> This stinks of circular reasoning. It's bad logic because climate deniers use it and climate deniers are wrong because they only ise bad logic. That would be

> This stinks of circular reasoning. It's bad logic because climate deniers use it and climate deniers are wrong because they only ise bad logic. That would be a good point, if that was what I was arguing but it's clearly not. I am pointing out that this is a common form of argument used by climate deniers, and then, independent of that fact, demonstrating why it's poor logic. My argument regarding why the logic is poor has nothing to do with the fact that's it's a commonly used line of reasoning in climate denial. However the classification of the logic as such is useful to help people quickly identify the common set of erroneous methods used that show up very frequently in online discussions (and sadly, very commonly on HN). Climate denial arguments do tend to use faulty logic in a similar vein to the way creationists tend to use faulty logic, because the evidence in favor of the alternative hypothesis is so much greater the easiest way to "attack" that hypothesis is through poor use of logic. But clearly that does not imply that all logic employed by people in these camps is inherently faulty.