The big Lewandowsky … and the 97%

Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky is a “cognitive psychologist” at the University of Western Australia who seems to have a rather magnificent obsession with promulgating the message of the purported perils of “dangerous” climate change. By his own admission, he also likes to take trips back to the future.

On September 3, Lewandowsky began the rapidly snowballing descent of his credibility with a post that begins:

I recently published a paper on the motivated rejection of science that is forthcoming in Psychological Science.

How can one have “recently published” something “that is forthcoming”? And why in this particular post does Lewandowsky provide no link to this “recently published … forthcoming” paper?! Nor does he tell his readers in which issue of the journal they might find this opus in support of his Magnificent Obsession.

One might also ask why Anthony Watts received no response to his enquiry to the journal at which this purportedly “recently published” paper “is forthcoming”:

I asked Psychological Science editor Robert V. Kail to investigate this paper, as did others. Crickets

This does not inspire confidence in either Lewandowsky or the editor of the journal Psychological Science.

Notwithstanding several interim diversions of the desperate kind in lieu of responding to legitimate questions regarding his survey, his paper, and his methodology, it was not until September 10 that Lewandowsky chose to highlight – and provide – an introductory link to his paper.

Lewendowsky’s “published … and forthcoming” paper (which he claims is “In press”) begins as follows:

More than 90% of climate scientists agree that the global climate is changing largely due to human CO2 emissions (Anderegg, Prall, Harold, & Schneider, 2010; Doran & Zimmerman, 2009).¹

In the conspicuous absence of any due diligence on his part, I can (almost) understand why Lewandowsky might have blinded himself to the many faults of the authorities to which he chose to appeal.

There can be no doubt that he is dedicated to “the cause” and I cannot imagine that he would have conducted any due diligence prior to granting credence to the fault-riddled conclusions of Anderegg et al or those of Doran and Zimmerman.

I have yet to see any evidence that Lewandowsky’s “published … and forthcoming” paper is anything but “motivated” by his dedication to “the cause”.

There are so many questions that have arisen from Lewandowsky’s purportedly published paper that he’s chosen to avoid answering, that one might wonder if his mere “over 90% of climate scientists agree” was a typo!

After all, the climatically correct mantra (according to his sources, which include the pronouncements of Anderegg who uses the “data” compiled by green hobbyist Prall, a tech-support guy at the University of Toronto) is we’re doomed … and so is the planet.

It matters not that the late great communicator, Saint Stephen of Stanford was the mentor and/or sponsor of Anderegg’s abysmally inadequate “paper” from which the “97% of climate scientists” meme was derived.

Lewandowsky’s “survey” – and the paper he has purportedly “published” – has so many deficiencies, even from a transparency perspective let alone from the perspective of those who know far more about survey design (e.g. Thomas Fuller) and statistics (particularly Steve McIntyre) than Lewandowsky has been able to demonstrate he possesses.

So I found it somewhat amusingly ironic that, in a follow-up poll to ascertain who among the skeptics might have participated in Lewandowsky’s 2010 survey, those who chose Option 2, “I’m a skeptic and I DID NOT participate in the Lewandowsky survey in 2010″ constitute … 97% (as of this writing, Total responses to all four options = 1,698), where it has consistently hovered since I began periodically checking on September 14.

Full disclosure: I chose Option 2 … which places me among the clear majority whose voices Lewandowsky seems to want to silence – as he has recently demonstrated by the post-moderation purging of inconvenient comments on his flurry of self-serving “revisionist” blog-posts.

Dr. Judith Curry recently remarked on her blog:

Conspiracy theorists (?)

The latest ‘explanation’ for lack of belief in the IPCC consensus ‘truth’ is that these non believers are conspiracy theorists.

[...]

While I have used the term ‘auditors’ for deep investigations of problems with climate data, BS detection seems much more apt for this particular issue.

Lew, get a clew. I hope this experience with the skeptical bloggers has revealed what they are really all about, as they have revealed YOUR conspiracy by finding a really big pile.

Motivated (?) reasoning

[Curry concludes by offering:]

an alternative hypothesis: the motivation reasoning is on the other side, the liberal defenders of the CAGW consensus. Once the ‘consensus’ argument stepped beyond climate science into the realm of ‘dangerous’ impacts and ‘solutions’ involving global changes in governance and energy policy, BS detectors were triggered in people who didn’t share that motivation.

Hear! Hear!

Phil Jones keeps peer-review process humming … by using “intuition”

During the course of his 2010 testimony to the U.K. parliament’s Science and Technology Committee, UEA’s renowned Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Phil Jones, responded to a question regarding the peer-review process by indicating that he had never been asked to provide data and code for any of his contributions to the peer-reviewed literature when such papers were under review.

One might reasonably infer from this that when Jones is a reviewer of a paper, he doesn’t ask to see data or code either. I recently came across a Climategate E-mail [2486.txt] from Jones which would confirm that this is a reasonable inference.

Jones was responding to a Jan. 28/2004 observation from Peter Gleick (who has a penchant for reviewing books he’s given no indication of having read, and for failing to substantiate his accusations about others).

In this instance, the thread title was, “MBH Submission (fwd)”, and Gleick’s observation was:

I find Reviewer A’s email a pretty convincing indication of what CC and Mann will face if the code isn’t released.

Yuck.

The timing suggests that “Reviewer A” may well have been Steve McIntyre who, recounted the following, shortly after Schneider died in 2010:

[Schneider] asked me to review a 2004 submission to Climatic Change by Mann et al responding to MM2003 – consistent with his public representations. It seemed to me that there was an inherent conflict of interest in such a review but this was obviously known to Schneider and I attempted to separate out my interests as a disputant from my obligations as a reviewer as much as possible.

[...] my approach was informed by ideas of due diligence that were not then characteristic of academic peer reviewing. In my capacity as a reviewer, I asked to see supporting data for Mann’s supposed rebuttal to MM2003 – the topic of his submission – and to see source code to document his allegations that we’d supposedly made grievous mistakes in implementing his methodology – again an important aspect of his submission. [...]

Schneider replied that he had been editor of Climatic Change for 28 years and, during that time, nobody had ever requested supporting data, let alone source code, and he therefore required a policy from his editorial board approving his requesting such information from an author.

But I digress …

Jones’s Jan. 29 reply was addressed to many recipients, including Gleick and Stephen Schneider – founder and editor of the journal Climatic Change [CC] [text reformatted and emphasis added -hro]:

Steve, Peter et al,

I totally agree with Peter on Yuck. The tone of the email from Reviewer A indicates the sorts of issues we would be in. Here are my thoughts:

If you accede to this request the whole peer-review process goes down the tubes.

Reviewers will be able to request the earth from authors. If we all started doing this the number of reviews we could do would dramatically reduce. I currently do about 20-30 reviews a year. If I began asking for this sort of information from journals (AMS, AGU, RMS etc) I would be laughed out of court. I guess it would stop the papers to review coming.

The whole system would grind to a halt. I’ve never requested data/codes to do a review and I don’t think others should either. I do many of my reviews on travel. I have a feel for whether something is wrong – call it intuition. If analyses don’t seem right, look right or feel right, I say so. Some of my reviews for CC could be called into question!
[...]

Well, now I understand the intricacies of this much-vaunted “peer-review” process. “Intuition” and Because! I! Said! So! will trump due diligence, every time – otherwise the whole process would go “down the tubes”.

Amazing. Simply amazing.