More Anti-Global Warming dishonesty

Apparently science is now a democracy because we keep hearing about scientists signing up and saying they disagree with global warming.  Take for example this new piece in the wall street journal entitled No need to panic about global warming bragging about being signed by 16 scientists.  Apparently the author of this opinion piece believes that facts can be voted on.

But science is not a democracy.  We cannot simply vote on what we want to be true, instead we must have evidence to find out what is true.  If we could vote on truth I would say its high time we held a vote on whether or not cancer exists.  Unfortunately, the fact that science is about evidence rather than getting names to support you is something that politicians and the general public don't seem to understand.

The very fact that those opposing global warming are resorting to polling names of those who oppose global warming as opposed to citing studies should clue us in to the fact that they are wrong.  If the evidence showed that the earth isn't warming then the warming denialists could cite to that evidence rather than just trying to find names to support them.  As it stands the only way for the global warming denialists to argue is to use rhetorical tricks to cover up the fact that all the evidence stands against them...

Do Lad Mags really talk like rapists?

The university of Surrey has recently reported that it is publishing a research paper in the British Journal of Psychology dealing with whether study participants could tell the difference between statements made by convicted rapists and those made by men's magazines.  There was one giant glaring problem I immediately saw with this study allowing for giant bias--the researchers were the ones choosing the quotes and thus could choose what quotes participants were reading.  Why is this problematic you may ask.  The reason is that if you select the proper quotes from two sources you can make any two groups look alike.  So long as you keep the quotes short and obscure enough it will be hard to determine who made a statement.  Of course, I have not seen the research because it has not been released yet, so I qualify my following arguments with the fact that the research may adequately address my complaints.

So, what did the study find... it turns out participants couldn't accurately guess which statements were made by rapists and which were made by men's magazines.  Now, without any further ado I will address the large potential problems I see with this research and the press release by University of Surrey and why I think this conclusion is misleading.  I will address 3 main problems I see: 1) guilt by association fallacy, 2) misleading selection of quotes, 3) cherry picking quotes.