COMMENTARY: Arguments Often Misleading

NORTHWEST ARKANSAS — Most Americans, not an “anti-scientific minority,” remain unconvinced of claims that human activity is the major cause of global warming.

An examination of the rhetoric and argumentation of Professor Emeritus Arthur Hobson’s recent commentary illustrates why.

The essay is typical political propaganda, not science. It ignores cogent objections to man-made (anthropogenic) global warming (AGW) dogma, cherry picks data, and spins disaster scenarios. It even begins with a whopper of a logical fallacy - argumentum ad hominen - attacking opponents as unscientific, rather than addressing the merits of their arguments.

Often such rhetorical malpractice is used to close off thought, argument and investigation.

The human role in climate change is deserving of honest and logical debate. The essay could have honestly addressed the unsolved problems of AGW theory. It could have presented argument for ignoring the antiscientific behavior of scientists (most infamously at East Anglia University) who suppressed inconvenient findings. It could have dealt forthrightly with the politicians’ misuse of the IPCC study and exposed those on both sides who use any weather anomaly that fits their prejudice to support or attack AGW.

It could have disavowed the shallow opportunism of Al Gore, while making a logical case that Senator Imhofe should be considered as bad.

Deceptive as it was, the essay was as good a pro-AGW argument as I’ve seen published.

That inconvenient truth is why, according to a recent Rasmussen poll, 67 percent of Americans are unconvinced that humans cause global warming. Skeptics are the majority.

But they are not anti-scientific. Most recognize that CO2 clearly can be a greenhouse gas, albeita minor and inefficient one. But they await an explanation of how man’s contribution of CO2, about 3 to 4 percent of atmospheric CO2, drives severe climate change, when water vapor accounts for about 95 percent of the greenhouse effect and is over 99 percent naturally caused. Water vapor is, for AGW advocates, an inconvenient truth. So they ignore it.

The majority wonders how it is that global temperatures dropped from the 1940s through the 1970s, with atmospheric CO2 rising. Many recall how an early generation of inept or unethical scientists proclaimed man-made global cooling in the 1970’s.

That error doesn’t mean AGW proponents are wrong now. But the media campaigns, the disaster scenarios, and the politics of personal destruction leveled against dissenters are not usually tactics of those who believe they have truth on their side.

Many skeptics know that the “Medieval Warming Period” was airbrushed out of the “hockey stick” chart that AGW fans loved so long. That long warming period - unaccompanied by an increase in man made CO2 - simply disappeared. Not only does this falsification result in overstating the influence of CO2, but it also makes any benefits of warming - that’s when Greenland earned its name as a lush and fertile agricultural land - vanish. The rhetorical purpose is to prevent disaster scenarios from being contested.

We skeptics want to know how CO2 is the major cause,when its increase has sometimes followed or coincided with increased temperatures as well as sometimes preceding them.

And of course we also know that even a perfect correlation is not causation.

Often the connection between actual or predicted disasters is merely assumed - for example, the Russian heat wave. A recent report from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration contradicts the assumption: “The natural process of atmospheric blocking, and the climate impacts induced by such blocking, are the principal cause for this heat wave.”

But we skeptics are open to being convinced. But by science, not by name calling, hysteria or ignoring inconvenient data and explanations. However satisfying those rhetorical excesses are to true believers, they don’t convince open minded people.

Further many of us suspect that AGW is primarily convenient cover for another expansion of federal power. We remember how the real problems with our health care system went unaddressed, alternative plans ignored, and the people’s will subverted, all to justify passing a monstrous and counter-productive health care “reform” bill.

Americans will use our freedom to decide individually, despite the arrogance of a selfdefined elite, whether academic, media or whatever. Honest debate is welcome - no demanded.

The genius of the American experiment, validated for over 200 years, is that all of us are wiser than any “elite” group of us Scientists must act like scientists, testing hypotheses, showing their work and leaving agendas at home. And the media must report scientific controversies with balance and accuracy. Then, we the people will decide, through our individual actions, and we will decide wisely.

BUDDY ROGERS IS A FINANCIAL ADVISER BASED IN ROGERS AND A FORMER CANDIDATE FOR U.S. SENATE.