Paper On Conspiratorial Thinking Invokes Conspiratorial Thinking

Layzej writes "Last summer a paper investigating the link between conspiratorial thinking and the rejection of climate science provoked a response on blogs skeptical of the scientific consensus that appeared to illustrate the very cognitive processes at the center of the research. This generated data for a new paper titled 'Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation (PDF).' The researchers reviewed the reactions for evidence of conspiratorial thinking, including the presumption of nefarious intent, perception of persecution, the tendency to detect meaning in random events, and the ability to interpret contrary evidence as evidence that the conspiracy is even greater in scope that was originally believed. Some of the hypotheses promoted to dismiss the findings of the original paper ultimately grew in scope to include actors beyond the authors, such as university executives, a media organization, and the Australian government. It is not clear whether the response to this paper will itself provide data for further research, or how far down this recursion could progress. I fear the answer may be 'all the way.'"

Comments

Climate science...

[thejynxed]

To deny what is happening is beyond ridiculous. This planet now has less ice being formed at the caps and in glaciers and more water vapor, methane, etc in the atmosphere than it did even five years ago. The average temperatures for water at the caps alone is rising at an alarming rate.

I've actually gone to places where historically, there have been glaciers solidly covering the ground for well over 25,000+ years, and there was nothing but bare rock, with the glaciers having receded more than five+ miles up the valley towards the mountain tops.

Some of these particular glaciers, only receded that far within the last fifteen years.

The last time we've had these particular conditions occurring, there were tropical and sub-tropical forests and swamps in places where they are in no way currently found (aka when some dinosaurs still roamed).

What is happening, is our pollution is compounding on the natural cooling and warming cycles, and pushing us much farther into a warming cycle than we've ever dealt with in recorded history.

What is scary, is the CO2 we've pushed into the atmosphere in record tonnage, is melting permafrost layers in Canada, Alaska, Siberia and other places, releasing several hundred thousand metric tons of methane into the atmosphere every day, which is MANY times worse than CO2 (picture Venus), and just reinforces and pushes the global temperature rise even further.