Hubris with a side of Stupid

A letter in the local rag's OPED section today hit a new low for rational discussion regarding climate change. After conceding that somewhere around 97% of the scientific community agrees that human activities are responsible for most of the current  global warming trend, "Ignore that, even if true", they say, because reducing carbon emissions might be expensive. I'll save the really insane comment for later. read on, it's worth the wait. 

  I've concluded that there are basically three separate schools of thought , if indeed it is actual thought, on the climate change denier community, which are in some ways about as grounded as Holocaust deniers. They are: 

a: Climate change can't be real because if we admit it is, our wealthy  Corporations which make money on energy and utilities will have to spend more and profit less. We're here, we want cheap gas and electricity, so fuck the next generation(s). The reality is that this group doesn't really care if climate change is real, they just don't want to act on it.

b: Since most major corporate donors to far right causes and candidates are  deniers (or ignorers) the sycophant candidates they own are also rabid deniers. It's in their financial interest to be so, and those who blindly listen to and parrot the rhetoric of the Jindals,  Perrys,  Trumps and Santorums become, reflexively and without critical analysis,  global warming deniers, even to their own potential detriment.

c: The third, and in many cases the most vociferous deniers, seem to be the Far Right evangelical fundamentalist  Christians.  I believe that this knee jerk anti-global warming bias stems from their belief that 1. God made the Earth 2. God can do anything he/she/it  wants, and therefore:  3. It borders on apostasy and sacrilege to believe that insignificant, puny mankind could ever have that same impact. This is convenient for the Far Right, since most Evangelicals lean that way.

Now for the truly astounding wrinkle introduced by today's letter to the editor. In an act of hubris blended with sheer gall and stupidity beyond anything I've ever even heard , the following assertion was made. I'll paraphrase to give it more flow and form. "Even if all these scientists around the world agree that Global warming is a real issue, that is relatively meaningless, since  after all Galileo and Einstein, both were going against the established beliefs of their day."  The assertion here being  that Global warming deniers are analogous to Galileo and Albert Einstein!

What the person obviously didn't think through, or more likely understand,  is the fact that in Galileo's case, he wasn't arguing against science, he was using science (you know, hypothesis, observation, data accumulation, etc.) to refute Christian dogma  "the earth is the center of the universe because we humans are God's creation, ergo more important than everything else." This is the diametric opposite of what he thinks he said!

In the case of Einstein, he wasn't arguing against  science, he was using higher math to explain and amplify some physics concepts that science hadn't yet explained.  Far from being opposed by the scientific community, Einstein was awarded the Nobel in theoretical Physics in 1921. Of course the aforementioned Galileo was threatened with excommunication and forbidden to write. 

Seldom, if ever, has anyone been so drastically and diametrically incorrect and ill informed.