The level of debate on global warming is shriekingly poor. Not that I have any hope of convincing the world to reject bad logic, but here are some of the more common fallacies making the rounds.

1. The Consensus Appealing to “the” consensus is a form of the appeal-to-authority fallacy, but it is more so a stacking-the-deck fallacy. It works thusly: the IPCC goes out among the credentialed and asks, “Doest thou agree with me?” If the answer be “Aye”, the person is added to the Nice list; if it be “Nay”, the unfortunate is entered into the Persona Non Grataledger. The IPCC then reports that there is a consensus among its membership, and that because this consensus is a consensus, its conclusions are beyond question.But “the” consensus is not a consensus of all climatologists. Your own author, for example, despite offering his services repeatedly—to be remunerated at the same rates as the rest of the Aye-sayers: he has to eat, after all—has never had his offer accepted. “The consensus” is therefore not a consensus in the plain English meaning of the word.

   Actually, of course, even some who say Nay make it onto the Nice list, but their views are not accorded equal weight with those of the leadership. See Judith Curry’s interesting post on “the” consensus for more on this (suggested by an anonymous reader). (more…)

Source:  Hot Air

by Bruce McQuain

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SPPI Note:  Original SPPI papers by Dave Evans

Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt?

Manufacturing Money and Global Warming

Ocean Temperatures: The New Buff in Climate Temperatures

There is No Evidence

Reprints by Dave Evans at SPPI

A Simple Proof that Global Warming is not Man-made

The Wong-Fielding Meeting on Global Warming

Global Warming – A Classic Case of Alarmism

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David Evans is a scientist. He has also worked in the heart of the AGW machine.  He consulted full-time for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) from 1999 to 2005, and part-time 2008 to 2010, modeling Australia’s carbon in plants, debris, mulch, soils, and forestry and agricultural products. He has six university degrees, including a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University. The other day he said:

The debate about global warming has reached ridiculous proportions and is full of micro-thin half-truths and misunderstandings. I am a scientist who was on the carbon gravy train, understands the evidence, was once an alarmist, but am now a skeptic.

And with that he begins a demolition of the theories, premises and methods by which the AGW scare has been foisted on the public. (more…)

Last week, Michael Ignatieff and 142 other Members of Parliament voted in favour of a motion to ban oil tanker traffic on the north coast of British Columbia. This week, Liberal MP Joyce Murray from Vancouver Quadra introduced Bill C-606 to put that motion into law by amending the Canada Shipping Act to prohibit oil tanker traffic on the north and central coast of British Columbia.

Ms. Murray and every single one of those MPs played right into the hands of the U.S. foundations seeking to block oil tanker traffic. Whether intentional or not, these actions will also stop oil exports to Asia. On the surface, this is about oil, Canada’s single most important export. More important, this is about the sovereignty of our country, which should be decided by Canadians, not foreign-funded campaigns. (more…)

Source:  American Spectator

By Paul Chesser

From this morning’s edition of the Washington Examiner‘s weeklong series on Big Green:

The median salary among all 15 of the highest-paid Big Green environmental officials (the nonprofits like Environmental Defense Fund, Nature Conservancy, etc.) is $261,295, while the median total compensation for the 15 is $308,465….

You know — these are the leaders of the groups who constantly wail that nature is under unrelenting assault by Big Oil, whose money and influence they say is the Goliath to the enviros’ David.

Meanwhile:

[Big Green] opposition nonprofits analyzed by The Examiner included the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute, Concerned Women for America, Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Tax Reform, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Citizens Against Government Waste, National Taxpayers Union, and the American Conservative Union.

An Examiner analysis found a median salary of $228,703 among the opposition groups, or nearly $33,000 less than that received by the environmental executives. The gap is even wider when media total compensation figures are compared, with top executives at environmental opponents receiving $254,605, or nearly $54,000 less than the top 15 environmental executives. (more…)

Source:  the Air Vent

Bob Ward (Andrew Montford’s recent nemesis), has written a piece titled – Why ExxonMobil must be taken to task over climate denial funding.  Before we get into that, his recent review of Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion was incredibly biased, missed the technical meaning of nearly the whole thing and bordered so much on libel he was forced to change it.  The purpose of pointing this is to show the Taminoesque personality we’re dealing with and the fact that, intellectually,  Bob is perfectly comfortable with publishing pro-AGW climate disinformation.

In this case, Bob Ward goes after Exxon for funding conservative groups accused of publishing, you guessed it,  disinformation on climate. I hate to break it to him, but I’ve seen a lot more disinformation from main stream climate science® than I have from any conservative group.  Hockeysticks, melting Antarctic, melting Himalayas, melting sea ice, drought, ridiculously exaggerated sea level rise, expanding hurricanes, shrinking fish, sheep, birds and plants (no I’m not kidding on the last four).

So what Bob Ward is apparently saying, is that it’s ok to fund hockeystic temp curves which have no more relationship to temperature than a kid with a crayon, but not to fund those who point out the errors.  Clear now? (more…)

by Jonathan DuHamel, Economic Geologist

Source: http://tucsoncitizen.com/wryheat/2010/01/20/climategate-analysis/

The Science and Public Policy Institute has published an analysis of the leaked climategate emails. This 149-page document takes the emails in chronological order and shows, with comments on each message, how science was perverted.

In the introductory material the report says:

The entire industry of “climate science” was created out of virtually nothing, by means of a massive influx of funding that was almost universally one-sided in its requirement that its recipients find evidence for man-made climate change—not investigate whether or how much mankind had caused climate change.

Many “climate scientists” built their entire careers on this funding; and so it is not surprising that they became so completely reliant on this conditional lifeline, that they became single-mindedly focused on achieving the ends for which they were commissioned—and viciously attacking any intruders who may threaten that lifeline.

The PDF file may be download from either of these links:

http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/reprint/climategate_analysis.pdf

or http://tinyurl.com/yl8o3t8