I thought Michael Egnor was the DI's biggest liability for stupid arguments. Now I'm thinking based on Aferensis' posts that it's probably Dave Scot based on his suggestion that "All the hominid fossils we have wouldn't fill a single coffin."
But my favorite part of how embarrassing he is for humanity is how people, sometimes inadvertently, make predictions about his stupidity.
Take this entry on global warming on Mars
The planet Mars it seems has heated up a half degree since 1970 just like the Earth has. Its southern ice cap is melting just as the northern glaciers are melting on Earth. But it's all just a big coincidence. Nothing to see here folks. It's not the sun getting warmer heating both Earth and Mars alike to the same degree. Famed climatologist and inventor-of-the-internet Al Gore says it's all your fault. Move along now.
This is largely based on this paper from Fenton et al. about climate forcing on Mars published in April.
Now, I read about this at the time, and as usual, since I don't study this stuff, I read the editor's summary "Mars Hots Up" (weird British usage eh?) to see why I should care.
Well, there was this one paragraph that I knew, I knew, would be prophetic.
The warming on Mars is likely to be seized by climate-change sceptics here on Earth - if Mars is hotting up even without any cars or pollution, then perhaps the Sun or some other natural, Solar-System-wide factor is to blame. But to infer that would be "crazy" says Christensen (see 'Hot times in the Solar System').
"The more we learn about Mars, the more intuition it gives us about Earth, but the systems are fundamentally different," he says.
Ha! I think this relates back to the discussion we had about cranks last week. They simply are not competent to evaluate evidence properly or what a good argument even sounds like. That's why DaveScot (or David Springer) is such a liability. He thinks he's smart, but he's really just embarrassing, and he can't figure it out.
Oliver Morton at Nature also had a good response to this if you want the full scope of the stupidity of DaveScot's argument.
I'm not sure what he gets for this. I guess he breaks the robot for just thinking Mars' climate has anything to do with Earth's, and he gets a crank too.
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I would also nominate DaveScot for the "cherry picking" icon. What he's doing there is, indeed, classic selectivity to reinforce a predetermined conclusion. Instead of talking about what we know about the orbital behavior, atmospheric composition and other aspects of Mars that make it very different from Earth, it's better to just say "hey, Mars is heating up too, AGW is a myth!"
Seems like he needs an icon unto himself --- or do you have something like a "full Monty" icon? Or since you have the deck of cards, a "full house"?
You mean to say that this evolution denier is also a global warming denier? Say it isn't so!
DaveScot also promotes DCA as the cancer cure Big Pharma doesn't want you to know about.
Just to foster the general link-love, Phil Plait also had a good post on Martian warming.
Not to mention the Al-Gore-invented-the-Internet bit is a myth that still lives on. At least he's consistent in not examining evidence.
http://www.wired.com/politics/law/news/2000/10/39301
"You mean to say that this evolution denier is also a global warming denier? Say it isn't so!"
if he's old enough I have a Jackson that says he was also
a smoking-causes-lung-cancer denier.
...and an HIV-causes-AIDS denier?
But probably not a Terrorists-did-911 denier. I mean, that would be silly.