If you confront them with this evidence, citing all the reports and papers, they'll just switch from <pet theory> to <pet theory 2>, possibly after firing off a final riposte defending <pet theory> that makes it abundantly clear they couldn't even be bothered to read the links you dug up, forcing you to ask yourself if you really want to do all that homework again.
Fake-reasonable arguments are easy. Countering them is hard. If you don't discard them as a matter of policy (peer review or STFU), they will dominate the decision making process with 100% certainty.
Honestly, if you are engaging in this, consider whether your side really is the right side to be on in the first place.
The GP does some finger pointing ("you know that they are not being honest with you.") which might have detracted subsequent (and valid) questions that could be answered in a more pleasant sense by other HNers. We should set an example, if we're feeling superior.
So does that mean you're willing to do the legwork to dig up the IPCC reports, chase down the studies they reference, and put together an academic-quality rebuttal? Or are you just asking for someone else to do it?
In either case I offer my sincere gratitude to anyone willing to fight the weighted odds. It ain't gonna be me, though. Been there, done that. I've got a few hours of weekend left, and I aim to enjoy them.
You have the power to make this change. Not retroactively in this discussion, of course, but in the next. Spend the time to research the truth, the effort to write a scholarly reply, and there will be no need for responses like the one you saw me make.
What is that technique the fake-reasonable argument makers use? It's like a Gish gallop but slower. Maybe that's the best description of it.
I joke, but the whole point of the Gish Gallop is to rapid fire weak arguments. I don't think it exactly fits.
As an aside, does anyone know of a good source that categorizes and explains these modern underhanded argument techniques?
For a more askew look at the topic check out Derailing for Dummies :)
http://www.derailingfordummies.com
FWIW I think its important to be careful with these concepts. I often see a perfectly valid point though a poorly constructed argument blown out of the water by reference to these techniques. There's an awful lot of subtlety to this stuff which if misapplied can cause you to miss out on certain valuable points being made just because of how they're being made. Also important to remember that these "weapons" can also be abused by the hypothetical ne'er-do-wells to prevent novel contributions to discussion ...
It seems you're implying that the argument being presented is basically just, "The world is getting warmer, aaaa!!!" There's much more to it than that. In fact, even the article you're criticizing provides a more nuanced justification than that, which opens you up to criticism for constructing a strawman argument. The real argument is, "Researchers have built detailed models to try and understand how the climate behaves, and sussed out many, if not all, the factors that influence global climate, and based on those models we can make certain worrying inferences about the current state of things and how we expect them to develop in the future."
Those models do a very good job of hindcasting global climate over the period for which we have good, detailed data. This period admittedly and unfortunately does not cover much of the Little Ice Age. In climate science, as everywhere else, the GIGO principle applies. But since we do still get non-garbage out when we put non-garbage in, that leaves us in a state where they seem to be our most reliable source of information. If you want to challenge them, it's not enough to point out various historical events that are primarily hard to explain due to lack of data. You need to be able to propose a better model.
Concrete example: Nobody threw Newton out the window just because, despite all the myriad places where his model worked stunningly well, there were a few things it couldn't explain. They waited until Einstein came up with a model that explained everything Newton's model could handle and more. And then they used that in some spots, but still mostly just stuck with Newton because the math is easier and accurate enough for almost any practical use. That's the way science works for physics, and that's the way it works for climatology, too.