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.
"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 [???]."
No, because that was actually irrelevant. In this context, Soon's record within the scope of climate research is what's being scrutinized, not his personal life.
If Soon's opponents were attacking his love of Dune or his tendency to eat falafel, there might be an analogue here.
Irrelevant. The technique you used was the same as Smathers, and your intent was the same - to damage someone's reputation by insinuations and smears. It is low behavior.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I did read your reply; I'm saying that in the aggregate, a credible paper is unlikely to be written by someone without formal schooling in the relevant field.
Further, technology is applied science - it is not unlikely that one can become an expert through informal and professional practice. Your previous comment was about computer science, which is not necessarily the same thing, and which is closer to mathematics than anything else. Climatology is concerned primarily with physics and chemistry, but also geology and in some cases, paleontology. Most of these fields share little in common with pure maths or engineering. The comparison, then is not totally valid.
The basic training you require to be a competent scientist is hard to come by outside of academia. The actual work of science tends to be done in a laboratory. It's highly, unlikely, then, that someone who has put in the years (often decades) of work in academia to be on par with a hobbyist, whatever that may look like in this context.
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 …
Pointing out that someone is not trustworthy when considering whether or not to trust their conclusions is not ad-hom.