re: You just couldnt make this stuff up. NASA: Sea levels have been falling for two years

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His arguments essentially boil down to claiming the other side is falsifying their data without real evidence, lying about what his former institution believes on the topic, and making really poor assertions. While having never once submitted anything on this topic to the peer-review process.

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This is true, but looking at his primary arguments about the topic, he even agrees see level has rise, just to a far lesser extent.

But this is why climate science is so toxic. It's no longer about the scientific evidence and arguments, it's about the scientists themsleves. They're just like the rest of us, and get caught up in emotions and can incorrectly characterize the other side in situations like that, whether they believe it or not. And the politicalization has probably made that even worse in climate change science.

When one of my major professors had a few drinks in him at a party, I learned a lot about the personal disagreements and outright contempt that some of the most well-known scientists in my field had for each other. I would have never known from their work, and in fact they actually were pretty much studying the same things and held the same views scientifically.

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Those are the type of people that really shouldn't have any credibility in this debate. Like inviting a Heartland Institute spokesman to debate a climate scientist.

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But I'm not sure how that's relevant here. It looks like sea level changes was part of his primary reseach for decades. I agree that too often they use scientists who don't seem relevant to the topic. At the same time, I would trust Nassim Taleb's analytical skills if he was brought on to help model some time-series in most any field of study. But then again that's probably why he doesn't get involved in unrelated fields.

And when he does, he's usually arguing against philosophical issues and interpretations that are counter to the scientific reasoning that's foundational to any discipline and based on his expertise. For example, I've seen him criticize climate scientists for overstating consequences and predictions because they're understating or flat out ignoring the uncertainty of the models in the longterm exacerbated by ignoring the risk of a misspecifying parameters or the underlying distributions. Of course, this is the same criticisms that made him famous in the first place (Black Swan), and it's a phenomenon that occurs in all sorts of phenomenon when using that type of modeling.

Of course, none of those criticisms are anything like the nonsense we see here. I would closer myself a skeptic, mostly because I believe causation is argued to strongly, especially to the extent of it, and forecasts are argued to confidently, and the consequences of those forecasts are argued too knowingly.

But I still believe in the general premise that it's warming and humans are contributor. But for a while, I felt the arguments I was critical of were too much, but now my the other side has gotten far more ridiculous and gone straight denial, that I'm far more disconnected to their nonsense that I have to argue against them instead. And what I believe is healthy skepticism is being done a disservice. Because they've actually become what would usually be the most ridiculous strawman against healthy skepticism. The OP basically stuffed himself with straw and gleefully posted that ridiculousness.