Analyse this! Climate mind games

The destination of this garden path was no surprise: "a major determinant of the acceptance of science was the perceived consensus among scientists. The more agreement among scientists, the more people were likely to accept the scientific findings."

"Perceived consensus" is important because, according to Lewandowsky, "it highlights how damaging the media's handling of climate issues can be when they create the appearance of a scientific debate where there is none: More than 90 in 100 climate researchers agree on the basic fact that the globe is warming due to human greenhouse gas emissions."

But is an orthodoxy always right and the blogosphere always wrong? Does the former have a monopoly on Lewandowsky's "true scepticism" and "reasoned theorising"? Are internet blogs merely a "platform for climate denial"?

There is surely room for legitimate debate here. How much anthropogenic warming will there be and what will be its consequences? (The UK Met Office recently noted there has been no statistically significant global temperature increase for the past 16 years, despite increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.)

With no established laws of climate change, no models with genuine predictive power, the perceived consensus's embrace of alarmist speculation and risk-management rhetoric is a worry. Confronted with the intractable nature of climate uncertainty, some resort to dishing up red herrings and other fare, such as this one: "the less we know, the more we should worry."

One study last year at UWA's CSL looked at "how attitudes towards spiders affect the processing of spider-related information". According to the course synopsis, the study "involved a spider".

Lewandowsky's latest hypothesis seems to be about something similar in the climate change space; how attitudes of "denialists" – who are allegedly all conspiracy theorists - towards climate change affect their processing of "climate change-related information".

His ABC Drum post of 3^rd May 2010, Evidence is overrated if you are a conspiracy theorist, concluded with an observation about a new canary in the alarmist coal mine - the changing mating rituals of European Lepidoptera.

The conspiracy theory known as climate "scepticism" will soon collapse because it must be extended to include even the macrolepidoptera, including the rhopalocera, geometroidea and noctuoidea. Yes, the European moths and butterflies must be part of the conspiracy, because they mate repeatedly every season now, rather than once only as during the preceding 150 years.

There will always be people who believe that Al Gore issues mating orders to butterflies via secret rays sent from Pyongyang. But they are not the people who contribute to a rational society in the information age.

One problem with the paper – at least according to some who have examined it closely, such as Climate Audit principal, Steve McIntyre– is the apparent lack of – not actual spiders – but bona fide "denialists".

Controversy continues to rage, inter alia, over the quality of Lewandowsky's raw online survey data sourced from "more than 1,000 visitors to blogs dedicated to discussions of climate science", as well as the questionnaire itself. Was the data wholly derived from a group of genuine – and not just pretend - climate sceptics, aka doubt-manufacturing denialists? What was the risk of scamming contamination from masquerading mischief makers, and so on?