Dear JKJ,

This is really great fun and now you truly have become a guilty pleasure.

So let us continue.

The 'non sequitur' was always going to be your get out of jail card wasn't it. In reality if you were going to employ it in that fashion you could have done so straight after accepting that the world was experiencing sustained global warming.

Your retort could well have read; 'I admit your proposition, and at this point you’ve lost the argument because AT BEST you will have ended in a non sequitur, because you still haven't established any reason for anyone to do anything about global warming.'

You just wanted to save it until you felt stuck/torn.

However the way you have chosen to employ it is quite nonsensical and does raise questions about your understanding of the term.

Shall we explore it together.

“In a non sequitur, the conclusion could be either true or false, but the argument is fallacious because there is a disconnection between the premise and the conclusion.” Wikipedia

Implicit in this is the understanding that the party who raises the propositions also gets to raise the conclusion. I delivered four propositions, but you declared the conclusion as delivering a “reason for anyone to do anything about global warming”. You sir have created the disconnect not I therefore your claim that you have won is incorrect and without logic.

More to follow.

Dear Poirot,

A battle uphill? I said at the start this could be diverting and indeed it has. I'm not sure it could be described as a battle. We are just picking our way through an amicable discussion.

Hi CSteele,

I think you might have found a new form of 'red herring', or 'straw-man' - I've been calling it the 'wounded goose' ploy (I think I have to attribute it to Cohenite).

You write:

"I said at the start this could be diverting and indeed it has. I'm not sure it could be described as a battle. We are just picking our way through an amicable discussion."

Yes ! Divert ! A brilliant tactic !

The trouble is that you can only use this tactic once, once obervers start to twig to it.

Okay, back to topic - should religious rubbish be taught in state-funded schools, Christian, Muslim, Judaist, Buddhist, whatever ?

I'm suggesting that it is completely unnecessary in a modern, post-Enlightenment society. Secular values are adequate. Waddaya reckon ?

Cheers,

Joe

Dear JKJ,

Now to your answers to the charge of employing logical fallacies. Post constraints mean at this time I shall examine just the third one as this is the least defensible.

You initially wrote;

“Any other warmists accept my challenge to renounce logical fallacies, state your case, and prove it?. If you do, go ahead. If you don’t, then the inescapable conclusion is that none of you is able to defend your irrational belief system.”

I charged that;

“There couldn't be a plainer example of "Argument from silence (argumentum e silentio) – where the conclusion is based on the absence of evidence, rather than the existence of evidence.” Wikipedia

You defended yourself with;

“My conclusion isn’t based on absence of evidence. It’s based on the evidence that, having challenged you to state and prove your argument without reliance on fallacies, you have failed to state it, ending in a logical fallacy.”

The evidence you were calling for was 'other warmists' willing to state their case. In the absence of said evidence, you drew your conclusion “that none of you is able to defend your irrational belief system”. That my good sir is a “conclusion is based on the absence of evidence”.

Please note you have gone from “other warmists” in your original proposition to referring directly to me in your explanation/defence. Two separate entities and thus risking a charge of a further fallacy.

In the spirit of our earlier agreement I offer you the opportunity to rephrase your defence to better reflect the particulars of your original assertion.

Here you go, JKJ. When you're finished with your present exercise in whatever it is you're trying to prove (apart from your own superiority), perhaps you'd like to peruse the response from Marcott et al:

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/03/response-by-marcott-et-al/

Straight from the horse's mouth (and not via "mass media")

Thanks for that, Poirot:

"Summary and FAQ’s related to the study by Marcott et al. (2013, Science)

"Prepared by Shaun A. Marcott, Jeremy D. Shakun, Peter U. Clark, and Alan C. Mix

"Primary results of study

"Global Temperature Reconstruction: We combined published proxy temperature records from across the globe to develop regional and global temperature reconstructions spanning the past ~11,300 years with a resolution >300 yr; previous reconstructions of global and hemispheric temperatures primarily spanned the last one to two thousand years. To our knowledge, our work is the first attempt to quantify global temperature for the entire Holocene.

"Structure of the Global and Regional Temperature Curves: We find that global temperature was relatively warm from approximately 10,000 to 5,000 years before present. Following this interval, global temperature decreased by approximately 0.7°C, culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene around 200 years before present during what is commonly referred to as the Little Ice Age. The largest cooling occurred in the Northern Hemisphere.

"Holocene Temperature Distribution: Based on comparison of the instrumental record of global temperature change with the distribution of Holocene global average temperatures from our paleo-reconstruction, we find that the decade 2000-2009 has probably not exceeded the warmest temperatures of the early Holocene, but is warmer than ~75% of all temperatures during the Holocene. In contrast, the decade 1900-1909 was cooler than~95% of the Holocene. Therefore, we conclude that global temperature has risen from near the coldest to the warmest levels of the Holocene in the past century. Further, we compare the Holocene paleotemperature distribution with published temperature projections for 2100 CE, and find that these projections exceed the range of Holocene global average temperatures under all plausible emissions scenarios."

0.7 degrees. Wow.

So what factors have been 'causing' these trends ? AGW alone ? or what ?

And are we now back where we were 5,000 years ago ? What was going on then ? A shift in many parts of the world from nomadic hunter-gathering to agriculture and urbanisation ? And how did that turn out ?

Cheers,

Joe

Poirot, you are a compulsive linker devoid of understanding of what you link to; Marcott is finished in terms of data and technique and is a nadir for even the standards of AGW 'science'; you know this when even a died in the wool believer like Raypierre Humbert says:

"As noted in the FAQ, the time resolution of reconstruction is approximately a century. Thus, it is not quite fair to compare the reconstruction to instrumental data that is not smoothed to the same time resolution. It is conceivable that there are individual centuries in the Altithermal where the temperature rose as fast as today, and to the same extent or more, but these would not show up in a record smoothed to 100 year time resolution. I think this is very unlikely, but the paper doesn’t strictly rule out the possibility. This remark applies only to the warming of the past 100 years. Where we are going in the next century is so extreme it would show up even if smoothed down to the centennial resolution, I think."

Humbert skates around the issue but his basic scientific training comes through; Marcott simply smoothed away all the nasty warm periods in the past. All that is left is the future, which like bad used car salemen the AGW prophets assure us will be bad unless we buy their snake oil now.

csteele, your 'complaint about Watts' 'yellow line' has been answered above at Saturday, 16 March 2013 4:41:57 PM, in reply to Agro who has disappeared into the ether; to persist with your claim can only mean you are a person who is incapable of conceding error.