Climate survey update

November 2, 4:17 PMSF Environmental Policy ExaminerThomas Fuller

Previous Next

22 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the SF Environmental Policy Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Wow. That's my first reaction to the responses we've seen so far to Examiner.com's First Annual Global Warming Survey. Just--wow.

In less than three days more than 3,000 of you have taken the time and made the effort to fill out this survey. By comparison, Pew's survey on climate change in October of this year gathered 1,500 answers.

The survey's still open--click here to take it, if you haven't already. But I thought I'd let you know about some of what you'll be seeing from me over the next few weeks.

Most important, of course, is the vital news that I am currently tied with Al Gore. The survey asks who the most reliable source of information is for global warming and climate change issues. Both Al Gore and I have the same number of votes. Of course, the two of us are competing for last place...

Obviously I want to thank all of you who have participated. I greatly appreciate your assistance. I also want to thank those who linked to the site--Watt's Up With That, Roger Pielke Jr., Roger Pielke Sr., Lucia Liljegren's The Blackboard, Bart Verheggen's My View on Climate Change, and anyone else I'm forgetting or don't know about. Update: Like Climate Change Fraud, who I indeed forgot--and who have been very helpful in the past.

I also want to thank all of you who provided comments on how future versions of this survey can be improved. I learned a lot from this experience, and the next version will be better. Of particular note is the large number of responses we received from outside the U.S.--I'll exploit that to better advantage in the next one.

A note on trust--I'm a liberal Democrat, and most of my readers and the survey's respondents are not. I hope you'll trust the analysis process--although I'll have to take my chances on my opinions, I guess. I will make the entire data set available for anyone who wants it--I already have quite a list of people signed up. I've been doing online surveys since 1996, but that doesn't mean I can't make a mistake.

I'm also a 'lukewarmer'--neither skeptic nor AGW activist. Same holds true there--I know I'll have to earn your trust--but I think we can move towards (at least) trust, but verify...

I'd also like to express my regrets that some of the websites I invited to link to the survey chose not to. I think the opinions of their readers would have been a valuable addition to the results, and I do hope some of them managed to find their way here without a link. Maybe next year.

I'll close the survey tomorrow at some point, and start the analysis. I will present the analysis here, in bite-sized chunks, and hopefully in plain English. I already see some very interesting things in the raw data, and I think it will be fun. Of course, I have strange ideas of fun, you might say.

As an analyst, there's this odd moment of peace after the data has been collected and before the analysis actually begins. You know what you've got, in one respect, and all that rush and hurry of making sure the data gets in the door in the right condtion is over. It's a really good feeling. It's a better feeling when you find some information that actually throws some light on an important issue. That's probably more important to you.