Re: OMG Zombie keeps rising @ btrower
@42:
You really have not made an argument there.
Re: "Climate denial"
This is not even a thing. It is an unsavory pejorative term invented by frustrated alarmists simply unable to articulate a coherent argument or answer any particular criticism. Beyond that, it is a fallacious mutant combination of ad hominem attack and appeal to the crowd. You might as well through in a side of vericundiam or misercordium. Your a distillation of the argument that is put forth by alarmists and they are absolutely incapable of seeing its flaws. You cannot build spaceships and robots on a philosophy that ignores empiricism and attacks your critics for saying so.
Re: "Creationists"
This one is similar to the 'denial' one. It is particularly rich because it is the argument from Evolution Through Natural Selection that crushes the alarmist theories. It is deeply ironic that the side adopting creationist tactics and dismissing the lessons of Darwin are attempting to tar their critics with the label 'creationist'. People who simply believe in Evolution without understanding it stand on no higher ground than people who believe in Creationism. Like the Evolution/Creation debate, this one is more heat than light from the polar extremes and people at the polar extremes display a mean spirit that extends to deliberately ignoring or characterizing their opponents arguments.
For the record, I am a strict Evolutionist, not because I 'believe' it, but because I *understand* it. That is clearly more than we can say for the extreme alarmists who have no inkling suspicion about why canalization over geologic time makes it exceedingly unlikely that the alarmist theory is correct. Thermageddon could happen. We should never say never, but the probability is small to the point of vanishing, surely much below the danger of a meteor strike or a life-threatening change in the sun.
Re: "anti vaxxers"
As one can imagine, I am pretty much on board with vaccination. By coincidence my family is midway through getting them now. Like evolution, this is not a matter of belief with me it is a matter of understanding how it works and liking the cost/benefit trade-off. Unlike alarmists, I would not dismiss the concerns of people about vaccination out of hand without engaging them and despite my understanding and belief I would still give them a fair hearing. Besides, to the extent that 'anti vaxxers' are wrong they follow the same broken lines of reasoning as alarmists. You belong together.
Re: "all use the same techniques you do"
Well, you are a pot calling a kettle black without even realizing it is not a kettle. Techniques? You mean demanding evidence and reasoned argument consonant with my understanding of the laws governing the universe? Demanding parsimony? Criticizing sloppy reasoning, invalid statistics and politics masquerading as science? Sure. People who understand scientific pursuit realize that scientists are skeptics by definition. Alarmists think of 'skeptic' as a dirty word on a par with holocaust denier. They are entirely mixed up with respect to this.
I admit to a certain stridency with my argumentation but I generally put forth fairly straightforward, logically coherent arguments consistent with evidence and comfortably under the umbrella of science rather than sophist rants. Misusing language and name calling happens on both extreme sides, but if we have to pick a side that owns this, it is surely the alarmist camp. It seems they quite simply cannot disagree without invective.
Re: "The facts are so plain that AGW happens it takes a fool of epic proportions to believe otherwise."
Indeed. Is that, then, the entirety of your case to support condemning people in the third world to death, perverting the world economy to the tune of trillions of dollars, and (ironically) damaging the biosphere? For the record, it would be charitable to say your argument is a bit thin.
There are Nobel laureates who disagree with you. I mentioned one in particular in an earlier comment. Even were your conclusions true, the above argument does not support them or anything else except yet another example of alarmists unable to articulate a real argument and unable to understand why that is not OK. I mean it is OK as a rhetorical device if that is all you bring to the table, but it is invalid as argument. You lose the formal debate by abdicating your responsibility to bring a cogent argument to the table.
Skeptics are largely unpaid volunteers, saying what they say because they believe it is the right thing to do. They have stood against a withering assault on world politics and the house of science because they have a deep conviction that things like 'cap and trade' are wrong and they feel they must take a stand. They have, without funding, assembled facts and arguments and criticisms of the Global Warming narrative against much backlash. People like the Climategate whistle-blower have endured savage criticism and condemnation from the establishment hierarchy in order to bring what they believe to be the truth to light.
Alarmists tend to be blind believers or people with compromised interests. However, in fairness there are a lot of honest people who believe on the basis of what they have been told. Were the assembly of facts they have been told and the supporting arguments sound I would believe too. We part company because someone like me is skeptical until they see proof and there is no proof of CAGW because it is not real.
For the record, most thoughtful skeptics are not denying the evidence that we are rebounding from the little ice age and that the world has warmed. To some extent, we agree on many of the facts, but we disagree on how to interpret them. Does CO2 cause any warming at all? Probably. Our evidence is not very good for this, but it seems plausible. Do humans affect the climate? We really don't know, but I think most skeptics would be willing to allow that we might have a little effect. Thus far, the skeptical view is the one that has been the most predictive and the best at rationalizing the reliable data (not nearly what they think it is, BTW).
If we take facts supported by evidence and sound argument and put them together to create a picture of Global Warming consistent with the body of science and the real empirically testable world, we find that the world is likely warming a little and that we might have an effect. However, the odds on favorite bet ten years ago was that CO2 would have a negligible impact on climate and that climate would stay within perfectly ordinary limits consistent with the null hypothesis. That was the evidence a decade ago, five decades ago and it is the evidence today.
The 'bedrock' of alarmism is the IPCC summary, a political document. The statements from scientist organizations endorsing the Global Warming narrative are political ones, not scientific. To the extent that I know we have sound data, those political statements are not in line with the members they claim to represent. The notion that '97%' of scientists endorse the Global Warming narrative is nonsense on its face; easily debunked. The fact that so many alarmists present that argument at all shows that they have a profound innumeracy and an uncritical credibility that calls the rest of their beliefs into question.
My background makes me confident that thermageddon has a negligible probability of happening and that current efforts to stop it are politically and financially motivated in their entirety backed by dupes who have trouble with logic and numbers and are too trusting for their own good.
Don't trust me. Don't trust them. Dig into this yourself. I am entirely confidant that someone in possession of the facts and their faculties will agree with me. Something happening? Maybe. Important? Not likely. Actionable on global scale that raises the cost of energy? Absolutely not.