The Terror of Nuclear Power

Artwork: Nathan Bebb

(http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4092)

Listen To Podcast

Let's have a seat at Homer Simpson's control panel, chow down on some donuts, and nap away into oblivion while blinking lights and buzzers warn of impending doom and that glowing green bar of uranium that fell into our trousers. Today we're going to examine the popular notions about nuclear power. Specifically, if xenophobia had not killed nuclear power in the United States in the late 1970's, there's a good chance that we'd have all been driving electric cars for the past 20 years; and uncounted billions of tons of carbon dioxide would never been sucked out of the ground, burned in power plants, and exhausted into our atmosphere.

So let's state the obvious. The immediate reaction to that statement is "OK, that may be true, but look at all the new problems we'd have created with Chernobyl-type disasters and lethal nuclear waste." Fair enough, and important questions, to be sure. Let's start with a quick primer on the various types of nuclear reactors.

So-called Generation I reactors were the early prototypes developed by many nations, and actually placed into production in a few cases. Generation I reactors were characterized by fundamentally unsafe designs, and kludged layers of afterthought safety systems. When most nuclear nations began deploying commercial reactors, they were usually of Generation II design. Generation II reactors were significantly improved, but these changes were primarily evolutionary. Most of the commercial plants in operation in the United States are Generation II designs. A little over ten years ago, Generation III designs began appearing in some of the world's most advanced nuclear nations. Generation III reactors incorporate not only evolutionary improvements, but also revolutionary changes such as fuel cycles that result in much less nuclear waste; reduced capacity for the creation of weapons-grade plutonium; and passive safety designs wherein the reaction cannot be sustained in the event of a problem and the system effectively shuts itself down, by virtue of its basic design. The newest plants being designed for commercial use are called Generation III+, which incorporate all the newest knowledge from operating Generation III designs. If a new reactor was approved and built in the United States today, it would be a Generation III+ design. Even if every plant employee keeled over with a heart attack, neither a Chernobyl nor a Three Mile Island type accident would be possible; the systems are fundamentally redesigned so that the reaction cannot be sustained if things go outside the parameters.

The Idaho National Laboratory is the United States' primary advanced reactor research facility, and they've outlined six new reactor types to be developed for Generation IV. The designs take everything to a new level: Lower cost, safer designs, near-total elimination of nuclear waste, and reduced risk of nuclear weapons proliferation. There are also Generation V reactors in the ether, but these are primarily the domain of late-night rumination sessions at the lab, fueled by tequila and pot.

Then there's fusion power, which is everyone's ultimate goal. Fusion reactors have the profound advantages of using simple tritium or deuterium for fuel, producing no significant waste, and absolute safety since if anything goes even slightly off-kilter, the plasma disappears and you have no reaction. It's the ultimate in cheap, clean, safe, renewable energy, despite gross misunderstandings of the technology expressed by Greenpeace and other factions. The first operational tokamak fusion reactor for research is being built by the international ITER consortium in France and is expected to come online in 2016.

So you can probably guess that Three Mile Island was probably not the newest and safest design, and you'd be right. It was a Generation II design. It was the first and only significant nuclear accident in American history. A broken valve caused coolant to leak into a containment facility designed for that purpose, raising the temperature of the core and causing a partial meltdown. Despite significant confusion on the part of the operators (this being their first experience with an accident), and a somewhat lengthy chain of errors and misunderstandings, everything eventually worked out just as it should. There were no deaths or injuries, and despite 25,000 people living within five miles of the plant, nobody was exposed to any radiation worse than a single chest x-ray. All the studies predict zero cases of future cancer, despite ongoing lawsuits that the courts continue to find to be without merit. With proper perspective, Three Mile Island can (and should) be characterized as a shining example of how well the safety systems work, even in the face of human error and old-fashioned reactor design.

But that's not the way it was perceived. By an unfortunate coincidence, Jane Fonda's movie The China Syndrome about a nuclear accident came out only twelve days before Three Mile Island. The Cold War with Brezhnev was in full force and the words "nuclear accident" were simply too much for a scientifically uninformed public. Three Mile Island became the first nail in the coffin of American nuclear power.

Seven years later in 1986, things got much worse. Chernobyl was suffering from inadequate funding. Much basic maintenance had never been performed. It had only a skeleton crew, nearly all of whom were untrained workers from the local coal mine. The only manager with nuclear plant experience had been a worker installing small reactors on board Soviet submarines. Some genius decided to run a risky test of a type that no experienced nuclear engineer would ever gamble on. The test was to shut down the water pumps, which must run constantly in that type of reactor; and then find out whether the turbines, spinning on their momentum alone, had enough energy to restart and run the pumps during the forty-second delay before the backup diesel generators would kick in. The test was so risky that one faction within the plant deliberately disconnected some backup systems, trying to make the test too dangerous to attempt. The test was run anyway. It didn't work, the pumps couldn't keep up, the graphite core caught fire, the coal miners couldn't find any shovels so they didn't know what to do, and the reactor exploded. If you think I'm exaggerating this, there are extensive resources both online and in print, if you really want the hairy truth. In this short space I'm probably not even giving you ten percent of what a travesty this was — I'm tempted to call it a joke but it's so not funny. For example, they scheduled this right in the middle of a shift change, and the new workers coming in didn't even know what was going on.

Two people died that day, and some 30 to 60 people were dead within three months. Predictions of eventual cancer deaths caused by the radiation run from 1,000 to 4,000. And, of course, the damage to the local environment is extensive and difficult to estimate. The terror of a radiation cloud blowing across Europe was the second nail in the coffin of American nuclear power.

Not only was Chernobyl a monumental failure of the human element, the plant was a Generation I design, specifically an RBMK reactor, which is generally regarded as the least safe reactor type ever built. One design flaw is that the core used combustible graphite, and this distinction is the main reason that Chernobyl-type disasters are not possible in most reactors around the world. Only a very few Generation I designs are still in use, all in the former Soviet Union, and all have been retrofitted with improvements intended to prevent this type of accident. Other nations have long been lobbying for the closure of these reactors, and rightfully so.

How do the dangers of nuclear energy compare to the dangers of fossil fuel energy? A report in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that some 50,000-100,000 Americans die each year from lung cancer caused by particulate air pollution, the biggest cause of which is coal-burning power plants in the midwest and east. Even taking the maximum predicted death toll from Chernobyl, we would need a Chernobyl-sized accident every three weeks to make nuclear power as deadly as coal and oil already is. Shall I repeat that? If the world was filled with Generation I reactors run by feuding coal miners, we would need a worst-case scenario every three weeks just to match the US death toll we've imposed upon ourselves by clinging to our current fossil fuel system. Next time you see a hippie cheering the defeat of nuclear power in the US, realize that a healthy environment and saving lives are clearly not their priorities.

Well, maybe to them it's more about the future of the planet than about saving lives today. Maybe they just don't want to see high-level nuclear waste created that's going to poison the planet for tens of thousands of years. I can see that. But here's the problem with that logic: The plants we're designing now produce less waste than ever. Some on the drawing board produce none at all. We've already created most of the waste that we ever will. It already exists. It's out there. Lobbying against future cleaner plants won't make the existing waste go away. It's out there now in temporary facilities in neighborhoods all across the country, way more vulnerable than it would be in proper permanent storage in Yucca Mountain.

Opponents say that Yucca Mountain is geologically unstable or otherwise too hazardous, so the waste might leak out. Well, trust me: The location of the Yucca Mountain site was one of the most lengthy and expensive decisions the government ever made. What do you think they were doing with all that time and money, picking their noses? Well, it was a government program, so a large part of the time and budget probably was spent on nose mining. Nevertheless, this was one of the most scrutinized decisions ever made. Environmentally speaking it's as good a site as we could hope for. If you're concerned about it, go to a neutral and reliable source and research it personally. From every scrap of reason I can muster, environmentalists should be Yucca Mountain's #1 fans. I can't imagine why they prefer to leave the waste out where it is now, unless they are driven more by ideology than by science. Who would have thought that?

There is a safe and clean solution to our energy crisis, gasoline prices, and global warming. It's the latest generation nuclear reactor.

You should follow me on twitter here.

Locally Grown Produce

(http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4162#)

Listen to Podcast

Today we're going to be politically incorrect again and point our skeptical eye at another sacred cow: Locally grown produce. Particularly in the United States, but in many other countries as well, one of the newest and fastest growing market segments is locally grown produce. The claims are that locally grown produce is less wasteful of fuel because it doesn't need to be delivered over long distances; it's fresher for the same reason; and it supports a small local organic farmer instead of an immoral megacorporation that sources food from cheap overseas producers.

I discussed one of these claims, about local delivery burning less fuel, in a May 2009 entry on SkepticBlog.org. It must have been pretty inflammatory, because it generated a huge number of comments. Most of them followed this pattern: The commenter begrudgingly agreed with the mathematics of the delivery question, but then claimed that I missed the point completely because the real reason to like locally grown produce has nothing to do with a low carbon footprint of minimal delivery miles. I'm not sure I buy that — virtually everyone I've ever asked says that's what locally grown is all about — but hey, I'm fair, we'll give them all a voice here.

Maybe this guy's climate can produce a better, cheaper, lower footprint pineapple than your local climate (Photo credit: Wikimedia)

First, let's give a brief overview of the mathematics of local delivery. Think of the traveling salesman problem. This is where you speckle a map with all sorts of random locations. The traveling salesman's problem is to find the shortest possible driving route, called a tour, that visits each of the locations. It's among the most computationally difficult problems in mathematics. But there's a cool piece of free software by Michael LaLena that finds one efficient solution using a genetic algorithm. Try to stump it with a pattern of hundreds of dots that you think will be hard to connect, and the software blows your mind with a surprisingly simple tour that visits all the locations.

Many years ago I did some consulting for a company that was then called Henry's Marketplace, a produce retailer built on the founding principles of locally grown food. Henry's had evolved from a single family fruit stand into a chain of stores throughout southern California and Arizona that sold produce from small, local farmers. Part of what I helped them with was the management of product at distribution centers. This sparked a question: I had assumed that their "locally grown produce" model meant that they used no distribution centers. What followed was a fascinating lesson where I learned part of the economics of locally grown produce.

In their early days, they did indeed follow a true farmers' market model. Farmers would either deliver their product directly to the store, or they would send a truck out to each farmer. As they added store locations, they continued practicing direct delivery between farmer and store. Adding a store in a new town meant finding a new local farmer for each type of produce in that town. Usually this was impossible: Customers don't live in farming areas. Farms are usually located between towns. So Henry's ended up sending a number of trucks from different stores to the same farm. Soon, Henry's found that the model of minimal driving distance between each farm and each store resulted in a rat's nest of redundant driving routes crisscrossing everywhere. What was intended to be efficient, local, and friendly, turned out to be not just inefficient, but grossly inefficient. Henry's was burning huge amounts of diesel that they didn't need to burn. So, they began combining routes. This meant fewer, larger trucks, and less diesel burned. They experimented with a distribution center to serve some of their closely clustered stores. The distribution center added a certain amount of time and labor to the process, but it still accomplished same-day morning delivery from farm to store, and cut down on mileage tremendously. Henry's added larger distribution centers, and realized even better efficiency. Today their model of distributing locally grown produce, on the same day it comes from the farm, is hardly distinguishable from the model of any large retailer.

Compare the traveling salesman's simplified tour to a tangle of crisscrossing bicycle spokes, and the inefficiency of direct delivery between farm and store becomes acutely clear. If we want to minimize the carbon footprint of the entire food cycle, eliminating direct delivery is the easiest place to make the biggest gains. So, right off the bat, the main reason most people prefer locally grown produce is shot down, and shot down in big flames. But let's turn to the SkepticBlog commenters and see what people had to say.

As did a number of readers, Ian pointed out that you have to consider the total price. Not just the cost of distribution, but also the cost of the retailer's wholesale purchase. Total them all up, and in some cases it might be cheaper to buy from ridiculously far away:

...Wal-Mart [buys] fruit from South Africa, coffee from Kenya, etc. Flying this produce around the world is clearly using more fuel than even an inefficient model for distributing food locally. The efficiency comes not from reducing fuel usage, but from paying significantly less for the produce.

This was underscored by another poster, "Old White Guy":

As someone who spent a good chunk of his life controlling distribution for several large companies, I can say the only thing that matters is getting the product to the point of sale as inexpensively as possible. If that [means] the cheapest wine in the store comes from another continent, so be it.

This suggests that it some cases, huge container-sized purchases might still be cheaper for the large retailer, even though their delivery produces a lot of wasteful emissions, and their production might be with some god-awful third-world high-pollution child-labor dogs-and-cats-living-together environmental disaster. That might be true in some cases, but those would be the exception, not the rule. Most of the time, produce is cheaper from those countries because the native growing conditions are much better for that particular crop. Tomatoes flourish in Spain but require heated greenhouses in the United Kingdom, and so the overall energy efficiency of growing them in Spain and transporting them overseas to the UK is actually better.

A number of people who disagreed with my article repeatedly referenced Michael Pollan's book The Omnivore's Dilemma. Pollan devotes one of the book's four sections to the practices of holistic cattle farmer Joel Salatin. One of Salatin's rules is that, in the interest of a minimum carbon footprint, he won't ship his beef at all; customers have to drive to him to pick it up. While I applaud Salatin for having the right idea and the right motivations, I don't believe he thought through this particular point very critically. Salatin should instead design practices that more directly address his desire: He should allow only shipments that use a minimum amount of fuel per pound of beef delivered. Instead, he adopts a rule that might put hundreds of cars and vans on the road, each delivering only a few pounds of beef. Salatin's solution is emotionally satisfying and makes for a fine sound bite, but its underlying science is flawed and counterproductive to his stated goals.

The elephant in the room on Joel Salatin's farm is that his near-total self-sufficiency methods require an outrageous 550 acres to support only 100 head of cattle and a herd of pigs, plus some turkeys and chickens. Most of the acres are used to grow the feed and raw materials the animals require. I didn't find any valid defense of this, and Pollan's book simply avoids the issue. Typically, pasture-fed cows require half an acre each, so Salatin is using about ten times as much land as he should. Such wasteful land usage might work well in the case of a high-end boutique retailer like Joel Salatin, but it's clearly well beyond the limits of practicality for the world's real food needs.

The overall picture is often a lot more complicated than simply "locally grown". Let's say you want sheep or dairy products, and you live in New York. Where are those products going to come from? Certainly not from anywhere local. If you get them from a state or two away, which is about as local as possible, what went into their production? A lot of feed, for one thing. But spin the globe and look at New Zealand. New Zealand has the world's most efficient sheep and dairy industries, and one big reason is their climate and conditions that allow year-round grazing. According to the New York Times:

Lamb raised on New Zealand's clover-choked pastures and shipped 11,000 miles by boat to Britain produced 1,520 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per ton while British lamb produced 6,280 pounds of carbon dioxide per ton, in part because poorer British pastures force farmers to use feed. In other words, it is four times more energy-efficient for Londoners to buy lamb imported from the other side of the world than to buy it from a producer in their backyard.

And yet many of the same people who are so vocal about a minimum carbon footprint consider this massive net energy savings to be immoral because it includes overseas transport. Why? Is it a geopolitical preference? Is it a matter of supporting farms from your own country instead of sending money overseas? OK, fine, that's an absolutely valid point of view. But if your true motivations are political, don't greenwash them and claim that you're really interested in environmental science.

If it's support for small business, if you'd rather support someone like Joel Salatin than a megacorporation like Wal-Mart, that's also an absolutely valid point of view. Just call it what it is instead of greenwashing it and claiming environmental awareness. To get the premium boutique experience, Salatin's customers burn way more gas per pound of beef delivered than do Wal-Mart's container ships from New Zealand. If you have other reasons to object to Wal-Mart's New Zealand beef, fantastic; just be aware of what your objections really are. It's more intellectually honest, it's more insightful, you'll learn more, and you're not being disingenuous.

Don't get me wrong, I love farmers' markets. We go to our local one sometimes and it's a fun family event for us. We love the giant, wonderful tomatoes and strawberries that you can't get at the supermarket. But I understand that farmers' markets are more of a community experience than an efficient (or "green") way to buy food. The real reasons to enjoy your farmers' market have nothing to do with it being somehow magically environmentally friendly. Too often, environmentalists are satisfied with the mere appearance and accoutrements of environmentalism, without regard for the underlying facts. Apply some mathematics and some economics, and you'll find that, more often than not, a smaller environmental footprint is the natural result of improved efficiency.

A Magical Journey through the land of logical fallacies Part 2

Listen to Podcast

(http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4074#)

Today we're going to continue with the second part of our exploration through the jungle of logical fallacies, so sharpen up your machete and follow me as we hack and chop our way through all of this mess. If you haven't heard last week's episode, we covered many of the most common logical fallacies and other argumentative devices that are commonly used by proponents of something that can't otherwise be supported by evidence, like many pseudosciences and conspiracy theories. Hopefully, familiarity with these devices will help you to identify them in conversation. And, when you point them out, you often strip your opponent of the tools on which he depends the most. If you're going to have a debate, stick with valid arguments. Don't get caught out by fallacies.

We finished up last week with post hoc rationalizations and slippery slope arguments. And we will now continue with:

Excluded Middle

The excluded middle assumes that only one of two ridiculous extremes is possible, when in fact a much more moderate middle-of-the-road result is more likely and desirable. An example of an excluded middle would be an argument that either every possible creation story should be taught in schools, or none of them. These two possibilities sound frightening, and may persuade people to choose the lesser of two evils and allow religious creation stories to be taught alongside science. In fact, the much more reasonable excluded middle, which is to teach science in science classes and religion in religion classes, is not offered.

The excluded middle is formally called reductio ad absurdum, reduction to the absurd. Bertrand Russell famously illustrated how an absurd premise can be fallaciously used to support an argument:

Starling says: "Given that 1 = 0, prove that you are the Pope."
Bombo replies: "Add 1 to both sides of the equation: then we have 2 = 1. The set containing just me and the Pope has 2 members. But 2 = 1, so it has only 1 member; therefore, I am the Pope."

Just keep in mind that if your opponent is presuming extremes that are absurd, he is excluding the less absurd middle. Don't fall for it.

Statistics of Small Numbers

You really have to take a statistics class to understand statistics, and I think the part that would surprise most people is the stuff about sample sizes. Given a population of a certain size, how many people do you have to survey before your results are meaningful? I took half of a statistics class once and learned just enough to realize that practically every online poll you see on the web, or survey you hear on the news or read about in the newspaper, is mathematically worthless.

But it extends much deeper than surveys. Drawing conclusions from data sets that are too small to be meaningful is common in pseudoscience. Listen to Bombo make a couple of bad conclusions from invalid sample sizes:

"I just threw double sixes. These dice are hot."
"My neighbor's a Mormon and he drinks wine, so I guess most Mormons don't really follow the no-alcohol tradition."
"I went to a chiropractor and I feel better, so chiropractic does work after all."

Weasel Words

Giving a controversial concept like creationism a new, more palatable name like Intelligent Design is what's called the use of weasel words. Calling 9/11 conspiracies "9/11 Truth" is a weasel word; clearly their movement has nothing to do with truth, yet they give it a name that claims that's what it's all about.

Weasel words are a favorite of politicians. Witness the names of government programs that mean essentially the opposite of what they're named: the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind, Affirmative Action. By the way certain programs are named, it sounds like it would virtually be criminal to disagree with them.

Weasel words can also refer to sneaky wording in a sentence, like "It has been determined", or "It is obvious that", suggesting that some claim has support without actually indicating anything about the nature of such support.

Fallacy of the Consequent

Drawing invalid subset relationships in the wrong direction is called the fallacy of the consequent. Cancers are all considered diseases, but not all diseases are cancers. Stating that if you have a disease it must be cancer is a fallacy of the consequent.

Listen to how Bombo blames Starling's failure to heal upon his failure to take one particular treatment, without regard for whether that treatment is a valid one for Starling's particular condition:

Starling: "I am dying of bubonic plague."
Bombo: "You did not drink enough wheatgrass juice."

Even assuming that wheatgrass juice was a suitable treatment for anything, it would still not be a suitable treatment for everything, so Bombo's suggestion that Starling's illness is a fallacious consequence for his failure to drink wheatgrass juice.

Loaded Question

A loaded question is also known as the fallacy of multiple questions rolled into one, or plurium interrogationum. If I want to force you to answer one question in a certain way, I can roll that question up with another that offers you two choices, both of which require my desired answer to the first question. For example:

"Is this the first time you've killed anyone?"
"Have you always doubted the truth of the Bible?"
"Is it nice to never have to hassle with taking a shower?"

Any answer given forces you to give me the answer I was looking for: That you have killed someone, that you doubt the truth of the Bible, or that you don't shower or bathe. Loaded questions should not be tolerated and certainly should never be answered.

Red Herring

A red herring is a diversion inserted into an argument to distract attention away from the real point. Supposedly, dragging a smelly herring across the track of a hunted fox would save him from the dogs by diverting their attention away from the real quarry. Red herrings are a favorite device of those who argue conspiracy theories:

Starling: "Man landed on the moon in 1969."
Bombo: "But don't you think it's strange that Werner von Braun went rock hunting in Antarctica only a few years before?"

Starling: "9/11 was perpetrated by Islamic terrorists."
Bombo: "But don't you think it's strange that Dick Cheney had business contacts in the middle east?"

Red herrings are fallacious because they do not address the point under discussion, they merely distract from it; but in doing so, they give the impression that the true cause lies elsewhere. The wrongful use of red herrings as a substitute for evidence is rampant, absolutely rampant, in conspiracy theory arguments.

Proof by Verbosity

The practice of burying you with so much information and misinformation that you cannot possibly respond to it all is called proof by verbosity, or argumentum verbosium. To win a debate, I need not have any support for my position if I can simply throw so many things at you that you can't respond to all of them.

This is the favorite device of conspiracy theorists. The sheer volume of random tidbits that they throw out there gives the impression of their position having been thoroughly researched and well supported by many pillars of evidence. Any given tidbit is probably a red herring, but since there are so many of them, it would be hopeless (and fruitless) to respond intelligently to each and every one of them. Thus the argument appears to be impregnable and bulletproof. It may not be possible to construct a cogent argument using proof by verbosity, but it is very easy to construct an irrefutable argument.

Poisoning the Well

When you preface your comments by casually slipping in a derogatory adjective about your opponent or his position, you're doing what's called poisoning the well. A familiar example is the way Intelligent Design advocates poison the well by referring to evolution as Darwinism, as if it's about devotion to one particular researcher. Or:

"And now, let's hear the same old arguments about why we should believe UFOs come from outer space."
"Celebrity television psychic Sylvia Browne tells us in her new book."

If you listen to this podcast, you know that I poison the well all the time. It's one of my favorite devices. But I do it obviously, for the entertainment value, and not as a serious attempt at argument.

Bandwagon Fallacy

Also known as argumentum ad populum (appeal to the masses) or argument by consensus, the bandwagon fallacy states that if everyone else is doing it, so should you. If most people believe something or act a certain way, it must be correct.

"Everyone knows that O.J. Simpson was guilty; so he should be in jail."
"Over 700 scientists have signed Dissent from Darwin, so you should reconsider your belief in evolution."

The bandwagon fallacy can also be used in reverse: If very few people believe something, then it can't be true.

Starling: "Firefly was a really cool show."
Bombo: "Are you kidding? Almost nobody watched it."

Consider how many supernatural beliefs are firmly held by a majority of the world's population, and the lameness of the bandwagon fallacy comes into pretty sharp focus. The majority might sometimes be right, but they're hardly reliable.

That concludes our look at logical fallacies. There are certainly many others, but these are the big ones and then some, and most of the others are just subcategories of some of these. Learn these fallacies, and become handy with them. You'll find that you can easily recognize them in almost every argument someone makes, and then you're well equipped to stop them in their tracks, and require them to instead make a non-fallacious argument. Doing so strips away the bulk of the meat from the arguments of most people who advocate things that aren't evidence-based, and places you handily in a commanding position.

A Magical Journey through the land of logical fallacies Part 1

Listen to Podcast

(http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4073)

If you've ever had a conversation with anyone about their supernatural or pseudoscientific beliefs, you've almost certainly been slapped in the face with a logical fallacy or two. Non-scientific belief systems cannot be defended or supported by the scientific method, by definition, and so their advocates turn elsewhere for their support. In this episode, we're going to examine a whole bunch of the most common logical fallacies that you hear in reference to various pseudosciences. When you hear one that you recognize, be sure to wave and say hello.

Let's begin with:

The Straw Man Argument

We're starting with this one because it's the most common and also one of the easiest to spot. This is where you state your position, and your opponent replies not to what you said, but to an exaggerated and distorted caricature of what you said that's obviously harder to defend.

Starling says: "People who commit minor offenses should be let out of jail sooner."
Bombo replies: "Emptying out all the jails would create havoc in society."

Well, maybe Bombo's right, but that's not relevant, because "emptying the jails" is not what Starling advocated. In fact Bombo did not refute Starling's point at all — he invented a different point that was easier to argue against. He created a straw man — one of those dummies stuffed with straw that soldiers use for bayonet practice. It's too weak to fight back. And Bombo can then take satisfaction in having made a point that no reasonable person would argue with, and he appears to have successfully defeated Starling's argument, when in fact he dodged it.

Ad Hominem

From the latin for "to the person", an ad hominem is an attack against the arguer rather than the argument. This doesn't mean that you simply call the person a jerk; rather, it means that you use some weakness or characteristic of the arguer to imply a weakness of the argument.

Starling: "I think Volvos are fine automobiles."
Bombo: "Of course you'd say that; you're from Sweden."

Starling's Swedish heritage has nothing to do with the quality of Volvo automobiles, so Bombo's is an attempt to change the subject and is an avoidance of the issue at hand. Bombo is trying to imply that Starling's Swedish heritage biases, and thus invalidates, his statement. In fact, one thing has nothing to do with the other. Ad hominem arguments try to point out fault with the arguer, instead of with the argument.

Appeal to Authority

This type of argument refers to a special authoritative source as validation for the claim being made. Every time you see an advertisement featuring someone wearing a white lab coat, or telling you what 4 out of 5 dentists surveyed said, you're seeing an appeal to authority.

"Acupuncture is valid because it's based on centuries-old Chinese knowledge."
"This article in a peer-reviewed scientific journal says that people are getting fatter."
"A growing number of scientists say that evolution is too improbable."
"Wired Magazine says that Skeptoid is an awesome podcast."

An appeal to authority is the opposite of an ad hominem attack, because here we are referring to some positive characteristic of the source, such as its perceived authority, as support for the argument. But a good authority supports a position because that position has been shown to be otherwise justified or evidenced, not the other way around. If you say that scientists support Theory X, are those scientists claiming that Theory X is true because they believe it? No, good scientists attach no significance at all to their own authority. Theory X needs to stand on its own; an appeal to authority does not provide any useful support.

Special Pleading

An argument by special pleading states that the justification for some claim is on a higher level of knowledge than your opponent can comprehend, and thus he is not qualified to argue against it. The most common case of special pleading refers to God's will, stating that we are not qualified to understand his reasons for doing whatever he does. Special pleadings grant a sort of get-out-of-jail-free exemption to whatever higher power lies behind a claim:

Starling: "Homeopathy should be tested with clinical trials."
Bombo: "Clinical trials are not adequate to test the true nature of homeopathy."

No matter what Starling says, Bombo can claim that there is knowledge outside of Starling's experience or at a level that Starling cannot comprehend, and the argument is therefore ended. Bombo might also point out that Starling lacks some professional qualification to discuss the topic, thus placing the topic out of Starling's reach.

Bombo: "You're not a trained homeopath, so you shouldn't be expected to understand it."

A special pleading makes no attempt to address the opponent's point, it is just another diversionary tactic.

Anecdotal Evidence

One of the most common ways to support just about any non-evidence based phenomenon is through the fallacious misuse of anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal evidence is information that cannot be tested scientifically. In practice this usually refers to personal testimonials and verbal reports. Anecdotal evidence often sounds compelling because it can be more personal and captivating than cold, uninteresting factual evidence.

Anecdotal evidence is not completely useless. You could say "We saw the Bigfoot corpse at such a location", and if that information helps with the recovery of an actual body, then the anecdotal evidence was of tremendous value. But, note that it's the Bigfoot corpse itself that comprises scientific evidence, not the story of where it was seen.

"I know for a fact that ghosts exist. My friend, who is a very reliable person, has seen ghosts on many occasions."

Anecdotal evidence is great for suggesting new directions in research, but by itself it is not evidence. When it is presented as evidence or in place of evidence, you have very good reason to be skeptical.

Observational Selection

Observational selection is the process of keeping the sample of data that agrees with your premise, and ignoring the sample of data that does not. Observational selection is the fallacy behind such phenomena as the Bible Code, psychic readings, the Global Consciousness Project, and faith healing. Observational selection is also a tool used by pollsters to produce desired survey results, by surveying only people who are predisposed to answer the poll the way the pollster wants.

Bombo: "The face of Satan is clearly visible in the smoke billowing from the World Trade Center."
Starling: "And in one of the other 950,000 frames of film, the smoke looks like J. Edgar Hoover; in another, it looks like a Windows XP icon; and in another it looks like a map of Paris."

Remember that one out of every million samples of anything is an incredible one-in-a-million rarity. This is a mere inevitability, but if observational selection compels you to ignore the other 999,999 samples, you're very easily impressed.

Appeal to Ignorance

Argumentum ad ignorantiam considers ignorance of something to be evidence that it does not exist. If I do not understand the mechanism of the Big Bang, that proves that there is no knowledge that supports it as a possibility and it therefore did not happen. Anything that is insufficiently explained or insufficiently understood is thus impossible.

Starling: "It is amazing that life arose through the fortuitous formation of amino acids in the primordial goo."
Bombo: "A little too amazing. I can't imagine how such a thing could happen; creationism is the only possibility."

Using the absence of evidence as evidence of absence is a common appeal to ignorance. People who believe the Phoenix Lights could not have been simple flares generally don't understand, or won't listen to, the thorough evidence of that. Their glib layman's understanding of what a flare might look like is inconsistent with their interpretation of the photographs, so they use an appeal to ignorance as proof that flares were not the cause.

Non-Sequitur

From the Latin for "It does not follow", a non-sequitur is an obvious and stupid attempt to justify one claim using an irrelevant premise. Non-sequiturs work by starting with a reasonable sounding premise that it's hoped you will agree with, and attaching it (like a rider to a bill in Congress) to a conclusion that has nothing to do with it. The sentence is phrased in such a way to make it sound like you have to accept both or neither:

"Corporations are evil, thus acupuncture is good."
"The government is evil, thus UFOs are alien spacecraft."
"Allah is great, thus all Christians should be killed."

When we do science, it takes more than simply connecting two phrases with the word "thus" to draw a valid relationship. Thus, non-sequiturs are not valid devices to prove a point scientifically.

Post Hoc

The idea that some event must have been caused by a given earlier event, simply because it happened later, is post hoc ergo propter hoc — "It happened later so it was caused by". The assumption of cause and effect is the type of pattern that our brains are hardwired to find, and so we find them everywhere. He took a homeopathic remedy, and his cancer was cured — one happened after the other, and so the faulty assumption is that the homeopathy caused the remission.

Starling: "I bought this car from you, and the heater is broken."
Bombo: "It worked before you bought it, so you must have broken it yourself."

Bombo sees that the breakage happened after Starling made the purchase, so he assumes that one caused the other. In fact there are no grounds for such a correlation. Combined with observational selection, faulty post hoc assumptions account almost entirely for the proliferation of alternative therapies and widespread belief in psychic powers.

Confusion of Correlation and Causation

Closely related to post hoc, but a little bit different, is the confusion of correlation and causation. Post hoc assumptions do not necessarily include any correlation between the two observations. When there is a correlation, but still no valid causation, we have a more convincing confusion.

Starling: "Chinese people eat a lot of rice."
Bombo: "Therefore the consumption of rice must cause black hair."

Due to the nature of Chinese agriculture, there is indeed a worldwide correlation between rice consumption and hair color. This is a perfect example of how causation can be invalidly inferred from a simple correlation.

Slippery Slope

A slippery slope argument presumes that some change will inevitably result in extreme exaggerated consequences. If I give you a cookie now, you'll expect a cookie every five minutes, so I shouldn't give you a cookie.

Starling: "It should be illegal to sell alternative therapies that don't work."
Bombo: "If that happened, any minority group could make it illegal to sell anything they don't happen to like."

No matter what Starling suggests, multiplying it by ten or a hundred is probably a poor proposition. Bombo can use a slippery slope argument to exaggerate any suggestion Starling makes into a recipe for disaster.

The slippery slope is probably the most common subset of the larger fallacy, argument from adverse consequences, which is the practice of inventing almost any dire consequences to your opponent's argument:

Starling: "They should remove 'Under God' from the Pledge of Allegiance."
Bombo: "If that happened, all hell would break loose. Students would have sex in the hallways, school shootings would skyrocket, and we would become a nation of Satan worshippers."

That's enough for one day. Any more than this at one sitting would turn anyone into a quivering lump of irrational jelly, just like the one that first took shape in the primordial goo. Next week we'll continue and wrap up our list of logical fallacies. Until then, digest all of these that your system won't reject.