Comment Re:Good thing climate change isn't real! (Score 1) 293
Didn't you criticize me earlier for "smear attempts" and "ad hominems", saying it was a "dick move"?
Indeed, I did. But an "ad hominem" is not always a dick move, and not always falacious. It is acceptable to offer valid, topical criticism of a person's character or skills when it is material to the argument and the person has been offered as an authority. In other words, when you offer Dr. Spencer as a scientific expert, you make his credentials as a scientist fair game for criticism. So, in this case, offering evidence that Spencer may be a poor scientist is not only acceptable, it is generally expected as a rebuttal. You, on the other hand, wrote "SkS is a really, really bad site." That's not valid or topical criticism, and therefore is actually a fallacious ad hominem. So because you failed to provide valid criticism, it is in fact a "dick move". Eventually, you provided some weak criticism of a highly acclaimed paper by some of the people at SkS as justification for this evaluation, but even if I accepted that the criticism were in good faith, which I do not, it would barely be relevant.
Frankly, you seem to have a problem with understanding context and circumstances.
Additionally, I linked to three non-SkS sites that detail gross errors in the construction of that graph or the similar graph it was originally based off of, and your response is an article that mistakenly criticizes an SkS article that criticizes Spencer for errors made in a completely different forum, and claims their response to a different event contains cherry-picked data because it does not start in the same year as a graph which they make no reference to. Frankly, the article you cited appears to be written by someone who takes very little care in his writing or his reasoning. For example, it really looks like couldn't even be bothered to read the title of the article he's criticizing because the title clearly says they are debunking mistakes that Spencer made in a public appearance. One can only assume the author is grossly incompetent or grossly negligent. Of course, none that really matters, because I didn't link to that article on Skeptical Science in the first, so his invalid criticism actually has nothing to do with any of the valid criticism I provided that explains how Dr. Spencer has (intentionally or not) manipulated the data in that graph to make his position look better, and in the process produced a very misleading graph.
And according to the article you linked, if you really believe it, you should believe that the new graph that you linked contains cherry picked data (and is therefore invalid) since it also does not begin in 1979, but expecting any sort of consistency from you is clearly expecting too much.