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Same reason for the vitriol against anti-vax. These are people who are claiming to know better than the vast majority of the scientific community (seriously, it

Same reason for the vitriol against anti-vax. These are people who are claiming to know better than the vast majority of the scientific community (seriously, it's something like 99%+), despite having little to no expertise in the field. Multiple independent governments, thousands of peer reviewed studies across multiple disciplines, data collected from satellites, billions of dollars across decades of research... but still not enough. It's stupid and dangerous. To be capable of thinking that it's a hoax requires a severe lack of understanding of the simple scale of humanity. I find it more believable to think that you've been personally abducted by aliens than any segment of humanity having the ability to pull off a trick of such magnitude.

78h321sadfh7z 8y ago
Appeal to authority is not a legitimate argument in a discussion. Neither is reducing one side of the debate to climate change being a "hoax". The general debate in the scientific community resolves around the question as to what extent humans are involved, and this debate is still alive even if the majority wants it to be suppressed. The fact that the majority of scientists behaves irrational and pushes inadequate models into politics doesn't make their arguments any better.
mjfl 8y ago
All this may be true, but appeal to authority is still a logical fallacy. You can't just shame people into believing something they don't understand because "smarter" people believe it. It's a shameful failure of communication more than anything else. And I don't understand why people like you don't understand that.
- jaredklewis 8y ago
  Specialization is an unavoidable fact of life. Not everyone can be an expert in everything. If my car mechanic (or 99 out of 100 car mechanics) says I need new brake pads, and I don’t know anything about car maintenance, why would I reject their diagnosis? I would not only be endangering myself, but other drivers. If I am going to reject my mechanic’s diagnosis I need to have strong evidence and reasoning to support my position. Climate deniers don’t have that, and their pigheadedness puts everyone at danger. Efforts to summarize the scientific evidence for global warming for laymen are myriad. The arguments and evidence for global warming are extremely accessible. I don’t see how the blame isn’t on the climate deniers.
  - chillee 8y ago
    Ehh, I understand your point in general, but I think it's significantly more nuanced than that. Take the car mechanic. His incentives don't completely align with yours. Taking a benign example, his goals are to keep your car in good condition and to make money. Your goals are to keep your car in good condition and to save money. Thus, the car mechanic might err on the side of caution and suggest you replace your car brakes every 30 thousand miles, while you (assuming you knew all the relevant information) would only replace the brakes every 50 thousand miles. In the absence of "strong evidence and reasoning", you may still reasonably decide that you don't trust the mechanic.
    - jaredklewis 8y ago
      Sure, a given mechanic or a given surgeon might err. So go get a second opinion. But if you get 99 second opinions, and all but one agrees with the original mechanic, rejection of that diagnosis is an extraordinary claim. And an extraordinary claim requires strong evidence and reasoning if your decision is going to put the lives of others at risk.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > appeal to authority is still a logical fallacy The data are publicly available and the papers relatively accessible. The dismissal isn’t because climate deniers reject the mainstream. It’s because they reject the mainstream without trying to understand it.
  - colllectorof 8y ago
    So, how many research papers did your parents read when bringing you up? Can they cite the list of publications that convinced them to give or not give you the vaccinations? This is not how it works the real world. Saying "research is out there" is absolutely meaningless in convincing people, especially if you don't even post actual links/citations (which most people never do).
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > how many research papers did your parents read when bringing you up? They listened to their doctors. Modern life is too complex for everyone to understand everything fully. So we delegate decisions to reliable authorities. If one wishes to disagree with said authorities, i.e. with the status quo, the burden of proof is on the person bringing the disagreement. The problem with anti-vaxers and climate deniers is their rejection of the status quo without any proper evidence. (Also making decisions that negatively impact other people.)
      - colllectorof 8y ago
        >They listened to their doctors. Modern life is too complex for everyone to understand everything fully. Exactly. This directly contradicts the notion that "the research out there" is by itself sufficient to convince anyone of anything. People rely on authorities, and different groups of people have different entities they consider authoritative. >So we delegate decisions to reliable authorities. Sure. Like, uh, elected politicians? Who benefit from politicization of science, no matter which side of each issues they end up on? It it remarkable how oblivious most people are to the social dynamics of these issues.
- saudioger 8y ago
  The authority here is insurmountably large and the data is readably accessible. It's like a blind person claiming the sky isn't blue despite the determination of every sighted person. There isn't even a single point of authority here. The determination is made by climate scientists, biologists, ecologists, etc... across multiple independent governments, allies and enemies alike. Argument from authority is meant to avoid groupthink, but there are many many disparate groups coming to the same conclusion here while relying on entirely different sets of evidence. If you can use argument from authority to dispute this, then you can use it to dispute any consensus ever made.
  - throwaway8879 8y ago
    The sky isn't blue. Not always anyway. And not from everywhere.
    - iris-digital 8y ago
      Great point on how significant perspective is.
      - dymk 8y ago
        And on how willful misinterpretation of an analogy isn't actually a point against the analogy
        iris-digital 8y ago
        There's no misinterpretation here.
        SpecialistEMT 8y ago
        It's a strawman
  - mjfl 8y ago
    But for other consensuses, for example evolution, any individual person can readily explain how it works to a anyone else. Then it is up to the person hearing the model to accept it as fact, and maybe they make some logical error rejecting it. But until you explain to them the model, I don't think you should have any expectation that they should believe you. It sounds like no one responding to me actually understands how climate models work. How do they work? What are their assumptions, their dynamical models, their uncertainties? I don't think you or anyone else in this thread can tell me that. You can tell me "the data is there", or vague assertions like "there are papers everywhere" - that's it, no specifics. If you were writing a scientific paper with such vague assertions it would be thrown in the trash. Only specialists are qualified to even enter the debate. That is the essence of the fallacious appeals to authority that undermine all climate arguments. And the specialists are terrible communicators.
- bibixii929 8y ago
  There's little reason to believe many high-profile climate deniers are acting in good faith, especially those employed by think tanks and other PR organisations. As the questions are political, you need rhetoric. As unfortunately as it may be, it should be obvious by now to everyone following politics that being "polite" is not a winning recipe in the game.
  - microcolonel 8y ago
    > There's little reason to believe many high-profile climate deniers are acting in good faith These people act as authorities as well. If the alternative is to appeal to another authority, then it seems like choosing not to change opinions is a reasonable course of action for somebody who is already convinced on the basis of authority. The public case for concern about climate change has been marred with incessant exaggeration (for example, lady liberty was supposed to be semi-submerged by now, and the north pole was supposed to be completely free of ice by 2013). The source of many Americans' (and Canadians') skepticism of climate predictions is a continuous outpouring of exaggeration and fabrication, especially on the part of Al Gore (whose film was shown to a significant proportion of Canadian school children [and I imagine, American school children as well] in the oughts).
    - saudioger 8y ago
      >lady liberty was supposed to be semi-submerged by now, and the north pole was supposed to be completely free of ice by 2013 Citation needed
      - microcolonel 8y ago
        Al Gore continued to repeat this claim until at least 2009, my source is snopes and their sources. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/ I trust Snopes here since they are desperately attempting to cast Gore's statements in a positive light. They choose to address whether Gore "predicted" this event, rather than whether he disseminated the prediction. If the question is whether he confidently disseminated this prediction, the answer is a resounding yes. The IPCC publish estimates generally between 2035 (on the very low end) and 2100+ (generally "possibly before the end of the 21st century", i.e. possibly later) for the arctic ice cap to melt almost completely.
- camgunz 8y ago
  It's not an appeal to authority. That would literally be, "I'm a climate scientist, trust me". What's actually happening is: "I'm a climate scientist, trust me, but if you don't, look at this ludicrous amount of data and research gathered/conducted over generations".
  - lordlimecat 8y ago
    AFAIK appeal to authority is only a fallacy when the authority is an expert in an unrelated field. It is not an appeal to authority to reference the opinion of a well-established astrophysicist when discussing astrophysics.
    - kjeetgill 8y ago
      No, it is always logical falacy in a literal sense. The existence or the appeal of any authority is not a logical argument. If you think the authority is justified by factual, logical arguments you're meant to cut out the middle man and simply present those facts and their logical argument. It's worth saying that no one really expects you to live life or strictly act like this. Avoiding fallacies is really just about putting forth a concrete logical agument. Retoric (and life) can be plenty productive without logical rigor and appeals to authority have meaning and value outside of 'logic'. Ethos, logos, pathos anyone?
- hobs 8y ago
  So is an argument from personal ignorance.
- mnm1 8y ago
  Are you saying that all science is appeal to authority? Do you understand how science works? These climate change deniers can run their own experiments and verify the findings that almost all scientists agree with, but they don't or they choose to misinterpret the data like the last graph in the article. Science isn't appeal to authority and trying to reduce it to that is what is shameful. Truth does exist and if it hurts some people's feelings so be it. Their feelings are not even a consideration when the alternative is having an unlivable world. These people should be ridiculed and their opinions put when because they are stupid, wrong, and they are hurting billions others. We put people in jail and even kill them if they take one life, but if they endanger literally billions of lives, we should be understanding? It's a shame we can't put these people in jail and it's a shame to defend these people that are running our world with their stupidity.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- dagss 8y ago
  Wait wait... appeal to the scentific community is a logical fallacy? You can say this same thing about almost any scientific finding. A less controversial example: General Relativity is extremely odd and widely accepted. If someone refuses to believe General Relativity, would you really say the problem is "failure of communication"? Any kind of meaningful communication on the subject would take years, and also (if you insist in not trusting others) require a lot of expensive experiments to be carried out. Any "communication" short of that is in a sense propaganda; in that how believable you make it seem to the layperson is not correlated with how true it is. No, rather than a problem with communication, the problem is arrogance in believing that General Relativity (or Climate..) is something you can have an opinion about without years of physics training. (There are physics professors that may dispute GR. That is fine; it did not seem that your topic was communication with sceptical academics in the climate sciences)
  - greenleafjacob 8y ago
    It's a logical fallacy, but it can be a pragmatic decision to delegate reasoning, especially where the claim is expensive to evaluate (e.g. science because of time for prerequisite knowledge and training) or the consequence of being wrong is low.
microcolonel 8y ago
You might recall that the primary claim of anti-vaccination folks started with a blind appeal to authority.

78h321sadfh7z 8y ago

Appeal to authority is not a legitimate argument in a discussion. Neither is reducing one side of the debate to climate change being a "hoax". The general debate in the scientific community resolves around the question as to what extent humans are involved, and this debate is still alive even if the majority wants it to be suppressed. The fact that the majority of scientists behaves irrational and pushes inadequate models into politics doesn't make their arguments any better.

mjfl 8y ago

All this may be true, but appeal to authority is still a logical fallacy. You can't just shame people into believing something they don't understand because "smarter" people believe it. It's a shameful failure of communication more than anything else. And I don't understand why people like you don't understand that.

jaredklewis 8y ago
Specialization is an unavoidable fact of life. Not everyone can be an expert in everything. If my car mechanic (or 99 out of 100 car mechanics) says I need new brake pads, and I don’t know anything about car maintenance, why would I reject their diagnosis? I would not only be endangering myself, but other drivers. If I am going to reject my mechanic’s diagnosis I need to have strong evidence and reasoning to support my position. Climate deniers don’t have that, and their pigheadedness puts everyone at danger. Efforts to summarize the scientific evidence for global warming for laymen are myriad. The arguments and evidence for global warming are extremely accessible. I don’t see how the blame isn’t on the climate deniers.
- chillee 8y ago
  Ehh, I understand your point in general, but I think it's significantly more nuanced than that. Take the car mechanic. His incentives don't completely align with yours. Taking a benign example, his goals are to keep your car in good condition and to make money. Your goals are to keep your car in good condition and to save money. Thus, the car mechanic might err on the side of caution and suggest you replace your car brakes every 30 thousand miles, while you (assuming you knew all the relevant information) would only replace the brakes every 50 thousand miles. In the absence of "strong evidence and reasoning", you may still reasonably decide that you don't trust the mechanic.
  - jaredklewis 8y ago
    Sure, a given mechanic or a given surgeon might err. So go get a second opinion. But if you get 99 second opinions, and all but one agrees with the original mechanic, rejection of that diagnosis is an extraordinary claim. And an extraordinary claim requires strong evidence and reasoning if your decision is going to put the lives of others at risk.
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> appeal to authority is still a logical fallacy The data are publicly available and the papers relatively accessible. The dismissal isn’t because climate deniers reject the mainstream. It’s because they reject the mainstream without trying to understand it.
- colllectorof 8y ago
  So, how many research papers did your parents read when bringing you up? Can they cite the list of publications that convinced them to give or not give you the vaccinations? This is not how it works the real world. Saying "research is out there" is absolutely meaningless in convincing people, especially if you don't even post actual links/citations (which most people never do).
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > how many research papers did your parents read when bringing you up? They listened to their doctors. Modern life is too complex for everyone to understand everything fully. So we delegate decisions to reliable authorities. If one wishes to disagree with said authorities, i.e. with the status quo, the burden of proof is on the person bringing the disagreement. The problem with anti-vaxers and climate deniers is their rejection of the status quo without any proper evidence. (Also making decisions that negatively impact other people.)
    - colllectorof 8y ago
      >They listened to their doctors. Modern life is too complex for everyone to understand everything fully. Exactly. This directly contradicts the notion that "the research out there" is by itself sufficient to convince anyone of anything. People rely on authorities, and different groups of people have different entities they consider authoritative. >So we delegate decisions to reliable authorities. Sure. Like, uh, elected politicians? Who benefit from politicization of science, no matter which side of each issues they end up on? It it remarkable how oblivious most people are to the social dynamics of these issues.
saudioger 8y ago
The authority here is insurmountably large and the data is readably accessible. It's like a blind person claiming the sky isn't blue despite the determination of every sighted person. There isn't even a single point of authority here. The determination is made by climate scientists, biologists, ecologists, etc... across multiple independent governments, allies and enemies alike. Argument from authority is meant to avoid groupthink, but there are many many disparate groups coming to the same conclusion here while relying on entirely different sets of evidence. If you can use argument from authority to dispute this, then you can use it to dispute any consensus ever made.
- throwaway8879 8y ago
  The sky isn't blue. Not always anyway. And not from everywhere.
  - iris-digital 8y ago
    Great point on how significant perspective is.
    - dymk 8y ago
      And on how willful misinterpretation of an analogy isn't actually a point against the analogy
      - iris-digital 8y ago
        There's no misinterpretation here.
        SpecialistEMT 8y ago
        It's a strawman
- mjfl 8y ago
  But for other consensuses, for example evolution, any individual person can readily explain how it works to a anyone else. Then it is up to the person hearing the model to accept it as fact, and maybe they make some logical error rejecting it. But until you explain to them the model, I don't think you should have any expectation that they should believe you. It sounds like no one responding to me actually understands how climate models work. How do they work? What are their assumptions, their dynamical models, their uncertainties? I don't think you or anyone else in this thread can tell me that. You can tell me "the data is there", or vague assertions like "there are papers everywhere" - that's it, no specifics. If you were writing a scientific paper with such vague assertions it would be thrown in the trash. Only specialists are qualified to even enter the debate. That is the essence of the fallacious appeals to authority that undermine all climate arguments. And the specialists are terrible communicators.
bibixii929 8y ago
There's little reason to believe many high-profile climate deniers are acting in good faith, especially those employed by think tanks and other PR organisations. As the questions are political, you need rhetoric. As unfortunately as it may be, it should be obvious by now to everyone following politics that being "polite" is not a winning recipe in the game.
- microcolonel 8y ago
  > There's little reason to believe many high-profile climate deniers are acting in good faith These people act as authorities as well. If the alternative is to appeal to another authority, then it seems like choosing not to change opinions is a reasonable course of action for somebody who is already convinced on the basis of authority. The public case for concern about climate change has been marred with incessant exaggeration (for example, lady liberty was supposed to be semi-submerged by now, and the north pole was supposed to be completely free of ice by 2013). The source of many Americans' (and Canadians') skepticism of climate predictions is a continuous outpouring of exaggeration and fabrication, especially on the part of Al Gore (whose film was shown to a significant proportion of Canadian school children [and I imagine, American school children as well] in the oughts).
  - saudioger 8y ago
    >lady liberty was supposed to be semi-submerged by now, and the north pole was supposed to be completely free of ice by 2013 Citation needed
    - microcolonel 8y ago
      Al Gore continued to repeat this claim until at least 2009, my source is snopes and their sources. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/ I trust Snopes here since they are desperately attempting to cast Gore's statements in a positive light. They choose to address whether Gore "predicted" this event, rather than whether he disseminated the prediction. If the question is whether he confidently disseminated this prediction, the answer is a resounding yes. The IPCC publish estimates generally between 2035 (on the very low end) and 2100+ (generally "possibly before the end of the 21st century", i.e. possibly later) for the arctic ice cap to melt almost completely.
camgunz 8y ago
It's not an appeal to authority. That would literally be, "I'm a climate scientist, trust me". What's actually happening is: "I'm a climate scientist, trust me, but if you don't, look at this ludicrous amount of data and research gathered/conducted over generations".
- lordlimecat 8y ago
  AFAIK appeal to authority is only a fallacy when the authority is an expert in an unrelated field. It is not an appeal to authority to reference the opinion of a well-established astrophysicist when discussing astrophysics.
  - kjeetgill 8y ago
    No, it is always logical falacy in a literal sense. The existence or the appeal of any authority is not a logical argument. If you think the authority is justified by factual, logical arguments you're meant to cut out the middle man and simply present those facts and their logical argument. It's worth saying that no one really expects you to live life or strictly act like this. Avoiding fallacies is really just about putting forth a concrete logical agument. Retoric (and life) can be plenty productive without logical rigor and appeals to authority have meaning and value outside of 'logic'. Ethos, logos, pathos anyone?
hobs 8y ago
So is an argument from personal ignorance.
mnm1 8y ago
Are you saying that all science is appeal to authority? Do you understand how science works? These climate change deniers can run their own experiments and verify the findings that almost all scientists agree with, but they don't or they choose to misinterpret the data like the last graph in the article. Science isn't appeal to authority and trying to reduce it to that is what is shameful. Truth does exist and if it hurts some people's feelings so be it. Their feelings are not even a consideration when the alternative is having an unlivable world. These people should be ridiculed and their opinions put when because they are stupid, wrong, and they are hurting billions others. We put people in jail and even kill them if they take one life, but if they endanger literally billions of lives, we should be understanding? It's a shame we can't put these people in jail and it's a shame to defend these people that are running our world with their stupidity.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
dagss 8y ago
Wait wait... appeal to the scentific community is a logical fallacy? You can say this same thing about almost any scientific finding. A less controversial example: General Relativity is extremely odd and widely accepted. If someone refuses to believe General Relativity, would you really say the problem is "failure of communication"? Any kind of meaningful communication on the subject would take years, and also (if you insist in not trusting others) require a lot of expensive experiments to be carried out. Any "communication" short of that is in a sense propaganda; in that how believable you make it seem to the layperson is not correlated with how true it is. No, rather than a problem with communication, the problem is arrogance in believing that General Relativity (or Climate..) is something you can have an opinion about without years of physics training. (There are physics professors that may dispute GR. That is fine; it did not seem that your topic was communication with sceptical academics in the climate sciences)
- greenleafjacob 8y ago
  It's a logical fallacy, but it can be a pragmatic decision to delegate reasoning, especially where the claim is expensive to evaluate (e.g. science because of time for prerequisite knowledge and training) or the consequence of being wrong is low.

microcolonel 8y ago

You might recall that the primary claim of anti-vaccination folks started with a blind appeal to authority.