Lewandowsky to Remove All Blog Based References

Over the past few weeks I have had several communications with Dr. Lewandowsky regarding his wonderful contribution to science very appropriately titled:

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

“MOTIVATED REJECTION OF SCIENCE”

Think about that. Who could reject the truth of “science”?…. It must be one who has such powerful beliefs on something that scientific fact, real proof, even unequivocal evidence has no effect on their opinion. How much more Orwellian a title could be written? As we have learned at Climate Audit, from the content of the paper the irony is difficult to overstate.

As you unfortunate victims readers know, I have a naturally acerbic personality which is even more poorly contained in blogland. The very title of the Lewandowsky article attacks the open discussion on which science is necessarily based. A more biased attack on reasoned skepticism is hard to fathom.

The Air Vent blog isn’t exactly a great life achievement in my point of view but it is one of the far too rare science-first blogs skeptical of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. I didn’t imagine that a conservative engineer who started a free blog under a pseudonym complaining about political and monetary pollution of climate science would extend to being banned by climate blogs, being outed by the British press, surprise phone calls on Sunday morning, hacked email drops, being contacted by the anti-terror squads of the British government and then recently being libeled with accusations of being an anti-science denier and advocate of conspiratorial whatever in the Journal of Psychology..

You have to love liberalism in all of its wonderful forms. Does anyone wonder now why I published under “Jeff Id” ?

Here is what Lewandowsky wrote under the guise of science:

Thus, AIDS denial has been linked to the belief that the U.S. Government created HIV; the tobacco industry viewed lung cancer research as an \oligopolistic cartel,” and climate deniers believe that temperature records have been illegitimately adjusted to exaggerate warming (e.g., Condon, 2009).

The article in the references is the lone Internet link of any kind in the references:http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/11/29/global-temperature-records-above-the-law/ (Accessed 6 May 2012). Certainly the post is argumentative but it is about the collusion by Jones and UEA officials to ignore legal freedom of information requests. Unlike Lewandowsky, it seems obvious that nobody really knew what data was used in CRU ground temperatures at that time. Now we know even Phil Jones was a bit confused on the matter. Fortunately, after climategate, Dr. Phil became a lot more open to releasing the data and I believe tAV was the first blog to reproduce his results after code became available.

The accusations by Dr. Lewandowsky were allowed by the editorial review of the Journal of Psychology yet claims that I’m a climate change denier and that I believe temperatures were illegitimately adjusted are clearly false. I wrote first to Lewandowsky regarding the error and received an automated reply about his travel so I wrote to his coauthor. After some time, I was told that Lewandowsky didn’t believe he was in error using this rather cute bit of sophistry:

I don’t believe I cited you inaccurately given the context of what I was saying and referring to—although I agree that your name was listed in a sentence with the noun “denier,” thereby creating a tacit association that was in fact not intended on my part.

So even after telling him of his error, Lewandowsky is still saying that I have accused someone of illegitimate temperature record adjustment for the explicit purpose of exaggerated warming but apparently I’m not a denier. I have not made either claim of course, however, on a similar vein there are some UHI based embarrassments by the climate change extremist community that I could happily detail for him. The funny bit is that Lewandowsky proposed to replace the Condon reference for climate change deniers with a “google search” that would include my blog amongst others:

I therefore suggest that I remove the citation “(e.g., Condon, 2009)” and replace it with “(see supplementary material for sources).” The supplementary material can then contain a set of links to 10 or so sites making claims about illegitimate adjustments, presented in an order based on Google-rankings, so that other than entering search terms, no human intervention is required in selecting citations. (Of course, that’s how I got to your post in the first place, so there is no guarantee that your link might not pop up again; I hope you can accept that because I don’t want to re-introduce human selection.)

I told him that listing my blog in any manner as supportive of his claim was clearly false at this point and it would not be acceptable. I received no more replies from Lewandowsky after that point.

So I contacted the editor of the Journal of Psychology ….

Eric Eich didn’t respond at all at first. So I threw a bit of a fit with him and got the reply that they were looking into the matter and ‘promised’ to get back to me when they had a decision. I thanked him and provided these examples as to why the claims were false:

Not a denier of climate change:

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/12/05/it-is-what-it-is-and-the-god-of-physics-will-have-it-no-other-way/
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/radiative-physics-yes-co2-does-create-warming/
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/08/06/radiative-physics-simplified-ii/

No claim of illegitimate adjustments to temp records:

http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/global-land-temps-cru-style/
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/03/28/111/
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/03/25/thermal-hammer-part-deux/
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/cru-howto/

The links were sent with a few other details as well, so I waited another week without reply. I wrote again asking what decision was made and received this a couple of days ago from Eric Eich:

Mr Id: Dr. Lewandowsky has agreed to remove your citation not because it was misleading–he does not believe it was–but because I think it is best replaced by a source other than a blog post. Any other blog post cited in the manuscript is also being replaced, for the same reason. … Eric Eich

Eric refused to use my last name during any of our communications despite the journal’s reference being to “Condon” and despite me signing all of my correspondence “Condon”. I even pointed out the discrepancy in name after his first reply to no avail. His repeated inability to use my name, made it quite obvious that that the Editor of the Journal Of Psychology is in no way emotionally detached from this issue.

Now some of the sophistry of the reply is due to the fact that they cannot admit libel even by accident but I found this resolution to be rather humorous. Lewandowsky is claiming his false claims are not “misleading” but Eric Eich believes that all references to blog post must be removed for some unexplained reason.

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