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As William noted 'Galileo was of course, standing with the new science of his day, not against it.' So what does Sammy Wilson have as basis for rejecting the idea of man-made climate change? The Belfast Telegraph quotes Wilson as 'Galileo was a scientist who stood against the conventional wisdom of the time and was regarded as a heretic, they wanted to prosecute him.'. Does anyone here know what Sammy Wilsons scientific record on climate change is?

True, the conflict between conflict between Galileo and the Church has become convenient shorthand for any conflict between observed evidence and received wisdom (belief), and of the Church refusing to abandon outdated or incorrect teaching.
It's significance is that Galileo's belief has been shown subsequently to be true, the Aristotelian geocentric view was being challenged by a heliocentric view, based on observations by Copernicus, Galileo and others.
What Galileo lacked was the technology to conclusively prove his case at the time. (It subsequently has been proved.)
Had he described his beliefs as a 'hypothesis', rather than as 'fact', the church would probably have accommodated him.

Rather than repeat others' work here are some links that provide a variety of overviews of the Galileo case. There are many more if you do some Googleing.




As for Mr Wilson, Sammy he prefers to act on what he believes, rather than the balance of the evidence.
To be fair to him, this is what he states he believes:


Being a politician: "Despite his views on CO2, Mr Wilson said he does not intend to backtrack on commitments made by his predecessor at the Department of the Environment, Arlene Foster, to make the Stormont estate carbon neutral."
He justifies it by separate arguments, e.g. savings on fuel costs etc.

There's a response to Mr Wilson's views here.


What Mr Wilson is very vague about is exactly what he thinks the mechanisms are that cause changes to our planet's climate, and in providing evidence to back his case up.

In this instance Mr Wilson is in the position of Pope Urban VIII, not Galileo.

Well, Sammy is no Galileo - that's the first thing. Secondly, there has been a lot of falling-over-of-selves to try to bring Galileo back into the fold, or rather to make it appear that the religious authorities (oxymoron, I know) were less spiteful towards Galileo than they actually were. Indeed, John Lennox tried this on in his woeful "God's Undertaker" book, which I heartily recommend if you want a reason to bang your head repeatedly against a wall.

It is perfectly true that Galileo believed in god - so did everyone back then, and he had no reason not to. Indeed, he was quite the theologian. What raised the ire of the church was not Heliocentrism (ah, I like that - makes me feel all important ;-), but the fact that Galileo was a Freethinker. He would not take direction on what he should think or say.

As for his insufferable hubris in not claiming that his "hypothesis" WAS a hypothesis, anyone who is a scientist is well aware that when we are putting forward something radical, we have to fight for it. We have to make the case in every way we can, and we also have to turn our own energies and motivations back on our own ideas, testing them. I don't recall such tentativeness ever emanating from pulpits - "Jesus loves me, this I hypothesise"... So who's arrogant?

Galileo was entirely correct; he *did* have the evidence that strongly favoured his hypothesis, and moreover, the counter-hypothesis (i.e. the prevailing "wisdom") had NO evidence in favour of it - again, just bland assertions. Subsequent work confirmed that he was right, but it is quite wrong to say that he simply plucked his assertions from thin air.

Some revisionist historians of science have tried the old "Blame the Victim" canard - Galileo brought it all on himself - he should have been more humble and conciliatory. He shouldn't have dressed in such a sexy provocative way when he went to the night club.

It doesn't wash.

Of course the affair was a lot more complex than it is typically portrayed, but even as a simplified parable, it works very well. "Revealed Truths" should never be taken for granted, but should be tested rigorously, and abandoned if they are nonsense.

In this respect (shudder), Sammy is right. Scepticism *is* due over climate change. However, scepticism is not just bliss-ninnying and ignoring evidence - it is an intellectually rigorous testing exercise, weighing up *evidence*. And although Sammy Wilson is an atheist, and hence gets at least a couple of points on the Helio scale of merit, he needs to go the extra mile and do some critical thinking and decision analysis.

Me, I'm more concerned about increasing population, destruction of the biodiversity buffer and our haemorrhaging money into the pockets of al-Qaeda and assorted crazed wahhabis via our ridiculous fossil fuel policies.

-H

Give it a rest H...Galileo couldn't account for the absence of stellar parallax. The predictive power of Heliocentrism didn't kick in until Kepler abandoned circular orbits. He didn't have the evidence needed to overturn geo-centrism.

His persecution by the Church probably had more to do with his claim (in letter to Castelli for example) that scientific observations could overturn official interpretations of Scripture. In principle Bellarmine agreed, but he wanted the Church to have the say on when that had happened. Not individual scientists. Suppose Atomism gained the ascendancy? Would Galileo then have the authority to challenge Transubstantiation if he felt it was incompatible with his Science?

I don't think historians should ignore evidence just because it conflicts with Dawkinsian myths. So far as I can tell, the Science v Religion model is no longer accepted as a model that explains the Galileo affair. It's more complex than that.

GV

Though it is worth noting that Christian religious fundamentalists and those of similar tendencies are saying that Global Warming couldn't happen because the Bible supposedly says it couldn't. They have verses from Genesis and Isaiah which they quote out of context to "prove" this...

Graham, give it a rest back atcha. The lack of parallax turns out to have been a false objection, as you know. Fair enough, Big G didn't work out *why*, but he was DEFINITELY in a position to point out that the heliocentric theory worked a LOT better than the geocentric model, so the objections of some of the revisionist historians are pretty damned limp.

In any event, the point remains: science beats dogma.

The atheistic freethinker, the green warrior, the Irish republican and the worldly Unionist along with the wavering protestant and the pagan Romanist have turned their sights upon Sammy Wilson, MP, MLA, in the same way that the Roman Catholic church turned against Galileo, for his views on transubstantiation and for championing of Copernicanism.

Humanist and atheistic freethinking sinners who have championed the green cause are now worried because the day of their eternal doom and punishment is getting closer and is closer than they think, so they are now trying to play God in their missionary zeal to prevent that day, whereas Sammy Wilson, knows that someday the earth will be consumed by a fiery conflagration, and that the old earth and the old heaven will be replaced by a new heaven and a new earth, Sammy Wilson realises that man is not King of his own destiny in contrast to the freethinkers who think that they are god of their own sinful destiny.

The bottom line and the message that the green advocates must realise is that God is in control, and that the catastrophic changes on earth are a sign of the end times. Sammy Wilson is not for hiding himself in the caves of the mountains amongst the rocks.

We are melting William melting.

"Ahhhhhhhhhhh!!! You cursed brat!
Look what you've done!! I'm melting, melting.
Ohhhhh, what a world, what a world.
Who would have thought that some little girl like you could destroy my beautiful wickedness.
OHHHHHHH!!! NO!!! I'm going...ohhhhhhh..ohhhhhhhhhhhhh...."
(wicked witch of the west in the wizard of Oz.)

In 1988 I stood in front of the Columbia glacier in Prince William Sound. I saw recent photos about a year ago. I also saw progress photos of the Northern polar ice cap. That much ice does not melt unless something big is happening. It's probably already too late to stop it. I used to be a skeptic but not any more. This is real. Small wonder so many scientists are so scared. Too bad this wasn't a scientific issue instead of a political issue fifteen years ago when it might have been avoided. Too late now.

Arguing in the face of facts is not science, it's anti-science. It's nice to know that when I'm about to die, the rest of the human race won't be far behind. After all these hundred thousand years of human life on earth, I will have lived in the most interesting of them.

"After all these hundred thousand years of human life on earth, I will have lived in the most interesting of them. "

You really had to see the Stooges at the Whisky A Go Go,

I'm an environmentalist biker, I've been known to go to extraordinary lengths to miss trees.

"In 1988 I stood in front of the Columbia glacier in Prince William Sound"

Exxon Valdez hit a tree a year later.