For months since getting a deluge of responses to the survey on sceptics I’ve been trying to find some way to get funding to hire in the necessary resources to do the funding and/or work with a group who have the resources themselves.
My first point of call was to write to government in both England and Scotland. Their response was: “we don’t want to know anything about sceptics”. I doubt if I were an academic I would have had the same insulting response.
Unfortunately, my next port of call was academia, but because UK academics include people like Lewandowsky and as most of UK academia appear to me to be openly hostile to sceptics I don’t believe they can be trusted on this. But I did put feelers out whenever I spotted someone in the right kind of area who was not openly hostile to sceptics. But nothing came of it and slowly I ran out of ideas of who to try.Unfortunately, having worked in the UK wind industry I am aware of rumours (i.e. I once listened into a conversation by wind developers talking about how it took place and then suddenly shutting up as they realised I was there) that the industry employed people to actively “disrupt” protest groups. And when the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum was set up, we had someone turn up who registered the intended domain on the spot, and was then less than helpful and was then never heard of again. So I will not trust anyone who “volunteers” unless I can personally vouch for them.
Unfortunately, I never expected more than 100 responses and as it turned out some of the comments were “too personal”** which I felt could potentially identify some people. So I will not share the raw data with anyone unless I’m absolutely certain they are trustworthy.
Sinking to the lowest levels
And then a few days ago it happened. I contacted someone at the BBC to see if they would have any interest.
Now on reflection I realise that I must have scraped the bottom of the barrel!
Should it now be released?
So, as I cannot see any way forward, to complete the analysis, I am now considering how to release what I can. The options are:
- To create the standard over-view report provided by the software which simply lists the numbers answering each question/category.
- To release the full database removing all columns of questions which contain comments and so might be specific enough to identify some people.
**To use a fictitious example: how many people farm lamas and would that kind of job description not make it relatively easy to identify e.g. Anthony Watts if he just happened to have a Lama farm?
Put up the survey questions so we can get an idea of what was asked.
Without looking again at the questions I’d suggest you publish everything but the comments as a anonymised data. If the comments are worth sharing but identify the survey subject, how about rearranging them and posting them as single columns of data? That way the comment doesn’t reference the other question answers or visa versa.
Of course it’s typical of the warmists to be uninterested in how sceptics really feel. Plus there’s too much in the psyche science to do with getting to people’s inner thoughts. They design surveys to trick people into revealing the ‘real’ answer. All they tend to get is something that reflects the survey designers preconceptions. By the very dint of this being designed by a sceptic, in the minds of warmists, the questions won’t dig for the truth they want to arrive at. We’re in denial dontcha know.
Personally I hate surveys. They allways have questions where I want to write ‘it depends’. In climate surveys I often feel my answers would make me a warmist but I’m really not.