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.
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?
Australian Climate Madness 
That one thing about conspiracy theories: EVERYTHING that happens, anything anyone says, anthing anyone does, is proof that there is a conspiracy.
lewandowsky feeds his own paranoia, every time he looks into the exponentially growing skeptical blogosphere.
You’d think Lewandowsky would be able to self diagnose his OCD!
In the meantime the real tragedy is that the tax payer continues to foot the bill for this “research”.
[snip – agreed Keith, but not for publication]
its ALL bluster..
[snip – sorry, I’m moderating heavily]
People claiming they haven’t received emails is some kind of conspiracy. Seriously, this [snip] signs himself up for ridicule.
This [snip] is typical of the watermelons who, no matter what evidence is placed before them, they suddenly point to their guide dog. I will also ask again, WHO PAYS THIS [snip]’s BILLS?
I don’t get why the skeptic side is giving this guy so much attention. His study was biased, everyone sees that, even the alarmists know that it was biased and give his study little credence. So please fellow skeptics, stop talking about this guy, stop giving him publicity and let him fall back into obscurity. We are shooting ourselves in the foot.
Once his name disappears from the blogosphere, he and his work will be forgotten.
[REPLY – Klem I have to disagree. Lewandowsky is a senior academic at an Australian University, receiving public funds for his research, and is frequently published on the ABC (see here), the Conversation (see here), and elsewhere. He has a high profile including an association with Skeptical Science author John Cook (see here). Hence the attention.]
I guess that might be true in Oz, I see what you’re saying, but we here in N America wouldn’t know him from Adam. But now with all of the attention he is getting on the blogospherre from my fellow skeptics, he is becoming much better known here. Pretty soon he’ll have book tour in N America, the left media will want to interview him about his discoveries concerning skeptics and conspiracies, Bill Maher will have him on his show so he can crack a few of his foul mouthed anti-Romney jokes. This Lewandowsky guy is gaining notoriety in N America when he should remain in obscurity.
I find it strange how Lewandowsky can create a ‘conspiracy theory’ paper on climate change, yet over at his website Shaping Tomorrow’s World he won’t accept comments “… containing the words ‘religion’ and ‘conspiracy’ tend to get deleted.” Weird!
I’m an engineer for a small, private company. I could never get away with faking stuff, using clearly lousy methods of analysis, etc. I guess it’s nice to have tenure, eh?