An appeal to authority is a good reason to believe something if the authority can be understood to be knowledgeable. It's especially useful in cases where your readers can't all be expected to understand the nuances of the decision making involved and you want to avoid appealing to emotions (which works better). What basically never works are appeals to logic, frequently even here (a place which explicitly stimulates it). The reasons for why it doesn't work here (miles of text with pedantic arguing, usually not a lot of substance) are different for why it won't work in public (people don't feel like doing that with you, usually) but they are there.

Especially in a case such as this an appeal to authority can be useful, as there is a big bad-faith storm of "discussion" surrounding the subject that really isn't doing anyone any favours.