Here Come the Tautologists, Watch Out Popperians

So cooling and cold is due to warming, so the next ice age might be do to green house gasses and the green house effect produces a colder planet.
Warming could be the reason for more Antarctic and Arctic ice or for less ice.
I told you this cold snap would not slow down the warming propagandists. They’ve got a stake.

When researchers have a premise that must be defended, watch them contort themselves.
If the polar vortex disruption causes the planet’s average temp to decline, and if it is due to Arctic warming caused by Green House Effects, would we then assume that warming causes cooling?
Or What?
From The Hill, news for the Federal Capitol. Quoting an anxious advocate for the warming theory who has an “explanation” that surely is tautological for purposes of our analysis, or at least strained and disregards the evidence that there are factors other than green house gas that may be in play.
Tautological thinking is anchor/tunnel vision fallacy on steroids. It is outcome bias energized by intellectual passion and crass unprofessional self interest. Hard to give up a profitable scientific enterprise that attracts millions in funds.
http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/194520-arctic-warming-may-be-to-blame-for-severe-cold-snap
You may recall that La Nina/El Nino warm/cool dynamics in the Pacific effect high altitude winds, for example impacting hurricanes, so here we go with a narrative that is “just so” that teases out some scientific truths to cobble together an argument that allows the climate change/catastrophic warming thesis to survive another pile of contradictory evidence. This theory on the vortex remind you of “the ocean ate the warming?”
If ghg theory is proven by evidence that appears to be contradictory, that, my friends is close enough to a tautology for me.

25 thoughts on “Here Come the Tautologists, Watch Out Popperians”

  1. I feel in good company then. 🙂
    I’m probably blurring tautology with some over logic fallacy. But whatever the rhetoric, this GW argument is illogical.

  2. join the rhetorical morons club with me.
    your point is what I thought covered it, but many have corrected me and, to tell you the truth, I couldn’t disagree with their disagreements and I did make the point that if global warming is always the answer to the question, then it is not the answer to any question.

  3. My understanding is that a tautology is something that will always be true but conveys no additional real information. Like if I said that all the children in a class will be boys or they won’t be boys. I think this “everything means global warming” falls in that definition. But hey I only had a one logic class in college, so I won’t argue too hard on this one either.

  4. that will not solve the problem, my friend, since there is a variation in the sunspot activity that affects the pacific and atlantic oscillation that impacts the_____ (you fill in the item) so where are we ? we are in a complex and wonderful world that controls wild variations with feedback loops.
    Or whatever.

  5. We’ve always been at war with East Asia, and we’ve always said that GHGs would cause colder winters.

  6. Rhetoric is essentially the Art of persuading people to accept a lie. The best primer on rhetoric would be a book on logic that discusses the Fallacies of Informal Logic. The Fallacies are all (sometimes obvious) errors in logic that are nonetheless persuasive (based as they are on the inexact nature of human consciousness), helping people to accept ideas which are not supportable by rigorous logic. Start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies and follow the threads.

  7. With the claim that the record cold we are surviving is due to global warming, “climate change” has now morphed into classic Orwellian doublethink.

  8. I have a solution to all this unwanted warming and cooling. The solution is simple but the application will take the combined output of every nation on earth and it still might not be successful. All we need to do is get rid of this annoying axial tilt. Voila, problem solved and permanent 12 hour days and 12 hour nights. No more daylight savings time. Two problems solved for the price of one.
    sarc off.

  9. In regard to Global Warming, I always say a theory that predicts everything, predicts nothing. Which is just another way of saying it’s a tautology.

  10. excellent work mr. g, and my gratitude.
    I wish I had been more lucid in my effort to name the deception.
    I am still searching for a proper way to describe the “answer for any question” magic we are dealing with.

  11. I do understand that it is an extreme challenge. Part of the problem is that nowhere in modern society is how to think and identify accurately actually taught. This is something you must learn on your own and usually without much guidance. Most give up. Some advance part way. Few are willing to invest the time, the effort, the mental discipline, and the absolute intellectual honesty required to “crack the code”.
    I have cracked part of the code and it took roughly 60 years to do it. At the beginning, my drive was to make things that work. That led to the drive to understand how to solve problems. That in turn lead to a passion for philosophy. Not the trash kind taught today but the true love of knowledge, what it is, and how to acquire it. Those drives are what has driven me for most of my life. The outcome of that effort is partly exposed in the few posts of mine you have read.
    PS: Click on my name and you can read a substantial portion of my earlier writings that I have placed on line. They offer some insight into my method.

  12. I don’t know that it has an actual name but it consists of dropping the context of the fundamentals details of cause and effect. Then assuming that cause and effect are disembodied somethings that can do or be anything at the whim of the one proposing the universal cause. There by giving the desired result no matter what the circumstance.
    However, causes and effects are not disembodied. A cause is a something that actually exists with a specific identity acting upon something else that exists also with its specific identity. An effect is the response of the acted upon thing that exists to the action of the other thing that exists. Both, what the actor and the acted upon can do is intimately connected to their individual natures – what they actually are. Add to that the specific context of the interaction and you have a very specific consequence. As such, it is several universes from being a one size cause that fits all desired effects.
    The holding of a universal cause that has any desired effect is at best belief in magic. Belief in magic is the result of gross ignorance and very sloppy to irrational thinking to the point of psychosis. At its worst, it is a transparent attempt to confuse others in order to perpetrate a monumental scam. See the state of CAGW for instructive detail of all of the above.

  13. Well let’s use the word “climatautologist” to describe someone whose hypothesis is supported by a range of evidence that any clear thinker would say was contradictory. As in, extreme heat and extreme cold are both caused by global warming.

  14. I can never get fine points of rhetoric.
    Your comments are helpful. I’m still flummoxed, trying to explain how the warmers can present their answer for everything as some kind of magic.

  15. I can’t disagree with the point. I am unable to describe the nature of the trick. The answer for everything regardless of the circumstances. It is the answer always–what would it be called?

  16. Using the same words to describe different things is equivocation. A tautology is not necessarily wrong but it adds no new information and is thus is cognitively and logically useless. Equivocation is always wrong because it confuses, misdirects, obscures, and destroys communication and understanding. However, that is its usual purpose.

  17. I had the same problem you did, Tautology is using the same words to describe different things, but not really. It’s hard to get hold of.
    statements are constructed in such a way that the truth of the proposition is guaranteed or that, by defining a dissimilar or synonymous term in terms of another, the truth of the proposition or explanation cannot be disputed.
    So the answer to questions 1, 2,3 is the same even if the 3 questions are based on evidence that would refute the common answer. It means twisting the answer or premise so that it answers all the questions or is still right, no matter the conditions. Sort of. If a circular argument satsfies you–use that to describe this universal answer problem we run into. Everything is do to carbon dioxide increases, everything you ask about, the answer is carbon dioxide and green house effect.
    So global warming/GHG effect is the answer for all things, warming/cooling/extreme events, which probably has a better rhetorical monicker, I just don’t know what it is. The answer for any question or set of conditions?
    John Dale Dunn MD JD Consultant Emergency Services/Peer Review Civilian Faculty, Emergency Medicine Residency Carl R. Darnall Army Med Center Fort Hood, Texas Medical Officer, Sheriff Bobby Grubbs Brown County, Texas 325 784 6697 (h) 642 5073 (c)

  18. Actually, it is much worse than being a tautology. A tautology is simply the process of equating two different names for the same thing. What the climatists do is break the connection between the word and the thing. They invest their own arbitrary wish, intent, and fantasy into the word. They then presume that the originally named thing has magically acquired the newly invested attributes of the severed word as if it had them all the while.
    They, in effect, are rewriting reality. This is why they find calling numbers taken from actual measurements and then repeatedly applying corrections and adjustments to them, data. Then they use that “data” as scientific proof of the validity of their wises, intents, and fantasies. It is nothing but intellectual fraud perpetrated on a monumental scale.
    The interesting thing is that they are dismayed when reality does not agree to work according to their “brilliant” plan but simply continues to do its thing as it has done for well over 13 billion years. This is why I suggest it would be much more successful to understand the meaning of a word is the thing to which it refers and not the fuzzy, foggy, miasma of momentary intent on the part of the speaker or writer.

  19. Warming = global warming
    Cooling = global warming
    therefore
    Warming = Cooling
    Two things equal to the same thing must be equal to each other. The logic is iron clad. How could I have missed such a fundamental truth all this years?
    I recall seeing the Jetstream dip deep and be “responsible” for cooler/colder weather for 40+ years. Seems to happen in the winter, or at least get talked about in the winter. So what’s so new that now the movement of the Jetstream is a sign of AGW? These guys shouldn’t have used every weather event to claim global warming, they are getting into ridiculous, unbelievable extremes.

  20. Jennifer Francis study takes a hit:
    “We conclude that the mechanism put forth by previous studies [e.g., Francis and Vavrus ,2012; Liu et al. 2012], that amplified polar warming has led to the increased occurrence of slow-moving weather patterns and blocking episodes, appears unsupported by the observations.” barnes.atmos.colostate.edu/FILES/MANUSCRIPTS/Barnes_2013_GRL_w_supp.pdf
    I guess some peer-reviewed science can be ignored if it’s inconvenient.

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