Lewandowsky: Backdating
Aug 5, 2013
Bishop Hill in Climate: Sceptics, Ethics

This is a guest post by Shub Niggurath.

Steve McIntyre has a post on the Lewandowsky affair. It is a key one, so a summary might be useful.

The notorious 'Fury' paper from the Lewandowsky group is, at time of writing, in chronic 'temporary withdrawal'. The 'Moon' paper has data issues that invalidate the paper. When questioned how he reported on skeptics in the Moon paper without surveying them, Lewandowsky said he had asked skeptics in 2010 to host the survey. He didn't say who they were. This came as a surprise. Searches showed no messages from Lewandowsky. Several skeptic bloggers reported no receipt. Subsequently, others fished out the survey emails. It was realized they were sent under assistant Charles Hanich's name. The bloggers contacted each other and dug up the emails rapidly. This was summarized on Jo Nova's blog and other venues on a running basis.

A day before this, a post appeared on the Shaping Tomorrow's World blog. In it, Lewandowsky posted names of the sceptical bloggers to whom he sent survey requests. The Lewandowsky group rely on this chronology: the Fury paper states the names of the bloggers "...became publicly available on 10th September 2012, on a blog post by the first author of LOG12". 'LOG12's first author is Lewandowsky.

Steve McIntyre shows evidence that Lewandowsky actually published the post on the 11th of September - after skeptics announced their discovery of the survey emails - backdating it so that it would appear as if the discovery was made possible by his post.

The 'Moon and Fury' saga is now no longer in the realm of a science debate. There are three incidents involving the behaviour of Lewandowsky and his group about which they have been directly confronted: 

Stephen Lewandowsky has [yet] to respond to any of them.

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