[wahern]

If I wrote a long essay, seasoned with the same phrasing, terminology, and reasoning used by credible academics, that proclaimed the spaghetti monster was real, you would be wise to dismiss my argument out-of-hand without personally reading it unless you were persuaded otherwise by someone or something else. Wasting your time on the off-chance that I had something relevant and substantive to offer would be a poor gamble.

Ad hominem is an informal fallacy, not a logical fallacy. A logical fallacy always makes an argument invalid. An informal fallacy makes an argument extremely suspect, but context matters. Unless you can instantly read and criticize all the arguments published everyday, or unless you're immortal and don't care about timely application or responses to arguments, you must structure your approach to acquiring knowledge. Alternatively, you could go through life haphazardly, allowing coincidence or, more often, wealth and social station to dictate the ideas you're exposed to.

Your point would stand if climate skeptics were earnest and constructive participants. But they've shown themselves not to be.

In short, credibility matters. Climate skeptics as a group lack credibility, and climate skeptic arguments as a class lack prima facie credibility. In the context of climate change discourse, pointing out (with citation) that an author is a bone fide climate skeptic (a label and affiliation with substance in our times) is totally legitimate, IMO.

I appreciate that some people with idle time are willing to dive in and provide more substantive criticism. But such earnest people aren't always around, and even reading their analyses takes time. I think it's fair to argue credibility, just like it's fair to argue credibility wrt EmDrive without painstaking analysis of wild quantum mechanical hypotheses.

[jamez1]

This would be fair if she wasn't arguing that the credibility of healthy skepticism shouldn't be tarnished in science.

"Climate believers" attack her credibility, she defends her credibility, but her arguments are invalid from the start because she's not credible?

The group of people who want to research the grandiose climate change narrative from a skeptical angle are attacked because of political reasons not because what they are doing is wrong scientifically.

Climate science should be thankful she exists, not offended.