Re: Logically Fallacious (Ryan Price, Times, October 5).
I will have one more attempt to explain to Ryan Price where he errs.
The informal logical fallacy ‘appeal to authority’ is not the same as deferring to experts. You don’t want an orthopaedic surgeon to do your heart surgery just because he offers his opinion – it’s the wrong expert. Likewise, [Nobel Prize-winning physicist] Ivar Giaever has no expertise in atmospheric physics – science that explains why more CO2 in the atmosphere means Earth retains more energy from the Sun.
There is no scientific argument about this. Even the oil companies no longer contest it in court. Their problem is it was their own scientists who warned them about it – in the 1960s. But profit came first and they spent billions on propaganda – lies that are now seeing them back in court.
Ryan Price seems to think reality is what advertising buys. It is not. In science, it is presented by the scientific community – The Royal Society of London, National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Physical Society, American Chemical Society etc, and of course the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – which is the world authority. [It is] based on evidence, not ignorance and wishful thinking.
Dennis Horne
Howick
