UPDATE: After a cursory look at the percentages in the response to the Lewandowsky survey from the blogs he listed as participating, it seems the outcome doesn’t fit the title. See below.

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From the “free the metadata” department, we have this gem. Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky of the University of Western Australia’s Cognitive S cience Department devised some sort of survey where he supposedly contacted skeptical climate blogs to ask we post a link to gather opinions for his survey. He says he contacted five and they all declined. Only one problem with that; none of the mainstream skeptical blogs appear to have any knowledge of being contacted. That includes WUWT and Climate Audit, among others.

I keep all my email, and I see no such contact or invitation. I’ve searched WUWT and found nothing in comments from him inviting to participate either. To be thorough, I also searched for any communications from his co-authors Klaus Oberauer and Gilles Gignac. I’ve found no invitation of any kind, but I did find that a commenter in the USA, PaulW left a note about it on WUWT here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/29/new-wuwt-sstenso-page-now-online/#comment-469869 But, he’s not affiliated with UWA or the authors, and it was purely a comment of curiosity. One of our moderators, D.B. Stealey took the survey (now deleted) after seeing the comment, and noted “Interesting questions.” but he didn’t note any invitation to post it on WUWT, nor did I.

Similar lack of confirmed invitations are being reported in other skeptical blogs, and the list is growing. But, for some reason, Dr. Lewandowsky refuses to divulge which skeptical blogs he contacted.

Jo Nova and Lucia Liljegren are asking some very pointed questions. Given the sheer lunacy on display in the paper…

…I think Jo Nova nailed it with this line:

It’s as if Stephan did not want to know what real skeptics think?

Lucia asked Lewandowsky in a direct email about it and got this response:

Sorry, no, they likely replied to my requests under the presumption of privacy and I am therefore not releasing their names. The blogs that did post the link (thereby publically identifying themselves, unlike those who declined) are: %http://www.skepticalscience.com %http://tamino.wordpress.com %http://bbickmore.wordpress.com %http://www.trunity.net/uuuno/blogs/ %http://scienceblogs.com/illconsidered/ %http://profmandia.wordpress.com/ %http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/ %http://hot-topic.co.nz/

“…they likely replied” That seems to me to be pretty weak data for a scientist. Either they replied requesting confidentiality or they didn’t, there’s no “likely” about it when gathering hard data.

Time to fess up, perfessor. Show the list and proof of contact and confirmation that they declined the invitation. You have my full and complete permission to release my name. Other skeptical bloggers have also granted permission on Lucia’s website, so there’s no reason to hold back now.

In comments at Lucia’s, Steve McIntyre notes:

The University of Western Australia has fairly standard academic misconduct policies. http://www.research.uwa.edu.au…..guidelines http://www.research.uwa.edu.au…..rch-policy If Lewandowky’s claim about 5 skeptic blogs was fabricated, it appears to me that it would be misconduct under university policies. The person responsible for investigating complaints appears to be the Pro VIce Chancellor (Research) ,Robyn Owens, dvcr@uwa.edu.au. She is in a position to get an answer, given Lewandowsky’s refusal to disclose the information.

In other news, the Lewandowsky survey data was put online at Bishop Hill. See it here.

Make of that data what you wish, but it seems to me that if you only ask questions of one side, as shown is the blog list above, you’ll get one-sided answers. That’s hardly science.

UPDATE: After looking at the survey data provided on the Bishop Hill blog here, it is beginning to look like the answers were skewed by participants at those blogs for what they think he wanted to hear, rather than a true sample.

For example: If you look at column R in the Excel spreadsheet, labeled CYMoon, which according to the paper in question:

It says:

CYMoon The Apollo moon landings never happened and were staged in a Hollywood studio. .742

That is the result of this question structure:

Unless otherwise noted, all items used a 4-point scale ranging from \Strongly Disagree’ (1) to \Strongly Agree” (4). Table section headings correspond to latent variable names in Figure 2.

OK do a simple scan of the 1’s and 2’s in column R, which correspond to ‘Strongly Disagree’ and ‘Disagree’ and you get them as the majority, with a smattering of 3’s and 4’s. So I decided to use Excel’s function for counting occurances. =COUNTIF(R2:R1146,”1″, and =COUNTIF(R2:R1146,”2″ =COUNTIF(R2:R1146,”3″ =COUNTIF(R2:R1146,”4″

The (corrected, I had the 1 and 4 counts backwards originally, thanks Lucia) distribution of responses to the Moon Landing question are:

1067 Strongly Disagree

68 Disagree

4 Agree

6 Strongly agree

Total responses are 1145 (Rows R2 to R1146, top row R1 is title, so subtract 1 from 1146). Therefore 1067+68 = 1135 1135/1145 = 0.9912

Only 0.9% of respondents actually believe that the moon landings “never happened and were staged in a Hollywood film studio”. So what does that say about the title of the paper:

NASA faked the moon landing—therefore (climate) science is a hoax

I see a retraction for this paper in the very near future.

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