I examined Tom's isolated quote from the YouTube transcript at Reply #9;
In context, the video author is responding to critics, and pointing out that their analysis did not account for refraction. He then proceeds to take account of it for them;
" "On a globe earth things are very different; on a curved surface because of the curvature our line of sight is not parallel to the surface, and therefore objects in the distance may appear - a 500 meter object can appear below the height of a 200 meter object as it's closer than the camera. So - this is the observation, and we can draw a line across the screen level with the top of the tower - you'll see that the north and south towers are slightly shorter, confirming what we know about their heights, and we see that Cairnoch Hill at 430 meters above sea level is significantly below the line, and these hills at 500 or thereabouts meters above sea level, are level with, or maybe in places just above the line; that's impossible if the earth is flat. The people claiming perspective is the answer, or that I don't understand perspective, are wrong. I understand perspective quite well enough to see that this image is impossible to take on a flat earth.
One other YouTuber, called Phuket Word, made an attempt to explain this in terms of the tilt of my camera. He claimed that if I tilted the camera down or up, this hill and this bridge tower, the relative positions to each other in the image would change - the hill would come up above the tower and drop down below the tower as the camera is tilted up and down. I posted a video showing that this is not true. I have the still image from a video (I have several videos) that showed that it doesn't matter whether the camera is tilted slightly up and down whether the bridge Tower appears near the top of the photograph or the video near the bottom to the left to the right in the top corner bottom corner it doesn't matter where it is how much the camera is tilted makes no difference at all the observation remains exactly the same. Cairnoch Hill is always well below the height of the bridge tower. So that objection has been thoroughly dismissed with the actual evidence from reality As far as I'm aware PW has accepted that he was wrong about this and is, I think, hiding from the problem that this photograph presents for his Flat Earth belief.
Another group of people have had a go on, sort of on a video, they made a present presentation on Nathan Oakley's so-called debate channel. Now, Nathan's debate channel is, of course, nothing of the sort - it's a place where flat-earthers congregate and tell each other lies about the shape of the earth, and then attack any globe earther who comes on and tries to hit them with some real proper facts and information. But they did have a go at explaining my observation, and how it could be possible on a flat earth so let's have a look at what they did. They use the wider angle, or more zoomed out version of the image - this one - and this includes some identifiable Peaks although Earl’s Seat and Dunbrach are really just part of this Ridge here and so’s (hill) part of this… kind of just looks like a line of hills all the same height - but they're all different distances from the camera. (hill name) is a particular peak here, and Meikle Bin and Dunbrach all peaks in this area and these are identified from peak finder. What they've done is - they've calculated what the angular size of those hills and the bridge tower should be, according to a flat earth, and according to a globe earth, and then they've asked the question - do the sizes of those hills in the picture match the angular sizes that are predicted by globe earth and a Flat Earth model? I'll just bring that line down, so you can see we're looking at exactly the same kind of observation here, the previous picture just showed it more zoomed in. So here is their spreadsheet, and not surprisingly, it contains some mistakes, and it contains a methodological error. if you like.
By and large I like the idea; I think that the way that they've approached this is it's quite good and I almost wish I'd done it in my original, myself in my original video, but they made a mistake in allocating a distance for the bridge - the bridge is not 45 kilometers from the camera, it's 46 and a half kilometers - and that will affect the angular size that they get for that bridge, so this figure that they've used for the bridge angular size is not correct.
Since that's a reference point for all the other angular sizes that they measure in their analysis, then everything is incorrect. Furthermore they've taken the target hidden height away from the total height of the hills, so on a globe earth part of the hills - each of these hills - will be hidden beyond the curvature of the earth, and so it's perfectly reasonable to subtract the target hidden amount from the total amount and then to calculate the angular size - the problem is they've made no allowance for atmospheric refraction.
Tom's isolated quote (atmospheric refraction is a known and well studied phenomenon and will always occur to a greater or lesser extent on a spherical earth, because light traveling initially in a straight line towards the camera from an object will get closer to the surface of the earth as it moves to the camera and then again get further away from the surface of the earth as it approaches the camera. Certainly in the case of this observation that's what will be happening. Therefore light is traveling through different densities of air, and as we know, different densities of a medium have different refractive indices, and therefore will cause the light to bend slightly to refract. So atmospheric refraction should be taken into account here and that will affect this “relative ball heights” as they call it, the relative height of these hills on a globe earth, and that will affect the angular sizes. So they've not used the correct angular sizes for any of their observations or any of their analysis)
However, let’s look at the analysis and what it shows.” "
He then discusses their analysis, then says, at 20.35
“Let's see what happens if we use figures that include atmospheric refraction and include the correct height for the bridge. Here is my version of their method....“