Results are out - see below.
Anthony Watts has an article up by/about Mike Haseler (archived here), who going by uknowispeaksense is regarded as a "legend in his own lunchtime". What he isn't is a true sceptic, though that's what he's called his blog, and I'm not even sure that he's Scottish. (Then again he also calls himself a climate scientist though from his own blog, the closest he's got to anything remotely related to climate science is designing precision temperature controllers and who knows what they were used for!)
What is clear is that he is tied up with another shonky organisation that call themselves (or their blog at any rate) the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum. Mike describes himself as "Chairman". According to the blog there are six on the committee. They had a bit of a natter one day and decided that with six people they could form a club, from the look of things. (I mean, if three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization.**)
Anyway, like the ScottishSceptic blog, the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum blog is just another dime a dozen anti-science blog. (The third most recent article on the blog is promoting Murry Salby of all people! You can see an archive of their home page here if you're curious about them.)
A month or so back Mike Haseler asked fellow fake sceptics to complete a survey. According to UKISS, he did the rounds of various science denying blogs in the UK and the USA. A month later and he's got some preliminary results.
Mike reckons he got 5,000 responses, so he managed to get as far as reading the respondent count. He also managed to process some of the questions, but he reckons it will take him a year to write a report.
It's pretty obvious that Mike Haselaar doesn't design or analyse surveys for a living. Still, to take a year, even part time, to write up the result of a 21 question survey, of which most were just demographic questions and of which only two were open ended (including the last "any other comments" question) probably means he hasn't got a clue what to do with the responses. Nevertheless, he's going to try to get some funds from the "guvmint" he so despises to tide him over while he tries to figure it out. He wrote to Anthony Watts:
Given the huge number of responses and detail of questions a full assessment will take up to one year to complete.Do you reckon he's going to go through each response one by one? Or what? Weird that the number of responses is a factor in writing up the results.
What about the "detail of questions"? Well, all but two were tick the box questions so that would take no time at all to analyse. In fact he should by rights have prepared the analytic framework before he asked people to respond, as part of the survey design. He should have already set up the crosstabs or whatever he was doing. Then all he needed to do was plonk the numbers in. If he wanted to do any fancy analysis on the basis of the initial results he could still do that. But a year? Sheesh!
Now normally if a person wanted someone to pay for something they'd write up a proposal and pitch it to the prospective funder. You wouldn't write a mickey mouse survey that has no apparent design, is filled with loaded questions and pitched to the scientific illiterati and then say "it's all too hard to analyse and will take me a year, how about some dosh!" But that's exactly what Mike Haselar is doing. He wrote to Anthony Watts that he's:
... looking to rub shoulders with the politicians in the hope of scrounging more public money...
Oops - nope. I accidentally (on purpose) got that from one of his articles when he was writing about something else. I'll try again. What he says about his twenty-one question quiz:
This is a huge commitment from an organisation that has no outside funding and is reliant on one full-time volunteer (Mike Haseler). We will therefore be approaching the Scottish and UK government with a view to obtaining funding to complete the analysis.
A huge commitment? Uknowispeaksense has the survey here. See for yourself. It's a short quiz with only one six-part question about climate. (The rest are mainly demographic questions and voting preferences etc. although there is a strange question which I'll get to shortly) The vaguely climate sciency question was simple in the extreme, or I should say simplistic. Mike prefaced the survey asking people to "Please say if you agree or disagree with the following statements" and then proceeded to give them three more choices. So he couldn't even get the simplest question straight.
Anyway, here is the one and only climate question. Feel free to complete it. I'll let it run for a while and let you know the results FWIW :)
Mike had one other question that was, well I don't know what he was trying for with this one. I think he may have been trying to figure out the extent to which his respondents had a tendency for conspiracy ideation. Maybe you can figure it out.
What he did was offer a number of statements about a flu epidemic and wanted people to put them in order from most trustworthy to least trustworthy. In case people didn't understand what he wanted he put the question another way and told them their highest ranking should be at the top and the lowest ranked at the bottom. Then, because he still wasn't sure his readers would understand what he wanted, he tried a third time, telling them the highest ranking should be at the top etc.
Here it is, thanks to UKISS. Click to enlarge it.
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| Source: scef via uknowispeaksense |
All the statements except the top one provide a source for the information. What do you reckon Wondering Willis Eschenbach would put up the top :)
Anyway. That's it. Just goes to show that despite their scorn of guvmint and guvmint-funded research, some fake sceptics have no hesitation in putting their hands up for taxpayer funding. And it just goes to show why fake sceptics have such a hard time getting research published. Some of them are so hopeless they can't even design and analyse a simple little survey on their lonesome.
As for Mike Haseler - given his history, I'm waiting for him to come running crying "copyright" and "libel" and "sue".
PS If you want to know Mike's preliminary results, you can read them in the WUWT archived article here.
PPS**
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Results - 97% agree
Okay - the survey has run long enough. The numbers are actually just survey respondents so they don't necessarily reflect the readership of this blog. Having given that caveat, I'll extrapolate the results to HotWhopper readership anyway. It makes life more interesting :)- 3% of HotWhopper readers are science deniers of the "sky dragon slaying" type.
- 3% of HotWhopper readers aren't aware that burning hydrocarbons results in CO2 - or maybe they aren't aware that coal and oil are hydrocarbons or maybe they don't know how a lot of electricity is produced or maybe they don't know that most motor vehicles run by burning petrol or diesel.
- 3% of HotWhopper readers don't know that earth has warmed, rather a lot actually, and rather quickly.
- One HotWhopper reader says climate doesn't change naturally.
- 15% of HotWhopper readers don't agree that CO2 will cause catastrophic global warming, 68% agree that it will and 17% are "neutral", though I can't tell what proportion of that 17% took "neutral" to mean "don't know" vs "neither agree nor disagree" vs "I'm not saying".
- 97% of HotWhopper readers understand something about CO2 and greenhouse gases and climate. Now that number seems awfully familiar.
