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That's fairly ad hominem. Can you give some examples?

by cpr 11y ago

platz 11y ago
It's pretty obvious that there is a clear bias from the beginning, and the tone is revealing as well.
epistasis 11y ago
Interesting, you find my comment to be fairly ad hominem but you don't the slide deck you shared? Basically all the "data" and arguments that he's presenting are cherry picked to be on the edge of plausibility, but as soon as you poke at them at all they fall part. It's really just a standard piece of denialist schlock. For example on slide 4 look at his plot and compare to the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_of_the_Medieval_Warm_Period_and_Little_Ice_Age_in_IPCC_reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_of_the_Medieval_Wa... It's a bunch of canned and repeated arguments that are easily shot down, but doing each one takes so much time. It's like "debating" a creationist, shooting down an argument means that many more easily shot down arguments come right back up, with the denialist side somehow never loosing credibility while trying to assail the credibility of others. If somebody finds that slide deck interesting, please read other data too, it's a completely biased picture, meant to trick people. Something balanced like the IPCC will be far more solid information, with proper citations, that can be backed up.
- hueving 11y ago
  >Something balanced like the IPCC will be far more solid information, with proper citations, that can be backed up. How could an organization dedicated to a topic filled with people who dedicated their life to said topic be trusted to have a balanced view of whether or not that topic has an impact? Just purely from a conflict of interest perspective, it seems similar to asking for a balanced view of religion from the 'international panel of priests and pastors'.
  - epistasis 11y ago
    That seems like an argument for getting programming best practices advice from an auto mechanic. Climate scientists are not dedicated to advancing the idea of anthropogenic climate change, they are dedicated to studying the climate, where ever that leads them. If this were not true, then some of the contrarian scientists in the field would have much stronger criticisms of the work. As it is, their criticisms are relegated to rather minor details, without any good rebuttals of the primary thrust. If you want to make the claim that the IPCC is not balanced on this, then there should be much stronger criticisms of the science in the IPCC, rather than the easily knocked down trivialities that appear in denialist memes.
  - HiLo 11y ago
    What? So these otherwise very intelligent people, don't see the flaw with discrediting their own profession for the sake of getting respect? You think that is what's going on?
kzhahou 11y ago
No -- ad hominem is a personal attack unrelated to issue under discussion. Saying an author cherrypicked to arrive at a desired conclusion, is not that.
notahacker 11y ago
The most obvious weakness in it is that he criticises numerous regression models (and presumably knows how to build one himself) and even sneers at the concept, but his own arguments are all based on simplistic "the line looks different during the sunspot activity period" generalisations. Which isn't going to impress people on here that work with messy datasets on a daily basis, and know that once you've acknowledged multiple uncorrelated factors impact the variables, the shape of the basic scatter plot doesn't tell you very much. The scaling of the "to inform, not to scare" graph to show "normal CO2 limits in a confined space" is particularly silly since afaik absolutely no climate scientist has ever speculated we're all about to suffocate from the additional carbon dioxide released. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to his argument that climate forecasts are an inexact science, humanity is perfectly capable of living at higher average global temperatures and engineers might be better focusing attention on structural adjustment problems (like flooding and regional disruption to crops). But this is a polemic rather than a more compelling approach to reading the figures. And the idea mooted at the end that airline certification levels of certainty should be applied to all public policy decisions is just... amusing.

That's fairly ad hominem. Can you give some examples?

by cpr 11y ago

That's fairly ad hominem. Can you give some examples?

platz 11y ago

It's pretty obvious that there is a clear bias from the beginning, and the tone is revealing as well.

epistasis 11y ago

Interesting, you find my comment to be fairly ad hominem but you don't the slide deck you shared? Basically all the "data" and arguments that he's presenting are cherry picked to be on the edge of plausibility, but as soon as you poke at them at all they fall part. It's really just a standard piece of denialist schlock. For example on slide 4 look at his plot and compare to the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_of_the_Medieval_Warm_Period_and_Little_Ice_Age_in_IPCC_reports https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Description_of_the_Medieval_Wa... It's a bunch of canned and repeated arguments that are easily shot down, but doing each one takes so much time. It's like "debating" a creationist, shooting down an argument means that many more easily shot down arguments come right back up, with the denialist side somehow never loosing credibility while trying to assail the credibility of others. If somebody finds that slide deck interesting, please read other data too, it's a completely biased picture, meant to trick people. Something balanced like the IPCC will be far more solid information, with proper citations, that can be backed up.

hueving 11y ago
>Something balanced like the IPCC will be far more solid information, with proper citations, that can be backed up. How could an organization dedicated to a topic filled with people who dedicated their life to said topic be trusted to have a balanced view of whether or not that topic has an impact? Just purely from a conflict of interest perspective, it seems similar to asking for a balanced view of religion from the 'international panel of priests and pastors'.
- epistasis 11y ago
  That seems like an argument for getting programming best practices advice from an auto mechanic. Climate scientists are not dedicated to advancing the idea of anthropogenic climate change, they are dedicated to studying the climate, where ever that leads them. If this were not true, then some of the contrarian scientists in the field would have much stronger criticisms of the work. As it is, their criticisms are relegated to rather minor details, without any good rebuttals of the primary thrust. If you want to make the claim that the IPCC is not balanced on this, then there should be much stronger criticisms of the science in the IPCC, rather than the easily knocked down trivialities that appear in denialist memes.
- HiLo 11y ago
  What? So these otherwise very intelligent people, don't see the flaw with discrediting their own profession for the sake of getting respect? You think that is what's going on?

kzhahou 11y ago

No -- ad hominem is a personal attack unrelated to issue under discussion. Saying an author cherrypicked to arrive at a desired conclusion, is not that.

notahacker 11y ago

The most obvious weakness in it is that he criticises numerous regression models (and presumably knows how to build one himself) and even sneers at the concept, but his own arguments are all based on simplistic "the line looks different during the sunspot activity period" generalisations. Which isn't going to impress people on here that work with messy datasets on a daily basis, and know that once you've acknowledged multiple uncorrelated factors impact the variables, the shape of the basic scatter plot doesn't tell you very much. The scaling of the "to inform, not to scare" graph to show "normal CO2 limits in a confined space" is particularly silly since afaik absolutely no climate scientist has ever speculated we're all about to suffocate from the additional carbon dioxide released. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to his argument that climate forecasts are an inexact science, humanity is perfectly capable of living at higher average global temperatures and engineers might be better focusing attention on structural adjustment problems (like flooding and regional disruption to crops). But this is a polemic rather than a more compelling approach to reading the figures. And the idea mooted at the end that airline certification levels of certainty should be applied to all public policy decisions is just... amusing.