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Here's a nice example of equating AGW skeptics to creationists, one that I vaguely remembered, but had trouble digging up: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/20

Here's a nice example of equating AGW skeptics to creationists, one that I vaguely remembered, but had trouble digging up: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/11/hello_stan_palmer.php http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/11/hello_stan_palmer... . As I said, the controversy long ago became uncivil. Besides illustrating the creationist comparison, I think it illustrates my point about AGW advocacy resembling eugenics advocacy. If a lazy screenwriter wanted rhetoric for a 1920s eugenicist scorning a prominent critic, he could do worse than "the myopic little nitpickers, people who scurry about seeking little bits of garbage in the fabric of science (and of course, there are such flaws everywhere), and when they find some scrap of rot, they squeak triumphantly and hold it high and declare that the science everywhere is similarly corrupt." But wouldn't those words sound out of place in a defense of a successful theory like quantum mechanics or of the germ theory of disease? Admittedly, those words are here in the mouth of a defender of the successful theory of natural selection. But he seems to be a sadly devolved specimen of the breed. Some years ago I read Darwin's reaction to Lord Kelvin's criticisms (in some webbed version of Origin of Species). Darwin just didn't declare victory because Darwin had assembled a "rational synthesis" and Kelvin had not: Darwin reacted as though addressing criticism on the details was important in and of itself. (I myself tend to dismiss modern creationists, but certainly not because I think that details are unimportant compared to one's "coherent picture on a scientific issue." Details are very important, and one of my beefs with creationists is that they tend to be stubbornly spectacularly wrong on the details. E.g., ICR continues to misstate the second law of thermodynamics http://www.icr.org/article/456/ http://www.icr.org/article/456/ . It is easy for evolution to be consistent with the second law, because so much entropy is carried by food and O2 and CO2, or by sunlight and IR. In that particular article, the main sleight of hand seems to be ignoring the outgoing IR.)

Tichy 18y ago
Well that is somebody's blog post who admits in the beginning that he is very cranky right now - a major strawman. If you show that off as a proof against GW, then it is VERY weak evidence. You are doing the same thing as Crichton: trying to make an emotional argument, rather than a scientific one. I suppose you could also find lots of quotes against quantum mechanics, even of famous physicists of the day. Why else would there be that quote about new scientifc discoveres not being accepted by the existing elite - rather, the old people die and the young ones embrace it. Your last quote about creationists: details are important, but I have also seen that kind of thing: they find some ancient bone that somehow doesn't fit into the exact THEORY on the history of that specific bone (like whatever some animal has not lived 20000 years ago, but only 10000 years), and then claim they have thereby refuted evolution theory. That's ridiculous, and too much detail indeed.
- william-newman 18y ago
  If I had misrepresented Myers as making the most best arguments the AGW folk have, and knocked his arguments down and proclaimed victory, you could honestly say "major strawman." But I am not playing that rhetorical trick. I already acknowledge more level-headed arguments for AGW, when I acknowledged martythemaniak's cite of IPCC as the highbrow case for AGW, and nominated McIntyre as a critic that I think makes solid criticisms. (And I note you aren't impressed with historical buckets, fine, they don't float my boat either. Try bristlecone pines, taking note of how heavily they were weighted in the famous hockey stick temperature reconstruction, and how prominently that reconstruction figured in the Gore/IPCC case for global warming. McIntyre is also a persistent critic of data not being archived, and of records like tree rings ending decades ago and not being brought up to date, and IMHO he's dead right on those things, and the relative incuriosity of the pro-AGW people is curious.) I didn't knock down Myers to dishonestly imply that that shows I can refute the most valid arguments that AGW has to offer. I used Myers' post as an example to support two of my previous claims about AGW arguments. (1) The way martythemaniak casually compared AGW critics to creationists is not, as you argued, just an isolated instance provoked by Crichton's use of a point-by-point analogy to eugenics. (2) The controversy is uncivil. Crichton's choice of an emotionally-charged historical examples may not be a good thing, but it is not a case of AGW critics dragging a previously high-minded discussion into the emotional mud. (And once I reread the article, I noticed that passage which seemed so ripely reminiscent of the emotional arguments of a B-movie eugenicist, making it a dramatic example of my other point, the tendency to defend AGW with arguments suitable to defend pseudoscience. You may say picking on a grouchy professor with a well-read blog is unsuitable. Do you suppose the "very cranky right now" professor thought better of his words a few days later, and qualified them and/or apologized for them? I doubt it: usually that's done by adding some kind of text on the web page itself, like "UPDATE: foo," and I didn't see anything like that. So I think you're trying to hold me to an unreasonable standard: most people would agree that a professor of science with a well-read blog is a pretty solid choice as an example of argument tactics used by AGW supporters.) You wrote "they find some ancient bone ... ridiculous, and too much detail indeed." It's true that an actual important failing of creationists is blowing up some irrelevant detail, often exaggerating or outright misrepresenting it. It's also true that Myers might have been trying, in a dimwitted but virtuously vigorously partisan way, to allude to an important failing of Intelligent Design: unfalsifiability. Either failing could be used as a starting point for a complete rewrite, building something intellectually honest over the rubble of Myers' indignation at creationists for too stubbornly criticizing one of his favorite theories. But would the resulting valid criticism of creationists be applicable as a valid criticism of McIntyre? McIntyre is obviously guilty of what Myers accuses the creationists of, stubbornly criticizing one of Myers' favorite theories. But I don't consider that a sin, and it doesn't seem to me that McIntyre is guilty of the actual sins of the creationists, like being vastly sloppier with details than those they criticize, or claiming a vacuous theory is an improvement over a theory with considerable predictive power. (And why are you comparing the AGW defenders to people making remarks against QM? My point was that an awful lot of AGW arguments don't look like the arguments characteristic of correct theories. If AGW advocates make remarks that resemble QM skeptics, that doesn't weaken my point, it sorta strengthens it. It is true that in politically charged controversies like Darwinism, flaky arguments were made both on the correct side and on the incorrect side. But that doesn't excuse invalid arguments "on the correct side." I don't know the intellectual history, but I'd guess that Darwin supporters who honored the flaky arguments for Darwinism might have been a contributing factor to the rise of politicized pseudoscientific knockoffs like social Darwinism and eugenics.)

Tichy 18y ago

Well that is somebody's blog post who admits in the beginning that he is very cranky right now - a major strawman. If you show that off as a proof against GW, then it is VERY weak evidence. You are doing the same thing as Crichton: trying to make an emotional argument, rather than a scientific one. I suppose you could also find lots of quotes against quantum mechanics, even of famous physicists of the day. Why else would there be that quote about new scientifc discoveres not being accepted by the existing elite - rather, the old people die and the young ones embrace it. Your last quote about creationists: details are important, but I have also seen that kind of thing: they find some ancient bone that somehow doesn't fit into the exact THEORY on the history of that specific bone (like whatever some animal has not lived 20000 years ago, but only 10000 years), and then claim they have thereby refuted evolution theory. That's ridiculous, and too much detail indeed.

william-newman 18y ago
If I had misrepresented Myers as making the most best arguments the AGW folk have, and knocked his arguments down and proclaimed victory, you could honestly say "major strawman." But I am not playing that rhetorical trick. I already acknowledge more level-headed arguments for AGW, when I acknowledged martythemaniak's cite of IPCC as the highbrow case for AGW, and nominated McIntyre as a critic that I think makes solid criticisms. (And I note you aren't impressed with historical buckets, fine, they don't float my boat either. Try bristlecone pines, taking note of how heavily they were weighted in the famous hockey stick temperature reconstruction, and how prominently that reconstruction figured in the Gore/IPCC case for global warming. McIntyre is also a persistent critic of data not being archived, and of records like tree rings ending decades ago and not being brought up to date, and IMHO he's dead right on those things, and the relative incuriosity of the pro-AGW people is curious.) I didn't knock down Myers to dishonestly imply that that shows I can refute the most valid arguments that AGW has to offer. I used Myers' post as an example to support two of my previous claims about AGW arguments. (1) The way martythemaniak casually compared AGW critics to creationists is not, as you argued, just an isolated instance provoked by Crichton's use of a point-by-point analogy to eugenics. (2) The controversy is uncivil. Crichton's choice of an emotionally-charged historical examples may not be a good thing, but it is not a case of AGW critics dragging a previously high-minded discussion into the emotional mud. (And once I reread the article, I noticed that passage which seemed so ripely reminiscent of the emotional arguments of a B-movie eugenicist, making it a dramatic example of my other point, the tendency to defend AGW with arguments suitable to defend pseudoscience. You may say picking on a grouchy professor with a well-read blog is unsuitable. Do you suppose the "very cranky right now" professor thought better of his words a few days later, and qualified them and/or apologized for them? I doubt it: usually that's done by adding some kind of text on the web page itself, like "UPDATE: foo," and I didn't see anything like that. So I think you're trying to hold me to an unreasonable standard: most people would agree that a professor of science with a well-read blog is a pretty solid choice as an example of argument tactics used by AGW supporters.) You wrote "they find some ancient bone ... ridiculous, and too much detail indeed." It's true that an actual important failing of creationists is blowing up some irrelevant detail, often exaggerating or outright misrepresenting it. It's also true that Myers might have been trying, in a dimwitted but virtuously vigorously partisan way, to allude to an important failing of Intelligent Design: unfalsifiability. Either failing could be used as a starting point for a complete rewrite, building something intellectually honest over the rubble of Myers' indignation at creationists for too stubbornly criticizing one of his favorite theories. But would the resulting valid criticism of creationists be applicable as a valid criticism of McIntyre? McIntyre is obviously guilty of what Myers accuses the creationists of, stubbornly criticizing one of Myers' favorite theories. But I don't consider that a sin, and it doesn't seem to me that McIntyre is guilty of the actual sins of the creationists, like being vastly sloppier with details than those they criticize, or claiming a vacuous theory is an improvement over a theory with considerable predictive power. (And why are you comparing the AGW defenders to people making remarks against QM? My point was that an awful lot of AGW arguments don't look like the arguments characteristic of correct theories. If AGW advocates make remarks that resemble QM skeptics, that doesn't weaken my point, it sorta strengthens it. It is true that in politically charged controversies like Darwinism, flaky arguments were made both on the correct side and on the incorrect side. But that doesn't excuse invalid arguments "on the correct side." I don't know the intellectual history, but I'd guess that Darwin supporters who honored the flaky arguments for Darwinism might have been a contributing factor to the rise of politicized pseudoscientific knockoffs like social Darwinism and eugenics.)