Re: Popular Science Comments Closed Forever
Posted: Fri Sep 27, 2013 9:35 pm
Pretty good. Realclimate is my usual source of debunking, but I've seen other climate realists use links from skepticalscience and I didn't see any mistakes.rj40 wrote:Schneibster, have you ever visited this site:
http://www.skepticalscience.com
What do you think of it?
I haven't looked since he let the deniers take over BAUT, and one of them kicked me off. He'd need to have a pretty good explanation of that. And I'd need to see him fix it. I doubt he cares enough about my opinion to bother. So I don't bother with him. For a while I called him the Bad Astronomer and Worse Climatologist.rj40 wrote:What about:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy.html
The actual title of the logical flaw/rhetorical trick should be "appeal to false authority." It's not a fallacy if the authority is in fact an established authority in the field, and even less a fallacy if they're a scientist who's made a career of it. Nobody wastes their career on lies except a politician.rj40 wrote:Would you/can you explain to me how more or less believing what the majority of scientists who specialize in the field say, cannot simply be dismissed as an argument from authority? I think I know why, but would like to read what you think.
Here are two sites that have extensive information on logical fallacies/rhetorical ploys for analysis. I find Nizhkor more concise, but Stephen's Guide more informative. There is also a popular psychology book called The Art of Clear Thinking by Rudolph Fleisch (think I got the spelling right) that examines these logical flaws as attempts to describe politics and advertising fallacies/ploys; it actually goes more in depth than either site, but is not nearly as comprehensive. The book may be out of print; it's worth your time to get a copy if so. You should also read Doug Rushkoff's Coercion.
http://onegoodmove.org/fallacy/welcome.htm "Stephen's Guide to the Logical Fallacies"
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ "The Nizhkor Project's Index of Fallacies"
Political ones. The Libertardians have taken over the management of most science sites, and all the atheism sites. They defend Darwin on one forum and deny global warming on another. It's schizophrenic, like believing in relativity and denying the law of gravity.rj40 wrote:What websites do you frequent where the majority of commenters agree with you, for the most part?
Above.rj40 wrote:And then, vice versa.
It's ten years late and a billion dollars short. They've managed to delay it long enough that it's going to be a slow disaster. Fools.rj40 wrote:I wouldn't worry too much, the person you probably didn't want to be President lost, and the folks you probably (on the whole) wanted to gain seats in the legislature, did. New laws are being suggested which seek to address AGW. Not as many as you might want, but more than zero. All in all, I would think you would be mildly happy.
I am currently predicting between 2.5 and 3.5 human deaths as a result of climate change, divided among heat death in the tropics, starvation due to growing climate moving to infertile land, flooding, and mega-typhoons and -hurricanes, by the end of the century.
We have one hope; luckily it's going great guns. We need to produce fuel from the atmosphere using sunlight and stop mining it out of the ground and burning it. We've got a bacterium that craps gasoline, an algae that stores diesel instead of fat, a rare earth catalyst that makes kerosene, and a carbon nanotube catalyst that makes gasoline; all use sunlight, water, and CO2 from the air, and either grow more-or-less naturally or are more-or-less infinitely reusable.
I hope one of them works; fortunately for me I'm unlikely to be alive at the end of this decade, much less the 2020s.
Good luck.
realclimate, desmogblog, and NASA/GISS are mine. Of course I'm a programmer so I can actually read the GISS AOGCM code directly and check if they've left anything out; they haven't. What amuses me is most of the deniers actually know enough science to know whether the model is correct or not; obviously they're ignoring reality. I've watched a lot of software projects get wrecked by idiots just like these.rj40 wrote:Visiting here can be, in some ways, like that part of C.S. Lewis's book where the character visits Hell. Was it "The Pilgrim's Regess?" I can't remember. Anyway, I don't think you are going to change many minds here, and gloating won't solve much. But what would help me is some good AGW sites.
My ability to change minds depends on two factors:
1. Peoples' lack of understanding of science.
2. Peoples' ability to learn new things.
The deniers are the ones who are bad at this and I have neither the motivation nor the interest in trying any more. Deniers, enjoy hell. You'll be there to see it; looks like a self-punishing foolishness to me. They all seem to think only brown people are going to die of it.