Barry Brook wrote:

"Scientists should beware of feeding trolls by engaging them on their terms. Instead be strong, well-informed advocates for good science! Don’t think that it is enough to be merely passive bystanders. Good science alone invariably wins these silly debates, but usually not before denialist spin does much damage."

Good science does not invariably win if winning means convincing the audience. One can be good scientist advancing one's thesis with rigour but not be as skilled in debating techniques as the denialist.

don aitkin, you write:

"If the science were absolutely clearcut, we wouldn't be having these unending debates, and governments would already have acted."

i think this is exactly the point of the article. sometimes the science IS exactly clearcut but still it doesn't end public debate. such is unarguably the case with evolution. there is no serious debate amongst practising scientists over the fundamental fact of evolution. nonetheless, religiously inspired obfuscation ensures that we continue to have a public evolution/creation debate. (i hope everyone will forgive me for ensuring we get a couple more thrilling posts from runner).

of course that does not mean the existence of public debate should simply be ignored, or proscribed (col rouge, who even suggested this?). it does not mean the same disconnect exists with the debate over AGW. the case has to be made.

what i think it means is that the existence and the nature of the public debate does not necessarily reflect the nature or the depth or the seriousness of the debate amongst practising scientists. and, people confuse the one for the other.

My problem is that as a non-scientist, I have difficulty knowing who is credible and who is not in the global warming debate. Some 'trolls' are easy to spot, but I suspect the good ones are less evident. Any advice? Perhaps the OLO moderator could flag the credible posts for me. ;)

Article is an expansive ad hom attack, hence illogical.

Agreement does not a fact make. The apparent expertise/authority of an offering confers nothing upon intellectual merit. Appeal to authority/expertise is another logical fallacy, ergo anti-intellectual.

Logic and reason are integral to good science. The article fails its advocated standards.

True science doesnt hold fast to a theoretical view, nor advocacy, its about being intellectually open to exploration, until PROOF is established, asking questions and never resting until it has PROOF. It questions the theories, all of them, all the time. It requires rigourous, un-emotional inquiry without psychological/personal attachment to lines of inquiry or outcomes. In fact questioniong a theory is integral to a rigourous testing and development of that theory. That a scientist has a problem with this is odd.

Dismissing so-called anti-intellectuals without regard to logically correct rationale (cornerstone of science) is not intellectual. Together with the fact that the article takes a contrary position to the contrarians (as opposed to their message), makes for fantastic irony.

Rational and intellectual appraoch would be to drop the thinly veiled diatribes, emotive projections and personal characterisations, speaking exclusively to the INTELLECTUAL substance of a position. In short, play the ball.

'Good' science arises from continuously challenging theories, eventually yielding correct understanding. The latter is a miniscule proportion of the former. The vast majority of theoretical offerings dont pan out and are essentially marginal, at best. The trial and error approach is integral to inquiry. Science history is replete with contrary camps. Its also underscored by contrarian trail blazers who conceptualise the new paradigms required to calrify, discover and invent.

Of course, they thought Columbus and Galileo were contrarian fools.

Leveling veiled insults of people with different views, like 'denialist', with its thinly veiled and plausibly deniable allusions to a gratuitous historical event is not intellectual rigour, quite the contrary. Its cowardice. Its emotionally and psychologically manipulative, irrational and betrays any pretension to 'good' scientific method.

There is no proof gravity exists. Ergo: it's a big fib.

In any normal society people would laugh at such an assumption, but not on OLO!

Trade215 wrote:

"True science doesnt hold fast to a theoretical view, nor advocacy, its about being intellectually open to exploration, until PROOF is established, asking questions and never resting until it has PROOF. It questions the theories, all of them, all the time. It requires rigourous, un-emotional inquiry without psychological/personal attachment to lines of inquiry or outcomes. In fact questioniong a theory is integral to a rigourous testing and development of that theory. That a scientist has a problem with this is odd."

In science proof is never established we merely have plausible explanations which can be overthrown by new evidence or new insights. Newton's laws of motion were unchallenged until the twentieth century when they proved to be a special case of relativity where the velocity of moving bodies was much less than the velocity of light, and the warp in space-time was too small to be detected.