Ehrlich’s Zombie Blog

[This article replaces one which I put up last night when I was rather drunk, and which had the stupid title  “Ehrlich: Fascist”. (Do other bloggers write when they’re half cut? It’s very tempting, since blogging is a kind of simulated human interaction in which you’re quite invisible to your interactee. So you can get plastered or pick your nose while talking to someone. Like in the confessional, or the House of Commons). There’s a lot more to be said on Ehrlich and the totalitarian tendencies of his thought. This post concentrates on one of the bizarre traits he has in common with so many other warmists - the zombie blog. I’ve added Mooloo’s comment to my original post]

Anthony Watts has an article on historically high world grain harvest at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/13/corn-up-7-worldwide-paul-ehrlich-of-course-sees-agricultural-collapse/

He mentions Paul Ehrlich and his forty plus years of predicting imminent famine. Anthony does this stuff well, and to an audience of hundreds of thousands, so it might seem churlish to criticise, but I I disgree most strongly with this:

“Every university has their own nutty professor. As long as people recognize that Paul Ehrlich is just that, and that none of his gloom and doom scenarios have come true, we’ll all be fine. Ehrlich is the poster child for why tenure shouldn’t be a permanent thing, but one that you have to be reviewed at some interval to keep.”

My reasoned argument is that if university authorities start reviewing tenure,  Lindzen might be the first for the high jump – you just can’t tell. There’s a moral argument to be made as well, for which my authority is Noam Chomsky, Jewish defender of Palestinian rights, who wrote a preface to a book by a notorious Holocaust denier, Professor Faurisson, who was relieved of his post as professor of history  at the university of Lyon because of his political beliefs. This provoked an enormous scandal in France, with leftwing intellectuals who had idolised Chomsky for his anti-imperialism denouncing him as a pro-Nazi.There’s a full discussion of the subject at:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faurisson_affair

in which Chomsky is quoted as saying:

“It seems to me something of a scandal that it is even necessary to debate these issues two centuries after Voltaire defended the right of free expression for views he detested. It is a poor service to the memory of the victims of the holocaust to adopt a central doctrine of their murderers.”

So there Anthony. I disagree wih you, while defending to the death your right to blah blah (Who said that?)

But back to Ehrlich, who was in the news for being made a Fellow of the Royal  Society, forty years after predicting that we Brits would by now be an island of savages reduced to eating members of the Royal Family in order to survive. It’s not quite true, is it? And why should we give you a prize for saying it was?

Ehrlich is not any old nutty professor. He’s been at Stanford for centuries, he’s been on more lists of hundred most influential thingies than you”ve had hot dates, and he’s still going strong. And he has this organisation – MAHB – which Ehrlich says means Millenium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere, even though it was originally conceived as the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior. (Next week: My Ass Hurts Bad. Who cares? Only those who formulate the Hundred Greatest Thinkers blah blah  articles for Time Magazine and company).

When I found out about this organisation of nutty professors from Stanford to Upsalla I naturally went to their site and came upon this latest article

http://mahb.stanford.edu/groups/ayurvedicproduct-blog-get-rid-of-excess-weight/

Yes, I know. But three hours ago I could read it, in all its glorious South Asian prose, which had apparently been up for several weeks, but which neither I nor Wayback saw fit to record. However, thanks to Google I can reveal the scientific marvels which MAHB (copyright Stanford and Upsalla Universities) has since suppressed.

“Patients can get rid of blood pressure. … Excess weight is not only unsightly but disease forming. … With the help of non medicinal natural products and by teaching patients how to read … Ayurvedic Herbal Cure Blog: Get Rid of Knee, Hip and Joint Pain. How to Get Rid of Kapha Dosha. Many Ayurvedic practitioners believe that diabetes is caused by excessive kapha . … but you should get rid of excess kapha if you think you may have an imbalance. Symptoms of excess kapha include mucous congestion, weight gain, excessively … Excess weight is not only unsightly but disease forming … Got ama? Vatas, the joints (causing cracking joints); Kaphas, the fat (causing weight gain). … Gentle exercise helps our bodies get rid of toxins by encouraging bowel … Other specific herbs and spices help with excess ama, according to the …. Blog at WordPress. com.”

There were no comments at the Ayurvedic Herbal Cure article, which alas, I failed to record. Neither were there any comments at the previous article by Partha Dasgupta and Paul Ehrlich on April 28th: “Pervasive Externalities at the Population, Consumption, and Environment Nexus”

“Partha Dasgupta and Paul Ehrlich highlight the ubiquity of externalities of decisions made by each of us on reproduction, consumption, and the use of our natural environment… We show that externalities at the nexus are not self-correcting in the marketplace. We also show that fundamental nonlinearities, built into several categories of externalities, amplify the socio-ecological processes operating at the nexus. Eliminating the externalities would, therefore, require urgent collective action at both local and global levels. To read more, access the full article here.”

Accessing the full article costs twenty dollars for twenty four hours. So I turned to the previous article:

http://mahb.stanford.edu/whats-happening/sex-and-earth-day/

Award-Winning Environmental Film Describes an Unorthodox Way to Slow Global Warming and a Free Way to Watch it

 April 1, 2013, Denver – Even though sex and global warming are rarely discussed in the same sentence, much less in the same film, the long ignored truth was recently explored in the 2011 award- winning environmental documentary Mother: Caring for 7 Billion.  In celebration of Earth Day, the filmmakers of Mother announced the Internet release of their 2013 “Director’s Cut” of  Mother that will stream for free on the Internet from April 19 until the end of May.  Christophe Fauchere, the director and co-producer stated,  “We want Mother to be viewed by as many people as possible for Earth Day because Mother holds up a mirror and shows people a very different way to look at their role on this planet.”  As Lisa Hymas from The Grist  went on to say in her article  “This is not your father’s population documentary…  Mother takes a feminist/humanist view as it explores the issues of our exploding numbers.”   

 The journey to make the film was not always easy.  Mireya Navarro in her New York Times Green Blogwrote about the making of Mother  “they (the filmmakers) found some environmental groups reluctant to address the subject for fear of alienating their supporters.  One group hung up on them when they called..”  Writer Sacha Vignieri added to this environmental urgency in her Science magazine review “Our choice to avoid discussion of the population issue, however, will not make the problems disappear. Christophe Fauchere’s film Mother: Caring for 7 Billion encourages us to reengage, both publicly and personally, with the reality of what our increasing population will bring.”   

 Mother: Caring for 7 Billion (2011) is currently being shown in hundreds of classrooms around the country and is being broadcast throughout the world…

The Millenium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere clearly aims to hve an impact on the world -  the kind of impact that few movements in world history have had. Yet the last three articles on their website have received a total of zero comments in the past six weeks. Within hours of my linking to the site, the apparently unwelcome Ayurvedic article disappeared. The apparently welcome article about sex and the streaming Mother remains up, though uncommented.

[Here I had a comment about Ehrlich being a fascist, which I remove because it was completely  unsupported by evidence. I plead tiredness and emotionality. There’s a lot more to say about the social and political origins of Ehrlich’s weird freaky failed prophesies, and their appeal to the likes of the members of the Royal Society. Another time. I finished like this..]

No-one is listening. No-one is commenting at his blog. Absolutely no-one is interested in his message, except, of course, his colleague at the university of Uppsala, those who voted him in at the Royal Society, and those who support his message in the governing establshments of the English-speaking countries.

People made fun of Hitler because only twenty-odd freaks turned up to his first meetings. NO-ONE is turning up to Ehrlich’s meetings. Yet his political message governs the policies of the major democratic nations of the world.

This should worry us.

 

One Response to Paul Ehrlich: Fascist. [reposted here]

 

 Mooloo says:

May 15, 2013 at 5:53 am

His message isn’t remotely getting any policy traction.

NZ’s politicians keep wanting to increase our population. There is much whining in the press about our aging population and net immigration rate. Sure there’s a racist overtone (because the outgoing are more often white than the incoming) but no-one gets any traction with the idea that we should be reducing our population. China aside, no-one has tried very hard to reduce population, and many countries actively reward breeding.

Nor do politicians actually try to reduce consumption in any free countries. In fact the general theme all over the world is one of desperately trying to increase it. His Malthusian message of running out of raw materials is so obviously wrong that it isn’t even worth engaging with.

Ehrlich is like the medieval Pope. Right, in principle. Totally ignored, in practice.

The gongs are there to shut him up – since establishment scientists are ignored, on principle, by most people. What traction Chomsky has is largely because no-one suspects him for a second of giving the line the people in power want to hear.

 

A Tale of Two Steves

Stephan Lewandowsky, Professor of Cognitive Psychology, formerly of the University of Western Australia, now of Bristol University, England, recently published a paper establishing a causal link between climate denial and belief that the Apollo moon landing was a hoax. This link was based on four anonymous responses (out of a total of more than 1300) to a faulty on-line survey. There is good evidence that two of the four responses were faked.

This paper has received widespread uncritical publicity in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the New York Times, the New Yorker, Huffington Post, the Raw Story, the Daily Beast and Salon, and elsewhere.

Professor Stephen Emmott, Microsoft Professor of Computational Science at Cambridge, (and also Professor at Oxford and London) had a notable theatrical success last year at the Avignon Festival and the Royal Court Theatre, London. He received rave reviews and favourable interviews in the Guardian, Observer, Telegraph, Times, Financial Times, Evening Standard, Forbes (everywhere, in fact except the French press) for “Ten Billion”, his one-man-show in which he made use of his immense scientific expertise to predict the collapse of civilisation before the end of the century -  a collapse which, according to Professor Emmott, science is helpless to prevent. The best thing to do, according to Professor Emmott, is to teach your children to use a gun.

Neither Professor Lewandowsky nor Professor Emmott likes us climate sceptics much. Professor Lewandowsky has shown himself quite willing to lie and defame us in order to weaken our stranglehold on public opinion. But he hasn’t actually suggested killing us, as far as I know. So if I had to choose one of them to share a desert island with, I’d go for Stephan. Stephen seems a nice enough bloke, but Stephan’s sarcasm and mendacity would be easier to live with than Stephen’s murderous fantasies.

Also, Stephan seems to possess survival instincts which Stephen lacks. Stephan has just  moved from the University of West Australia to Bristol England. Within days of his arrival, he was awarded the Wolfson medal for outstanding achievement by the Royal Society, which handily tops up his university salary by ten, twenty or thirty thousand a year over the next five years.

Then look at the press coverage that he’s getting for his Moon Hoax article. (The second one, Recursive Fury, has got less mentions since being shunted by publishers “Frontiers in Science” into a limbo state somewhere between publication and withdrawal). It started in Huffington Post last July, moved on to the  Guardian and Telegraph, and was decisively trashed at hundreds of blogs, before finally being published last month (six months after prepublication) whereupon the publicity started all over again, notably in the New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/conspiracy-theory-climate-change-science-psychology.html

which says:

“… over all, the trends were clear… the more likely they were to be conspiracy theorists, the less likely they were to believe in climate science.”

Then there was this from Salon:

http://www.salon.com/2013/04/24/why_people_believe_in_conspiracy_theories/singleton/

“Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of Western Australia, published a paper late last month in the journal Psychological Science that has received widespread praise for looking at the thinking behind conspiracy theories about science and climate change.”

with the phase “widespread praise” linking back to the article in the New Yorker.

Then, just ten days after the Boston bombing, Lewandowsky was interviewed about the resulting conspiracy theories at the Daily Beast:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/04/25/boston-bombing-conspiracies-and-what-s-behind-the-false-flag-crazies.html

“The proliferation and sheer power of such ideas come as no surprise to Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor of psychology who has made a study of the conspiracy-obsessed… Lewandowsky, whose study of conspiracy-minded climate-change deniers was recently featured in The New Yorker…”

Lew’s Moon Hoax paper is not rocket  science. It’s not even climate science. It’s worthless trash. Anyone can see that. If I’d produced a survey like that in my first week as a market researcher, I’d have been told politely to look for another job. If I’d done it in my second week, I’d have been thrown out of the Market Research Society.

I pointed out in a comment at the New Yorker that  Lew’s paper was based on a lie, but no-one seemed interested. Anthony Watts of the world’s most popular science blog, Jo Nova of Australia’s most popular blog, and of course Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit have all made the point over and over again, far better than I can. But they’re not the New Yorker. And none of them are ever likely to get a medal from the Royal Society.

*          *          *

Stephen Emmott starts from a rather more elevated position than Stephan Levandowsky, as Microsoft Professor at Cambridge, leading a team of sixty of “a new kind of scientist” doing “a new kind of science”. The results of his research, financed by Microsoft and the United Nations, were summarised in his stage performance “Ten Billion” (financed by the Arts Council and the European Union) in the ringing conclusion: “We’re F*cked”. He too, received streams of adulatory praise from every corner of the mainstream media (though not, curiously, in France, a subject I’ll be coming back to). He was inundated by offers to turn his message of doom into a tv documentary. There were  rumours of a TED talk, and then finally a contract was signed with Penguin for a book, to be published on May Ist.

At this point the media coverage for Stephen starts to diverge radically from that received by Stephan. Under the heading “Penguin Reveals Some Stellar Acquisitions” sandwiched between “Underland” (Robert Macfarlane’s long-term exploration of the hidden worlds beneath our feet)  and the secret diary of Dennis the Menace, Booktrade reports:

“… Penn has also acquired a title by Stephen Emmott, head of Microsoft’s Computational Science Laboratory in Cambridge, called Ten Billion. A devastating and shocking vision of the impact we are having on our world, Ten Billion is a book about our future: our failure to tackle an unprecedented planetary emergency and a cry for radical collective action – action which Emmott believes is deeply unlikely to happen… Allen Lane will publish in September 2013.”

So publication has been put back four months, which didn’t  stop Texas estate agent Liz Sullivan from publishing a favourable review of the book (all 128 pages) back in February. She gave it four stars (out of five), two more than Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”, and one less than Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse”.

One would expect Penguin /Allen Lane to pull all the stops out to publicise a catch like this, but the proceeds of their PR efforts so far have not been impressive. All I’ve found so far is this:

http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/restaurants/five-things-david-sexton-ate-this-week-8522660.html

where London’s free evening rag’s food bod reports eating:

“A great chunk of cod, a luxury these days, perhaps not quite sustainable, at a Penguin Press dinner at the Groucho Club, while being told about nuclear Armageddon by Eric Schlosser, catastrophic overpopulation by Stephen Emmott, and finding peace in deepest Siberia by Sylvain Tesson”.

Presumably other journalists were present, but none of them seem to have reported their experience. Perhaps they don’t like cod.

Otherwise, the work of Emmott and his sixty-strong team of a new breed of scientists seems to be getting a meagre press. I reported at

http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2012/10/07/stephen-emmott-microsoft-google-computational-science-end-of-the-world-golden-lion-tamarin-monkey/

on an app for spotting endangered species which got some coverage on green blogs in Italy, France, Argentina and Canada, and at

http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/cuckoo-in-the-nesta/

on a comment piece in Nature about his team’s General Ecological Model,

paywalled at source but available here

http://www.unep.org/pdf/Purves_etal_2012.pdf

which got some coverage on two blogs in Rumania. There were favourable mentions on the German public broadcaster DeutscheWelle and in the Tehran Times, and that seemed to be about it.

Then today I found this:

http://www.jonathanangelascott.com/main/wordpress/2013/04/ten-billion-by-stephen-emmott/

It’s by  Jonathan and Angela Scott, “the Big Cat People”, and they say this:

“Is it too late to save the planet? Margot’s coffee table has other words of wisdom for all of us. A 2012 copy of the FT Weekend Magazine flagged up the performance of “TEN BILLION” by Stephen Emmott’s, one of Britain’s leading scientists, at the Royal Court last summer. In the article written by Clive Cookson, Emmott says: ‘I’m deeply sceptical about the rational optimist’s view that we will invent ourselves out of trouble, because our inventiveness and cleverness got us in to trouble in the first place.’”

and they conclude:

“Crucially Emmott brings it all back to the nub of the problem when he says; ‘There is almost certainly more hope for the future in changing people’s consumption patterns….Radical behaviour change is needed more urgently than anything that science and technology could provide.’ Meanwhile the sun is still shining in England and the natural optimist in me says ‘it’s a beautiful day, believe in small miracles and carry on in a more ‘mindful’ way! Brad, Vicky, Peter and Liz, Paul and Carole, Margot and all our good friends heading to Galapagos – lets have an amazing trip in the land of Darwin! What would the great man have thought about all this?”

There are two comments to Jonathan and Angela’s post. Camilla says:

“We are looking forward to Galapagos too. See you in Quito. Milly & Pete”

and Jonathan and Angie reply:

“Blimey – I don’t quite know how we could have missed the fact that you are coming to Galapagos too. That is sooooo!!!!!! Cool. It is going to be some party! Darwin will be turning in his grave with all the banter and high jinks! See you soon and hugs and kisses from us both!”

I don’t imagine Jonathan and Angie noticed my comment on the FT article (I think it was the only one) but I’d just like to say:

Jonathan and Angie (and Milly and Pete – do you ever get called “Millipete” by rude friends? – I hope not) and Brad, Vicky, Peter and Liz, Paul and Carole, Margot  and all the others, may I wish you all a super holiday?

There’s an unfortunate tendency among us climate deniers to point out a certain inconsistency among fans of green doom-mongering when they  bewail the end of civilisation while flying off to the further corners of the earth to savour the last dying embers of our ecosystem. Bugger them, I say. Good luck to you. And as I sit on my Ryanair flight to England tomorrow, I shall put down my paperback copy of the Voyage of the Beagle and raise a toast in a five euro plastic cup of O’Leary’s best Hungarian Chardonnay to you and your friends. Have a lovely time.

*           *           *

I shall be out of touch in faraway England for the next week. I leave my half dozen fans with this Lewandowsky-style questionnaire:

Who would you rather be marooned on a desert island with?

1) Professor Stephan Lewandowsky

2) Professor Stephen Emmott

3) George Monbiot

4) Vivienne Westwood

5) Naomi Campbell

6) Dr Viren Swami

7) John Selwyn Gummer (Lord Deben)

8) Baroness Worthington

9) Sally Weintrobe

10) the Golden Lion Tamarind Monkey

11) Don’t know, haven’t been paying attention to your blog

Lew’s Gong: like … wow.

I’ve noted in comments on previous articles how Lewandowsky continues to hold his own in the media, from the New Yorker to the Daily Beast. Now there’s this from

http://bristol.ac.uk/news/2013/9330.html

“Two Bristol academics are among the 27 new Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holders.

“Professors Stephan Lewandowsky, Chair in Cognitive Psychology in the School of Experimental Psychology, and Fred Manby, Professor of Theoretical Chemistry in the Centre for Computational Chemistry, have both been successful in securing this prestigious award from the Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science.

“Jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the scheme aims to provide universities with additional support to enable them to attract science talent from overseas and retain respected UK scientists of outstanding achievement and potential.

“Professor Lewandowsky receives the award for his project entitled ‘The (mis)information revolution: information seeking and knowledge transmission’, which addresses how people navigate the blizzard of information with which we are faced on a daily basis, not all of which is accurate or truthful. The project emphasises how people update their memories and under what conditions they are able to discount information that turns out to be false. The project also examines how people interact with, and influence, each other to understand how information spreads through a society.”

*                  *                    *

And now for the good news. Possibly the first sensible look at the Moon Hoax paper from a mainstream source, written by a global warming believer, at:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/

In the course of a sensible and funny analysis of the perils of online polls, the author Scott Alexander says:

“I really wish polls like these would include a control question, something utterly implausible … like “Do you believe Barack Obama is a hippopotamus?” Whatever percent of people answer yes to the hippo question get subtracted out from the other questions…

“Alas, not all weird poll answers can be explained that easily. On the same poll, 13% of Americans claimed to believe Barack Obama was the Anti-Christ … (a friend on Facebook pointed out that 5% of Obama voters claimed to believe that Obama was the Anti-Christ [...]. On the other hand, I do enjoy picturing someone standing in a voting booth, thinking to themselves ‘Well, on the one hand, Obama is the Anti-Christ. On the other, do I really want four years of Romney?’)

[...]

“The paper’s thesis was that climate change skeptics are motivated by conspiracy ideation – a belief that there are large groups of sinister people out to deceive them. This seems sort of reasonable on the face of it – being a climate change skeptic requires going against the belief of the entire scientific establishment. My guess is that there probably is a significant link here waiting to be discovered.

“Unfortunately, it’s…possible Stephan Lewandowsky wasn’t the best person to investigate this? Aside from being a professor of cognitive science, he also runs Shaping Tomorrow’s World, a group … which seems to be largely about promoting global warming activism. While I think it’s admirable that he is involved in that, it raises conflict of interest questions. And the way his paper is written – starting with the over-the-top title – doesn’t do him any favors…”

The author goes on to describe our discussions as “the worst flame war I have ever seen on the Internet”, which I find strangely comforting.

Lew’s Guru and the Science of a Beautiful You

A number of us have been writing letters of complaint to the publishers of Lewandowsky’s two papers insulting climate sceptics, and to the University of Western Australia, with a view to getting the papers withdrawn. I have a feeling our complaints will be unsuccessful. Here’s why.

The authors of the second paper, “Recursive Fury”, are two professors of cognitive psychology and two authors of blogs specialising in countering the views of climate sceptics (the subject of the paper). One blog author, John Cook of Skeptical Science, was awarded an adjunct professorship by the School of Psychology at the University of Western Australia as a result of his involvement in this paper.

The authors thank Alexandra Freund, who, (like second author Klaus Oberauer)  is a professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Zurich, for her comments on an earlier version of the paper.

[Professor Freund is “interested in process of developmental regulation across the lifespan. The central assumption guiding her research is “that individuals actively shape the direction and level of their development through selecting, pursuing, and maintaining goals in interaction with social or environmental opportunity structures.” Her publications include: “Changing eating behaviour vs. losing weight: The role of goal focus for weight loss in overweight women”  and “Psychological consequences of longevity: The increasing importance of self-regulation in old age”].

As I pointed out at

http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/lews-crew-the-plot-sickens/

when the paper was first published at frontiersin.org the first two comments, within one minute of each other, were from Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and Professor Michael Ashley, who then had a good laugh together over the fact that their near simultaneous posting must be the result of a conspiracy. So that’s six professors involved in the story before we even start looking at the paper.

 *               *              *

“Recursive Fury” has an extensive bibliography, including many sources which are not actually quoted anywhere in the paper. These include papers on: the speeches of Ayatollah Khomeini;  the Egyptian uprising; schizophrenia; institutional mistrust among multiethnic men who have sex with men; conspiracy beliefs among men who have sex with men; homophobia among men who have sex with men; antisemitism; and sexual (dys)function and the quality of sexual life in patients with colorectal cancer.

One author who is cited extensively is V. Swami. Three of his papers are mentioned in the bibliography, and they are referred to  a total of six times in the paper.

For example, Swami, V. (2012). on “Social psychological origins of conspiracy theories: the case of the Jewish conspiracy theory in Malaysia” is the source quoted for the statement in the paper that conspiracist ideation is associated with right-wing political leanings.

Here are some of the things Swami has to say about conspiracy theories and the people who hold them:

“… because the critique of power offered by conspiracy theories is often simplistic, they are susceptible to racist and exclusionary narratives, which in turn create discord and public mistrust…”

“… many scholars came to view conspiracy theorists as paranoid and delusional; that is, conspiracy theories were viewed as the products of extreme paranoia, delusional thinking, and narcissism. This individual or collective pathology was thought to effectively stunt any form of socio-political action by conspiracy theorists, which in turn heightened their paranoia.”

“Recent work has provided some support for the idea that conspiracy theorists have particular personality profiles marked by paranoia and delusional thinking. For example, two studies have reported that belief in conspiracy theories is positively associated with schizotypal tendencies, that is, the tendency to be suspicious, paranoid, and experience magical thinking and unusual beliefs..” 

All these statements are supported by reference to peer-reviewed literature, some of it by Dr. Swami himself.

Swami’s paper reports that “in the Malaysian context, belief in the Jewish conspiracy theory may only be weakly associated with belief in other conspiracy theories. Rather, belief in this conspiracist, anti-Semitic narrative appears to serve ideological demands and needs that may be more pronounced in the Malaysian context.” while

“belief in general conspiracy theories was significantly associated with right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation, albeit weakly.”

So the source which Lewandowsky quotes as establishing “that conspiracist ideation is associated with right-wing political leanings” in fact establishes a weak association between anti-Semitism and other conspiracy theories, which are themselves weakly associated with right-wing authoritarianism – “at least in the Malaysian context”.

One might wonder why Lewandowsky et al thought a study of anti-semitism among Malaysian ethnic Malays to be relevant to a study of conspiracy ideation among climate sceptics, particularly as it provided only weak support for the point they make.

Lewandowsky’s paper, “Recursive Fury” was edited and peer-reviewed  by Dr. Viren Swami.

Dr. Swami is a prolific and enthusiastic author. When he’s not writing about conspiracy theories, he’s writing about beauty. He is the Attraction Expert at

www.youbeauty.com/ 

 the Science of a Beautiful You, where he writes on:

“Do Appearances Matter?”, “How to Find Love: A Plan”,  “Why The Workplace is a Hot Spot for Romance”, and “Getting Up Close and Personal”.

He is also author or co-author of 213 peer-reviewed articles on aesthetics, body image, and tattoos, among other subjects, including: “Context matters: investigating the impact of contextual information on aesthetic appreciation of paintings by Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso”, “Men’s oppressive beliefs predict their breast size preferences in women” and “The influence of practitioner nationality, experience, and sex in shaping patient preferences for dentists”. He’s been turning out one scientific paper every two weeks, on average, since 2005. And he still finds time to edit and peer-review the papers of colleagues who who cite him.

Most of these papers are behind paywalls, but I managed to find this one from 2007: “Perception of Female Buttocks and Breast Size in Profile” by Furnham and Swami.

The summary says:

“Results showed significant main effects of breast size (with an overall preference for small breasts) but not of buttock size. Gender of the participants did not have a significant effect on the variables, although there was a significant interaction of breast and buttock size. The findings suggest that variables such as breast size are minor cues of female physical attractiveness”.

It seems that the psychology of the appreciation of the human form is plagued by the same secrecy as palaeclimatology when it comes to publishing the data necessary to the interpretation of results – in this case the stimulus material used in the experiment. Neither  “Perception of Female Buttocks and Breast Size in Profile” nor Kleinke & Staneski (1980). “First impressions of female bust size” nor Koff  & Benevage (1998)  “Breast size perception and satisfaction” satisfy this basic need. In the interest of scientific openness, I shall appoint myself the Steve McIntyre of voyeurology and demand to see the data.

This is vital, since each new study in this area contradicts the previous one. Furnham and  Swami report a preference for small breasts, while Kleine and Staneski, using written stimuli, found that men prefer medium-sized breasts. (Could this possibly be due to the wording of the descriptions – the so-called Goldilocks-Porridge Effect?) However, when the same experimenters used colour photographs, they found that women with smaller breasts were rated as competent, ambitious, intelligent, moral and modest. while women with large breasts were judged to have the opposite characteristics (i.e. they were cack-handed, dumb slags, basically). It is clearly difficult to judge these results without seeing the visual evidence for oneself.

The Furnham & Swami study aimed to judge the dual influence of breasts and buttocks, so naturally “used modified versions of Wiggins, Wiggins, and Conger’s (1968) nude female silhouettes in profile, which combine three breast categories (small, medium, large) and three buttocks sizes (small, medium, large) to produce a total of 9 different combinations of stimuli. This manipulation allowed us to test the effect of changing buttocks and breast size on female physical attractiveness.”

[Wiggins, Wiggins, and Conger (1968), since you ask, discovered that large breast preference was associated with a "Playboy" image, while preference for large buttocks was related to an "anal character" syndrome].

In the absence of the stimulus material, let’s look at the responses, which came from a “total of 114 British undergraduate students (71 females)”, which I calculate, means just  43 males to judge the manipulation of 9 combinations of breast and buttock sizes.

Here’s all we know of the stimuli:

“The stimuli consisted of 9 nude female silhouettes, prepared by Wiggins et al. (1968) in such a manner that the size of breasts and buttocks could be varied systematically. Three levels of breast size (small, medium, large) and three levels of buttocks size (small, medium, large) were employed for this study. No other alterations were made within each category, and all other sex-specific information (e.g., the hairstyle) was kept constant. Breast and buttocks were manipulated through the computer modification of the selected attribute.”

Of all the ways there are of manipulating breasts and buttocks, computer modification is surely the least satisfying. Could the liking for small breasts possibly be due to a preference for non-photoshopped photos? In the discussion it is proposed that perhaps a “reason for the current findings may be the nature of the stimuli used. It is of note that figures depicting silhouettes with large breasts were somewhat unrealistic in comparison with small-breasted figures”.

I can see the headlines now: “Students prefer women with realistic breasts, study shows”. 

I’ll have to leave the analysis of the results to those less statistically challenged than I. Maybe someone could explain this:

“Mauchley’s test of sphericity yielded a significant interaction of breast and buttocks size (x2 = 65.73, p < 0.001). Due to the violation of the sphericity assumption, the Greenhouse-Geisser correction was applied to the degrees of freedom”.

*           *           *

Our complaints to the editors of the two Lewandowsky papers made a number of disparate points, but they all come down to the judgement that the papers do not come up to the standards expected of a peer-reviewed scientific paper.

Frankly, looking at what goes on in the world of peer-reviewed social science, I don’t think we have a leg to stand on.

Socialism for Sceptics

There’s an adoring article by Leo Hickman at

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/12/jeremy-grantham-environmental-philanthropist-interview

on Jeremy Grantham and the millions he gives every year to fighting climate change. That’s the same Leo Hickman who thought he had the scoop of the century  a few months back when he discovered a UKIP MEP had given Ben Pile a few thousand to make a film about wind turbines.

TinyCO2 said it well in a comment on a thread initiated by E17 at

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/discussion/post/2099655?currentPage=7

“When Jeremy Grantham gives loads of money away to green causes he’s not having less, he’s having more. He’s got everything he needs for comfort and he’s using some of his spare money to feel like a benefactor … The people who feel the cuts first are the people at the bottom…”

On the same thread, Mike Jackson, who, like me, lives in France, linked to an interesting article by Brendan O’Neill about the Gay Marriage Consensus. Mike pointed out how it resembled the Global Warming Consensus.

http://www.spiked-online.com/site/article/13518/

(Interesting that it takes an eccentric Marxist site like Spiked Online to stick up for Conservative Values).

There’s a lot of discussion of  the New Left Project, the Webbs, Mrs Dutt Pauker the Hampstead Thinker, etc. at the BishopHill thread I mention above, which took us miles off the subject, which was about using Public Relations to further climate scepticism.

I did my usual “It’s all sociological” number, and said:

“I come back to my point that opinions as deeply implanted as global warming (or gay marriage rights) are too important to their holders to be tackled by PR. It’s about a new social class creating its ideology. It may take a counter-ideology to defeat it – possibly one devoted to keeping the lights on, defeating poverty and raising the living standards of those suffering from current politics of austerity (We could call it “socialism”…)”

…which isn’t likely to win me many friends at BH, which is more UKIP in its readership profile. Thinking there may be some lefties lurking here (including Chris Shaw) I thought maybe it’s a subject that deserves a post and some discussion.

*              *              *

From the Nature Imitating Art Department:

When I wanted a stinking rich environmental philanthropist for my “Apocalypse Close” saga, I naturally thought of Jeremy Grantham. But because I’d given him transvestite tendencies for the sake of a silly joke, I had to change his name, and Huntingdon seemed close enough geographically, so Tom Huntingdon* it was. See

http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2012/09/28/apocalypse-close-chapter-two/

Then in February I was transcribing Vivienne Westwood, and she described how she’d read an article about James Lovelock and decided she had to Do Something, so she went on the net and discovered how socialist ex M.P. Frank Field had teamed up with a Swedish millionaire to buy up the Amazon and he only needed  £125 million, so she phoned Kate and Naomi… Then she decided that ordinary people needed to be involved too, that milionaire fashion models shouldn’t have to save the world all on their own, so she started a website

http://climaterevolution.org.uk/

so I wrote about that too.

http://geoffchambers.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/knickers-to-climate-change/

It’s beyond satire, though I do my best.

*              *              *

Anyway, back to the Guardian and Leo Hickman’s hagiography of Grantham and his millions…

A longer, and presumably even more adoring version of Hickman’s article is promised for Monday. Already, we’ve learned that Grantham’s conversion to environmentalism came when he was on holiday with his family in Borneo and the Amazon [what, both at once?] and saw “logs along the side of the river”.

(“What? Logs? People cutting down trees? Don’t they realise the tropics are a nature conservancy area for me and my family to holiday in?”)

Leo, bless him, is not entirely naive:

Having said that, his interest isn’t entirely selfless. “Fifteen years ago, we started a forestry division [at GMO] because I had fallen in love with land and trees, and because I realised it was a mispriced asset class. We have done extremely well in that sector, outperforming the benchmark for 15 years.”

Which brings me to my point about nature imitating art. Because in the last episode of Apocalypse Close I’d sent my Huntingdon character to Brazil (where Moonbat, Delingpole, Barry Woods and Dung will soon join him) with a briefcase full of title deeds, little knowing that the real Grantham had already made the trip. I’m always one step behind reality.

___________________________________________________

* My character Tom Huntingdon is also a sly reference to Chris Huntingford, a climate scientist who, in an article ostensibly disagreeing with Lovelock’s call to suspend democracy in order to fend off disaster, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/apr/01/james-lovelock-climate-change-pessimism

said this:

“Lovelock’s comment that possibly the only solution is to temporarily suspend democracy needs considerable discussion with social scientists and historians. I cannot be alone in feeling nervous about such a view. Surely, some of the most unstable periods in history have been when governments have become dictatorial.”

An Oxford academic feeling nervous about  dictatorship, and saying that he’d have to consult social scientists before he could support it: – that made me mad and I said so in the comments ad nauseam…

BishopHill’s Angels on the Warpath

Update 8th April

When I put this article up I posted links to it at Climate Resistance, New Left Project, TalkingClimate (where Chris Shaw’s article has been posted, so far without comments) and, a day later, at Chris Shaw’s own site

http://www.notargets.org.uk/index.html

My comments haven’t appeared at NLP (where it seems all comments from sceptics are now banned) but [added 9 April] it has at Talkingclimate. Chris replies in comments below, for which I thank him.

I’m banned from the Guardian, so couldn’t comment there, where Chris’s article also appeared

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/22/zombie-movies-climate-change-no-one-happy-ending

I tried and failed (due to their confusing zombie pop-up registering policy) to comment also at

http://klimazwiebel.blogspot.fr/2013/03/climate-zombies.html#more

the German sceptic site where Chris got an enthusiastic plug (in English) from Werner Krauss, coauthor of die Klimafalle, a book which makes much the same point about the essentially political nature of the debate. There’s an interesting comment there from Reiner Grundmann, who teaches sociology at Nottingham.

______________________________________________________

A bunch of us sceptics were having a go at a deep green lefty on a far left site the other day, (as you do) swirling around the poor fellow like a flock of angry starlings round a scarecrow stuffed with popcorn.

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/what_zombie_films_can_teach_us_about_climate_change

The point of Christopher  Shaw’s article was one we’d been making for years, that the supposedly critical 2°C “limit” to safe global warming had no scientific justification. Except that Shaw’s conclusion was that therefore there was no safe level of global warming at all. We shouldn’t listen to the scientists because no limit they could come up with could be guaranteed.

(He’s right of course. Even if the earth doesn’t heat up at all, there will still be storms, floods and droughts. Just as you could reduce the speed limit to 10 mph and people would still get run over).

Shaw, to give him credit, responded to our criticism politely, asking Robin Guenier  if he’s read The Merchants of Doubt, (which explains how the people and organisations who were behind the lies about the carcinogenic properties of cigarette smoke were the same people and organisations spreading doubt about climate change) and explained to Rhoda Klapp just how record-breaking last years heatwaves were, by linking to some very brightly coloured maps.

[Maurizio, if you’re reading this, add this one to your list of “climate change phenomena that miraculously turned up just at the moment we were able to record them”:- record heatwaves just as we invent cheap colour printing with that extra deep magenta ink].

Then he lost his cool rather with Latimer Alder’s questioning of his records, with:

“I can only assume I am asked these questions as a desire to snag up people like myself in inane school yard banalities of ‘prove it’”.

To Geronimo he provides an unanswerable argument:

“My work is based around exactly the point you make – no one can predict the future – so how do you know catastrophic climate change won’t happen at 1 degree of warming?”

Then the tone changed abruptly with this comment from Ed Rooksby:

“Christ, climate change deniers in the comments of a left-wing website. This really is depressing.”

To which Robin Guenier replied, pointing out the futlilty of  current policies and saying:

“For the Left to embrace a total reversal of this policy would, I believe, be a return to its proper values.”

After comments from Ben Pile and me, a certain Neil stepped in, quoted Ben at length, and addressed himself to the editors:

“Sir! Sir! Molesworth is firing ink pellets at me Sir!”

[sorry, wrong quote]

“NLP editors – I agree with Ed Rookby’s exasperation. I would appreciate it if you would consider whether NLP environmental articles gain anything by allowing climate change deniers/sceptics to come in and disseminate their fog of unknowing and divert and deter intelligent, constructive debate about how the Left should respond to the emerging environmental crisis. I think you’re taking tolerance of opposing views a bit too far.”

Alice Bell, environment editor added her tuppenceworth:

“I appreciate Neil and Ed’s frustrations. However, the problem is that drawing a line between ‘intelligent, constructive debate’ and ‘fog’ is far from straightforward…”

And a couple of hours later, editor Dave (“call me David”) Spart himself stepped in:

“Alice’s suggestion to ignore what you do not find interesting, constructive or useful seems like a sensible idea to me.”

And popped back 20 minutes later to agree with Neil:

“Neil – I take your point. This is a site aimed at people on the left (broadly defined) and people who are interested in the ideas of the left. On climate change, the pieces we publish are for an audience that broadly accepts the overwhelming scientific consensus..” 

Conversation continued normally for a while with Ben, Rhoda, Brownedoff, Shub, JamesP, and a polite reply from Christopher Shaw to me. (“Normally” is perhaps an exaggeration, since comments were held up in moderation, sometimes for a day or two, but still…)

Then editor David returned to the fray:

“Perhaps its an encouraging sign that the denialist tendency is so rattled by our little website that they are flinging themselves in droves at its comments threads, and expending such energy here.

“The problem you face, of course, is that there is an overwhelming and long-established scientific consensus that climate change is real, is caused by human activity and will increasingly have calamitous effects on human life over the years to come …

“I’d heard that we were getting a bit of traffic from the denialists on these articles, but I’d not really taken a proper look until this particular thread. I’m glad that I did.  Its encouraging to see how weak some of this stuff is, when you look at it. Possibly goes some way to explaining point two in this previous article of ours..”

Sweet Gaia. Something is amiss in the vast media empire that is New Left Project. But never fear, the ever-watchful David is on the job. Alice is new to the job and is having trouble controlling her class, but the Head is at hand, ready to step in and issue stern warnings:

“I’d heard that we were getting a bit of traffic from the denialists on these articles, but I’d not really taken a proper look until this particular thread.”

.. with a subtle warning to the new girl to get a grip

 “… I’m glad that I did…”

The mysterious “point two in our previous article” is that:

‘The climate sceptics’ mission to destroy public trust in climate science has utterly failed. Public belief that global warming is real and manmade is now back to pre-Climategate levels…”

And the source for this claim is:

http://www.noiseofthecrowd.com/climate-change-opinion-is-now-up-to-pre-climategate-levels/

where it is claimed that:

“Climategate’, recent cold winters and the economic climate no longer have any discernible impact on public belief that climate change is real and man-made..”

Which was written in July 2012. No doubt they’re sharpening up their survey questions for this year. Trouble is, it’s difficult to get people to stop and answer questions about global weirding in a blizzard…

Back to New Left Project. Next to comment was Alex Cull. Alex is probably the politest, gentlest critic to ever grace the blogosphere, so it took the class by surprise when headmaster David stormed in:

“I’ve spelled this out in fairly plain English already…. as I suspect you understand perfectly well… With me so far? …  And if there are people bleating … I hate to break it to them, but we’re pretty relaxed about that. I hope this clarifies things for you and others, because I DON’T PROPOSE TO REPEAT THE POINT.”

Whereupon a hushed silence fell upon the class for thirty hours, only to be broken by Alice:

“I wanted to say a couple of things to the people who are still commenting on (or just watching) this thread. Several comments have been deleted in moderation before being published on this thread. For those few who care about such things, it wasn’t me who deleted them. My personal view is we should publish anything that’s not outright offensive, respond to those we think it’s productive to respond to, and ignore those we think there’s little point in engaging with. I’m generally quite a fan of at least reading the ‘bottom half of the internet’ (and don’t like the hierarchies of talking about top/bottom either). However, the view of the NLP editorial team as a whole is slightly stricter…”

Alice Bell is a prominent academic and green activist. Since she teaches classes (in the history, philosophy, and communication of science?)  she may have issues about free speech, scepticism – stuff like that …

After we were all put into detention by the moderator and eventually expelled by the Head Editor, we carried on our chat at Ben’s place

http://www.climate-resistance.org/2013/03/alice-in-wtf-land.html

where Ben quoted Shaw at his best:

“The abstraction of a single dangerous limit removes climate politics from our immediate lived experience and into the locked conference rooms of global institutions. Instead of being rooted in the value systems which people use to negotiate life it becomes a symbol, residing in the hands of a few, that can be reconfigured to suit the changing needs of these elites.”

and added:

“I’ve spent years trying to say the same thing so concisely…”

Chris (may I call you Chris?) Shaw, I’ve been writing fan letters to Ben for years, and I’ve never received a pat on the back like that. I’m green (no, that’s not my colour) purple with jealousy.

I appreciate the delicacy of Alice’s position, and I appreciate doubly the efforts of Christopher Shaw to engage with us. I hope the dialogue can continue here. We have something to say to each other.

The Lewandowsky Endgame

Lots of people are wondering why serious sceptic blogs like ClimateAudit,

http://climateaudit.org/2013/04/03/tom-curtis-writes/

Wattsupwiththat

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/03/lewandowsky-paper-provisionally-removed-due-to-complaints/

and BishopHill

http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2013/4/3/lew-two-in-doo-doo.html

are devoting so much attention to the Lewandowsky papers and the question of whether Lew and John Cook were fibbing when they said that the survey was linked at Cook’s blog SkepticalScience.

(The question doesn’t arise for this blog. I trawl the net for the trivial. I revel in the ridiculous. I get ecstatic about the execrable. Cook and Lewandowsky are my Laurel and Hardy, my Mutt and Jeff, my Romeo and Juliet*).

The answer is this: a peer-reviewed paper may be a steaming pile of Findus Lasagna, but it’s still a peer-reviewed paper. The only way you can get it withdrawn is by showing that it contains a deliberate falsehood. That’s why Steve McIntyre is breaking the habit of a decade and crying Pants on Fire.

Mann, Amman, Steig, Briffa, Gergis, Wang, Jones and Marcott are still standing, despite the brilliant work of  Steve and others. Lewandowsky is a tottering skittle. The first peer-reviewed paper to be withdrawn just might be the breach in the dike to bring the whole house of cards to its knees and reveal its feet of clay.

Back in early September 2012 I pointed out to Cook in the clearest possible terms that there was definitive proof that the survey was never linked at SkepticalScience.

I suggested that perhaps Lewandowsky had overlooked the fact, and that it would be easy to rectify the error. Instead of which they went ahead and published.

It took Lew a matter of days to draw his conclusions from the survey. Links went up at seven blogs 28th and 29th August 2010, and four weeks later, on 23rd September Lew was announcing at Monash University that he had a survey with 1100+ respondents which proved conclusively  that climate sceptics were conspiracy theorists.

It took another two years to get the article into pre-publication. It seems highly likely that there was some reticence to publish this nonsense, possibly on the part of his co-authors, who presumably provide the statistical expertise, or on the part of the peer reviewers, or of the journal editors. We shall never know. Science thrives on openness, we are continually being told, but when it comes to the process by which scientific papers come to be published, the Vatican could learn a thing or two from science.

The revelation of the lie is an object lesson in how conspiracies come unravelled. I haven’t checked the exact dates, but I think the honour goes to Barry Woods for having badgered Lewandowsky into lying about the SkepticalScience link, as only Barry can, in early August 2012. DGH wasted several hours of his life hunting out the Cook tweet and mentioned it at ClimateAudit September 15th. Simon Turnill of Australianclimatemadness spent $400 getting hold of the Cook / Lewandowsky e-mails via FOIA. He is the unsung hero of this story.

(He also censored my first comment at his blog. So did Jo Nova. What is it about me and Australia? I am the Northern Hemisphere’s greatest Austrophile. Norman Lindsay is my favourite twentieth century artist. Gilbert Murray is the formost twentieth century classical scholar, Trendall the greatest expert on Greek art. I introduced a generation of French-speaking African science students to the work of David Evans. Where’s the justice?)

I went on a dead thread at SkepticalScience to ask where I could find the comments to their link to the Lewandowsky survey, out of a vague curiosity. My curiosity was rewarded by a private e-mail exchange with John Cook  and  a barrage of  comments from Tom Curtis accusing me of  contradicting myself and  being a conspiracist ideationalist.

Too right I am. For where two or three are gathered together in their name, there is Lewandowsky in the midst of them. 

I can’t say that at skepticalscience because of Cook’s religious beliefs. I’ve been censored at skepticalscience for saying I believe that the Turin Shroud is a miraculous emanation of Jesus Christ, and too bad for my atheism. And for replying to a commenter who cited Norman Cohn’s “The Pursuit of the Millennium”.

The Lewandowky affair has been re-alighted by this article

http://climateaudit.org/2013/04/03/tom-curtis-writes/

in which Tom Curtis apologises to Steve McIntyre. The thread is embroidered with praise for Tom Curtis for being  “a gentleman and scholar” for his “forthrightness”, for “standing up and looking for the truth here, regardless of ‘side’”, for his “work and honesty with this issue”, his “courtesy in debate” and his “ integrity”.

Tom Curtis is not a gentleman and a scholar. He’s an author at SkepticalScience who criticised the Hoax paper and has been doing his best to back-pedal ever since. Something funny happened at Skeptical Science in September. I’ll try to get to the bottom of it when I’m feeling less tired and emotional.

The evidence is on these two SkepticScience threads if anyone’s interested:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=3&t=155&&n=1540

http://www.skepticalscience.com/news.php?p=2&t=106&&n=1934