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100 Reasons Analyzed
Dec. 16th, 2009 11:58 amThe breadth and sheer cheek of the bogosity in that 100 Reasons article took my breath away. After tearing it apart yesterday, I thought I'd do a bit of analysis:
Fully a quarter of the arguments are ideological, completely unrelated to the natural world or to science; they're "kyoto sucks" or "obama sucks" or "windmills suck".
Next largest are the lies. Straight-out deception. A fifth of the document is just plain lies.
What next? Attacks on the credibility of the IPCC, and 'climategate' smears: these aren't challenges to the science, but snarks at the people. This is what happens when ideologues go after scientists, and it's ugly.
Next is crank references. I'm including some fringey references that may pan out in that, because they're being spun as cranks who will tear down the lie - some honest work may be misquoted by the authors, and I apologise if that's the case.
And then we're down into the usual denier crap: cherry-picking (you can prove anything that way; one node is not a keystone, it is an outlier); it's the sun; the CO2 lag canard; baffling people with numbers (mixing up rates and values is a classic obfuscation trick); obsolete science and finally crumbs of logical fallacies, stuff that just doesn't make sense.
How did this rubbish get past the fact-checking apparatus of the national press? This has all the credibility of "Elvis Sighted on Moon".
Fully a quarter of the arguments are ideological, completely unrelated to the natural world or to science; they're "kyoto sucks" or "obama sucks" or "windmills suck".
Next largest are the lies. Straight-out deception. A fifth of the document is just plain lies.
What next? Attacks on the credibility of the IPCC, and 'climategate' smears: these aren't challenges to the science, but snarks at the people. This is what happens when ideologues go after scientists, and it's ugly.
Next is crank references. I'm including some fringey references that may pan out in that, because they're being spun as cranks who will tear down the lie - some honest work may be misquoted by the authors, and I apologise if that's the case.
And then we're down into the usual denier crap: cherry-picking (you can prove anything that way; one node is not a keystone, it is an outlier); it's the sun; the CO2 lag canard; baffling people with numbers (mixing up rates and values is a classic obfuscation trick); obsolete science and finally crumbs of logical fallacies, stuff that just doesn't make sense.
How did this rubbish get past the fact-checking apparatus of the national press? This has all the credibility of "Elvis Sighted on Moon".
