re: #15 Slumbering Behemoth

I believe Mr. Sinclair does his cause a bit of a disservice by throwing in that piece of WMD snark near the end.

Also did his cause a disservice by tacking on “we humans are definitely the cause of global warming” and “the consequences will be dire.”

Whatever one thinks about the reality of “anthropogenic” global warming, one can’t make a case for it simply by pointing out that a skeptic of AGW like Watts was mistaken in thinking that the ground temperature readings were inaccurate. (Though, admittedly, Watts is a lame loozer for having brought up the point of weather-station accuracy in the first place, since any attempt to deny that there is an observable and ongoing trend towards warmer global temperatures is at this point a YEC sort of exercise.)

In addition to making a plug for the truth of AGW that wasn’t at all justified by the preceding content, Sinclair compounded his error with the gloom-and-doom forecast that the consequences of global warming (whatever its causes) must be “dire.” In reality, the long-term effects of global warming are likely to be just awful for some regions of the planet, and totally SEX-sational for other regions. And good or bad, these effects will unfold over a generational timespan, and not within a few days, as Hollywood would have it.

Of course, the cherry on top of Sinclair’s Crazy Kake of Dubious Logic was the jab at Fox News and the WMD reference — both examples of the ad hominem fallacy.