by /u/NGC6514

This is a story about Reddit user /u/HappyFluffyBunnies, a regular of the /r/ClimateSkeptics subreddit for climate change denial. Despite the use of the word “skeptics” in the title of their subreddit, numerous examples of cognitive dissonance and refusals to accept evidence pervade /r/ClimateSkeptics. I have provided links for proof of everything in this story, so that there can be no confusion or claim of twisting the truth.

In a recent discussion about climate change, Bunnies claimed that climate scientists don’t understand the physics involved in their own field:

No, they don’t understand the physics involved. Most of today’s “climate scientists” have only come into the field recently.

I asked Bunnies a few simple, climate-related physics questions so that Bunnies could prove his or her qualifications to make such a statement about the physics knowledge of climate scientists. I explained that Bunnies should have no problem answering these questions, since a climate scientist could answer each of them in about a minute, and since, according to Bunnies, climate scientists don’t even understand the physics relevant to their own field.

Note that Bunnies had also claimed to have taken a university nuclear physics course as a biology major before switching majors to psychology. I asked Bunnies how he or she could have taken nuclear physics without the 8 or 9 prerequisite physics courses (not including labs), and Bunnies acknowledged not having taken those prerequisites.

Bunnies refused to address these physics questions on 10 different occasions, claiming that he or she didn’t know what questions I was talking about. I called bunnies out on that, and so Bunnies finally agreed to address these questions.

In response, Bunnies said that the questions were impossible to answer, as Bunnies didn’t know which equations were involved (i.e. didn’t know the physics). In that same response, Bunnies also claimed that the problems I wrote were “erroneous,” and later asserted that I wouldn’t even be able to solve them (yes, the questions that I had written).

In response, I spoon-fed the answers to Bunnies in a set of solutions that I wrote up in LaTex. These solutions show that the problems are actually quite simple to solve with some knowledge of physics (I solved each problem in about a minute, as can be seen in the solution set, where the time of calculation is given at the end of each problem).

Even after all of this, Bunnies still cried foul:

Kid, you lied about your qualifications, you lied about creating those questions, you lied about being able to answer them yourself. It’s all been a bluff that backfired on you.

Keep in mind: This is all after Bunnies brought up his or her psychology degree’s neuro specialization and implied that I didn’t have a degree that qualified me to speak on this subject. After I told Bunnies about my status as a current astrophysics PhD student (which, by the way, has been verified with flair over at /r/Science), Bunnies claimed I was lying about my education.

Bunnies again called into question my qualifications by pointing to a comment to which I had replied in /r/Space, asserting that my reply demonstrated a lack of physics knowledge, as, according to Bunnies, I didn’t know why the sky was blue. Bunnies claimed that the sky is blue because of nitrogen (the comment itself has since been removed, but I managed to save a screenshot):

From a guy who doesn’t know why our sky is bluie [sic] and the sky or [sic] mars is pink. For your information, it’s the nitrogen. Some candidate for astrophysics.

I explained that the sky is blue due to Rayleigh scattering, and provided 9 different links which confirmed that. Of course, Bunnies fought me on this, calling me “genius-boy” and repeating that the sky is blue due to nitrogen. I explained again that the sky is blue due to Rayleigh scattering, but Bunnies continued to argue, claiming that some other process was responsible for the sky’s blue color:

The molecules are able to scatter light because the electromagnetic field of the light waves induces electric dipole moments in the molecules.

Of course, Bunnies did not realize that this is the definition of Rayleigh scattering (listed as “Rayleigh scattering, which causes the sky to appear blue” on Wikipedia).

From the Wikipedia article: “Rayleigh scattering results from the electric polarizability of the particles. The oscillating electric field of a light wave acts on the charges within a particle, causing them to move at the same frequency. The particle therefore becomes a small radiating dipole whose radiation we see as scattered light.”

Believe it or not, this continued on in another thread, where Bunnies not only held to his or her incorrect claims about why the sky is blue, but made other incorrect claims about relativity and the Big Bang.

Here is a summary of some more of Bunnies’ claims:

The gram is not a unit of mass (source) Normal forces do not exist (source) Force and momentum are the same thing (source) Orbiting planets do not have angular momentum from their orbital motion (source) Infrared and heat are the same thing (source) Orbiting planets do not have angular momentum from their orbital motion (source) Angular momentum has nothing to do with orbits (source) The Big Bang theory has holes in it, but the pseudoscientific ”electric universe” idea does not (source) The Moon’s orbital speed would be faster if it orbited farther from the Earth (source) The meteor that killed the dinosaurs could have knocked the Earth into a completely different orbital path (source) Frame dragging (not conservation of angular momentum) explains why the planets orbit in the same plane (source) Physics formulas are “ludicrous” if they have wavelength terms in the denominator (source) Radiative transfer is not relevant to the temperature of the Earth (source) A “standard optical depth for reference” is needed to calculate the optical depth of something (source) Any two objects emitting infrared radiation must be the same temperature (source) Nitrogen scatters blue light and CO₂ scatters red, with CO₂ scattering more red light than blue (source) Specific angular momentum is the angular momentum of one particular object, not angular momentum per unit mass (source)

It turns out this type of behavior of thinking oneself an expert is not uncommon for Bunnies. Many other examples can be found, such as Bunnies debating biology with an evolutionary primatologist (screenshots of the posts from this exchange are found here).

The bottom line is this: Bunnies engages in arguments about things he or she does not understand, and then refuses to accept the truth, disregarding all evidence put forth.

Don’t be like Bunnies.