Posted on 02/17/2011 12:38:22 PM PST by neverdem
Will it take the Republican Party as long to accept modern science as it took the Roman Catholic Church? The church waited 359 years to admit Galileo was right — the earth does move around the sun. Not until 1992 did the Vatican officially withdraw its condemnation of the man Albert Einstein called the father of modern science. Today, even children know that the earth revolves around the sun. But that idea was heresy to the 17th-century church. When Galileo would not abandon his views, the Inquisition put him on trial in 1633. He was forced to recant under penalty of death, then lived under house arrest for the rest of his life. Now the House Republican majority is launching its own attack on Galileo’s scientific descendants. Rejecting mainstream climate science became a GOP litmus test during the 2010 midterm elections. Republican leaders then floated the idea of putting mainstream climate science on trial in congressional hearings. This week, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Energy Committee, introduced legislation that would “repeal” the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare. After Galileo reluctantly recanted, legend has it that he muttered, “Eppure, si muove.” In other words — censorship and repression could not change physical fact: The earth moves around the sun, whether the church agreed or not. This is true today: Modern science has conclusively demonstrated that human activities are dangerously overheating the planet — notwithstanding Republicans’ desire to repeal that conclusion. Republicans are the only major political party in the world that rejects this mainstream climate science. The right-of-center parties controlling governments in Britain, Germany and France, for example, not only embrace mainstream climate science, they support far more aggressive climate policies than anything advocated by Republicans — or Democrats — in Washington. U.S. news coverage usually refers to climate deniers as skeptics. That is misleading. Skepticism is invaluable to the scientific method. But an honest skeptic can be persuaded by facts. These deniers are largely impervious to facts — at least facts that contradict their worldview. When virtually every major scientific organization in the world, including the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and its counterparts in 18 other industrial countries, has affirmed that man-made climate change is real and extremely dangerous, only a crank would continue to insist that it’s all a left-wing plot.
What, are all these organizations and the thousands of scientists associated with them part of a vast conspiracy? Are they all lying careerists or incompetent buffoons? That is the only logical conclusion to draw from the Republicans’ continuing insistence that climate science is bogus.
Despite having no more scientific credibility than the Flat Earth Society, the climate cranks have held our nation’s climate policy hostage for decades. One reason the United States has done so little to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the past 20 years is that our government has listened as much to these climate cranks as to real scientists.
As a result, our planet is now locked into at least 50 more years of rising temperatures and the climate effects they unleash — longer droughts, stronger storms, harsher heat waves, rising sea levels. The young people of Generation Hot—the two billion people born worldwide since NASA scientist James Hansen put the world on notice in 1988 that global warming had begun—are fated to spend the rest of their lives coping with the hottest climate in civilization’s history.
Yet if one judged solely by recent media coverage, one would think deniers have a point. In an embarrassing display of scientific illiteracy and political gullibility, news organizations have repeatedly played into the deniers’ hands: Implicitly endorsing their unfounded accusations of fraud against scientists whose emails were stolen, by portraying a single error in a thousand-page Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report as reason to question all of mainstream climate science.
Then the media largely abandoned the climate story over the past 12 months, even as mainstream scientists were turning out one landmark study after another, clarifying the extreme peril.
There is no point trying to change the climate cranks’ minds. For economic as well as ideological reasons, they will no more acknowledge the truth of man-made global warming than the 17th-century Vatican would concede that the Bible was not literally true.
The rest of us, however, can change how we relate to the cranks.
As Republicans seek to repeal climate science, it is past time for the chattering class in Washington to stop giving them a pass. Climate cranks should instead be called to account for the terrible damages they have set in motion and prevented from further sabotaging our nation’s response to this crisis.
We cannot wait 359 years to believe in science.
Mark Hertsgaard is the author of six books including, most recently, “HOT: Living Through the Next 50 Years on Earth.”
and it is also fitting that the moron doesn’t recognize which side he is on and that it is not the right one...
heavy sigh.... (increasing carbon footprint with that one)
teeman
OK, I’ll concede that man is causing global warming by emitting carbon dioxide
when they can explain to me how reducing a “greenhouse” gas that makes up 0.117%,
that’s ZERO POINT ONE ONE SEVEN PERCENT
of the greenhouse effect
will have any effect on climate.
HACKS!
“deniers”?
Pa-th-etic, when will the Global Warming Believers realize that is not grape kool aid that is in the center of their meeting?
If we are the deniers, then why do they resort to fixing the data? At least we are honest in our science.
“This is true today: Modern science has conclusively demonstrated that human activities are dangerously overheating the planet.”
Outrageous lie.
That was when the church was the government....
“There is no point trying to change the climate cranks’ minds. For economic as well as ideological reasons, they will no more acknowledge the truth of man-made global warming than the 17th-century Vatican would concede that the Bible was not literally true.
The rest of us, however, can change how we relate to the cranks.”
What is hilarous about this dimwit is that overwhelming evidence to the contrary of his ‘facts’ go in one ear and out the other for the exact same reason he states that the cranks don’t believe. I myself can’t wait indeed to see how history laughs at these beliefs of man made global warming. He’s a ‘concensus’ guy, when there is no consensus and scientists that have one bit of intellectual honesty know that it isn’t a done and finished scientific fact. It is a theory, being tested. He’s one of those ‘scientist’ type thinkers that said string theory and quantum mechanics was impossible in the 1950’s because it went against the already established scentific ‘fact’ of reality at the time. Dullard to the core.
Speaking of which, will Sharia Law recognize global warming?
Or will it behead people who put their environmental religion before Allah?
The Galileo/Vatican contraversy is grotesquely simplified in the popular recitation. Galileo was not a competent astronomer by Renaissance standards. He did not understand either Ptolemaic nor Copernican methods, which weakened his arguments immeasurably. Basically, Galileo had a contentious personality and a way of making enemies (and admirers). One of his admirers was Pope Urban , but when Galileo went out of his way to insult Urban in Dialogues the Pope declined to intervene and save him from his enemies.
He may have unwittingly stumbled on the real truth, with a minor correction:
Despite having no more scientific credibility than the Flat Earth Society, the climate cranks environmentalist wackos have held our nation’s climate energy policy hostage for decades.
Fixed. Obviously, our author is one of said wackos.
So, 4% of 0.037% is.... 0.0148% of the atmosphere. That is what we are talking about here, at most. But wait: eliminating all of that amount would mean wiping out the human species, which is certainly not the intent of climate change proponents, right? Well, most of them, anyway. Instead, what they propose is the implementation of radical and expensive government controls in an effort to reduce the human CO2 contribution by... (wait for it)... 1%.
Thus, trillions of dollars and massive new global government regulations are proposed to reduce CO2 emissions by fifteen ten-thousandths of one percent - well within the normal season variance of CO2 concentrations on Earth. It is the biggest scam - and power grab - ever proposed in world history.
And now, we have this:
"Modern science has conclusively demonstrated that human activities are dangerously overheating the planet..."
Not even James Hansen, the "Hockey Stick" Man himself, would be willing to make such an outrageously false statement. Other idiots however, apparently have no such reservation.
Here is REAL SCIENCE!!!!
http://miltonconservative.blogspot.com/2010/03/simple-chemistry-and-real-greenhouse.html
Any “global warming” nuts wanna have a crack at debunking this?
Wash your eyes out with this rebuttal:
Mark Hertsgaard displays an embarrassing lack of self-awareness with that statement. But then perhaps leftists such as Hertsgaard have lost the ability to feel embarrassment, when the alternative is paying attention to facts that call leftist dogma into question.
First he decries the supposed intransigence of the authorities (as represented by the RCC) that refused to listen to the arguments of Galileo ("the denier"), while lionizing Galileo's efforts. Then in the next breath he uses a "reference to authority" argument to prop up his assertions of impending man-made climate-change doom and to damn all of those pesky deniers (Galileo excluded, of course). He's playing a game of "good denier, bad denier" without even realizing what he's doing. Talk about cluelessness...
Hint to Hertsgaard: "Major scientific organizations" are political animals that follow the money, the orthodoxy, and the crowd - they are not actually organizations that follow the scientific method to arrive at their pronouncements. The leadership of such societies have often taken sides on issues without adequately polling their membership. For example, do some research about the controversy within the APS (American Physical Society) wherein actual scientists took strong issue with the official position of the APS leadership that climate science was settled science.
It would be a good idea for bandwagon jumpers such as Hertsgaard to do some reflection on the meaning of the oft-repeated caution that "science advances one funeral at a time"...
Here’s where I got the 0.117% number.
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
We’re talking about slightly different things, but the gist is the same - man’s CO2 contribution is MINIMAL.
That site is referring not to the actual greenhouse gas content in the atmosphere, but the gas’ contribution to the greenhouse EFFECT.
Lefties - you're gonna have to come up with another magic bullet to impose communism on us. We're not buying this one.
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