Circular reasoning (also
known as paradoxical thinking or circular logic), is a logical fallacy in which
"the reasoner begins with what he or she is trying to end up with".
The individual components
of a circular argument will sometimes be logically valid because if the
premises are true, the conclusion must be true, and will not lack relevance.
Circular logic cannot prove a conclusion because, if the conclusion is doubted,
the premise which leads to it will also be doubted. Begging the question is a
form of circular reasoning.
Circularity can be
difficult to detect if it involves a longer chain of propositions. However,
circular reasoning is often of the form: "a is true because b is true; b
is true because a is true."
But what if b is based on a
lie, then the whole edifice of circular logic comes crashing down. That is
precisely what happened to the BBC relying on hyped NGO Climate reports. Read
on and enjoy!
(See Ben Pile’s brilliant
rebuttal of those sorts of argument here)
Page 32 of the PDF version
of Climate of Poverty contains the following statements:
Kenya is getting warmer.
This is confirmed by measurements on the ground. For example, the maximum
temperature in Kericho, a highland area in the Rift Valley province where most
of Kenya’s tea exports are grown, has increased by 3.5C during the past 20
years.
Readers interested in the
source of that claim are directed to endnote #3 of the Kenya chapter. Appearing
on page 45 of the PDF, it reads: S Wandiga, ‘Assessment of
the Impact and Adaptation to Climate Change’, AIACC Regional Workshop, Dakar,
23 March 2004.
In other words, the
alarming info about temperatures in Kericho came from a presentation made at a
workshop. Except that it didn’t.
For starters, the webpage
devoted to that 4-day Workshop
says it hadn’t yet begun on March 23. It says
that Shem Wandiga, a professor of chemistry, chaired a session on March 24th,
during which other people made presentations. It says the talk he himself
delivered three days later had a different title: Community stakeholders’
discussions and workshops in the Lake Victoria Region.
You can read the abstract here
and the PowerPoint presentation here. Neither mentions temperatures in
Kericho. Instead, this is a discussion about what people in focus groups said
about “climate-induced malaria and cholera.”
In other words, the
Christian Aid citation is utterly bogus. No presentation by that name was
delivered by that person at that workshop.
On page 16 of Wandiga’s CV,
under the heading Research Accomplishments, we learn that he was involved in an
“Assessment of Impact and Adaptation to Climate Change.” He says he was the
Principal investigator in
[a] project called “Capacity building to evaluate and adapt to
climate-change-induced vulnerability to malaria and cholera in the Lake
Victoria Region.”
That sounds more like
social work than chemistry, but never mind.
Yesterday, Christian Aid
issued a statement that Hickman has added to the bottom of his account. The
charity has now changed its story. It says it got its information about the
Kericho temperature rise not from a 2004 workshop but from interviews it
conducted with experts who were interpreting research published in 2006. Here’s
a direct quote:
The statistic suggesting
the maximum temperature in Kericho, Kenya had risen by more than 3 degrees from
the year 1978 – 2001 was included in good faith in Christian Aid’s 2006 report
The Climate of Poverty.
Even charities these days
won’t acknowledge when they’ve made a mistake. Instead, they blithely substitute
a 2006 citation for a fake 2004 citation as if that sort of thing happens every
day. No big deal. All in good faith, don’t you know.
Christian Aid now wants us
to take the word of unnamed “Kenyan academics” that they’ve interpreted a 2006
“peer reviewed report” correctly. Except that this research has not been
published in a peer-reviewed journal. It is a Working Paper. Its publisher, as
Christian Aid tells us, is an organization called Assessments of Impacts and
Adaptations to Climate Change project (AIACC).
The AIACC is the brainchild
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). One of its stated
purposes is to encourage research in developing countries that might eventually
be published in peer-reviewed journals.
If you scroll down to the
bottom of the AIACC’s About
Page
you’ll find a steering committee that
includes IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, the former IPCC chairman Robert
Watson, and many other familiar names.
So after citing an
imaginary source, Christian Aid now rests its case on research that came into
the world via the IPCC.
To recap, then, in 2006
Christian Aid released a report that contained a startling claim about a
temperature spike in Kenya. The source it cited was entirely bogus.
Nevertheless, the claim got repeated. The Church of Sweden, for example,
released a climate change report in 2007 that told us about this temperature
spike and directly cited the non-existent 2004 source (see page 12).
Another report, titled
Africa – Up in smoke 2, also repeated the claim (see page five). Its lead
author, John Magrath of Oxfam, didn’t independently verify the info. He simply
assumed that the Christian Aid authors knew what they were talking about.
Later, the temperature
claim made it onto page two of a 2009 brochure under the subheading Evidence of
climate change in Africa. Those authors didn’t check the facts, either. They
used the Africa – Up in Smoke 2 report as their source.
And then the BBC got in on
the act. Like the brochure authors, the BBC relied on the Africa – Up in Smoke
2 report even though that document is miles away from being peer-reviewed
science.
The fact that Africa – Up in smoke 2 was written by Oxfam and funded by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth,
the World Wildlife Fund and other pressure groups should have been a warning to
BBC personnel.
But it wasn’t. Some
lessons, it seems, need to be learned the hard way.
