WATTS EXPLAINS WHY LEWANDOWSKY PAPER ON CONSPIRACY THEORIES IS WRONG: ITS A CONSPIRACY BETWEEN JOHN COOK AND THE PROF

Copy to Word (or similar), Ctrl+A, Shift+F3 (or similar).

Of course, you'd have the bother then of recapitalising the initial caps of the proper nouns by inserting your cursor in those words and hitting Shift+F3 again. ;-)

I do like the tags for "filed under": ANTHONY WATTS, BLOGGING, BULLSHIT, FUNNY

Sorry about the all caps, but I couldn't be bot..., but you know the rest :-)

Actually, that's a lie, as I had to purposely make them all caps. If you select the blog post (or even just its title) and paste it into Word or (better) Notepad you lose the all caps anyway. Which begs the question... Why the all caps? I guess the ScienceBlogs' editor works differently.

So you think this is a good paper rather than the typical self-reinforcing of stereotypes by faux social science types like Oreskes who want to be seen as left-wing heroes?

[Some of Oreskes stuff was good - the "Ivory tower" one that wiki uses was good, and the denialist attacks on it were funny and incompetent. Other stuff she has done has been less good; see for example http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2010/08/25/nierenberg-vs-oreskes-round-2/ or just search Oreskes on this blog -W]

This should be in all-CAPS given the huge implications of this conspiracy.

[Plus lots of bright primary colours and <blink> -W]

@WMC "[Some of Oreskes stuff was good - the "Ivory tower" one that wiki uses was good, and the denialist attacks on it were funny and incompetent. Other stuff she has done has been less good; see for example http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2010/08/25/nierenberg-vs-oreskes-round-2/ or just search Oreskes on this blog -W]"

Ah, well I read both pieces, I don't want to get things too off-topic, but it seems like the Ivory Tower piece is a based around a rather subtle strawman.

My main point was that there should be a little skepticism regarding some of these social science types who are clearly pushing an agenda, which your previous article(s) on Oreskes tends to enforce.

TGL:

So you think this is a good paper rather than the typical self-reinforcing of stereotypes by faux social science types like Oreskes who want to be seen as left-wing heroes?

Good or bad, it's not bad because Cook manages the domain name for SL's server.

Deflect much?

Note that Stoat didn't say a word about the merit of the paper in his OP ...

So Willard Tony finally figured it out. Prof. L. and John have the whole bunch hooked. The gaff is coming soon enough:)

@dhogaza "Good or bad, it’s not bad because Cook manages the domain name for SL’s server.

Deflect much?"

It does indicate a strong belief which can inadvertently lead to all sorts of problems including, but not limited to, selection and confirmation biases.

It's wider than you thought, this conspiracy. From the Watts thread:

I also want to know why Jo Nova’s site shows a notice saying it has been ‘Suspended’. What is behind this?

REPLY: DDoS attacks. She’s had a couple of threads outlining them. I wonder what sort of group might want to take down her website? Oh, wait. – Anthony

Conspiracy theorist? Moi?

If I wanted to discredit Watts, this is exactly what I'd post under his name* Just hilarious.

More popcorn please.

* I didn't btw, I'm not part of the conspiracy. Or maybe this is a double bluff. Help! I can't remember who I'm conspiring against any more. Neverending recursive conspiracy anyone?

"It does indicate a strong belief which can inadvertently lead to all sorts of problems including, but not limited to, selection and confirmation biases."

Conspiracy confirmed!

@dhogaza

"Conspiracy confirmed!"

I believe in human nature - not conspiracies.

I don't believe conspiracies are possible for humans on large scales or time periods.

"I don’t believe conspiracies are possible for humans on large scales..."

Watts has only uncovered a conspiracy of two people, so it's not really necessary to extrapolate. Yet ... you seem to share his "concern".

@dhogaza

"Watts has only uncovered a conspiracy of two people, so it’s not really necessary to extrapolate. Yet … you seem to share his “concern”."

Which conspiracy would that be? That Lewandowsky and Cook are strongly socially connected?

That just seems to be factually accurate.

In any case, my "concern" is simply to look at things from alternate points of view. These sorts of studies have a poor track record in that they often confirm the biases of the scientists.

Exposing that bias solidifies those concerns.

"Which conspiracy would that be? That Lewandowsky and Cook are strongly socially connected?"

That it matters.

Can people tell me why the two co-authors on the Lewandowsky paper are ignored?

Oh, they can't be linked to prior statements about AGW? Never mind...

Mann Bradley Hughes

Why should Oreskes bother with primary sources when she can quote Vanity Fair without attribution ?

When we can't access a website most of us don't immediately take it as a personal slight - not Steven McIntyre. If he can't access Lewandowski's website Lewandowski must be personally thwarting him - http://climateaudit.org/2012/09/14/the-sks-link-to-the-lewandowsky-surv…

While its hard to be certain what McIntyre's problem was - I managed to reproduce a problem accessing Lewandowski's website from a couple of places around the world - but the same problem affected other sites with the same network provider (Optus) - so, I know its hard to believe, but maybe just maybe there was a network problem - say corrupted data on a router in say Melbourne or LA, rather than a vindictive Psych prof in WA out to get Steven McIntyre.

The paranoia in that CA thread is a real eye opener. It's clearly still not occurred that they're making Lewandowsky's point far more eloquently than his paper ever could.

When we can’t access a website most of us don’t immediately take it as a personal slight – not Steven McIntyre.

Actually, yes, he does, two other instances that I'm aware of. It's not healthy ...

What's hilarious about their conspiracy theorizing and all that, at this point it appears none of them has figured out a most direct link between Cook and SL and SKS and SL'd site:

They both run the same (SkS) software, just with different CSS skins.

TGL: get on it! More evidence of conspiracy!

Steven McIntyre seems to have now realized that its possible his problems accessing Lewandowsky's website were not Lewandowsky blocking him, and disappeared the comments where he accused Lewandowsky of being unethical, petty and spiteful - which I guess is as close to an apology as Lewandowsky will get.

sounds like the amusing incident a few years back when McI was hammering a GISS webserver with a script he wrote. a sysadmin noticed the heavy load it was inflicting on the machine, temporarily blocked requests from that IP.

turns out he was violating their robots.txt no-scraping policy. but that's ok: as Steve explained, he wasn't using a web robot to scrape the site, he was just using a script to automatically make tens of thousands of web requests. clear difference.

obviously this was Hansen's thugs unfairly victimising poor Stevie, and definitely not a sysadmin's bog-standard reaction to some antisocial arsebucket abusing one of their services.

http://climateaudit.org/2007/05/17/giss-blocks-data-access/ has the full comedy-show. see how disgusted he is that, even after telling them that he is Stephen McIntyre (you know, The Climate Auditor), and ordering them to unblock him post haste, they didn't immediately comply while apologising and tugging their forelocks.

ligne ...

sounds like the amusing incident a few years back...

Yep, that's one of the two incidents I alluded to above.

The other had to do with an airport in the UK blocking him or something like that, does this ring a bell?

oh yeah, and this comedy goldmine too: http://climateaudit.org/2009/06/07/banned-at-sudbury-airport/

some random free wifi point at an airport doesn't let you access one website, but another works? not only that, but a local academic then comes over and praises RealClimate? obviously Laurentian University have been putting pressure on local businesses. or something.

any resemblance between Stephen McIntyre and an over-tired, paranoid, entitled 6 year old is obviously also due to the climate conspiracy.

andrewt

...disappeared the comments where he accused Lewandowsky of being unethical, petty and spiteful...

Now I wish I'd saved a couple.

Because the accusation was that SL et al were blocking McI and friends with the intent of causing the latter to think they were being blocked and leading to conspiracy-laden commentary ... which would lead to SL et al unblocking them while falsely claiming that no blocking had been done ... then using the commentary to support the denialists-are-conspiracy-prone hypothesis.

A trap, in other words. The paranoia was a beautiful thing ...

dhogaza: ha, that'll learn me not to refresh the thread before commenting :-)

ligne - thank you! yes, the sudbury incident was the second one I alluded to (while being too lazy to go find the thread myself, thanks for your diligence).

Anything else we should be remembering?

haha, there's more: http://climateaudit.org/2009/01/16/nasa-giss-blocks-access/

"What annoys me is the act itself: that they had blocked me once again. And yes, there’s history: I’ve been blocked at U of Virginia (Mann), Roger Williams U (Rutherford) and U of Arizona (Hughes)."

what's that, Steve, you keep getting blocked by a whole swathe of independent organisations? obviously it's because they're all out to get you, and not at all that you never seem to show any consideration for others, or learn from your transgressions.

blocking by user-agent is pretty crude, but as any sysadmin is well aware, you don't always have the time to implement a scalpel fix, and you don't always have the perpetrator within flame-thrower or flensing knife range.

"it appears none of them has figured out a most direct link between Cook and SL and SKS and SL’d site: They both run the same (SkS) software, just with different CSS skins."

wow, it's almost like Lewandowsky wanted to set up a blog, knew John Cook, and that he ran a blog, so asked him to set up a blog for him too. it's like an antipodean Watergate.

At sites where comments get disappeared, or in any thing using DISQUS (which allows editing of comments for a long time, and uses an annoying relative date setup that ends up eliminating timestamps):

A) Use WebCite, if it isn't blocked.
B) do screen grabs if needed

The silliest element of the paranoverdrive:
SL's blog is moderated.
Now, would SL block the very people who might provide additional data? If were SL, I'd want comments recorded there in a convenient place :-)

T. Fuller?

Yeah, but the thing that you're missing is that the Lewandowsky paper is fundamentally complete and utter shit. As A E Houseman said, three minutes thought would suffice to find this out, but thought is irksome and three minutes is a long time. Even Watts can be right occasionally.

Yeah, but the thing that you’re missing is that the Lewandowsky paper is fundamentally complete and utter shit.

Which doesn't explain the guilty-as-charged overly-emotional response by the denialsphere, in which they manage to demonstrate that they really *do* believe in a conspiracy of climate scientists (no suprirse, of course).

So we're all in agreement that the Lewandowsky paper is fundamentally complete and utter shit?

No, Squanto, we are not all in agreement. Just as we are unlikely to agree that the reaction by the blogosphere to the paper reinforces the main gist of the paper: most pseudoskeptics are pseudoskeptics because they are libertarian, and there's a higher relative amount of conspiracy nutters amongst the pseudoskeptics.

Here's one from the Australian ABC's "The Drum" _ :

"TONY : 16 Sep 2012 12:46:15pm I'm sick and tired of hearing the same BS mantra repeated adnauseum, "The science is settled", "We know AGW is real and we are to blame" NO!IT IS NOT SETTLED AT ALL. To prove it read the full report from the worlds leading Atmospheric Physicists, Scientists and experts who have published an equally voluminous report to the IPCC's fourth assessment debunking it completely with valid pier reviewed and proven empirical scientific data covering every aspect of climate relevant to the claims made by the Political Neo Marxist IPCC and its UN masters who are pushing us into a single centralized global government in compliance with Agenda 21 now ICLEI and the whole "Sustainability" mantra. For those who doubt this is fact just look at who is dictating school curriculum under UNESO's 5 pillars of indoctrination coauthored by 3, one being Mikhail Gorbachev and encapsulates the dictum of "Sustainability", "Environmentalism" and "Social Engineering" which is just Communism dressed up and has been adopted by every level of government from local to federal, including public schools from K-12, then ask yourselves if this is what we want for our children's futures? A government run from New York, we can neither vote in or out and one that dictates what we eat wear and believe, now they are removing God from the public school system. We should keep in mind our entire system including political, constitutional and judicial is all based on the Christian bible and its commandments, and for good reason, you only need look at Nth Korea, Stalin's Russia and Mao's China to see how well Atheism has performed there.
Carl Marx and Fred Engels were the first to use the bogus claim of catastrophic climate change in 1883 in opposition to Free Market Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, they claimed Russia would suffer a catastrophic ice age because of the Industrial Revolution and the burning of fossil fuels, sound familiar?
The ABC is complicit in repeating the UN's and this Leftist Governments doctrine while marginalizing and silencing any opposition, when we the tax payers responsible for paying the ABC's wages, are supposed to get unbiased news and information. It's high time the ABC grew a spine and started reporting the full story instead of regurgitating and sneaking into every report the AGW mantra adnauseum. I believe when election time comes, and the weather is its cyclic self as has been since the big bang and the sun still rises in the east, Australians will look to a completely different source for leadership, maybe someone from the TEA Party or Family First, someone who will consider the constitution as a valid sound base for policy and prosperity of Australians instead of this global Leftist Utopian dream that has never existed nor been accomplished, it's time we shifted back to our Judeo-Christian based utopia that has been a proven and reliable model, where since the Enlightenment al."

I suppose the deniers rubbishing SL's paper will conveniently disown this bloke and tens of thousands like him who hold the same views. Didn't John Grisham, or some other well known fiction author, write similar conspiratorial crap in the intro to one of his books?

One denialist/conspiracy blog _ Before It's News _ has 177,000,000 visits. If only half are deniers, that leaves nearly 90,000,000 potential conspiracy nuts who'll believe everything presented on the blog. In it, we find this sort of stuff: A thread titled "Agenda 21′s Globalist Death Plan For Humanity", where he promotes Monkton and also claims that at the... "U.N. Summit at Rio in 1992, the Conference Secretary-General, Maurice Strong, said 'Isn't the only hope for this planet that the industrialized civilization collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that about?' "

Another thread is titled _ "Global Warming Author Says “Bar-Code Everyone at Birth”.
Conspiracies? Where?