Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who watches the watchmen? Who guards the guards themselves? Who...keeps the beekeepers. You would need quite a large hive for that I suppose. Alright, maybe that last one doesn't work, but one that certainly does work is: who attacks the attack blogs? Or, in the nomenclature of the internet, who trolls the trolls? In the climate change world there is an answer to that question, and like anything in this viper's nest of a debate, it's a controversial one. Please allow me to introduce to you the virtual phenomenon that is Stephan Lewandowsky and his colleagues at the university of Western Australia.
In summer 2012, Lewandowsky et al. submitted a paper to the journal Psychological Science with the title “NASA Faked the Moon Landing – Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science.” This is quite an entrance, it must be said. If you've managed to link the climate change debate to the Moon Landing conspiracy theory in the very first sentence on the page, it's pretty clear where you stand.
Now, since this is a psychology paper and I have no background in this area, I'm not going to try and address the papers merits. I can tell you what they did though. They asked 1377 followers of climate denial blogs to fill in a questionnaire, the purpose of which was to ascertain whether they believed in conspiracy theories or not. The theories they asked about are listed in table 1 of the paper, ranging from “AIDS was introduced by the Government and administered to gay and black men in the 1970's” to “In July 1947, the U.S. military recovered the wreckage of an alien spacecraft from Roswell, NM, and covered up the fact.” From this questionnaire, they found that “endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the Federal Bureau of Investigation killed Martin Luther King, Jr.) predicted rejection of climate science as well as other scientific findings.”
This obviously did not go down well with the climate sceptic/denialist blogs. So, in a move so ironic that it made a clanging sound as it dropped, Lewandowsky and his colleagues starting trying to trace the comments about their original paper on these blogs to see how conspiracy theories evolve. The conspiracy theory they were looking at in question being that their research was made up because they're puppets of the climate change hoax. Woah. I might need Christopher Nolan to help me out with that many levels.
In February of this year the new paper appeared, named in delightfully circular fashion: “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation.” This time around, they "identify and trace the hypotheses that emerged in response to LOG12 (the previous paper) and ... show that many of the hypotheses exhibited conspiratorial content and counterfactual thinking." Here the story gets really interesting, because the journal in which that article appeared have recently taken it offline, because it was the “subject of complaints”. However it has not been retracted or withdrawn, which happens when a paper is fundamentally flawed. So now the most recent paper is just kind of in limbo, although you can find versions of it kicking around on the web.
Clearly this is an ongoing story, and one which is little more than a sideshow to the overall problems caused by climate change. I happen to be a little sceptical myself about the results from internet surveys, with the obvious problem of only getting responses from the people particularly interested in the subject. As I said though, I'm not really in a position to judge, not being a psychological scientist. I'm certainly still interested in what happens to their most recent paper in the end. Whatever the outcome, as long as Anthony Watts and co. are furious, Lewandowsky et al. have certainly acheived something worthwhile.
Lewandowsky S, Oberauer K, & Gignac GE (2013). NASA Faked the Moon Landing--Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science. Psychological science PMID: 23531484
