New blog title:
Recursive Fury
This one is not one that occurred to me.
University of Bristol Professor Stephan Lewandowsky (and two other researchers) published a paper stating that climate change denial is associated with a belief in conspiracy theories. The work was based on surveys filled out by readers of climate change denial sites who were invited to participate.
The response of many climate deniers was that Lewandowsky et al did not in fact use responses from true climate change deniers, but instead from people who only claimed to be climate change deniers. The assertion is that the responders were people who accepted the science of climate change, but claimed to be deniers to make the deniers look bad. Some climate change deniers insisted this was done in collusion with the researchers.
In other words, when accused of being conspiracy theorists, climate change deniers insisted they were not, and that any allegation that they were conspiracy theorists was in fact, a conspiracy.
He then wrote another paper called “”Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation”. This got the deniers more upset, and some threatened legal action against the journal that published the paper. This second paper was retracted.
At the time of this writing (early February, 2015), you can find the second paper on a site hosted by the University of Western Australia here.
Image from Blogger website.