Posted on 24 June 2025 by BaerbelW

A week ago today, we published a blog post highlighting Sabin Rebuttal #33, which answers the question "What is the effect of hot or cold weather on EVs?". With that blog post, this phase of our effort to turn the report "Rebutting 33 False Claims About Solar, Wind, and Electric Vehicles" into individual rebuttals was done and dusted. In this recap we summarize the happenings and provide some behind-the-scenes glimpses into the tasks needed to pull this off. The report was 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 in 2024.

Creating the rebuttals 

When we first spotted Sabin's report it looked like a fairly straightforward copy & paste job to turn their PDF into individual rebuttals. But, as often happens, the devil is in the details and in this case it proved to be the many references to published papers, government resources and other publications or websites. All told, there were more than 460 references mentioned via superscripts in the text, many of which went to the same publication which was cited in full just once in the report's footnotes of the page it made its first appearance on. Later mentions then referred back to that first reference.

For our purposes, we however wanted to include the relevant list of references in each rebuttal and also add peer reviewed papers to our glossary so that we could mention those within the texts via author name(s) and year of publication as we usually do. First order of the day was therefore to create a big spreadsheet, listing all the references mentioned in the report and adding cross-references where needed to then hopefully make the rebuttal creation at least somewhat easier.

Setting up the rebuttals then went fairly smoothly and we did it in two steps: we first created the rebuttals with title, fact- and myth-statement as well as the text. In a second step, we added the references based on the content prepared in the spreadsheet. By November 1, 2024 all 33 rebuttals had been fully created and published and we went live with our blog post announcing their availability. We also created a page with a list of all rebuttals for easy reference.

Preparing the weekly blog posts and sharing on social media

Starting on November 8, 2024 we highlighted one of the rebuttals each Tuesday with the publication of a blog post. 33 weeks and rebuttals later, this series came to an end last week. And even though the creation of the blog posts was mostly a copy and paste job from the rebuttals, some manual activity was still needed to make them look somewhat like a rebuttal by adding a screenshot of the fact-myth-statements taken from the top of each rebuttal. These screenshots include the short URLs for easy access to the full rebuttals.

In parallel to the blog post publications we also shared the rebuttals on social media, like Facebook, Linkedin, Bluesky and Mastodon. Some of these happened in weekly installments (Facebook) while others were more random with sometimes a group of four or five rebuttals getting highlighted together (LinkedIn) as time allowed.

German translations

In summer 2024 we were approached by the Institute for translations at the University Heidelberg. They were looking for suitable texts their students could translate into German as course work during the autumn/winter semester. After translating 20 of the short fact briefs created with Gigafact the students tackled the 33 rebuttals based on the report published by the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. In February 2025 we received these translations and have published all of them in the meantime. These translations were only possible thanks to the work of students Julia Hellwig, Damianus Pawlak, Isabel Schmitt, Yasmin Speltz, Andrei Sumcov and Ulrike Weber under the guidance of Simona Füger snd Nicole Keller. They made an appearance in a presentation about our various collaborations at the European Geosciences Union General Assembly in Vienna.

What next?

Since their creation, some of the rebuttals have already seen minor updates for example due to feedback provided in comments on Skeptical Science or sent directly to the Sabin team. We expect this to continue as work on these kind of rebuttals is never really finished. Another set of changes was provided by Matthew Eisenson from Sabin: he had gone through all the references in the report and updated the ones leading to US-government sources with permanently archived ones to ensure that the information stays available and cannot be spirited away. 66 links were impacted and it took 2 to 3 hours to identify and update them on our end.

We are of course interested to add more rebuttals about renewable energy and electric vehicle myths to our list of arguments in the "It's too hard" category. So, please let us know in the comments or via our contact form if you know of other resources like Sabin's report which could be turned into rebuttals.

As mentioned above, we have German translations for all 33 rebuttals provided by Sabin, but while their language is now German, the content in most cases is based on information related to the U.S.A. This is obviously okay for a direct translation but we could still add country specific information either directly in the rebuttal as another section or in a separate footnote. If you have any leads for that, please let us know as well.

Skeptical Science is an all-volunteer organization but our work is not without financial costs. Contributions supporting our publication mechanisms from our readers and users are a critical part of improving the general public's critical thinking skills about science and in particular climate science. Your contribution is a solid investment in making possible a better future thanks to improving our ability to think productively, leading to better decisions at all levels of our climate change challenge. Please visit our support page to contribute.