Why I am a jellyfish when it comes to global warming theory

Most climate skeptics accept the theory that a rise in atmospheric CO2 will cause a rise in terrestrial temperature.  Where they differ from Warmists is in estimating the quantum of the temperature rise. Looking at both the theory and the data, skeptics think the effect of more CO2 will be so minute as to be probably undetectable.

There is however another camp of skeptics who think the whole theory is bunk.  They think that a rise in CO2 CANNOT affect temperature.  Such thinkers coalesce to some degree around the Principia Scientific publication run by John O'Sullivan.  Their "Bible" is Slaying the Sky Dragon.

One would think that both types of skeptics would get along with one-another in perfect amiability but that is not always so.  The "Slayers" tend to be rather shrill critics of the mainstream critics.  In their dogmatism and hunger for consensus they seem rather like Warmists at times.

So I am a jellyfish.  I take no side in the dispute.  Either side could be right in my view.  I think that Warmism has long ago left the realm of science and become a political creed of the Left.  So the important thing is that both skeptical groups piss on global warming fears.  Just as in politics generally, I think you have to have a big tent for your side to win the contest with the Left.  And I would be happy to have a beer with anyone in the tent.

But I was not always a jellyfish.  For a while the slayers had convinced me.  I thought that global warming theory transgressed the first and second laws of thermodynamics.  After a while, however, I concluded that those laws could be applied only to convective processes in the atmosphere, whereas global warming theory is about radiative heat transfer.  At that point I had a small correspondence with theoretical physicist Lubos Motl and he assisted me towards a view that the theory could be expressed in a way not contrary to the law of physics.

So what  I now make of the theory depends on the old law of the conservation of energy.  Energy is not created or destroyed but just changes guise.  So when  energy (heat) from the sun hits the earth, that energy does not just vanish.  It does a number of things and one of those things is that it bounces back in the direction whence it came.  And when it hits a water or CO2 molecule it in turn  bounces off that.  But it will bounce in all dirtections so only a small portion of the bounced radiation will bounce back to hit the earth.  And since CO2 molelcules are a tiny proportion of the atmosphere, you have only a small proportion   of a tiny proportion of the heat being re-radiated to the surface by CO2 molecules.  So the total effect must be very small indeed.  So even in theory the  Warmists are wrong to proclaim a  detectable effect of CO2 levels.

And  what the theoory says is of course exactly what we observe.  Temperatures have remained stable over 17 years during which CO2 levels have risen sharply.  So  there has been no detectable effect of CO2 levels.   Any effect has been too tiny to detect.

But in their typical  way, one of the slayers had a go at me recently  for my view that, even given their own theory, warmists are barking up the wrong tree.   I reproduce the correspondence:

Spotted this sentence in your lead story today: "On the global warming theory as I see it, CO2 reflection is such a minor source of heating that the effects of variations in it SHOULD be so minuscule as to be  undetectable ..." You've got a PhD, so where do you reckon the "warming" comes from then?  Think a bit further and you can only come to one conclusion: in the open atmosphere, CO2 can only act as a coolant, never a warming agent.  Provide me with just one piece of actual observed proof that there is any warming off atmospheric CO2.

I replied:

I am agnostic about the theory.  The form of it that makes some sense draws on the law of conservation of energy.  If back radiation from the earth hits something opaque in the atmosphere the energy should bounce and some of that should hit the earth.  But since CO2 is a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, its effect should be tiny.  That's the theory but reality could be different

The Slayer replied:

The entire basis of the "theory" you mention is incorrect, hence my email to you in the first place.  The concept of "heating by back-radiation" is a myth, has never been observed in Nature and can in fact not exist!  Imagine if such a heating mechanism did exist, we'd be able to build super-efficient heaters where for an input of 1kW we get 2kW out - or any wattage higher than the input.  For sure, any effect off a tiny fraction is tiny, but the only effect that can be scientifically ascribed to adding any gas to the atmosphere is a cooling effect, never a warming effect.  With CO2 being a radiatively active gas, it will in fact act as a super-coolant!  Only when captured in a bottle will the walls of the bottle warm up more when CO2 is inside, because the re-radiated energy can not get out without first dumping its energy into the material of the bottle. Out in the open, that very same property will cause extra fast cooling of the CO2 molecule, where O2 and N2 can only rely on conductive and convective heatloss.  Also remember that in the bigger picture, the sun dumps its heat onto the surface, the air then takes that heat and convects it upwards and sideways with wind - a heatloss situation at all times! Never can more heat be created by recycling the original solar heat - if only!  Delayed cooling is not warming; that delay can at best increase the average temperature - a rather meaningless concept as all weather stations are measuring the air at some 5-7ft off the ground!

I replied:

I don't think you have grasped the law of conservation of energy. Where does the energy (heat) go when it hits a CO2 molecule?"

The Slayer replied:

Thanks Ray, there is no point to any further comms.

Does the brevity of the final reply mean that I won the argument?  I think so but I also think that the important thing is to have the discussion.  Winning and losing are not what science is about.  And I am still open to conviction either way.  I could be wrong!


Please Take Me off Your List of Hate

Mrs Instapundit sends off a fiery reply below to the latest attempt to "psychologize" conservatives.  Leftists have been doing that at least since 1950 and the amusing thing is that most of what the Leftists write is transparent projection:  They accuse conservatives of what are their own faults  -- hate, authoritarianism etc.  So it is no wonder that their attempts to substantiate their accusations through actual psychological research eventually come to naught.  Background here and here.

The "polarized mind" concept below is just the latest version of a very old accusation.  On previous occasions it has been referred to by Leftists as "intolerance of ambiguity", "rigity" "dogmatism" and lack of "openness".  When you know how closed off from evidence Leftists are, you can see why they project that on to conservatives.  Background here  -- JR.


So I received this press release about a newly released book by psychologist Kirk J. Schneider Ph.D:

    FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
    PRESS CONTACT

    Lorna Garano

    510-280-5397

    lornagarano@gmail.com

    A Psychologist Diagnoses the Tea Party-and other extremists threatening our world. In “The Polarized Mind: Why It’s Killing Us and What We Can Do about It,” Kirk J. Schneider Ph.D., calls for a new and deeper psychological understanding of our greatest political and social conflicts and those who drive them.

    It’s easy for liberals to snicker at the misspelled signs and misplaced anger of the Tea Party, but psychologist Kirk J. Schneider says that we dismiss or diminish groups like this at our own peril. Schneider, the author of THE POLARIZED MIND: WHY IT’S KILLING US AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT (University Professor Press, 2013, paperback), has done an exhaustive study of extremist movements throughout history and he says it’s time for us to look more seriously at what he calls “the polarized mind.” In “The Polarized Mind: Why It’s Killing Us and What We Can Do about It,” Kirk J. Schneider Ph.D., calls for a new and deeper psychological understanding of our greatest political and social conflicts and those who drive them.

    “You can see gradations of the ‘polarized mind’ at work in virtually all destructive political movements from Nazi Germany to Maoist China to our very own Tea Party. In fact, it is the pervasive malady of the 20 and 21st Centuries,” says Schneider.

    How does the Tea Party fit in? Many among its ranks have seen their lives profoundly upended by economic, social, and political trends beyond their control. They tend to be middle class people who are mired in debt and have seen a sharp decline in their living standard due to the shift to a service-industry economy. They often face stiff competition for low-wage jobs and when they land them they may be confined to dull, meaningless work day after day. They resent any government help for people who are even less fortunate and train their anger on those who are the least responsible for their plight. And it’s not just an empty wallet that drives them. It’s also a sense of social dislocation. “I think many in this movement are embittered over the increasing complexity of contemporary life. They look at the 9/11 attack-which once would have seemed unthinkable-the decrease in church attendance in many places, the loss of two-parent households, gender equality, the lack of simple ‘good guy’ and ‘bad guy’ presentations of the U.S. vs. the rest of the world, and they feel profound existential anxiety-as if the ground beneath them is giving way,” says Schneider.

    Although you won’t find “polarized mind” in any official diagnostic manual, for Schneider it’s crucial that the psychological community and the world at large rethink our ideas about mental illness if we are to understand the forces at play in the world. “When we think of mental illness, we think of a discrete and politically powerless group of people who have received a diagnosis, but if you look at the key criteria for diagnoses it’s abundantly clear that they describe vast swaths of the population, not a marginalized group,” says Schneider. Look, for example, at some of the traits of narcissistic personality disorder or psychopathy: A callous disregard for the feelings of others, the reckless disregard for the safety of others, a sense of entitlement, arrogance, a grandiose sense of self-importance. These traits are readily seen in the Tea Party and other extremist groups.

    “No one can or should deny the historical forces that have shaped movements like the Tea Party, but to overlook or dismiss the psychological factors that are linked to them is to have less than a full understanding of what makes extremism tick-and how we can defuse it,” says Schneider. Recognizing the polarized mind when we see it is the first step.

Here is the reply I sent back to Lorna Garano:

"How DARE YOU send me this trash associating law abiding American citizens with Nazi Germany and Maoist China. I am a psychologist who has sympathy for my fellow Americans who are so “extremist” that they believe in lower taxes and the Second Amendment. Horrors!

What is “killing us” are polarized minds like Kirk J. Schneider Ph.D who is so narrow-minded that he thinks those who have different political beliefs than himself are the enemy and seeks to assign them with a “diagnosis.” What is truly extremist and scary to those of a more conservative or libertarian persuasion is that so many psychologists such as the one below are such political hacks for the Democratic Party. Please take me off your list of hate.

Helen Smith, PhD"

SOURCE



Leftist hate in Australia  -- a personal observation

I am enrolled in the Queensland electorate of Griffith, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's old seat.  I used to get a nice Christmas card from Kevvy every year while he was there.  So I will be voting in the by-election caused by Kevvy's retirement after his recent defeat in the federal election.

The LNP (conservative) candidate for the by-election is Dr. Bill Glasson, a most energetic campaigner and an ophthalmologist by trade.  His father, also Bill Glasson, was a minister in the long-running Bjelke-Petersen (conservative) government of Queensland.  So the present Bill has name recognition.

I was sitting in my usual Buranda brunch destination about mid-morning yesterday when Bill and a campaign assistant walked in -- also seeking brunch.  The assistant was a nice-looking young lady who might have been his daughter.  She had "Vote Bill Glasson" written all over her t-shirt so she was at any event a helper.

Bill & Co. sat down beside a lady in a green dress.  The restaurant was busy so some tables were right up against one another.  Bill chose one such table.  As the lady beside him got up to leave, she launched a furious verbal assault on Bill:  Quite egregious behaviour in a restaurant.

I was too far away to hear what she was saying and I am pretty deaf anyway but a professional actor could not have done a better job of portraying rage and hate  than this woman did  -- finger pointing, tensed-up body and all other conceivable hostile body  language.  Bill just sat there.  She gave up after a few minutes and walked out.  She must have thought of more things to say, however, as she shortly thereafter came back into the restaurant and resumed her angry tirade at Bill.

It was a most remarkable assault on a man the woman did not know personally and who has never been a member of any government.  She appeared to have been blaming Bill for something some government had done but why she blamed Bill for it was  obscure.

When I had finished eating, I went over, shook Bill's hand, introduced myself as a Griffith voter and said I would be voting for him.  I then asked him what the lady had been on about.  He said it was confused but it was something about hospitals.  All Australian public hospitals are in a mess so that might be understandable.  The government that got Qld. hospitals into a mess was however the recently departed Leftist government.  So again, why blame Bill?

I then said to Bill:  "She was full of hate, wasn't she?".  He agreed.  Just his conservative political identity was enough to fire her up.

UPDATE:  A reader has sent me the following story:

This happened to me while my family and I were in Orlando, Florida attending my nieces wedding. My father (85 yo) mother (82), sister (56), brother-in-law (64), my wife(49) and I (47) were out eating dinner at a sparsely populated Chinese restaurant.

My brother-in- law jokingly asked me "so how do you feel about Obama?", in response to a statement I said about taxation. I made no reply to this.

Shortly thereafter, a woman left the table near us very quickly and went to get the check rather than wait for it to arrive at the table she was sharing with a man.

The next thing I know, the fat, long haired man is towering over our table and he starts to bellow. He told us how sick to death he was of us right-wing fanatics and we had better get used to the leftist running the country. He told us how much he hated us homophobic, racist assholes and wished we were all dead.

Keep in mind, my brother-in-law is Puerto Rican/ Italian mix and my nephew is gay and we had mentioned nothing racial or about sex all evening. He just lit into us.

After I had enough, I got up and motioned for him to follow me outside. He asked why should he go outside. I replied that was were I was going to tune him up. He did not follow me outside. He was taller and heavier than I am, but not near as solid.

This is happening more and more in America. F*ck 'em, let them suck on knuckles. This being polite to liberal assholes only begets more abuse. End it swiftly and brutally.


Ya gotta laugh:  Those significant hundredths of one degree

I reproduce below a current news report derived from NOAA and GISS.  You will see that continuing warming is proclaimed with no hint that the data might be troublesome to Warmism.  It is classical warming propaganda much as we hear every year.

I have been naughty, however.  I spent about 2 minutes on a Google search to find out what the actual figures were.  Here is a quote from NOAA:

"The year 2013 ties with 2003 as the fourth warmest year globally since records began in 1880. The annual global combined land and ocean surface temperature was 0.62°C (1.12°F) above the 20th century average of 13.9°C (57.0°F). This marks the 37th consecutive year (since 1976) that the yearly global temperature was above average. Currently, the warmest year on record is 2010, which was 0.66°C (1.19°F) above average."
 Do you see what they are doing?  The differences in temperature that they rely on for a judgment that something was warmest are in hundredths of a degree!  They treat unbelievably tiny differences in temperature that exist only as a statistical artifact as if they told us something! For instance they contrast the 2013 anomaly of .62C with 2010, which is .66C.  The difference is only 4 hundredths of one degree Celsius!  

Is there any point at which they would concede that a difference is too small to be taken seriously?  Thousandths of one degree?  Millionths of one degree?   Medieval theologians used to debate how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.  Theology is alive and well among Warmists!

America's two top scientific agencies have released separate reports on last year's climate, confirming the global warming trend is continuing.

The American space agency, NASA, releases a climate report each year - alongside a separate report from its sister agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

The two agencies collect their data separately and their reports show slightly different results. But the trend is clear.  At least nine of the warmest years on record have happened since 2000.

According to NOAA, 2013 was the fourth warmest year for the planet since records began in 1880.

Ocean temperatures were half a degree Celsius above the 20th century average.

NASA says carbon dioxide is at its highest level in the atmosphere in 800,000 years, having risen from 285 parts per million in 1880 to 400 parts per million last year.

Unless current trends change, the world should expect each of the coming decades to be warmer than the last, NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt says.

He describes the warming of the past few decades as "unusual," and urges people not to judge whether climate change is happening or not based on random weather events like cold snaps.

"The long-term trends in climate are extremely robust," he said.

"People have a very short memory when it comes to their own experience of weather and climate, and the only way that we can have a long-term assessment of what is going on is by looking at the data."

Last year also marked the 37th year in a row with higher than average global temperatures.

SOURCE


Warmist proud of censoring dissent

In view of the great difficulty skeptics have at getting papers published in academic journals, one group of prominent skeptical scientists decided to set up their own journal.  No problem, you would think.  All sides of a debate should be aired.

But Warmists did not see it that way at all.  They went all out to pressure the publisher (Copernicus)  to ditch the journal  --  which it did.  Prominent Warmist James Annan is even proud  of his efforts in that direction.  He crows:

"Kudos to Copernicus for the rapid and decisive way in which they dealt with this problem. The problems at the journal were was first brought to my attention by ThingsBreak just last night, I emailed various people to express my concerns and the journal (which was already under close scrutiny by the publisher) was closed down within 24h."

The book burners are here!  Such efforts by Warmists clearly have more in common with totalitarianism than with science and convey nothing so much as fear and panic.  A commenter on his blog sums up the strange version of science behind such efforts:

"You've got to love climate science when you see episodes like this.

I think it is safe to say that in no other science do you see such overt power games played out like this.

It is clear that it is not just the retraction of a publication that is of primary importance here, it is the spin that comes off that retraction that is most important.

"Pour encourager les autres"

Since the ostensible reason given in the letter was that the publishers were "alarmed" at criticism of the IPCC it is obvious the lesson an observer should take is that any attempt to go out on a limb and "alarm" people must be shown to be wrong and is not to be encouraged.

You guys in climate must be so proud to have the best policed science that humanity has ever seen."


Prevalence of psychopathy in politics

As I have pointed out at length elsewhere, there are many reasons why people can have hate in their hearts for the society around them.  But those who have that hate are the Left.  And it is that hate which makes them want to change us all.


The anger and hate is sometimes so strong that it is visible -- Mrs Clinton  with TWO clenched fists.  Even the Communist salute requires only one. The fist is the emblem of the Left.  It tells you what they want to do.

But a major reason for the hate is ego.  The hater thinks highly of himself and resents that the world does not give him the praise and rewards that he thinks are his due.

It is hard to know for certain how much Leftism is driven in that way.  It is very evident in Leftist leaders but is it  widespread among the voters?  When people are questioned immediately after voting in Presidential elections, the reasons that Democrat-voters give for their vote seem to be founded mainly on profound ignorance of the facts and issues.  Democrat candidates are blamed for what Republicans do and vice versa.

For all that, however, many ordinary people who favour the Left   often do express the same resentment of the world that we see in Leftist leaders.  I can warrant that from the many social attitude surveys I did in my social science research career.

As I also set out at length elsewhere, however, many Leftist leaders are not only egotists but are in fact the ultimate egotists -- psychopaths, people who have no real concern for other people at all  -- people to whom only their own self-interest is visible.  Though their psychopathy is "sub-clinical", i.e. it is subdued enough to keep them out of trouble with law enforcement and the mental health system.

So when both the leadership of the Left and a substantial part of their supporters are psychopathic, we clearly have one half of the political spectrum that is  substantially insane.  Beneath their  superficial charm lies a serious mental defect.

That such a pathology has engulfed half of politics is of course extremely disturbing.  My comment  (during my research career) that psychopathy is often successful in various ways appears to have been confirmed in spades.  It even appears in fact to have been reproductively successful, which is very alarming.  We now have a substantially psychopathic population around us.

That psychopathy has been reproductively successful for many years now is not hard to fathom.  As I have pointed out psychopaths seem to have a magic way with women.  The women eventually get disillusioned but pregnancies often occur in the interim.  And these days the children of such pregnancies will normally survive to adulthood.  So there has been a gradual but steady drip of psychopathy into the population.  And the "soft" penal practices of the current era have greatly facilitated that.  Criminals are now rarely executed but are released back into the population to continue their mayhem.  And a substantial number of those criminals are psychopaths.

No wonder our Leftist political opponents often seem to be off the planet -- JR


That "100 months" prophecy

In early January 2006 the BBC held a sort of Old Fashioned Revival Hour in which top BBC people got together with top Greenie fanatics and helped prop up one-another's belief that Global Warming was the One True Faith.  You can read about it here.

One little excerpt from the report of what went on there fascinated me:

"Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation, who argued there were only 100 months left to save the planet"

100 months is 8 years and 4 months and if we count forward from then we arrive at April 2014.  We're nearly there!  But the planet looks much the same as it did in 2006 so it looks like Simms is yet another Warmist false prophet.

But the planet may have a reprieve.  In August 2008 Simms said we still had 100 months at that time!  I wonder what refined calculations went into that revision?

Warmists are such clowns.  Perhaps we should not berate them too heavily.  Laughing at them is a bit like laughing at the disabled.  Their mental fixations certainly disable their reasoning powers (if any).


Main genes for IQ now isolated

This is much sooner than anyone expected. The .90 correlation between a gene set and IQ mentioned below is historic.  Correlations don't get much better than that in psychology.  The IQ deniers have always looked pretty silly in the light of the evidence but I cannot see that they have any room to move now at all  -- JR

Factor Analysis of Population Allele Frequencies as a Simple, Novel Method of Detecting Signals of Recent Polygenic Selection: The Example of Educational Attainment and IQ

Davide Piffer, Interdisciplinary Bio Central, November 27, 2013

Synopsis

Weak widespread (polygenic) selection is a mechanism that acts on multiple SNPs simultaneously. The aim of this paper is to suggest a methodology to detect signals of polygenic selection using educational attainment as an example. Educational attainment is a polygenic phenotype, influenced by many genetic variants with small effects. Frequencies of 10 SNPs found to be associated with educational attainment in a recent genome-wide association study were obtained from HapMap, 1000 Genomes and ALFRED. Factor analysis showed that they are strongly statistically associated at the population level, and the resulting factor score was highly related to average population IQ (r=0.90). Moreover, allele frequencies were positively correlated with aggregate measures of educational attainment in the population, average IQ, and with two intelligence increasing alleles that had been identified in different studies. This paper provides a simple method for detecting signals of polygenic selection on genes with overlapping phenotypes but located on different chromosomes. The method is therefore different from traditional estimations of linkage disequilibrium. This method can also be used as a tool in gene discovery, potentially decreasing the number of SNPs that are included in a genome-wide association study, reducing the multiple-testing problem and required sample sizes and consequently, financial costs.

SOURCE



Big attack on Lindzen comes now he has retired

The Guardian has just put up a supposed dismantling of Lindzen's scientific expertise by two old hard-heads of Warmism.  Nuccitelli in particular never accepts any fact that is detrimental to Warmism.  He has always got some ad hoc reasoning that enables him to wriggle out from under it.

The article has provoked widespread derision from climate skeptics  -- who accuse it of fudging the facts "hell West and crooked".  But I gather that no-one is publishing their views in anticipation of Lindzen himself doing a rejoinder.

I did however have a close look at the article myself and when you dig down you find that all the "proofs" of Warmism that they quote go  back to tendentious claims made by other Warmists.  It's a case of Warmists quoting Warmists to prove that Warmists are right!

Let me give an example of that:

I was particularly fascinated by their claim:  "The 15-year 'pause' myth? Completely debunked".  Since even many prominent Warmists accept the pause as fact this is a good example of Nuccitelli refusing to retreat an inch from Warmism.  No contrary evidence or argument can move him.  He is the perfect dogmatist.

But what is the basis of his dogmatism in this instance?  I followed back his links and his basis for rejecting the pause is a paper by Cowtan & Way which said that the orthodox HADCRUT record was erroneous because it left out the temperature record in areas where there was no temperature record  -- such as parts of the Arctic and Antarctic.

So how do you get a temperature record from a place where there is no temperature record?  Easy.  You make it up!  They used a statistical estimation technique called "kriging" to produce the missing figures but in the end it's all just a guesstimate.  And that the missing areas all showed lots of Warming is just a coincidence of course!  Since nobody doubts that the vast Antarctic has been cooling overall the kriging has obviously not captured the facts.

So you see the shallow ice that Nuccitelli is prepared to walk on to preserve his convictions.  With him, there is no honest estimation of the truth based on the balance of the evidence  -- just a determination to admit nothing and concede nothing contrary to Warmism  -- JR



"Essentialism": A new stick to beat conservatives with

This latest fashion in psychological research was brought to my attention in an article by Matthew Hutson, a journalist with some qualifications in psychology.  I made some rather scathing comments on Hutson's article here.  In reply, Hutson referred me to the academic journal article which was the chief underpinning of his thinking.  The article is "Social Class Rank, Essentialism, and Punitive Judgment" by Kraus & Keltner (2013).  I thought I might offer a brief evisceration of it.

Essentialism seems primarily to mean belief in genetic determination.  If you believe that a peron is as he is because of his genes, you are an essentialist.  By that criterion conservatives are likely to be essentialists.  And the authors clearly think essentialists are a bad lot.  So who are these essentialists?  In good Marxist fashion, the authors say that your social class position determines that.  So they selected some statements to the effect that your class position was largely genetically determined and correlated that with your opinion of your own class position.  I myself found that your subjective estimation of your social class position was a powerful predictor of other class-related variables back in 1971, so I have no quarrel with them on that score. 

What they found in their Study I and Study II was however quite contrary to the Marxist theory.  They found that there was virtually no overlap (a 4% overlap; r = .20) between their measures and your social class.  High social class people were almost equally divided over whether class was genetically determined or not.  So class was NOT behind "essentialist" beliefs.

That might have stopped our dynamic duo but it did not.  In Study III they  looked for other things behind "essentialism".  The disappointing results of their first two studies do however seem to have disheartened them.  Their next experiment was very low quality indeed.  They told a small group of students some lies and then asked them questions about how strongly they would punish certain offences.  If they were serious about measuring punitiveness, they might have used my approach instead of the very ad hoc approach they did use.  Be that as it may, however, the main effect in their analysis was not even statistically significant, let alone meaningful.

Not discouraged, however, they went on to study 4, in which they used tricks to change what class people thought they belonged in.  They then examined how these "manipulated" class perceptions related to punitiveness.  They found some weak effects on type of punishment desired by people in these "manipulated" classes.  In other words, even by abandoning reality altogether they still could not find much in the way of class effects.

With such disappointing results, you will be surprised at their conclusion:

"Social class is a primary determinant of rank in human social
hierarchy, and it profoundly shapes perceptions of the social environment".

Their data if fact warrant the following conclusion:

"Social class is a primary determinant of rank in human social
hierarchy, but it negligibly shapes perceptions of the social environment"

They knew what they were going to conclude from the beginning and stuck with that.  All the experimentation they did was just window dressing that they did not even believe in themselves.  There is no evidence at all that essentialists are the bad guys they were intended to be -- JR