Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Debating Warmers

Debating warmers is very frustrating because they are so poorly informed. They claim the debate is over because scientists have reached consensus. This constitutes a logical fallacy known as appealing to authority. Moreover, science and consensus are mutually exclusive processes. Science is about questioning, experimenting, testing, and validating. Consensus is a political process of compromise and conformity.

Their letters of last week claimed authority from the UN’s IPCC report released earlier this month. They all overlooked that the science report they were supposedly quoting hasn’t even been completed yet, let alone published. Rather, the Summary for Policymakers written by government-paid delegates and bureaucrats is what had been released. The scientists who actually conducted the studies had no input or review of this political summary. Unsurprisingly, the reason these bureaucrats state they have 90% certainty that humans are driving climate change is because they openly state that the science report will be edited and modified to conform to the Summary’s statements before it is released. No field other than climate science could release a summary of a report that hadn’t yet been written and do so with a straight face. This is unabashed fraud.

The alarmists claim that the only explanation for the apparent increase in recent temperatures is because of human-generated CO2. Because the two events occur together, alarmists say nothing else can explain it. Here, they are committing the logical fallacy of confusing correlation with causation. This is nothing more than very shoddy critical thinking on the part of the alarmists.

With no evidence to support their claims, alarmists are desperate to silence critics. The Royal Society, closely in concert with Senators Rockefeller and Snowe, tried to intimidate Exxon-Mobil into halting funding for skeptical studies. Grist Magazine is calling for Nuremburg-style trials for “climate change deniers.” The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen thinks any meteorologist who questions human-driven global warming should be de-certified and denied employment. The Democrat governors of Oregon and Delaware are trying to fire their State Climatologists because they won’t proclaim the new state religion of global warming.

Studies demonstrating that oceans are losing heat content, and experimentally proving that cosmic rays and solar irradiance drive climate change, were not accepted for the UN’s report because of an arbitrary cutoff date. These studies would interfere with warmers ability to blame humans and to find capitalist witches to burn in atonement. Of course, this is New England.