Well Geoff, to be fair to Adam he has been open minded enough let my last comment through - and I imagine that means he'll respond in some way.

I'm sure we're never going to agree on this - but I think this business of activist academics has to be dragged out into the open for all to see clearly.

From your last post at Adam's blog, you've obviously spotted what Lewandowsky is up to and been happy to expose it - why give Adam a pass for doing the same?

Reply posted in response to Adam Corner's statement on his Talking Climate blog:-

Adam, thank you for taking the time to respond to my earlier post.

I’m afraid how­ever that your response seems to raise more ques­tions than answers.

The point at issue is your clear and unam­biguous state­ment to the politi­cians and policy makers at the PE forum that — “I am a researcher not a campaigner”.

You now state — “In my per­sonal time — when I do not rep­resent anyone but myself — I have taken part in many cam­paigning activ­ities, and I plan on con­tinuing to do so”

So you are, and intend to remain, a campaigner.

You follow this by — “I stand by my opening com­ment at the Policy Exchange event — because all I was intending to convey was that I am not, and have never been to the best of my know­ledge, a paid campaigner.”

I think we all under­stand that the vast majority of polit­ical cam­paigners are not paid and, as far as I’m aware, no one has ever alleged that you were a “paid cam­paigner”. What you are doing here is simply trying to soften your admis­sion by using a rather obvious “straw man” argument.

You say on COIN — “I appre­ciate you see COIN as some kind of rad­ical organ­isa­tion, but to me.. it is only a cam­paigning organ­isa­tion in the very mildest sense of the word. In any case, i don’t do any campaig­ning for them … it just aims to com­mu­nicate cli­mate change better… COIN is a cam­paign group for cli­mate change only in the way that the Science Media Centre is a cam­paign group for sci­ence. Only if you think that pro­moting public engage­ment with cli­mate change, and encour­aging people/organisations to con­sider what steps they could take to reduce their carbon foot­prints is con­tro­ver­sial, would you think that there is any­thing even vaguely con­ten­tious in the work I do for COIN.”

Again, no one ever sug­gested that COIN was par­tic­u­larly rad­ical or con­ten­tious — simply that it was a cam­paigning organisation.

I’ve had another look at their web­site & clearly IS a cam­paigning organ­isa­tion — run by a guy who cheer­fully boasts — “George has twenty years exper­i­ence in research and cam­paigning and out­reach for envir­on­mental and indi­genous rights organ­isa­tions. He has worked as a senior cam­paigner for Greenpeace and the Rainforest Foundation…….Before joining COIN George was one of the founders and co-ordinators of Rising Tide, a national net­work of grass­roots cli­mate change cam­paign groups.”

So, in sum­mary, you have told us that you are and intend to remain, a cam­paigner both per­son­ally and as a dir­ector of a cam­paign group — but you “stand by” your state­ment that “I am not a campaigner”.

I’ll leave it to others to draw their own con­clu­sions from that.

On the sub­ject of your Guardian art­icle, repeated above — per­haps you could cla­rify for us whether you regard this as part of your cam­paigning activ­ities or your research work.

If the former — well I guess it’s about par for the course in the Graun.

If the latter — I’m frankly mys­ti­fied by the basic concept.

I’m a reg­ular vis­itor at most of the “pro-science” blogs Lewandowsky used and, as Barry has remarked, genuine sceptic posters are rel­at­ively rare there.

The oddest thing, though, is that I have never seen anyone on the scep­tical side of the argu­ment make any ref­er­ence at all to any of the classic “con­spiracy” issues Lewandowsky and your­self have chosen to high­light in your “research”. I’ve lit­er­ally never hear a scep­tical com­ment­ator on any blog com­ment on the Apollo moon land­ings, Kennedy’s assas­sin­a­tion or 9/11 con­spiracy theories.

I have, how­ever, reg­u­larly heard com­ment­ators of a cli­mate act­ivist per­sua­sion accusing scep­tics of being “believers in con­spiracy the­ories”. The alleged belief is usu­ally por­trayed as “why would all the world’s sci­ent­ists ganging up to invent a scare story”.

I’ve haven’t ever actu­ally heard that argu­ment employed by a sceptic — but it’s a “straw man” argu­ment much used by cli­mate activists.

Most psy­cho­lo­gical and soci­olo­gical research on the nature of cli­mate “den­iers” has tended to identify them as middle aged to older white males, often with higher than average tech­nical edu­ca­tion, retired from pro­fes­sions involving busi­ness and engin­eering and with strong con­ser­vative and free market views. I wouldn’t argue with much of that since it fits my own pro­file — but I’m mys­ti­fied by the intel­lec­tual leap that assumes that this demo­graphic includes those prone to con­spiracy theories.

In my exper­i­ence con­spiracy the­ories usu­ally flourish among rad­ical extreme left and anarchist groups. The com­monest place to find them in the UK is among the CIF com­ment­ators at your own dear Guardian where the belief that George Bush got his busi­ness bud­dies to wire the WTC with explos­ives, stopped the CIA from invest­ig­ating known ter­ror­ists and stood down the air force inter­ceptors is common currency.

Taking note of what Barry Woods and Geoff Chambers have dis­covered above — it’s pretty obvious that the gen­esis of Lewandowsky’s “research” was as follows:-

He and his buddy & co-author John Cook, who hap­pens to run Australia’s main cli­mate act­ivist blog, started dis­cussing “cog­nitive work” on “den­iers” in 2010. John offered to help by “coding” his “denier” con­trib­utors in some unspe­cified way.

Quote -
“I only assign bias if its obvious from the com­ment. I haven’t done any­thing with that data yet, I’m not even sure why I’m doing it other than my obsessive com­pul­sion to col­lect data. The other day, Steve Lewandowsky (cog­nitive sci­entist) asked if I had any num­bers on the ratio of skep­tics to warm­ists so I dove into the data­base and counted up around 100 assigned skep­tics and around 400 assigned warmists.”

and -
“I’ve been having some intriguing con­ver­sa­tions with Steve Lewandowsky who’s throwing cog­nitive exper­i­ment ideas at me to see what’s tech­nic­ally pos­sible. Having a sig­ni­fic­antly sized group of people clas­si­fied as skeptic or proAGW makes all sorts of inter­esting exper­i­ments possible.”

Followed by -
“What’s inter­esting is Steve Lewandowsky has done some research showing there is a high cor­rel­a­tion between con­spiracy the­or­ists and cli­mate den­iers. This is a theme that could be explored further.”

So, Steve designs an “exper­i­ment” whereby he sticks a ques­tion­naire, with loaded ques­tions of his own devising, exclus­ively on blogs con­trolled and pop­u­lated by his co-activists — and even they are incred­u­lous — “Yeah, those con­spiracy theory ques­tions were pretty funny, but does anyone think that hard­core den­iers are going to be fooled by such a trans­parent attempt to paint them as paranoids?”

Steve makes no attempt to con­trol or identify responses — other than excluding duplicate IP’s and the most obvious jokers (age 95).

These uncon­trolled responses to his arbit­rar­ilyy loaded ques­tions, from anonymous posters, exclus­ively on 8 fan­at­ic­ally anti-sceptic blogs — con­vince Steve that cli­mate scep­tics gen­er­ally believe that the CIA shot Kennedy, Bush blew up the WTC and NASA never got to the moon.

As I said above, Adam — if you wrote this in your act­ivist role we can all shrug and move on.

If you’re put­ting it for­ward as the fruits of ser­ious sci­entific research — you’re in danger of making your­self a laughing stock.

I've been trying to think of an analogy for Steve Lewandowsky's eccentric view of the scientific method and the best I could come up with was this:-

I am (hypothetically) a young, gay Australian academic. I have a lot of young, gay friends with similar interests and concerns – one of which is equal treatment of gay people under the law.

We all believe that gay people should be allowed to get married in exactly the same way as straight people and we are distressed that a vocal group of mainly conservative, religious older people are opposing this.

I don't like these sort of people. I think they are smug bigots – they also tend to be fat and play golf.
I don't actually know any of them because, I mean, honestly who would want to hang out with creeps like them?

I feel so strongly about this issue I decide to use my academic position to do some research into exactly what makes these people into the kind of narrow-minded pompous fools they so obviously are.

I discuss my plans with my buddy John who runs the local gay bar. He says he very occasionally gets a few of these old conservative, religious bigots in there and agrees with me that they are pretty nasty types.

I decide the best way to expose the truth about these indescribably unpleasant people is to find out what they think and write a paper about it. To find out what they think, I'll use the well proven technique of getting them to fill in a questionnaire.

I grab a clean sheet of paper and sit down to design my questionnaire. What sort of questions should I ask to get to the truth about these revolting characters? It's a bit tricky since I don't actually know any of them – but I've got a gut feel for the sort of things they might get up to.......

1.Do you believe in God?
2.Do you regularly play golf?
3.Is your waist size in excess of 38 inches?
4.Have you stopped beating your wife yet?
5.Have you ever wondered what it would be like to put a cute little kitten in the microwave?
6.Have you ever been tempted by the thought of sexual intercourse with farm animals?
7.Do you ever think that Hitler might have had a point after all?

I'm pretty happy with that – seems to cover all the bases – now to decide where to distribute it.

I take a bunch of them along to John's club and put 'em on the bar. It's always pretty busy in there so they should be no shortage of takers.

A few of the regulars pick one up and read it. They seem to find it quite funny and snigger a bit – but I decide, as a serious scientist, I should ignore sniggering.

I take a stack of them round all the other clubs where I'm a regular and leave them.

A couple of weeks later, I go round and collect all my questionnaires, take 'em home and read them. As I read them, I feel a strange mixture of emotions. Horror – because these people are obviously just as evil as my worst imaginings – but also a warm glow of satisfaction because my diligent academic research will finally expose them for what they really are.
I write up my paper, scattering the raw meat of the questionnaire replies with a seasoning of the statistical formulae and algebraic notation that's the internationally accepted mark of a true work of science. Then I send it off to the publishing journal.

In due course of time, a few thousand miles away on the other side of the planet, a naïve young scientist who shares my interests spots the synopsis of my paper on the internet and reads it.

He is horrified – his worst suspicions are confirmed. He picks up the phone and calls a friend, who happens to be an editor at Gay News. “I've just read this awful piece on the internet that says people who oppose gay marriage also beat their wives, roast kittens, have sex with animals and support Hitler”.

His friend is a bit less naïve, but does have a paper to fill “Are you sure about that – it sounds a bit, sort of, OTT?”.

The young scientist delivers his killer blow “It's all true - it's in a published scientific paper”.

How can the editor refuse such an impeccable source - “OK zip me over 5000 words and we'll get it in”.

Meanwhile, a few thousand miles away in the other direction, deep in his dark and malodorous tomb, the body of the long dead Professor Feynman rotates so fast that pieces of his putrifying corpse rattle onto the inside of the rotting casket.

It's science Richard – but not as you knew it.

Disclaimer – I once wrote a piece of whimsy on Bishop Hill that included references to witch doctors, natives with spears and a met office official with a pretty young assistant. The forces of political correctness rained down on my head for about a week with allegations of racism, sexism and all possible combinations thereof. I want to point out therefore that this piece is just a puny attempt at satirical observation of the phenomenon of confirmation bias. I have no knowledge of, or opinion on, the sexuality of anyone involved in the episode referred to – or indeed anyone else.