What Do We Think About Climate Change

In the middle of repeatedly calling Boston a weasel, eddy is taking time out to complain about ad hominem attacks? Go figure.....

 

Interresting, you do exactly what you denonce.
I suppose human being are quite similar when they whant to be right.
Daniel

 

Bit of a difference. Any attack is not by definition "ad hominem". The ad hominem attacks against the scientists do not address the scientific arguments they present. They attack the associations of the scientists, not the work they do or the accuracy of their arguments. They are simply an attempt to divert attention from the merits of the debate. How many times have we seen Boston used the term, "oil industry hack, industry pr shill, etc, etc, yet not address the scientific argument at all. He did this in a reference to Tim Ball and referred to the "Fronties Centre" as a facist rag. That is an ad hominem attack.

In the case of Boston, he has repeatedly misrepresented data, sources, superimposed the results of one study on to another, made claims such as his tin shed remark about the Heartland Institute which he was unable to back up. Another beauty is his constant use of "97% blah, blah,blah" which has been resoundingly debunked. He has done this from his first post to his last. My nickname for him " Boston the Weasel" directly relates to his behavior here in this thread so is not an ad hominem attack but a thorougly justified response to his sleazy or "Weasel-like" tactics.



From Wikipedia on argumentum ad hominem..........


"In reality, ad hominem is unrelated to sarcasm or personal abuse. Argumentum ad hominem is the logical fallacy of attempting to undermine a speaker's argument by attacking the speaker instead of addressing the argument. The mere presence of a personal attack does not indicate ad hominem: the attack must be used for the purpose of undermining the argument, or otherwise the logical fallacy isn't there. It is not a logical fallacy to attack someone; the fallacy comes from assuming that a personal attack is also necessarily an attack on that person's arguments."[5]

"You are just an ignorant twit." This is an insult and it is abusive, but it is not an argument. Because it is not an argument, it cannot be a fallacy. Of course, that doesn't mean that such personal insults are OK - just that when they appear alone, they aren't logical fallacies.[10]


Ad hominem abusive
Ad hominem abusive usually involves insulting or belittling one's opponent, but can also involve pointing out factual but ostensible character flaws or actions which are irrelevant to the opponent's argument. This tactic is logically fallacious because insults and even true negative facts about the opponent's personal character have nothing to do with the logical merits of the opponent's arguments or assertions.

Examples:

"You can't believe Jack when he says the proposed policy would help the economy. He doesn't even have a job."
"Candidate Jane's proposal about zoning is ridiculous. She was caught cheating on her taxes in 2003."

 

My shots at Boston are not ad hominem as they are directly related to his conduct here, not the fact that he is a total unknown masquerading as an expert. Besides, he is a weasel! Calling you a liberal as a manner of discrediting your views on AGW would be an ad hominem attack. This is not hair splitting, they are totally separate issues.

 

And...not weaseling.

 

Now I realize it's not a problem of you not understanding what you read, but the problem is you do not read at all. Read the paper I posted, man, read it, instead of posting nonsense.

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/...005.4639v1.pdf

 

From Wikipedia:
It is a too long post to me to read.
Just kidding
Daniel

 

I suggest you to send your analysis to Scafetta (nicola.scafetta@gmail.com), Komitov (bkomitov@sz.inetg.bg), etc, etc, and tell them they are wrong. They will be most grateful and amazed by your genius.

 

Why are you laughing? I 'suggest' that Alan is eminently more qualified to do that analysis than you are. And Scafetta would probably take him seriously whether he agreed with him or not, since he and Scafetta are both professional physicists with PhD's in their field.

It amazes me that when we finally get someone on here who actually knows what he's talking about instead of being an internet instant expert, he's subjected to a steady stream of disrespect and abuse.

 

again Sloweddy lies and assumes but fails consistently to present a single reference point for his wild claims and baseless lies

 

"Scafetta would probably take him seriously" - No
"...actually knows what he's talking" - Come on, Troy. The guy had some chemistry classes. The chemical proof of this is a small aspect that can easily be deligated to any chem student. The alleged fact that this guy grades papers of chem students does not make him any more qualified than anyone that refreshes high school chemistry.

"physicist"? - I thot he had some chemistry classes. I like Physics!

 

Actually Guillermo, with one small exception (figure 11) Scafetta did not do a Fourier analysis of the data. Instead, he performed other kinds of kinds of spectral analysis, primarily using the maximum entropy method. If he would have done a Fourier analysis on the same data set I examined (global temperatures for years 1880-2009) he would have found exactly the same thing I found, i.e. no peak corresponding to a signal of period ~60 years.

As indicated above, rather than doing a spectral analysis using Fourier transforms of global temperature data for years 1880-2009, Scafetta did a maximum entropy analysis of global temperature data for years 1850-2009. The difference in the starting dates of the two analysis (1850 vs. 1880) is not likely to make much difference. Anyway, the data I had available were for 1880-2009, the starting date of which coincides with the GISSModelE average simulation (reproduced in figure 1 of Scafetta's paper). In his maximum entropy spectral analysis Scafetta found a peak corresponding to a period 60 years.

It is unclear why Scafetta chose to use maximum entropy spectral analysis rather that Fourier spectral analysis. If I were to speculate, it would be because he didn't find the peaks he was looking for in the Fourier spectral analysis.

However, it doesn't really matter very much because, as I already pointed out: 1) Fluctuations of experimental data around a longer term trend line are no surprise. Fluctuations are to be expected. 2) Scafetta only claims to explain part of the temperature trend (about 60%) over just a fraction of the time period of interest (less than 40 years out of the 159 years of global temperature records he used for his maximum entropy calculations, i.e. only about 25% of the time period), so he is not even attempting to explain the overall long term temperature trends.

Finally, it is worth pointing out that Scafetta does not try to quantitatively calculate the climate trends based on cause-effect relationships, i.e. the various forcing factors involved, such as solar irradiance falling on the earth, CO2 levels, etc. Instead what he does is to search for periodicities in the climate data and use these to try to explain a small part of the observed climate trends. He then tries to relate the periodicities that he thinks he found in the climate data to periodicities in planetary motion. For example, he relates the periodicity in the orbit of Saturn to the alleged 60 year cycle in the climate data.

This sounds a little too close to astrology to fit my taste, but in any case, he has no real physical model to quantitatively tie the planetary motions to climate trends. Here is a direct quote from his paper that summarizes his position on this: "The idea proposed here is that the climate oscillations are described by a given, even if still unknown, physical function that depends on the orbits of the planets and their positions." The closest he comes to making a solid mechanistic argument is to make some hand waving and non-quantitative comments about things like tidal forces acting on the sun and some non-quantitative comments in the appendix about collective synchronization of coupled oscillators. None of these speculations are tied to solid quantitative calculations. Thus, even if seen in the most favorable light, Scafetta's paper only amounts to the earliest beginnings of a partial hypothesis to explain part of the global climate change.

 

Just to clarify, my PhD is in physical chemistry rather than physics, though there is quite a bit of overlap between the two fields, and in my undergraduate work I did minor in physics. Also, I have published some papers in the physics literature.

 

What papers, Feynman?