Analyse this! Climate mind games

Seeking some light relief in the nation's elusive "climate conversation"? You need go no further than the peer-reviewed journals of psychology. For a small fee you can join the fun, as folk entertain each other with eccentric (grant-funded) research into how best to placate the Beast of Climate Change Denial before it irreversibly damages both your mental - and Gaia's - health.

A favourite of mine appeared this year in the Journal of Environmental Psychology (volume 32, issue 2): Nicolas Gueguen's "Dead indoor plants strengthen belief in global warming."

Participants were surveyed in a room where trees with or without any foliage were displayed. They were asked to report their own beliefs toward global warming. Participants were more likely to believe in global warming in presence of the trees without foliage.

Gueguen, from the Universite de Bretagne Sud in Lorient, France, is a versatile chap. Before moving into the (presumably more lucrative) climate circus Big Top, Francophile mating rituals seem to have been his research focus: Eg: "Say it with Flowers": Effect of flowers in a room on female receptivity of a male's courtship request. (Social Influence, 2011, 6, 105-112).

Such erudite stuff is proliferating at a rate now exceeding the alien seed pods in Don Siegal's Invasion of the Body Snatchers. ("It's weird. Let's hope it's not catching," GP Dr Miles Bennell remarked, as more of his patients began suspecting friends or relatives were imposters.)

Consider another example closer to home: the curious psychodrama that began in the University of Western Australia's Cognitive Science Laboratories. It became public this year when Professor Stephan Lewandowsky made a University News media release on 23^rd August - "What motivates rejection of (climate) science?"

Lewandowsky and joint authors Klaus Oberauer and Gilles Gignac cannily used online surveys, multivariate analysis and specialist insight to explore the notion of "conspiracist ideation", especially in the "climate arena."

Their (peer-reviewed) paper, NASA faked the moon landing, therefore (climate) science is a Hoax: An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science, "in press" with Psychological Science, apparently "provides empirical confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science."

They claim, for example, "those who subscribed to one or more conspiracy theories [such as Princess Diana's death was not an accident; the Apollo moon landings never happened; etc], or who strongly supported a free-market economy, were more likely to reject the findings from climate science, as well as other sciences" (my italics).

The researchers – led by Lewandowsky – also claim discovery of a new causal relationship:"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.)

Stretching a long bow further, they declared another "first" with eye-watering panache. Their "ideological rejection" hypothesis applied not only to climate science, but also to "other scientific facts".

While "there has been much research pointing to the role of free-market ideology in rejecting climate science," this was "the first time it's been shown that other scientific facts, such as the link between HIV and AIDS, are also subject to ideological rejection" (my italics).

The destination of this garden path was no surprise: "a major determinant of the acceptance of science was the perceived consensus among scientists. The more agreement among scientists, the more people were likely to accept the scientific findings."

"Perceived consensus" is important because, according to Lewandowsky, "it highlights how damaging the media's handling of climate issues can be when they create the appearance of a scientific debate where there is none: More than 90 in 100 climate researchers agree on the basic fact that the globe is warming due to human greenhouse gas emissions."

But is an orthodoxy always right and the blogosphere always wrong? Does the former have a monopoly on Lewandowsky's "true scepticism" and "reasoned theorising"? Are internet blogs merely a "platform for climate denial"?

There is surely room for legitimate debate here. How much anthropogenic warming will there be and what will be its consequences? (The UK Met Office recently noted there has been no statistically significant global temperature increase for the past 16 years, despite increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.)

With no established laws of climate change, no models with genuine predictive power, the perceived consensus's embrace of alarmist speculation and risk-management rhetoric is a worry. Confronted with the intractable nature of climate uncertainty, some resort to dishing up red herrings and other fare, such as this one: "the less we know, the more we should worry."

One study last year at UWA's CSL looked at "how attitudes towards spiders affect the processing of spider-related information". According to the course synopsis, the study "involved a spider".

Lewandowsky's latest hypothesis seems to be about something similar in the climate change space; how attitudes of "denialists" – who are allegedly all conspiracy theorists - towards climate change affect their processing of "climate change-related information".

His ABC Drum post of 3^rd May 2010, Evidence is overrated if you are a conspiracy theorist, concluded with an observation about a new canary in the alarmist coal mine - the changing mating rituals of European Lepidoptera.

The conspiracy theory known as climate "scepticism" will soon collapse because it must be extended to include even the macrolepidoptera, including the rhopalocera, geometroidea and noctuoidea. Yes, the European moths and butterflies must be part of the conspiracy, because they mate repeatedly every season now, rather than once only as during the preceding 150 years.

There will always be people who believe that Al Gore issues mating orders to butterflies via secret rays sent from Pyongyang. But they are not the people who contribute to a rational society in the information age.

One problem with the paper – at least according to some who have examined it closely, such as Climate Audit principal, Steve McIntyre– is the apparent lack of – not actual spiders – but bona fide "denialists".

Controversy continues to rage, inter alia, over the quality of Lewandowsky's raw online survey data sourced from "more than 1,000 visitors to blogs dedicated to discussions of climate science", as well as the questionnaire itself. Was the data wholly derived from a group of genuine – and not just pretend - climate sceptics, aka doubt-manufacturing denialists? What was the risk of scamming contamination from masquerading mischief makers, and so on?

For McIntyre, "Lewandowsky's results are bogus because of his reliance on fake and fraudulent data, not because of replication issues in his factor analysis. Nor do I believe that there should be any "doubt" on this point. In my opinion, the evidence is clearcut: Lewandowsky used fake responses from respondents at stridently anti-skeptic blogs who fraudulently passed themselves off as skeptics to the seemingly credulous Lewandowsky."

High-profile climate scientist, Judith Curry, concluded her post on 15^th September by noting that, "while I have used the term 'auditors' for deep investigations of problems with climate data, BS detection seems much more apt for this particular issue."

The "backfire effects" - more than a record 2,500 STW blog comments during September - forced Lewandowsky to make ten posts defending his paperon Shaping Tomorrow's World. They included: Drilling into Noise, An Update on my Birth Certificates, Confirming the Obvious and A Simple Recipe for the Manufacturing of Doubt.

The STW site, incidentally, "was made possible by a grant from the Vice Chancellor of the University of Western Australia and by the support of the Institute of Sustainability and Technology Policy at Murdoch University."

There appear to be instances where legitimate comments have been deleted by STW moderators; while others – often containing pejorative words such as "conspiracy", "denier" and "denialist" - escaped their scrutiny, despite STW's comments policy.

The post below, for example, was deleted because it contained "extensive quote", despite critical relevance.

GrantBat 00:55 AM on 20 September, 2012:

"From Mr McIntyre's post that you refuse to link to, a psychologist writes:

The authors are certainly well aware that the "significance" of this correlation is beside the point. With very large degrees of freedom virtually any correlation is likely to be "significant". The relevant question is whether the size of the correlation is at all interesting. Even accepting the doubtful premiss that this is a sensible way of computing the correlation in question, this one suggests that about 1.5 percent of the variance between the two variables is shared. Most sensible people would see this as not very much. Add to this the fact that it is a computation over a data set comprising strings of ordinal values with a very truncated range and you start to worry. Add to this the acknowledged extreme vulnerability of the data set to the effects of rogue data points (and there are many) and you start to worry more. Add to this the fact (I think "fact" is justified) that the data were collected in a sloppy way, and worry segues into despair.

I am a professional psychologist. Psychology has contributed a great deal to the practical application of statistics and is justifiably proud of this fact. It is extremely unfortunate (I am tempering my words) to see my discipline made into a laughing stock by "green" activists. The more so, because the authors of this paper with their professional hats on are very well aware of all these points and chose to ignore them because of their somewhat warped perception of the greater good.

My experience of academic life in Australia was that fellow psychologists had a commendably low threshold for detecting nonsense and a robust way of showing it. Where are they now?"

Coincidentally, I attended the 2012 Second Ordinary Meeting of Convocation, the UWA Graduates Association, on Friday 21 September. Associate Professor David Hodgkinson, Warden of Convocation, was Chair of the Meeting. Professor Paul Johnson, the University's new Vice Chancellor, was guest speaker.

Concerns were raised at the Meeting about the tone and quality of recent activity at Shaping Tomorrow's World. Was the site's operation and moderator policy consistent with Convocation's governance aims and UWA's mission to "achieve international excellence"?

The university, however, has yet to find any evidence of research misconduct. On 20^th September, Climate Depot's Marc Morano received a surprise letter from UWA Professor Robyn Owens, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research). It was a response to his reply to an unsolicited email from Lewandowsky about publicly releasing blogger site names.

After completing a review of Morano's submission, Professor Owens concluded that, inter alia:

1. The focus of Professor Lewandowsky's research relates directly to his interest and expertise in scepticism and the updating of memory. As such, the topic of this paper of is well within his remit and consistent with the University's Code of Ethics and in particular the academic freedom of staff;
2. The research was undertaken in a manner compliant with the University's strict Human Ethics approval;
3. A review of all correspondence to the blog sites was undertaken confirming the contact with blog sites;
4. The paper has been peer-reviewed and accepted in a high quality, international journal.

That, however, is not the end of the matter. Questions are now being raised about the UWA Ethics Committee's approval process.

How did we get to this point? A key driver has been the discipline's enthusiastic embrace of the alarmist orthodoxy, both nationally and internationally. The Australian Psychological Society's Climate Change Reference Group and Public Interest Team became concerned about climate change - "this profoundly important environmental and social issue" - two years ago.

Determined to get a slice of the multi-billion dollar climate Magic Pudding, it released a position statement: "to emphasise the urgency of climate change as a global problem with significant psychosocial and health implications; to advocate for government, businesses, and organisations to develop effective strategies to minimise climate change impacts; and to position psychologists as a professional group with expert knowledge, skills and resources that can help in climate change science, including mitigation and adaptation (my italics).

The statement, unsurprisingly, stressed how APS research could contribute to understanding "the psychological dimensions of global climate change", including "how psychologists can assist in limiting climate change" (my italics).

There are other perspectives on what is going on here, such as blogger S Ender's prophetic assessment three years ago (Nov 20, 2009 6:05 PM):

This psychologising of the climate-change debate betrays two things about its proponents; firstly, an attitude towards sceptics that is deeply cynical, contemptuous and patronizing; secondly, a belief that subliminal psychological techniques (brainwashing, in all but name) [Lewandowsky et al's "de-biasing"] can and should be used to make sceptics change their minds - a belief that is perfectly Orwellian in its sinister implications.

"There is nothing so absurd," Marcus Tullius Cicero wrote in 44BCE, "that it has not been said by some philosopher" (De Divinatione, book 2, section 58). At this strange decarbonising moment in our history, he surely would extend his observation to include the many now getting their daily bread - and cognitive kicks - from psycho-babbling about climate change; and to at least one "conspiracist ideation" theorist?