Clearly Deluded

Bishop Hill:

There has been great hilarity overnight, with Stefan Lewandowsky and Skeptical Science's John Cook making complete fools of themselves again.

It started when Barry Woods was examining the supplementary data to Lewandowsky's latest paper, the one that analysed sceptic reactions to his previous carcrash paper on various blogs and tried to present these as evidence of "conspiracy ideation". Among the comments categorised as "Espousing Conspiracy Theory" was this one:

The thing I don't understand is, why didn't they just make a post on sceptic blogs themselves, rather than approaching blog owners. They could have posted as a Discussion topic here at Bishop Hill without even asking the host, and I very much doubt that the Bish would have removed it. Climate Audit also has very light-touch moderation and I doubt whether Steve McIntyre would have removed such an unsolicited post. Same probably goes for many of the sceptic blogs, in my experience. So it does appear to that they didn't try very hard to solicit views from the climate sceptic community.

Unfortunately, this was written by Richard Betts, the very mainstream head of climate impacts at the Met Office. Oh dear.

Richard seems somewhat taken aback, quizzing Skeptical Science's John Cook, a coauthor on the paper:

Hi @skepticscience, why was my comment here http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/8/31/lewandowskys-data.html … "espousing conspiracy theory"?! That's just crazy. http://www.frontiersin.org/personality_science_and_individual_differences/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073/abstract …

Cook, a winner of the Eureka award for advancing climate change knowledge, offered this hilarious response, pretending that a comment that had been categorised by him and his coauthors was "raw data":

@richardabetts supplementary data for Recursive Fury are any comments *related* to particular theory. It's raw data, not final paper.

The Universities of Western Australia and Queensland must be very proud.

The final word should go to Richard:

@wattsupwiththat @lucialiljegren @aDissentient Here http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/8/31/lewandowskys-data.html … at Aug 31, 2012 at 9:00 PM. Lewandowsky et al clearly deluded!

Bonus points to Cook for for misunderstanding what "raw data" is. No, no, no: "raw data" is not some early form of a paper before it becomes a "final paper".