Merged "Climate change deniers more likely to believe in other CTs"

[Myron Proudfoot]

I think it may be simpler than the paper suggests. Many people distrust 'Authority' and, by extension, 'Government'. A degree of mistrust is probably a healthy thing for society, but CTers have taken that lack of trust to an extreme, and distrust everything (more or less) that the government/media says. If NASA had released the Apollo 11 footage and called it a science fiction film, the CTers would be telling anyone that would listen that "Seriously dude! They landed on the moon for real!".

"Well, I don't trust the government" often seems to be the fallback position of may a CTer when the illogic of their position is pointed out.

 

[Her Grey Eminence]

Actually if you read the paper, which I assume no one has actually bothered to, you will find that there is a far stronger association with free market ideology (as you would expect) than with conspiracy ideation.

There is also the problem that they didnt try to weed out those who were trolls.
Some of these issues are set out here
http://climateaudit.org/2012/09/08/lewandowsky-scam/

Apparently only 10 respondents (out of 1000+) believed the Moon Landing hoax, and as for 9/11 conspiracies

The results for 9/11, the signature conspiracy of Lewandowsky’s previous editorial, were hardly consistent with Lewandowsky’s expectations, though this was not disclosed in his writeup. Of the 69 respondents who purported to agree with the 9/11 conspiracy, the proportion of warmists and “skeptics” was in almost exact proportion to their overall self-identification.

The conspiracies with heavy and disproportionate skeptic shares are limited to the small-count wacko conspiracies: the Moon Landing, AIDS, Area 51, Roswell etc. and in absurd answers to questions about the relationship and consensus on HIV to AIDS and smoking to lung cancer – an association that, in my opinion, strongly supports heavy contribution of fake responses related to the wacko conspiracies.

Despite Lewandowsky’s contrary statements and implications, even for most of the wacko conspiracies (e.g. the cluster around Moon, AIDS), more respondents professed to be warmists than skeptics. The only conspiracy (or wacko beliefs) with a purported majority of “skeptics” are: the New World Order conspiracy; and purported disbelief in the connection of HIV to AIDS and smoking to lung cancer, both with vanishingly small samples (16 and 11 respectively) and evidently contaminated by fake answers.

 

[threadworm]

Actually if you read the paper, which I assume no one has actually bothered to, you will find that there is a far stronger association with free market ideology (as you would expect) than with conspiracy ideation.

There is also the problem that they didnt try to weed out those who were trolls.
Some of these issues are set out here
http://climateaudit.org/2012/09/08/lewandowsky-scam/

Apparently only 10 respondents (out of 1000+) believed the Moon Landing hoax, and as for 9/11 conspiracies


The results for 9/11, the signature conspiracy of Lewandowsky’s previous editorial, were hardly consistent with Lewandowsky’s expectations, though this was not disclosed in his writeup. Of the 69 respondents who purported to agree with the 9/11 conspiracy, the proportion of warmists and “skeptics” was in almost exact proportion to their overall self-identification.

The conspiracies with heavy and disproportionate skeptic shares are limited to the small-count wacko conspiracies: the Moon Landing, AIDS, Area 51, Roswell etc. and in absurd answers to questions about the relationship and consensus on HIV to AIDS and smoking to lung cancer – an association that, in my opinion, strongly supports heavy contribution of fake responses related to the wacko conspiracies.

Despite Lewandowsky’s contrary statements and implications, even for most of the wacko conspiracies (e.g. the cluster around Moon, AIDS), more respondents professed to be warmists than skeptics. The only conspiracy (or wacko beliefs) with a purported majority of “skeptics” are: the New World Order conspiracy; and purported disbelief in the connection of HIV to AIDS and smoking to lung cancer, both with vanishingly small samples (16 and 11 respectively) and evidently contaminated by fake answers.

You would guess that the number of people who don't believe smoking causes lung cancer will get smaller over time.

 

[Erock]

You would guess that the number of people who don't believe smoking causes lung cancer will get smaller over time.

 

[bit_pattern]

Actually if you read the paper, which I assume no one has actually bothered to

Interesting way to premise your argument, considering the argument consists entirely of someone else's reading of the paper.

 

[Her Grey Eminence]

Interesting way to premise your argument, considering the argument consists entirely of someone else's reading of the paper.

Actually no, my argument consists of someone else's looking at the raw data underlying the paper.

How do I know this? Because I read the paper and I amongst other things I was surprised that so little actual data was presented, just two tables if I recall, one of which did some pairwise correlations. I don't pretend to understand some of the numerical modelling presented, but I do understand pairwise correlations.

The pairwise correlation with freemarket ideology was 77%, and that with conspiracy ideation was, IIRC, 21% - but you had to dig a long way into the paper to find that. But it appears the underlying raw data is even more undermining

I believe the journal - if it accepts the paper, will provide the raw data but I couldn't find it on the website you linked to (perhaps I missed it). I think Climate Audit links to it, so he has released it.

 

[bit_pattern]

but you had to dig a long way into the paper to find that.

It was written up in the abstract.

 

[Her Grey Eminence]

One r value was, the other wasn't.

The weaker r value - not disclosed in the abstract - made up the bulk of the paper.

 

[Scott Sommers]

Actually if you read the paper, which I assume no one has actually bothered to, you will find that there is a far stronger association with free market ideology (as you would expect) than with conspiracy ideation.

There is also the problem that they didnt try to weed out those who were trolls.
Some of these issues are set out here
http://climateaudit.org/2012/09/08/lewandowsky-scam/

Apparently only 10 respondents (out of 1000+) believed the Moon Landing hoax, and as for 9/11 conspiracies

I did read the entire article and in a past thread pointed out a number of methodological limitations in the study. Your criticism is addressed in the article, although it may not be clear. The authors used a sophisticated form of analysis called Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to control for this problem.

The authors of this paper would agree with you. They mention this point several times in the paper. The aim of the paper is to address the "Motivated Rejection of Science" rather than just climate science. What they mean by this is that, "conspiracist ideation as a personality factor or cognitive style, with numerous theories [can be] captured by a single latent construct" (p. 14). This is quite different from the way that you posit the research question.

They also make this point on p.11 and 12, the first page of their conclusion.

Rejection of climate science was strongly associated with endorsement of a
laissez-faire view of unregulated free markets. This replicates previous work (e.g., Heath & Giord, 2006) although the strength of association found here (r ' :80) exceeds that
reported in any extant study. At least in part, this may reect the use of SEM, which
enables measurement of the associations between constructs free of measurement error
(Fan, 2003)...We suggest that free-market ideology was more
important for climate science than conspiratorial thinking

The significance of the model comes on page 12

The third construct, the perception that previous environmental problems have
been solved, turned out to predict rejection of climate science, but not of the other
sciences. We suggest that this construct reects a predisposition to dismiss environmental
concerns (or consider them solved) that is prevalent in particular among adherents of the
free market (as evidenced by the weight with free-market ideology;  = :50).

What I mean is that they are aware of this point in their data, but are trying to link their findings with a research literature that talks about why such a link would exist. You are positing a different model than the one tested in this paper. If you look at the last couple of pages of the paper, you'll see pages containing circles and arrows. These are models the authors were testing. The point is to see how well the data they found fits the model.

However, I still do not agree with the authors conclusions. They fail to link their study with another research literature that addresses irrational beliefs such as ghosts, Bigfoot, etc and thus miss out the importance of social grouping as the main causal factor in such beliefs systems.

I have several other problems with this paper.

I do not believe the Internet methodology is valid.

The original sample size was 1377 (p. 7). Large numbers of respondents were removed because they voted more than once, "duplicate responses from any IP number were eliminated (N = 71)" (p. 8). So at a minimum, 5% of respondents voted twice. This does not appear to be encouraging to me.

This is a very large portion of the sample and points to a great deal of carelessness in answering the questions.

Scaling of answers on a Likert-type scale is problematic
Respondents do not necessarily make the same distinctions in belief as the scale and different scales provide. For example, many respondents probably do not make distinctions between the 8 and 9 on the 9-point Likert scale used by Swami et al that the authors also used in their study. As a result, someone indicating 8 and someone indicating 9 would be indicating. In one of the scales (p. 9), they found 2 factors and solved this by summing the scores on the items that loading on each. This would also be a common practice, but is problematic.

Another solution to the problem, which has never been tried, is Rasch Partial Credit Molding. The PCM calculates the log-likelihood of respondents selecting each of the response categories. Thus, we are able to see if two or more response categories have the same chance of being selected and are not be discriminated against by the respondents.

I would like to examine problems like this using more sophisticated techniques, like Rasch partial credit molding I wrote about above. I'm looking for co-authors who have access to students in English-speaking countries. Anyone interested in helping with this, send me a pm.

 

[aggle-rithm]

A thought provoking article from Stephen Lewandowsky from UWA highlighting the parallels between science denial and other conspiracy theories, in particular the political mindset of people who share such CT views.

I think the problem is that people misunderstand what it means to be in a democracy. It does NOT mean that everyone has an equal say in defining reality.

 

[bit_pattern]

I did read the entire article and in a past thread pointed out a number of methodological limitations in the study.

Oh. My bad! Should have UTSE'd. Mods, feel free to merge

 

[Her Grey Eminence]

I did read the entire article and in a past thread pointed out a number of methodological limitations in the study. Your criticism is addressed in the article, although it may not be clear. The authors used a sophisticated form of analysis called Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to control for this problem.

As I made very clear I do not pretend to be expert enough to assess the modelling done. However, there are people who do have that statistical skill and they make what appear to me very powerful arguments - I linked to one of them

We all know that it is possible to misuse statistics and that is the argument that those equally qualified in statistics as the authors make.

Having said that, I don't doubt that a subset of climate deniers have conspiracy ideation, just in the same way did some of those who believe the US and UK governments deliberately deceived the public about the presence of WMDs in Iraq (tellingly although the survey actually tested this question but the results have been withheld both in the paper and in the released raw data.) But importantly the majority of both climate sceptics and WMD sceptics are not influenced by conspiracy ideation.

Let me restate, out of 1100 respondents, only 10 stated a belief in the Moon Hoax and a number of those were probably troll responses.

 

[Scott Sommers]

As I made very clear I do not pretend to be expert enough to assess the modelling done. However, there are people who do have that statistical skill and they make what appear to me very powerful arguments - I linked to one of them

I don't mean to sound too brash, but I am expert enough. Among other things, I just wrote a doctorate qualifying exam that covered structural equation modeling.

Am I correct that the Steve McIntyre, who is the author of the blog post you linked to, is a climate change denier?

The blog post you linked to is difficult to deal with right from the beginning. Citing a comment left on this page, McIntyre writes,

...the “paper has no data worth interpreting with regard to conspiracy theory ideation”. The scam identified by Curtis was that these respondents were almost certainly warmists caricaturing skeptics. Their caricatures were grotesque: two respondents, claiming to be skeptics, purported to believe in every single conspiracy, no matter how wacko. That the US government was complicit in 9/11; that the Moon Landings were fake; that SARS and AIDS were government plots, etc etc. As others have observed, the number of actual respondents purporting to believe in the various conspiracies was, in many cases, very small. Only 10 respondents purported to believe in Lewandowsky’s signature Moon Landing conspiracy. These included a disproportionate number of scam responses. Indeed, probably all of these responses were scams.

I can understand his problem with the methodology, but the idea that conspiracy theorists are bat crazy and believe all sorts of dumb things? This is proof that the study is a "scam"? Nonsense. Anyone who has spent time on this forum knows this to be the case. McIntyre is clearly disturbed by the company he is keeping and is trying to 'deny' that such an association exists.

I am not defending the study. As I have said, I think there are serious issues with the methodology. But the idea that conspiracy theorists are bat crazy and give weird answers? Give me a break. I have no doubt that the proportion of clinically mentally ill among CTers is higher than the general population. It's not clear to me how this affects the use of Likert-type scales like those used in the original study.

McIntyre then goes on and on about checks on the validity of the data. He seems to feel this has something to do with checking whether the data is good or not. This is ridiculous. He seems to believe that lay respondents to the survey will be going through the items as though they are experts looking for inconsistencies.

In Lewandowsky’s zeal to tar skeptics with conspiracy theory labels, Lewandowsky overlooked a fundamental stratification of respondents – one that clearly separates a Climate Audit-style skeptic from the caricature in Lewandowsky’s editorial, a caricature also held at the anti-skeptic blogs. Consider the following two questions:
CO2TempUp – I believe that burning fossil fuels increases atmospheric temperature to some measurable degree.
CO2HasNegChange – I believe that the burning of fossil fuels on the scale observed over the last 50 years has caused serious negative changes to the planet’s climateAc.
Actual skeptics at the major climate blogs, in line with Lindzen, Christy and Spencer, would agree with the first and disagree with the second. However, a fake skeptic response, constructed according to the caricature in Lewandowsky’s editorial, would disagree with both.

This looks just like a mathematician trying to pretend he knows how to read social science data. And what do you know...McIntrye is a mathematician trying really hard to pretend he knows how to read social science data.

This kind of 'contradiction' happens all the time in social science data. Sometimes it's placed as checks in the items. I understand the MMPI has items like this, but I have never read an actual MMPI. I personally have used items like this in surveys I did of pornography use. They are very hard to interpret directly. In fact, respondents will give answers to anything put in front of them whether or not these items reflect things that actually exist or even if they make sense. Respondents will answer items they don't understand and then tell you they did understand them. That's why you have to ask lots of people and use statistical techniques that average out the noise. But in fact, statistics are not the best way to handle this problem, as I have pointed out in my post above. There is a very good paper on this somewhere in the Internet. If you want to read it, I'll try and find it again.

Sometimes it happens by accident, as it appears happened here. The idea that respondents are reading items carefully and are responding to the items in the ways intended by their designer(s) is a sign of nativity and childishness with the data. Especially with items that are politically charged administered to a population that almost certainly suffers from other serious issues.

It is a very common problem with investigations of this type to have to sort out what was understood by respondents when they responded. That is the point of the study I suggested in my other post regarding the analysis of scoring with Rasch Partial Credit Modeling. Without a proper scoring system, it is never clear what's happening in the data. McIntyre seems unaware of this problem, as he would be given his background.

But for the most part, he sounds to me like a whining baby trying to hide behind behind big data and lots of figures that most of his readers won't be able to properly understand. He may be great at making climate models, but when it comes to social data, he should stay home.

We all know that it is possible to misuse statistics and that is the argument that those equally qualified in statistics as the authors make.

Having said that, I don't doubt that a subset of climate deniers have conspiracy ideation, just in the same way did some of those who believe the US and UK governments deliberately deceived the public about the presence of WMDs in Iraq (tellingly although the survey actually tested this question but the results have been withheld both in the paper and in the released raw data.) But importantly the majority of both climate sceptics and WMD sceptics are not influenced by conspiracy ideation.

Let me restate, out of 1100 respondents, only 10 stated a belief in the Moon Hoax and a number of those were probably troll responses.

Yes, you are right. But I recommend a second very thorough reading of the paper to address this point. The reference to Moon Land Hoax occurs only twice (that's 2 times) in the whole text of the paper and one of them is from the Abstract. I have pasted these below. All other references to the MLH are in titles and coding definitions for the SEM model.

In the abstract

We additionally show that endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy
theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin-Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing) predicts rejection of climate science as well as the rejection of other scientic finndings, above and beyond endorsement of laissez-faire free markets

In the text,

It is therefore possible that this disposition predicts the rejection
of science independently of the scientic domain in question: if conspiracist ideation reects a stable personality or cognitive characteristic, then beliefs such as that NASA faked the moon landing may predict rejection of a range of scientic propositions, from HIV/AIDS to climate change.

The reference to the MLH has little to do with their model or data and more to do with making a sexy title. Personally, I have no problem with that. Do you?

I have to go to bed. I'm going to say this directly, McIntyre is crap. He appears unable to understand the data properly and embarrassed by a real demonstration of what kind of people he is in bed with.

The article has nothing to do with belief in the Moon Landing Hoax. Belief in the MLH has almost nothing to do with the contents of article and its presence in the data would not have affected the outcome. It is a marketing ploy to attract attention to the article.

But then, I would have thought that was obvious.

 

[Dcdrac]

Alright I come clean it was me as one year old child genius I hoaxed the moon landings using nothing mre than a fairy lquid bottle and a couple of action men (GI Joe in US Speak))

 

[jaydeehess]

The blog post you linked to is difficult to deal with right from the beginning. Citing a comment left on this page, McIntyre writes,


Quote:
...the “paper has no data worth interpreting with regard to conspiracy theory ideation”. The scam identified by Curtis was that these respondents were almost certainly warmists caricaturing skeptics. Their caricatures were grotesque: two respondents, claiming to be skeptics, purported to believe in every single conspiracy, no matter how wacko. That the US government was complicit in 9/11; that the Moon Landings were fake; that SARS and AIDS were government plots, etc etc. As others have observed, the number of actual respondents purporting to believe in the various conspiracies was, in many cases, very small. Only 10 respondents purported to believe in Lewandowsky’s signature Moon Landing conspiracy. These included a disproportionate number of scam responses. Indeed, probably all of these responses were scams.

McIntrye may have never perused the pages of this forum. I can think of several posters here who just might purport to " believe in every single conspiracy, no matter how wacko. That the US government was complicit in 9/11; that the Moon Landings were fake; that SARS and AIDS were government plots, etc etc.". Thus by his measure they are all obvious trolls and POEs but would hesitate to make that assumption based soley on a declaration that it must be so.

 

[Scott Sommers]

McIntrye may have never perused the pages of this forum. I can think of several posters here who just might purport to " believe in every single conspiracy, no matter how wacko. That the US government was complicit in 9/11; that the Moon Landings were fake; that SARS and AIDS were government plots, etc etc.". Thus by his measure they are all obvious trolls and POEs but would hesitate to make that assumption based soley on a declaration that it must be so.

And this is the charitable criticism of him. The source of all true things, Wikipedia has this to say about him,

Stephen McIntyre (born c. 1947) is a Canadian mathematician, former minerals prospector,[1] and semi-retired mining consultant who is best known as the founder and editor of Climate Audit, a blog devoted to the analysis and discussion of climate data. He is most prominent as a critic of the temperature record of the past 1000 years and the data quality of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

It continues,

Colby Cosh, writing for Maclean's magazine, believes McIntyre's criticisms of climate science are at the heart of the Climatic Research Unit email controversy in November–December 2009. McIntyre is mentioned over 100 times in the hacked emails. In the emails, one climate researcher dismisses him as a "bozo". Others speculate over his funding, and argue about whether to ignore or counterattack him—although, according to Cosh, some unnamed scientists acknowledge that his criticisms have merit.[2]
The Associated Press analysis of the CRU e-mails stated: "Some e-mails said McIntyre's attempts to get original data from scientists are frivolous and meant more for harassment than doing good science. There are allegations that he would distort and misuse data given to him. McIntyre disagreed with how he is portrayed. 'Everything that I've done in this, I've done in good faith,' he said."[26]
BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin wrote that McIntyre "arguably knows more about CRU science than anyone outside the unit - but none of the CRU inquiries has contacted him for input." [27] New Statesman named McIntyre one of its "50 People Who Matter 2010", citing his role in the Climategate controversy.[28]

Keep in mind that New Stateman also named 9/11 conspiracy guru David Ray Griffin among its most influential people in 2009.

It appears more to me that McIntyre is bothered by the idea that he shares a space in the world with such truly disturbed people. Here we all know this, but McIntyre appears to be imaging that he holds some critical space shared with only the truly skeptical. On the forum, we see this all the time where members claim they are being "skeptical" by doubting the "official story". He's no different from this. In fact, I would say he is directly analogous to such Truther scientists as Steve Jones or Denis Rancourt, who have legitimate degrees and meaningful reputations in scientific fields that have nothing to do with their conspiracy beliefs.

 

[Her Grey Eminence]

I don't mean to sound too brash, but I am expert enough. Among other things, I just wrote a doctorate qualifying exam that covered structural equation modeling.

You don't sound too brash, just a little less disingenuous and not completely honest. I don't want to sound too confrontational but I think your specialty is social science and so while you may have some experience with using structural equation modeling to assist your investigations, unless you have a solid statistical training you are not an expert. I myself have used R-programming to run statistical tests and have some knowledge of simpler tests that I used in my field of expertise - but I am by no means an expert.

I don't doubt that SEM is very powerful when used in good faith and answering question when the data supplied is relevant and insightful. But it can also be used to create junk science or mislead if you want to.

For example: Suppose we collected a whole bunch of unrelated questions
1. People who like asparagus
2. People who are multilingual
3. People who ski at Aspen
4. People with double-barrelled surnames.
5. People who vote Republican
We might be able to construct an SEM model from that and produce numbers, but it wouldn't be meaningful - people with double-barrelled surnames might be more likely to eat asparagus and be multi-lingual, they might be more likely to eat asparagus then to be multilingual or perhaps the people who are multilingual are less likely to eat asparagus. But there is no meaning to this.

So let us take this sentence from the abstract

Endorsement of the free market also predicted the rejection of other established scientific findings, such as the facts that HIV causes AIDS and that smoking causes lung cancer.

Perhaps this is true in the confines of their survey (although I think the numbers would have been vanishingly small and possibly from trolls) but it has no wider meaning. If you meet a person who endorses the free-market the likelihood that they dispute HIV causes AIDS is vanishingly small. Hypothetically those who dispute HIV causes AIDS might be more likely to endorse the freemarket (although I doubt it) but you would have to have a large samples of HIV-deniers to do say that.

I don't think this paper really adds to anything you couldn't tell by spending an 1 hour online: most climate deniers are influenced by free market ideology, a small subset have conspiracy ideation. They are probably relatively non-overlapping groups. I don't believe, because of the limitations of the methodology, that numbers or the modelling add much of value to subjective observation. If you wanted to say those with conspiracy ideation are more likely to believe in climate science or disbelieve in climate science - you would either need to target websites where lots of conspiracy theorists congregate or maybe do a very large population wide survey - large enough to catch enough conspiracy theorists in its net.

The reference to the MLH has little to do with their model or data and more to do with making a sexy title. Personally, I have no problem with that. Do you?

I see, so in social science it is ok to make a stupid poorly evidenced claim in the abstract (which is probably all that 90% of people will read) so long as you don't spend too much time on it in the body of the work?

Fair enough.

 

[Scott Sommers]

[

You don't sound too brash, just a little less disingenuous and not completely honest. I don't want to sound too confrontational but I think your specialty is social science and so while you may have some experience with using structural equation modeling to assist your investigations, unless you have a solid statistical training you are not an expert. I myself have used R-programming to run statistical tests and have some knowledge of simpler tests that I used in my field of expertise - but I am by no means an expert.

I think we have a tone here that is easily manageable, and I appreciate your sincerity. I am a standardized test designer. In fact, I am a senior manager on what is probably one of the largest non-propriety standardized tests in the world. While the department I study in is Educational Psychology, my specialization is in measurement theory, such as the kind used to develop Item Response Theory and Rasch Modeling. The dissertation I am preparing to defend deals with procedures to validate test standards that use these techniques. So in the same sense that many of our JREF friends are only engineers and not mathematicians, yet they frequently construct arguments based in mathematical reasoning for why certain types of conspiracy arguments can not be true, we would be equally 'experts' in our mathematically-based tools.

But yes, it would be correct to say that I am not an "expert" in SEM no matter how much I know about causal modeling.

I don't doubt that SEM is very powerful when used in good faith and answering question when the data supplied is relevant and insightful. But it can also be used to create junk science or mislead if you want to.

For example: Suppose we collected a whole bunch of unrelated questions
1. People who like asparagus
2. People who are multilingual
3. People who ski at Aspen
4. People with double-barrelled surnames.
5. People who vote Republican
We might be able to construct an SEM model from that and produce numbers, but it wouldn't be meaningful - people with double-barrelled surnames might be more likely to eat asparagus and be multi-lingual, they might be more likely to eat asparagus then to be multilingual or perhaps the people who are multilingual are less likely to eat asparagus. But there is no meaning to this.

This is probably not true. If you could show me such a model, I would of course concede the point, but there are very clear ways to distinguish the meaningfulness of models. Similar things are said about Rasch Modeling about which I know a great deal, both practical and mathematical. They are not true and only appear true for people unfamiliar with how to read the available statistical software.

So let us take this sentence from the abstract


Perhaps this is true in the confines of their survey (although I think the numbers would have been vanishingly small and possibly from trolls) but it has no wider meaning. If you meet a person who endorses the free-market the likelihood that they dispute HIV causes AIDS is vanishingly small. Hypothetically those who dispute HIV causes AIDS might be more likely to endorse the free market (although I doubt it) but you would have to have a large samples of HIV-deniers to do say that.

I don't think this paper really adds to anything you couldn't tell by spending an 1 hour online: most climate deniers are influenced by free market ideology, a small subset have conspiracy ideation. They are probably relatively non-overlapping groups. I don't believe, because of the limitations of the methodology, that numbers or the modeling add much of value to subjective observation. If you wanted to say those with conspiracy ideation are more likely to believe in climate science or disbelieve in climate science - you would either need to target websites where lots of conspiracy theorists congregate or maybe do a very large population wide survey - large enough to catch enough conspiracy theorists in its net.



I see, so in social science it is ok to make a stupid poorly evidenced claim in the abstract (which is probably all that 90% of people will read) so long as you don't spend too much time on it in the body of the work?

Fair enough.

Much of this seems very strange to me. The paper is not really about climate denial. This is one only aspect of the paper. However, it is the one that McIntyre has focused on because it appears he is uncomfortable with the idea that he shares an important part of his identity with the mentally ill. The paper is about conspiracy ideation as a personality trait. You may have missed this because of confusion about a technical term the authors used in the paper. The term "latent variable" appears many times in the paper. While the term has a statistical meaning, it is referring here to the idea of an underlying personality characteristic - conspiracy ideation - that explains other beliefs. As the authors state in the abstract and throughout the paper, they are examining,

empirical confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science.

You may not think this is a particularly important piece of information in living your life, but it does fit into a larger research literature that finds this useful. In fact, I would say from my own research on organized conspiracy groups, this is extremely important. These groups are run by activists who do not necessarily share other beliefs about the world with people they are influencing. The paper raises the possibility that even mainstream conservative political beliefs could be being powered by clusters of people who have links to the truly deranged. For example, climate change denial is widespread in the We Are Change group that also promotes 9/11 Truth, chemtrails and the New World Order. That there is an empirical demonstration that climate change denial is also part of the whacko conspiracy world, and not just a conservative political belief, seems very significant to me. While everyone on the JREF is aware of this point, many people outside our small circle of initiates are not. Evidently McIntyre and others are not because he in fact states this as one reasons for why the study is not believable - because the raw data points to people who endorse all kinds of really crazy conspiracy beliefs.

I think you are quite wrong. While I have many problems with the study, it is just as good as many other social science studies of irrational beliefs. I don't think they're particularly good, either, and may try and address some of their problems when I finish my degree.

I hope this addresses your points.

 

[bit_pattern]

As I made very clear I do not pretend to be expert enough to assess the modelling done. However, there are people who do have that statistical skill and they make what appear to me very powerful arguments - I linked to one of them

I don't pretend to understand statistics tbh but I'm sure as **** familiar with Steve McIntyre and his underhanded, misleading and deceptive attacks against climate science, all of which have seemed like powerful arguments to the uninitiated too, until the agenda driven and misleading tactics are exposed by other scientists. This is the reason McIntyre publishes predominantly on blogs, he can "audit" science from the safe confines of behind his computer screen.

Edited by LashL: 

Edited to properly mask profanity. Please see Rule 10 re: the auto-censor.

I realise this argument is probably a textbook example of some logical fallacy but the man McIntyre is little better than a troll.

 

[JayUtah]

I realise this argument is probably a textbook example of some logical fallacy but the man McIntyre is little better than a troll.

Yes, technically it's argumentum ad hominem since you're evaluating a specific claim based on properties of the person making it rather than on the evidentiary and logical merit it might have. But it's a gray area here since the properties you identify relate to the credibility of other arguments he has made on the same topic. To be scrupulously honest and faithful to the principles of skepticism, you should evaluate each and every one of his arguments on its merit alone. But yeah, credibility matters.