I mean, it's a fairly easy one to do if you live near a body of water. I've had decent success looking at the coast of Normandy from Alderney. Now, it was more like 18.5 kilometres rather than 23 miles, so it's an expected drop of "only" 27 metres - but that's still 27 metres of height that my sight line somehow overtook.
27m given a viewer height of 0. With a viewer height of 1m it's 17.5m, 2m it's 14m. And that's without refraction.
Obviously I don't know the details of what you did, what you were looking at, what the atmospheric conditions were.
What I do know is I've seen a load of images said to be "gotchas" and "proof of FE" and they are all people making basic mistakes like:
Failing to take viewer height into account.
Failing to take refraction in to account.
Misidentifying what they're looking at and therefore how far away it is
Not accounting for the fact that the distant object is not at sea level.
Not acknowledging that the bottom part of the object is missing.
For someone who really likes accusing others of being lazy, you're really unwilling to do anything.
Similar answer to the one in the thread about space travel. I'm not the one who feels like I need to test anything.
The shape of the earth has been known for millennia. If there was any lingering doubt about it, which there wasn't really, the pictures and footage from the space race, and the emergent technologies like GPS and Satellite TV put and end to that. I've seen enough timelapses of boats going over the horizon, the claim that some make that if you zoom in you can see them again is clearly untrue. A friend who is in to sailing has told me how distant landmarks emerge from over the horizon top first.
I've never seen any timelapse of a boat going out to sea and just getting smaller and smaller until the optical zoom fails to resolve it.
All that said, on occasional trips to see family near the coast or on holiday I've done a few slightly half hearted tests but never well enough to find anything that conclusive.
I don't have an issue with refraction as a concept, but that doesn't make your flippant use of it any less an ad-hoc explanation. You take a variable phenomenon, declare without evidence that the variables must have just magically aligned for different conditions every time someone has replicated an experiment, and you consider the matter closed. I'm just not happy with such lazy shallow-mindedness.
I'm not really sure what you mean by this. Tom has posted timelapse videos of it varying over the course of a day - while claiming he can replicate the Bishop in varying conditions: "Provided that there is no fog and the day is clear and calm, the same result comes up over and over throughout the year".
He's not shown any evidence that he's done this at all, let alone that he can consistently repeat the results. His (correct) claim that refraction is variable demonstrates that his other claim about consistently being about to reproduce the results is impossible.
Obviously if someone presents a photo like the black swan you can't really know what the atmospheric conditions were like when the photo was taken. Maybe if you look in to where and when it was taken you can approximate it, but it's impossible to be that accurate. But the you can infer the conditions
from the photo. The photo IS the evidence.
Now, if someone showed me a photo which is
completely impossible on a globe, something no amount of refraction or accounting for viewer height and so on could explain, then I'd take that seriously. I just haven't seen it yet.