Bishop Hill Irony fail
Mar 16, 2012 Climate: CRU Ethics Readers will be amused by the outpourings of Lawrence Souder and Furrah Qureshi of Drexel University. Their latest paper appears in the Journal of Scientific Communication.
Most accounts of an ideal scientific discourse proscribe ad hominem appeals as one way to distinguish it from public discourse. Because of their frequent use of ad hominem attacks, the Climategate email messages provoked strong criticisms of climate scientists and climate science. This study asks whether the distinction between public and scientific discourse holds in this case and thus whether the exclusion of ad hominem arguments from scientific discourse is valid. The method of analysis comes from the field of informal logic in which argument fallacies like the ad hominem are classified and assessed. The approach in this study focuses on a functional analysis of ad hominem—their uses rather than their classification. The analysis suggests three distinct functional uses of ad hominem remarks among the Climategate emails: (1) indirect, (2) tactical, and (3) meta-. Consistent with previous research on ad hominem arguments in both public and scientific discourse, these results reinforce the common opinion of their fallacious character. Only the remarks of the last type, the meta- ad hominem, seemed to be non-fallacious in that they might help to preempt the very use of ad hominem attacks in scientific discourse.
Throughout their paper, Souder and Qureshi refer to anyone who questions any aspect of the AGW hypothesis as "deniers". Perhaps irony hasn't made its way to the top of the ivory tower yet.
The paper is quite interesting though.
Reader Comments (58)
Don - nicely put. I hope you won't mind me copying your comment to my thread at tallbloke - where you'd be most welcome.
Mar 16, 2012 at 2:09 PM | ScientistForTruth quotes and writes:
'The remark...suggests an impulse to horde information and seems to violate the norm of
communalism.'
Who does the reviewing, editing and proofreading for this journal? This is, after all, supposed to be the Journal of Science Communication, so how can something as illiterate as 'horde' for 'hoard' slip through?
It is a Freudian slip. "Hording information" is one of the first techniques developed by V. I. Lenin and it has been employed by all communists since that time.
What is the "norm of communalism?" Free love?
Mar 16, 2012 at 3:09 PM | omnologos
"Would describing Monbiot as "intellectually moderate" be considered offensive?"
He might be an intellectual moderate in a discussion of the best organizational structure for world government.
Mar 16, 2012 at 4:30 PM | Dreadnought quotes and writes:
...but their imperfections became public only after their siege mentality had been breeched by a desperate act of boundary invasion.
"Doesn't that mean someone clad their mentality in britches? Were they sans culottes until then?"
Screamingly funny! Thanks so much. (They put their britches on their heads.)
For those who might be interested, I have deconstructed the 1997 Trenberth Kiehl diagram.to show that it and presumably the IPCC climate models are utter and complete bunkum: http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/03/16/hans-jelbring-back-radiation-and-observational-meteorologial-evidence/#comment-20146
What they did was change the 26 W/M^2 real average IR emission from the Earth's surface to the 390 W/m^2 you get from a ~15°C black body in a vacuum, a totally artificial construction because to get radiative flux > convective flux for such an emitter [a steel plate has similar epsilon] your need >120°C, as I found experimentally in many metallurgical situations.
The 'back radiation' of 324 W/m^2 is totally imaginary, a fudge factor to get the imaginary high warming of the atmosphere.
The latter appears to be the result of the incorrect interpretation of CO2 IR absorption data.
My comment about this post on Climate Audit has made a new top post! (but it seems to have no title!)
http://climateaudit.org/2012/03/17/15846/
I seem to be making a habit of this... :-)
(I'm DR_UK on other blogs as there is another DR on WUWT)
"Emmanuel Todd: “Après la Democratie”. Both authors are well to the left.
Robert E. Phelan, a sociologist who sometimes comments here, and at WUWT, has more in the same vein.
Mar 16, 2012 at 7:36 PM | Unregistered Commentergeoffchambers "
The French Socialist party contains a non negligible minority of this strain. They absolutely hate "Social Democrats" (though Social Democrats are old-fashioned themselves in my opinion) I always say they're fine with the "social" part, it's the "democracy" they hate.
Pielke, Sr. posted a great comment showing how the Phil Jones ad hom sneer is either dishonest or merely incompetent, since Jones had acknowledged (to Pielke, Sr.!) the lack of independence of the major data sets six years earlier:
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2012/03/22/comment-on-the-article-ad-hominem-arguments-in-the-service-of-boundary-work-among-climate-scientists-by-souder-and-qureshi-2012/