Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Anthony Watts while waiting for "the crash" commits reductio ad Kim Jong Ilium fallacy

Sou | 8:28 AM Go to the first of 4 comments. Add a comment

WUWT-ers are nothing if not patient.  They reckon the world has been waiting for two hundred years for someone to disprove the greenhouse effect, they can probably wait a bit longer.

All known science is wrong - sez Anthony Watts

Today Anthony Watts links climate scientists, skepticalscience.com, John Cook and Kim Jong Il of North Korea in the one short post.  He thinks that the more scientists agree with something the more likely it is to be wrong.  You know, like the notion that planets orbit the sun and other what he calls "laughable" science.

Here is what he wrote, in part, referring to the 97% scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming:
When they get that large, at 97%, they tend to be as laughable as some of the voting results we see in North Korea:...Whether it be a political majority, a social majority, or a synthesized scientific majority, a majority that large almost always tends to come crashing down once the methodology is examined.
Isn't that a variation of Godwin's Law or reductio ad Kim Jong Ilium?  Maybe it's time to add to the list of things that could "come crashing down" with a majority "that large":

  • HIV can lead to AIDS
  • Smoking can lead to lung cancer
  • Smoking can lead to COPD
  • Sex can lead to children
  • Science deniers have some very weird notions
  • Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius at 1 atm
  • The earth revolves around the sun
  • The earth rotates on its axis
  • DNA encodes our genes
  • Anthony Watts is just another nutter
  • CO2 is a greenhouse gas
  • Burning hydrocarbons releases CO2 and H2O
  • A drop in pH means the solution becomes more acidic
  • A rise in pH means the solution becomes more alkaline
  • Humans didn't roam the earth when dinosaurs were around
  • The earth has been around for longer than 6,000 years
  • A body of water doesn't need to be at boiling point for water to evaporate
  • The sun's surface is quite hot relative to the surface of the earth
  • If you jump off a ledge you are more likely to fall to the ground than float away
  • Water is wet
  • Clouds are composed of solid or liquid water
  • 2 and 5 are the only prime numbers that end in 2 or 5
  • Peanuts aren't nuts
  • Many science deniers are nuts


  1. Hang on......sex leads to children? Well now that I know that I better stop doing it.

  2. remember my first sexual encounter,

    I was frightened, anxious, excited and all alone

  3. I know too many people who would deny the first 17 point and probably 3 or 4 of the remaining ones.

    Those deniers are all religious, all conservative, all uneducated in science, all convinced that they know better than people professionally trained and experienced in science, and all detectably the the lower intelligence quartiles.

    Dunning and Kruger studied the effect whereby uneducated people thinking that they know more than they do. There should be a corollary that notes that stupid people often think that they're smarter than they are.

    Bernard J.

  4. ...in the lower...

    It's been a long day...


    Bernard J.



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