Well, you are wrong. Ad Hominem means, &quot;X is wrong because Y making that claim is a jerk&quot;.<p>I am saying &quot;X is a claim in a highly technical field that most of us lack expertise in. Y making that claim has a made large factual errors in prior publications, and his claims run contrary to the vast majority of his peers.&quot;<p>Sorry if you miss the nuance in my point. People also have referred to this concept as &quot;taking with a grain of salt&quot; or &quot;heuristics&quot;.<p>Now, outside of arguments over semantics, the link article is lousy and the interpretation over what the lousy article claims by the great-grandparent post are incorrect.<p>The TL;DR of the linked article is: &quot;They should have used  data from another sensor, too. Based on 5 months of overlap, I&#x27;m going to assume I can just adjust the other sensor&#x27;s data and use them in a single trend. Even if you accept that, I&#x27;m going to use a linear regression in this new cherry picked range, after making a big point about the nonlinearity of the underlying data. Even  minimizing it the most I can, it still shows a 40 year trend of 3 mm annual sea level increases.&quot;