User:Tillman/Criticism of Lewandowsky

A long article at Spiked magazine strongly criticized Lewandowsky's research on climate change deniers. Author Ben Pile wrote that the paper "NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax" is based on "a poorly executed and error-prone online survey," uses "dodgy statistical methods" and that  "the data simply do not support his conclusions." In the retracted "Recursive Fury" paper, Pile wrote that Lewandowsky's work showed bad faith, allowing "his prejudices to form the basis from which his study proceeded." Pile described Lewandowsky's climate-change papers as "[d]ressing political arguments up in scientific terminology" and "nonsense cloaked in mathematical jargon."

Talk page draft, Criticism of Lewandowsky papers
Another editor removed the paragraph below, commenting "Essentially a string of disparaging quotes. Low quality source for any BLP."


 * A long article at Spiked magazine strongly criticized Lewandowsky's research on climate change deniers. Author Ben Pile wrote that the paper "NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax" is based on "a poorly executed and error-prone online survey," uses "dodgy statistical methods" and that "the data simply do not support his conclusions." Regarding the retracted "Recursive Fury" paper, Pile wrote that Lewandowsky's work showed bad faith, allowing "his prejudices to form the basis from which his study proceeded." Pile described Lewandowsky's climate-change papers as "[d]ressing political arguments up in scientific terminology" and "nonsense cloaked in mathematical jargon." Source.

If you read Pile's critical essay, I think he's done his homework. I thought about paraphrasing his blunt language, but it seemed better just to quote. Similar criticisms have been made by others, but all I found were blog posts, obviously not RSs for a BLP. For instance, the publisher of the retracted paper remarked:


 * My own personal opinion: The authors of the retracted paper and their followers are doing the climate change crisis a tragic disservice by attacking people personally and saying that it is ethically ok to identify them in a scientific study.


 * They made a monumental mistake, refused to fix it and that rightfully disqualified the study.

This was a threaded comment at the journal's retraction notice website [? here]