I was just browsing the NCSE (National Center for Science Education) site since I enjoy "Fossil Friday" and came across a link to an interesting article. It appears that a new tactic of anthropocentric climate change deniers is to bully journals into retracting legitimate studies. But, more telling about the state of mind of denialists is that they are likely to be so mentally imbalanced that they generally subscribe to other conspiracy theories.
However, what is so delicious is how the researchers use the deniers incoherent outrage as the grist for more research about their craziness.
To paraphrase the article it all started with; NASA Faked the Moon Landing—Therefore, (Climate) Science Is a Hoax An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science. It shows that besides the endorsement of free markets, climate change deniers are prone to endorse other conspiratorial thinking. In other words, they focus on the abnormal in order to reject science.
After that publication and not content to let a sleeping dog lie, the conspiracy bloggers and commentators went nuts, fabricating conspiracies about the authors, Lewandowsky and Cook. Like good researchers they couldn't dismiss such good data that just fell into their laps. And, with a title that I heartily approve of, they published; Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation.
A dislike of being hoist by their own petard, the conspiracists/science deniers were so outraged that they threatened the publisher with lawsuits. Even though the publisher found nothing amiss ethically or academically about the research, their dislike of even minor risk led them to pull the publication. As you can see from the link above, the paper, now is hosted by the University of Western Australia which champions academic freedom.
So, there you have it. When you see denial of science you are observing an abnormality of thought that is prone to other conspiratorial ideas. We really have little use for these people in setting public policy and need to find ways to increasingly marginalize them. Alas, there is money to be made in pandering to their fantasies as demonstrated by Fox News. But how we allow people who are science deniers into government is beyond me.