Mick I’m not gonna quote and paste because I’m on my phone and I spent too much time that I don’t really have these days on this earlier in the week.
- About Lindzen and Ad Hominem Argument:
The context in which I criticized Lindzen was after I brought up Rahmstorf’s credentials and you countered that Lindzen’s were even more impressive. I wasn’t responding to any specific argument by Lindzen with that, so I don’t think it constitutes and Ad Hominem argument.
That said, we again come back to the same problem I brought up before: I don’t know about you, but as a total non-expert, I’m just not qualified to address his actual arguments. While it is true that simply to dismiss his argument as false because of his political ideology, affiliations and activities would be Ad Hominem - don’t you think it leaves us (or me) as non-experts a little problem if we want to investigate his arguments critically, but simply lack the scientific and mathematical knowledge to do so? Basically that leaves us in the intellectually-crippling position of having to say, ‘Well, expert A said this… but expert B said this other thing, and who the heck knows who is right?’ Then we all just throw up our hands.
In fact, this is exactly why denialist strategy #1, promoted explicitly by Luntz in the memo I quoted a while back, and used long before that by the cigarette industry and others since works so well: produce experts who contradict the mainstream scientific narrative, get them out in front of the public at every opportunity to create a doubt in the public mind. I assume you’ve read Merchants of Doubt and know how all this works, so I won’t say more about it, except that it works for a good reason. Which is why I said the stuff in my lengthy post at the bottom of page 53 about Vegas and all that. And it is without a shadow of a doubt true that Lindzen is one of those handful of scientists, in this case. I realize it doesn’t make him necessarily wrong… but it throw up a lot of red flags around him.
- About Rahmstorf and argument from authority:
I see how you could interpret my words that way, but two things: I didn’t know you’ve been reading RealClimate for years. The way you were expressing yourself, it kinda sounded like you thought the author was just some ax-grinding alarmist climate blogger. And as for “telling you how it is” or however exactly I put it, I meant, “those are the actual, specific numbers we’re talking about”. Which, I’m pretty sure, really is how it is. I definitely did not mean that Rahmstorf’s argument is automatically right just because he is an expert; however, siting expertise in an inductive argument is not fallacious.
Like I said to Fred, sources matter. Credibility matters. Heck - I’ve had anti-GMO, anti-vax, even CREATIONIST people take an argument way over my head. At that point, I have to admit I’m out of my depth and all I can do is take the matter back to the sources I trust. That doesn’t mean I don’t keep an eye on those sources, and if they start getting called out on repeated issues of bias, taking inappropriate funds or what-have-you, I’m going to de-trust them, difficult as that will be. It’s happened before.
So-called “knowledge” is really just a leap of faith - the best we can do is try to keep the length of the leap as small as possible.
- About my standing on shaky ground:
About models, I now have a sense of what you’re talking about, although so far I’m not very much persuaded. I will try to do a little more reading up. On the issue of temperatures, however, I’m really curious. I understand that there are issues about how temperatures are taken, problem with site locations, problems with the whole idea of temperature anomalies, etc. But the modern temperature record is corroborated about ten different ways, just with human measurements. In addition to that, there are natural factors such as animal migrations, when seasons arrive and so forth. When you have this many independent lines of evidence pointing at the same conclusion, it’s really hard for me to see how that could be called “shaky ground”, whatever complicated over-my-head arguments are made. It’s true there are quibbles over this or that method of homogenization and so forth - Curry brought up one in the article which Fred posted. But those are points really best left for between scientists; so far I’ve never seen a single argument why they should be important enough to constitute ground shaky enough to influence the decisions of policy-makers.
But let’s say I’m totally wrong and even the temperature record is totally questionable. Ok, then fine: so-called AGW skeptics should be willing to sit there, and hammer that out until the question is basically settled to the degree where a reasonable person would say, ‘Ok, yes, temperatures are increasing at basically such-and-such a rate per decade’… or else say, ‘No, the argument stops here. You can’t even prove the globe is warming. Why go any further?’ But what they do is the strategy so typical of denialism in general: not actually refute anything or provide a better method or better explanation: just try to conjure up some reasons for doubt, and stay sitting on them. Then they progress to the next argument… and whenever that’s not going so well, suddenly it’s right back to “skepticism” about the temperature records.
To quote the Skeptics’ Dictionary:
I don’t mean this to be an argument from authority: I mean it to be a very reasonable heuristic for a non-expert trying to make sense of things in the world.
As far as the Ludic Fallacy, I think it was? I’ve never heard of that one. No criticism of the argument intended here, but it strikes me as a ironic to hear this - given how many times confusing statistics have been used to try to discredit aspects of AGW theory by people like McIntyre and many others. One thing I like about Tamino (Grant Foster) is that he really has a nack for making the statistics in this issues somewhat intelligible. In any case, I will try to read up on it - but I think we will get back to the same problem I keep bringing up. If I/we don’t truly comprehend the statistics involved, I/we aren’t going to be able to assess whether they’re being used inappropriately in this instance, and it’s still going to have to go back to heuristics: what is the credibility of the source on this issue, is there any evidence of intrusive bias, what do other experts say, etc.
Finally, about fallacies in general: look, I’m not saying I never engage in fallacious reasoning or bad argumentative tactics. Course I do. But I think there are reasonable vs. unreasonable levels. When practically every representation of one’s opponent’s argument is a caricature, when relevant points and questions are constantly avoided, when questions are asked with literally no hint of interest when an answer is produced, when personal attacks are habitual, when one uses things like lymerics to constantly annoy the other participants in a discussion - I think it’s not unreasonable to say this person has gone off the rails into trolling. Sorry, I feel there’s peace now and don’t raise these issues to re-start anything, but you seem to be saying I’ve been employing fallacious reasoning all along - hence I’ve just been getting what I deserve - and I think it’s fair to defend myself against this assertion.
