Showing posts with label logical fallacies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label logical fallacies. Show all posts

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

The Signs Are Everywhere - Part 2

You can access part one here.

Logical fallacies
The reason why there's a 97% consensus is because of the many lines of evidence that humans are causing global warming. Human fingerprints are being observed in heat escaping out to space, in the structure of the atmosphere and even in the changing seasons. Another denialist technique used to counter the weight of evidence is the logical fallacy.

The most common fallacious argument is that current climate change must be natural because climate has changed naturally in the past. This myth commits the logical fallacy of jumping to conclusions. It's like finding a dead body with a knife sticking out of its back, and arguing that the person must have died of natural causes because humans have died of natural causes in the past. The premise does not lead to the conclusion.

The Signs Are Everywhere



It is only the ideologically blind who refuse to see the signs. Whether we live on the West Coast, Central Canada, or the East Coast, we are being affected by climate change, More protracted droughts. More wildfires. More oppressive heatwaves. Or unseasonably cool conditions.

Of protracted winters I will not even speak.

So what is to be done about the obdurate climate-change denier? Other than ignoring them, we can confront them with the facts they so willfully dismiss. We do that by first recognizing their sleazy and unscientific tactics. Here is how we do it:

One of the deniers' favorite strategies is to invoke fake experts.
Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. This has been found independently in a number of studies, including surveys of Earth scientists, analysis of public statements about climate change and analysis of peer-reviewed scientific papers. How might one cast doubt on the overwhelming scientific consensus? One technique is the use of fake experts.

We see this in online petitions such as the Global Warming Petition Project, which features more than 31,000 scientists claiming humans aren't disrupting our climate. How can there be 97% consensus when 31,000 scientists disagree? It turns out 99.9% of the petition's signatories aren't climate scientists. They include computer scientists, mechanical engineers and medical scientists but few climate scientists. The Global Warming Petition Project is fake experts in bulk.



More to come.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Absolutely!

For me, one of the biggest offenses against logical thinking is absolutism, which essentially says there is only one right answer, that everything is black or white, with no gradations of gray. An example would be Vic Toews infamous assertion, when controversy erupted over his deeply flawed Internet surveillance bill, that those who opposed the legislation were siding with child pornographers. Another would be George Bush's claim, after 9/11, that 'You are either with us, or with the terrorists.'

Despite what the above examples might suggest, such thinking, sadly, is not the exclusive domain of those with limited intelligence; we all have the potential to fall into the absolutist trap. I am no exception, despite the fact that I try as much as possible to practise critical thinking.

Yet sometimes, there seems to be only one ineluctable conclusion to be drawn, as absolutist as it may appear. Such is the way I felt this morning upon reading Tim Harper's latest column. Entitled A hand stretched across the aisle in the print edition of the paper, the piece details the efforts of the NDP's Nathan Cullen and Liberal leadership candidate Joyce Murray to promote a one-time co-operative pact among the three parties in order to unseat Stephen Harper in the next federal election. Elegant in its simplicity, the plan would work as follows:

... seats held by the Conservatives in which the governing party received less than 50 per cent of the vote would be targeted for co-operation... Each of the three parties would nominate their own candidates and, assuming all three parties backed co-operation, the single candidate would be chosen in a run-off.

This way, of course, the centre and left would not be siphoning off votes from each other, which is what occurred in the last election, allowing Stephen Harper's crew to come up the middle and form a majority government despite being supported by only a minority of voters.

Joyce Murray avers that the majority within the three parties (this includes the Greens) support the notion, but what is telling is the reaction of the party leaders and leadership aspirants: NDP leader Thomas Mulcair has forbidden his MPs from responding to a letter from Green Party leader Elizabeth May championing the notion. Montreal MP Marc Garneau accused [Murray] of giving up on her party. And Justin Trudeau, of no fixed ideology, and, who once flirted with the idea of co-operation, has slammed the door on the prospect.

For me, there are no shades of gray, no nuances, in their flat rejection of the one strategy that could break Harper's stranglehold on Canada. Each is consumed with the bald lust for power. All other considerations, including what is best for the country, are secondary. I can see no other explanation.

So whether I am guilty of absolutist thinking or have drawn the only reasonable conclusion possible, I leave to the reader to decide.