argument strategies

I find the most convincing arguments are those with data or statistics to back them up. Emotional arguments are interesting to listen to...sometimes, but they don't convince me by themselves. I know people who argue vehemently about things they know nothing about. This kind of ties in with the articles for this week in that at least 4 of these people I'm thinking about, have never set foot inside a college. Aside from practical things like helping you land and keep jobs, a college education also teaches you to look at things from different perspectives. It also teaches you to check your sources. Just hearing it "on the TV" or reading it in the paper is not good enough. My personal favorite is "I hear that..." followed by an emotionally-charged empty-headed argument about some controversial topic that your interlocutor knows nothing about.
If you really want to convince people, back up what you say with something other than "the news" or "some guy at work". As I mentioned in class, a few semesters ago I wrote a paper for a biology class on global warming. I tried to show arguments from the side that global warming is a man-made phenomenon and should be addressed vs global warming is a natural fluctuation and nothing to worry about. I found it very difficult to find reliable sources for backing up the "nothing to worry about" argument. There were plenty of "don't worry about it" arguments out there, but not written by anyone who actually knows anything about the climate. They were written by spokesmen for public policy think tanks, authors who work for economic magazines, and others in the corporate world or government.
Needless to say there agendas at work here. These people are also educated and can make convincing arguments if taken at face value, one of the fallacies on our list, but these people are not climatologists and have no formal education in climatology or perhaps the sciences in general. They know how to argue and convince the pedestrian masses, however and so politically charged things like climate change become "controversial".
Some of these journalists would say things like "scientists still can't agree" or similar things. It sounds good, but it's simply not true. The scientists do seem to agree. In fact, all but one from the ones I was able to find with public statements about climate change. The one climatologist I was able to find in the "nay" column was countered by evidence pointing to inaccuracies in his data which was based on 1970's satellite data that other climatologists point out is no longer considered accurate.
In the 1990's there was a proliferation of talk radio shows and TV talk shows with guests pulled from the ranks of the "average Joe" who spouted ill-conceived opinions on all sorts of topics. That brought new meaning to "I heard on the radio that..." Who cares what you heard? Who said it? What do they know? What do they have to back up their arguments besides superlatives?
The problem is time. We don't have time to research everything we want to opine about. When people put forth "arguments from authority", the reader assumes this authority figure knows what they are talking about. My climate paper is an example. I'm not a climatologist and wouldn't know what to do with the raw climate data if I was presented with it. I have to assume that when a climatologist interprets this data in a certain way, he or she knows what they are talking about. Maybe they don't. Maybe they have an agenda too. I do know enough, however to take arguments from non-authorities, without data to back them up, no matter how eloquently or emotionally put, with a lot of salt.