Feeling less depressed about that article - retraction has been issued!

Well, TPP was feeling down when be blogged about a depressing news article on climate change based on a published study, which has now been retracted because the journal was worried about legal problems the article might generate. That actually cheers TPP up considerably, although no academic problems were at the root of the retraction. However, when the title of the article is "Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation" the ideation is that it can be ignored. TPP's regard for Frontiers of Psychology has fallen to an all time low among psychology journals that he regularly reads, which is none.  HT to Stoat over at Science Blogs for calling my attention to Retraction Watch blog.

How-to lesson on climate denialism - USA Senate version

One of the big worries in science is interpreting the facts correctly, and if you don't you look stupid, so most scientists are really, really careful about making very solid interpretations.  Now the key thing here is that you start with facts.  If someone has a different interpretation, they still had to deal with all the same facts, and if they don't, well, then their explanation usually just doesn't cut it.  But in the through the looking-glass world of science denialism, facts are simply things to be ignored or made up.  Here's a good example: Huckahofe in action where these two characters simply waltz along carefree with a total lack of knowledge and seemingly not even the least bit worried about ever being brought to task for it.  Too often the media is complicit acting as if everything is just an opinion, you have an opinion, they have an opinion, we just report both; you have facts, they have facts, you're both entitled to them. So how nice to see an article with nice links to what is known to show you what these two don't know. And, yeah, you sound stupid.  Thank you, thank you.