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I wouldn't call a paper whose lead author is a well-established denier with no scientific training (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Monckton,_3rd_Visc...), and which is co-authored by a known practitioner of large-scale scientific fraud for pay (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Willie_Soon) particularly reputable.

marcus_holmes 4010 days ago

ad-hominem. Who cares who wrote it, what does it say?

thaumaturgy 4010 days ago

Ad hominem fallacy fallacy: http://laurencetennant.com/bonds/adhominem.html

Pointing out that someone is not trustworthy when considering whether or not to trust their conclusions is not ad-hom.

Attacking a persons 'trustworthiness' instead of dealing with their arguments and evidence is pretty much the dictionary definition of the ad-hominem diversion. It doesn't interest me to learn that he kicks cats or dresses in lingerie and calls himself Marjorie at the weekends. If you believe that he is wrong, then show where and how he is in error.

http://www.robsheldon.com/tactics-of-crackpot-debate/#4

thaumaturgy 4010 days ago

You inspired me to write a thing which will save me a lot of time in the future. Thank you.

DanBC 4010 days ago

You're right not to be intersted in whether he kicks cats or not when you're thinking about whether he's honest or not.

But, when thinking about whether he's honest or not being given examples of previous dishonesty is relevant.

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_to...

Just like the infamous Smathers campaign speech?

"Are you aware that Claude Pepper is known all over Washington as a shameless extrovert [pervert]? Not only that, but this man is reliably reported to practice nepotism [necrophilia] with his sister-in-law and he has a sister who was once a thespian [lesbian] in wicked New York. Worst of all, it is an established fact that Mr. Pepper, before his marriage, habitually practiced celibacy [???]."

bcheung 4010 days ago

Actually, it is.

You can't look at someone's financial interest to know whether what they said is true or not. Similarly for any other attribute about them that you don't like.

There are many great thinkers who were gay. We don't invalidate their work because of that.

At best, you need to keep that in mind and take what they said with a grain of salt. Funding gives you a clue about which areas to be more critical about, but just because they have an interest one way or the other doesn't invalidate what they said.

If someone has been found to be a nutjob, you may casually dismiss what they said as a time saving device or because there is low probability what they say has any value to you. But even a nutjob is sometimes right.

Really? You think it doesn't matter that the primary author on a paper about climate science doesn't even have an undergraduate-level education in the subject? That the second one credited has a history of accepting large sums of money to write papers endorsing spurious claims DIRECTLY RELATING to climate change?

marcus_holmes 4010 days ago

A lot of the IPCC lead authors are paid by NGO's (like Greenpeace) with a vested interest in climate alarmism. Do we discount their work too?

Climate science covers a lot of different areas, everything from economics, through hard chemistry and fluid dynamics, to pure statistics. No one person can be an expert on all of this, and no one qualification will make anyone competent in all of them. Experts from related disciplines are perfectly qualified to speak on "their" areas of climate science.

Greenpeace is a non-profit, so they have much less to gain from 'climate alarmism' than the fossil fuel industry does from climate denial.

Monkcton studied classics and received a post-grad diploma in journalism. That's pretty far removed from being a related discipline.

Aloha 4010 days ago

Are you going to tell me that every person who has ever written a paper on computer science needs to have a degree in it? While I won't question this guys qualification might be questionable - making a blanket statement that someone must be specifically educated in a subject to write a good paper on it is specious.

How often does it happen that a layman manages to get published in a well-regarded journal? Out of all the papers that laypeople publish anywhere, how many survive scrutiny from experts in the paper's problem domain? And out of those, how many that actively seek to overturn a paradigm succeed?

Based on this metric alone, it is highly unlikely that Monkcton is qualified to discuss climate change, and as it happens, his published work tends to be published by fairly obscure journals whose standards of review are questionable, and when they pass the desks of career climatologists, the result is generally unfavourable to him.

Aloha 4010 days ago

There is a difference between "layman", "well known expert in their field", "so and so with a degree in $field" "well known expert in their field with a masters in $field"

If you read my reply, I don't question the guys qualifications, I was objecting to the blanket statement of "you must have a degree in $field, to be expert" - many papers in technology, are written by people without degrees in that field.

arrrg 4010 days ago

Neither you nor the person you are responding to probably has the requisite qualifications to actually tell …

Judging something like this without relying on outside signals seems rather impossible and pointless if you are not, you know, an actual expert. No matter how much you want to believe you can be one about everything …

> co-authored by a known practitioner of large-scale scientific fraud for pay (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Willie_Soon) particularly reputable.

Flagged for libel. It is one thing to argue a position you believe, it is quite another to smear another's character.

It wasn't libel the last time you brought it up and it isn't libel this time. Soon failed to disclose non-trivial amounts of funding that he received from parties who have a vested interest in deriding climate science. Given how often his work has failed to pass muster when scrutinized by climate scientists and skeptics, it is hard to fathom how any of this can amount tosimple incompetence.

The article you linked to is almost comical in its petty malevolence, well beyond the point of self-satire. This kind of character assassination, however reprehensible, is ultimately irrelevant. If you believe Dr. Wei Hock Soon is wrong, then show where and how he is mistaken.

Climate scientists have been doing that for almost 25 years at this point, and Soon's response has pretty much been to complain that he's being bullied and that science is being politicised. I find that to be actually comical, almost as much as the presumption that an intelligent and intellectually honest person could do this for as long as Soon has. And that his association with political and industrial think tanks is a non-sequitur in this regard.

Roodgorf 4010 days ago

The first graph on that second link is a bit confusing and seems pretty disingenuous. It has the "observations" region stretching to 2050. The rest of the article seems much more factual and interesting, but why start with something so misleading if your supposed goal is to debunk misleading projections?

themgt 4010 days ago

Do read this criticism of Roy Spencer's methods, which to me do not appear credible: http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/02/roy-spencers-latest-decei... http://blog.hotwhopper.com/2014/05/roy-spencer-grows-even-we...