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The logical fallacies of global warming denialists are easy to demonstrate. Here are some nice examples.
First they often say that scientific consensus is meaningless because, for example, nature is not a democracy. Then they attempt to refute global warming by claiming that there is no scientific consensus. This of course contradicts their own logic; you can’t have it both ways.
Second, there’s what we might call the “some guy said on the web” fallacy. Global warming denialists don’t support their claims by citing peer-reviewed research articles. This strategy would fail miserably, because the overwhelming scientific evidence is not in their favor. So instead they cherry-pick stuff from the web. For example, they cite web petitions that anybody could sign numerous times, and claim that these petitions prove that there is no consensus among “scientists qualified in the field”. Of course, they fail to point out the obvious, namely that the “some guy said on the web” plea can be used to prove absolutely anything you want.
Third, we have the time-tested “strawman” argument, in which the denialist tries to make scientists look stupid by misreprenting their arguments, which he obviously does not understand. The most common of these among the denialists is the “correlation does not prove causation” plea, but close on its heels is the “models can’t predict what I don’t want them to be able to predict” hope, which is more wishful thinking than anything else.
There are many others, and I’m sure we will continue to see them. What is encouraging, however, is that the denialism community does show signs of progress. In the mid 1990s they were claiming that global warming per se was a hoax, loudly and swaggeringly. Now they seem to have abandoned that proposition. Whether this progress was purely a political strategy (after all they don’t want to look like complete fools to their constituents) or whether it really is an embracement of the science is an open question.
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