wide grin and a warm optimistic nature. He’s a riot to be around, the life of the party, and genuinely considerate, always diplomatic, and not domineering in ways that smooth talking effusive people can sometimes be. In short, — I’d work with him any day, he’s a delight to be around, and inspiring to watch in action. A hero in his relentless quest to get the true story told. — Jo]
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9.4 out of 10 based on 97 ratings
A Disinformation Statement by the
Armenian Meteoastrological Society
(Adapted by AMS Archdruids 20 August 2012)
As told to Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The following is an AMS Disinformation Statement calculated to provide an untrustworthy, prejudiced, and scientifically-outdated misrepresentation of pseudo-scientific issues of great concern to us in getting more grants but of no concern to those of the public still at large.
Background
This statement provides a brief overview of why we want more money now, and why we will continue to want more money in the future. It is based on a highly-partisan selection from the scientific literature, presented as though science were based upon the ancient logical fallacy of argument from “consensus”, and further distorted by the bureaucrats of the Mental Panel on Climate Change, the US Notional Academy of Science and Television Arts, and the US Global Cash Recoupment Program.
How is our funding changing?
Well, every summer solstice we all dress up in dustsheets and go to Stonehenge to pray for grants. And our prayers have worked! The increase in funding now is unequivocal, according to many different kinds of evidence. Observations show increases in globally averaged grants. We got them by pretending that globally averaged air and ocean temperatures have increased, but in the past 15 years they haven’t. Never mind – our grants have!
For the nation as a whole, there have been twice as many record daily high grants as record daily low grants in the first decade of the 21st century.
We’ve been talking about widespread melting of snow and ice, but that hasn’t really happened either. Sea ice in the Antarctic has actually grown, but of course we don’t mention that: it would spoil the grants.
Meantime, those grants just keep rolling in. In the US, most of the observed grants have occurred in the pockets of Hansen, Mann, Santer, Solomon and other global warming profiteers. All of the 10 best years in the global grant records up to 2011 have occurred since 1997, with grants in most of those years being the greatest in more than a century of global records.
The funding trend is greatest in northern latitudes and over land, though there are some grants for oceanographic research in Hawaii and Tahiti. For the nation as a whole, there have been twice as many record daily high grants as record daily low grants in the first decade of the 21st century.
The effects of these grants are especially evident in the planet’s polar regions. Arctic meteorologists and climatologists have been increasing for the past several decades. Both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have gained significant amounts of grant-gatherers. Most of the world’s glaciers have never been visited (not that that stops us claiming that most of them are retreating), but what with all those grants we’ll soon be able to afford to ski – er, conduct field research – on all of them.
Other grant increases, globally and in the US, are also occurring at the same time. The amount of grants falling in very heavy amounts (we call these the heaviest 1% of all funding precipitation events) has increased over the last 50 years throughout the US. Grant levels are rising in elevation, with fewer and fewer grants frozen and more and more liquidity.
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8.8 out of 10 based on 71 ratings
The line that everyone seems to have missed (or become numbingly inured to) is one where Combet claims that Australians won’t be able to get rid of the carbon price even if they want to:
“(Greg Combet) said the linkage of the schemes would make it more difficult for Mr Abbott to axe the carbon price if the Coalition were elected.” [Source: The Australian]
The spiffy idea, apparently, is that voters won’t have an option of voting to decide a major part of our economic system. The Australian Labor Party’s proud contribution to the national debate is to tell us they have deliberately crafted the legislation that way. We the voters are supposed to be impressed that it will be harder for any newly elected representatives to remove it without major penalties. If the Australian people decide to toss the current government off an electoral cliff, the current government is going to fall, but make the nation pay. Yes, score ten points for Machiavellian behaviour, but I’m not so sure the voters will be impressed when they have to foot the bill.
Over 80% of Australian’s at the last election voted for parties that promised “no carbon tax”, do I need to use the words arrogant and undemocratic?
I suppose the smile-with-me-excuse is that the ALP “knows what’s best for Australia” and are so smart they can stop the stupid punters from choosing differently? Though a cynic might say that the ALP knows voters hate the carbon tax, and knows that it’s a gift campaign for the opposition to run against it, so they are protecting their political hides by neutering the advantage — bugger the cost to the citizens of Australia. I’m not sure which is worse, narcissistic tyrant, or pragmatic parasite.
It’s traitorously selfish, but where is the evidence that the ALP have higher aims?
The Labor Party were bragging about this back in October 2010, so over the last two years of dismal polls, they still haven’t done any soul searching about the philosophy of what The Australian Labor Party stands for? It tells us much about the current malaise within the Australian Labor Party that no wise elders have quietly advised these hollow men in their party that this is not in the spirit of western democracies. Aren’t the citizens of Australia supposed to decide which policies they want to live by and pay for? If 90% of Australians wanted to remove this legislation, theoretically, the Labor Party have booby-trapped it and there is no way Australians can vote against it to use their resources in ways of their choosing. If that isn’t unconstitutional, it should be.
9.4 out of 10 based on 99 ratings
 Thanks to Steve Hunter Thanks to Steve Hunter illustrations
Victoria’s windfarms have saved virtually no coal from being burnt.
South Australian windfarms have saved 4% of their rated capacity in fossil fuels at a cost of $1,484 per ton.
That’s only $1,474 above the current price of carbon credits per ton in the EU. They are 96% useless, and cost 150 times more than necessary for what they do (except for the times they are more useless and more expensive).
The point of a windfarm is not so much to produce electricity but to reduce greenhouse emissions.
If we built windfarms for the electricity they generate, we’d be better off paying for reliable electrons from cheap brown coal, and using the savings to research a cure for cancer. The point in putting up expensive, infrasonic thumping towers of steel and concrete that kill eagles and explode bat lungs is because it reduces our carbon dioxide emissions, except that it doesn’t really.
Mechanical engineer Hamish Cumming has written a whopper of a report (though I can’t find an online copy of it*). Because Victoria doesn’t have much of a gas powered grid, it can’t take advantage of the odd intermittent peaks of wind power. Like a huge car, the big coal fired plants run best at a steady pace, and all the switching up and down just reduces their mileage so they need more coal per kilowatt.
South Australia does have some gas power, but don’t get too excited, even there, wind farms reduce CO2 statewide by about 1%.
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7.8 out of 10 based on 138 ratings
The Australian Government,via Greg Combet, announced this week that Labor’s version of certainty is the kind that is un-certain. For two years they’ve been emphatically declaring that “Australia needs certainty” or it’s variant, “Business needs certainty” . (Right before that, they were emphatically declaring that “There will be no carbon tax”, so later, when they did exactly what they said they wouldn’t do, we found out what certainty means to the Australian Labor Party. It isn’t the kind of certainty that helps business and voters “establish beyond doubt” what a vote for a Labor Government means.)
While people are saying we have now linked Australia’s carbon “price” (from 2015 onwards) to the EU market. In effect it was linked before, as I mentioned here. Now that link is rearranged. Previously Australian companies could buy ultra cheap EU options but had to top them up to the floor price, but now they won’t have to pay extra to lift it to $15/ton.
Mr Combet said the government was not considering any other changes to the scheme. [Source: The Australian]
Yes, and we believe him don’t we?
Things are slightly more sane than they were last week, but the difference is negligible, and may not come into effect if the Coalition wins the next election a year from now. We are discussing changes to a scheme that may never occur in order to solve a problem that never was.
BlueScope Steel chairman Graham Kraehe said that the government’s move to dump the controversial $15-a-tonne floor price was a “tiny step in the right direction”.
“However it completely fails to address the major issue,” Mr Kraehe said. “For three years until July 2015, Australian businesses already struggling to compete due to a high Australian dollar, high costs and excessive regulation will also be subject to the world’s highest carbon price.” [The Australian]
I explained previously that while Europeans can buy credits for $4 per ton (and Australians will pay $23 — or at least $15) This new move would change that from 2015.
Scott the energy trader puts the changes into perspective with some details
When I spoke to Scott on the phone, the word he used about these changes was “panic”. He said he could not explain the details of this madness easily to the man on the street, but the number of changes, the backflips and the unexpected and random nature of them suggested bureaucrats were in a state of panic.
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9.4 out of 10 based on 61 ratings
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:
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 a Hoax:
An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science”
Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, C. E. (in press) Psychological Science
Faked the Moon landing? Not only do skeptics agree that the moon landing was real, two skeptics actually went to the moon and took photos (that’ll be Harrison Schmidt and Buzz Aldrin). Since many guys with years of top NASA service are skeptics too why doesn’t Lewandowsky ask them if they faked it? This is where cumulative nonsense takes us: the golden path to cosmic inanity.
Given that the survey audience was mostly alarmist (see the blog list above), and the survey’s intent was clear to commenters on those sites (see their comments below), its possible the team has “discovered” that some alarmist readers are prepared to fake the answers that they’d really like to see. The survey was so transparently designed to link climate skeptics with “conspiracy nutters” it would hardly be surprising if a percentage of alarmists readers of those blogs understood what was required, and dutifully performed.
Commenters could see what the survey was “getting at”:
pointer | August 30, 2010 at 11:42 am
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”.
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9.3 out of 10 based on 141 ratings
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