Tim Ball @ Watts Up With That:
A common fallback position when losing an argument is to assault your adversary personally. Known as ad hominem, it involves “attacking an opponent’s motives or character rather than the policy or position they maintain.”
In climate science, those who employ this rhetorical tactic attack individuals who ask probing scientific questions. The attacks indicate that they know how inadequate their science is. It often works because of a deliberate campaign to exploit basic sensitivities: fear the sky is falling, guilt about not protecting the environment, guilt about the damage already done, fear and embarrassment of showing ignorance.
People who challenge the claims of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are often labeled “global warming skeptics”. Skeptics do not deny that warming occurred in modern times, but, sensibly, questioned the cause. The IPCC said it was due to human production of CO2. This is driven by a political agenda, not science, so any opposition is considered troublesome and requires silencing.
The IPCC claim is an unproven hypothesis. Science advances by proposing hypotheses that other scientists challenge in their proper role as skeptics. The word skeptic has markedly different public and scientific connotation; negative for the former and positive for the latter. Scientists act as skeptics by trying to disprove the hypothesis. Global warming skeptics are acting appropriately.
The IPCC hypothesis was untested. Professor Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that consensus was claimed before the research even began. The IPCC tried to prove the hypothesis, putting them in the untenable position of eliminating, ignoring, or manipulating anything that showed the hypothesis was wrong. They had to shoot the skeptics who were the messengers of the problems.
Evidence showing that the hypothesis was wrong continued to emerge. But the IPCC and the vast majority of mainstream media simply ignored it. IPCC projections were wrong because the hypothesis was wrong. That the skeptics were correct was verified as CO2levels continued to rise, while temperatures leveled and declined. But instead of amending the science, as is proper science, alarmists simply changed the terminology. They stopped talking about global warming and started talking about climate change. Leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit for 2004 explained:
Good points, Curt.
As to science: the Renaissance was a time when evidence from experiments was used to confirm or deny an hypothesis. Prior to the Renaissance, our knowledge was based on Authority: what did Aristotle say? One could not question Authority.
Primary example: Galileo and falling objects. His experiments demonstrated that Aristotle was wrong.
We have left the Renaissance and gone back to Authority. “The Science is Settled”, saith our expert, Al Gore. This cannot be questioned.
Just because the data had to be cherry-picked, because a secret program had to be used to re-write the data, because the carbon dioxide budget for the globe is not well understood, or because most of the “Warming” appears to result from the “heat island effect” of locating weather stations in populated areas, none of these factual problems is relevant.
All that matters is Authority. Let’s go back to the old days of Feudal Lords, burning witches, folk medicine…oops, we are already there!
@mathman: This not only applies to climate change, but to the economy, employment, health care, gun ownership, education as well as most important components of our lives. Those of us who question the current processes and pathways are considered uninformed.