Richard Tol has a history of conducting polls which would, according to what he writes about them, have required ethics approval. Now Richard Tol also has a history of not really liking John Cook and especially Cook, et al 2013, so Eli was interested to see the announcement of a new Tol Poll, ostensibly surveying attitudes toward climate change.
Richard, AFAEK first announced his poll on January 19 on a thread at And Then
Some people have to be shown more than once.
From the survey... "Uncertainty about the impact of what I do is a good reason to stop doing it!"
Huh?
(FYI, I love how each item has an exclamation point!)
Is there any anonymity for those replying, or will this go into their personal dossiers for later?
So if the survey survey will not be used in future publications, who funded it and why?
Is it possible an economeritrician is paying for this out of his own pocket ?!
izen
Tee hee.
According to the UofS he does teach a module on 'Advanced research methods for economics'. Clearly this is an *ahem* Advanced Research Method. We shouldn't question.
Please don't call him an econometrician. Nobody who would treat all those runs of approximately the same model as independent observations should be called that.
I feel sorry for Richard. So much easier to use his name to construct cute headlines (I myself have referred to "The Tol of Climate Denial") than, say, Lomborg.
And now that I'm reminded of it, in that respect he is kind of like Harvard President Drew Faust, clinging to those Mephistophelean fossil fuels investments.
Prior approval for human subjects research is such a basic requirement that entering grad students commonly learn about it in a mandatory short course on ethics. How does a senior researcher not know this?
In previous research, did Tol sometimes skip this step?
Tol using poll results below. Not encouraging.
"A more important question is perhaps why the public lost so much faith in climate science that they prefer to believe Booker over you guys. The Telegraph poll suggests that 90% of 110,000 readers are with Booker."
If you limp all the way to the end, you can see that 88% of respondents are male, and 70% over age 45. Gee, hardly any selection bias there ...
The Torygraph poll is not representative of anything except "people who read the Torygraph and think global warming is a scam and have online access".
So it tells you nothing much about the public, the vast majority of whom, (Like 99%) don't read the Torygraph, don't have online access to it and think global warming is real. Note the bait and switch, first he mentions the public, then he moves onto the torygraph readers, actually listing the result somewhat correctly, but not mentioning how many took the poll. How many did take the poll? What is the sample size?
Slashdot online polls have long come with this disclaimer:
"This whole thing is wildly inaccurate. Rounding errors, ballot stuffers, dynamic IPs, firewalls. If you're using these numbers to do anything important, you're insane."
In previous research Richard skipped many steps. Thinking being one of them
In previous research, did Tol sometimes skip this step?
Yes. Or did he ask "Andy S" for permission to quote?
Economagician.
He amazes! He confuses! He makes results appear out of thin air!
(So, Russell. No charge for this.)
The exclamation marks.
I know climate revisionism is blatant thuggery and Tol is one of the thugs. But what is with climate revisionism that it always dumbs down so badly? People like Judith Curry and Richard Tol strike me as having been stricken by some sort of acute Alzheimer.
Their story and ways of doing are very much like the especially as such devised bad acting for bad acting as one may enjoy in porn movies. 'Enjoy', sorry.
Lovely, thanks all. Tee hee too.
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To Eli, this made it clear that the New Toll Poll would require research ethics approval, and, of course, the University of Sussex has people and procedures needed before such a poll is undertaken. Indeed, Cook et al 2013 has been attacked by the multitudes with various waving hands about ethics approvals that were related to the paper including many supporting demands for data on Prof. Tol's part.
Eli thought, perhaps indeed Prof. Richard Tol has sought such approval, so he wrote to the University of Sussex
The documentation associated with ethical approval, would, of course, provide insight into the construction and the purpose of the survey.
Today, came this reply
One may have fun speculating about whether
The fun part of course is that there may well have been interesting exchanges of Emails between the various research ethics officers and between them and Prof. Tol. Eli would prefer to fantasize about same rather than bother the various parties to open the Tolgate, still there are issues associated with the bother that the good Prof. Tol put others to, which raise ethical issues in and of themselves.
Those taken in, may of course, wish to register their disappointment with the University of Sussex and the appropriate school.