Steve McIntyre has posted a number of instances where Stephan Lewandowsky has reported correlations for which there is little or no evidence. My comment is

Even more bizarre than absurd correlations, is to draw inferences of cause and effect from correlations, when there are a huge number of equally valid (or invalid) inferences that can be made.

The title of the Hoax paper is “NASA faked the moon landing|Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science“. The first part implies that, due to coming to believe that the moon landing was faked, survey respondents reasoned that climate science was also a hoax. But, given that this survey was only on climate blogs, is it not more likely that the respondent’s rejection of “official” or orthodox version of events goes the other way?

Looking at the data there is a similar issue of low numbers on support of the paired statements. Only 10/1145 supported CYMoon. Of these only 3 supported CYClimChange. Of these only 2 scored “4” for both. And these were the two faked/scam/rogue respondents 860 & 889 whose support of every conspiracy theory underpinned many of the correlations. The third, 963, also supported every conspiracy theory. Let us assume that they are genuine believers in all the conspiracy theories. Further, let us assume that one of the 13 conspiracies in the survey did trigger a response of the form “because I now know A was a conspiracy, I now believe B is a conspiracy”. There are 2n(n-1)= 312 possible versions of this statement. Or, more likely, no such reasoning process went through any respondent’s mind at all. Given the question was never asked, and there is no supporting evidence for the statement “NASA faked the moon landing|Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax” it most likely a figment of someone’s imagination.

Data in support of this statement

In the survey the answer 1 was a strong rejection, 4 a strong support. Out of 1145 responses, only 6 strongly supported the “NASA faked the Moon Landing” hypothesis, and a further 4 lent support to it. Of these 10, only 3 support the “Climate Change is a Hoax” statement.

The strong support for conspiracy theories is shown by giving the average score of respondents over all 13 conspiracy questions. The 3 that supported by CYMoon and CYClimChange had the highest average scores of all 1145 respondents.