I’ll make a deal with alarmists. I’ll disregard all skeptics that have taken money from oil companies, if you disregard all science groups and environmental advocacy groups that have done the same.

Won’t be many left standing after that.

Of course Climate Progress isn’t astroturf!

Also not particularly informative about 3 days out of 5.

We all know in the broad who funds it, so not sure why that is an issue?

This is an outstandingly stupid paper.

Liberal know for a fact that once they get into the realm of logic and evidence, they come up short almost every time.

Its become a way for liberal commenters to dismiss any post, or even the majority of posts, as illegitimate.

Now liberal posters can claim they are the only “real” poster, and that everyone else is a paid corporate shill of some kind.

This will be completely ridiculed on the blogosphere, Chris. Just try to ignore it the best you can, and stay away from it, or else be prepared to be ridiculed with it!

I’m not quite sure what characteristic of astroturf sites this is supposed to be testing. If the only difference is whether funding sources were disclosed, it would indeed test the extent to which people were influenced by ad hominem considerations. But there also appear to be material differences in the content? Is the claim supposed to be that astroturf sites are more likely to use headings like “climate science”? This study does not, on the face of it, make any sense.

I’ve got an uneasy feeling that the difference was that “grassroots” was simply used to label pro-AGW and “astroturf” to label anti-AGW, and what this study is really showing is that giving them information on scepticism made people more doubtful of AGW. The “astroturf”/”grassroots” labelling would then be entirely misleading – propaganda dressed up as science in other words. There are of course many genuinely grassroots sceptical sources, and several prominent pro-AGW astroturf sites.

It would therefore be helpful to make it clearer what the distinction between “grassroots” and “astroturf” being tested actually was, and how it follows from the different types of authors. Because if they really did just label all sceptics as “astroturf”, this is even worse than the usual fare. I’m hoping it’s not true, and I’ve just misread the description. Did they in fact have both pro- and anti-AGW in both categories?