Got this email:

You mention Carbonsense.  On that website I found a "test".  I got the first two questions correct.  But from then on.  Any chance you could review this test and pull it apart?
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/GlobWarmTest/start.html

I know we've discussed this quiz before - it appears to have befuddled a few people. I wonder if its worth examining as a way of exposing the rhetorical techniques of deniers that mislead people.

I remember there was another site I looked at recently - Jon Nicol's, I think, that had another horridly misleading "quiz".  It would make for an interesting post to look at all these denialist climate quizzes and analyze the types of tricks they use.  In most cases they just give you a small bit of information and try to get the reader to draw a misinformed conclusion, like human CO2 emissions are small therefore we can't be causing global warming.  I've found they usually leave the conclusion for the reader to draw on his own, no doubt so they can claim they're not trying to mislead.

I've done that quiz before.  Monte Heib.  Kentucky Coal Mining Safety Engineer.

In the US, political organizations have perfected "push-pull" polling. Based on the comments, I suspect that the poll in question is cut from the same cloth.

Perhaps a quiz might be part of that 'sticky messaging' approach? 

There are lots of bad quizzes out there.  On the internet they always seem oriented to form a conclusion or "teach" you what someone wants you to "learn."  If SkS does a quiz, let's make it an interesting genuinely interesting quiz.  

I am almost always turned off by online quizzes.  But I think there are probably ways to do it well.

What might be interesting is a blog post exposing how these other denier quizzes mislead. Food for thought.

Hi Folks,

we wouldn't need to start from scratch as there already is my post from February:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-Quiz.html

Cheers
Baerbel

Doh!, forgot about that post Baerbel.