(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!'

"The strange case of psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky shines a light on the climate change industry."

Yes. Lewandowsky's totally biased research throws a light on what has been happening in climate research for a long time.

What's really worrying is that the climate researchers have gone out of their way to defend this work. That shows how corrupt the whole climate science research community has become.

Another day another flat earth story on OLO.

Bilge from beginning to end.
What I find particularly offensive is the way brainless partisans like this call themselves "sceptics"--an honorable position minimifidianists no nothing about.
That's all the comment this article deserves.

A great article which wittily captures the pompous and oppressive, pseudo scientific claptrap of AGW 'psychology'.

This paper reveals that AGW science is run by arrogant sophists whose disdain for those who disagree with them and the general populace is palpable.

The paper by Lewandowsky is a disgrace and reveals only his psychology.

A sober and much needed look at some of the AGW cheerleading which is being palmed off as research.

Lewandowsky’s survey reminds me of some employment psychological tests which narrowly determine that if monkey gives response a), then monkey can only belong to category 1) which can only make him a psychopath ,or worse, a “minimifidianists”.
All more befitting of a glossy pop magazine than academia.

"Another day another flat earth story on OLO."

Kenny, Yes it is hilarious, eh? I haven't been here for months and nothing has changed, it's Groundhog Day on OLO. I am dissapointed in Kile though. It seems he has been to uni but apparently graduated despite failing to understand the scientific method.

Or perhaps he is deliberately 'lying'- there is a lot of it going around - when he says "The researchers – led by Lewandowsky – also claim discovery of a new causal relationship:" Kile says that the authors claim discovery of a new causal relationship but then in the next sentence he cites the author - and 10 points to Kile for doing this because it is standard practice in science. But the authors actually claimed not to have discovered anything but to have found evidence for their hypothesis that one thing was "an overwhelmingly strong determinant" of another thing.

Kile seems to think that "causal" and "strongly determined by" are equivalent; that they mean the same thing. Kile presumes. He says that in cognitive psychology's lexicon, "strong determinant" presumably implies causation. What makes Kile qualified to presume this when the dictionary meaning of these terms is quite different?

Where do I go to find this cognitive pyschology's lexicon that Kile uses? What arrant nonsense!

It seems that Kile has some academic qualifications but he has presented in them in a non-academic form - perhaps he just likes to be an individual and have freedom and that is he why he chooses not to follow the 'rules' of science. It does make it difficult to check up on his publication record.

Anyhoo, we all know that having been to uni doesn't mean you understand how to do science so pffft to Kile. He's got nothin'.

But I'll link you to an interesting article about misunderstanding statistics
http://johnquiggin.com/2012/10/19/statistical-significance/

Curmudgeon, "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."

I wonder what do you mean by 'odd' papers? Perhaps you mean odd as in strange and unusual or perhaps you mean there are few papers about the issue. Either way you are totally wrong.

You say you 'have noted attempts to explain away..'. I can assure you that research is not done to explain 'away' anything, least of all something as significant as climate change scepticism.

Apart from being worried about the future of lack of because of the way it will affect their personal lives, researchers in the area of psychological science, are excited about having this behaviour to study. The broad term being used to explain the way you manage to be so blithely postmodern about one particular area of science without understanding that this what you are doing, is 'motivated reasoning'.

This quote is from Yale University, one institution that is investigating motivated cognition or reasoning:

"The Cultural Cognition Project is a group of scholars interested in studying how cultural values shape public risk perceptions and related policy beliefs. Cultural cognition refers to the tendency of individuals to conform their beliefs about disputed matters of fact (e.g., whether global warming is a serious threat; whether the death penalty deters murder; whether gun control makes society more safe or less) to values that define their cultural identities.

Project members are using the methods of various disciplines -- including social psychology, anthropology, communications, and political science -- to chart the impact of this phenomenon and to identify the mechanisms through which it operates. The Project also has an explicit normative objective: to identify processes of democratic decisionmaking by which society can resolve culturally grounded differences in belief in a manner that is both congenial to persons of diverse cultural outlooks and consistent with sound public policymaking."

http://www.culturalcognition.net/

Jeremy, "Why are we supposed to be interested in what some ignoramus "presumes"?"

Exactly, we developed science to tell us what is true or not, rather than rely on ignorance and yet here we are, when science has brought us such awesome lives and choices we have people, not only feeling free to have an ignorant unscientific opinion but, I think, actually misleading readers about 'facts'.

As you say the quality of this articles is 'way dodgy'. In the same way as Fox News ensures that their viewers are more ignorant and misinformed than people who don't watch any current events, publishing articles like this actually makes people 'stupid'.

If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd think 'the right' are deliberately misinforming people because, according to an article in the Boston Review, the more facts and information people have about policies, the more likely they are to vote for the Democrats, rather than for the Republicans. Shows why Fox News exists and why it does what it does.

Anyway here is the link to the article

http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.4/fowler_margolis_voter_knowledge_political_preference_democratic_party.php

Mollydukes,

"If I was a conspiracy theorist I'd think "the right" are deliberately misinforming people..."

In that case, you'll probably be interested in this article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/01/rightwing-insurrection-usurps-democracy