As far as fallacious, or a term more commonly known as an insult against logic, I run into this dilemma on a regular basis. Let me give you, hopefully, a pithy example.

The other day I made a similar reference on the Huffington Post about job loss, such as I gave you. To my dismay I was promptly excoriated for doing so. I said that under the Obama administration we have lost 1.6 million jobs. The only president in modern history that that has happened to. Now the way Obama tells it, and what his vassals believe, is that during his tenure, so far, he has created three million jobs. Something that I have not been able to confirm. Maybe that’s part of the “created or saved” scenario.

Anyway, we must have lost 4.6 million jobs, if indeed Obama’s claims are accurate. That’s the only way PolitiFact can come up with a net loss of 1.6 million jobs. And I assure you, PolitiFact has less of a political agenda to embellish than Mr. Obama does. Regardless of this fact, I was still called everything from a troglodyte to suffering from Obamaphobia. If there were ten sardonic comments, there were a hundred.

Now, this is where someone may have thought I was being fallacious, and was in fact accused of exactly that. So, I promptly posted my source, PolitiFact.com. And this is also my point to you; if you have facts to back up your commentary I would love to see it. If not, it is simply nothing more than commentary You see, we all have our opinions Mr. Snark, and I do love how you couch yours.

Oh, and as a sidebar, I listened to Obama’s speech the other day at the University of Michigan. Can you believe he still blamed Bush for the plight of students and the cost of education? I was astounded. Exactly when is he going to take responsibility for the office? I told my wife just today; I’ll give to Obama that Bush is the why for all our woes, I simply want him to move on with a plan that is not belied by his actions. A true executive doesn’t care how the organization got to where it‘s at, whose fault it is or what they did wrong, he’s solely concerned with what ideas he can implement to get back on track and get the organization growing again. Has this president done that? Healthcare? Stimulus? Bailouts? Onerous regulations? The most preponderant thing he’s done so far is repeal “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Pitiful, simply pitiful.

But nonetheless Mr. Snark, I truly enjoy our banter. It’s always a pleasure to have dialogue with an equally intelligent, and much less vitriolic, intellectual as yourself. I wish you all the best with your writing, or whatever endeavor you so choose. Ta-ta.

As for my writing being “fallacious,” well, word on the street is that I’m a master fallaciouist.

Hmm, is that another way of saying “I blow smoke?”

Keep reading and writing, Prole. And I’d tell you to “keep hope alive,” if I wasn’t worried that would send you lips-first to the gas pipe.

According to the computer models from the AGW crowd, global temperatures should have risen throughout the 90’s and the 00’s - not only did temperatures not increase, they actually declined. As predictors of global temperatures, the AGW models appear to be next to useless.

Even if the data are as perfectly accurate as we can make them, the results from the models suck when used as a predictor of future events. And suck badly. (Joel, if ever there was a need for an example of confirmation bias in science, this appears to be it.)

You see, science isn’t just supposed to be telling you what is happening now, it’s supposed to be able to accurately predict future events according to an analysis of both the past and present conditions. AGW fails miserably at this task.

I have decided — if Mitt gets elected I’m selling everything I own and moving to Mexico. If Obama gets elected, I’m commiting suicide. Everything will be over anyway.

I am uncertain how you can consider the economy stable; two million net loss jobs, a down grade in the US credit rating, real unemployment at about 18%, a 15 trillion dollar deficit, a historical high for repossessed homes, (including the years of the Great Depression)and many, many more unfavorable statistics. In fact, I wouldn’t be able to keep this pithy if I were to list them.

But then on the other hand, I can understand your view. If one were to buy into the “created or saved” jobs rhetoric, then one could reason how Obama stopped a depression. The problem with what is, what you write is is fallacious.

All of the data used by all of the other temperature studies was input for BEST. Directly or indirectly, there is no other data available. Some of the other studies may have chosen to filter out some of the data, and BEST’s methods may have filtered out different data and treated some things differently, but the full set of original data is the same for everyone.

Temperatures in BEST are indeed projected - implicitly or explicitly - beyond their immediate environment. There is no other way of getting a “global” temperature.

You say that I attacked BEST for releasing results before they were completely peer reviewed. Not true. It wasn’t the fact of releasing unreviewed results that I addressed, it was the effect (intended or not) of muzzling Anthony Watts. I said “Anthony Watts was very optimistic about the BEST project, on the basis that it would be genuine, hence the statements that you quote. But he was then shafted by Richard Muller, who sent him a copy of the unreviewed paper, asking him to keep it confidential, then hit the airwaves in a blaze of publicity still before the paper had been reviewed and while AW was prevented from commenting by the confidentiality request.”.

It is still the case, as I said before and have supported in some detail, that “The hope of BEST was that it might settle some of the outstanding issues - things like UHE. It didn’t.”.

I have no idea why you suddenly introduced confirmation bias into the conversation, but obviously confirmation bias is a potential risk in all science and all scientists. That’s why we have peer review and sceptics.

I have no need to defend Anthony Watts, and indeed I feel free to criticise him if required. I have criticised various climate sceptics at times, even describing as BS a peer-reviewed paper purporting to show that AGW was exaggerated. (AGW is indeed exaggerated, but the paper’s logic was wrong.)

You, on the other hand, have a very serious problem if you consider my criticisms of Michael Mann’s atrocious hockey-stick graph to be ad hominems. I suggest you take a clear and considered look at the graph, and all that has been written about it and the attempts to hide the divergence problem, and recognise that it is quite simply fraudulent. It is also still a disgrace that Michael Mann has refused to make data available which would allow others to check his work as per normal scientific process. I fail to see how you can try to claim that somehow this has not been a topic integral to this thread, as it has been a significant part since last July.

You claim BEST used the same data as previous studies. This is disingenuous and borders on a lie. The data for the BEST study was not the same as previous studies. You know that - I’ve already pointed it out to you, and your claim contradicts the fact that Watts promoted this study as the one that was going to finally do it the “right” way. Even if it were the same data, the fact is you accused one scientist of manipulating his results. If your libelous accusations were true, then the results of the new study would be different. How you can on the one hand say “one person manipulated his results”, and on the other hand say “of course someone else got the same results because it was the same data” is beyond me.

You say “The argument that ‘only a very small proportion of Earth’s surface is urbanised and therefore UHE is small’ is invalid, since the temperatures are projected way beyond their immediate location in order to provide a global picture.” You might want to read up on the methodology of BEST before you inaccurately portray it again. This is not the method BEST used - part of the reason Watts praised their method is that it was designed to eliminate this imaginary effect. You don’t know what you’re talking about, so you’re recycling old complaints.

Now let’s talk about “confirmation bias”. Confirmation bias is summarized by this: “still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest,” and it’s closely related to the placebo effect. A scientist must build walls around his analysis to protect it from his/her own confirmation bias. In the medical fields we have developed the method of double blind trials with placebo. Not only does the patient not know if he or she received the treatment, neither does the person running the study (look up ‘facilitation’ for an example of how badly things can go wrong if we don’t use safeguards to protect against even inadvertent bias).

Since you seem to think attacking individuals is fair game, let’s discuss Watts’s scientific capability and hypocrisy. He said he was happy with the BEST method. Then after he saw their results, he changed his mind. A real scientist does not have that right - once you’ve seen the results, your own bias affects your ability to rationally judge the method. Would he have made the same criticisms if BEST had agreed with what he wanted?

Let’s now talk about the recent project Watts led that they published. In this study they recruited volunteers from his (climate change denying) followers to check the accuracy of stations recording temperatures. I could spend a while talking about why using biased people to collect your data effectively guarantees a biased result (even if the collectors aren’t consciously biasing their measurements), but I want to save space, so here are two other issues.

First: You and Watts both attack BEST for releasing results before they were completely peer reviewed. Let’s be clear, BEST had completed their analysis before they released their results. That didn’t stop Watts from publishing a blog article titled “The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project puts PR before peer review”. Watts is a hypocrite on this point. He published a “mid term” report on their analysis at least a year before submitting it to peer review, and before the analysis was done (oh, and he solicited donations for the project from his followers). He did everything he could to get media attention for that. If he and you are right that this sort of behavior is unethical and makes results suspect, then why is he engaging in it?

Second, and perhaps more significantly, Watts admits that they used (at least) two different statistical techniques to analyze their data which gave different answers. AFTER seeing the answers, they decided which method to use. This opens the door for him to unconsciously (or consciously) select the method that gave the answer he wanted. I absolutely guarantee that you and Watts would excoriate any real scientist who did that, and in this case he would be right to do so. It is poor scientific principle.

Remember, after seeing the method (but before seeing the results) of BEST Watts said, “I’m prepared to accept whatever result they produce, even if it proves my premise wrong.”

Is Watts a man of his word? Is he a competent scientist?

I don’t care what your answer is. In fact, I already know you’ll just repeat ad hominem attacks. I’m bringing this up to show you that your idol is not the scientist you think he is. I’m fed up with this and have better things to do with my time.

Joel - I have been away over Christmas and New Year, and haven’t put in any time yet. Briefly:

The method used by BEST to identify rural vs urban stations is highly suspect. Let me re-phrase that correctly - it’s crap. They use MODIS to identify urban areas http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5700/b1104.pdf, so yes the big urbs are so identified, but small and probably some not-so-small towns fall into the “very rural” classification. UHE (which is indeed Urban Heat Effect) is not restricted to large urbs, in fact on a per annum basis it can be greater in a small growing town than in a large city, even if the city is itself growing. In Australia, BEST has classified about 870 stations as “very rural”. Just looking at the names of the “very rural” stations[*], over 100 are at airports and over 100 are at post offices. I suspect that the majority of the “very rural” stations are in fact in urbs of varying sizes or places with human development, and are therefore not at all “very rural”. Checking at the individual station level will be very time consuming so I haven’t tried to do it, and if I can’t at least semi-automate it in some way then I doubt that I will.

Michael Mann’s hockey-stick graph was absurd and a disgrace, as is ongoing support of it from people who should know better. Nothing about that statement or any other like it that I have made is an ad hominem and nor should it be construable as such.

Regarding your questions, the first two are answered above.

How large of an effect do you think it [UHE] could have? What is the mathematical basis for that estimate of how large it could be? Hard to quantify without doing one hell of a lot of work. My WUWT post http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/21/an-analysis-of-australian-rural-vs-non-rural-stations-temperature-trends/ which I think you have seen suggests that Australian rural stations may have warmed at only 60-70% of the rate at which urban stations have warmed, but the sample is small and the data is not particularly reliable. On a global scale I suspect that the UHE is rather smaller, but I have no evidence-based reason for saying so, other than that rather obviously UHE is unlikely over the oceans. The argument that ‘only a very small proportion of Earth’s surface is urbanised and therefore UHE is small’ is invalid, since the temperatures are projected way beyond their immediate location in order to provide a global picture. The point here [this blog] is though that since UHE is not dealt with correctly, the temperatures from BEST and others are unreliable, and certainly can’t be used to identify how much is due to CO2 - and BEST say explicitly that they haven’t tried to.

Does it not make you wonder even a bit that every careful study that’s been done by different groups with different methodologies and different data sets seems to arrive at the same historical temperature curve? As I explained, it’s not exactly surprising, since the input data is the same for all of them, and, as I said before “There is no problem at all with temperatures having risen in the late 20thC. I would have significant difficulty with a finding that temperatures had not risen then, because my understanding of the natural factors such as the sun and PDO is that temperatures should have risen then. The issue is what caused the temperature changes, in particular how much of it was caused by CO2, and where temperatures are headed now.”
and
“8. Global temperatures have risen similarly in the past, when CO2 could not have been the cause.
9. The proportion of the recent warming due to CO2 as opposed to natural causes is not known.
10. If global temperatures now continue to remain steady or decline, then the proportion due to CO2 must be small.”

[*]-The station classifications were not available online from Berkeley so I used information obtained from Berkeley by a third party. However, I requested the information from Berkeley and have now received it so I need to check, although I don’t doubt that the first set of information was correct.