Red herring
A red herring is something designed to throw the listener or reader off the track (a distraction). The red herring fallacy is to discuss a topic that sounds like it is relevant to the main topic, but actually is not. For example, if the topic is a new regulation to control air pollution one person may claim that taxes are too high and that there are already too many regulations. Another may claim that multi-national corporations are taking over the world, and need to be reigned in. A third may describe how much cleaner (or dirtier) the air was when she was a child. None if these arguments are relevant to the main topics, which are will the regulation will do more harm than good, and if there is a better way to reduce air pollution,
In popular usage, a red herring is an irrelevant fact that is thrown out in order to make it more difficult to reach the correct conclusion. My high school physics teacher, for example, would throw in information such as the temperature and barometric pressure that were totally unnecessary in reaching the answers on test questions . Anti-environmental "brownlash" writers are also found of red herrings. For example, Steve Milloy, the junk science man, stated that "Bette [Hileman] presumes to write about the climate change issue she should know some basics -- like the fact that about 98 percent of greenhouse gases are natural and not manmade." But the percentage of emissions is not the issue, what is important is the cause of the increase in greenhouse gasses. And there is near universal agreement among experts that the rapid increase in carbon dioxide and methane are being caused by activities like burning fossil fuels and clearing rain forests. (For more on this issue, see Why does atmospheric CO2 rise? by Jan Schloerer)
In another example, Dixy Lee Ray made several claims attempting to show that CFCs were a minor source of stratospheric chlorine. For example, she wrote (Environmental Overkill, page 34) that: "Sea water evaporation provides the atmosphere with 600 million tons of chloride per year." But the amount added to the atmosphere is not the issue, the amount that reaches the stratosphere is. And studies have shown that most of the stratospheric chlorine load is from manmade sources.(Rowland, Taubes, Russell et al).
References
Rowland, Sherwood, "The Need for Scientific Communication with the Public" Science, June 11, 1993, pp 1571-1576.
Ray, Dixy Lee (with Lou Guzzo), Environmental Overkill: Whatever Happened to common Sense?, HarperPerennial, 1993
Russell, et al, "Satellite Confirmation of the Dominance of Chlorofluorocarbons in the Global Stratospheric Chlorine Budget" Nature, February 8, 1996, pp 526-529.
Taubes, Gary, "The Ozone Backlash" Science, June 11, 1993, pp 1580-1583.
Written by Jim Norton
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