This is quite funny.
If you read back what I wrote, it certainly was not an appeal to authority. I was pointing out that WHAT Ridley said was important, NOT what his qualifications are. Appeals to authority are logical fallacies, and I don't employ them. You do.
Umm, Matt Ridley is a zoologist, not a climate scientist, so unless he has expertise in the relevant field, this is simply an appeal to authority. 'He's got a doctorate! From Oxford! So he must be right! My wife got her doctorate from Oxford. Within her field, she's a very highly regarded expert. But she doesn't make academic claims about matters in which she is not expert. In the field of climatology, there is, more or less, consensus:
THIS, Jon, is an Argumentum Ad Populam. A logical fallacy. It's called the consensus argument, and for the record it is the antithesis of scientific reasoning. And this is important, at least to those of us who are more concerned about the integrity of science than the advancement of preferred ideologies. In science, there is no place for the argument "almost everyone agrees, so it's true", nor is there a place for "whatever the expert says is true,
because he's an expert". If you actually think either of these has any validity or carries ANY weight, you have a truly faulty idea of what the Age Of Enlightenment was really all about.
...more than 95% of scientists working in the disciplines contributing to studies of our climate, accept that climate change is almost certainly being caused by human activities.
...We should also consider official scientific bodies and what they think about climate change. There are no national or major scientific institutions anywhere in the world that dispute the theory of anthropogenic climate change. Not one. Linky
The figures above come from a post-graduate study by Maggie Zimmerman known as Doran 2009. The study sought to find a consensus of
opinion on anthropogenic global warming among scientists. They sent their survey out to 10,257 Earth Scientists. There were 2 key questions:
- When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?
- Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
Two short but highly qualitative, not very precise questions. 3,146 scientists replied; less than 31%.
However, the responses were not what the researchers were looking for. They were looking for an overwhelming consensus but they hadn't achieved it. So they started culling responses by discipline, cherry picking who they themselves felt were authoritative to answer the questions they themselves had posed to over ten thousand potential respondents.
They excluded responses from astronomers, cosmologists, physicists, solar scientists, space scientists, meteorologists - anyone likely to believe that the sun or planetary movements/interactions may have an influence on the Earth's climate. But the results still weren't what they were looking for, so they proceeded to exclude responses from anyone who the researchers deemed didn't publish mainly on the subject of climate and didn't explicitly identify themselves as a "climate scientist".
That left 77 responses. 75 of those answered the two questions in the affirmative. That final subset (of less than 100 respondents - a no-no in research circles) gave rise to the claim that 97% of scientists believe the earth is warming and that humans are primarily responsible.
But don't take my word for it,
read the study for yourself. (PDF)
If you do have something published by experts in the relevant field as opposed to dilettantes, that contradicts this, please link to it.
And there's the appeal to authority.
LOL
How do you win one of them seats :shrug:
