Paper On Climate Conspiracy Theorists Generates Conspiracy Theories
A summary in the form of bad pseudo-BASIC:
10: Researchers publish paper showing how climate change deniers engage in conspiracy theory-generating behavior.
20: After the paper is published, the deniers react by engaging in conspiracy theory-generating behavior about the paper.
30: Researchers notice said behavior.
40: Goto 10.
Or, to put it in sciencey terms:
In the case of the response to our earlier paper, we were struck by the way in which some of the accusations leveled against our paper were, well, somewhat conspiratorial in nature. We therefore decided to analyze the public response to our first paper with the hypothesis in mind that this response might also involve conspiracist ideation. We systematically collected utterances by bloggers and commenters, and we sought to classify them into various hypotheses leveled against our earlier paper. For each hypothesis, we then compared the public statements against a list of criteria for conspiracist ideation that was taken from the previous literature.