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.