Morano Analysis #6: The appeal to authority, by the numbers

I have to feel sorry for Maslin. Once he’s accepted AGW as the central issue in this debate, he’s taken responsibility for presenting evidence of a centuries-long, world-wide, multi-system process. And he’s got about 60 seconds to get the job done. As we’ve seen, he can invite his audience to “look at” the evidence or he can remind them of some vivid event that they’ve already experienced. But the former isn’t going to help him meet his burden of proof now, and the latter is misleading and thus easy for Morano to knock down. The appeal to authority is a third option; can Maslin pull it off?

Morano Analysis #2: Hedging

I closed the first post by noting that Maslin seems to feel that Morano is attacking him–specifically, that Morano has accused scientists (including, presumably, him) of lying. There are a variety of other linguistic markers in this brief exchange that reinforce this picture of Maslin as  the weak victim responding to another’s aggression:  the hedges with which Maslin prefaces many of his remarks.