Fiddling While the World Burns

The article below was published in USA Today on August 18th. It is by Cal Thomas, a pundit on Fox News and a widely syndicated columnist. In this article he challenges the global warming consensus of the scientific community. I thought it was a great article to examine forensically, for it is riddled with fallacies. What a disservice to the country that this asshole should be given the mike! Take him off the air!

I have included my comments in bold
Not so hot air

By Cal ThomasThursday, August 16, 2007


In every child's life there comes a time when childhood fantasies are shattered and he or she is forced to accept reality - there is no Santa Claus or tooth fairy; parents don't always mean it when they promise to stay married until parted by death. Grown-up scientists, theologians, historians, archaeologists and others who pursue facts and objective truths are rooted in reality and constantly adjusting their conclusions, theories and hypotheses when new information comes to light. Those who ignore facts and cling to outdated information, or outright falsehoods, can quickly embrace fanaticism.

So it is with "global warming," the secular religion of our day that even has a good number of adherents among people of faith. Having decided to focus less on the eternal and whether anyone dwells there, global warming fundamentalists are pushing planet worship on us in a manner that would make a jihadist proud.

(This is an interesting tactic: to describe global warming science as a "secular religion". This is intended, no doubt, to evoke the culture wars so as to divide the 'secular humanists' from the faithful. The faithful--the intended audience of this piece--are invited here to see their faith being threatened by the secularists--the scientists on the opposite side. Here 'global warming fundamentalists' are trying to get us to worship the planet rather than God. This is a fallacy called 'poisoning the well'. But there is also a claim being made that global warming scientists are clinging to outdated data. This is a fallacy of 'distorting the facts', for the facts do not indicate that global warming scientists are clinging to outdated facts.)

There are at least two characteristics all fundamentalists share. One is the exclusion and sometimes suppression of any and all information that challenges or contradicts the belief one wishes to impose on all. The other is the use of the state in pursuit of their objectives, overriding the majority's will.

Setting up the two birds with one stone: scientists are fundamentalists who want to use the state to override the majority's will. This is a fallacy of appeal to authority--specifically appeal to the authority of the many. The idea is that the "majority" know whats true (or best) AND NOT partisan scientists who have their own fundamentalist agenda.

With global warming, some members of the scientific community - not all of whom are climatologists, who disagree among themselves - have circled the wagons, denying access and labeling illegitimate any scientist who disagrees with the "doctrines" of a recently warming planet. The big media have been complicit in this censorship or ridicule of alternative views, mostly refusing to interview anyone who does not push the global warming faith. CBS News this week broadcast a four-part series on "climate change." Newsweek magazine recently slammed global warming "deniers." That brought a counterattack in the Aug. 20 issue from Newsweek contributor Robert Samuelson, who termed the article "highly contrived" and "fundamentally misleading." In 1975, Newsweek was just as convinced - using "scientific evidence" - that a new Ice Age was upon us.

This is a widely deployed strategy by the far right: declare there is reasonable disagreement on scientific issues (the science is, so Cal Thomas maintains, controversial at best), and then declare that anybody who insists on the veracity and univocity of the science is being a fundamentalist for not integrating the controversial science. This is a fallacy of distorting the facts. While there is a range of estimates, some views are simply wrong and/or suffer from methodological errors and that is why no peer reviewed journal will publish their results. Thomas is distorting the facts here by implicitly insisting that all the written views of "scientists" are equally rigorous and deserve to be included in the overall picture and that those scientists who do not integrate these views are acting the part of religious fanatics. But this fails to take seriously the way in which the process of peer review works.

Many global warming fanatics have pointed to NASA as proof that their concerns about a warming planet are justified. They have repeatedly cited the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), whose director, James Hansen, has asserted that nine of the 10 warmest years in history have occurred since 1995, with 1998 the warmest. When NASA was confronted with evidence provided by Climate Audit, a blog run by Stephen McIntyre devoted to auditing the statistical methods and data used in historical reconstructions of past climate data, it reversed itself. Without the fanfare used to hype the global warming fanaticism it had earlier supported, NASA now says four of the top 10 years of high temperatures are from the 1930s. Several previously selected "warm" years - 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2004 - fell behind 1900.
GISS now says its previous claim that 1998 was the warmest year in American history is no longer valid. The warmest year was 1934.

By now they--the scientific consensus on global warming--have become "fanatics". Thomas thinks he has scored a winning point by showing that 1934 was the warmest year not what the political arm of NASA said it was, in the 1990's. Thomas thinks he has scored a big point here, as though disproving that one fact were enough to cast doubt on the whole global warming hypothesis. See, 1934 was a hot year! Its all good! Its happened in the past and theres nothing to worry about!This is an interesting example of fallacies of hasty generalization and of overlooking the facts. It is not a relevant defeater of the global warming hypothesis that there were occassionally very warm years over the last thousand years (anomalies). And yet, Thomas thinks he has the smoking gun here by surpassing the mountains of confirming evidence for anthropogenic global warming in favor of this one fact and then rushing to the conclusion that global warming science is a hoax!


Has any of this new information changed the minds of the global warming fundamentalists? Nope. Neither has much of it seen the light of day in the mainstream media, which continue to carry stories where seldom is heard an alternative word and the skies are polluted all day.
The New York Times ran a story in its Sunday Business section last week that said it would cost a lot of money to fight global warming. The implication being that this money should come from government (and taxpayers), along with more government regulations and control over our lives by the very people who seem to have difficulty winning wars and controlling spending.
The Earth has warmed and cooled over many centuries. One can get a sense of who is telling the truth about global warming by the company the concept keeps. Most of the disciples of global warming are liberal Democrats who never have enough of our money and believe there are never enough regulations concerning the way we lead our lives. That ought to be enough to give everyone pause, along with emerging evidence that the global warming jihadists may be more full of hot air than the climate they claim is about to burn us up.

Finally, we have the mack daddy fallacy of them all, the guilt by association fallacy: "One can get a sense of sense of who is telling the truth about global warming by the company the concept keeps...most of the disciples of global warming are liberal Democrats who never have enough of our money..."
So, just to be clear, we went from scientists who insist that their science is true (or largely true) to their comparison to religious fanatics, to actually being religious fanatics, to "disciples", to tax and spend democrats.

This piece should be seen for what it is, namely, a crude hack job by a political operative. It is a shame that such opinions are widely circulated in our society.