Let’s have an inquisition
Al Gore and others declared long ago that the debate over global warming was over — that it was accepted science, and that all those ignorant enough to defy them were “deniers,” akin to those who doubt the existence of the Holocaust. Unfortunately — despite the nifty ad hominems — the flatearthers refuse to adhere to dogma, especially in light of the so-called “Climategate” scandal. Society must deal with these people in the same manner society in the past dealt with those who challenged science: through an inquisition.
Like today, in the early seventeenth century there was an inconvenient truth — the truth of geocentricism — the belief that the earth is the center of the universe. It was accepted science since the days of Ptolemy and was beyond debate. That is, until a denier named Galileo Galilei advanced Copernicus’ heliocentricism — the belief that the sun is actually the center of the universe — through his book, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.
This could not stand. Nor did it.
Pope Urban VIII — the Al Gore of his day, whose truths were infallible and irrefutable, and who should also be admired by progressives of today for his ban on smoking — ordered Galileo in front of the Inquisition, where he admitted that the earth can’t move (notwithstanding the rumor that he muttered “And yet it moves” under his breath as he did.)
The same mechanism that shut up the heliocentrics can also shut up their modern-day equivalents.
Man-made global warming is true. In spite of the more than 700 scientists who doubt it, and in spite of Climategate, where the Hadley Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia courageously falsified data, lied, and suppressed facts in the name of truth.
And everyone must believe this truth, or there will never be the consensus necessary to save the world by destroying its economy. That is why those who refuse to accept the truth should forthwith be brought in front of an inquisitional tribunal, comprised of the New York Times editorial board and under the jurisdiction of one of the countless United Nations judicial bodies.
Like with the tribunals of old, trials will be swift, and justice merciful. Those heretics convicted of crimes against environmental thought will be given ample opportunity to recant their errors (with careful monitoring of their testimony to ensure that no one mutters “And yet it cools” under their breath.)
But if anyone persists in denial of what is so obviously true, they must, unfortunately, be consigned to the flames. Of course, such immolation will be conducted in an air tight chamber, so as to not allow any of the miscreants’ carbons to enter the atmosphere. For, even in death, they cannot be allowed to contribute to the earth’s warming.
And then soon the truth of global warming shall prevail. Just as the truth of geocentricism did.
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Very true. People often fail to realize that it was the academic elite of the day who persecuted Galileo. Their group happend to be called “The Church” at the time, but really they had very little to do with religion, let alone Christianity. What was called “The Church” then was a body politic and the center of academia, whose members where where they were because of family connections and political intrigue.
Sweet, great take on this.
NO ONE expects the Spanish Inquisition!
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Whil you main point is well taken, ironically, Galileo’s trouble stemmed not so much from heliocentrism, but from his insistence on teaching it as “settled science” even though he could not prove it. And of course dissing Pope Urban, who was a friend and supported Galileo’s theory of heliocentrism early on didn’t help
The whole Galileo thing was far more complex than presented here. The Pope was actually a friend of Galileo. But Galileo was more than a bit of a bully and went out of his way to offend just about everyone.
The key people against him almost certainly were aware that the Copernican theories were correct but Galileo went after them in such nasty fashion (and in once case incorrectly) that they went after him. He did not help his own case by writing up a pamphlet that had the Pope’s ideas repeated by a character called a simpleton.
The whole thing was more or less fixed anyway. This was in front of the ROMAN Inquisition not the Spanish one. Galileo was sentenced to house arrest with his daughter. Since he was past seventy and just about blind it made very little difference.
A lot of what we think we know about the time was from the Protestant perspective and they were just about as restrictive of intellectual freedom.
Instapundit and his links remind me of the joke about the thrice-married virgin.
For those who want to, you know, actually do something, see my name’s link. Find the smartest people you can find to come up with some questions, and have those smart people ask them. It’s a simple idea, but your leaders have no interest in promoting it, they just want to entertain.
to actually, you know, do something… you can’t JUSt ask questions. you actually do something by formulating stands, finding candidates that listen to you, AND THEN YOU VOTE FOR THEM.
now as for the other…
The inquisition, what a show,
the inquisition, here we go,
we know your wishin’ that we’d go away…
Al as Torqumada? Dunno, he certainly isn’t as talented as Mel Brooks. It’d take a miracle. [neigh!]
I’m fine with that, as long as I get the bathing beauties…
Al Gore in his own bumbling way just announced that the laws of gravity weren’t settled. Al Gore, weather whore
Galileo didn’t have the patience for the peer review process…..is that your point? By the way, Galileo was wrong about tides, circular orbits, and pendulums. It took time and the work of other scientists, including those in the Catholic Church, to confirm he was right on Heliocentrism (as was Copernicus before him) and wrong about the rest. Is that also your point?
OK, let’s be really clear about this; neither Galileo nor Copernicus get primacy for developing the idea of heliocentrism; that honor goes (to the point that we can assign it at all) to a Greek named Aristarchus of Samos, 1800 years before.
If I had a time machine and a handgun…. The person who deserves death more than any other man in the history of mankind is Aristotle. Aristotle may have been the single most significant impediment to scientific progress, in his every endeavor. His medical pronouncements were bunk; he may have caused the deaths of more patients than any other man in history. His physics were pre-kindergarten. His chemistry was SINGULARLY wrong. Aristotle may have been the WRONG-EST man who ever lived.
And yet, like Algore, he is revered for his dogma, wrong as it is.
The religious allusion is completely apt. Global Warming reeks with the stink of Original Sin and inescapable guilt. Unfortunately, for this religion, there’s no salvation at the end of the tunnel – and people will soon tire of its message of constant misery and doom. Men shall not live by nihilism alone.
Brilliant takedown!
Those of you who did not grow up in TN as I did cannot possibly fathom the depth of my disdain for Al Gore. I realized over 15 years before most people that ‘global warming’ was a scam. Not because I’m a brilliant scientist. Not because I’m particularly prescient. Just because I know that if it comes out of Al Gore’s mouth, it’s a lie. If you adhere to this one guiding principle, you will be right 100% of the time.
For those interested in what really happened to Galileo, buy or borrow from your local library a Teaching Company Course on Science and Religion by Lawrence Principe. He spends two half hour lectures on Galileo. The so called Galileo affair was about politics and not about science or religion. His trial took place smack in the middle of the 30 Years War which pitted the Catholic Habsburgs vs Protestant Germany and Scandinavia who were backed by Catholic France and Cardinal Richelieu. Galileo’s mentor in Florence was the Duke of Tuscany and who along with the Habsburgs was trying to depose Urban VIII who would not give his military support to the Habsburgs and was trying to negotiate a peace.
Galileo’s treatise was to be published by the Vatican in Rome and there is information to support that it was Urban who suggested Galileo’s emphasis and title for his book. Urban was a friend and admirer of Galileo. However, a plague prevented the necessary presentation of the book to Rome so Galileo got impatient and had the Duke of Tuscany publish the book. When the book appeared in Rome it was under the seal of a man trying to depose the Pope and put Urban III’s caveat that heliocentrism was unproven at the very end in the mouth of the fool.
Galileo had betrayed his friend, mentor and spiritual leader. He got off lightly as Urban VIII nephew helped over see the trial and never signed the verdict and sentence. Galileo got off lightly. He essential took sides in a major War and stabbed in good friend in the back. Hence, Urban’s cry of betrayal.
Galileo is the father of modern physics for it was on his shoulders that Newton stood. But he was also an arrogant ass.
The “Denier” moniker is being applied to the wrong side of the Anthropogenic Global Warming argument. Skeptics recognize that the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age actually occurred while AGW advocates have rewritten this history. Why? These two well documented climate changes spoil their narrative that preindustrial eras had temperature stability.
During the Medieval Warm Period, there was less polar ice than there is today. Tenth century Vikings circumnavigated Greenland and drafted sailing instructions. Eleventh century Scots grew grapes and made wine. After 1350, Vikings changed their publications warning of icebergs. Colonists on Greenland could no longer raise sheep, resorting to a diet of fish. There are 15th century paintings and woodcuts of Londoners skating on the Thames. If you look at any of the hockey stick graphs, you will find these events airbrushed away, their existence, denied.
It seems obvious that skeptics of AGW are grounded in reality, logic, history and science while advocates dwell in a fantasy.
AP ROME
Fr. Guiseppe Maldonado has taken great umbrage that his letters to the Ecclesiastical Cosmology Council have been seized upon as evidence by Christ denying scholars, many associated with heretical sects. The heretics have claimed the letters show an effort to hide knowledge supporting Galileo Galilei’s contention that the planets do not orbit the Earth.
Maldonado explained that the letter’s reference to the work of Tycho Brahe and Nicholas Copernicus as “dangerous to our cause” was written in the context of saving souls. “I did not want their heresies to lead the ignorant astray. Many simple folk are taken in by such seductive ideas.”
When asked to explain the much discussed “hide the moons of Jupiter” letter, Maldonado said that cosmologists often use the word “hide” to refer to a complex mathematical model for the absence of heavenly bodies orbiting anything but the Earth.
Brilliant!
Thank You GVC. It is long overdue that the true culprits in the Galileo affair be exposed. They were, not too surprisingly, the academics who sent heavily biased reports regarding Galileo and the “investigation” to the Pope. One Jerome Langford wrote three Editions of a little book, each one containing more information as it came out in the late 1960s. The title is “Science Galileo and the Church” and it has extreme relevance today, but not the way we were taught to think about this incident. Galileo taught heliocentrism without a problem for 16 years. There is too much to go into here, read the book, And yes Galileo was an arrogant ass, which contributed more to his problems than his science. Thanks GVC.
One more point: he never muttered anything under his breath when forced to recant. Galileo did make one request prior to the recantation. He asked that he not be forced to say he was not a good Catholic. The request was granted and Galileo remained a devout Catholic for the rest of his life.
Commenter Ken Mitchell wants to go back in time and shoot those who were wrong or disagree with him. And then he points out Aristotle as his desired victim. Mitchell is both right and wrong about Aristotle.
He is correct in that Aristotle was wrong about many specific aspects of science. But Mitchell ignores context. Aristotle was the father of science and made many great strides in establishing the methods of science. At the core of those methods was Aristotle’s philosophy of *reason*. As an originator who began the first formal steps in science, of course one would expect him to make some specific errors.
The problem is that the Church *enforced* those errors and did not allow others to use Aristotle’s method of reason to correct Aristotle’s specific errors. The Church demand focus upon revelation instead of reason. It wasn’t until Thomas Aquinas re-introduced Aristotle’s reason in the 13th century, under great danger, that it began to slowly flourish — culminating in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. And it was Aristotle’s reason that allowed Galileo to make his discoveries. But once again, the Church blocked, by force, the use of reason. So who is to blame? The Church for blocking the use of Aristotle’s method of reason for centuries? Or Aristotle for making some initial errors with respect to specific discoveries? The answer is the Church for blocking the use of reason.
(BTW, Al Gore is not the modern day Aristotle. Aristotle would have not have blocked the progress of knowledge. He would have encouraged others to use reason. Gore declares that some knowledge is no longer debatable and scorns those who use reason.)
Mitchell also correctly praises Aristarchos for developing the heliocentric theory 1800 years prior to Galileo. But he fails to point out two things. One, it is the Church that blocked, by force, the introduction of Aristarchos’ ideas. Two, Aristarchos’ discoveries would not have been possible without Aristotle’s scientific methods based upon reason. Aristarchos was a student of the school of Athens. His teacher was Straton. Straton’s teacher was Theophrastus. Theophrastus’s teacher was Aristotle. Aristotle was the founder of the school of Athens.
I suggest that Mitchell put his gun away and start focusing upon reason and its history. A good place to start is with “The Aristotle Adventure” by Burgess Laughlin.
http://tinyurl.com/yc4kgev
Acutally, more than 31,000 scientists have signed a petition stating that AGW is not settled science.
http://www.petitionproject.org/
Nicely done.
Since the AGW zombies insist on calling us deniers, I have taken to calling them warmers, because–as one of my commenters pointed out to me–it carries a sexual connotation that should appeal to their leftist proclivities.
Amazing what you can learn on the Internet, too bad for AL Gore that he invented it.
There are many interesting historical perspectives to be found in the comments. Without being completely in agreement with Steve, let me expand on what he says. At the time of Galileo, there had been a conflict raging in Europe for several centuries, between the rednecks and the intelligentsia. The rednecks, especially if women, were known as “witches”; the intelligentsia were known as “witch-hunters”. For details, I refer you to Hugh Trevor-Roper’s essay on “The European Witch-Craze of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries”. (I note that Trevor-Roper, being an intellectual himself, was hardly unbiased; still, what he says is pretty damning for the intelligentsia.)
One argument today that Galileo’s obtuse and murderous Pope didn’t face: snowstorms. The world is not warming. Global temperature is tipping into a deep, prolonged cold phase, which even climate cultists will not be able to ignore. They are the deniers. They have obstructed every honest effort to identify the real situation and take timely steps to deal with it, and when people understand this there is a serious risk that the real deniers may find themselves held accountable.
there aren’t 700 scientists who doubt it, there are over 31,000 (and i suspect more).
http://www.petitionproject.org/
Calling someone awarmer in a German bar will get you punched.
DirtCrashr,
Is “warmer” slang for “gay” in German?
Because that’s the slang in Czech. In fact, if you literally say “I’m warm” in Czech, you’re saying that you’re gay. You have to say “It is to me warm” to denote temperature.
Let me see if I get this right. Those with facts and science on their side who want to change from the polluting and destructive carbon based energy economy are like the church suppressing knowledge and thought. Those who want to maintain the status quo (where they happen to get wealthy off the carbon based economy) in the face of mountains of evidence are the modern day Galileos.
What a refreshing perspective.