Wood Romances

If you participate in debates on climate science, how often have you been told that Al Gore predicted that the North polar ice cap would be gone by 2013? How often have you been given quotes from Edenhofer "proving" that AGW is a political hoax from a socialist agenda to redistribute global wealth? These kinds of claims are everywhere in these debates, but frequently when we investigate these seemingly outlandish quotes, they turn out to be fabrications - contortions of what was actually said. In other words, they appear to be blatant dishonesty and personal attacks on the part of people who generate the fake quotes.  To be clear, not everyone using these fake/contorted quotes know that they are fake or contorted. People frequently share and promote things without checking on their accuracy, so I thought I'd collect a few of the more prominent fake quotes here. I may add to this as time goes by, but I'll begin with these four that I think are both extremely common and...

In previous posts in this series , I've tried summarize what I consider bad behavior among those debating climate change. So far I've discussing what I consider statistically unethical practices - using short-term trends, misusing scales, and using local instead of global data. Here I'd like to look how we make comparisons between types of data. In climate science, we need to deal with all sorts of different kinds of data. For global temperatures, I can think of at least 3 - proxies, the instrumental record (satellites, thermometers), and models (reanalysis, modeled projections, etc). It's perfectly fine to create graphs that include all of these kinds of data, but in doing so, we have to make sure that we are communicating honestly and making comparisons accurately. Proxy data has lower resolution and larger confidence intervals than the instrumental record, and modeled projections always depend in part on the assumed scenario, and confidence intervals for these projec...

In my first two posts in this series , I described the bad behavior of cherry-picking short-term trends and choosing the wrong scale to hide the incline of global temperatures. Here I want to consider the trick of using local (or regional) temperatures in place of global temperatures. As best I can tell, there are at least two reasons why people might want to do this. Some people want to say that global warming is good, the world is starved of CO2, and we need to add more CO2 to the atmosphere. Unsurprisingly, two of the most prominent proponents of this tactic are former geologists for the fossil fuel industry. They want to show that societies thrive when global temperatures are warmer. Others using this tactic seem to want to say that global temperatures don't correlate with CO2. And what better way to make that point than to use local temperatures instead of global temperatures? Prepare for some snarkiness.  Using Local Temperatures to Say Global Warming Is Good Imagine you ha...

In  Part 1  of this series on debaters behaving badly, we saw how some debaters behave badly by misusing short-term trends to claim that global warming has paused, leading to the proliferation of what I consider faux pause claims on the internet and social media. Here in Part 2, I'd like to consider the next most popular tactic I see used frequently in climate debates - using dishonest scales to make false claims about global temperatures or the correlation between temperatures and carbon dioxide. Misusing Scale to "Hide the Incline" of Global Temperatures One of the largest repositories of bad debate behavior on the internet is on the Watts Up With That blog. Anthony Watts recently wrote a post complaining about accurate reporting of global temperature anomalies and decided to replace them with his substitute version , which you can find on a side bar of his blog whenever you visit. It looks like this: To do this, Watts replaced the baseline temperature value of the G...

I've witnessed many debates about climate change recently in which debaters behave badly. In fairness to at least some of these debaters, many don't realize they're behaving badly. They received information they trust on blogs and YouTube videos, and they use this information in a discussions with others. But these bad tactics are still bad behavior even if we don't know it. So I thought it would be helpful to write a series on the dishonest tactics I see used in debate contexts that reflect bad behavior (either by the debater or his/her source). I'll begin with a tactic I've seen quite commonly recently - cherry picking short-term trends.  This tactic is frequently used by debaters attempting to show that global warming has "paused" or that Arctic sea ice is no longer decreasing. In the interest of brevity, I'll focus on the claim that there has been a "pause" in global warming. As we'll see, this is a  faux pause claim (I'll be...

Recently I came across a new word, "bulverism." The term was coined by C.S. Lewis to describe what is broadly similar to what Antony Flew called the "subject/motive" shift. Strictly speaking, it's a form of the logical fallacy, ad hominem - attacking the author instead of the argument. Bulverism takes the the following form:      A. Assume your opponents are wrong      B. Identify something about your opponents that supposedly explains why they are wrong Bulverism often springs up in debates that are highly contentious - that is, when people have strongly held beliefs that are also strongly opposed by others. In highly contentious debates, we tend to react in terms of our contempt for the other side of the debate (and even the person that holds the view being opposed). Lewis describes bulverism with an example from math, where fictional Ezekiel Bulver's father claims that the sum of any two sides of a triangle must be longer than the third, and his wife sa...