Hey, who am I to debate anyone on any scientific issue? I'm not an expert on anything. Fortunately, neither are the people I debate with. One guy, who will remain unnamed, is a Southern California television news anchor - so you know he can't possibly be any more intelligent than I am!
He loves going on and on about the "liberal" global warming conspiracy. First there was no global warming. Then there was, but it wasn't the least bit due to humans. Then there's this story about a brown haze that hovers over the Indian ocean and adds about 50% to the warming problem in Southeast Asia. Because it is caused by wood-burning fires, he takes this as an example that the warming is not caused by increased CO2, conveniently ignoring the fact that it's only 50% of the increase and that wood-burning fires are still something that humans are contributing to problem!
Here's his latest showing the temperature in our local deserts about 15 degrees below normal.
My reply was There you go with your logical fallacies again, *****. You are giving a [university] education quite an undoing.
"red herring -- An attempt to divert attention away from the crux of an argument by introduction of anecdote, irrelevant detail, subsidiary facts, tangential references, and the like."
My point is simply that anecdotal evidence is virtually useless while stories like this from the BBC that show patterns from well-documented studies are all that we can reasonably rely on.
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UPDATE (9/5/07 9:00 AM PST)
Newsweek just released a feature on Global Warming Denial. It's long, but very revealing.
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