Denier weirdness: Eric Worrall on putting scientists in charge...

At WUWT today Eric Worrall has mixed up politics and science into a logical fallacy (archived here). He is complaining about the US President suggesting that political leaders take heed of climate science experts, rather than spout nonsense from charlatans and science deniers. Eric implied that Obama was saying that climate scientists should be "running the country". Yes, deniers are weird.

Eric wrote an article under the headline: "Why don’t we put Climate Scientists in Charge of the Country?". Underneath he wrote:

President Obama recently gave a speech, in which he seemed to suggest that politicians should subordinate their decisions to the opinions of scientists. My question – why don’t we cut out the middleman, and put the scientists directly in charge?

No. That wasn't what Obama was suggesting. What he was saying was that political leaders should not spread lies and make up stuff to deceive the public about climate science. They should not cavalierly dismiss the findings of experts in any field.

An internally inconsistent straw man from the Cornwall Alliance

A few months ago the pseudo-religious science-denying cult the Cornwall Alliance posted a bunch of denialist videos on YouTube. I didn’t watch most of them, though a few hundred people have.  One of them did catch my eye. It had the title: Greener on the Other Side - Attacking the Person, Not the Argument, Is Wrong.

I liked the message, however it struck me as a possible example of a straw man logical fallacy. Still, I wondered if there were going to be examples given where the research was sound, but was criticised solely because of the funding source. (I realised it was probably too much to hope that the Cornwall Alliance would be telling fake sceptics to stop attacking climate scientists and instead read their research.) Anyway, I watched the entire one minute and thirty second video almost through to the end (missing only the final long promo). I thought I'd check to see if the argument was supported by examples or if it was just another logical fallacy typical of science deniers.

There weren’t any examples given. It was pure straw man through and through. However it turned out to be more than just a straw man fallacy. The very short video contradicted itself. Below is the transcript so you can see for yourself.

Is there a denial of twilight? - with Judith Curry and Mario Loyola

Earlier this week Judith Curry claimed that the "climate movement" is in twilight. Her headline was the deniosaur's plaintive hope "Twilight of the Climate Change Movement". I don't know what was going through Judith's mind when she wrote that. Was it that global warming will go away soon? Was it that the science of the past two centuries is nothing more than a "movement"? Whatever it was, it is evidence that Judith wants to continue to cement her place in the science denial movement.

Judith's evidence of twilight or movement or something was a copy and paste from an article by a science denier from the USA called Mario Loyola (who gets some minor mentions at DeSmog Blog). Judith emphasised some of the passages she liked, which were straight from the climate conspiracy handbook. She wrote:

I excerpted about a third of Loyola’s essay, highlighting the parts that I find most insightful. 

(I'm not sure Judith's excerpting without any substantive critique or analysis would pass the fair use test.) I read Mario Loyola's article at The American Interest (you only get one shot before you have to pay). It was your run-of-the-mill gish gallop complaining about efforts to mitigate global warming, with the sciency bits mostly about "ice age" and "CO2 is plant food". Mario wants us to adapt to multi-meter sea level rise rather than reduce the impact of climate change.

Judith said she highlighted the bits that she found insightful. Here's my take:

Logical fallacies and conspiracy theories from Rick Wallace at WUWT

As you probably know, five telltale techniques of science deniers have been documented. These are: fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry-picking and conspiracy theorising. This article is about an example of logical fallacies and conspiracy theories.

Red herrings and non sequiturs - logical fallacies

A guest at WUWT today (archived here) has decided that climate science is a hoax because:

1. there are differences of opinion among biologists about the definition of species, and
2. Lubos Motl's blog suggests there are still things being learnt about quantum physics.

Now you might wonder what this has to do with climate science. It doesn't. I'd say it's both a red herring and a non sequitur. Fake sceptics might not be much chop at science, but they excel at logical fallacies. This one, who goes by the name of Rick Wallace has decided that:

...in real science any state of agreement is labile at best – and establishing a consensus is about the last thing on peoples’ minds. I would go so far as to say that under these conditions, as often as not, a leading idea is a target to take aim at rather than a flag to rally ‘round.

What he has decided in his wisdom is that climate science is a hoax because scientists agree that greenhouse gases are what keeps the Earth warm.

WUWT's unethical use of the most vulnerable, denying them clean energy

One thing few would accuse Anthony Watts (or any science disinformer) of is applying ethics. Today is no exception. Unethical Anthony has a hypocrisy posing as "care" in an article with a headline:"The Ethics of Climate Change" (archived here).

He's using an article by someone called Bob Lyman** to pretend that letting poorer nations sink under rising seas is good for them. Once again he is hosting someone arguing that letting people starve from drought-caused famine, die from heat exhaustion or thirst, or suffocate under heavy smog, will be better than helping them modernise, survive and thrive with lots of clean energy.

Anthony Watts brings logical fallacies to ancient Peruvian climate migrants

It was only a couple of days ago that Anthony Watts asked for feedback and one of his readers leftturnandre wrote:

June 15, 2014 at 8:34 am
Got only a second now, but the very first thing that comes into mind: don’t allow fallacies. Don’t go down to the level of the opposition. Keep on the high grounds. 

Anthony Watts builds a straw man

Anthony didn't listen. Today he's built a strawman fallacy, writing:

One of the favorite boogeyman arguments used in climate alarmism is that climate has been stable for thousands of years, and that our recent industrialized era emissions will result in climate tipping point. However, this study in the Proceeding of the National Academies of Science suggest that climate disruption caused people in the Central Andes to migrate to find a better climate over a thousand years ago.

That's a strawman fallacy because he's misrepresenting the science just so he can tear it down. It's not that local climates haven't changed. It's that overall the world has, until now, had relatively little change since human civilisation began. Much less than what's to come. It's also quite silly because he's calling on that same science to show that climates have changed in different parts of the world at different times. So which does he believe? Climate science or climate science? His poor little brain must be doing cartwheels.

Is Anthony Watts now a greenhouse effect denier?

Anthony jumps to another logical fallacy in his second paragraph, writing:

This posited bout of climatic fluctuation occurred before anyone knew what carbon dioxide was. So what was the driver then? Surely it wasn’t CO2 levels, which according to James Hansen and Bill McKibben who say“safe” levels are below 350 parts per million, which according to this graph from CDIAC, was below 300ppm during the period of study. 

This time he's arguing that climate science attributes all climate change to a change in atmospheric carbon dioxide. He's implying that because droughts in what is now Peru in the relatively recent past (geologically speaking) weren't caused by a change in atmospheric CO2, then the current global warming can't be caused by increased CO2.

It looks as if Anthony Watts has become a greenhouse effect denier - which at other times he's denied.

Climate migrations in pre-Columbian southern Peru

Although the stray WUWT-er might think it, going by Anthony's silly lead in, the paper itself is not new climate science. These climate events have been known about for quite a long time. What it is presenting is evidence of human migration as a result of those climate changes. It's an anthropological study by a large team led by Lars Fehren-Schmitz of the University of California Santa Cruz.

Some of the paper is described at Phys.org:

To gain a clearer understanding of early Nasca, Wari and Tiwanaku peoples living in various parts of what is now Peru, the researchers collected DNA samples from 207 mummies found in both coastal and mountainous parts of the region. Mitochondrial analysis and Bayesian modeling indicated that people that had been living near the coast began migrating to the mountains sometime around 640 BC. They also found evidence of a reverse migration as people from the mountains migrated towards the coast around 1200 AD.

From the WUWT comments

Like Anthony Watts, many of the deniers at WUWT are not able to differentiate between local climate change and global climate change.

ferdberple says:

June 18, 2014 at 10:28 am
climate science 101. any climate change that can’t be attributed to humans must be due to volcanoes. we can tell how big the volcanoes must have been by how much climate change there was. In this case a big volcano must have started erupting in ∼640 AD and ended in ∼1200 AD. the cannot be connected to the medieval warm period, because this change in south America, as well as the change in Europe, even thought they were at similar times, were both only regional. global changes only occur when humans are involved.

Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7 is very wrong when he says:

June 18, 2014 at 10:26 am
So maybe these were really the “first climate change refugees” ?

TAG demonstrates a brain that works some of the time at least, and says:

June 18, 2014 at 10:33 am
Since the Little Ice Age in Europe was coincident with the 30 Years War, these findings should not be unexpected. The 30 Years War ended with the Treaty of Westphalia. This treaty created the concept of the sovereign nation state which shapes our world today. So it is no surprise that climate change can have dramatic and long lasting political and societal effects.
One thing that we should all remember the CO2 or not, climate plays an important part in our history and that even relatively slight climate changes can have large effects. natural variability can drive the course of history fro centuries. Don’t let the hype from climate activists and third team activist scientists distract us from this fact.

Chris B is a good little WUWT denier and says:

June 18, 2014 at 10:59 am
I’d like a couple million and a super computer to find out where all the SUV’s and coal plants went.

Pathway is also scoring brownie points from Anthony Watts and says:

June 18, 2014 at 11:01 am
If it doesn’t fit the agenda it is irrelevant. 

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Lars Fehren-Schmitz, Wolfgang Haak, Bertil Mächtle, Florian Masch, Bastien Llamas, Elsa Tomasto Cagigao, Volker Sossna, Karsten Schittek, Johny Isla Cuadrado, Bernhard Eitel, and Markus Reindel. "Climate change underlies global demographic, genetic, and cultural transitions in pre-Columbian southern Peru", doi: 10.1073/pnas.1403466111