Steve McIntyre and others have offered their opinions about the Lewandowsky scam, too.
Years before social scientists, climate scientists, and similar pseudoscientists became really aggressive in their attacks against proper science and even common sense, Richard Feynman said this about social sciences and similar pseudosciences:
Taken from the BBC-Horizon, the episode Pleasure of finding things out (50 minutes)
It's of course a funny monologue because it's so disrespectful and you may think of various social scientists who may deserve an exemption from Feynman's harsh appraisal. However, if you think about others such as Stephen Lewandowsky, you can't overlook that Feynman was probably too kind.
I finally spent some time by looking at Stephan Lewandowsky's blog:
ShapingTomorrowWorld.ORGHe shares the domain with a 31 other science-painted activists. Most of the members' blogs write posts supporting carbon regulation most of the time.
Well, if it were a domain about general science, you may expect the domain name to be something like "Understanding the World" or "Making Sense of Nature" or "Predicting the Future". However, their website is about "shaping tomorrow's world". The name itself may be enough for you to notice the not-so-subtle difference between science and political activism. Mr Lewandowsky – sorry, I surely don't respect his doctorate and even "Mr" is a huge euphemism – unquestionably belongs to the category of the political activism.
And when you look at his website, you will notice that he is a very ugly activist, indeed. He never finds or clarifies any mistake done by his foe. There is nothing to learn at that website. It's all about personal attacks against the people who may be inconvenient in his plans to "shape the world of tomorrow".
So at various points, they're linked to anti-Semitism, a black rapper named Sister Souljah who wanted to kill several whites every other week to compensate for the fact that blacks kill each other, to moonlanding conspiracy theories, and so on. He also passionately collects signs of disagreement between individual climate skeptics and their groups and so on.
Concerning his/their fraudulent research linking conspiracy theories to climate skepticism, he claims to have contacted 5 skeptical blogs in 2010 – be sure that TRF wasn't among them – but he can't reveal their identity for some obscure reasons. It seems that Joanne has been able to locate the five skeptic websites that got the invitations. But even if he offered skeptical blogs to participate in his survey, it's pretty obvious and he must have known that most of them and probably all of them would refuse to give room to a survey organized by an alarmist whose results were likely to be distorted in a way to try to harm skeptics – and indeed, we know that exactly this thing occurred.
So a legitimate survey would have to work against this bias and make sure that the participants are extracted from a representative part of the society, a balanced composition of blogs. Even more importantly, as I said weeks ago, he should have incorporated some filters against dishonest answers to the poll that the participants filled in order to hurt the other group, especially because it was so obvious that these illegitimate answers to the poll would affect the results asymmetrically (because the survey was run on alarmist blogs only).
Well, mostly climate alarmists did so (the survey appeared at alarmist blogs so it's not hard to see that many alarmists pretended to be paranoid skeptics, just like in the other way around in my parody of the poll) and this was arguably by design. After all, the guy wants to "shape the world of tomorrow" so he "shapes" the methodology of his research appropriately to achieve the "right shape".
This is not science. In fact, this is not even the kind of a behavior that is acceptable for an honest person who is a non-scientist. I urge the University of Western Australia that harbors this obnoxious crook to fire him as soon as possible.
Australian trade after cap-and-trade activation
Incidentally, Australia introduced the carbon ransom on July 1st and it wants to merge its system with the European Union's system. I haven't been able to find any other fresh news about the Australian economy after July 1st than this report on the trade deficit. After a $9 million surplus in June, they had a $556 million deficit in July (note that the Australian economy is exactly 10 times smaller than the U.S. economy: useful for comparisons).
The value of exports dropped 2.7 percent month-on-month, the value of imports dropped 1.5 percent month-on-month. On the other hand, the exports of fossil fuels went up 1.7 percent month-on-month. I suppose that when the stuff is exported, you don't have to pay the Australian carbon tax out of it, is that right? If so, the July trend surely looks like a path towards deindustrialization of Australia. The activity, investments, advanced production may be simply moving elsewhere.
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