Okay, so, being a gluten for punishment, and as a lifetime continuous student of trying to parse arguments logically... I watched the video linked in the post...
Postby marshallb66 on November 25, 2009, 6:21 am
1) This is a bunch of notes on the video... it may not be in the correct sequence, it assumes you watched the video and it is fresh in your mind (as I did not time reference notes to the video itself).
2) I do not want to hear rubbish on misspelling (if you want we can have a spelling bee for all those so inclined). Don't want to hear about grammatical mistakes either.
3) It is not well organised as I do not wish to spend time doing so... if you want to read further do so, if not I do not care.
I myself probably (well most likely) made mistakes in the notes.
4) And yes.. maybe I should "get a life"
5) oh yes, I will not be reading any more from threads on GW from Udonmap, as I do not want to waste my life completely. Ignoring GW, CimateGate, etc etc
If somebody wants to PM me on logical mistakes I made, I would be happy to learn, as I am certainly far from perfect and happy to be educated, but I do not want to hear any more nonsense as in this video.
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Introduction...
He is a writer, columnist, inventor, and educated in some Cambridge school.
Educated in what major. Mathematics? There is no mention of what his formal
education was in. How does this make him a climatologist? How does this bio,
which the narrator mentioned was a full bio, no admissions, make him an authority
on anything in any field of science? Even if he was a meteorologist or something
he would have more authority. He published in scientific works, which?
They forgot to mention them. He was an "advisor" to Margret Thatcher. Hmmmmmm
"Lord Monckton, the Nth something from somewhere. Being a "Lord" does not make you an authority on the subject at hand either. So, no points whatsoever on his authority as a climatologist then.
He quickly starts to evoke religious passages to win over his audience.
Quoting the Bible makes you an authority on science? hmmmm In my opinion, bringing Biblical references into a discussion supposedly about the science behind climatology shows that the actual science is not being taken seriously.
To summarise it a bit...
This man commits many logical fallacies throughout his presentation, and yet
has the audacity to point out the logical fallacies of others.
Some of the Fallacies committed in his presentation...
Appeals to emotions (scare tactics, religious fervour, us versus them,...)
Irrelevant appeal to humour
Fallacies of Distraction...
Slippery Slope Fallacy (Global government, etc)
False dilemma - do nothing or do everything
From Ignorance - because climate is a chaotic system, we can know nothing
Changing the subject
Ad Hominem attacks all over the place
"Poisoning the well" throughout
Avoiding the Issue (HIV, DDT, etc)...conspiracy
Appeals to Authority
Style over substance (compare his Lordships presentation to that of say Sam Harris)
Appeals to Motives..
Prejudicial Language (religion, environmentalism)
Consequences (economic implications)
Appeals to Pity (children, malaria)
Inductive Fallacies...
Suppressed Evidence Fallacy
Biased statistics (unrepresentative samples)
False Analogy, Faulty Comparison Fallacy, apples to oranges
Fallacies Involving Statistical Syllogisms...
Accident, generalisation is applied when circumstances suggest there should be an exception. (English temperature charts, Japanese temperature/radiance charts)
Quibbling Fallacy
I probably missed a few... I am tired
Most important points to me...
1) He did not mention why so many scientific organizations around the globe accept the IPCC conclusion. He attempted to show that there was no consensus. His attempt was the same as that used in "Creationist" arguments, pick a few outlier scientists and get them to refute particular parts of the theory. Same as the Tobacco "debate." Same mentality.
He wants to engender a view that there is NOT a consensus. But, as per my last post, there IS a consensus. His "argument?" is similar to the God of the gaps combined with, there is a conspiracy afoot, science is malleable...tweak it this way or that way. As if scientists are lay, gullible people. The models are NOT perfect, the data is not complete, therefore we should not care about what the models have to say.
Please tell me why, tens of thousands of real scientists conclude that the IPCC report is correct. Are they all conspiring? Scientists are noble men who want to discover the TRUTH.
2) His conclusion sums it all up quite nicely.
World government conspiracy... slippery slope fallacy.
Scare tactics. This IS NOT an argument about climate change. Scare scare,
and Heaven and Hell. Beautiful, this credulous religious audience have been sucked in completely by
the applause he received. I myself have fallen for conspiracy theories
so I understand how easy it is
to buy these stories. But this is science people, not who killed Kennedy!!
Genetic Fallacy - IPPC (tries to use the underlying dislike of the UN) therefore all these scientists must be ignored. Once again, he is allied to one side of the political/economic spectrum. Or perhaps it is a Composition Fallacy, that is UN politicians are bad therefore UN scientists are bad.
Authority - He says the head of the UN IPCC is a railroad engineer, therefore you can not trust the report. So, every CEO needs to be an engineer/scientist in the products he makes/sells? The head of NASA needs to be a scientist, I thought they were administrators? I assume an engineer can administer a large project as well as say... a politician who worked for Ms Thatcher
Uses religion - Genesis - his audience is religious (statistical probability in MN) so he uses religious quotes and latin to gain support of his audience. Gaining respect of audience for quoting from theist literature?
Genesis a book that if taken literally, goes against every discipline of science, but I am sure the audience gave His Lordship more authority on climatology because he has studied the Bible. Science is humbug, ignore it, and the scientists. God has a plan
(a bit of straw man for his Lordship)
Use of Loaded language throughout (GW bedwetters, communist, cowards, wimps, leftists, tree huggers etc)
These are tactics unbecoming of his Lordship. Constantly deriding his opponents. These are not arguments, just wonderful ways of winning over your audience.
He is speaking for "Free Trade" group? He obviously has an agenda of his own. But most scientists, as the gentleman mentioned himself, seek the truth. If he wants to use genetic fallicies, then he should also mention how he himself is biased.
Banning DDT was a terrible thing? Come on...
50K->1M died because they could not use DDT for malaria. DDT causes genetic
damage!!! If he wants to do a calculation, promoting indiscriminate DDT usage,
I think he is going to have a difficult time of that.
http://www.nrdc.org/health/pesticides/hcarson.asp AND WHAT HAD THIS GOT TO DO WITH CLIMATE FRICKING CHANGE!!!! Poisoning the well... oh those bad people, conspiracy, etc... how about he spends his time creating a good climate model than making these speeches? Something useful!
HIV - what has any of this got to do with climate change? It is a conspiracy of the LEFT, the communists. Build up the audience to believe that was a conspiracy, so this must be the same BAD people conspiring again. Somehow I do not recall climatologists involved in the HIV science. I must have missed that somewhere. Avoiding the issue.
His whole modus operandi seems to be to make it a conspiracy theory... those bad people are at it again. Those scientists, they know nothing, I am the authority. Sure! Then please write a climate model to predict what will happen in the next ten years, we will continue on the way to fixing the climate problem, if after 10 years, your model predicts the reality better than others, we shall assume you are correct. You have done nothing to help the situation except sow seeds of doubt in credulous people to continue your economic/political status quo in the world. My two bits, yet again.
He mentions a judgement in court against Al Gore's movie. I looked into this ruling and it seems it was not quite as terrible a ruling as they would point out. Semantics. This man takes many many things out of context. Quibbling Fallacy
He mentioned a Start Point fallacy, but he goes from using more data, to using less data. Why did he not go back in time? Instead he went forward where you get a smaller and smaller data set. He says it "is a bogus statistical technique." Linear regression, come on? Please tell that to the people who play stock market by technical indicators. He accentuates the short term trend-line, and picking his starting points as well, to show what he wants to show. Statistical analysis is bunk
Con con.
He does not mention the End Point Fallacy he committed... like speaking about a chart you are presenting as if the data is current, when the end point of the chart is decades old
Presenting skewed data again.
Apparently he does not understand the scientific method, refining the theory, models as better/more data becomes available and the climate is better understood. He goes on to say, since the models differ as to the temperature outcome (although as I recall they all pointed to increases in temperature, and differ on magnitude) then we just can not trust any of them. The whole thing should be thrown out, we should stick our heads in the sand. That is his pro-status quo statement. Perhaps this ties in with the Biblical references, as in, God has a plan
we don't need to THINK, and do SCIENCE. Well that is a straw man for his Lordship.
Lying to children. Learning from Hitchens
Evoking sympathy fallacy, as he mentions others doing, hypocritical to say the least.
One thing we KNOW is that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. That is undeniable!
He subtly implies that CO2 is not a green house gas, and warming precedes CO2 increases in the data. But, it is provable that CO2 causes warming of the air. He uses the temperature rise follows CO2 rise in the data. Scientists already know that there are many things that can kick off a change in climate (such as changes in the Earth's orbit), that will warm or cool the planet, "and then" the CO2 rising/falling will accelerate the trend. Without CO2 the temperature changes could never have been as dramatic as they were due to the initial mechanism. It is a reinforcing feedback mechanism in those cases! Biased statistics, not presenting the facts, this is not being honest about the science.
Showing a chart of English temperature, and forgetting we are talkig about the global temperature. Comparing apples to oranges. Local variations in temperature do not matter to the global trend.
He points to a report on the Greenland ice sheets (by laser altimeter), to show that the ice is actually growing in depth.
He does not mention that all the other studies show the ice sheets lowering, and that this report has been reconciled with the others (increased atmospheric moisture and precipitation and/or shifting storm tracks forced by enhanced greenhouse gases (IPCC 2007)).
Then he tries to use pictures of sensors, with snow around them to PROVE ice level is rising. Before picture, has the sensor standing tall, after pictures show the sensor having snow up to it ears. First, he doesn't know when the pictures were taken... after a storm perhaps? Snow is not an ice sheet thank you, and a few pictures of sensors, that is not science, that is con-artistry. Second, if the sensors are ON the ice sheet, and the WHOLE ice sheet is reducing in depth, then how would you be able to tell from a picture of the sensor, that it had risen or fallen? Ridiculous! It is like many commercials, before and after, "before" the picture is dark, the model wears ugly clothing and is not smiling. The "after" picture is bright, the model is smiling, new clothes, etc etc. People are easily manoeuvred by this tactic. Pattern recognition. But, in fact, as I mentioned, because the sensor sits on the ice sheet, you can tell nothing by taking a picture of a sensor!! How credulous one must be to believe that, but the audience was impressed
Tracks in the desert, missile trucks,... invade
Sunspots causing GW? This has been debunked by mainstream science for a long time. He used another chart where the data stopped in 1980, because the correlation between sunspot activity and temperature rise stopped there. If he would have used data to 2007 the correlation would have been shown to break down completely. He failed to mention this fact to the audience, that he used decades old data, once again. Biased presentation of data. Yet, he once again has the audacity to call others LIARS!!
Solar radiance, Japan sensors, correlation!=causation... obviously if the local radiance goes up, the temperature goes up as well. Local versus global yet again. Quibbling Fallacy.
Scale 1/10,000 of atmosphere is CO2... how can it cause a problem. Fallacy of size. Biased statistics fallacy. Laymen will take this as a serious point but not a scientist. Example, a virus is extremely tiny, yet can kill you quite easily!! Biased statistics presented...etc etc
He used temperature charts 20+ years old to show that the Medieval warm period had temperatures higher than today. Of course since the dramatic increase in temperatures have been most pronounced since then, he is presenting data skewed to his cause yet again. Biased presentation of extremely important data. That is LYING!! Not showing current data, taking segments of data, and speaking about the "temperatures now" as if it was the data to this date (or even remotely close to the date of the presentation)!! The data was decades old.
Then he goes on to compare the medieval warming chart he used, with a chart that seems to be a temperature anomaly chart, once again comparing apples to oranges. One is absolute temp, one is deviation data.
He makes a point of errors in IPCC charts, and reports. There are errors in many scientific reports. They are not mathematical proofs being presented. Misspelling something does not make the report wrong! He actually made a point of spelling errors in a chart title...made a joke, audience laughed...hahaha... these IPCC people are fools... please! Fallacy of Quibbling and Ad Hominem attacks again.
I do not know enough about climatology to say much of anything about the SCIENCE of it, but I know that this presentation is an attempted con, using con-artist tactics throughout.
Sometimes I am happy we do not have pure democracies if it is so easy to fool people. I even believed that Sadam had those WMD
Thank you GWB, and people like His Lordship.
it must be the Swine flu injection.. 
