“Our hero” in this case being Monckton at WUWT. Most of the post is a long rant about The Weekly Standard’s Lindzen puff piece exemplifies the conservative media’s climate failures by Dana Nuccitelli in the Graun, which is in turn a reply to What Catastrophe? MIT’s Richard Lindzen, the unalarmed climate scientist in “the weekly Standard” (wot I wrote about recently).
And of course I didn’t read it all. But I was struck by M’s reply to DN’s The major difference between Lindzen and Galileo was that Galileo was right. Which was:
Actually, Galileo was wrong. The Church, as well as informed scientific opinion, had long agreed that the Earth orbits the Sun and not the other way about. However, Galileo had drawn inappropriate theological conclusions from heliocentricity, perpetrating the notorious non sequitur that since the Earth was not the centre of the Universe the Incarnation and Crucifixion were of less importance than the Church maintained.
This is weird stuff. Lord knows what gnostic texts M has been smoking; he gives no refs. Wiki, as you’d expect has a reasonable version of the truth (which, for those who don’t know, is significantly more nuanced that the version you get taught in school).
Amusingly, in the weekly Standard piece that started this all off, we find “Most people who think they’re a Galileo are just wrong,” and the context (as you’d expect from a piece friendly to L) is that a comparison to G is good: i.e., G was essentially correct. Which is true (if you’re thinking of heliocentrism) or false (if you’re thinking of epicycles, or of physics versus geometry).
Refs
* Galileo: Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems: magnetism – a factoid I bet you didn’t know, and a motto.
* Galileo on infinity
* The sleepwalkers
* WUWT Parody Writes Itself – QS about a different post, but worth the LULZ.
* Papal Condemnation (Sentence) of Galileo (June 22, 1633) – thanks t.
