Global Warming!

Global Warming: Emerging Science and Distortions of it.

The other day, I was in my local Goodwill thrift store, wherein I chanced upon a video. 

 Understanding?  That's one way to spell 'misinterpretation.'

  As you can see, it's got simple graphics, a graph that's not very useful out of context, a picture of the sun.  In their defense, lots of people like the sun.  I can see why they'd make it a selling point.  Giant ball of gas that keeps us alive.  So let's flip this box over, shall we?

Dozens?  I think I counted six in the first segment.

 So, more words, and a lady.  Apparently Al Gore's film was too political, so let's take up some text to argue against it.  Not from a standpoint of having better science, mind you, but from the standpoint of politics says it's wrong in some countries.  Politicking to complain that someone is too political seems a bit less than scientific.  Sensationalist?  I'll let you decide.

Getting right down to business, I popped in this DVD.  I mean, who doesn't want some balance and perspective in their daily dose of morning message?  Starting with lesson 1, I have a nifty menu.  

Hockey Stick Error.  What else will it take to convince you?

Now, let's click that menu and watch some science happen!  The first thing that is quickly pointed out (within the first minute or so) is that the data must be wrong because some of it is collected in cities.  The argument here is that the data itself is wrong because cities are hotter than other places.  This sounds like a fair thing.  So they give us data without cities included, and it shows that the hottest years were in the 1930s instead of today, the further argument being that humans couldn't have caused the CO2 increase because we weren't burning fossil fuels yet like we are today.  The Industrial Revolution is somehow overlooked.  Also, it's important to note, the EPA isn't hiding this information.  Search it yourself and see.

A simple rebuttal would point out that the Heat Island effect is a known thing, and is factored into this.  A simpler argument would be that the Heat Island effect doesn't explain away all the data.  I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine other, more complex (or even simpler) arguments.

"Ironically, scientists believe..." says the narrator.  This is a common fallacy.  Scientists don't believe things.  Scientists see something, ask why it is happening, perform experiments, collect data, and see where those data fall.  Let's take gravity as an example for a moment.  Every day, ten times a day on average (sometimes more, sometimes less) I drop a ball a known distance.  I measure the distance, as well as the duration of fall.  From this I plot the information.  I see that, as I drop the ball over greater distances, the amount of time it takes to reach the ground increases.  This has nothing to do with what I believe.  This has everything to do with what I observe.  I can believe until the day I die that the ball should take equally long regardless of the distance, but the belief doesn't matter.  Science shows it, through observable, testable facts, to be what it is.

Back to the topic at hand.  Section 4 is about the lag of CO2 rise in relation to temperature.  The video does a wonderful job of presenting correct information here, but does so out of context.  I'll keep this short, as other people have done wonderful jobs of explaining it.  Basically, the earth's axis shifts a few degrees one way and wobbles in a reasonably large circle the other.  This happens over 20,000 to 40,000 years.  This precedes the CO2 shift, because it partially causes it.  However, it's also important to note that once the CO2 catches up, it is indeed a major contributor to further greenhouse gas buildup.

This segment is also somewhat hung up on the idea that we aren't educating people well enough that water is a greenhouse gas.  In one section of speech, I'm told that humans add less than 1% of the CO2 to the atmosphere (well, we add about 1% extra as non-natural processes, so this point is fine).  The part they leave out is that natural processes can't reabsorb the extra 1% we are making, not all of it anyway.  We are indeed adding more CO2 than the world can readily reabsorb, and this is kind of a big deal.

The face of skepticism.  Kinda.

Also there's a bit in here about Al Gore's movie, basically so they can say they disagree with it but pull the same information he uses and cherry-pick their 'arguments' by ignoring other evidence.  This is not how science works.  Oddly enough, in Lesson 3, the video claims it will tell me about the true nature of science, but there is no subsection/chapter dedicated to it.  I think that really spells out the whole brunt of this video.

The true nature of science?  Not important, apparently.

As you can see by this slide of the menu for lesson 3, I've got some serious learning to do.  I mean, they've got a fair point: there would be no global warming without the sun!

Let's get a bit more in-depth.  I saw section 5 there and just had to have a watch.

"Is rising CO2 as harmful as we've been lead to believe..." she asks.  "Is CO2 even a pollutant?" she continues.  That's a loaded question.  No one said it was a pollutant at this point, but rather a greenhouse gas.  Subtlety, folks!  The Professor Emeritus of Horticulture of Michigan State points out that CO2 is an important nutrient.  This is correct, although it's not as simple as just increasing CO2. We went over this a few paragraphs back, so I'll move on.  Next a fellow points out something I learned in or around 2nd grade, that humans and animals make CO2, and plants use CO2.  Also a correct fact.  Following that, a fellow points out that plants evolved when there were staggeringly high levels of CO2, greater than we could ever make today if we tried.  This is also correct to a point - we'd be dead long before we ever hit those levels, but those levels also existed at a time before 'plants' and 'animals' were two distinct categories of thing, or when mammals weren't really developed to the point we are today, et cetera.  That's not an argument suitable for this conversation, and I think the producers of the DVD are well aware of it (I could be wrong - science doesn't seem to be their strong point, after all).  

But then the best point.  They keep arguing for increased CO2 as though it is a miracle gas (their words, in fact), pointing out somehow that CO2 can miraculously make crops grow where they hadn't before.  Not only does this blatantly disregard the advances of science in the past 100 years, they go so far as to say increased CO2 could solve famines in parts of the world where it's a very real thing.  Going so far as to say increased CO2 (a level that won't kill us, mind you - CO2 is repeatedly pointed out not to be a pollutant, implying it's perfectly safe to humans somehow) could allow farms in the desert.  They even show a TIME magazine cover photo of someone from an east-African country and her child with the word FAMINE on the cover, and then show an impoverished little boy, just to drive home the point.  These people honestly think that increasing CO2 will fix global hunger, ignoring the fact that it's taken the likes of Bill Gates, various seed crop companies, tons of GM sciences, and tens of thousands of years of evolution to get us to this point with our food supply.  This is terrible ethics, using scare tactics to proselytize their position, being more political than the things they complain are too political.  It seems they think increasing CO2 to unhealthy levels is the best panacea for everything, and has no negative implications whatsoever.

But as I've rambled on long enough here for today, I'll end on that point.  Think skeptically, check your sources, and be like water, my friends.  The kind of water that holds CO2.

Rebuttal to Camels with Hammers defining of Atheism

This article is in response to a piece Camels with Hammers released here.

1: On the various 'types' of atheist.  

It would seem to me this argument is rather a hard one to describe.  But let's rewind a bit and watch this video first. 

     A lot of atheists say that atheism means simply a “lack of beliefs in gods”...

Well, yes.  This is what the word means.  Christians are just as atheist as any atheist when discussing the god Ahura Mazda, or Thor.  'Lacking a belief' or 'not believing in' are roughly the same thing.  This is a play on words, and the simplest way to think about it is via the corollary.  Is 'having a belief' any different than 'believing?'  This author thinks not.

Sometimes they (falsely) imply that no atheists make stronger claims of disbelief than that even though some of us (like me) surely do claim to positively disbelieve in gods...

Sure, some atheists are loud about saying there is no god, but atheists don't blow people up to get to heaven; atheists don't use fear tactics like hell to make people act 'right;'  Atheists have yet to lead a crusade or hunt witches; atheists have never drank the blood of their deity; atheists aren't burning down clinics; atheists aren't pushing for indoctrination of children via prayer in schools. 

We've seen theists try to drive anyone who disagrees with them out of town.  Atheists aren't doing this.  So I don't think it's fair to call this a false accusation, because atheists aren't killing and oppressing people to make them atheists.

...an atheist thoughtful enough about ... to frame themselves as “merely lacking belief in gods” is ... more likely than not going to have armloads of positive arguments from philosophy (and ones extrapolating from science and history) to say that God does not exist and to, in practice, outright disbelieve in God, irrespective of their principled claims to “simply lacking belief”.

But this contradicts the previous point he was trying to make, regarding atheists being more outspoken.  Any day, ten to one, a theists will evangelize their god and decry any other god, more than an atheist will.  My disbelief for Zeus is no stronger than my disbelief for Allah.  I lack a belief for both equally, see?  This article seems slanted heavily toward one particular subset of religious people.

I shall move on, since I could take an article on each individual point.

2: On children.

Many atheists claim that we are all born atheist...

Well, yes.  This is a testable hypothesis.  Again, the corollary is our best bet.  Are babies born believing in Marduk?  The answer would appear to be no.  Are babies born any more believing in Allah, Zeus, Loki, or any number of other gods?  It would appear not.  

If they also don’t believe in God, that’s not a point for atheism.

This is a reasonable thing to say, but it's got some logical fallacy to it.  The only thing that's not a point for atheism is 'having a belief' as the author likes to point out.  Babies have no beliefs (again, beliefs, not knowledge.).  Knowledge is not a requisite for belief, as this article seems to want to make it.  The other points made don't deal with belief, they deal with knowledge, and the author is correct, babies wouldn't know or believe any of them.

But it’s hypocritical then to assign them atheism either as though that were a merely neutral position and not a stance on a philosophical issue.

Again, rather a logical fallacy.  'Having no belief' is a neutral standpoint.  It's what makes (good) science work.  This is correct, babies have exactly zero evidence for lots of things.  Philosophy, though, in the truest sense, is attempting to figure out how the world works, and babies are good at that, as anyone whose ever been around one might know.  Babies act as if they lack beliefs on things (babies have no innate belief that electric sockets are bad, and they tend to act that way also).  We're not assigning them a stance on the issue, it's the evidence that shows it to be true. 

Put in a simpler way, it's absolutely true that babies or children have no more innate belief in Jesus than in Freya.  This also means they 'lack a belief' as the author pointed out earlier.  Atheism is atheism, the 'lack of belief' of something theistic.

On the point about whether or not children are more likely to posit god solutions to problems, I can't seem to find any reputable articles on this.  A google search gives links to dailymail type things, which are notoriously bad science links (let alone lacking peer review, or not being science journals).

Not even being able to understand the question of theism vs. atheism, means not having a position.

 This is a fallacy of composition, or perhaps a false dichotomy fallacy.  The simplest rebuttal is that plenty of competent, knowledgeable people exist, and some of them have no understanding of lots of things, yet still have a position on such questions.  Most people don't understand how nuclear fission works, but have a pretty clear belief that the word nuclear is bad somehow, and so is everything related to it.  According to this fallacy, however, people who are not scientifically literate on nuclear physics are incapable of holding this viewpoint, because it would require knowledge they don't have.  Formally, I think this is Existential Fallacy, as it implies that there is a (universal premise) requisite of knowledge to have (particular conclusion) a belief, which clearly is not true.

3: Exemplary something-or-other.

There could be two kinds of people who lack belief who I think it would be wrong to call atheists. 1. Those who perceive themselves to be too ill-informed or incompetent with reasoning about these issues to have a genuine opinion.

 Well, then point two is certainly no longer valid, because before it was an outsider needing to make that call.  Most creatures are unaware of their own ignorances, but are indeed perfectly capable of forming beliefs around them.  Otherwise, anyone who doesn't know the entire Bible shouldn't be considered a Christian, because it means they're ignorant of their own religion and can't actually make that choice for themselves.  It also probably means they don't know of all the other religions that exist, and therefore can't logically decide which one aligns more closely with what they believe.

Moving on.

The next bit is a terrible syllogism, because science doesn't work like that.  Religion, however, does work like that.  This is pretty clearly a masked man fallacy.  This is clearly telling here:

Now if 80% of the physicists become either squiniclists or asquiniclists then we would be justified in siding with the preponderance of expert opinion and become squiniclists or asquiniclists out of proper deference to majority of expert opinion.

Among other things, it is an appeal to authority fallacy.  It doesn't matter, in science, how many people say something is right.  It similarly doesn't matter in religion.  If that were the case, 90% of people ascribe to some sort of religion, and well over 50% of those are Abrahamic.  Ergo, this must be the default position...

I think we can see where that point leads.

But looking at all the evidence for and against squinicles, you’re genuinely undecided.

Well, if you're entrenched as much as the author gives you credit for, you probably do more science.  Equating someone like Neil DeGrasse Tyson to The Pope is a terribly fallacious thing to do.  For one, this has to do with evidence, of which religion has NEVER provided.  The default position, when no evidence is proffered, is actually atheism. But moving along, we have evidence for and against squincles, so let's go there.  In that case, we wait for more evidence before we have to decide, because this is good, logical science. 

A better argument might have been evolution, cosmic or biological.  This particular set of points actually illustrates the thing better, and plenty of people who have no understanding of either have plenty of viewpoints on both, whether the author of the article likes it or not.

In this case, you lack a belief about squinicles. Does that make you default to being an asquiniclist? 

No, because squincles aren't based on belief, they're based on evidence.  Again, this whole analogy doesn't work, but this drives the point home.   There are actually people alive who still believe the world is flat, in spite of the overwhelming evidence against it, and some of those people are not as well trained or educated as the folks pushing that idea.  Science doesn't care if 90% of people held that view, it would still be wrong compared to the evidence, and then 90% of the people would be incorrect, but would also defer to the majority opinion and so on and so forth....

As Krauss has said on many occasion, scientists love to be proven wrong.  Go out, do research, get your Nobel prize.  This is because science is, again, not a belief structure.  Beliefs don't require evidence; beliefs don't require knowledge.

So to be done with this rebuttal for now, I hope (and truly believe) I've made some good points here which carry on to the rest of the article.