Global Warming Proof by Assertion

Lenin is attributed with saying, "A lie repeated often enough becomes the truth."

Knowingly or not, Lenin was referring to what today is known as Proof by Assertion which is defined as, "a logical fallacy in which a proposition is repeatedly restated regardless of contradiction. Sometimes this may be repeated until challenges dry up, at which point it is asserted as fact due to its not being contradicted argumentum ad nauseam. In other cases its repetition may be cited as evidence of its truth, in a variant of the appeal to authority or appeal to belief fallacies."

There are numerous examples of this phenomenon in what passes for conventional wisdom today. The most popular example in my opinion is when one asserts that "Bush lied" about WMDs in Iraq. A lie, by definition, implies that the one doing the lying knows the truth. So in order for Bush to have lied about WMDs, he would have had to have known that they did not exist in the first place. Since they did not exist, he would know for certain that none would be found after the invasion, at which point he would be exposed as a liar. Even the biggest idiot in the world, a label that seems to stick quite well on our president, would know that being exposed as a liar during one's first term in office is not the best path to a second term.

Consider the following:

What if everyone believes in global warmism only because everyone believes in global warmism? That's the question that was asked in this opinion piece in the WSJ yesterday.

The media will be tempted to blur the fact that his (Nobel) medal, which Mr. Gore will collect on Monday in Oslo, isn't for "science." In fact, a Nobel has never been awarded for the science of global warming. Even Svante Arrhenius, who first described the "greenhouse" effect, won his for something else in 1903. Yet now one has been awarded for promoting belief in man-made global warming as a crisis.

How this honor has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on "availability bias," roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind.

Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: "Availability cascade" has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; "informational cascade" for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd's beliefs; and "reputational cascade" for the rational incentive to do so.

In addition to Lenin's sage wisdom as quoted above, Mark Twain best summarized the attitude that has seized the collective imagination of the whole global warming doomsday crowd when he said, "the average man is destitute of independence of opinion. He is not interested in contriving an opinion of his own, by study and reflection, but is only anxious to find out what his neighbor's opinion is and slavishly adopt it."

Seems like Mr. Twain defined "availability bias" over 100 years before Dr. Kahneman and Dr. Tversky.