Argument45--Thrive小组第5次作业.欢迎榴莲!!

z12y12l12UID: 2452277

TOPIC: ARGUMENT45 - The following appeared as an editorial in a wildlife journal.

"Arctic deer live on islands in Canada's arctic region. They search for food by moving over ice from island to island during the course of a year. Their habitat is limited to areas warm enough to sustain the plants on which they feed, and cold enough, at least some of the year, for the ice to cover the sea separating the islands, allowing the deer to travel over it. Unfortunately, according to reports from local hunters, the deer populations are declining. Since these reports coincide with recent global warming trends that have caused the sea ice to melt, we can conclude that the decline in arctic deer populations is the result of deer being unable to follow their age-old migration patterns across the frozen sea."

The author's argument that the decline in arctic deer populations results from they are unable to migrate across the sea is not convincing. It suffers from several critical fallacies and false deductions.

First of all, the author assumes the number of arctic deer is declining, just because he believes in the local hunter's report. However, this assumption is open to doubt. There is a possibility, that those hunters have changed their major work time for hunting, and the time do not overlap the deer's active time, this naturally lead to the result. Moreover, perhaps their skills are not as good as before, and because they could not successfully observe those agile deer, they think the number of deer is declining. Before a deeply inspect into this matter, the author could not draw the conclusion that the deer populations have declined.

Even the populations of deer have declined, the author's belief, that global warming would take the responsibility for the decline, is not reasonable. First, he did not provide any evidence that proves the global warming actually affects those areas and caused the sea ice to melt in the Canada's arctic region. The global warming, although cause a raise in global average temperature, paradoxically lowered the temperature in some area. It is entirely possible the global warming is lowering the temperature there.

Second, he simply neglects other possible alternatives that lead to the result. Since the existence of hunters in that area, maybe those hunters should take the responsibility of the decline in the populations of the deer, because their overmuch hunting. Or there would be a possibility that a wide spread disease, or an extinguishment of the food, would cause the decline. Whatever the reason is, the author should not easily conclude that it is because they are unable to migrate to their destination that many of them dead.

To sum up, the author failed to provide evidence that the population of deer have declined, or give us reliable research report that how have the number of deer declined. Before providing these, the arguer's conclusion is not as persuasive as it stands.


提纲：
1. Hunter's report are not reliable
2. The pop decline does not result from global warming.
    1) global warming maybe do not lower the temperature in the area the deer live.
    2) other factors that will cause the decline of the deer populations.

[ 本帖最后由 z12y12l12 于 2008-2-13 13:55 编辑 ]