 There's a new report out on climate change. I heard climate change naturally in the past, so what's happening now must be natural. So it interrupts, but actually that argument is misinformation. Who are you? John Cook. I researched how to stop misinformation. Well, you're not doing a very good job. Fake news is everywhere. But what can you do about it? Well the antidote to fake news is just a little bit of fake news and a dollop of explanation. What? We can inoculate people against misinformation by explaining the techniques used to distort the facts. In other words, explain the poor reasoning in bad arguments. And who are you? Peter Ellerton. We've developed a strategy based on critical thinking methods to analyse the nihilist claims. And I bet you're going to explain it to us. If you insist. The first step in analysing a claim is to break up the argument into its starting assumptions or premises and its conclusion. For example, the argument you just mentioned has two premises. The first one is that climate has changed naturally in the past. The second one is that the climate is changing now. And the conclusion is that current climate change is natural. What's wrong with that? Well to find out, we first check if the argument is logically valid. Does the conclusion follow from the premises? In this case, the answer is no. The argument commits to fallacy or non sequitur. Just because the climate changed naturally in the past doesn't mean it's changing naturally now. And that's it? I'm just getting started. If an argument's invalid, it's often because there's a hidden assumption. In this case, a hidden third premise. If something wasn't a cause in the past, it can't be a cause now. Adding this premise makes the argument logically valid. So now the conclusion must be true? Not so fast. The next thing we have to do is check that the premises are true. In this case, the third premise is false. It commits the single cause fallacy. Ignoring there can be multiple factors that cause climate change. So now we're done? We're done. Although it's worth pointing out the advantage of using critical thinking to debunk misinformation. The computer's talking. No, it's Dave. Where are you? I'm in the Alps. A simple way to expose bad logic is to apply a parallel argument. And show just how ridiculous the argument really is. The past climate change argument is just like arguing that because people died of cancer in the past, cigarettes can't be the cause of any cancer now. We took this critical thinking approach and applied it to the most common myths about climate change. Every myth we looked at had reasoning flaws. And we listened more in this paper, published in the Environmental Research Letters. If I take your paper, will you leave us alone? Sure. Fine. This article argues against vaccination. Actually, that commits the fallacy all. Shut up! Cherry picking.