[7] Lewandowsky told the Wall Street Journal that the original misinformation already had become a part of the Americans' mental worldview by the time it was retracted.

Based on a survey of visitors to global warming related blogs, Lewandowsky and his two co-authors concluded that belief in free-market economics was associated with being more likely to reject not only the mainstream scientific view of global warming, but also the mainstream scientific position on whether HIV causes AIDS and whether tobacco smoking causes lung cancer.

The study also concluded that believing in a "cluster of conspiracy theories"—such as that the FBI was responsible for the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.—was also associated with being more likely to reject the consensus view on global warming.

'"[17] The reaction to the paper from global warming sceptics was overwhelmingly negative, with Joanne Nova referring to it as "an ad hom argument taken to its absurd extreme, rebadged as 'science'.

His analysis found that, of the hypotheses generated by climate change deniers in response to his 2012 study, "many...exhibited conspiratorial content and counterfactual thinking.

[24] The paper was retracted with a notice published in March 2014, which stated:[25] In the light of a small number of complaints received following publication of the original research article cited above, Frontiers carried out a detailed investigation of the academic, ethical, and legal aspects of the work.

Freedom of Information requests made by DeSmogBlog had obtained copies of the complaints, which included allegations of misconduct: some used legal terms such as "defamatory".

[26] Staff of the Australian Psychological Society wrote to Lewandowsky expressing concern "that some scientific journals feel sufficiently threatened by potential liability fears to not publish articles with 'inconvenient information' about climate change.

[28] Ars Technica reported that this statement appeared to differ from the retraction notice, and according to one of the authors of the paper an anonymised version had been produced to meet the privacy concerns.

[30] The paper was later republished in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology along with additional data, under the title "Recurrent fury: Conspiratorial Discourse in the Blogosphere Triggered by Research on the Role of Conspiracist Ideation in Climate Denial".

"[33] Lewandowsky told Salon that these studies showed that "uncertainty also increases the likelihood of exceeding 'safe' temperature limits and the probability of failing to reach mitigation targets.

[35] In its March 2019 edition, Scientific American published an article about his work that posited that people drawn to conspiracy theories share some psychological characteristics that may be clustered.