There’s definitely a lot of class #3. 

There’s a lot that I’ve come across and probably much more that I haven’t. 

> There are patterns that an intelligent lay person can learn to recognize in the climate literature. A lot of bad arguments are placed in articles by non-idiots for the purpose of pandering to either grant reviewers or journal editors.

I believe that.  Maybe a better way of saying what I intended:

1. There are idiotic wrong arguments that are recognizable as such by people with no particular expertise.  

2. There are non-idiotic wrong arguments that are recognizable as such by people with no particular expertise.

3. There are non-idiotic wrong arguments that are not recognizable as such by non-experts.

The amount of effort required to identify wrong arguments probably goes up an order of magnitude with each class.  I'd put what you discussed in class #2.

elvismercury

only a true expert has the sophistication to detect bullshit arguments made by non-idiots

This isn't quite right. There are patterns that an intelligent lay person can learn to recognize in the climate literature. A lot of bad arguments are placed in articles by non-idiots for the purpose of pandering to either grant reviewers or journal editors.

However, as we've discussed before, someone making a bad argument for something isn't evidence that the thing isn't true anyways.

Politics_And_Law

What Happened to Climate Change?

Undisciplined

> only a true expert has the sophistication to detect bullshit arguments made by non-idiots

This isn't quite right. There are patterns that an intelligent lay person can learn to recognize in the climate literature. A lot of bad arguments are placed in articles by non-idiots for the purpose of pandering to either grant reviewers or journal editors.

However, as we've discussed before, someone making a bad argument for something isn't evidence that the thing isn't true anyways.