They aren’t Climatologists. It’s an inherently political organization:

“Appeal to Authority”

Also Known as: Fallacious Appeal to Authority, Misuse of Authority, Irrelevant Authority, Questionable Authority, Inappropriate Authority, Ad Verecundiam

Description of Appeal to Authority
An Appeal to Authority is a fallacy with the following form:

Person A is (claimed to be) an authority on subject S.
Person A makes claim C about subject S.
Therefore, C is true.
This fallacy is committed when the person in question is not a legitimate authority on the subject. More formally, if person A is not qualified to make reliable claims in subject S, then the argument will be fallacious.

This sort of reasoning is fallacious when the person in question is not an expert. In such cases the reasoning is flawed because the fact that an unqualified person makes a claim does not provide any justification for the claim. The claim could be true, but the fact that an unqualified person made the claim does not provide any rational reason to accept the claim as true.

When a person falls prey to this fallacy, they are accepting a claim as true without there being adequate evidence to do so. More specifically, the person is accepting the claim because they erroneously believe that the person making the claim is a legitimate expert and hence that the claim is reasonable to accept. Since people have a tendency to believe authorities (and there are, in fact, good reasons to accept some claims made by authorities) this fallacy is a fairly common one.

Left wingers believe in it because they’re left wing, not because they understand the science. Right wingers reject it because they’re right wing, not because they understand the politics.

No, no:

Conservatives understand the politics all too well: Leftists have been using pseudo-scientific claims to enslave people since Mao was knee-high to a Most Honorable Grasshoppah. Lysenkoism?
Please….

In any case, there is no rational basis for denying the basic proposition of anthropogenic climate change.

“Begging the Question”

“O shameless beggar, that craveth no less than the whole controversy to be given him!” The OED’s first citation for “to beg the question” is from 1581.

Fowler gives two examples of non-circular question-begging: “that fox-hunting is not cruel, since the fox enjoys the fun, and that one must keep servants, since all respectable people do so”. Gowers notes that single words, such as “reactionary” and “victimization”, can be used in a question-begging way.

I never wrote anything of the kind. I am just as happy to keep Al Gore out of this as I am to keep the idiot TV weatherman quoted above out of it.

I imagine you do. Yet, that bloated oaf is, in fact, the standard bearer for your Global Warming ’science’…..

page 134: “For the other climate change drivers, RF
is often estimated using general circulation model
(GCM) data employing a variety of methodologies
(Ramaswamy et al., 2001; Stuber et al., 2001b;
Tett et al., 2002; Shine et al., 2003; Hansen et
al., 2005; Section 2.8.3). Often</B, alternative RF calculation
methodologies that do not directly follow the TAR definition of
a stratospheric-adjusted RF are used; the most important ones
are illustrated in Figure 2.2.”

Page 140: “Therefore, using 1750
may slightly overestimate the RF, as the changes in the mixing
ratios of CO2, CH4 and N2O after the end of this naturally
cooler period may not be solely attributable to anthropogenic
emissions. Using 1860 as an alternative start date for the RF
calculations would reduce the LLGHG RF by roughly 10%.”

Page 142: “However, as reported by
Bergamaschi et al. (2005), national inventories based on ‘bottom-
up’ studies can grossly underestimate emissions and ‘top-
down’ measurement-based assessments of reported emissions
will be required for verification.”

But don’t take my word for it: read the IPCC report!

Omigosh, Ophie! You’re right! It reads just like every environmental scare-story of the last 40 years!

I’m an engineer. I read scientific and engineering papers all day. There are enough ‘weasel words’ in there to make it largely meaningless. Heck, I wouldn’t even bomb Iran on that kind of disseminating information and tentative conclusions!

How come they sound less sure of their theory than you do?

I have been waving The Koran report in your faces for some time now. That’s where all the evidence is. I gave you a link to it. Read the evidence. It’s all there. I have been begging you skeptics to step up to the plate and tell me what you don’t like about The Koran. Yet so far not one person here has been willing to talk felafel. Is there no one here capable of actually addressing the issue?

B’ismillah! Such a worthy and faithful Friday sermon, Imam!

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2008/pdf/budget/energy.pdf
http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/doe07pf1.pdf

The current flap about corn-derived ethanol notwithstanding (the subject of enormous misinformation), corn-based ethanol is just a stepping stone toward a cellulose-derived ethanol industry. Combined with biodiesel and new car battery technologies under development, we can now anticipate cars that will be able to travel 100 miles on less-than 1/2 gallon of petroleum products in the near future. This is when the world will achieve true energy iindependence from the Middle East. As I recall, transportation accounts for about 75% of all liquid petroleum usage in the U.S.

This is not to diminish all the other alternate fuels technologies under development, including nuclear and coal liquifaction.

On planetary temperature changes: I can’t find any source material on that. I recall looking it over about a year ago, and determining that the whole thing was bogus. It started with some data from Mars indicating some temperature increases, but I don’t think those increases were global and we certainly don’t have a solid enough time series to draw much in the way of conclusions. There might be a case for Martian global warming, but if so, it’s weak. On the other hand, the stuff about the other planets was all hornswoggle. The temperatures in the upper Jovian atmosphere are controlled by the weather underneath. Jupiter is a net emitter of radiation, not an absorber, so any activity there is impossible to assign to the sun. And there simply wasn’t any data on other planets to corroborate the claims.

As to the Little Ice Age, there’s mountains of data on this topic. The broader version of it is called “Paleoclimatology” and is thoroughly covered in Chapter 6 of the IPCC report. The basic story is this: yes, there have been lots of variations in climate. The temperatures go up, the temperatures go down. But these historical variations are slower than what we’re experiencing now. And mostly they operate at lower average temperatures than we are seeing. That is, we’re already warmer than the historical average, and the temperature is rising, not falling.

If you want to see some decent contrarian arguments, I suggest that you look at Climate Audit, which I linked to earlier. The great majority of the contrarian stuff I have seen on the web is dreck. You will also see some robust debate on Real Climate. A good example is this discussion of the role of the oceans in absorbing CO2. What’s important to notice here is that there are 397 responses to the article, and if you read them you’ll see people poking and prodding at the content, asking tough questions, challenging fine points, arguing over the details. If you have the time, read through the whole thing and your misconceptions about scientists as zombies marching in unison will forever vanish.

My instincts tell me that Global Warming is a load of hooey.

Instincts are really good for avoiding lions, selecting mates, and tracking prey. They’re not so good when dealing with highly complex scientific issues. For this class of problems, reason is the only way to fly.

He’s going to send 20,000 troops to the sun.”

Things I do to conserve energy:
1. mow my small yard with a push mower
2. use cold water tide for laundry
3. ride a motorcycle weather permitting to get to and from (great freaking gas mileage on these motorized bicycles)
4. use compact fluorescent light bulb’s as my old bulbs burn out
5. in the winter, kick the thermostat down a couple degree’s and wear a sweater. oh the humanity!

My instincts tell me that Global Warming is a load of hooey. Additional I should add that I dont see much harm in the perputation of Global Warming Hysteria.

I have said it before and I will say it again, lets end our dependence on mid east oil. Everyone can pitch in towards that effort. Be it ’save the planet’ or ‘lets get out the f_ck out of the middle east’

Now you can clearly see why my method of arguing philosophy, a[s]sumptions, and logic premises are so much prefered by me.

I’ve heard rumblings that temperatures on other planets have been rising recently. I’d love to see hard evidence on that rumor, as it’s one of the strongest arguments in favor of solar cycles.

Any information on any sort of modeling concerning the Little Ice Age in the 16th-17th century, or the astonishing warming of Greenland that allowed numerous Viking settlements there, only to see them abandoned when cooling subsequently happened, in the 800-1200 A.D time range, would be helpful, too.

I believe Ophiuchus is interested not on vague pronouncements but in debating the actual information that is out there. (At least I hope he’s interested in such a debate.)