My friend @sarrie joined Steemit recently and las week wrote a post about Smart Grids contributing to the fight against climate change. @wizardave responded with a comment denying the effects of climate change so, though late in reply, I felt I should respond to these points because they're new arguments for me regarding the everlasting debate that shouldn't be.

The first problem with his comment is that there was no evidence, but a simple appeal to authority logical fallacy. He claims to be 'a journeyman lineman, nuclear reactor operator, natural gas jet engine electric generator operator and diesel generator operator'. He continues to point out that he was a manager of a town that installed wind power.

Further on in the post he drops three quotes from authority figures that happen to agree with his point of view, none of which provide any evidence in and of themselves.

This is a common and fatal flaw in many debater's arguments, yet if often comes across as a smoking gun if complemented with enough confidence. So here are @wizardave's points and my rebuttals accordingly - With evidence.

'Polar bear populations are increasing' - False.

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The claims that these are based from are wild guesses at best. Knowledge of the arctic and even the process of counting such elusive animals was in its infancy in the 50's and the numbers claimed come from dubious and outright incorrect sources:

A report from the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture's S.M. Uspensky, who surveyed nesting sites on a portion of Russian turf and extrapolated an Arctic-wide population of 5,000 to 8,000 in 1965

Lomborg, the Danish economist whose work provides a torrent of talking points for Conservative pundits, says there were "probably 5,000" polar bears in the 1960's. The book's footnotes cryptically attribute the Number to "Krauss, 2006."

(on Krauss' response to this under questioning) Krauss, now a Houston-based correspondent for The Times, told me he couldn't recall the source of the 5,000 number

There is a whole in depth review and investigation into the widespread yet false information regarding this. Here - the truth is, we just don't know how many existed back then and we don't really know that accurately even today. But what we do know is that polar bears are being pushed to take drastic actions such as interbreeding and changing their diet to birds and their eggs, devastating their populations as a result, scavenging from people and even attempting to take on walruses. Behaviours are becoming more desperate and noticeable, actually threatening Alaskan Natives.

'Sea levels are decreasing, not increasing.' - False.

Sea levels have been rising about 3mm a year since 1993. The information of sea levels dropping comes from a single 18 month period in 2010 in which sea levels did indeed drop. Since then, however, the rise has shown around 10mm increase annually.

Conveniently, an in depth analysis of 25 years of data has been published just this week, something I was going to add to my 'What I learnt this week' post before I ended up doing this one instead. The data shows that the 3mm increase is actually increasing at an accelerating rate of 0.08mm annually which could potentially double the sea level predictions for the year 2100.

As for that period of sea level drop? Well, fluctuations are normal to start off; it's rare to see a chart that has a purely smooth trajectory without any deviation, but there is an actual explanation. A series of climate activities including a strong La Nina oceanic oscillation phase in the Pacific an Indian oceans caused rain to funnel itself over to Australia and become locked away in its lakes and significantly increased rainfall across the continent. Australia has a geography that kind of pushed water inland, pooling inside and remaining apart from the oceans, so it took some time for that water supply to re-circulate back into the oceans. You can read of this research here (also image source)

Even if we disregard this information, a temporary drop in an overwhelming rise is not something one should take out of context to fit their argument - this is how rumours and fake news spreads.

'Antarctic glacial ice is at an all time high.' - True

As NASA states, between 2012 and 2014, this was indeed the case, but it comes with a caveat:

Antarctica and the Arctic are two very different environments: the former is a continent surrounded by ocean, the latter is ocean enclosed by land. As a result, sea ice behaves very differently in the two regions. While the Antarctic sea ice yearly wintertime maximum extent hit record highs from 2012 to 2014 before returning to average levels in 2015, both the Arctic wintertime maximum and its summer minimum extent have been in a sharp decline for the past decades. Studies show that globally, the decreases in Arctic sea ice far exceed the increases in Antarctic sea ice.

The study in question states that:

As a whole, the planet has been shedding sea ice at an average annual rate of 13,500 square miles (35,000 square kilometers) since 1979, the equivalent of losing an area of sea ice larger than the state of Maryland every year

This was a disappointing aspect to @wizardave's comment since he stated 'Several studies picked and chose the data to be included in their conclusions. Real science examines all data.' - yet he specifically and deliberately picked and chose data without reading the context.

'Citizens of low-lying atoll nations such as Tuvalu have not had to abandon their island' - True

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As counterintuitive as it might be, it turns out that the island is indeed getting bigger, but again there is an explanation. Islands are dynamic environments that go through erosion on a daily basis. But if erosion was such a big factor, why did they not disappear thousands of years ago?

The simple answer is the opposing force against erosion: sediment deposits. The depositing sediments of Tuvalu has been enough to slightly offset the threat of rising water levels so far, giving it a 2.9% increase in landmass over 40 years, which you can read more about here.

But this doesn't actually disprove anything. In fact this study describes this phenomenon in spite of sea level rise, not due to the lack of sea rise. Once again the information has been taken out of context to support one's beliefs.

Appealing to Authority

As I said earlier, the rest involves still no evidence, and simply drops quotes from John Coleman, William Happer and Richard S. Lindzen. Lets take a quick look.

Richard S. Lindzen

Title: 'American atmospheric physicist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology'. Yet he is full of scientific misinformation. Skeptical Science will provide most the following information.

We’ve already seen almost the equivalent of a doubling of CO2 (in radiative forcing) and that has produced very little warming

This argument has been rebutted numerous times, as it ignores Thermal Inertia, Aerosols and other cooling effects. A very in depth analysis into how wrong this is can be found here and I suggest doubters take the time to readd.

...one can see no warming since 1997.

This is absurd and is based on taking small segments of climate data out of context. In fact, there is no way to mistakenly read this to take the data out of context, and could only have been done deliberately to misinform the public. Typically, they take a chart and find a brief pause, zoom in on that and ignore the rest, as demonstrated on the left.

I think these two points are enough to discredit this scientist, but you can see dozens of his comments thoroughly rebuked here.

William Happer

Happer has not actually published any research on climate, but instead ranted on The Wall Street Journal. - hardly a reputable source. He claims that CO2 levels were higher once upon a time, with alligators living happily in the arctic. What he failed to mention was that this came with ocean acidification and warming that ended up in an end-Permian extinction event. Not only that, but the rate of CO2 emission increase is ten times faster now than it was then.

No more needs to be said about Happer.

John Coleman

Coleman is a co-founder of a weather channel, and the claims supposedly made by him have been soundly debunked. I found Coleman died just last month, so I doubt we'll hear much more from him, but previously he stated that he had an epiphany during watching a football game.

Upon reading a huge speech on the subject by him, it's important to note that he is not an actual climatologist or an academic in any related field, nor did he actually do any research. He simply regurgitated others' arguments. A substantial rebuttal to his claims can be read here.

Conclusion

Whether you are a scientist or a scientific skeptic, we are all under the communal eye of rigorous peer review. If you wish to have a respectable point, you need to adhere by the standards you accuse others of lacking. This comment I ripped apart was easy to approach because none of the information was actually hidden - information was just lazily taken out of context to confirm one's bias.

We're all guilty of this, and so we're all responsible for balancing out each others' claims and keep everyone grounded. If anybody decides to further debate this post, I hope their arguments do not consist of a scrambling of quotes, youtube videos and cherry picked data, and instead looks at reputable, reliable evidence.

Good luck!