'Lew, get a clew'

16 September, 2012 by

Inspector Clew-seau

Quote of the Day comes from Judith Curry, who skewers the ridiculous antics of Lewandowsky:

The latest ‘explanation’ for lack of belief in the IPCC consensus ‘truth’ is that these non believers are conspiracy theorists.  See Stephan Lewandowsky’s editorial Evidence is overrated if you are a conspiracy theorist.  Lewandowsky’s ‘evidence’ was a scammed internet survey.  Bloggers such as Steve McIntyre, Anthony Watts, BishopHill, Lucia, JoNova are all over this, and have exposed the scam (note: there are multiple posts on each of these blogs).  BS detection in action.  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.

The ‘conspiracy’ among green climate bloggers has been further revealed by the leak of John Cook’s secret forum (link).  SkepticalScience seems to becoming the ringleader for conspiratorial activities by the green climate bloggers.  All this is high entertainment for those of us who follow the climate blog wars.  But take a step back, and consider how bad this makes you look, and how poorly it reflects on the science and ’cause’ that you are trying to defend. (source)

In other Lew News, Steve McIntyre reports that the Professor has now taken to deleting whole bunches of inconvenient comments on his blog:

Today, Lewandowsky (who is being assisted by an SkS squadron) liquidated every single comment by Fuller on the entire blog, leaving rebuttals to Fuller in place without the protagonist. This is different from not approving the blog comments: it’s an after-the-fact cleansing of Fuller from the blog.

The University of Western Australia should hang its head in shame at Lewandowsky’s Gleickian antics. (source)

And WUWT unearths an interesting few comments from the secret Un-Sk Ps-S database that was inadvertently “left open” earlier in the year (oh dear, how sad, never mind):

And this isn’t about science or personal careers and reputations any more. This is a fight for survival. Our civilisations survival. .. We need our own anonymous (or not so anonymous) donors, our own think tanks…. Our Monckton’s … Our assassins.

Anyone got Bill Gates’ private number, Warren Buffett, Richard Branson? Our ‘side’ has got to get professional, ASAP. We don’t need to blog. We need to network. Every single blog, organisation, movement is like a platoon in an army. ..This has a lot of similarities to the Vietnam War….And the skeptics are the Viet Cong… Not fighting like ‘Gentlemen’ at all. And the mainstream guys like Gleick don’t know how to deal with this. Queensberry Rules rather than biting and gouging.

..So, either Mother Nature deigns to give the world a terrifying wake up call. Or 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.

Ohhh kayyy… scary stuff.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Lewandowsky update

15 September, 2012 by

Cook and Lew – best buddies

It’s almost impossible to keep up with the flood of articles on the Lew Paper.

From Climate Audit we have:

From WUWT:

From The Air Vent:

And from Jo Nova:

Lewandowsky’s responses can be found here, a website which is coincidentally maintained by John Cook of Skeptical Science. And the UWA Climate Science web page has a link back to Un-Sk Ps-S… So Cook writes the stuff on SkS, and then Lew then says anyone who doesn’t believe it is a nut job! Brilliant.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Lewandowsky update

11 September, 2012 by

Lots of questions…

More on the moon landing denier paper:

I particularly like this bit in Lucia’s post in response to Lewandowsky’s third question:

3. Where do we go from here?

We read the contents of the invitations, note the dates and request copies of the other invitations and compare them. This will provide data to determine whether the method of inviting people was designed to introduce bias.

Precisely what the FOI will show. The University have advised that a decision will be made on 18 October 2012.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

The Lew Paper 'a landmark of junk science' – McIntyre

9 September, 2012 by

McIntyre: “junk science”

Steve McIntyre (Climate Audit) conducts a detailed and thorough analysis of the Professor’s moon landing denier paper, which concludes thus:

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.

Unless it is acceptable practise for scientists to knowingly allow falsehood to be published under their name, on hearing of a significant flaw in their paper, the paper must be re-written if there is time; withdrawn and re-written if there is not time for a rewrite before going to press; or have a correction published if it has gone to press. Because these are minimal standards of proper conduct, suggesting that an as yet unprinted paper be re-written or withdrawn is no more offensive than suggesting that it contains major flaws. The only way my suggestions can be considered offensive is if it is insulting to suggest major flaws in somebodies paper. Such an ettiquette is, however, entirely inconsistent with the vigourous review that is the sin qua non of science. Such an ettiquette may have grown up among scientists by custom; but in that event it is irrational and I will not pander to it.”

Curtis did not allege “fraud or other scientific wrong doing” on Lewandowsky’s part. According to Curtis:

At most Lewandowsky has been too casual in screening for gamed responses; and slightly over interpreted the results. That represents a major flaw in the paper (if I am correct); but has no implications whatever about Lewandowsky’s integrity as a scientist. IMO, Lewandowsky’s choice of a title is, and should be, far more damaging to his reputation as a scientist than the other flaws (IMO) in his paper.

We’ll soon see whether Lewandowsky’s allegiance to the Cause and to his own self-importance is greater than his commitment to science. If Lewandowsky ignores Curtis’ call to withdraw the paper and, despite knowing of important flaws, proceeds to, in Curtis’ words, “knowingly allow falsehood to be published under [his] name”, it will also provide an interesting test of the relative strength of Curtis’ allegiance to the Cause relative to his commitment to science.

Read it here.

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With:

Lew Paper?

9 September, 2012 by

Josh on Lewandowsky and the moon landing denier paper:

Cartoons by Josh

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,

Lewandowsky update

8 September, 2012 by

Lewandowsky, Rose and Oreskes

Yet more on the ‘moon landing denier’ paper from the buddy of John Cook at Un-Skeptical Pseudo-Science, who has a long history of smearing sceptics, and who devises a survey which conveniently shows that those who question the climate consensus are conspiracy theory kooks. Colour me surprised. Not.

The latest twist, according to Lewandowsky, is that the mere fact of querying the manner in which sceptic blogs were asked to participate in the survey is itself a “conspiracy theory” …

WUWT:

So explain to me professor Lewandowsky, how failure to receive or be able to find emails supposedly sent, without any other mode of contact or attempts at communication is somehow conspiracy theory.

If Lewandowsky sent an email, it likely ended up in SPAM. Lots of “take our quick survey” emails are spam these days. He should know better than to trust email as the only contact medium for something he deems important. Instead, he accuses us of being conspiracy theorists when we ask for proof.

Lucia:

I have absolutely no idea where anyone would get it into his wool-filled brain cavity that giving him permission to release information he claims to wish to release is evidence that I or anyone else harbor a conspiracy theory. I also don’t know why he thinks anyone would have egg on our faces if it turns out we are on the list. We are asking precisely because we want to know. Moreover, we are asking the information be shared because we want others to know.

I would also like to respond to his insinuation that we haven’t some how looked hard enough for the emails. I can only speak for myself, but I am happy to reveal why I am not going to look harder.

Conducting his survey may have been important to him at the time but it’s really nothing to me. I do not think its importance to him compels me to maintain records of our email exchanges for his sake. I does not compel me to burn email exchanges with perfect strangers into my memory nor to resurrect the hard drive which died in 2011 so that I can search for any emails he might have sent me in 2010.

As for me, I have searched all of my emails from 2010 with various search criteria, including old backups, and found nothing. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t sent, but it may have ended up in the spam filter, or in the trash. And for a time, my ACM mail trash was emptying every week for some unknown reason. So if it went in there at that time it’s gone for good.

Even if Lewandowsky does eventually release the names of the bloggers who were contacted, it won’t show the history of communication between the eight chosen sites and the five “sceptic” sites, or indeed any other sites that were contacted as part of the survey process.

However, the FoI certainly will, and will shows what steps were taken to secure the participation of any blog contacted as part of the research.

N.B. You can sense the contempt Lewandowsky holds for those who dare question his methods in the tone employed here. I guess he thought he could brand all sceptics as conspiratorial nut-nut jobs and we’d just quietly slink away and say, “Yeah, you’re right, we are nut-jobs”. And his defence mechanism to this criticism is to resort to childish sarcasm in his responses – as one commenter puts it, how “professorial” is that, professor?

Filed Under: Climate Tagged With: ,
«Previous Page