A little global warming information:

I got to give it to you, you are certainly a "master-(de)bater."

Hey dumbass, where did I explicity "conclude the information(this guy's arguments) must somehow be fallacious" ?? NO-where. What I was pointing out was simply what being funded by this administration means. It is akin to being funded by they very same industry he denies having any ties to. Did I make any explicit comments that his science was flatly wrong? No. I made a valid point about his ties to an industry influenced admin. So you know what you can do with your "ad hominem circumstantiae" (which, by the way, we were all soooo very impressed by your usage of).

This is hilarious. You talk about "off-hand dismissals of those appeals on the grounds that the scientists in question are tied to a certain political agenda," but of course you ONLY defend the global warming sceptics against such attacks. Oh, pray tell, where is your defense of Al Gore? Every conservative I know slams his views on Global Warming simply because, well, he's Al Gore. They figure he MUST want to destroy America because he is horrible bleeding heart liberal. Most of the people bashing the global warming sceptics that I see on this site are much more well-versed in the science under discussion than the people who bash the global warming theory "alarmists" (their term).

And I love how you bash people who argue by "appealing to authority", or by casting doubt on one's opinions because of certain money ties to groups that might influence their views, but yet you use exaggeration and hyperbole to make your point, by saying that Global Warming sceptics are compared to Holocaust deniers, which is clearly an over-the-top analogy, since one is about a future prediction and science and one is about a recent historical fact. Just because the word "deny" might be included in both assesments of a person's views, doesn't mean the two labels are equal. I don't think evolution deniers are teh same as Holocaust deniers. One group is willfully ignorant because of their religious beliefs or their anti-science bias, and the other is group is usually made up of people that simply hate jews.

Just because someone is biased, even heavily biased, doesn't mean their science is bad or their information is wrong.

Let's do better than this.[/quote]

Yeah, no shit. And if someone IS heavily biased, there is a very good chance their science or information IS not objective and IS wrong. And again, so many global warming "alarmists" get bashed in the same way as the sceptics: sceptics claim (like you did) that scientists with a history of objectivity must be agreeing with global warming theory simply so they can receive more funding for their research. It is a two-way street, yet you only defend that attacks that occuring in one direction.

On one point I agree with you: yes, YOU can do much better than your last post. At least I hope so.

Kevin52 wrote:

But I suppose you would rather listen to the scientist Al Gore.

No, we'd rather listen to 1000's of scientists that agree with the basic tenets (not ALL the points) of Gore's views about Global Warming rather than the 5 or 6 guys you can drum that wholeheartedly disagree with him. But good try, Kev

googlerific wrote:

Lindzen will probably be dead in 20 years, so what is the point of the bet? He's probably smarter than any of us on this board, and has raised good points about non-conforming thoughts on climate change not being published or funded. Many times in history scientists have all believed the wrong thing, and scoffed at someone with a wild view (e.g., plate tectonics - read about Alfred Wegener and others).

Wow, you made some dense points.

A) if he will be dead in 20 years, THEN WHY DID HE PROPOSE THE BET?? It was his idea, jackass!

B) there have been plenty of smart people who convince themselves ahead of time on what they will find, and they do everything they can to find the answer they believe they should find and ignore everything that contradicts that answer they want (does WMD's ring a bell?)

c) yeah, many times the marjority is wrong. How often is the miniscule minority wrong? A lot more times. Good luck betting the planet's future on the fact that sometimes the miniscule minority is correct and the vast majority incorrect in science

Good points Billy Beer.

One point I am tired of reading is the one about weather forecasting and climatology being different sciences. While that may be true on the surface, both sciences are underpinned by the same mathematics of non-linear dynamical systems (aka chaos theory). Such systems by definition have high input sensitivity which means an accurate prediction (assuming you have a perfect model, which we do not) requires an extremely accurate measurement of the initial state (which we are also incapable of). The output state of the system can be so different based on a small change in the input that our predictions are worthless.

I wonder if the climatologists are trying to fool all of us or if they have fooled themselves into believing that their models have any significant value.

I'm not anti-environmentalist (I love going for a run out in nature). I don't want the human race or even other species to die off. I don't care if I use an internal combustion engine or some cleaner device since I have no investment in oil companies. But I do have a problem taking the word of intellectually dishonest scientists. I may not be a climatologist myself but I did take "Feedback Control of Dynamic Systems" and I understand the underlying math just fine. I stopped listening to the climatologists when their rhetoric went from "We're concerned about this trend" to "Global warming is indisputable". The magnitude of their hubris is nauseating.

pumb wrote:

c) yeah, many times the marjority is wrong. How often is the miniscule minority wrong? A lot more times. Good luck betting the planet's future on the fact that sometimes the miniscule minority is correct and the vast majority incorrect in science

I'm not sure that's a point you will want to try to prove. I think nearly every advancement in human history started with a discovery that was made by one person and at that point in time the person making the intellectual leap forward would be categorized as the minority opinion. Using one of your examples, Darwin was certainly in the minority when he proposed the theory of evolution.

I'll continue to stick with the minority opinion, thank you very much.

pumb wrote:

Hey dumbass, where did I explicity "conclude the information(this guy's arguments) must somehow be fallacious" ?? NO-where.

Actually, come to think of it, you didn't draw those conclusions. My bad. But when I read it, I felt compelled to point out that it was the kind of discussion that people can and do use as an "argument."

You talk about "off-hand dismissals of those appeals on the grounds that the scientists in question are tied to a certain political agenda," but of course you ONLY defend the global warming sceptics against such attacks.

I never presented a side on this. In fact, I don't have any opinion at all on it. I'm just talking about what's an argument and what isn't.

And if someone IS heavily biased, there is a very good chance their science or information IS not objective and IS wrong.

There's a chance of it. But you'll never know without examining the facts of their argument to see if they gathered or presented those facts selectively or drew refutable conclusions. Science should eliminate the practice of judging the book by its cover.

Thank you.