Mike Haseler (aka the Scottish Sceptic) has prepared a survey asking for professional and personal opinion on AGW, and he has asked that I carry it here (unlike Lewandowsky).
The rationale and link to the survey:
The aim of the survey is to understand the nature and background of those interested in the climate debate online. It will provide an invaluable insight into the education and work experience of participants, test the relevance of politics in forming views and assess employment and social factors for their relationship with views on climate.
The link to the survey is:
I’ve taken the survey, it takes about 5 minutes and while there are a couple of confusing questions (which is something you’ll see in ANY survey), overall I think it is reasonably well done.
Note: if you start the survey, FINISH IT, otherwise it just creates more work to cull incomplete responses. Also, I have no connection to this survey in any way, I was simply asked to make a notice of it.
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I filled this out on the Bishop Hill site, I believe. It was posted there several days ago.
Will be interesting to see the results.
Server is down and I waste 5 minutes answering
The survey included some ambiguous and even somewhat curious statements with which you couldn’t really say with certainty that you knew what you were answering. However, I hope the results are presented at wuwt.
Charlie Johnson (@SemperBanU) says: January 22, 2014 at 11:43 am “Will be interesting to see the results.” Limited preliminary results.
http://scef.org.uk/survey/index.php/statistics_user/action/surveyid/868721/language/en
My feedback at the end of the survey:
Another survey that fails to get at the different SCIENTIFIC views of skeptic and believers. Your one decent question in this regard was whether the respondent believes that human activity will cause catastrophic warming, but why didn’t you also include the key metric that the IPCC itself is promulgating? “Do you believe that humans have caused more than half of the warming since 1950?” Then you would have a measure of whether the respondent agrees with the IPCC position. Are you just ignorant and are unaware that the IPCC has asserted this made-for-survey position? Sheesh.
Just took the survey. Pretty easy to see the points the questions are driving at given standard orthodoxy on both sides of the argument but I think if we get plenty of “skeptics” to participate it will become clear we aren’t a bunch of uneducated wing nuts & in fact quite the opposite. Might be helpful to giving this side of the argument a bit louder voice
Fess up… who else typed “something random” in the screen at the end?
Well done and good cross validation questions. It will be interesting to see the data breakdown.
Not sure if this is related to the survey, but why do we allow journalist to make the claim that “this or that event is caused by Climate Change”. This is a ridiculous claim, as Climate Change is a resultant of changing weather conditions over a certain period time. It is not in and out of itself a mechanism. I believe that what they meant was that a certain extreme weather event may have been caused by an increase in the earth’s temperature, irrespective of the cause of the warming. Continuing to say “and scientist believe that the drought may caused by Climate Change” is totally wrong terminology.
@leeHarvey
Me. 🙂
LeeHarvey says:
January 22, 2014 at 12:12 pm
Fess up… who else typed “something random” in the screen at the end?
Started to except i realized that it was possible that it wouldn’t be random enough to pass a bot filter…..
LeeHarvey says:
January 22, 2014 at 12:12 pm
Fess up… who else typed “something random” in the screen at the end?
That was a test to see if you just blindly followed instructions literally or are innovative.
I didn’t like the question about attitudes to difference sources of news on a flu epidemic. I think this question may be used to infer all sorts of general things about my attitudes to authoritative sources of information that are not actually true.
For example I discounted the results of my own experiments because — hey it is a flu epidemic we are talking about here — and I simply don’t have the right expertise or live in the right geographic location. I also discounted scientific papers because with publication delays, the LAST place you want to look for news of something fast moving like an epidemic is in a scientific paper (unless you want news about last year’s epidemic). I would actually trust newspapers to give a timely early warning (although I wouldn’t trust them to get ANY of the details right). And so on.
Then after I had answered the question it occurred to me that I’m going to come across as some guy who trusts newspapers more than scientific journals or the results of his own experiments. That is why I hate questions like this.
Lee Harvey said, “Fess up… who else typed “something random” in the screen at the end?”
I typed, “Random. Hehe haha waga waga kja;flsjkflskfjdlfjks;f” Life is too short not to have fun.
cynical_scientist says:
Tim’s response: I agree with you about it being difficult. Also I thought your write up about it to be very good.
I decided to go with my gut. No I’m not doing experiements in it. Other than the time I quickly drank some pop and scarfed down a large amount of chocolate. The noises, explosions, and resultant smells were interesting. Since I’m not a researcher studying flu epidemics, I went with the truth. I don’t decide there is an epidemic based on one source of data. I decide based on multiple sources of data. After that come single sources of data.
You’re right that answer could be interpreted in many different ways. Oh well.
Re: the “random” question, what could be more random than “I follow Nottingham Forest” ?
I’ve done the survey and made my final comments thus:
‘The trust questions are too definite. Whether newspapers or government scientists or doctors etc are to be trusted depends on their record, the terms in which they report their claims and a whole host of other factors. Other questions are to vague to represent my views accurately. In fact, the questions appear to me to be designed to reflect your assumptions.’
Lee Harvey:
I typed: Something Almost Random
Yep, I also typed “something random” at the end.
Or to be complete I typed
But the extra words were just so as I wouldn’t be suspected of being a bot.
@ur momisugly cynical_scientist
Yes, that was my impression also. I ended up putting my GP at the top of the list. Two years ago, I reported to him with symptoms of hay fever, something my wife and son have always suffered each spring, but myself never before. He assured me it was hay fever and a bit of an epidemic among his patients. We new-to-hay-fever sufferers all had two things in common: we were all in our 60s and we were all very keen gardeners. Happened again this spring once the weather finally warmed up.
LeeHarvey says:
“Fess up… who else typed “something random” in the screen at the end?”
“Steven Goddard rocks” Hopefully the filters won’t make sense of that.
What ever became of this?:
A poll to test the Lewandowsky methodology
Posted on January 10, 2014
Brandon Schollenberger writes:
As you’re aware, Stephan Lewandowsky has written several papers claiming to have found certain traits amongst global warming skeptics. I believe his methodology is fundamentally flawed. I believe a flaw present in his methodology is also present in the work of many others.
To test my belief, I’m seeking participants for a short survey (13 questions). The questions are designed specifically to test a key aspect of Lewandowsky’s methodology. The results won’t be published in any scientific journal, but I’ll do a writeup on them once the survey is closed and share it online.
The survey closed after 1 day. Did I miss the results?
My comment at the end:
I would like to see a survey ask scientists and engineers simply, “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement (quoted from a prominent politician): ‘climate change is real, man-made and dangerous’?”
David says at January 22, 2014 at 1:59 pm
He posted his summary here. It demonstrates the folly of such surveys.