Global warming deniers aren't Galileo in the story. They are the catholic church / inquisition:

[LadyLeigh]

Idiots without any evidence in their favor who contradict the findings of real scientists and back up their claims using political strong-arming. And who refuse to change their point of view in the face of evidence.

Science isn't about "voting". Science is about right or wrong. Galileo was right and the church was wrong.

Just because you have a controversial claim it doesn't make you a revolutionary. Your claim has to be right first. 2+2=5 isn't revolutionary. It is simply wrong.

[hobbit709]

1. My reply to Gov. Cementhead "E pur si muove"

[jberryhill]

2. "Science is about right or wrong"

I would amend that to:

"It is about the most maximum confidence fit to the available data"

I loved Perry's, "The science isn't settled."

Well that is the point. Science is not about "right or wrong", it is only ever about the highest degree of present confidence in fitting the data within measurement accuracy.

Is the science of Newtonian mechanics "settled". Well, yes it is at everyday human ranges of momentum, size and energy.

Is Newtonian mechanics "right"? That's not even a valid question which science seeks to answer, anymore than whether quantum mechanics is "right". QE converges with the results of Newtonian mechanics on everyday scales, which renders NM to be perfectly valid for figuring out everything from billiard ball collisions to spacecraft orbits with acceptable accuracy.

I'd love to quiz Perry on what science he considers to be "settled". In what discipline have all of the scientists snapped their fingers and said, "Our work here is done" and then gone off to pursue careers in home improvement?

Is the basic outline of evolution "settled", Rick?

Is the basic outline of cosmology "settled", Rick?

What a fucking moron. What we call a system of thinking that doesn't re-examine its hypothesis on a regular basis is "dogma". Science ain't that.

There is an ever-expanding frontier of scientific knowledge, and these people who seize upon competing hypotheses at the edge of that frontier in order to say, "Oh, those scientists don't have a clue" are either the dumbest, or most cynical, of them all.

[LadyLeigh]

5. From a "philosophy of science" point of view you are correct of course.

There are no right and wrong theories, only theories which have been ruled out with large likelihood empirically, and those who have been shown to be correct with large likelihood within their domain of applicability.

From a practical point of view however, "geocentrism is wrong" is just a much more concise way of saying "there is no recorded observation that favors geocentrism over heliocentrism" :P

Einstein was wrong when he set the cosmological constant to zero.

[struggle4progress]

3. See what Perry did? Instead of discussing CO2 levels, we're trying to decipher

some garbled BS remark he made about Galileo and we're yammering about the Inquisition. It's a trick: he twiddled his fingers and Presto chango! the real issue disappears while everybody looks somewhere else.



May 11, 2011, 1:08 pm
On Our Radar: Vatican Panel Calls for Climate Change Action
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF
A report by a scientific group sponsored by the Vatican blames man-made emissions for recent global warming and the retreat of mountain glaciers and calls for urgent action to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases. “We call on all people and nations to recognize the serious and potentially irreversible impacts of global warming caused by the anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases and other pollutants,” the group says ...
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/on-our-radar-vatican-panel-calls-for-climate-change-action/

[Blue_Tires]

6. exactly...

[Gregorian]

4. I was thinking exactly this last night.

It deserves a cartoon. A Perry administration would be like going back to the Inquisition days. A Bachmann administration...I don't remember what it was. One could have a field day with this stuff. It's quite frightening, really.