DAR
Let's unpack Mr. Rogers material and see how it holds up. In his title he boldly claims Dr. Hobson's "Arguments Often Misleading." Let's see if he can back that up.
BUD
Most Americans, not an “anti-scientific minority,” remain unconvinced of claims that human activity is the major cause of global warming.
DAR
Let's be frank, Buddy is the epitome of this "anti-scientific" crowd he speaks of. I say this because his article is littered from beginning to end with all of the standard cliche' misunderstandings of climate change that the most pedestrian global warming deniers have been peddling from the beginning. His errors are so basic and rudimentary they reveal he hasn't done a moment of research to check and see if his claims are true. He just naively repeats this misinformation he has heard, blissfully unaware (let's hope) of how ridiculously false it is.
Whether Buddy's anti-scientific position is shared by a minority or a majority of the American public is entirely irrelevant to the truth of the claim (ad populum fallacy), so I'll just ignore it.
BUD
The essay is typical political propaganda, not science. It ignores cogent objections to man-made (anthropogenic) global warming (AGW) dogma, cherry picks data, and spins disaster scenarios. It even begins with a whopper of a logical fallacy - argumentum ad hominen - attacking opponents as unscientific, rather than addressing the merits of their arguments.
DAR
More bold claims, zero substance yet. And first a pet peeve. If you are going to throw Latin phrases around to look smart then at least learn to spell them correctly (it's argumentum ad hominem). And once you've got that down, take a little more time and learn when they apply and when they don't. The ad hominem fallacy applies when you substitute argumentation with a personal attack. Dr. Hobson hasn't done that so he has not committed this fallacy. Pointing out that there is a "powerful anti-scientific minority of Americans" led by Senator Inhofe is a statement of fact. Pointing out that Buddy Rogers is terribly, profoundly, misinformed on the subject of climate change is also an observation I make, correctly, based upon easily demonstrable facts which are provided below, carefully referenced.
BUD
[Hobson's essay] could have presented argument for ignoring the antiscientific behavior of scientists (most infamously at East Anglia University) who suppressed inconvenient findings.
DAR
Buddy provides not a scrap of evidence in support of this assertion. He needs to update his propaganda. The scientific inquiries have been completed, the reports are in. Along with some minor caveats regarding sloppiness and some suggestions "an inquiry panel of leading scientists, nominated by the Royal Society,... concluded:
"We found them to be objective and dispassionate in their view of the data and their results, and there was no hint of tailoring results to a particular agenda.
"Their sole aim was to establish as robust a record of temperatures in recent centuries as possible."
Link
"no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit."
Link
"A separate review by Penn State University into accusations against Michael E. Mann cleared him of any wrongdoing, stating that "there is no substance" to the allegations against him."
Link PDF
"...the independent Science Assessment Panel... [found] absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever" and that "whatever was said in the emails, the basic science seems to have been done fairly and properly." He said that many of the criticisms and allegations of scientific misconduct had been made by people "who do not like the implications of some of the conclusions" reached by the CRU's scientists."
"...despite a deluge of allegations and smears against the CRU, this independent group of utterly reputable scientists have concluded that there was no evidence of any scientific malpractice."
The assertion that "inconvenient findings" were suppressed is a dishonest smear, now debunked by careful scientific review and only spread by those like Buddy who have a political agenda and lack knowledge of the facts of this case and the science in question. At this point the respectable people in media who have spread misinformation on this are apologizing. Is Buddy going to apologize for spreading misinformation? He should.
BUD
[Hobson's article] could have dealt forthrightly with the politicians’ misuse of the IPCC study...
DAR
Buddy provides no examples of "politicians misuse of the IPCC study." What politicians do is entirely irrelevant to science in question anyway.
BUD
[Hobson's article] could have disavowed the shallow opportunism of Al Gore, while making a logical case that Senator Imhofe[sic] should be considered as bad.
DAR
Buddy throws out the smear against Gore of "shallow opportunism" but he doesn't even attempt to back it up with a single example or reference. I am still waiting for someone to throw something at Al Gore that isn't based upon misinformation and more often, lies. I'll just point out that there is a reason why Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts and there is a reason why Inhofe will never have such and honor and instead will mostly receive well deserved derision.
BUD
Deceptive as it was, the essay was as good a pro-AGW argument as I’ve seen published.
DAR
Buddy does not even attempt to provide a single example of deception. So who is being deceptive? I agree Art's article was quite good. So when is Buddy going to provide a single example of these "Arguments Often Misleading" he promised us in his heading?
BUD
...according to a recent Rasmussen poll, 67 percent of Americans are unconvinced that humans cause global warming.
DAR
Buddy doesn't know how the ad hominem fallacy works (or how to spell it) but if he would like to learn a new Latin phrase correctly this time he might take the opportunity to familiarize himself with the Argumentum ad populum fallacy. I say this because he just committed it with bells on. Truth is not determined by how many people hold a certain belief. The American public is profoundly illiterate on scientific issues and this is especially compounded on the topic of climate change. As Dr. Hobson already pointed out this is largely because of an army of misinformed political hacks like Buddy Rogers who go around repeating mind numbingly bogus anti-scientific arguments that they neither understand nor care to take the time to try and understand.
Knowledge is specialized and this is especially the case with the complex subject of climatology. You don't consult a plumber about tuning a piano and you don't poll the American public to determine whether or not climate change is occurring. That's just dumb.
BUD
Skeptics are the majority. But they are not anti-scientific.
DAR
Almost without exception they are. Among those with specialized training in this field, the understanding that the earth is warming and humans are largely responsible is, with known degrees of uncertainty, settled science. I'll limit myself to three examples:
1) "[A] survey, conducted among researchers listed in the American Geological Institute's Directory of Geoscience Departments, "found that climatologists who are active in research showed the strongest consensus on the causes of global warming, with 97 percent agreeing humans play a role."
Link
2) "All "scientific bod[ies] of national or international standing [agree with] the basic findings of human influence on recent climate change.”
Link
Notice "all of them."
3) "A 2004 article by geologist and historian of science Naomi Oreskes summarized a study of the scientific literature on climate change.[87] The essay concluded that there is a scientific consensus on the reality of anthropogenic climate change. The author analyzed 928 abstracts of papers from refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003,... none of the abstracts disagreed with the consensus position, which the author found to be "remarkable."
Link
This is an extremely strong consensus. Maybe Buddy who is trained in financial advice is right and all of these trained climatologists and scientific institutions are wrong. I don't think reasonable people are going to think this is very likely.
BUD
Most recognize that CO2 clearly can be a greenhouse gas, albeita minor and inefficient one.
DAR
Buddy reveals his ignorance with this astonishing howler. How CO2 works to warm the earth was discovered in 1824 and was well studied and confirmed beyond dispute by 1896. Buddy's misinformation is so bad it's more than a century out of date! Gavin Schmidt, a
climatologist with NASA says of CO2:
"Without it, we'd be 33 degrees Celsius colder than we are."
Buddy may not know about Celsius is since he lives in the only country on the planet that doesn't still doesn't use the metric system,
so let's help him out. If it's a nice balmy 24 degrees Celsius (75.2 Fahrenheit) and we drop the temperature 33 degrees Celsius, we are now 15 degrees Fahrenheit. Without CO2, our balmy day just became 17F degrees below freezing. Since when is that a "minor and inefficient" greenhouse gas?! Buddy needs to update his talking points and maybe he should get informed about such basics BEFORE he writes columns in the newspaper and makes a fool of himself.
BUD
But they await an explanation of how man’s contribution of CO2, about 3 to 4 percent of atmospheric CO2, drives severe climate change,
DAR
This is misleading at best. C02 is a trace gas representing a tiny .04% of the earth's atmosphere (again completely refuting the notion that it's minor or inefficient). Importantly, nearly all of the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere in the last century or so, is "man's contribution." We know this by measuring isotopes and a host of other methods. Buddy might stop repeating talking points and educate himself about the science of how we know humans have raised our CO2 concentrations to the highest levels in about
two million years. Here's a good place to start:
How much of the recent CO2 increase is due to human activities?
BUD
when water vapor accounts for about 95 percent of the greenhouse effect and is over 99 percent naturally caused. Water vapor is, for AGW advocates, an inconvenient truth. So they ignore it.
DAR
Completely wrong. Every single comprehensive study of the earth's climate is going to (of course) include contribution from water vapor. Buddy again reveals he knows nearly nothing of this subject. For an introductory explanation see
here. This Scientific American article is also quite easy to understand. Of the "Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense" they chose make the one you are passing along here #1.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... n-nonsense
BUD
The majority wonders how it is that global temperatures dropped from the 1940s through the 1970s, with atmospheric CO2 rising.
DAR
Well this majority you keep speaking of are like you, having no training whatsoever in climatology. So we won't ask them. Instead,
best to look to the science. See
here and
What About Mid-Century Cooling? for a quick introduction.
BUD
Many recall how an early generation of inept or unethical scientists proclaimed man-made global cooling in the 1970’s.
DAR
Wrong again. Your claim is false yet a common canard passed around by deniers who haven't checked their claims. It's a favorite of commentator George Will. He isn't a climatologist either. Note:
"The fact is that around 1970 there were 6 times as many scientists predicting a warming rather than a cooling planet. Today, with 30+years more data to analyze, we've reached a clear scientific consensus: 97% of working climate scientists agree with the view that human beings are causing global warming."
Your claims stems from a single article in Newsweek. It's best to not get your science from coffee table news magazines, even when they are now, 35 years old.
BUD
That error doesn’t mean AGW proponents are wrong now.
DAR
No, it wouldn't. But as shown, the error was yours. The consensus in the 1970's was very strongly for warming.
BUD
But the media campaigns, the disaster scenarios, and the politics of personal destruction leveled against dissenters are not usually tactics of those who believe they have truth on their side.
DAR
Again, lots of assertions, not a single example to back it up. When are you going to get to those "Arguments Often Misleading" in Dr. Hobson's article? If they occur "often" you shouldn't have any trouble finding one. Why haven't you tried to show one yet?
BUD
Many skeptics know that the “Medieval Warming Period” was airbrushed out of the “hockey stick” chart that AGW fans loved so long.
DAR
Of course no denier discussion would be complete without an ignorant snort about at the hockey stick. That's #2 in the
above mentioned Scientific American article. Basically, all climate charts give us hockey sticks, you can make yourself aware of at least 10 others studies
here. There are many others. They're all hockey sticks and we live on the blade. Note:
"The truth is that whichever version of PCA you use, the hockey-stick shaped PC is one of the statistically significant patterns. There’s a reason for that: the hockey-stick shaped pattern is in the data, and it’s not just noise it’s signal."
Link
BUD
That long warming period - unaccompanied by an increase in man made CO2 - simply disappeared.
DAR
Wrong again. To begin with, it was regional, not global. Get informed.
BUD
Not only does this falsification result in overstating the influence of CO2, but it also makes any benefits of warming - that’s when Greenland earned its name as a lush and fertile agricultural land - vanish.
DAR
And now we get Greenland anecdotes from Erik the Red, "who was in exile and wanted to attract people to a new colony. He believed that you should give a land a good name so that people want to go there!
What the science says...
"The Greenland ice sheet has existed for at least 400,000 years. There may have been regions of Greenland that were 'greener' than today but this was not a global phenomenon."
See
Greenland Used to be Green. Another standard denier canard.
BUD
We skeptics want to know how CO2 is the major cause,when its increase has sometimes followed or coincided with increased temperatures as well as sometimes preceding them.
DAR
Well then you should read what climatologist have published for your benefit on this subject. Here are some links to help you out:
What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?
CO2 Lags Not Leads
CO2 lags temperature - what does it mean?
When you are through with those, there are lots more.
BUD
But we skeptics are open to being convinced. But by science, not by name calling, hysteria or ignoring inconvenient data and explanations.
DAR
You haven't shown a single example of "data and explanations" being ignored. You have only demonstrated that you can pass along the standard denier arguments that any high school novice can debunk in a few key strokes. When are you going to treat us to one of those "Arguments Often Misleading" in Dr. Hobson's article? Time is almost up and you haven't even tried.
BUD
Further many of us suspect that AGW is primarily convenient cover for another expansion of federal power.
DAR
No one is interested in what your politics lead you to "suspect" but rather what you can show regarding the science in question. So far you have only shown that you don't have even a rudimentary understanding of the science of climate change. As anyone can see, this stands in sharp contrast to Dr. Hobson's knowledge of the issue (and mine).
BUD
We remember how the real problems with our health care system went unaddressed, alternative plans ignored, and the people’s will subverted, all to justify passing a monstrous and counter-productive health care “reform” bill.
DAR
And now you want to talk about health care? How does that address Dr. Hobson's article?
BUD
Americans will use our freedom to decide individually,
DAR
No, America is a country of 330 million people and some things have to be done collectively. Addressing the problems brought about by climate change is one of those things we'll have to deal with collectively. But do feel free to help out individually. Perhaps buy a Prius. That's what I did.
BUD
despite the arrogance of a selfdefined elite, whether academic, media or whatever. Honest debate is welcome - no demanded.
DAR
Excellent. When would you like to begin the "honest debate?" You will need to leave at home all of this dishonest junk you brought along this time. You claimed Dr. Hobson's arguments are often misleading yet you can't provide a single example. You don't even try. That's not honest. To debate this topic you would first need to gain an introductory understanding of the issue. You haven't done that. You've only shown you can repeat easily refuted talking points that have nothing to do with science. That's not honest and it's not useful.
BUD
The genius of the American experiment, validated for over 200 years, is that all of us are wiser than any “elite” group of us Scientists must act like scientists, testing hypotheses, showing their work and leaving agendas at home.
DAR
Yes, that would have gotten us to the moon in 1969 and probably cured polio too. It's not "elite" scientists with "agendas" we need but rather Americans testing things at home, perhaps around the kitchen table, with vinegar and backing soda. Science is fun! Sorry, the idea that climatology is something the nonspecialist or complete novice can do at home is too ridiculous to even ridicule. I gave it my best shot.
BUD
And the media must report scientific controversies with balance and accuracy.
DAR
Well there's always Fox News, I hear they're fair and balanced. Oh wait, here is 42 pages of links showing
them and their ilk getting it all wrong on climate science. Hey, that's just like you! No wonder Americans are so confused. Or is it willful ignorance? It has to be at this point. Surely all of the honest GW deniers left your sinking boat some time ago.
BUD
Then, we the people will decide, through our individual actions, and we will decide wisely.
DAR
Do you mean wisely in the sense that you wrote your ridiculous, error filled article? I hope not. That wasn't very wise.
Careful readers will note that while you never did get around to giving us
a single example of "Arguments Often Misleading" in Dr. Hobson's article you did hoist upon us a great pile of your own misleading arguments. Pathetic.
D.
"I'm not a skeptic because I want to believe, I'm a skeptic because I want to know." --Michael Shermer