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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 […]
I wondered who was funding Oreskes to fly all the way around the world to deliver two seminars in Perth to audiences of mostly evangelical believers. Michael Kile (Quadrant magazine) reveals more of the details. Presumably she is funded by the Professors-at-large program at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Western Australia (UWA). We still have no details on the amounts.
UWA think achieving “international excellence” is so important they’ve put it in their logo.
…
We see below how many of the UWA hosts benefit from climate change grants, and thus would potentially gain from promoting a baseless smear against critics who threaten their funding or status. These hypocrites are happy to promote the untruth that skeptics are funded to speak, when the they themselves are the ones who benefit financially from a dubious scare campaign. The professors-at-large program is supposed to foster public debate, but four of the ten Oreskes hosts signed a letter seeking to silence a skeptic from speaking at another university.
Who would sponsor an expert that is ignorant of 99.99% of their topic?
Oreskes claims skeptics are funded by big-oil, but misses that most oil companies […]
In response to the ABC doco I Can Change Your Mind, the believers of man-made global warming are out attacking with logical fallacies, cherry picking deceit, and the usual barking mad irrelevant lines about tobacco and AIDS. Desperate eh?
Never before in one day on one post have I enjoyed responding to Mr Unskeptical himself (John Cook), as well as Stefan Lewandowsky (aka Lysenko-strikes-again) and Clive-break-democracy-Hamilton.
John Cook on the ABC website.
Cook is from the University of Queensland, and he runs the ambush site “Skeptical Science” (where even the name of the site is misleading, and where he dutifully parrots the government scientists).
John Cook
His litany of logical errors continues:
He’s still resorting to namecalling with a term he can’t define scientifically. Which paper do we deny John? You’ve had two years to find it, and you still can’t come up with anything better than papers which cheat by changing color schemes, or which use wind-shear instead of thermometers to measure temperature? He’s clinging to that consensus, when evidence is what matters. The fallacy is known as argument from authority — but in science, authority is trumped by data. In contrast, I keep referring to 3,000 ocean […]
What kind of organization receives all its funding from one source, then claims to be “independent?” (Yes, spot another GONGO idea).
The Conversation trumpets that it is “Independent” but it’s funded with $6 million from … the Government. As Tim Blair said “it’s a baby ABC“. (A Government organized “non government” organisation).
The Conversation gets 20,000 readers a day (apparently). According to the Alexa Stats, I single-handedly get about half the global traffic they do. They have an entire nation of university staff to help write stories. I’ve had ten guest authors and have written over 700 posts myself.
(If what they do costs $6 million, does that mean my site is worth $3m? Am I grossly underpaid, or are they grossly overpaid?)
This is another example of the self-growing-cycle of big-government. The site is dominated with stories that favor statist-big-government policies. They break laws of logic and reason, claim that experts are writing, but we non-experts working from home can point out the errors of those with professorships in our spare time, and with no PhD.
Consider the wit and wisdom of one Stefan Lewandowsky — who writes as a Professorial Fellow of a misnamed topic […]
UPDATE: While MediaWatch (ABC) is hassling Jennifer Marohasy, Marc Hendrickx at ABCnewswatch responds in kind, posting an excellent open letter to MediaWatch, asking if they can outline their own scientific qualifications to judge Jennifer Marohasy’s scientific work. ABC staff want to know her motivations, but Marc wants to know theirs. And “given that they employ 11 staff full time” and produce “one 15 minute show per week”, do they consider that this represents good value for the Australian taxpayer? Touche!
Brilliant Marc. It’s a must read.
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Jennifer Marohasy has extraordinary influence. She’s so powerful that the ABC’s Media Watch program has singled her out, asking questions about her income and disclosures that they don’t even bother to ask Tim Flannery. Presumably they don’t think anyone still takes Tim seriously.
They sent her a barrage of questions last Friday, which she hammered in a detailed reply on the weekend. I hear they are still sniffing around anyone they can think of who may know something about Marohasy, asking leading questions and volunteering information that isn’t correct.
Media Watch (aka Witch Hunt) thought this was a question worth asking:
[To Jennifer Marohasy] In your recent opinion […]
The other headline I could have used: Jo Nova and Watts Up graphs used in UEA lectures!
It doesn’t get much better than this. Imagine finding out your work helped to support a university course in a place right at the center of the dogma and unscientific reasoning you are working to expose? Well I’m chuffed. 🙂
Allan Kendall is a lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UEA) with principles and an open mind, who gave his students the whole story. I applaud his brave approach, he would have known he risked castigation and exile in his workplace, and that there would be little reward.
Curiously a small storm erupted on Bishop Hill. Alan Kendall is defending UEA, saying that not everyone or every branch of research at UEA ought to be tarnished with the poor behaviour of the Climate Research Unit. And his behaviour rather proves his point, but many commenters at UEA are bagging him for expecting anyone to take UEA seriously, and in a sense they are right too. Therein lies the rub.
People of Kendall’s quality are either rare or silent at UEA. As long as the Chancellor of UEA continues to deny that […]
What’s the worst thing you could call a scientist? Apparently, a “climate change denier” and “a fraud”.
Even scientists who are hunting Yetis are not suspected of being as evil, unscrupulous and deranged as skeptics-of-the-extent-of the-UN-committee’s-projections-of-man-made-global-warming, aka, “climate-change-deniers”. I mean, who would dare question the UN, eh? It is a collective God, it can’t be wrong — like, say, the Pope in 1633. If they say it’s 3 degrees / 2 degrees /3.3 degrees, whatever, they must be right (even if they do keep changing their mind).
Scientists who are hunting Yetis have no credentials, poor sods and are ripe for a whack.
Who are these “international scientists” who are going to find his Yeti for him? We have been given no names, nor credentials, nor institutions they belong to. I suspect, like so many of the so-called climate-change deniers, they are frauds.
But here’s the thing, I know the author, Darren Curnoe (though it’s been a while), and he’s a really nice guy. We shared a group house once, when I was on the way from science to TV, and he was on the way from TV to science. We had avid conversations about the evolution […]
It’s hard to believe, but not long ago, people used to write to me to tell me not to use the word “skeptic” telling me it had a bad name. “Use the word realist” they said. But I wasn’t going to let the forces of darkness get away with destroying the English language. I’m proud to be a skeptic. I wasn’t giving that word up. And besides, I had a feeling that if we stuck with the truth, the distortion the-newspeak-team had set up would come back to bite them, and I rather wanted to whip them with that.
After all, what’s not to like about the word skeptic (or sceptic):
1565–75; From the Latin scepticus, meaning thoughtful, inquiring
From the Greek : skeptikós, means to consider or examine (akin to skopeîn, meaning: to look, “scope”)
“Skeptic” is a prize worth having.
In Nov 2009 I pointed out the bleeding obvious truth: What’s the opposite of skeptical — gullible. It caught on (if I do say so myself).
And if we are the skeptics, then it followed that they are the Unskeptics and who wants to be an Unskeptical Scientist?
Bitten by their own propaganda campaign, the […]
What are they so afraid of?
It’s all become a media frenzy. Who would have thought that holding an opinion about climate sensitivity due to a trace gas could become a reason to mark someone as an untouchable heretic? Venues are being canceled (and new venues arranged), the media are hunting in packs, and the university witchdoctors are coming out to show how neolithic (but politically correct) their reasoning is.
And they think they are so civilized.
They are stone age tribes with smartphones.
University Witchdoctors — collapse under the hypocrisy of their own reasoning
Academics want climate sceptic’s Lecture cancelled! is the headline on the front page of The West Australian.
Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s serious. We can no longer stand by and watch as once great institutions embarrass themselves with childlike efforts to silence dissent.
Natalie Latter, a PhD Student at UWA, wrote a letter, endorsed by a few other academic types (who ought to have saved her and themselves from such an embarrassing mistake):
“Lord Monckton propounds widely discredited fictions about climate change and misrepresents the research of countless scientists,” says the letter. “With zero peer-reviewed publications, he has declared […]
“Climate denial and the abuse of peer review“
Can someone get Stephan Lewandowsky his medication? His new marketing message is that “deniers” don’t do peer review papers. There’s a curious case of acute-peer-review-blindness (APRB) occurring. It doesn’t matter that there are literally thousands of pages of skeptical information on the web, quoting hundreds of peer reviewed papers, by people far more qualified than a cognitive-psychologist, yet he won’t even admit they exist.
…most climate deniers avoid scrutiny by sidestepping the peer-review process that is fundamental to science, instead posting their material in the internet or writing books.
Dear Stephan, deny this: 900 papers that support skeptics. What is it about these hundreds of papers published in Nature, Science, GRL, PNAS, and Journal of Climate that you find impossible to acknowledge? (And do tell Stephan, if people need to publish peer reviewed material before they venture an opinion on climate science online, how many peer reviewed articles on climate science have you produced?)
Obviously, the real deniers are the people who deny the hundreds of papers with empirical evidence that show the hockey stick is wrong, the world was warmer, the climate changes, and the models are flawed.
9 out of […]
With Jeff ID sadly shutting down the Air Vent, it’s worth a comment on comments, on blogging, and on the strange lifestyle that this is. But given that it’s 11:22pm 12:35pm here, and my office is still full of packed boxes (thanks to the marvellous newly laid wooden floor) tonight is not the time to try to eruditely capture the conditio sine qua non of blogging.
Instead I’ll say I completely understand why Jeff wants some time out (indefinitely). There must be a way to maintain a blog without it taking over all the spare moments in a day, and I’m going to find it, though the compass on my desk is just pointing at the magnet in my hard drive, and there is no GPS in the house.
Thanks for the patience of all the regulars out there who are turning up this month to find an erratic rhythm.
It’s a case of positive feedback
Due to the immediate feedback nature of comments and emails, once a post goes up, it’s easy to… keep posting, in the sense that ideas flow, questions that desperately need answering turn up, things that need debunking arise, and people send in good ideas […]
Stephan Lewandowsky reasons by bad-analogy
How do we know man-made climate change is a mortal threat? Some people discuss radiosondes, but for Lewandowsky, the answers lie in laser surgery, gravity waves, airplanes, bridges, AIDS, nanotechnology, falling apples, and driving cars into brick walls.
On Ad Hominem Unleashed (otherwise known as the ABC), Lewandowsky is working his way through the fallacies season by season — he’s tried argument from authority, he’s hailed expert opinion, and even pretended that expert opinion is evidence.
So now, moving right along into Spring, he’s come to a variation of the “insurance” argument. Having told us how absolutely certain everything is, with a straight face, he’s now telling us it’s uncertain, but basically, since we absolutely definitely know it might be bad, we ought to reject the best source of energy known to humankind, and try all the alternatives, no matter how uncertain they are, even if it kills people. (I’m sure he doesn’t think of it that way, but he might change his mind if he spent a day with a mother in Tanzania who can’t afford to boil drinking water and is nursing a child with typhoid.)
Follow his “thinking”
Lewandowsky is so ahead-of-the-pack […]
John Abraham, University of St Thomas.
What do you do when someone speaks against your faith, sounds authoritative, well informed, and backs everything up with lots of evidence? If you’re sane, you change your mind.
If you are John P. Abraham, a lecturer in fluid mechanics at the University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, you write to a few select scientists distorting what your opponent said, and then collect the infuriated responses. Abraham went on to assemble a list of things Christopher Monckton didn’t say, complained about things he didn’t cite (even if he did and it’s printed on his slides), pretended he couldn’t find sources (but didn’t take ten minutes to ask), and created a litany of communication pollution in an effort to denigrate Monckton’s character.
The untruths and fabrications have come back to bite him.
We’ve seen these tactics before. Tim Lambert (aka Deltoid) did a similar thing when he ambushed Monckton with quotes from Pinker that he arranged with emails he still hasn’t revealed. And when it comes to attacking things, graphs and arguments that weren’t made, John Cook of SkepticalScience did the same with his attempt to rebut the Skeptics Handbook. What matters to the religious […]
It’s taken 21 months, four professors, and three associate/assistant professors, and THIS is the best they could come up with? The printed version listed no author (the pdf has been updated with John Cooks name*) yet wears the logo of the University of Western Australia (UWA), which will embarrass that university as word spreads of the intellectual weakness of their “Guide“.
Did UWA commission this piece of rather inept, qualitative “feel-good” science and clumsy reasoning? Stephan Lewandowsky invited John Cook to speak at UWA and “offer assistance“.
The booklet uses a mislabeled graph with a deceptive scale, won’t show the damning graphs it supposedly debunks, assumes positive feedback occurs despite the weight of empirical evidence against it (Douglass, Spencer, Lindzen), and repeats irrelevant information even though The Skeptics Handbook describes why rising sea levels and glaciers and ice sheets can’t possibly tell us what causes the warming. It misleadingly discusses a different fingerprint — one that isn’t the key point and isn’t disputed by skeptics. Cause and effect are mixed up, and naturally there are strawmen arguments to unnecessarily destroy for the spectacle of being seen to do something. To top it off, Cook still thinks a measurement is […]
Plenty of copies
"Scientific Guide" To The Skeptics Handbook
I’m elated. Last night outside the Watts Up lecture at UWA here in Perth there were people handing out a so-called “Scientific Guide” to the Skeptics Handbook. Let’s put this in perspective, I wrote the Handbook two years ago, and it’s taken this long for those-who-want-to-scare-us to put together a specific printed response. I’m an unbacked, solo pro bono writer, and they needed no less than 5 professors, 2 associate professors, and 21 months, and THIS is the best they can do?
I’m also chuffed. The infamous Professorial fellow Stephan Lewandowsky spoke the night before in the same room as we spoke in (about the dangers of consensus) but maybe he’s finally read my multiple responses to the stone age reasoning he was using and the light bulb has gone off. Maybe he’s realized that the masses of engineers, geologists, lawyers, medical experts and people with just plain common sense out there are never going to be fooled by his old witchdoctor routine about the Gods of Science at the IPCC. I was informed by people who saw the presentation that for the first time he spoke without resorting […]
Picasso-Brain-Strikes-the-Climate-Debate: Can't think. Can't reason.
Tomorrow night the University of Western Australia (UWA) is hosting “Climate change scepticism under the spotlight”, where people who ought to know better are reverting to stone age reasoning. “Hail the Gods of Science!” The shame, the shame, it’s my old university.
Australian Professorial Fellow Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, from UWA’s School of Psychology, will discuss the perils of ignoring consensus in science…
The UWA School of Science ought to be grovelling embarrassed. Any scientific professorial fellow ought to warn about the dangers of ignoring the empirical evidence, or the perils of missing the whistleblowers who point out logical flaws.
Can we add that up?
Let’s follow the reasoning on consensus science. How do you weight the scoring system? Is one post-doc worth 3 honors students, or 5? Do we dilute citation-value according to the number of authors on each paper? Does a Nobel peace prize winner trump a class of undergraduates? Quick, we need a committee to figure it out. I can feel the need for a emergency formation of the Scientific-Authority-Demarkation-Institute. UN based of course.
I have written many times about how Lewandowsky uses Argument from Authority ad nauseum along […]
The Australian Department of Climate Change
People have asked me if the Rudd Government’s postponement of the ETS means we’ve won, as in game over, time for that beach holiday in Broome? But the end of the game is nowhere in sight while our government still has a Department of Climate Change stacked with high paid executives that soak up $90 million a year. The gullible guys who leapt in with both feet are still top-dogs. The end is not even close while two of our largest daily papers don’t realize they are the real Deniers they disparage, or when the second in charge of our opposition still thinks we need to trade carbon. Joe Hockey (our shadow treasurer) said this week that “a carbon price is inevitable”. He used the same old line: “scientists say blah”, as if a consensus of “scientists” is either (a) faultless and incorruptible, or (b) in control of the weather.
Carbon trading, “inevitable“? How about “inane”? Even better: perilous, fraud-prone, and serpentine. It boils down to forced markets trading fake goods that nobody would willingly buy. It’s not a “carbon” market, it’s a Permit Market. And a permit (especially to something unmeasurable) is […]
This is too rich. Baa Humbug has found scientific peer reviewed research that skeptics are more attuned to reality and better able to discount misinformation (!) but, oh the irony, which researcher makes this claim? The man with the fairy dust logic, Stephan Lewandowsky. It’s just a shame he wouldn’t know a skeptic if one sat on him.
He presented his research conclusions in Nov 2007 in Online Opinion and The Canberra Times as A Sceptics Guide to Politics. One week later with a completely straight face, he implored everyone to act to save the climate, because it was obvious. Of course.
In his world, if you question officialdom and you’re “right”, you’re a skeptic, but if you question officials and you’re “wrong”, then you’re a denier. Got it? It all makes sense, but only if Lewandowsky is God. Somehow He knows when to trust the news-media and politicians: John Howard and George Bush couldn’t be trusted over Iraq, but obviously Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong are entirely correct on Climate Change. (After all, most of the world’s bankers agree with them.)
I recently conducted research with colleagues abroad in which we investigated how people processed information about Iraq. We […]
Ad hominem Unleashed on the ABC
On our ABC there’s lots of talk “about evidence” but next to nothing of actual evidence. (The empty homage to “evidence” is handy though, it keeps the pretense alive that it’s a scientific conversation). Stephan Lewandowsky is still doing his Picasso-brain-best to search in all the wrong places for enlightenment.
Is the planet warming from man-made CO2? Lewandowsky “knows” it is. Why? Because the 9/11 truthers are conspiracy theorists (and conspiracies are always wrong). O’ look, a few people ask odd questions about an accident in a building years ago, and sometimes those people are also the species Homo Sapiens Climata Scepticus (!). So it follows (if you are insane) that because some people still doubt the official story of an unrelated past event, man-made global warming will contribute 3.7W/m2 in the year 2079, and we’ll all become souffles in the global Sahara.
I’m not making this stuff up. I’ve tallied up the obvious errors from both articles. His power to confuse himself with red herrings is … “impressive”.
Lewandowsky scorecard for logic and reason
Argument from authority 4
[…]
Picasso-Brain-Strikes-the-Climate-Debate: Can’t think. Can’t reason.
Stephan Lewandowsky’s ABC article on climate change was headlined “Opinion Versus Evidence“. Then with dead-pan delivery, he lists the “evidence” but it’s all … opinions.
The question of “delusion” is looming. I mean really, is this a cry for help? There are not many laws of reason that Stephan leaves unbroken. He appeals to authority, attacks the “man”, and talks about everything bar the evidence on climate change. Is he serious? “Trust me” he says, the world is warming because AIDS is real, mass-murderer Ivan Milat was guilty, Lord Monckton is only a non-voting member of the House of Lords, a few skeptics are burko, 97% of paid climate scientists agree that we ought to be worried and keep paying them, and someone has discussed the actual money that climate scientists earn (how could they) and to top it off, the IPCC report is 3000 pages long (!).
Not to mention that Google Scholar (“I’m so technical”) finds lots of hits (thanks to Vice President Al Gore who arranged for the US Government to pay billions of dollars to his favorite researchers, and who also is on the Google advisory team), plus the world […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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