Earlier this week, Dr. Judith Curry wrote a post on her Climate etc. blog asking for some help with something she’s writing about cognitive biases and logical fallacies. She apparently could “use some help fleshing out” the definitions of terms like Ad Hominem with “examples from climate change.”
The very first cognitive bias listed is confirmation bias, which she describes as “the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s preconceptions.”
For example, if you were Judith Curry, and wanted to write about cognitive biases and logical fallacies in the climate space, but didn’t have any examples on hand, so you asked your blog denizens to give you examples to prove the point you’re trying to make, that might be confirmation bias.
So we’ll put aside for the moment that her “How we fool ourselves” post very much looks like an example of confirmation bias. And we’ll just briefly mention that if you want an actual expert’s take on fallacies and misinformation, John Cook’s got you covered.
Instead we’ll just offer some examples of logical fallacies in the climate space, that Curry won’t have to go too far to find.
For example, Curry describes the “Self-serving bias” as being “a tendency for people to evaluate information in a way that is beneficial to their interests,” which of course describes every single bought-and-sold denier scientist and pundit whose paychecks originate in some fossil fuel billionaire’s bank account. Or, in Curry’s case, a tendency for her to say and do things that are in the interest of her forecasting company’s clients, which happens to include fossil fuel companies.
In the fallacies section, Curry lists some that she’s “seen used in arguments about climate science.” We bet she has! For example, “correlation implies causation” is one she describes, and that can be seen in her own “stadium wave” paper, that, as it turns out, didn’t actually show that a pattern of natural variability in the temperature record is what’s causing climate change. Interestingly enough, her insistence on natural variability being the sole reason for any warming observed so far can also be seen as a “fallacy of the single cause,” when a complicated answer is discarded for a more simple explanation.
The last fallacy Curry lists is “appeal to consequences of belief (argumentum ad consequentiam): an appeal to emotion that concludes a hypothesis or belief to be either true or false based on whether the premise leads to desirable or undesirable consequences.”
In other words, basically every single one of her commenters who denies climate science because they’re scared of the “big government” solutions.
In the end, maybe Curry was right to go to her own blog to get examples of bias and fallacies. But she doesn't need to ask her commenters, she has plenty of examples of "how we fool ourselves." She just needs to read her own posts.
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