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Comment by KevinMS | Hacker News Reader

Hysterical website brought to you by Center for American Progress.

From their website

Our mission is to transform progressive ideas into policy through rapid response communications, legislative action, grassroots organizing and advocacy, and partnerships with other progressive leaders throughout the country and the world.

addendum: for those confused, this is political advocacy and its probably not a good idea to post this stuff here unless you want HN to become reddit. Oh, how can it be advocacy if everything is true? Sometimes its not what you say, but what you leave out.

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Given that most of the article is made of highlights from 10 scientific articles published in such high profile reviews as Nature, Science, or Nature Geoscience, I do not think you can reduce it to "political advocacy" from a "hysterical website".

Ignoring the 'hysterical' epitaph for a moment, it is fair to note that the website is openly a political website.

Selecting high quality scientific articles to bolster my political argument doesn't stop my aim being political - it may just mean that I have a convincing argument!

It is fair to be wary, however, of the process of selection in situations like this - these were 10 articles selected from many. Why were they chosen? Was the process of choosing neutral (such as in an independent literature survey) or political in nature?

This is where the nature of the site may give reason to look more closely, especially where they top and tail the actual science with partisan name calling, such as the reference to people concerned with the transparency and reliability of the climate science processes (ie 'Climategate') as the "anti-science crowd".

The argument that "HN is not Reddit" is one that should be taken seriously. Yes, there are some political links on HN unrelated to the tech industry or entrepreneurialism that have been interesting and fostered good discussion. The question is, how do we separate the good stuff from the tired propaganda?

First of all, any political link that uses sensationalism should probably be avoided.

Second, rehashing of an old issue everyone knows about already (like global warming, or the federal deficit) isn't particularly useful.

You're using a straight Ad Hominem, or as pg calls it a DH1.

Ad Hominem by association you mean? I'm not "attacking" the website because of its associations, just pointing out its associations are very very partisan and therefore the site probably shouldn't be posted here.

I agree, I don't find politics-and-science to be good bunk-buddies. They selected 10 out of a huge list, all good articles but are they a true representation of the progress in climate science or are they the top-10 list for Climategate potentials from biased over-estimated distortions of evidence.

All the climategate research, at least what I could tell, pointed to global warming. Just not as much as the authors wanted though.

You tried to discredit the argument on the basis of irrelevant issues with the author, that is an Ad Hominem.

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