(quote)

"that free-market ideology was an overwhelmingly strong determinant of the rejection of climate science" (my italics). (In cognitive psychology's lexicon, "strong determinant" presumably implies causation.)

(end quote)

Why are we supposed to be interested in what some ignoramus "presumes"?
Fact: to any scientist, this means (unless it's coincidental, and standard statistical techniques tell how likely this is) that the two
phenomena either have a common cause, or either one causes the other.

Kile is arbitrarily picking one of these, which I would have thought not the most likely - I presume so as to throw doubt on the work.

Normally I would have stopped reading the article right there, but since, in psychology, gathering statistics is the easy part, and explaining them is the hard part, I read on, hoping to read some explanation of this correlation.

What do I find next about the quality of the article? On the next page,

"The UK Met Office recently noted ..." The words "UK Met Office" are a hypertext link. But not to the Met Office (this itself is a sign of a writer who doesn't deserve to be taken seriously) but rather to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, well-known as a "denialist" organisation rather than a scientific one.

To repeat a question I raised a year or so ago - doesn't the OLO editorial team have any notion of quality?

jeremy
Sorry, but you lose badly on that one, and your plea for quality control is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about what is happening.

The author has every right to point to the odd papers that come out of the psychological sciences on this issue. I, myself, have noted attempts to exaplain away scepticism on the basis of psychological theory which are obvious nonsense.

The problem is that the global warmists have made forecasts that have proved to be obviously wrong, even to those who pay no attention to such matters.. thus, in 2009 we were told the drought in South East Aus would be permanent and the dams would never be full again. We promptly got two years of rain and full dams. Ten years or so ago UK met office researchers declared that snow would disappear altogether in a decade..

Then there is the problem as the UK Met Office has recently admitted (with little publicity here, but some media attention in the UK) that there has been very little warming at all in the past 16 years or so.
A media story on teh announcement is here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released--chart-prove-it.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

On top of all that came the climategate emails.

Now none of this is to say that global warming is right or wrong, and global warmers have an answer for all of the above, but it is to say that there are obvious, straightforward reason for an increase in skepticism. Forecasts based on these theories don't seem to be working. Psychology has nothing to do with it.

I have before me the UWA media release that Kile referred to and it's a howler.

It's hard to know where to start but positively associating free market advocates and climate denial is curious. Well, actually, it's barking mad as how do you operationalise free market advocates and their beliefs? I'm a bit free market when it comes to trade but not so free market when it comes to welfare.

Apparently those who believe in conspiracy theories (Marilyn Monroe's death, Diana Prince of Wales, Apollo 11, etc) were also more likely to reject global warming. Really? Those who also reject the link between tobacco and lung cancer or the link between HIV and AIDS were also more likely to be climate skeptics. Really?

I do hope this wasn't done on an ARC grant.

Psychology is a science which, in Australia at least, is dominated by Leftist 'social justice' style thought and has little room for any other view. The ideological leanings of the academics who run the profession go hand in hand with those who control the new honey pot of climate change funding.

Lewandowsky made so many fundamental errors in his anti-skeptic 'questionnaire' that it became clear that he has a personal vendetta against those who disagree with his support of climate alarmism. It was not an objective scientific study by any means.

His endless attempts to justify his results have a resentful tone as if he feels that critics are simply trying to stop the flow of funding which he feels he so richly deserves.

This guy has done a lot of harm to Psychology and Psychology has done a lot of harm to itself by being incapable of addressing the issue. This suggests that it is easy to bias results in Psychology and arrange questionnaires to get the results one wants.

"I do hope this wasn't done on an ARC grant."

Bad luck Cheryl.

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/10/lewandowsky-a-paper-of-highly-questionable-ethics-approved-in-a-last-minute-switch-with-a-different-study/#more-24279

Jo Nova has done a series on Lewandowsky; she is apparently peeved Lewandowsky is giving her alma mater a bad name.

Anyway, any pretension Lewandowsky had to being an expert on AGW or even a scientist have taken a knock with this paper.

McIntyre tears his methodology apart; talk about confirmation bias; Lewandowsky swims in it

Kile might also have mentioned that the number of respondents to the Lewandowsky survey who claimed that the moon landing was faked made up less than 1% of the total. There's good reason to believe that many of those were alarmist trolls trying to make sceptics look bad. But this tiny and dubious subset of respondents was seized upon so that Lewandowsky could work up his misleading and offensive title for the paper.

I wonder if 1% of psychologists believe in astrology? Look out for my next paper: 'Aussie shrinks: stargazers galore!'