Philosophy Discussion Forums

GE Morton wrote: ↑January 9th, 2020, 11:02 am

Greta wrote: ↑January 9th, 2020, 5:43 am Australia's gun laws have only been slightly relaxed since the amnesty in the 90s after the Port Arthur massacre.

Universal Alien's information is completely wrong. However, I do not believe he is a bad actor. Rather, it is such an outrageous, bald-faced lie that I can only imagine that he was lied to by Fox and/or the NRA. https://www.factcheck.org/2017/10/gun-c ... a-updated/

It is disgraceful the way Fox twists good people's minds with their lying and misrepresentation.

UA's claim was clearly false. But so is the claim that Australia's 1996 gun laws substantially reduced gun homicides. They have declined since then, but so have they in other English-speaking countries. Indeed, the decline in the US since the mid-90s has been steeper than Australia's, which has liberalized its guns laws over that period.

https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that- ... homicides/

Greta wrote: ↑January 9th, 2020, 5:32 pm
Whatever, climate change is far more dangerous than guns in Australia. Two thousand homes gone, and countless other assets. Half a billion animals killed, including many of our koalas. Some of our main food belts have been decimated. Many areas have air quality multiple times worse than in Delhi.

Greta wrote: ↑January 10th, 2020, 6:37 am If current events around the world and the mountains of scientific backing are not enough for you, then you are operating based on political ideology rather than logic.

Why are you on a philosophy forum? I don't understand it. Why not do this on the political forum, where you can butt heads with people who are not nauseated by blatant party political bias?

GE Morton wrote: ↑January 9th, 2020, 8:35 pm

Greta wrote: ↑January 9th, 2020, 5:32 pm
Whatever, climate change is far more dangerous than guns in Australia. Two thousand homes gone, and countless other assets. Half a billion animals killed, including many of our koalas. Some of our main food belts have been decimated. Many areas have air quality multiple times worse than in Delhi.

Blaming Oz's fires on "climate change" is almost as specious as crediting the gun laws for the reductions in homicides. Bushfires are as common there as kangaroos. They are part of the ecosystem. This year's fires are bad, but for the previous 10 years they were quite mild, by historical standards, in terms of number of hectares burned. In only two of those years did fires consume > 100,000 ha. And this year's fires will not approach the scale of the 1974-75 fires, which consumed > 100,000,000 ha.

To be sure, the human losses from fires have increased, for the same reason the losses from hurricanes in the US have increased --- because more people are building more subdivisions and office parks in fire- or hurricane-prone areas.

http://joannenova.com.au/2019/09/its-a- ... windfarms/

GE Morton wrote: ↑January 10th, 2020, 11:26 am

Greta wrote: ↑January 10th, 2020, 6:37 am If current events around the world and the mountains of scientific backing are not enough for you, then you are operating based on political ideology rather than logic.

How do events around the world bear on the question of the causes of Australia's bushfires, which have been occurring since time immemorial?

Nothing New Under the Sun (also, Uniformitarianism, “Seen it all before;” "Surprise, surprise;" "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose."):

Fairly rare in contemporary discourse, this deeply cynical fallacy, a corruption of the argument from logos, falsely proposes that there is not and will never be any real novelty in this world. Any argument that there are truly “new” ideas or phenomena is judged a priori to be unworthy of serious discussion and dismissed with a jaded sigh and a wave of the hand as "the same old same old." E.g., “[Sigh!] Idiots! Don't you see that the current influx of refugees from the Mideast is just the same old Muslim invasion of Christendom that’s been going on for 1,400 years?” Or, “Libertarianism is nothing but re-warmed anarchism, which, in turn, is nothing but the ancient Antinomian Heresy. Like I told you before, there's nothing new under the sun!”

Essentializing: A fallacy of logos that proposes a person or thing “is what it is and that’s all that it is,” and at its core will always be the way it is right now (E.g., "All terrorists are monsters, and will still be terrorist monsters even if they live to be 100," or "'The poor you will always have with you,' so any effort to eliminate poverty is pointless.").

Also refers to the fallacy of arguing that something is a certain way "by nature," an empty claim that no amount of proof can refute. (E.g., "Americans are cold and greedy by nature," or "Women are naturally better cooks than men.") See also "Default Bias." The opposite of this is Relativizing, the typically postmodern fallacy of blithely dismissing any and all arguments against one's standpoint by shrugging one's shoulders and responding " Whatever..., I don't feel like arguing about it;" "It all depends...;" "That's your opinion; everything's relative;" or falsely invoking Einstein's Theory of Relativity, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, Quantum Weirdness or the Theory of Multiple Universes in order to confuse, mystify or "refute" an opponent. See also, "Red Herring" and "Appeal to Nature."

LuckyR wrote: ↑January 10th, 2020, 4:17 pm
Nice try. While total hurricane stats are not compelling over the centuries, the onset of severe storms (associated with higher ocean temps) is dramatic. For example, in Florida, between 1850 and 1915 there was one Category 4 storm (in 65 years), OTOH in the last 75 years there have been eight Cat 4's and two Cat 5's.

Greta wrote: ↑January 10th, 2020, 5:38 pm
The claim is that Australia's bushfire have been "occurring since time immemorial". This clearly ignores magnitude, frequency, season length and intensity*.

A common measure of bushfire severity is the number of hectares burned per year. By that measure, as I said, Australia's fires over the last 10 years have been relatively mild, in historical terms. This year's fires are anomalous.

I have been trying to better understand logical fallacies, given the sad state of public conversation today:

* The above has been a standard line of the Murdoch media since the fires so we can safely assume that GE Morton gets his news from Fox. Murdoch has deep links with the fossil fuel industry, and his publications are known to cynically muddy the waters of the climate change debate. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/ ... rage-email

Ironic that in your inquiry re: fallacies you commit one. "GE Morton gets his news from Fox" is an ad hominem.

In fact, I got that info from the table in the Wikipedia Australia bushfire article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bushfires_in_Australia

Greta wrote: ↑January 10th, 2020, 11:32 pm I'll admit it's an ad hominem if you admit that Fox is not your primary news source.

Meanwhile you have not admitted your own fallacy, nor do I expect you to. You think that Australia's fires have nothing to do with climate change.

Scientists, however, have a more grounded view: https://www.science.org.au/news-and-eve ... -bushfires

In NSW alone, 4.9m hectares burned was the largest area destroyed in the state since records began, Associate Professor Owen Price from the University of Wollongong said.

According to data collected by the NSW Office of Environment and Heritage, the previous NSW record was 3.54m hectares burned in the widespread grassfires of 1974–75.

Figures compiled by the 2004 National Inquiry into Bushfire Mitigation and Management record that 4.5m hectares were burned in 1974–75 – higher than the NSW OEH figures, but still below this year’s record.

As well as setting a record for area burned, Price said this year’s fires were burning through a large amount of forest, rather than grasslands.

This has made the current fires more devastating, harder to fight and more dangerous to people and to wildlife, he told Guardian Australia.

“The 1974 fires were 4.5m, and that was mostly in the arid and semi-arid grasslands,” Price said. “The actual impact of that was far less. What we’re talking about here is forest fire.

“In forest, the fires are far more intense, they produce far more smoke, they burn far more material, so there is a bigger greenhouse gas output and they take longer to recover. When they reach homes, they are harder to stop.

“Some of the fires in the north of the state in November were going through rainforest. There are areas, say Kanangra national park, west of the Blue Mountains, that has not been burnt in recorded history.”

Dozens of current and former fire chiefs have also described this year’s fires as unprecedented. The RFS commissioner, Shane Fitzsimmons, said in December this season was “absolutely” the state’s worst on record.

“The biggest fire seasons in the past have burnt about 20% of the forest,” Price said. “But this time it is going to be more than half, which puts animals at a much higher risk.

“It’s a new record by any measure,” he said.

In December, the federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, said up to 30% of the koala population on the NSW mid-north coast could have been killed in the fires, and a NSW government inquiry heard from an expert that the fires were so large “we will probably never find the bodies”.

In January, the bureau of meteorology confirmed that 2019 was Australia’s hottest year on record, while the record for the hottest day across the country was broken two days in a row – on Tuesday 16 December and Wednesday 17 December.

In its annual climate statement, released on Tuesday, the Bureau of Meteorology said 2019 was also Australia’s driest with a national average rainfall total of 277mm – the lowest on record.

“The immediate reason [for these fires] is the drought,” Price said. “Basically all the moisture has been sucked out of the landscape and the plants. Then you have to ask the question, what has caused the drought?

“Drought is a natural periodic thing, but the fact that this is the worst drought on record, and we’ve broken temperature records many times this year, is a pretty unequivocal indication that climate change has made this worse.”

Greta wrote: ↑January 11th, 2020, 4:15 pm Morton, those like you who wilfully who peddle untruths for political purposes and never admit it deserve ad hominem attacks. I note that you have stood firm on your misinformation.
...
I look forward to your admission of error LOL!

Greta wrote: ↑January 11th, 2020, 4:15 pm
The fires of 74/75 are not even close to the the scale of current fires - not in fuel, not in deaths, not in property damage, not on loss of arabale land or extinctions.

. . (since you don't believe that carbon is a greenhouse gas, I realise this info will mean nothing to you).