In this case, it's not really a matter of who to trust. You can go out and do some basic experiment to prove this for yourself.

Leftists like to say things like "the science is settled" and "it's not controversial, all scientists agree" when it comes to actually controversial things like climate change and shit. But in a case like this, it's obvious because you can literally measure it for itself. It's as settled as saying "this piece of paper is larger than this piece of paper" because you can just compare them.

I've noticed this phenomenon on Reddit and I see it here. It's a problem with the format, that's not really fixable, besides encouraging people to not assume a commenter on reddit is right just because they have upvotes.

What happens is people who aren't familiar with the topic read it and it reads like someone who knows what they're talking about. They find it interesting, so they upvote it. This props it up, so it gets more upvotes as more people see it, and it gets a bunch of replies commending it.

Then someone reads it and is like "what, this is plainly wrong" and makes a comment. That comment then gets downvoted and buried by people who were convinced by the original comment, and now feel "wronged" by the person saying that they're wrong. It's bizarre how a comment can amass near instant support out of nowhere.