There were only ten positive responses.
There are many questions to be answered about this paper in “Psychological Science.“ Questions worth asking at all kinds of levels.
The authors, Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, C. E., drew conclusions about skeptics by largely surveying alarmist sites. They got hardly any positive responses, some of which may have been faked (who can tell?). Then with a tiny ten positive responses out of 1147, the authors drew inferences about a group of people which must number between one hundred thousand to one million or more individuals. Worse, of the ten who thought the moon landing was faked, only three or four were skeptics. In the UPDATEbelow note that there appear to be three different forms of the survey, a point that surely needs some explanation.
The headline of the study “NASA faked the moon landing—therefore (climate) science is a hoax: An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science” is drawn from only those ten responses. Do I need to say it’s a sample size too small to draw any conclusions? I shouldn’t. But this point alone should have been enough for the paper in its current form to fail review, yet it didn’t.
Furthermore, the questions and the aim of the survey was so transparent (see below) that commenters on the sites where it was hosted openly discussed whether “deniers” (the obvious targets) would be fooled by them.
An AGW alarmist conducts a study using crappy methodology to arrive at invalid results.
Quelle surprise!.
Fail an undergraduate? This is another “survey” that would fail to receive a passing grade at an elementary school science fair. This isn’t science. At all. It is deliberate political tripe.
Seriously, how can people who supposedly have devoted their lives to reasearch abandon their principles so highly for their own personal politics?
Also, there was a link to the survey here? I missed it completely, or dismissed it utterly. Did any of y’all take the survey?
I commented on Hansen’s rants being a voluntary resignation from the scientific community a few days back. Looks like we have more volunteers here, including an entire so-called “peer reviewed” journal.
Do you think the journal is not actually peer-reviewed? Why is it “so-called”?