Recurrent Fury: Conspiratorial Discourse in the Blogosphere

Looks like a SkepticalScience.com double-header considering the noteworthy Guardian.com article by Dana Nuccitelli that SkS shared this morning.  The reason is that I know all too well that implying a grand conspiracy, denigrating scientists and the reactionary dismissal of the significance of a "97% consensus" among actual experts regarding the causes and dangers of society's relentless injection of atmospheric insulation (read greenhouse gases) are about all we can get out of climate science contrarians these days, so I thought this was a must article to add to this collection.

It's about a new study:  "Recurrent Fury: Conspiratorial Discourse in the Blogosphere Triggered by Research on the Role of Conspiracist Ideation in Climate Denial"

By Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, Scott Brophy, Elisabeth A. Lloyd, Michael Marriott

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Climate denial linked to conspiratorial thinking in new study

Posted on 8 July 2015 by dana1981

http://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-denial-linked-to-conspiratorial-thinking-recurrent-fury.html

A new study has examined the comments on climate science-denying blogs and found strong evidence of widespread conspiratorial thinking. The study looks at the comments made in response to a previous paper linking science denial and conspiracy theories.

Motivated rejection of science

Three years ago, social scientists Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac published a paper in the journal Psychological Science titled NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science. 

The paper detailed the evidence the scientists found that, using survey data provided by visitors to climate blogs, those exhibiting conspiratorial thinking are more likely to be skeptical of scientists’ conclusions about vaccinations, genetically modified foods, and climate change. This result was replicated in a follow-up study using a representative U.S. sample that obtained the same resultlinking conspiratorial thinking to climate denial.

Of course science denial and conspiracies go hand in hand

This shouldn’t be a terribly shocking result. When confronted with inconvenient science, those in denial often reject the evidence by accusing the experts of fraud or conspiracies. We saw a perfect example of this behavior just a few weeks ago. When scientists at NOAA published a paper finding that there was no ‘pause’ in global warming, one of the most common responses from those in denial involved the conspiratorial accusation that the scientists had somehow fudged the data at the behest of the Obama administration.

Nevertheless, nobody likes being characterized as a conspiracy theorist, and so those in the denial blogosphere reacted negatively to the research of Lewandowsky and colleagues. Ironically, many of the attacks on the study involved conspiratorial accusations, which simply provided more data for the social scientists to analyze. For example, the authors were accused of everything from faked data to collusion between Lewandowsky and the Australian government.

#2 The Conspiracy - Dissecting Dr Lindzen's intrinsic obtuseness

#2  "government created monopoly" and further conspiracy ideation

{slight editing 3/13/15 noon}

 This is the second part (link to first one) of my review of an interview by Alex Epstein with Professor Richard Lindzen.  I've taken the time and trouble to transcribe much of it in order to focus on Lindzen's bizarre version of reality and to juxtapose it against history and the known science.  

In this installment we consider the possibility that 'alarmists' aren't all in on a grand conspiracy to take away your freedoms and that they are alarmed for good reasons.

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Power Hour: Questioning Climate Science with Dr. Richard Lindzen October 22, 2012 | Alex Epstein

Richard Lindzen joins Alex Epstein to talk about perspectives on climate change:

• Questions about climate
• “Balance” in nature
• The goals of environmentalists

1:45  Alex:  Whenever I read one of his (R.L.) papers I get almost emotional just by the level of clarity and diligence and utter lack of any kind of appeal to authority. ...

3:05  Lindzen: What bothers me about this issue is the intrinsic obtuseness of the questions. ...

________________________________

5:00  Alex:  ... how science has become much more institutionalized, as you describe it reminded me of a government created monopoly.

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Government created monopoly on climate science?  And he seriously believes it.  Can't leave the conspiracy ideation alone.  

… Here are the six characteristics associated with conspiracist ideation:(https://wickershamsconscience.wordpress.com/2014/04/18/wonkery-conspiracy-ideation-and-science/) 

• The folks behind any conspiracy are always nefarious. There aren’t any conspiracies for good purposes, only bad purposes.

• The person claiming there is a conspiracy typically considers herself, at least tacitly, to be the brave antagonist of the nefarious intentions of the conspiracy; that is, the victim is also a potential hero.

• The conspiracy theorist refuses to believe anything that does not fit into the conspiracy theory. Thus, nothing is at it seems, and all evidence points to hidden agendas or some other meaning that only the conspiracy theorist understands.

• Nothing happens by accident. Small random events are woven into a conspiracy narrative and reinterpreted as indisputable evidence for the theory.

• The underlying lack of trust and exaggerated suspicion contribute to a cognitive pattern whereby specific hypotheses may be abandoned when they become unsustainable, but those corrections do not impinge on the overall abstraction that ‘something must be wrong’ and the ‘official’ account must be based on deception. Princess Diana was murdered and Princess Diana faked her own death.

• Contrary evidence is often interpreted as evidence for a conspiracy. This ideation relies on the notion that, the stronger the evidence against a conspiracy, the more the conspirators must want people to believe their version of events (“self-sealing reasoning”).

Also see: http://scienceblogs.com/denialism/2013/02/26/what-happens-when-you-study-conspiracy-theories-the-conspiracy-theorists-make-up-conspiracy-theories-about-you/

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What Alex ignores is that these developments (see the end of this post for a list of major Environmental Acts of the twentieth century) were driven by accumulating knowledge at the insistence of an informed electorate.  

It was demanded by "We The People" with US Reps. grudgingly bowing to the people's will.  Aren't we a democracy?

Timeline: The Modern Environmental Movement

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/timeline/earthdays/

- - -

As for Alex's loathed 'climate science' bureaucracy, come on, get real. it's no different than what's happened within every other human endeavor over this past half century - that's the price of unrestrained population growth and breakneck progress.  

considering the angry mind of your typical right-winger

An incident occurred this afternoon that I find so quintessentially representative of what I see to be one of the main problems with your typical rightwing/Republican/Libertarian/TeaParty/Christian types (and yea, OK, extreme left wingers fall into this category also) that I've decided to record the incident.  

Fox News: A driving force behind global warming denial

I know I single out Watt's and McIntyre's deceptions quite a bit, but let's not forget these people would be nothing without the PR megaphone afforded them by certain deep-pockets and some leading Republican oil-interest warriors, Senator Inhofe and Rep. Barton jump to mind.  The third leg of this massive con-job is the media, among the biggest players there is the Murdoch owned Fox Network and Wall Street Journal Op-Ed pages.  

Because of this - I found a recent SkepticalScience.com post worth adding to the collection over here at WUWTW.

At the end of the SkepticalScience.com post there's a link to the Guardian article it's based on.  Here's a hopeful piece of information from that longer article:

A growing number of American conservatives are demanding that the Republican Party stop denying the problem and begin participating in crafting the solution. For example, the list of conservatives supporting a revenue-neutral carbon tax continues to grow: 

51 percent of registered RepublicansArt Laffer, economic advisor to Ronald Reagan
Greg Mankiw, economic advisor to George W. Bush and Mitt Romney
George Shultz, Reagan's Secretary of State
Gary Becker, Nobel Laureate in economics
Bob Inglis, former Republican Congressman from South Carolina
A staffer for a House RepublicanWilliam Ruckelshaus, EPA Administrator under Nixon and Reagan
Lee Thomas, EPA Administrator under Reagan
William Reilly, EPA Administrator under George H.W. Bush
Christine Todd Whitman, EPA Administrator under George W. Bush

Let's hope that list grows in a hurry.

{Thank you SkepticalScience.com for your generous Reposting policy!}

Fox News found to be a major driving force behind global warming denial (via Skeptical Science)

Posted on 8 August 2013 by dana1981 A new study published in the journal Public Understanding of Science (PDF available here) surveyed a nationally representative sample of over 1,000 Americans in 2008 and 2011 about their media consumption and beliefs…

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Another big problem over at Steven McIntyre's ClimateAudit...

... is his, and his supporters obsession with obscure data processing and modeling issues.  Issues that by all rights belong with the full time experts.  

In fact, a cute analogy occurred to me while reading the comments over at ClimateAudit today. Back in the day, I was decent at keeping my cars alive and maintained... in a simpler world... 50s,60s,70s models.  Haven't forgotten any of that knowledge, but I'd be nuts trying to go at my '99 pick up, let alone a friend's 2010.  It requires a level of training and expertise and tools I don't have, and if my ego didn't let me recognize that, my attempts to do-it-myself would result in expensive disaster after disaster.

McIntyre makes a big deal of statistical proficiency and the lack of top tier statisticians among climatologists - he never mentions that climatologists learned from early mistakes and lessons, and have long taken expert statisticians on board as collaborators.  {They really are trying to get as accurate as possible!}  

For instance, McIntyre won't tell you about the "Geophysical Statistics Project" and NCAR's collaboration

Now I understand why climate science 'skeptics' hate SkepticalScience.com (+ climategate)

{edited for some typos, and to add two more investigation reports.  7/18/2013}


I've been reminded this afternoon why science-skeptics demonize "SkepticalScience.com" so viciously.  It's because the SkepticalScience team do such a great job of collecting and organizing real scientific information in a wonderfully simple and clean, accessible manner.  The occasion was a discussion over at http://www.debate.org.  The topic being "The Hockey Stick is Bad Science."  The actual debate was about a year ago, now it's down to the sparsely visited comments thread.  

I made a comment and the debate "contender" showed up to reply.  Unfortunately he dished up the usual denialist mantra I've come to know so well.  The sentence that inspires this post is:

"The Climategate e-mails showed a deliberate attempt to suppress skeptical viewpoints from ever being published."

When I hear someone inflating Climategate, like that, it's like a red flag - and I want to yell: "Stop and learn about what you're talking about!  Why can I be so absolute?  

Because, when one actually takes the time to familiarize themselves with all the claims based on those stolen emails, it comes down to maybe a half dozen short quotes, taken out of context, at that.  Most pathetic of all is that we are talking about personal, private emails, not data-sets or studies or actual publications.

Conspiracy Ideation . . . or a refusal to accept facts

Once again I'm going to repost an interesting article from the folks at SkepticalScience.com since it cuts to the core of what I'm appreciating more and more as the real issue we need to face today.  

You see, as the evidence get's more and more overwhelming, the obstinence of denialists has been getting more and more belligerent and below the belt. 

The debate has lost all pretense about struggling to better understand our global heat distribution engine (climate), and has turned into a 
no-holds-bared brawl by denialists within the blogosphere and other media outlets.

If you are interested in the human nature behind these dynamics, check out this article.

{Thank you SkepticalScience.com for allowing folks like me to repost your excellent and informative climate education articles ! }