Readers know that I am a collector of formal fallacies. I keep them on the mantle, well-dusted and polished. "Saving the Hypothesis" doesn't strike me as a formal, Aristotelian fallacy, but it surely is a common thing for folks to struggle to salvage a notion in which they are emotionally invested, regardless of new data. We all do that sometimes unless we catch ourselves BSing ourselves.
Larry Anderson at American Thinker proposed this fallacy in relation to the Global Warming Climate Change whatever topic. One quote:
I distinctly remember the first time I had an argument with someone about "climate change." It was a warm spring day in April of 1975. I was walking across the campus at Harvard headed for lunch. A fellow classmate (we were both juniors) ran up to me. He was really excited. He hollered out:
"Have you heard? The ice age is coming. They've proven it with computer studies at MIT."
"How did they prove that there is an ice age coming with computers?" I asked my friend.
"The planet is getting colder. They have the data. And it is going to keep getting colder. They have these computer models --"
I stopped him right there. I knew enough about computers to understand that they were not up to accurately predicting short-term weather patterns -- let alone an ice age.
"No way. Computers aren't that powerful. "
"But they have the data and they have computers!"
"I know they do. But computers spit out whatever they are programmed to spit out. Load a computer with the data that the world has been getting colder; ask it what the weather will be tomorrow, and what do you think the computer is going to tell you? The world is getting hotter? If it does you'd better get a better computer. You hungry?" I replied and I continued on my way to lunch.
The original "climate change" hypothesis was that the planet was getting colder and that it would continue getting colder. That was a very simple hypothesis and was easily proven or refuted. Planet keeps getting colder = hypothesis correct. Planet gets warmer = hypothesis incorrect.
The world got warmer instead of colder. The "climate change" hypothesis was rewritten. This time the planet was facing a catastrophic meltdown. The world was not only getting warmer -- it was going to keep getting warmer at an ever increasing and life-threatening rate.
