Climate Deniers: You’re Not Paranoid – We Really are Out to Get You February 7, 2013

So here’s what happened. A curious group of psychologists did some reading of climate denial materials, and noted the odd correlation between climate denial and a grab bag of wackjob conspiracy theories, i.e., moon landing hoax, AIDS conspiracy, etc – your standard “they’re all in this together and of course they say that it just proves they’re all in on it” kind of reasoning. If you’re a moon landing nut, you are more likely to be a climate denier.

…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 scientific findings

And for God’s sake, don’t get ’em started on Chem trails…for examples, just peruse the comment threads of any of my videos…

So, anyway, they published, and of course, the expected squeals from the climate denial community ensued. But, there was another thing, too.

Turns out, according to climate deniers, that studies showing correlation of climate denial with conspiracy theories, are in fact more evidence themselves of just how deep the conspiracy goes….

Hence, another paper.

I said this stuff writes itself. Maybe you thought I was joking?

SkepticalScience:

In the case of the response to our earlier paper, we were struck by the way in which some of the accusations leveled against our paper were, well, somewhat conspiratorial in nature. We therefore decided to analyze the public response to our first paper with the hypothesis in mind that this response might also involve conspiracist ideation. We systematically collected utterances by bloggers and commenters, and we sought to classify them into various hypotheses leveled against our earlier paper. For each hypothesis, we then compared the public statements against a list of criteria for conspiracist ideation that was taken from the previous literature. This follow-up paper was accepted a few days ago by Frontiers in Psychology, and a preliminary version of the paper is already available, for open access, here. The title of the paper is Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation, and it is authored by myself, John Cook, Klaus Oberauer, and Michael Marriott.