Analyse this! Climate mind games

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.