What Is a Logical Fallacy? You've probably heard of Aristotle, the Greek philosopher and scientist, known as the father of logic. Among his vast contributions to the body of knowledge were in reasoning and fallacies: rhetoric, the study of argument and persuasive strategies, and refers to faulty reasoning or a breakdown in the logic of an argument. As writers, we try to avoid fallacies to prove our arguments; as readers, it's important to be able to identify fallacies to discover whether or not we are being misled or if we cannot trust the information we're receiving. While logical fallacies in arguments are often unintentional, writers can sometimes use them intentionally to mislead or manipulate an audience. Aristotle, the father of logic There are various classifications of fallacies.
A structural fallacy refers to a fault in the structure of the premises of an argument. A verbal fallacy is a fault or problem in the way the arguer is speaking or writing; for instance, a politician who is a powerful and emotional public speaker has the ability to captivate an audience with his or her energy and distract the audience from focusing on the actual words and meaning of the argument. And a material fallacy is a fault in the argument itself; for instance, using the example of one broken iPhone to claim that all iPhones are manufactured poorly is known as a hasty generalization.
The rest of this lesson will focus on examples of material fallacies. Examples of Common Fallacies The best way to avoid logical fallacies in your writing and to avoid being misguided by them in your reading is to learn how to spot them in an argument. Here are some common material fallacies. It can be helpful to try to spot them in TV advertisements and billboards, especially political campaign ads.
Hasty Generalization: A general conclusion that a certain condition is always true based on one instance or observation. For example, John's iPhone broke after two weeks, so there must be something faulty in the general manufacture of iPhones.
Ad Hominem (Latin for 'To the man'): Attacking perceived faults of the person rather than his or her argument, resorting to name-calling and labeling. People generally resort to this tactic when they don't have a logical counter-argument. For example, you can't believe that President Smith is going to lower taxes. He's a pathological liar! Appeal to Ignorance: Supporting a claim merely because there is no proof that it's wrong. For example, there's no concrete evidence that pigs can't fly, so they must be able to fly. Appeal to Faith Relying on faith without solid evidence to support a claim.
For example, Narnia is a real place because I really believe it exists, even though I've never seen it. I just have faith that it's real! Appeal to Tradition: Pointing to traditional practices or what's always been done in the past to support a claim. For example, pointing to American slavery to justify racial discrimination.
(This is similar to the 'two wrongs make a right' fallacy, which we'll talk about shortly). False Authority: Relying on the evidence of a so-called expert. This is a popular tactic in advertising with celebrity endorsements because we look up to and trust the judgment of celebrities, often assuming that because they're wealthy, they have the best of everything. For example, David Beckham signs autographs with Sharpies, so obviously Sharpie is the most reliable pen on the market. Argumentum Ad Baculum: The appeal to fear or a threat. Think email chain letters here. For example, if you don't send this to ten people right now, aliens are going to rob your bank account!
Bandwagon Fallacy: The belief that an argument is valid because a majority of people accept it. For example, everyone I know is voting for John Smoot, so he's obviously the best choice for president. Slippery Slope: The belief that a change in procedure will have drastic, adverse consequences. For example, if students are given ten minutes rather than five minutes between classes, they'll just start skipping classes altogether.
Two Wrongs Make a Right: Justifying your actions by accusing someone else of doing the same thing. For example, missing curfew and justifying it with the argument that your sister does it all the time. The Straw-Man Fallacy: Attacking an argument that doesn't exist. Think of the straw-man fallacy as kind of like a rhetorical scarecrow, set up to distract.
This is a common tactic in debates, with opponents trying to disprove another's claims by attempting to refute them with more complicated and elaborate claims. For example: Person A- Medical marijuana is very effective in relieving pain in cancer patients. Person B- Legalizing marijuana is just going to continue to lead to a lazy and degenerate society. The problem is that person A isn't talking about generally legalizing marijuana, only about its medical properties. Person B is raising the broader issue of the general legalization of marijuana as a distraction from the main issue at hand: access to medical marijuana. Rather than disproving person As claim, person B tries to make the audience focus on a bigger issue and forget about listening to person A.
A valid interpretation is that the 5th quintile sees rising incomes while others do not, but we go on to make the logical fallacy. A driver was identified as. I am running Logic Pro 9.0.2 on a Macbook Pro (10.5.8), using a Steinberg MI4 audio/MIDI interface (whose drivers & firmware are up to date). This setup works fine with all my other apps (Ableton, Reaktor, Guitar Rig, etc), but when I fire up Logic, I get the error message in the subject line. The CoreAudio.Missing.
Lesson Summary A logical fallacy is an argument that appears on the surface to be reasonable but in reality is weak or faulty and misleading. There are a few subcategories of fallacies: the structural fallacy, the verbal fallacy and the material fallacy (the last of which was the focus of this lesson). Logical fallacies are most often accidental or unintentional, based on a misinterpretation of information or the need for more evidence. Sometimes, however, logical fallacies are used cleverly to mislead or manipulate an audience - a common tactic in advertising and politics.
Common material fallacies include the hasty generalization, the straw-man fallacy, the bandwagon fallacy and the two wrongs make a right fallacy. Note: It's important to remember that these categories are used generally to organize argumentative fallacies. Some fallacies might fall into more than one category. For example, if you decide that Sharpies are the best pen on the market because David Beckham uses them, this is both a false reliance on an authority figure and a hasty generalization because you're basing your conclusion on one example. Learning Outcomes When you are finished, you should be able to: • Explain what a logical fallacy is and why they are important to identify • Describe the three classifications of fallacies • Recite some examples of common material fallacies.
Guest essay by Ari.H. Global warming has become a religionThis is the opinion of Nobel Prize Winning Physicist,, and many others. Climate change alarmism has a surprising number of attributes of a medieval or even ancient religion. Nevertheless, real religions have some pre-requisites, like a tradition spanning at least few generations.
So the proper name for climate alarmism is a cult. And these are the telltale attributes: 1) Climate alarmists pretend to possess indisputable truths about the past, present, and future.
From minute details of the paleoclimate to the world state 200 years in the future, alarmists know everything. 2) The alarmist movement stubbornly refuses to debate its dogma, calling it “settled science” and viciously attacking its critics.
The attacks are not limited to name calling but include prohibiting scientific research that contradicts this dogma. Significant figures within the movement call for criminal persecution of those who publicly disagree with the dogma and, in some cases, for those who do not follow it. Proposed punishments for “” and “” include prison and even. 3) The alarmist movement has a formal doctrine-setting body — the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The reports and summaries by this body are considered by the alarmists to be the main source of authority on all things related to climate, energy, the biological cycle, and consequentially, everything else. The cult followers (individuals, organizations, and even governments) regularly quote these unholy texts and use them to justify their decisions.
4) The alarmist movement has its own priest class: taxpayer-funded impostor “climate scientists” who have no independent (of the climate alarmism) scientific achievements. Frequently, they do not even have scientific degrees. The alarmists sincerely believe that only members of the priest class are capable of understanding and seriously discussing “climate science.” Physicists, biologists, meteorologists, engineers, mathematicians, and other outsiders need not apply. It is worth noting that this priest class was appointed by politicians (mostly from developing countries) and is completely disconnected from the eminent scientists who founded climate change research at the peak of their scientific careers and produced the most results prior to 1985. All the eminent scientists who have publicly spoken on the topic since the early 1990s strongly opposed climate alarmism and were attacked or defamed by the alarmists. The list of these “sceptics” and “deniers” includes Freeman Dyson, William Nierenberg, Frederick Seitz, Richard Lindzen, Fred Singer, and Roger Revelle. None of the founders of climate change research support the alarmism.
5) The climate change cult appears to worship the computer models that its shamans built with their own hands — literally man-made idols. Needless to say, much of the content of IPCC’s texts comes from these computer models. 6) The alarmists deny, ignore, or distort elementary scientific facts, some of which should be known even to kids: – Photosynthesis.
Plants grow by converting atmospheric CO 2 into biomass. Significant parts of the world agricultural output are due to additional CO 2 fertilization. – Archimedes’ principle.
Melting of Arctic ice cannot increase the sea level because Arctic ice floats in water. – Sunspots and the effect of solar activity changes. 7) The alarmists appeal to medieval science errors. These errors can be described as beliefs that nature has existed forever in some unchanged state. The inability of a common man or a medieval scientist to observe such changes was the cause of these beliefs. The alarmists revive these errors by denying, ignoring, or underestimating natural climate change; evolution (including species’ disappearance and adaptation); higher CO 2levels in the geological past; natural sea level increases in the current interglacial period; tectonic movement; the complex trajectory of the Earth’s motion around the Sun; and the astronomic observations of stars similar to the Sun.
8) The alarmists have created and spread climate mythology, sometimes intentionally modeled on archaic misbeliefs that many alarmists attributed to religion. The common logical fallacy can be described as an appeal to everyday experiences, not applicable to the discussed natural processes (the “Flat Earth fallacy”). Some samples: – Incorrect association of CO 2 with warming because of the word “greenhouse”—the mother of the global warming scare. Most city dwellers only know that greenhouses are warm and contain elevated levels of CO 2 and easily led to believe that CO 2 causes warming.
Most farmers also know that CO 2 is added for fertilization and does not cause greenhouse warming. This is why states with many farmers (like Oklahoma) are skeptics of the climate change cult and states with many professors (like Massachusetts) are. – Incorrect claim that (allegedly anthropogenic) global warming causes glacier melting or Antarctic ice sheet collapse.
Ice cream does melt faster in a warmer room, but glaciers and ice sheets are influenced by totally different physical processes and on a totally different timeframe. – Incorrect claim that global warming causes droughts. Droughts are popularly associated with high temperatures but not caused by them. See – False attribution of wildfires, New Orleans’ devastation from Hurricane Katrina, current, and various disasters to global warming.
These disasters are caused by environmentalist politics, not by global warming. Was only Category 3 upon landfall. New Orleans was supposed to withstand all hurricanes up to the highest Category 5, but the required barriers were not built because of the. – Time scale confusion. Processes that take hundreds of years are described as if they happen overnight. 9) Like an established religion, the climate change cult has its own “start of the time”—usually 1880 (sometimes the 1880s), which is allegedly the beginning of instrumental temperature records. 10) Climate change cult has its own eschatology—calamities, catastrophes, and the end of the world caused by global warming.
To avoid this horrible end, we have to repent (i.e., accept the climate change cult dogma), stop sinning (releasing CO 2), and generously pay whomever the IPCC or UNFCC will tell us. 11) The climate change cult calls its dogma science but fails to make any scientific (i.e., non-trivial and testable) statements. For example, “Climate change is real” is a trivial statement. The statements about temperatures in 2100 are not practically testable.
When alarmists were making testable statements (such as the infamous 1988 James Hansen testimony before Congress and early IPCC reports), they were proven to be incorrect. 12) The climate change cult seeks and actually exerts control over governments.
To add to the above, the climate change cult has survived multiple exposures of its frauds—something that a normal fraud cannot survive. Nevertheless, many cults involve fraud, and even true believers are not against profiting from their position in their cult. The climate change cult has been elevated by the Obama administration into state religion. Both the and appear to have converted to this cult. References [1] James Hansen may be the only possible exception. But he is an outlier among “climate scientists” in many other respects. His are not approved by the.
If the cult were not state sponsored, he would become a schismatic. [2] See Donna Laframboise, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert.
[3] This may sound extravagant, but this is the actual state of “climate science” today. 25 years ago, there was a clear distinction between the science and the misrepresentation of the science.
For example, the IPCC First Assessment Report reviewed the science, while its Summary for Policymakers misrepresented it. Since then, the quality of the science has been steadily deteriorating, apparently both through intentional fabrication and the race to the bottom in the competence of the “climate scientists.” Existing physical models were used outside of their applicability space, and new models were developed and applied without proper validation.
Some models were intentionally fabricated to produce politically desirable outcomes, other models were developed by through incompetence, impatience, and ideological zeal. One might guess that there was some amount of competition between the models, leading to their evolution and the survival of the fittest (models and modellers). The fitness criteria was conformance to the alarmist agenda. Apparently, the surviving models were then compared and then tweaked to better match each other. In parallel, the models have been tweaked to accommodate real-world data. When tweaking individual models was not enough, “ensembles of models” were created.
Model runs were called experiments. New models were developed and parametrized based on the output of such “experiments,” then “verified” against existing models. The output of the new models became new “data” and so on. Today, the climate-related models are not understood by the modellers themselves, the models lead their own lives and describe their own imaginary worlds (like the ). Today, much of the peer-reviewed literature in the “climate science” (including IPCC AR5) simply does not distinguish between the real world and computer models. This is more appropriately called worship than scientific research. This is not limited to global circulation models but permeates many parts of “climate science.” [4] Yes, some “climate scientists” are photosynthesis sceptics (and the rest have not heard of photosynthesis).
From National Geographic, published by The National Geographic Society:. Another one, from the University of Gothenburg:. Photosynthesis skepticism is a booming research field! The leading alarmist website and explains that “Too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.” [5] The claim that the melting of “polar ice” causes the sea level to rise has been frequently accompanied by evidence that the Arctic ice area was shrinking, especially in the periods when the Arctic ice area was really shrinking.
The Antarctic ice cap has not been shrinking. I am not trying to figure out who among alarmists are ignorant of the Archimedes’ principle and who intentionally mislead the public. [6] A few weeks ago, Sun sceptics struck again. International Astronomical Union announced:. “Corrected Sunspot History” sounds like something from Orwell when it appears on Discovery News, CBS News, and Nature News.
I understand that as an acknowledgement that the uncorrected sunspot history suggests otherwise and that Dr. Willie Soon has been correct. Of notice, the history was corrected based on a to arxiv.org, not on a peer-reviewed (or even pal reviewed) paper.
Nir Shaviv has called the paper because there are other proxies confirming the increasing solar activity over the 20 th century. I have pointed out that the “progressives” are a cult for a couple years, like in my comment here last year: I don’t pay attention to making parallels between the prototypical ritual-focused religion, such as Catholicism. I pay attention to how plain-ol’ everyday people get drawn in to passionately adopt and defend the cult thinking. I call CAGW, and a lot of the progressive agenda, a virtue-cult. We are familiar with religious cults – they are easy to comprehend. A persuasive leader informs you of The Truth, and saves you from being one of the unwashed masses. You get to go to heaven, or whatever the religion says.
The progressivism cult is different; you don’t get in line with the one true God; instead, you get to hold the virtuous knowledge and beliefs, and so you get to be superior to everyone else. You get lured in by everyday political discussions and issues. As you pay attention, you receive and hold more than an informed view on a political topic; you get the impression that you need to advocate for this position because the counter position is held and promoted by a monolithic group of people who are essentially evil.
Across issues – global warming, population overload, the environment, racism, war on women, etc. – you get receptive to “progressive”-spun information which makes you feel smart and informed, but all the narratives have the same monolithic enemy / evil.
The evil is a shadowy presence. But it really boils down to the enemy of Marxism. Their dreaded enemy is the unholy trinity hegemony of nukelar family, Christianity, and capitalism. Many are invested in the progressive agenda to virtuously wage war against this hegemonic evil.
Hang around these devoted individuals, reflect on this, and you will start to see it. Many WUWT readers are agnostic or atheistic enthusiasts of science. Many of you have been fed the concept that Christians are dumb, and anti-science, etc. This is all rhetoric from this virtue-cult. They need you to adopt those beliefs in order to innoculate you against any point of view I, or other Christians, might have. And, you can dismiss anything I have to say once you discover I am a member of any of these evil groups: square nukelar family man / “intolerant” (now you can grasp the political need for the “tolerance” meme); Christian, or in favor of any sort of capitalism/free trade views.
So, the thought structure is all aimed at the enemy. The cult thought structure does not accord with reality, and so cannot stand up to scrutiny.
It falls down pretty easily. To protect the virtue thought structure, automatic knee-jerk responses need to be built in to attack the messenger rather than address the message. Here is a crystal-clear example of how easy it is to make the house-of-cards thought structure fall: how Leah Remini left Scientolgy: she asked where the leader’s wife had been lately. They could not handle the threat posed by the simple truth. So, she woke up and left. So Gloria, I’m curious as to how you linked “Christians” to the opposition to “evolution” or a very old earth.
I belong to neither of those two camps, but nor am I ignorant of them. And last time I checked, the Biblical story of a “6,000 year old earth”, or the “Creation of all species in six days”, predates Christianity by thousands of years; and I’m not aware of any citation of those ideas anywhere in the “New Testament” which is post Christianity, well at least in the “King James” version.
I don’t know of anywhere in any of the four gospels, where Jesus Christ is cited as making reference to any such notions. But then I could be wrong. Like I said I’m not an adherent or a scholar of Biblical texts, but I did read some of it once; a long time ago. Somehow, Christians do catch it from a lot of angles.
What sets them up to be the whipping boys. I just read a learned scientific article about the reality (or not) of the “scientific” concepts known as “String Theory” and the other theory of “Multiverses”. After an in depth discussion of the history and nature of both concepts as scientific theories; which have one property in common; neither one is capable of experimental verification; by any means known to science, the authors of the paper ended by saying that only time will wean the disciples of these cult ideas from their absurdity. Well they stopped short of ROFLMAO. They were too polite to declare both notions BS. So cultists come in all shapes and sizes.
My own view of that is that nothing that “wggles” (in any fashion) can be fundamental, as it must be constructed of even smaller moving parts. And anything that can be observed by any means whatsoever; which is to say can register a difference between its presence, and its absence is a part of THE universe. Anything that can not, even in principle be observed by any means, is simply not a part of science. Well those are just my opinions of course. Not to be cited in your PhD thesis for credit.
(they will give you an F). George, Has it really escaped your notice that on this blog people claiming to be Christians frequently attack evolution and the age of the earth? I agree with you that the largest Christian denominations, such as the Roman Catholic Church, Greek and Russian Orthodoxy and Mainstream Protestantism, accept the validity of evolution and the great age of the earth, yet there are millions of adherents to allegedly Christian cults who do not. Unfortunately many of those adherents pollute comments here, making it easy for Warmunistas to associate “climate change” skeptics with anti-evolutionist crazies. Thank you for your good comments on religion.
I also appreciate you tying modern, politically correct progressives to the origins of political correctness (PC), loathing and hating yourself and your country, as coming from the ideology of Marx. These PC progressives do owe their philosophy and beliefs the the Marxists – Leninist communists. Finally, they share the same response when being caught in a lie of a crime. Deny everything, admit nothing, and counter attack with outrageous claims and smears. Gloria in Excelsis Deo. I recall that from my Altar Boy days as a thoroughly “Brain Washed Catholic”. From my recollection my indoctrination excluded Evolution as an approved thesis.
Now since my mind is completely purged from RELIGION my conversations with GOD are PURER and CHEAPER. I bought a Trilogy of Darwinism form Amazon, i.e., “Darwin Day in America” by John G. West, “Darwin’s Doubt” by Stephen C.
Meyer and “Debating Darwin’s Doubt ” by David Klinghoffer. The first I’ve started Darwin Day subtitles “How our Politics and Culture have been Dehumanized in the name Science”captured my imagination. When I’m done with all three maybe I’ll have a clearer conclusion. But one thing I’m clear about is that RELIGION is the OPIATE of the MASSES.
Carbon bigfoot August 29, 2015 at 7:22 am Catholic doctrine officially now accepts the fact of evolution, although IMO in its latest version it also allows for divine intervention at any point. Its doctrine might be called theistic evolution. Of course there is no scientific reason for imagining divine intervention in the evolution of life on earth, but if some feature appears to someone to require it, that’s their lookout. ID advocates find that some or all bacterial flagella were divinely ordained. Why the Designer wanted to make pathogens more effective at killing people and other living things is a puzzlement. Maybe it had to do with the Fall. Those would not be the first three books on evolution I’d read, but coming from your background, maybe not so bad.
Anyway, I hope you’re happy living without the faith foisted upon you in your youth. Lots of great books have been written on evolution since even before Darwin and Wallace discovered natural selection, but, since science marches on, IMO it’s best to read the most recent work, if you’re limited to just three works.
For instance, some of the most popular books from the 1980s, ’90s and ’00s would now seem quaint. Gould in particular has not worn well, although his work is still worth reading. Here are five from the past decade that I can recommend.
Shubin’s own paleontology is already outdated, but his experience as a human anatomist and fossil hunter remains valuable (although his grasp of English is sometimes shaky; he uses “disinterested” to mean “uninterested”, for instance): The Greatest Show on Earth, Dawkins, 2010 Why Evolution is True, Coyne, 2009 Your Inner Fish, Shubin, 2009 The Making of the Fittest, Carroll, 2007 Relics of Eden, Fairbanks, 2007 Dawkins of course is perhaps the most famous militant atheist in the world, but that doesn’t detract from his solid scientific work. Some of these five are targeted at refuting the blatant lies of creationists, while others are more general. The list emphasizes genetics over other lines of evidence showing evolution to be a constantly observed, scientific fact. A list just as good could be made of books on fossils, for instance. Gloria— one can have FAITH without religion and don’t shed a tear for me. At 72 I’m quite comfy with myself and my relationship with GOD—I don’t need middlemen or women.
I don’t know if you ever read the series ” Conversations With God,” Books 1,2 & 3 by Neil Donald Walsh. The first books I’ve ever read about OUR CREATOR that actually makes some sense. Based upon the EVIDENCE I’ve seen we are genetic alien hybrids. The proof is all around but difficult to comprehend with all that Religious Propaganda we have been fed. Back when I was taught Catholic Doctrine ( Catechism ), I was informed that it was a Mortal Sin to believe in Evolution and that included Eating Meat on Fridays, Mass in anything but Latin, women covering their heads in church, etc. Birth Control is next on their agenda if the Malthusians have their way. I’ve read all your references and they are not compelling.
Carbon, I don’t know about Catholic doctrine on evolution when you were a lad, or perhaps the personal belief of the teachers, priests and nuns with whom you came in contact, but official doctrine now supports theistic evolution. I don’t think there is any evidence in favor of the conjecture that humans are alien hybrids. It’s possible that all life on earth is in a sense alien, ie having arisen from microbes carried here from outer space by meteors or comets, but IMO not likely. I’m impressed by your religious faith if you’ve actually read all five of those books and still aren’t convinced of the objective, scientific fact of evolution. I’ll grant that none of them is perfect. In fact, all lack some obvious examples of observable evolution, but it would take an enormous book to fit in all the evidence, since all the evidence in the world confirms the fact of evolution and none is against it.
The sea ice/sheets/caps on Antarctica/the Arctic/Greenland/Iceland are shrinking/growing yes/no/maybe depends on who’s counting. Polar bears and penguins are endangered/having a hard time/pretty much as usual yes/no/maybe depends on who’s counting.
The sea levels are rising, land is subsiding yes/no/maybe depends on who’s counting. The global temperatures are rising/falling/flat lining based on satellite/tropospheric/sea surface/land surface with or without UHI/TOB/homogenization/adjustments/bald faced lying yes/no/maybe depends on who’s counting. Nothing but sound and fury, tales told by people missing the point, signifying nothing. The only meaningful question is what does CO2 have to do with any of this? How are these contentious topics connected to CO2?
IPCC’s dire predictions for the earth’s climate are based entirely on computer models, models which have yet to match reality. The projections began with a 4 C increase by 2100 which has since been adjusted down to 1.5 C.
The heated discussions mentioned above, led by warmists shrieking “See, we told you so!!, “ attempting to retroactively validate or refute those models, models driven by the radiative forcing/feedback of CO2 and other GHGs. IPCC AR5 TS.6 says that the magnitude of the radiative forcing/feedback of CO2 “remains uncertain.” (Google “Climate Change in 12 Minutes.”) Implying that IPCC was also uncertain in AR4, 3, 2, 1.
IPCC is not uncertain about one issue, though, redistribution of wealth and energy from developed countries to the underdeveloped ones to achieve IPCC’s goal of all countries enjoying above average standards of living. Besides, the greatest threat to mankind isn’t CO2, it’s poverty & hot lead. [6] A few weeks ago, Sun sceptics struck again. International Astronomical Union announced: Corrected Sunspot History Suggests Climate Change since the Industrial Revolution not due to Natural Solar Trends. “Corrected Sunspot History” sounds like something from Orwell when it appears on Discovery News, CBS News, and Nature News. I understand that as an acknowledgement that the uncorrected sunspot history suggests otherwise and that Dr. Willie Soon has been correct.
Of notice, the history was corrected based on a pdf file uploaded to arxiv.org, not on a peer-reviewed (or even pal reviewed) paper. This is grossly incorrect. The Corrected Sunspot Number is based on this peer-reviewed [and accepted by the Journal Solar Physics] paper and on Dr. Nir Shaviv has called the paper irrelevant to 20th century warming because there are other proxies confirming the increasing solar activity over the 20th century This is highly [and cleverly] misleading.
The corrected sunspot number and the ‘other proxies’ are also increasing during the first half of the 20th century but all decreasing since the mid-century maximum. The point of the new reconstruction is that solar activity in every century since 1700 increased to approximately the same height and decreased to the same floor every ~100 years, thus have no long-term trend over the past 300+ years. The above ping-pong exchanges leads to nowhere.
What appears to matter is not intensity of solar activity but periodicity and polarity of its magnetic field. Even so, it may not be the sun in itself that is driving the climate change, but a particular part of the globe, mainly north American tectonic plate the location of the last Laurentide ice sheet. The North east Canada (location of one of the globe’s strongest magnetic and gravity anomalies) has magnetic oscillations synchronous in periodicity and phase with solar magnetic field. Further more, the well known ~60 year oscillations of the nearby N. Atlantic’s SST (the main component of the global temperature natural variability) are synchronised and phased in with the every third solar magnetic cycle. Why that should be so is the major unknown, since it strength of the ~ 60 year quasi-periodic magnetic oscillation is an order of magnitude grater than the intensity of the solar field impact reaching the Earth’s orbit.
It is clear that the solar input has no sufficient variability to alter the global temperature to degree required, but the oscillations of the sea floor to the west of the mid Atlantic ridge may be sufficient to affect the strength of the N. Atlantic’s drift current and so change intensity of the heat transport from the equatorial region pole-ward. That isn’t a very compelling rebuttal.
Let me help out a bit in order so you can be more convincing. Average amplitude of the geomagnetic 22 year cycle in the vicinity of Hudson Bay is 70nT, which is about strength of a major geomagnetic storm Amplitude of geomagnetic 60 year cycle is around 600nT, or about an order of magnitude stronger than a major geomagnetic storm Bi-decadal change in the geomagnetic field tracks sunspot cycles (inverted correlation) with 2 micro Tesla p/p amplitude, about two orders of magnitude of strength of the heliospheric magnetic field at the Earth’s orbit.
What we can safely assume is that these oscillations are not induced (but could be synchronised) by much weaker impulses of the major geomagnetic storms from the even numbered sunspot cycles, or alternatively (and possibly more likely) both the solar and geomagnetic oscillations could have a common origin. “There is no 60-yr geomagnetic cycle” That is rather bold statement in face of overwhelming evidence, since in both its existence is exceptionally clear (see graph above posted at 1.51pm). Undoubtedly application of the climate science paradigm: ignore data ‘science is settled’, no further discussion is required.
Lets take a another look at the above (posted at 2.58pm) There are six minima inflections starting at around 1680 ending around 2000, that would make it 5 complete cycles superimposed on the longer term curve, or 320yers/5 = 64 years, which is the current length of the qusi-periodic Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation, better known as the AMO, the principal component of the global temperatures natural variability. Without accepting existence of the data content any further discussion can not be productive.
Contradicting data is not advancing science, it is obstinate support of dogma in the face of obvious. Svalgaard, your comment smacks of desperation how to counteract reality. I was expecting that you could do a bit better. Geomagnetic field is what it says on the tin ‘geo’ & ‘magnetic’ i.e. What is measured by the magnetographs, or magnetic needle if you wish, here on the terra firma, and that is the data I am using.
If you care to read on what you are commenting about, your wouldn’t stray into irrelevancy. Let me remind you: The geomagnetic field intensity (as contained in the available data from NOAA and gufm1 data bases) for the North American tectonic plate, it has its highest intensity in vicinity of the Canadian Hudson Bay, which has one of the greatest gravity (& geoid) anomalies on the Earth and in the distant past was the center of the.Laurentide ice sheet Analysis of data shows: –Existence of 22 year component of an average strength comparable to the strength of a major geomagnetic storm (i.e. Disturbance of the Earth’s field due to impact of a CME). The 22 year component is synchronised in periodicity and phase with alternative sunspot cycles (i.e. Positive going peaks are in phase with even and negative going peaks in phase with odd numbered sunspot cycles. In the graph above geo-magnetic signal is inverted).
–Spectral analysis of the data also shows strong presence of ~ 60 year periodicity which appear to have peaks synchronised with peaks of the every third even, and the troughs with every third odd numbered sunspot cycle. This does mean that the sunspot cycles have 60 year periodicity. –In addition, this ~ 60 year quasi-periodic oscillation is coincidental with the well known North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature quasi-periodic oscillation known as the AMO. Atlantic’s western half with the Gulf Stream moving warm waters northwards is on the N. American Tectonic plate with the above geomagnetic data applicable to. Your argument would be more convincing if you comment on what is said, rather then opposing a non-existing statement. I was prepared to accept your justification of the sunspot number series corrections, but judging by the methods employed in the above discussion, I am not so sure any longer that I should do so.
Thanks for your consideration, but only justifiable and objective argument to what I wrote will be effective. I was puzzled by the difference between old SSN and GN spectra at longer periodicities. It is suspected that the solar cycles were unusualy long during Maunder minimum and possible prior to it. Let’s look at GN spectrum since 1700 and compare to SSN spectrum since 1700, and Voi la! Hundred year periodicity is back!
Your narrative is still alive and well! My recommendation to Clete, Svalgaard and Co Exclude the Maunder Minimum Group Number from the spectral anlisys. Once upon time I pointed to the Met Office at the error in their calculation, to their credit they changed the algorithm, to their eternal embarrassment they refused to acknowledge it.
I hope you do better. We actually don’t do spectral analysis in any of our papers, so no need to accord the Maunder Minimum any special considerations in that regard. If you would care to actually read our papers, you will find that ends with “Solar activity appears to reach and sustain for extended intervals of time the same level in each of the last three centuries since 1700 and the past several decades do not seem to have been exceptionally active, contrary to what is often claimed: “most active in 11,000 years” (e.g. Solanki et al., 2004). That makes the “core” of the Maunder Minimum (1660–1700) stand out as a unique event since the telescopic observations of solar activity began” And thus an interesting resarch topic in its own right. Lesson: If you want to compare spectra, always use the same time interval for both series [as you have just discovered]. Svalgaard: “Lesson: If you want to compare spectra, always use the same time interval for both series [as you have just discovered].”.
And again “Lesson: only compare the same time periods.” Not necessarily so. Eliminating GN 1615 to 1700 reduces data span by 85 years out of 400 or 21% Now let’s reduce SSN from 1700 to 1800 by 100 years out of 315 or 32%, a much larger proportion. As you can see 100 years is still there (shift is minute), despite the fact that anything above 214/3 or 71 years may be inaccurate. Do you ever consider or admit that you could be wrong? I’m done for now. “Lesson: only compare the same time periods.”. “you must use the same time intervals.
End of lesson.” It is a lesson I have learned some 30 years ago, when I wrote bits and pieces of FortranIV for simple extraction of fundamentals in audio signals. Lesson was: 1 – data series is 0 (zero) symmetrically padded to the same length 2048 elements, which I still use when the data span is shorter than about 1600 -1700 samples, in that way each side is extended by at least 10% of the total data span. 2 – If a highly accurate record of the higher components (harmonics) are required then a further step in the process can be used in order to minimise ends effect. If linear regression shows significant rising or falling ramp (this is not particular problem with SSN, but it is for the global temperature spectrum, see result in the graph below ), or sitting on a pedestal then data is de-trended in order to eliminate characteristic content of the triangle waveform or end ringing components of a pedestal.
Global temperature clearly shows (beside ENSO and 9 year AMO) presence of the two most significant components found in the N. American tectonic plate ‘oscillations’. Now we are back were we started; Lesson you can take note of is: a)when you do your FFT on the GN apply the same principle. B)If found same spectral components in two sets of data that can be related do not apply dogma (oh, it is another spurious correlation) apply science and attempt to find out why it is so. Strange choice of words.
I showed 50 year and 100 year moving averages above. I chose two different averaging widths to show two samples of possible response types with progressively decreasing bandwidth (corresponding to longer equivalent time constants of the Earthly response). This shows that, the longer the time constants, the more monotonic the response (no surprise there). No cherry picking.
Nothing other than what the CMIP modelers do when running different scenarios to get a feel for possible responses. I took the data for total sun spot number from. If you repeat the processing for those data, you should get the same result. I took the data for total sun spot number from here.
If you repeat the processing for those data, you should get the same result. This is where the cherry-picking comes in. The sunspot number at your source was derived from only one observer on any given day before 1981, and it is generally accepted that while useful for analysis of variations on a time scale less than one year, the Group Sunspot Number [GSN] derived from all available data [typically ten observers per year] is superior for long-term studies. Hence the use of the GSN by most people. So, you should have used the revised Group number, also available on the SILSO website.
If you do that you should get the same result as I: no trend the past 300+ years. I’d ask you to justify in greater detail why it should be considered superior – I have a study suggesting group carries less information – but, I don’t really care to get into it with you. Make it 100 years and you will see a distinct 20th century trend. Cherry picking?
Who knows what the dominant time constants involved are, or on a more descriptive level, the overall bandwidth and characteristic modes of the response? But, it establishes in any case that, taking the group number as the bee’s knees, there is still an avenue for increased solar forcing to be responsible for the warming observed in the 20th century, and this rejiggering of the SSN numbers has not foreclosed it, even assuming you’re really, positively sure you’ve got it right this time. The main reason it is superior is that modern data shows that the number of spots per group is not constant [Wolf assumed it to be 10, hence his formula SSN = 10*Groups + Spots] but varies at least by a factor of two [it is currently about 5]. Another important reason is that the SSN is based on only one observer per day [before 1981], while the Group Number uses all available observers [typically 10].
So, repeat your analysis with the Group Number and come back here to report and show your Figure. Post Normal Sunspot Science Dr. Svalgaard: “And there is no 60-yr cycle in solar activity:” Hmm No 100 year periodicity in the ‘NEWly tailored sunspot data’ by Clete &Svalgaard Svalgaard: the sun is same now as it was 100 years ago, and 100 years before then.
I suppose that one has to be abandoned from now on. Vukcevic: That graph for the GSN looks a bit of a mess, this is what the Group Sunspot Number Spectrum should look like How’s about that then: –11 years on the nose –60 years (another Dr.S i.e. Sc.tta would be over proverbial ‘moon’, sorry meant to say ‘planets’) –85 years, Gleissberg cycle, not anything 70-100, but 85. – I don’t like too much this new Group Sunspot Number science, not that spectrum is wrong, but compilation of the data doesn’t appear to confirm and conform with what we already know about solar activity. “If the number of spots per group varies [as it does] the SSN = 10*Groups + Spots formula gives a poorer measure of solar activity.” Than just Groups alone? How do you pull that off with just a scaling factor?
“Show your Figure [if you have one]” Yeah. I got pretty much the same result as you. Then, I increased the averaging time to 100 years. Result: marked trend in the 20th century. It all depends on how rapid the Earthly response is.
How long do you thing it would take to boil a pot of water the size of the oceans? We’re talking long time constants. Do it yourself if you want to see. It’s a trivial change to what you did with your graph above. Just double the averaging time. Than just Groups alone? How do you pull that off with just a scaling factor?
I have no idea what you mean. The formula assumes that the number of spots per group is 10. It varies, so extra variance is introduced, not representative of real solar activity. I got pretty much the same result as you. Then, I increased the averaging time to 100 years. Result: marked trend in the 20th century. Show your Figures.
Here is mine: I would not call that a ‘marked increase’, and it is matching with an equal decrease from the 18th and 19th. It looks that your ‘religion; is getting the better of you. How long do you thing it would take to boil a pot of water the size of the oceans?
We don’t need to boil the oceans. Most people in this ‘business’ [e.g. Shaviv] find a time constant of ~10 years. With that you get. “The formula assumes that the number of spots per group is 10. It varies, so extra variance is introduced, not representative of real solar activity.” Your group number also varies by proportionately the same amount. You can’t say in one breath that the group number taints the total count, then in the next that the group number alone is untainted.
“I would not call that a ‘marked increase’” Plot just the part from 1750 on at full scale, and you will. “Most people in this ‘business’ [e.g. Shaviv] find a time constant of ~10 years.” Ridiculous.
The oceans do not be reach steady state temperature from top to bottom in 10 years. You can’t say in one breath that the group number taints the total count, then in the next that the group number alone is untainted.
As usual, you are not paying attention. The group number is fine, it is the sunspot number that is tainted.
Plot just the part from 1750 Judicious cherry-picking certainly helps. The point is that the 20th century was no more active than the 18th. The oceans do not be reach steady state temperature from top to bottom in 10 years. Your grasp of thermal physics is totally lacking. The oceans are highly stratified and the top can vary a lot without the bottom changing much.
“The group number is fine, it is the sunspot number that is tainted.” By the group number. The group number measures some number of spots. You would say, to be a valid contribution to the total count, it needs to be weighted by the actual number of counts in each group.
But just so, each group must be comparably weighted relative to other groups to have a uniform basis of comparison. Your group number is just as tainted as the FOM you claim is tainted by it. “Judicious cherry-picking certainly helps.” Doesn’t matter if it is. The cherry pick is still a valid potentiality. You have a contention: there is no possible relationship between solar activity and Earthly temperature variations. That is your thesis.
It takes only one contradiction to invalidate a thesis. The cherry pick is such a contradiction. “The point is that the 20th century was no more active than the 18th.” The 100 year running average says no.
“The oceans are highly stratified and the top can vary a lot without the bottom changing much.” You demonstrate no grasp of physics at all. The full effect is experienced when every element reaches steady state after the onset of the impetus. In a diffusive phenomenon such as this, one would, in fact, expect a “fat tail” response in which convergence to the steady state takes a very long time, indeed. Since you’ve resorted to ad hom, I’m going to assume you have nothing more to contribute except a bludgeoning insistence on keeping your eyes closed.
Have a nice day. By the group number. No, by the number of spots. A group is not just a collection of spots, but the eruption of a [shredded] flux rope generated at depth forming what is called an ‘active region’. Experience shows that the number of active regions is the important parameter for solar activity. Adding the number of spots would make the measure better, but the number of spots per group varies with time so the ‘better’ solar activity measure would be SA = a*G+S, except that a varies with time and is generally unknown for the early times.
Setting it to 10 was Wolf’s ‘panic’ and pragmatic solution to at least get ‘some’ measure. So, the real measure to use is the Group Number. You have a contention: there is no possible relationship between solar activity and Earthly temperature variations Nonsense, I contend that the influence is small [not the major driver], not that it is non-existent, but only that it is almost buried in the noise [of the order of 0.1 C]. The 100 year running average says no. The 100-running average has two maxima: 1755 4.82 groups which is greater than 1954 4.81 groups and the average group numbers for 18th century is 4.74 while for 20th century it is 4.51 So on both accounts, your statement is false And that alone invalidates your silly and physically wrong argument.
But, as you say: time to end the discussion as you don’t make any progress. Bart says, August 27, 2015 at 8:18 pm: “You conclusions are ill informed. But, there is no point in continuing the argument as you are out of your depth.” You have my full support on this one, Bart. Leif speaks of “your religion” prohibiting you from this and dictating that, when it is obvious to everyone that he is the one displaying religious fervour on this subject. Even changing the historical record to apparently ‘suit’ his preconceived idea (dogma?) that the Sun does NOTHING when it comes to long-term climate change.
But like you point out, it is how the global climate system responds to long-term (incremental) changes in solar forcing (on various levels) that matters. And on this, Leif of course doesn’t hold the sacred Truth any more than the next person. And so the 50 and 100-year filtering that you do is indeed a relevant exercise to simply see what is possibly the case. Looking at even his own plots, it seems pretty obvious that the Sun is ‘ramping up’ ever so gradually from the low-point in the 17th century. Yes, there’s an early peak, but that doesn’t mean that the total energy content of the climate system has already reached its peak in the 18th century.
Leif seems to assume that global temperature should simply follow directly the general outline of the solar curve, when it is much more likely that it is a slow, cumulative effect over centuries, a gradual (“background”) trend increase superimposed on cycles of internal (oceanic) variability, starting from the chilling depths of the LIA and building steadily towards the more benign, balmy conditions that we experience today. 100 Feet Full Movie Download In Tamil. Alexander: Svalgaard is caustic for sure. But he’s not here to be nice.
A drill sergeant isn’t supposed to be nice – he’s supposed to keep you from getting your head taken off. And the important issue is whether or not he’s right. My position is simply this: If there are flaws in any given skeptic argument, I want them addressed, discussed, and fully vetted – because we can’t EVER be wrong, not even trivially. Warmists can be wrong all day, every day, and repeatedly make the most wild, asinine, arrogant statements and it simply doesn’t matter. And we can cry about the double standard all day, but we still have to DEAL with it. At this point this is a propaganda war (in which the stakes are enormous) and the fact is, we are at a tremendous disadvantage.
The only thing we have on our side is honesty and truth. Tamper with that at our peril. Dear Leif, The article refers and links to the press release by IAU. The press release mentions only the pdf file by Clette et al. If the press release is not correct – protest IAU. I did not endorse IAU statement and its coverage by the leftstream media, but ridiculed them.
Just to be clear, I have not expressed opinion on your research. Likewise, I have recited opinion of Dr. Shaviv regarding the paper from the press release, and linked to his blog. BTW, your 2015 paper has not been published on Solar Physics as of today. Regardless of your back-peddling here, your reporting was highly negative and misleading.
The preprint referred to links to the major paper published in 2014: Clette, F., Svalgaard, L., Vaquero, J.M., Cliver, E.W.: 2014, Revisiting the Sunspot Number. A 400-Year Perspective on the Solar Cycle. My paper in Solar Physics is accepted for publication in a Topical Issue to be published later this year. A preprint is available on my website as well as on Arxiv.org. The press release is not based on unpublished work. A very public Wiki summarizes to Workshops held the past several years Your tone was inadmissible [‘struck again’] and unworthy serious discussion. Shame on you.
This whole argument should have been put to bed before it ever got underway. Everybody assumes that because you can put heat through the base of a pot of water and cook your spuds that heat can also pass freely through the surface. Its understandable but its wrong. The surface of water does not obey the laws of thermodynamics and blocks the heat.The molecules at the surface of water rearrange themselves to create surface tension.
The surface of the water is not exactly the same as the body of water.You can not heat a gas and have that heat penetrate the surface of water, try heating the surface using a gas gun. Only radiation will put heat into water. Its just as well that the planet works this way because if there was the ability of heat to freely pass through the surface of water the coast of say would become very warm in summer and the water would almost certainly reach temperatures well above the 26.5degs at which cyclones are triggered. Because the surface of water ignores the laws of thermodynamics there is no such thing a AGW. Another device borrowed (intentionally or otherwise) from religion is GUILT. Traditional religions usually made any and all expressions of human sexuality into targets to feel guilty about. This was fertile ground for imposed guilt because most of us have difficulty in not giving in to sexual urges so we (almost) all had something to feel guilty about.
The important thing about guilt is – YOU FEEL GUILTY ABOUT SOMETHING YOU CAN’T STOP DOING! With AGW, we are supposed to feel guilty about nothing more than being members of the human race and, by everything we do, destroying the perfect, timeless Arcadian paradise (not unlike the Garden of Eden when you think about it, and of course, equally fictitious) that existed before those evil fossil fuels started destroying paradise. Redemption, of course, is at hand, if we just – believe!!! I would consider that most religions treat sexuality as an essential and beautiful part of life. It is the Johnny come lately monotheistic religions that say otherwise. If we consider only the “primitive” religions they appear to be scientific in that they are attempting to explain the origins and working of the world and its contents.
The evolution of monotheism mirrors the development of priestly monopoly of control over people’s lives and thoughts. If this is indeed so then religions can be considered to be false (pseudo) science. However I do not condemn those that believe, but leave them to believe in peace and ask that they leave me to not believe in peace also. How did this hypothesis ever come so to dominate and corrupt science, when it was born falsified? Indeed, it was still-born from having already been shown false the first time it was hatched, in the first half of the 20th century. At least at that time, scientists practiced the scientific method, so that AGW advocates like Guy Callendar (whose seminal 1938 paper found an ECS of 1.67 degrees per doubling of CO2), admitted their hypothesis had been falsified by the bitter cold of the postwar decades (in his case specifically the winter of 1962). Yet after the PDO switch of 1977, this already shown false hypothesis was conveniently revived, with a world government apparatus behind it to enforce orthodoxy, no matter how much Mother Nature said no.
The immediate global temperature response to the zooming upward of CO2 in 1945-76 was cooling. This fact alone should have showed science that AGW is a myth. The present flat to cooling GASTA only confirms this inconvenient truth. How can man-made CO2 be the primary driver of climate since 1945 when for 50 of those 70 years the climatic response to increasing CO2 (usually at an accelerating rate) has been cooling to flat global average temperatures?
Yet this anti-scientific belief is what climate cult orthodoxy requires. In fact, the trend line of 1977 to ’96, during which time rising (rather than falling or flat) T happened accidentally to coincide with rising CO2, is itself chimerical. What really happened was a one time step increase in 1977, the effect of which can be extended as a trend line for the next 20 years before petering out. The heat blown off by the super El Nino of 1998 dissipated the last vestiges of the 1977 event and ushered in our presently cooling world. ‘How did this hypothesis ever come so to dominate and corrupt science,’ Massive amounts of cash, jobs for the boys and it suited certain political outlooks, there is no grand conspiracy just normal human self serving interest combined with arrogance and an inability to admit mistakes.
Ask yourself this, if tomorrow you could push a button and make CAGW ‘go away ‘ would that mean less or more status and cash for climate ‘science’ after you do that you can guess which route the people working in this area tend to take. Proof that CO2 has no effect on climate and identification of the two factors that do cause reported average global temperature (AGT) change (sunspot number is the only independent variable) are at (new update with 5-year running-average smoothing of measured AGT.This shows the near-perfect explanation of AGT since before 1900; R^2 = 0.97+).
Using the same methodology with the ‘corrected sunspot history’, the ‘break even’ sunspot number increased from 34.22 for the ‘old’ sunspot numbers to 59.66 for the ‘corrected’ SSN (break even means the planet cools at SSN lower than the break-even number and warms at SSN higher than break-even). R^2=0.973 for the ‘old’ and 0.969 for the ‘corrected’ SSN when compared to the 5-year running average of reported average global temperatures since before 1900. Great post – and some good additional points in the comments. The question that needs to be answered to tie this together once and for all: when climate fanatics are speaking/thinking/acting for their cause, are they driven by the same parts of the brain that motivate religious fanatics? Not sure if any research has been done in this area, but it certainly would be interesting if neuro-science could shed some light.
If it is not the caseperhaps the hypothesis here would have to be considered “falsified”.so at least it is testable. It’s even worse! Most of the alleged 0.7 degrees C of warming since c. AD 1850 occurred in the ~90 years before WWII, when the absolute and rate of rise in CO2 was minor compared to since the war. Very little warming has happened in the 75 years since 1940.
Not surprising when you consider that for the first three decades plus after the war there was global cooling, as there has again been since c. All the supposed post-war warming occurred during the brief interval c. 1977 to 1996. AGW makes no sense whatsoever.
“All the supposed post-war warming occurred during the brief interval c. 1977 to 1996 ”. =========================== A period which happens to coincide with a marked reduction in cloud cover: “ This decrease roughly corresponds to a radiative net change of about 0.9 W/m2 within a period of only 13 years, which may be compared with the total net change from 1750 to 2006 of 1.6 W/m2 of all climatic drivers as estimated in the IPCC 2007 report, including release of greenhouse gasses from the burning of fossil fuels ”: (Climate + clouds). Cause or effect? Yes, climate alarmism is a religion. Michael Crichton explains: Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists.
Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs.
If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths. There’s an initial Eden; a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion; that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs imbibe. [] The eco-religion is based on the belief in ‘dangerous man-made global warming’ (MMGW). The fraction of the public that believes in it is acting almost identically to Dr.
Leon Fesinger’s “Seekers”, a cult the famous psychologist studied in the 1950’s. The Seekers were led by a woman he calls “Mrs. Keech” (a pseudonym). She convinced her followers that a flying saucer would arrive at a certain date and time, and take her people to safety as the planet was destroyed. Her followers sold everything they had, went to her house on the appointed day, and waited for the flying saucer — just like climate alarmists are waiting for runaway global warming and climate catastrophe, or like followers of the Rev. Harold Camping waited for the end of the world.
But of course, no flying saucer appeared, just like no runaway global warming (or any, for that matter) appeared. Keech’s Seekers admit that they had been flat wrong? Festinger reported, rather than admit they were wrong, the Seekers doubled down and became even more adamant that the flying saucer had only been delayed.
Festinger wrote: “A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point.
We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating attacks. But man’s resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.” That explains the refusal of the climate alarmist crowd to face reality: not one of their alarming predictions has ever come true, but no matter. They still believe.
In fact, their belief is even stronger now. JoNova says: if you are a devout believer in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) and want to convert me to your religion then I’m going to tell you how you can do it: •Step 1 – Stop making predictions that don’t come true. •Step 2 – When you make a prediction, don’t just say something “might” happen. •Step 3 – Don’t live your life like you don’t believe a word you’re saying. •Step 4 – Stop the hate. •Step 5 – Stop avoiding debate.
•Step 6 – Answer questions. •Step 7 – Stop enjoying catastrophes. •Step 8 – Don’t use invalid arguments. •Step 9 – When you are wrong, admit it and apologise.
•Step 10 – Stop claiming that 97% of scientists agree that humans are warming the globe significantly. •Step 11 – Stop lying. If you think it is okay to lie if it’s for a good cause, you are wrong. •Step 12 – Rebuke your fellow Warmists if they act in an unscientific way. •Step 13 – Stop blaming everything on Global Warming. •Step 14 – Why are the only solutions always big-government “progressive” policies?
No alarmist has taken her up on her 14 suggestions, at least not here. Even the minority of MMGW alarmists who are not victims of the new ‘green’ religion refuse to admit they were ever wrong. Writer Leo Tolstoy explains why: I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives. But for most of them, belief in dangerous AGW is faith-based.
They cannot produce any measurements quantifying AGW. But that does not matter to religious acolytes. Their belief is enough. It’s mighty hard arguing rationally with a Jehovah’s Witness. Or with a climate alarmist. 4 weeks ago I got stuck in a 1.5 hour long traffic jam trying to get back to Portland under the St.
Johns Bridge closed because a bunch of Greenpeace cultists were hanging from the bridge wearing diapers in 103° heat illegally preventing the Fennica from going down the Columbia River to Alaska. Our firemen risked their lives to get these idiots down – none were arrested, the local radio station covered it nonstop for hours – breathlessly calling them “kayaktivists” ( the ones in the water), and when the ship finally plowed through on Thursday evening, most of the “reporters” had nothing but admiration for these brainwashed fools – no regard for all the loss of productivity for us stiffs who pay the taxes that fund the grants for climate “scientists”. The morons had cell phones calling in to radio shows saying ” we sent a message. ” Yeah, and they saved the planet. Gil Dewart August 26, 2015 at 3:33 pm says; “There is a lot about this mythology that relates to ancient human fears and hence draws on deep wells of irrationality.” Succinctly put, Gil Dewart.
I take precautions. All it takes is one nut-bar. Who will save the planet from those who want to save the planet?
My experience with alarmists face to face, and I am always civil, is they invariably turn red and quickly walk away. As the denizens of WUWT?
Know, their arguments are easily, and politely rendered moot. Aug 26, 2015 UN IPCC has NO Credibility by Allan MacRae to my latest paper. It is a retrospective of our debate on the Kyoto Protocol that was published in 2002.
[excerpt] “One’s predictive track record is perhaps the only objective measure of one’s competence. The IPCC has a negative predictive track record, because ALL of its scary projections have failed to materialize. The IPCC thus has NO credibility; actually it has NEGATIVE credibility. Probabilistically; based the IPCC’s negative predictive track record, one would more correct if one assumed the opposite of the IPCC’s scary projections.” Plus ca change, plus ca change pas Regards to all, Allan. Cult of Calamitous Climate has a nice ring to it, but whatever the label their actions speak for the faithful. The most troubling aspect of their righteousness is their absolute refusal to practise what they preach.
They harangue everyone else to change our evil ways, while they wallow in every luxury fossil fuels can provide. As for the “Carbon is evil” schtick. From a carbon based lifeform it is a little rich. The quote from P J O’Rourke covers their preachers beautifully; “The college idealists who fill the ranks of the environmental movement seem willing to do absolutely anything to save the biosphere, except take science courses and learn something about it.” Now I notice academia has attempted to circumvent this observation, by offering up multiple courses professing to be “Environmental Science”. But their graduates seem unaware that water is wet. A question for Mr Svaalgard, I’m not a scientist and have noticed that you seem to be of the view that the sun has very little effect on climate change as a driver. Wouldn’t the Sun’s magnetic variability combined with both Earth and lunar proximity have an effect in terms of modulation of cosmic rays and subsequent cloud formation along with electromagnetic influence of the jetstream via the ionosphere?
It’s also that any variability in the source of almost all the heat energy in a heat driven system would be significant one would think, although I’m enquiring about electromagnetic variability primarily rather than radiation as I’ve read that TSI doesn’t necessarily exhibit strong correlation with climate. I apologise again if they’re stupid statements as I’m not a scientist myself like many people here and merely would like you to communicate your expertise to me in terms a layman can understand. Thanks in advance. The cosmic ray modulation follows [inversely] the sunspot number. If there has been no long-term trend the last 300+ years, there has also not been any trend in the cosmic rays, so any mechanism that depends on cosmic rays could not explain in simple terms the trend in climate. Same thing for the sun’s magnetic field. Now, it is possible that there exists an incredible, unknown, powerful mechanism that bypasses the above argument, but that looks like special pleading to me and I see no evidence for such a process.
In conversations with globalwarmists, the discussion usually ends with the following: Me: “So, if CO2 rises to 500ppm (or 600, or 1,000), earth will pass a tipping point which will result in runaway greenhouse effect and the end of the world?” Them: “Yes.” Me: “So why hasn’t it happened before?” Them: “What do you mean?” Me: “During the Paleozoic and Mesozoic, a period of nearly 500 million years, atmospheric CO2 averaged more than 4,000ppm, and in the pre-Cambrian, it was much higher. Why didn’t earth experience a runaway greenhouse effect then?” Their answers usually involve one of the following: –That never happened–CO2 is higher now than ever (this is the most common answer, accompanied by “deniers just make up lies”, or something similar) –The rapid increase in CO2 is unprecedented and that’s what will trigger it. –“Man-made” CO2 is more dangerous. –Conditions are different now. I don’t talk to these people about it anymore. It’s too much like talking to a fundamentalist Christian about evolution.
And the irony is: they think that by excluding any possible refutation of their beliefs, they are being true to “science”, and by questioning global warming, I’m “anti-science”. As a scientist myself, I’ve often been frustrated by how easily such cults arise and how quickly people become believers.
This cult would run out of oxygen, except that it fills the political need of a “crisis”, so necessary to progressive politicians to expand their control. I know this isn’t a political site, but we need to recognize why this latest end-of-the-world religion survives, and why offering truth on excellent sites like this one isn’t really enough. Propaganda is a powerful tool—look what it did in Europe in the 1930’s. The real problem is that only one side has a viable propaganda machine, and that’s something the so-called “progressives” are very good.
Socialism / statism / Marxism / Communism is the religion. It has been the world’s fasting growing religion in the past 100 years.
The climate change wars — climate doomsayers versus deniers — are a propaganda tool. The Coming Climate Change Catastrophe Cult (5C) is just using CO2 as a boogeyman to promote government expansion by scaring people, and hoping the scared people will turn to their government for “help”, or just blindly accept whatever expansion of government power “required” to fight the “crisis”. Modelers are well paid extras, and their computer models are props, in this power play. This is all about gaining power and money by manipulating the general population. The science is irrelevant — not that predicting the future climate with computer games has anything to do with science! Temperature and CO2 data will be repeatedly “adjusted” until it fits the computer game predictions. Contradictory data will be ignored.
The few people who really believe they are saving the Earth are “useful idiots” who have no idea Earth’s climate today is better than it has been in over 500 years for plants (more CO2) and humans (warmer, and faster growing food plants). Students have been brainwashed for several decades to believe humans are destroying the Earth, and maybe they are in China, so there is little hope of convincing most people under 30 years old that their climate today is better than ever and more CO2 / more warming would be something to celebrate, not fear. It is amazing how an invisible and harmless (false) boogeyman like CO2 can be used to control people. And the only sure way to stop this power grab is to hope for a cold decade or two. Scientists who study the sun / solar system seem to be predicting this. Let’s hope they are right, or the temperature stays constant for the next decade (although the “adjustments” will eventually “fix” that!). This website is useful for real scientists and other logical people to study the subject.
In the “real world” a typical person who visits this website sees as an ongoing science debate that makes their eyes glaze over — I’ve sent people here, and that’s what they tell me. I checked my local library in Birmingham, Michigan and found about 212 climate change / global warming books in their database. I studied the brief summary for each book, and identified only four (4) books that were “skeptic” books, and two of those were by the same author. That’s less than 2% of all the books identified with that subject search.
It would not surprise me if most people have never read ANYTHING skeptical of the 100 year climate predictions, even though the predictions have been grossly inaccurate for 40 years. Or maybe 2% of what they’ve read or heard was skeptical. The primary reason ‘skeptics’ are unable to convince others there is nothing to fear, is they tend to debate the science, which few people will ever understand, assuming ANYONE understands what causes Earth’s climate to change.
What I don’t hear often enough is any skeptics celebrating more CO2 in the air for its positive effect on green plants, and the animals and people who eat them, and celebrating the slight warming, which people love. Skeptics who are afraid to celebrate more CO2 and warming as good news will never reverse the climate change brainwashing.
Note how the climate doomsayers don’t debate their predictions — they skip that step on the assumption ladder and move up to the next step: Discussing what new government powers are needed to prevent the “crisis” when they are not too busy attacking the characters of climate “deniers”. When the general public loses interest in global warming, the leftists invent new names, such as climate change and carbon pollution, and then publish more specific scary predictions to get attention. Another way to counter the climate doomsayers is to “accelerate” the crisis and demand a radical solution, such as an immediate $3 per gallon climate change fund tax on each gallon of gasoline sold, to discourage driving. When the average person hears that, he’ll explode — everyone wants to save the Earth in theory, but no one wants to pay for it.
That’s why the climate doomsayers are so silent about the costs of their risky schemes. Free climate change blog for non scientists. No money for me. A public service. I wrote “Socialism / statism / Marxism / Communism is the religion.” They are all just different forms of statism where the government controls a large percentage of the economy. Communism has lost favor and in some nations, and has morphed to other forms of socialism.
Free enterprise is dying, even in the US. The Chinese version of Communism + free enterprise is a combination with the worst aspects of a dictatorship, and the worst aspects of capitalism: (1) Infrastructure building that no one needs — even unoccupied cities –,just to keep people employed, and (2) Manufacturing with almost no regard for pollution. Real pollution — not the airborne plant food Co2. Actually, Communism/Socialism/Marxism have been the fastest shrinking social orders of the past 100 years. The breakup of the former USSR into mostly capitalist democracies for example.
The problem with all of them is that they quickly devolve into totalitarianism (Stalin, Castro, Chavez). I do not think any qualify as religions or cults. I am a layman, but I think the science is very relevant and should be argued especially since it favors the skeptical view. However, if human induced CO2 warming turns out to be real (I have no confidence in this perspective) then I would want the alarmists to prove their case based on the science not ideological grounds and the same for the skeptics.
We laymen need to at least try to grasp the science. The posts here are very helpful and most here will help you understand if only you will ask. I do not doubt that alarmists use deceptive tactics but I think they are more born of pride than a vast socialist conspiracy. They want to retain status and funding. Unlike the alarmists, the scientists here seem to welcome constructive criticism.
It makes the posts here both informative and entertaining. Statism (such as Socialism / Marxism / Communism) is the fastest growing secular “religion” in the past century.
If you think it has been “the fastest shrinking social order”, then we must be living on different planets. In 2008 the two US Senators closest to matching the label “socialist” were Obama, who pretended to be something else, and Bernie Sanders, who was proud of being a socialist. Then one of them was elected president for two terms. And the other is running for president in 2016, and doing surprisingly well against a female competitor who is at least pretending to be another Obama. If I had predicted these events back in the 1980s, or even in the 1990s, people would have said the predictions were crazy. Warming is good news for humans.
More CO2 in the air is good news for green plant growth. The known benefits of warming and more Co2 are rarely discussed. Scientists “hide the decline” and adjust data to match their computer games. “Deniers” are character attacked and can’t get government grants.
Wild guess predictions of doom and gloom from “carbon pollution” are not debated — the climate doomsayers stifle debate and brush off questions with “the science is settled”. Politicians are heavily involved, along with the UN, and Al Gore, who took two elementary science classes in college and couldn’t manage to get an A or B in either of them! This is politics. It is a delusion to think this is real science. Quote from Ian Plimer’s excellent 2009 book “Heaven and Earth”: (from page 463 and 464): “Environmentalism is an urban religion disconnected from Nature, or rural life, or the realities of food and mineral production.
This environmental religion is terrified of doubt, skepticism and uncertainty yet claims to be underpinned by science. Like many fundamentalist religions, it attracts believers by announcing apocalyptic calamities unless we change our ways. Logic, questioning or contrary data are not permitted.”. My preference is for a likeness to a Trade Union. Religion as an analogy is too extreme to let some people see the analogy.
A Trade Union is a voluntary association whose members can lock out other people (no ticket, no job) and which does not require a stretch of the imagination to see the analogy. A Trade Union can do anti-social things (like strikes that disrupt the progress of others) and has a known membership. It has a hold on finances to keep it going. It does not rely on a hidden ‘conspiracy’ to keep it going. Altogether a better analogy for me. It is more like the Axis Alliance in WWII.
Different parties finding common cause to achieve their own agenda. Academics want status and funding, Naomi Kline seeks to bring down capitalism, the UN wants sovereignty over the governments of it members, the Pope wants socialism (the redistribution of wealth). Developing / Poor nations see a potential windfall, perhaps some wealthier nations believe the hype and want to relieve their guilt. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend”.
So they unite. Ironically, an unholy alliance. Problem is they all want different outcomes so in the end they will fight one another. After WWII the West ended up in a cold war with the USSR, our former ally, and ended up with the former Axis Powers as our allies. Who knows where the ACGW movement will take us in the end? Michel: The explanation to which I come ( ) is that the populace is divided between those who dupe (twd) and those who are duped (twad). The primary weapon of twd is application of the equivocation fallacy.
Using polysemic words that include “science,” “model” and “predict” twd construct numerous equivocations – arguments in which a word changes meaning in the midst of the argument. Twad mistake these equivocations for syllogisms – arguments whose conclusions are known by their forms to be true. Thus twad are led to believe that the conclusions of the equivocations of twd are true when in fact they are false or unproved. Demonstrating that they have been duped, twad vehemently denounce the opponents of twd for moral degeneracy when it is twd who are the moral degenerates. The scientific framework known as the Anthropocene Age is in fact a scientific paradigm. In this paradigm, all human economic activities upset “tipping points” in ecosystems on the “fragile earth.” This scientific paradigm shift began to occur in the 60’s, and changes in weather because of human emission of greenhouse gases is only a subcomponent. It is a scientific paradigm shift which includes extraordinary, nearly psychotic phobias against any and all chemical compounds–and even ELEMENTS–now used to grow food, preserve food, or to mass manufacture anything.
These chemicals are all studied in scientific institutions with the sole purpose of convicting the chemicals of being carciongens or of tipping the balance of some system in nature. It is also largely a scientific paradigm shift which assumes overpopulation as an axiom and includes eugenics/transhumanism/birth control as an over-riding concern for the “environment.” This scientific paradigm shift was top-down, it involved a new language to describe the harmful effects of all chemicals and fuels, and it also involves re-writing the past in light of the new paradigm shift by the expert practitioners of science.
It is a poster child for Thomas Kuhn’s ever so Structured Scientific Revolution. And in this scientific paradigm, if any chemical can be found to be harmful in large amounts, it must be reduced to zero exposure in the environment.
It is not a religion as the author points out. It is a scientific paradigm, and has cultic aspects because cults can never, ever resist quoting the scriptures to deceive the simple and for personal advantage. A religion at minimum does concern itself with the afterlife, and all spiritual traditions I have read consider the human soul to be eternal.
For example, the Bible says that in heaven, there are countless people, a “great multitude from every nation, tribe and tongue.” People from all the families of the earth will be there. Thinking about the future must also entail thinking past your own personal death date. And we all have one of those. Linked from the excellent article: “[6] A few weeks ago, Sun sceptics struck again. International Astronomical Union announced: Corrected Sunspot History Suggests Climate Change since the Industrial Revolution not due to Natural Solar Trends. “Corrected Sunspot History” sounds like something from Orwell when it appears on Discovery News, CBS News, and Nature News. I understand that as an acknowledgement that the uncorrected sunspot history suggests otherwise and that Dr.
Willie Soon has been correct.” This is also a terrific illustration of the approach to science which Thomas Kuhn cunningly devised in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In science, he assumes that a group of expert practitioners of science are able to make a paradigm shift when the old paradigm has too many incommensurable facts. The practitioners then decide on a new paradigm, and as these paractitioners of science share a language and a framework, they are able to re-examine and re-interpret, and re-adjust the past in light of their new scientific paradigm.
The benefits continue for scientistific practitioners when they declare a structured scientific revolution. They also control the questions to be asked, the data to be gathered, the tools to be used, the interpretation of the data, and the interpretation of the past — all activities they share in order to complete the picture for their new paradigm. It’s how progressive scientists roll.
And Karl Popper had much to say about the enormous inadequacies of what Kuhn was hawking. [6] Sun sceptics struck again. International Astronomical Union announced: Corrected Sunspot History Suggests Climate Change since the Industrial Revolution not due to Natural Solar Trends. The sun is driving earth’s climate and weather. Plenty of scientists have worked on this question and there are still many questions about how solar activity is linked to our ionosphere and to the radiation belts surrounding earth.
However, “the practitioners of science” have instead chosen an anthropogenic “paradigm” and are busy correcting the past to show how the duck was really a rabbit! This shows how the questions they ask all revolve around “How does human activity affect this ecosystem, that ecosystem, this region, etc.” And the past will come into line with the newly adopted paradigm; that is part of the perks of having a Structured Scientific Revolution. Ref: Kuhn used the duck-rabbit optical illusion to demonstrate the way in which a paradigm shift could cause one to see the same information in an entirely different way.
Zeke says: Karl Popper had much to say about the enormous inadequacies of what Kuhn was hawking. Where they differ, Popper was correct and Kuhn was wrong. Popper’s basic insight was the absolute necessity for testability (falsifiability). The job of skeptics (actually the job of every honest scientist) is to falsify a hypothesis if at all possible.
That is any scientist’s #1 job. As Feynman says to scientists, you are the easiest person in the world to fool. Microsoft Dynamics Nav 2009 Ebookers. This is the biggest problem that the climate alarmist crowd has.
Everything stems from their failure to heed Popper and Feynman. That’s where confirmation bias, noble cause corruption, and all the rest of the fallacies come from. When all attempts to falsify a hypothesis (or a Conjecture, Theory or Law) have failed to undermine or destroy it, then what remains is considered the current state of science (since nothing can ever be proven in science). So far, nothing in the climate science conjecture/hypothesis of ‘man-made global warming’ (AKA: AGW) has withstood falsification. There are no testable measurements of AGW. That means that while some sort of AGW may exist, it is completely unquantified.
AGW does not alter what would be called natural variability; the system has not been changed in any observable or measurable way. Therefore, the climate Null Hypothesis has never been falsified by the alternative hypothesis: AGW. A measurable change is necessary to falsify the Null Hypothesis, but no change due to AGW has ever been measured. This is somewhat esoteric for the average person, who is subjected to a constant media drumbeat of “Man-Made Global Warming!!” 24/7/365¼. As a result, alarmist propaganda has been very effective.
But in the end, the truth matters. Eventually the MMGW scare will be defeated. But it is tenacious, supported by $billions. We have to be equally tenacious. Here is a typical example This is from Locarno which was the global reference observer: all other observers was scaled to [normalized to] Locarno’s sunspot number, which for the day shown was 108 = 5 * 10 + 58 [5 groups and 58 spots].
Now the spots were counted with ‘weighting’, i.e. Large spots were counted more than once. The reported spot count for each group [numbered 150-159] is given in the table at the upper right in the column ‘f’. For example, group 150 near the limb at the left is counted as three spots, although there only is one spot visible. This way of counting was instituted around 1947. For the past year, the Locarno observers [at my urging] also report [in the right-most column ‘LW’] the actual number of spots visible, which for the five groups totals 40, so that the real sunspot number should be 90 = 5 * 10 + 40. The ratio 108/90 = 1.20 shows that the weighting inflates the sunspot number by 20%.
This affects all values since 1947 and must clearly be removed as an artifact as the sunspot count was not systematically weighted before 1947 [the inflation factor varies a bit with the sunspot number in the range 1.1-1.25, with a mean of 1.20]. Such is the nature of the revision. I think that nobody in his right mind could object to this. Terry there is no reason to debate any of this, it is just a stupid from top to bottom. There is a mountain of research on climate change, agreed upon by scientists across the globe; all of which is completely misunderstood and disregarded by the scientifically illiterate, conspiracy theory believing saps trolling this site. These deluded folks would rather believe the effluent of an elaborate propaganda machine funded by petrochemical industry (i.e., Heritage Foundation), who spew their talking points into the fake news machinery (i.e, FOX “News”).
Because the propaganda agrees with their ignorant biases that they do not want to change to comport to reality. As Oliver North said, it is like arguing about whether owls exist. Pointless waste of time. Terry Oldberg, No, ‘Some guy’ doesn’t have a coherent argument to make. He says: There is a mountain of research on climate change, agreed upon by scientists across the globe; all of which is completely misunderstood and disregarded by the scientifically illiterate, conspiracy theory believing saps trolling this site. These deluded folks&etc. That isn’t an argument, that’s just pointless ranting.
What is this “climate change”? The climate always changes. ‘Some guy’ sounds like he’s mad about something. Maybe it’s because the endlessly predicted runaway global warming never happened? Or that there has been no global warming for almost 20 years? No wonder he’s angry.
His belief system just took four or five torpedoes; it’s goin’ down. ‘Some guy’ makes no scientific argument at all. If he wants to defend that statement, I challenge him to produce a measurement quantifying the fraction of man-made global warming (MMGW), out of total global warming from all causes, including the natural recovery of the planet from the recent Little Ice Age. Science is all about data.
Measurements are data. If some guy has any measurements of MMGW, let’s see them. Otherwise, MMGW is nothing more than a conjecture. Some Guy, Some of us are scientists and we understand climatology better than the computer gamers who get grants to run worse than worthless GIGO models in the attempt to advocate for a falsified hypothesis. But if you don’t like commenters here, then how about taking some education from scientists whose opinions you might find more credible, such as the heir to Einstein at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study Freeman Dyson, his colleague at Princeton physicist Will Happer, MIT Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Richard Lindzen or CSU Emeritus Professor of Atmospheric Science Bill Gray, the “Father of Hurricanology”? To quote the late, great “Father of Climatology” Reid Bryson, “You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide”. Hubris ˈ(h)yo͞obrəs/ noun “excessive pride or self-confidence.
Synonyms:arrogance, conceit, haughtiness, hauteur, pride, self-importance, egotism, pomposity, superciliousness, superiority; More antonyms:humility (in Greek tragedy) excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis.” Hubris is a word which Catholics use to describe the uppity peasants who question the interpretations of the professional interpreting caste. That is a total misuse and misapplication of the meaning of the word hubris. What is the author showing “superiority” to? The author is pointing out that the claims of the scientists and experts are both excessive and in error. ” 1) Climate alarmists pretend to possess indisputable truths about the past, present, and future.
From minute details of the paleoclimate to the world state 200 years in the future, alarmists know everything.” He takes pains to support this with various metrics used in the field. It is not hubris to point out that the practitioners of science claim knowledge they do not possess. Gloria Swansong, if you really understood how science works, you would not rely on individuals to but rather the consensus of experts in a given field. In the one-sided controversy that defines the politics around anthropomorphic climate change, dissenters all have personal motivations for their opposition to the scientific consensus, but they generally fall under two categories. The first are retired professors whose life work has been eclipsed by newer data, with no one is citing them anymore their glory days are over so they are letting their ego run rampant.
The second group are more interested in the petrochemical money so they become corporate shills (though in practice these camps overlap tremendously). Clearly I’m a lot more familiar with how real science works than are you.
Consensus is anti-science. All that matters is what can be shown false. That includes the repeatedly falsified hypothesis of catastrophic, man-made global warming. The consensus was that the sun goes around the earth. The consensus was that phlogiston causes combustion. The consensus was that an imbalance of humors cause disease. As Einstein said, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” In the case of “global warming”, every experiment shows the fanciful conjecture wrong.
Science isn’t done by an anointed priesthood issuing declarations ex cathedra that the hoi poloi must accept. As Feynman said, “Science is the belief in the ignorance experts.” On climate there are no experts, in any case. Computer gamers are not climatologists. Plainly, you have no regard for the centuries long development of the scientific method. You people foolishly think that government grant money is tainted, but petrochemical money is blessed by God. You also fail grasp that governments around the globe are funding the same research and getting the same results. What this is about is your hatred for our government and for environmentalists (which you conflate).
It has nothing whatsoever to do with actual empirical data, just your biases. So you seek self-styled experts writing books to line their own pockets and then cherry pick data taken out of a global context. That is why you are ignored by the scientific community.
Your are grasping at straws. You got bupkus for an argument. 9 replies the past few hours. 6 of those 9 demand “we” listen to and concur with the “authorities” and government-paid bureaucrats, even though the data and the measured results prove them wrong in the past 18 years, and dead wrong in every prediction they have made since Hansen heated up that Congressional room back in 1988. How many government-paid self-selected anonymous peer-reviewed star chambers can you buy for 92 billion dollars in government money spent in only three years? How many anonymous unknown government-paid bureaucrats can you buy for billions every year since 1988? The remaining 3 simply insult us.
None of you are addressing the fact that there is more incentive for petrochemical companies to develop propaganda, that you buy into, than there is for researchers to make up data. Science is not done by “anonymous unknown government-paid bureaucrats,” it is done by well known (within their field) academic researchers (i.e., experts) operating with peer review at the international level. Also, they get their grants whether they find that there is human influence or not.
But petrochemical companies lose if people wake up. You are following the wrong money. Also, none of you have tried to explain how tens of thousands of scientists operating in counties all over the world, in many different fields of research, with various funding sources, all (97%, at least) agree that humans are causing the climate to change. Moreover, all governments and relevant scientific bodies around the world agree that humans are causing the climate to change.
A conspiracy theory that vast is ludicrous and you should hang your head in shame for believing such silliness. And lastly, none of you seem to care to follow the money from so-called experts writing books that you quote from. First, they make money from their books, whereas researchers do not make a cent more from their work, no matter what the outcome. I have followed the money on every famous denier. They are all petrochemical shills. To make a fine point of this, they get paid to deny climate change. As for you non-climate change experts quoting data out of context that you do not understand, there is nothing good to say about your efforts and no reason to try an counter them.
Read the IPCC report. ‘Some guy’ says: None of you are addressing the fact Listen up, SG: you have yet to post a single verifiable scientific fact. You’re just some unhappy guy who hates the fact that you’re on the losing side of the “dangerous AGW” debate.
We like to argue facts and evidence because they show that the climate alarmist crowd has been flat wrong from the get-go. So stop your juvenile attacks, and either debate scientific facts and evidence — and be prepared to back it up with more than your discredited appeal to authority logical fallacy and your baseless assertions — or just go away and let the adults discuss facts and evidence. Berating everyone else because you’ve lost the debate shows your immaturity.
You’re only like that because Planet Earth herself is falsifying your cult’s multitude of failed predictions. If you had a good scientific argument, you would use it instead of falling back on your insults and name-calling. Gloria S says: Clearly I’m a lot more familiar with how real science works than are you.
That’s obvious from all the “Some guy” comments. He just began posting here, and every comment is invective and insults. No scientific data at all. As Terry Oldberg wrote above: Do you have an argument to make?
If so please present it. ‘Some guy’ has no credible arguments.
This site has the internet’s highest traffic numbers for a good reason: science is discussed here. No comments are censored because of their scientific arguments, no matter how wacky they might be. So readers can view all the comments, and decide for themselves which arguments most closely align with the current understanding of what we regard as scientific truth, and which arguments are nonsense. Then there is a third type of comment: ‘Some guy’s’ endless appeals to corrupted authorities and his data-free assertions.
Those aren’t scientific arguments. ‘Some guy’ doesn’t even attempt a reasoned argument.
He posts no data and he never uses logical, fallacy-free reasoning. He just insults everyone he disagrees with, not understanding how pathetic that looks to the mostly highly intelligent, well educated audience here. ‘Some guy’ is arguing now about the author’s last name; a clear example of an ad hominem fallacy. The reason is obvious: ‘Some guy’ has no credible data to support his eco-religion. Here are my arguments: 1) None of us are climatologists here, so we are not the people and this is not the place for comparing data. No one here has the training to evaluate the data.
My argument is about critical thinking, not data. 2) (Related to #1) There is a consensus of experts (which aren’t you or I) around the world, based a mountain of evidence, that the climate is changing and humans are significantly involved in that change. 3) You are following the wrong money (i.e., real influence). 4) Because you do not “believe” the “science you call those who accept the science a cult. I wish you could see how ironic that is.
5) You believe that this is hoax, but fail to address how or why such a hoax could be perpetrated at in international level (hint: it couldn’t). I have leftist friends who are against vaccines and fluoridation because they also do not trust our government. But they are as wrong as you people. ‘Some guy’ makes this so easy I’m almost embarrassed to refute him.
But since I enjoy pulling the wings off flies, here goes: 1) No one here has the training to evaluate the data. Climatologists such as Prof.
Richard Lindzen of M.I.T., Dr. Roy Spencer, and many others with similar expertise comment and post articles here. To assert that “this is not the place to be comparing data” only shows that you have no credible data. Sorry about that. 2) “Consensus”?? Science is not about consensus. But if you insist on making the ‘consensus’ argument, there are more than 31,000 professionals with degrees in the hard sciences, including more than 9,000 PhD’s, who have signed their names to the statement that CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere.
I have regularly challenged those who make the ‘consensus’ argument to post the names of even 10% of those numbers, educated in the hard sciences, who contradict that statement. No takers, ever. So then I challenged anyone to post the names of even one percent of similarly educated folks who disagree with that statement. Still no takers. Therefore, the ‘consensus’ argument (for whatever that’s worth in science; not much) is overwhelmingly on the side of skeptics of ‘dangerous man-made global warming (MMGW). 3) You are following the wrong money. OK then, what is the ‘right money’?
Money and influence have no place in empirical, testable science — something you avoid mentioning. 4) you call those who accept the science a cult. Those who believe with your religious fervor that ‘dangerous MMGW’ is happening act exactly like members of a religious cult. You believe, but you cannot produce even one measurement quantifying MMGW. You have no credible data to support your religious faith.
Thus, you are ipso facto part of a cult. 5) You assert that I “fail to address how or why such a hoax could be perpetrated at in international level (hint: it couldn’t).” I have repeatedly addressed that: the reason is money, and lots of it. $Billions in federal grants are handed out every year to “study climate change”.
That loot is not given to scientists who state the obvious: that there is nothing either unusual or unprecedented happening with global temperatures, and that there is no correlation between the rise in CO2, and any subsequent rise in global T. In fact, the only correlation shows that changes in CO2 follow changes in global temperature. There is no evidence that CO2 is the cause of global ∆T.
Therefore, the “carbon” scare is scientifically unsupported. Finally, you end with one of your usual baseless assertions: “they are as wrong as you people.” But you have posted no evidence showing that scientific skeptics of MMGW are wrong in any way. The fact is that your alarmist crowd has been flat wrong in every alarming prediction you’ve ever made. At some point, even you should start asking yourself: why is that? If your CO2=cAGW premise was correct, your predictions would be generally correct. But they’re not; they are all 100.0% wrong. Thus, your conjecture is wrong.
You just won’t admit it to yourself, even though everyone else here can see it.