Prof Stephan Lewandowsky had to make an ethics committee application in order to survey anti-skeptics to “find out” whether skeptics are conspiracy mad nutters (as you would). Simon Turnhill launched an FOI to ask for information and has received some information related to the ethics application. Turnhill wondered why the application seemed so unrelated to the survey. I pointed out that I’d seen a different Lewandowsky paper that fitted the description in the application. Simon hunted and found Popular Consensus: Climate Change Set to Continue (where Lewandowsky shows people in the Hay St. Mall in Perth, some “stock market” graphs and asks them to extrapolate the trend).

Lewandowsky appears to have done an ethics approval for this bland paper, and then put in a last minute request for a “slight modification” which was for an entirely different survey for a different purpose and an unrelated paper, and which, as it happens, uses an internet survey rather than a face to face one. But apart from that… it was nearly the same.

Worse, Turnhill found that by the time Lewandowsky was finalizing the ethics application in August 2010, he’d already done that bland survey fully 7 months before, and the paper was almost finished. The submitted paper was received on Sept 7th 2010, (the day after he started sending emails to skeptics under the name of his assistant Charles Hanich). Turnhill notes that Lewandowsky refers to “The Survey” in the future tense and as if there was only one survey.

>>>>>>>>>

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/10/lewandowsky-a-paper-of-highly-questionable-ethics-approved-in-a-last-minute-switch-with-a-different-study/

Steve McIntyre

[...]

Lewandowsky appears to be yet another person who has been “tricked” (TM – climate science) by IPCC and others hiding the decline in the Briffa reconstruction. In his post on replication, Lewandowsky claimed that the Briffa et al 2001 decline not only did not contradict the Mann hockey stick, but replicated it:

Replicable effects such as the conjunction fallacy are obviously not confined to cognitive science. In climate science, for example, the iconic “hockey stick” which shows that the current increase in global temperatures is unprecedented during the past several centuries if not millennia, has been replicated numerous times since Mann et al. published their seminal paper in 1998. (Briffa et al., 2001; Briffa et al., 200 Cook et al. 2004; D’Arrigo et al., 2006; Esper et al., 2002; Hegerl et al., 2006; Huang et al., 2000; Juckes et al., 2007; Kaufman et al., 2009 ; Ljungqvist, 2010; Moberg et al., 2005; Oerlemans, 2005 ; Pollack & Smerdon, 2004; Rutherford et al., 2005; Smith et al., 2006).

[...]

Both the Mann reconstruction and the Briffa reconstruction used very large networks of tree ring data: explaining why one series went up while the other went down ought to have been a priority for specialists. (The “consensus” explanation by the Hockey Team is simply incorrect and all-too-typical armwaving. They claim that the Briffa reconstruction, unlike the others, is from a small geographically unrepresentative subset. In fact, the Briffa reconstruction is from a very large network of 387 sites, while the other reconstructions cited above are from small (5-18 site) networks, in which bristlecones and/or Yamal are important components. The Mann reconstruction, like Briffa, is from a large network, but its methodology results in very high weighting to the bristlecones.)

[...]

Social Priming
Lewandowsky, who has written in the past on “social priming”, noted in his post that Kahneman had recently slagged social priming theories (a development covered at CA here.) Lewandowky’s post cited the following classic example of social priming:

For example, it has been reported that people walk out of the lab more slowly after being primed with words that relate to the concept “old age” (Bargh et al., 1996)

As partial support for the concept of “social priming”, it seems to me that there is a statistically significant increase in the incidence of drivel in writings by activists after being primed with words that relate to “climate skeptics”. This hypothesis will be more difficult to test among authors where the incidence of drivel is already high, even without social priming.

>>>>>>>>>>>

http://climateaudit.org/2012/10/14/lewandowsky-and-hide-the-decline/

Question – how did this title for a scientific paper:

Understanding Statistical Trends

Turn into this?

NASA faked the moon landing|Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science

Easy. You get ethics approval from your university for the first and use it to push the second. According to UWA rules, Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky was required to obtain approval for his survey from the UWA Ethics Committee. He got that, the process took a week.

>>>>>>>>

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/12/lewandowskys-bait-and-switch/

Links to Australian Climate Madness – Simon Turnill who obtained information on this process through an FOI, request and Climate Audit – Steve McIntyre’s bait and switch post.

Mr Chairman, Vice Chancellor and Members,

All of us here are committed to enhancing the University’s reputation and to ensuring good governance prevails on campus.

In this context, I want to mention the University-funded website: Shaping Tomorrow’s World. A number of alumni are concerned about the tone and quality of recent activity here [during September, 2102]. We wonder whether its operation is consistent with Convocation’s aims and the University’s mission to “achieve international excellence”.

Mr Chairman, [in your capacity as a member of STW’s Editorial Board], could you clarify at some stage if there is any governance provision that would require an STW Board member or Principal to, for example,

(i) stand aside if under investigation by the University for alleged breaches of the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (2007), or for any other complaints regarding research misconduct; and

(ii) cease involvement in the site’s management during the duration of any investigation, with reinstatement depending on the outcome?”

Michael Kile

The Warden replied that he would discuss my request with the STW Editorial Board and prepare a formal response for the next Convocation meeting in early 2013.

The Warden also was asked later to include STW’s moderator policy in the governance review.

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/10/lewandowsky-part-viii-formal-moves-for-a-governance-review-of-the-stw-blog/

Meanwhile, the Wegman Report is exposed as a plagiarised fraud; let’s talk about that, shall we?

BTW, have you guys never heard of LEDs?

This is getting worse by the minute
What a freakin amateur
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/9/5/more-lew.html

Yes, Montford is, indeed, a “freakin amateur” – what’s your point?

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

That Lewandowsky additionally misrepresented explained variances from principal components as explained variances from factor analysis seems a very minor peccadillo in comparison (as I noted at the time.) On this last point, to borrow Lewandowsky’s words, there seem to be two alternatives. Either Lewandowsky “made a beginner’s mistake, in which case he should stop posing as an expert in statistics and take a refresher of Multivariate Analysis 101″.

Or else Lewandowsky, cognizant of how thoroughly compromised his results are by fake/fraudulent data, rather than thanking his critics for spotting defects and withdrawing his study, has decided to double down by trying to manufacture doubt about criticism of the degree to which his data and results have been thoroughly compromised in the “hope that no one would see through his manufacture of doubt.”

>>>>>>>>

http://climateaudit.org/2012/09/20/conspiracy-theorist-lewandowsky-tries-to-manufacture-doubt/

Retained Eigenvectors and Factors

The decision on how many eigenvectors/principal components to retain has been a wheelhouse issue at Climate Audit.

Steig (in Steig et al 2009) had misunderstood the commentary of North et al 1982 on principal components and had additionally and incorrectly reified Chladni patterns as physical patterns. We observed that Steig’s retention of only three eigenvectors had incorrectly spread observed warming in the Antarctic peninsula onto the rest of the continent.

Retained principal components also (famously) arose in discussion of MBH, where Mann and others have created massive disinformation. Mann had notoriously used a highly biased principal components algorithm (not that a centered principal components method was necssarily correct either.) Using a centered principal components method, the bristlecone hockey stick, said by Mann to be the “dominant pattern of variance”, was demoted to a lower order PC (the PC4). Why a PC4 of a regional network should be a unique and magic thermometer for the entire world was never explained. In the NAS panel report, they recommended that bristlecones be avoided in reconstructions (regardless of which PC.) One would have though that this would have put a silver bullet in the MBH reconstruction. However, the climate science community has proved unequal to the small task of rejecting Mann’s use of contaminated upside-down Tiljander data. All these issues linger on.

Steve McIntyre

Lewandowsky’s most recent blog post really makes one wonder about the qualifications at the University of West Anglia Western Australia.

Lewandowsky commenced his post as follows:

The science of statistics is all about differentiating signal from noise. This exercise is far from trivial: Although there is enough computing power in today’s laptops to churn out very sophisticated analyses, it is easily overlooked that data analysis is also a cognitive activity.

Numerical skills alone are often insufficient to understand a data set—indeed, number-crunching ability that’s unaccompanied by informed judgment can often do more harm than good.

This fact frequently becomes apparent in the climate arena, where the ability to use pivot tables in Excel or to do a simple linear regressions is often over-interpreted as deep statistical competence.

I mostly agree with this part of Lewandowsky’s comment, though I would not characterize statistics as merely “differentiating signal from noise”. In respect to his comment about regarding the ability to do a linear regression as deep competence, I presume that he was thinking here of his cousin institute, the University of East Anglia (UEA), where, in a Climategate email, Phil Jones was baffled as to how to calculate a linear trend on his own – with or without Excel. At Phil Jones’ UEA, someone who could carry out a linear regression must have seemed like a deity. Perhaps the situation is similar at Lewandowsky’s UWA. However, this is obviously not the case at Climate Audit, where many readers are accomplished and professional statisticians.

Actually, I’d be inclined to take Lewandowsky’s comment even further – adding that the ability to insert data into canned factor analysis or SEM algorithms (without understanding the mathematics of the underlying programs) is often “over-interpreted as deep statistical competence” – here Lewandowsky should look in the mirror.

Lewandowsky continued:

Two related problems and misconceptions appear to be pervasive: first, blog analysts have failed to differentiate between signal and noise, and second, no one who has toyed with our data has thus far exhibited any knowledge of the crucial notion of a latent construct or latent variable.

In today’s post, I’m going to comment on Lewandowsky’s first claim, while disputing his second claim. (Principal components, a frequent topic at this blog, are a form of latent variable analysis. Factor analysis is somewhat different but related algorithm. Anyone familiar with principal components – as many CA readers are by now – can readily grasp the style of algorithm, though not necessarily sharing Lewandowsky’s apparent reification.)

>>>>>>>>

http://climateaudit.org/2012/09/18/lewandowskys-fake-correlation/

The Lewandowsky view is Drilling into noise. The McIntyre response: Lewandowsky’s Fake Correlation

My favourite Lewandowsky line is: “We cannot get into the details here…”

McIntyre can and does in gory depth. He posts the equations, the code, the tables, everything. He graphs the residuals, and shows the “severe non-normality” of them. He tests the correlation and finds that the two most obvious fake responses heavily affect the results:

>>>>>>

http://joannenova.com.au/2012/09/mcintyre-v-lewandowsky-can-we-call-in-a-statistician-at-uwa-to-help-lew/