Global Warming: Is It Really A Crisis?

The article I decided to find logical fallacies in was one I found on foxnews.com called “Global Warming: Is It Really A Crisis?”. The article discusses the hotly contested issue of global warming. It talks about how regulations against carbon emissions are harming us, how many scientists believe global warming is actually nonexistent, and how if it were real that the temperature increase would actually help the world in many ways. Something about this article told me that it would be ripe with logical fallacies …

One of the first arguments made against the regulations made due to global warming is about the rules that mandate that cars must get 35 MPG. The author claims that “The rules will make us poorer, forcing people to buy products that aren’t otherwise the best suited for them.” This logical fallacy is a “non sequitur” because he fails to tell the audience why these rules will make us poor. He skips several important logical steps in determining that conclusion.

The second logical fallacy occurs when the article says, “Are global temperatures rising? Surely, they were rising from the late 1970s to 1998, but ‘there has been no net global warming since 1998.’ Indeed, the more recent numbers show that there is now evidence of significant cooling.” This type of logical fallacy is called “stacking the deck”. The author uses sources that are biased and not credible as scientific evidence that global warming isn’t occurring. He completely ignores all the credible scientific data that is in favor of global warming because he doesn’t want his audience to know about it.

The third logical fallacy is painfully obvious and it seems very ridiculous that the author would even try to slip such a poorly though out argument into his article. He states, “If we believe that man-made global warming is ‘bad,’ we still don’t want to eliminate all carbon emissions. Having no cars, no air conditioning, or no electricity would presumably be much worse than anything people are claiming from global warming.” The author creates a “false dilemma” here by only giving the two extremes of a situation. In all the solutions I’ve heard about for solving global warming I’ve never once hear one so extreme that it calls for immediately cutting out all carbon emissions. The author tries to make his audience think that we have to decide between global warming or technology when that argument couldn’t be further from the truth.