If you want to avoid ad-hominem attacks, maybe you shouldn't present an unsubstantiated speculation about the motivations of climate scientists as your only hypothesis for 'explaining' what turns out to be (as others have pointed out) a faulty intuition?
Here's another motivation-based argument to think about: the organized, often irrational and sometimes threatening campaign of denial might have induced a tendency to discuss only the most bulletproof predictions, resulting in lowball estimates that will most likely rise as more evidence is uncovered.
> If you want to avoid ad-hominem attacks, maybe you shouldn't present an unsubstantiated speculation about the motivations of climate scientists as your only hypothesis for 'explaining' what turns out to be (as others have pointed out) a faulty intuition?
It doesn't warrant an ad hominem attack, it's pointing out an inconsistency - the claim about climate scientists' motives is as ad-hominem as many examples to be found in dictionaries. To his credit, credit_guy has been willing to consider alternative explanations than the one he started with.
Here's another motivation-based argument to think about: the organized, often irrational and sometimes threatening campaign of denial might have induced a tendency to discuss only the most bulletproof predictions, resulting in lowball estimates that will most likely rise as more evidence is uncovered.