Socrates on the ropes

At 8.04 pm EST last Friday, a momentous event occurred on planet Earth under a full moon. Warren Kerr, AM, the new Warden of Convocationat the University of Western Australia, made a brief statement about a website, Shaping Tomorrow's World.

The University's Acting Director of Public Affairs, Ms Janine MacDonald, had advised him that, as STW was not a University site and UWA was not an affiliated organisation, the UWA logo and affiliation claim must be removed from the site.

MacDonald would inform STW of her decision, presumably Principals – Professors Stephan Lewandowsky and Steven Smith, and the Editorial Board.

Are the other two university logos appearing on STW also misleading visitor traffic?

The site was established in early 2011 by a group of WA academics with a UWA grant and funding from Murdoch University's Institute of Sustainability and Technology Policy.

According to emails released under FOI, STW would "provide a forum for civil debate about the real issues facing us – not whether [dangerous anthropogenic] climate change is real, but what we should do about it...We will employ a strict moderation policy and we will (informally) "peer-review" all posts."

It would be an activist site, as a MU Engineering and Energy School academic stressed in an email of 25^th November, 2010.

"It's way past time for academe to stand up and make your voices heard for a broader audience. Preventing looming catastrophic climate change is something that simply must be engaged with by those with the knowledge to do so, beyond the confines of academic literature and institutions largely opaque to the majority of your fellow citizens. Please consider!" (my italics)

STW's UWA funding submission outlined its intention not only to provide information to the "interested general public, communicators and educators"; but also give "objective advice for businesses, policy-makers and elected representatives". Content would be "global in implication, but with an Australian flavour."

A month before launch, Lewandowsky felt the venture's success would depend on whether it could attract "contributions from as many academic colleagues around the world as possible." He wanted global readership for "to be worthwhile, we obviously need to ensure traffic."

Over at The Curtin University Sustainability Policy Institute, there was more noble-cause excitement.

"CUSP just finished a meeting with 30 grass-root groups to organise a 'stop the anti-carbon tax nonsense'. We should get about four times what they get to their rally. So many young people. This is the policy engagement I like!

'Shaping tomorrow's world...Yes we would have to be part of that. We have 60 PhD students working on these matters at CUSP alone. We only do academic work if it is shaping tomorrow's world...Not worth doing otherwise, when you see how little time we have to change."

STW was launched at UWA on Friday 13^th May 2011, but the site never achieved its ambitious goals. The "only thing missing was 100,000 readers a day."

Concerns were raised last year about some STW posts (here and here). The site's moderator policy seemed incompatible with the University's mission to "achieve international excellence".

There were instances where some comments had been deleted; while others – often containing pejorative words such as "conspiracy", "denier" and "denialist" - escaped scrutiny, despite STW's comments policy.

Scuffles in the Academy are a dime a dozen, but this one continues to have an intriguing smell about it. For those who came in late and missed last year's psychodrama, it all began when something weird happened in the University's Cognitive Science Laboratories. A fish began to rot from its head.

On 23^rd August, 2012, Lewandowsky made a University News media release: "What motivates rejection of (climate) science?" He and two co-authors, Klaus Oberauer and Gilles Gignac, described how they had used online surveys, multivariate analysis and their specialist insight to explore "conspiracist ideation", a murky phenomenon allegedly endemic in the "climate arena" and elsewhere.

Their (peer-reviewed) paper, NASA faked the moon landing, therefore (climate) science is a Hoax: An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science, which was accepted by Psychological Science on 7^th July, 2012 and published online on 26^th March this year, apparently "provides empirical confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science."

One problem with the paper – at least according to Climate Audit principal, Steve McIntyre – was the quality of its "denialist" data-set.

The authors claim their raw online survey data came from "more than 1,000 visitors to blogs dedicated to discussions of climate science". But how could they be sure whether it was from genuine – and not just pretend - climate sceptics, aka doubt-manufacturing denialists? And was there a risk of scamming contamination?

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 clear-cut: Lewandowsky used fake responses from respondents at stridently anti-skeptic blogs who fraudulently passed themselves off as skeptics to the seemingly credulous Lewandowsky."

The "backfire effects" forced Lewandowsky to defend his paper on Shaping Tomorrow's World in ten posts during September last year, including: Drilling into Noise, An Update on my Birth Certificates, Confirming the Obvious and A Simple Recipe for the Manufacturing of Doubt.

Ben Pile went further in a recent post on Spiked Online, The Pathologising of Climate Scepticism. He suggested Lewandowsky was attempting "to turn criticism into a psychological illness" solely to justify his sceptic-bashing.

That he had escaped censure raised deeper questions about (social) science and the Academy.

"How was it that such shoddy, prejudiced, and partial research passed the seemingly objective tests of peer-review, and that such errors of category, method and analysis were nonetheless deemed worthy of publication by editors of scientific publications?"

If Lewandowsky's work was representative of the quality of scientific research and the Academy's standards, what did it say about climate science and the quality of the so-called scientific consensus?

The saga continues, as does the smell of rotting fish - and dead horse.

On 18^th March 2013, online journal Frontiers published another paper by Lewandowsky, Oberauer, et. al. Titled "Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation", some thought it was a spoof, a quirky homage to Alan Sokal.

Not so. Our intrepid researchers cannily took the critical responses – now dubbed "recursive fury" - to the initial "moon-landing" paper (LOG12) as a valid data-set and thrust it into their Conspiracist Ideation Analyser (CIA), which duly churned out a predictable conclusion.

"This article analyzes the response of the climate blogosphere to the publication of LOG12. We identify and trace the hypotheses that emerged in response to LOG12 and that questioned the validity of the paper's conclusions. Using established criteria to identify conspiracist ideation, we show that many of the hypotheses exhibited conspiratorial content and counterfactual thinking...although alternative scholarly interpretations may be advanced in the future."

After another surge of recursive fury – more data for the CIA - Frontiers posted a statement several months ago that remains on the site.

"This article has been the subject of complaints. Given the nature of some of these complaints, Frontiers has provisionally removed the link to it while they are investigated, which is being done as swiftly as possible and which Frontiers management considers the most responsible course of action. The article has not been retracted or withdrawn."

Meanwhile, the world waits patiently for the appearance of some "alternative scholarly interpretations."

There was another momentous event this year. Lewandowsky became Chair of Cognitive Psychology at Bristol University's School of Experimental Psychology, but remains an STW Principal.

With controversy still swirling in the blogosphere, a BU media release stated his work offered "enormous benefits in the fields of experimental psychology, climate research and the wider public engagement with and understanding of scientific research."

Lewandowsky put it this way. Ironically, he was particularly interested in "the persistence of misinformation in society, and how myths and misinformation can spread"; and the "variables that determine whether or not people accept scientific evidence, for example surrounding vaccinations or climate science."

His BU list of latest publications includes the "NASA faked the moon landing" paper – but there is no mention of the one posted on Frontiers.

Cutting through a jungle of psycho-babble is no easy task, but someone has to do it.

Lewandowsky et al claim here that:

"Although most experts agree that CO2 emissions are causing anthropogenic global warming (AGW), public concern has been declining. One reason for this decline is the 'manufacture of doubt' by political and vested interests, which often challenge the existence of the scientific consensus."

Rather than explore whether there might be valid reasons for questioning the "scientific consensus" – as suggested by global reaction last week to a leaked version the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report – they instead explain it away by psychologising all scepticism as delusional, while concocting their own conspiracy theory: political and vested interests are deliberately undermining public concern by pumping out mischievous "doubt".

Meanwhile, back at UWA, MacDonald described STW academics as "experts in their fields who are making an important contribution to debate about these important global issues."

The University was, she wrote, "happy for them to use instead [of the UWA logo] a written acknowledgement such as:

"STW was established with the support of The University of Western Australia, Curtin University and Murdoch University. The blog is the product of the joint expertise of staff from these institutions and reflects their contribution to debate about climate change and social impact.""

Yet, paradoxically, there are UWA alumni whose views would be unwelcome on STW, despite their impressive work outside the Academy; such as Joanne Nova, Tony Thomas, and William Kininmonth, a contributor to Bob Carter and John Spooner's new book, Taxing Air - Facts and Fallacies about Climate Change.

UWA's Winthrop Hall Undercroft is dedicated to Socrates. The inscription on Victor Wager's 1932 statue states he "sought truth always by the path of open discussion and free enquiry. May his spirit preside here at all times."

In the University's centennial year, the Greek philosopher seems to be on the ropes again, despite being the inspiration for its "seek wisdom" motto. With his disciples effectively silenced, who will deter STW from continuing to promulgate unchallenged its hemlock of climate alarmism?

There is another paradox. While STW academics may be experts in their fields, if they are making such an important contribution to the debate, how do we explain the site's demonstrable lack of activity?

STW is neither achieving its objectives, nor reaching target audiences. Post frequency is poor, with only four in the past six months. Site traffic is very low, with only 120 comments during this period.

Of 125 posts since 5^th June 2011, 13 percent were made by the four STW Editorial Board members – Carmen Lawrence, Glenn Albrecht, Mark Edwards and David Hodgkinson; while Lewandowsky posted about 50 per cent of them.

Coincidentally, WA Supreme Court Justice James Edelman, defended Socrates in his Convocation speech on 'Challenges for University education in the next century." The commoditisation of education now underway, he suggested, would never substitute for a Socratic education or teaching method.

Would there have been more activity at STW had it promoted genuine free discussion and open enquiry, especially on matters climatic?

With UWA committed to intellectual freedom and the pursuit of excellence - and now ranked 91st in world university rankings - perhaps it should encourage those involved with it to do so.