Posted on 1 November 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom

Earlier this year our volunteer editor Marc Kodack spotted an impressive answer to climate change solutions denial, "Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles," which he included in our weekly climate research survey. Written by Matthew Eisenson, Jacob Elkin, Andy Fitch, Matthew Ard, Kaya Sittinger & Samuel Lavine and published by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School,  this was obviously a very useful and timely resource. So, we also shared it widely on social media— where we soon noticed a theme in comments: "Neat report - but it being a single PDF makes it impossible to link to each of the rebuttals directly."

We had - not so long ago - explicitly added "solutions denial" to our overall mission statement, but we didn't yet have many rebuttals in that category, mostly due to a lack of "inhouse" subject matter experts who could actually create and maintain these kinds of rebuttals. Sabin's report was therefore too good an opportunity to ignore, so we touched base with them in order to find out if we could create 33 individual rebuttals on Skeptical Science based on their report. We are very happy to report that the author team at Sabin quickly gave us the go-ahead for this adaptation of their work, so we set out to do just that.

As is rather common with projects and tasks like this, they tend to take somewhat longer than initially planned and hoped for, but we were eventually able to create 33 new rebuttals at the intermediate level, all linked to the "It's too hard" category in our taxonomy.

Because Sabin's report followed conventions of legal scholarship in its many references and footnotes, which we then adapted for our context, these rebuttals have a somewhat different look and feel to them compared to most of our other rebuttals.  References to other reports and online articles are included in a footnotes section at the bottom of each new rebuttal and referenced by superscript numbers within the text (labelled 1 in the image below). References to published research have been added to our glossary (almost 90 all told). If enabled on your end they will trigger the pop-up with the citation for and link to the paper (labelled 2).

Sabin's report starts with an Introduction which we re-created and adapted as a stand-alone blog post. There, you'll also find the full list of the 33 new rebuttals which have all been created at the intermediate level. Furthering the portability of Sabin's work and in keeping with all of our rebuttals, each of these is also available as a standalone PDF.

Starting next week on Tuesday, we'll highlight one of these rebuttals in a blog post each week but all of them are already available as part of our list of rebuttals.

Skeptical Science sincerely appreciates Sabin Center's generosity in collaborating with us to make this information available as widely as possible.