Climate Deniers are the Equivalent of Galileo? I don't think so.
Climate Deniers are the Equivalent of Galileo? I don't think so.
I recently retweeted a link to the statistics on the miniscule number of climate science papers that argued against the theory of global warming:
RT @hari: Between '91 & 12 there were 13,950 peer-reviewed #climate articles. 24 denied global warming. bit.ly/XX9PPR
Predictably, all kinds of people came out of the woodwork comparing the 24 scientists who wrote those papers to Galileo. Now, it's certainly still possible that the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming could be wrong, despite the overwhelming agreement among scientists, but the Galileo analogy is entirely backwards, since the "Galileo" position with respect to global warming is held by Roger Revelle, who first noticed something odd in ocean chemistry in 1957. It's taken fifty years for his discovery to be taken seriously, and if you want to argue from historical analogy, climate change deniers and their political and industry backers are far more in the position of the last of the Ptolemaic apologists, making their case on behalf of the church.
In addition to the post below on Roger Revelle's original work, this piece about the scientific process, as seen in climate science, is a must-read piece for climate deniers. http://www.aip.org/history/climate/reflect.htm
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Revelle.htm
I recently retweeted a link to the statistics on the miniscule number of climate science papers that argued against the theory of global warming:
RT @hari: Between '91 & 12 there were 13,950 peer-reviewed #climate articles. 24 denied global warming. bit.ly/XX9PPR
Predictably, all kinds of people came out of the woodwork comparing the 24 scientists who wrote those papers to Galileo. Now, it's certainly still possible that the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming could be wrong, despite the overwhelming agreement among scientists, but the Galileo analogy is entirely backwards, since the "Galileo" position with respect to global warming is held by Roger Revelle, who first noticed something odd in ocean chemistry in 1957. It's taken fifty years for his discovery to be taken seriously, and if you want to argue from historical analogy, climate change deniers and their political and industry backers are far more in the position of the last of the Ptolemaic apologists, making their case on behalf of the church.
In addition to the post below on Roger Revelle's original work, this piece about the scientific process, as seen in climate science, is a must-read piece for climate deniers. http://www.aip.org/history/climate/reflect.htm
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Revelle.htm
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