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Soon, the British press will print the shocking revelation that there is no such thing as "weather", and never has been. Edit: ...and I'm at -2. Guess nobody e

Soon, the British press will print the shocking revelation that there is no such thing as "weather", and never has been. Edit: ...and I'm at -2. Guess nobody else remembers that the same British press hyping climate denialism now is the British press which hyped the vaccine/autism link a few years ago? Science journalism in general is bad, but the British papers make most others look like peer-reviewed journals by comparison...

KirinDave 17y ago
It does seem like the register spun this fairly hard. Especially in the first half where they talk about the data as if it disagreed with the IPCC and then points out that the IPCC agrees with that assessment.
Tichy 17y ago
Sounds like a good idea for an Onion article :-)
CWuestefeld 17y ago
If you think an argument is wrong, present the logic and/or evidence to support your side. Meta-discussion doesn't go very far and specifically, ad hominem arguments like discrediting the messenger doesn't do anything to address the veracity of a story -- at least not from the perspective of rhetoric and formal logic. By way of example (and not to say that "two wrongs make a right"), an argument always used by climate-change believers (is there a better term? I don't want to say "supporters") is that they must be considered in the right because a preponderance of scientists agree with them. Yet recently, we've seen that those books were cooked, and that fewer scientists than they claimed were in agreement. Now, does the fact that we now know they were acting unethically mean that we should simply discard everything they've said? I think not; it simply means that we must apply a greater degree of skepticism.
- ubernostrum 17y ago
  Do not confuse source criticism with the ad hominem fallacy; if certain sources have, in the past, been inaccurate or unreliable, then it is relevant and proper to point this out and to treat such sources with caution. In this case, the criticism is that the sources -- a collection of popular British papers -- have in the past been extremely unreliable in reporting on scientific issues (example: the alleged link between childhood vaccination and autism), and a humorous comment was used to drive home the point.

KirinDave 17y ago

It does seem like the register spun this fairly hard. Especially in the first half where they talk about the data as if it disagreed with the IPCC and then points out that the IPCC agrees with that assessment.

Tichy 17y ago

Sounds like a good idea for an Onion article :-)

CWuestefeld 17y ago

If you think an argument is wrong, present the logic and/or evidence to support your side. Meta-discussion doesn't go very far and specifically, ad hominem arguments like discrediting the messenger doesn't do anything to address the veracity of a story -- at least not from the perspective of rhetoric and formal logic. By way of example (and not to say that "two wrongs make a right"), an argument always used by climate-change believers (is there a better term? I don't want to say "supporters") is that they must be considered in the right because a preponderance of scientists agree with them. Yet recently, we've seen that those books were cooked, and that fewer scientists than they claimed were in agreement. Now, does the fact that we now know they were acting unethically mean that we should simply discard everything they've said? I think not; it simply means that we must apply a greater degree of skepticism.

ubernostrum 17y ago
Do not confuse source criticism with the ad hominem fallacy; if certain sources have, in the past, been inaccurate or unreliable, then it is relevant and proper to point this out and to treat such sources with caution. In this case, the criticism is that the sources -- a collection of popular British papers -- have in the past been extremely unreliable in reporting on scientific issues (example: the alleged link between childhood vaccination and autism), and a humorous comment was used to drive home the point.