I like the soot theory too.

Science is a little different. You are allowed to offer evidence in your defense in scientific controversies. In the Inquisition, if you were "vehemently suspected," you were not allowed to defend yourself, and anybody else who offered to defend you was convicted without a trial, too.

However, Veizer is overdramatizing. The issue of carbon in climate change has been a respectable point of contention among climatologists for at least 20 years, when an MIT researcher (forget his name) published a peer-reviewed article whose title was something like "Do carbon concentrations precede warming?"

The answer then was, nobody knows. Nobody knows now, either.

Harry:

"Heretical" scientists are treated like outcasts, just like heretical actors, economists, and probably reporters as well. Look at Lomborg.

People are not tortured today, but you cloud the issue.

You said that one is allowed to offer evidence. To whom? If minds are closed, it takes a crow bar to open them, not a file or a paper. Granted, with science there is a foundation of knowledge (or filter) that generally keeps the quacks out, but politics inevitably seeps in, from complex fields like global warming to something simple like asphalt and road repair.

How else to explain someone like Lysenko?

Uh, Lysenko operated in a despotism without free discussion on any subject. He had no following among scientists in the free world.

Lomborg got plenty of forums to defend his views, and his defenders got plenty of chances to defend him. It was the wave of approving reviews (mine among them) that motivated Schneider and the others to counterattack.

Whether, or how much, Lomborg was correct is still a matter of debate. He got some things badly wrong, notably he did not understand the evolution of laterite soils in rainy, tropical conditions; and his analysis of metal supplies was correct but beside the point.

Had he offered a religious heresy, one of two things would have happened. He'd have fled Aarhus for the protection of some duke of another persuasion, or he'd have long since gone up in smoke.

Science is self-correcting. Religious belief is not. The Inquisition still has its defenders (Orrin, for example), and the Church has never admitted it was burning Jews for the sake of Jew-burning, or fat burghers for the pelf their pelts yielded.

Science is different in quality, and the knowledge it yields is also different in quality.

I thought it was soot and sunspots and that we were due for another ice age?

Harry:

All that's changed is how Inquisitions function--the Church doesn't burn people either, but if this were the 15th Century Science would.

Sandy;

That was the thinking in the 1970's. It stems from looking at long term historical records, where inter-glacial warmings last about 10,000 years. Our current one has gone on for about 10,000 years. This is one of the evidentiary supports for Veizer's theory, because his claimed causes would tend to have that kind of cyclic behaviour.

The only reason the church doesn't burn people now is that it's restrained by the secular power. (You might investigate what's going on in Tonga, the only Christian nation where the secular power is aligned with the church.)

Your fancy that science would be burning its heretics has no basis in experience. It might happen, but it never has.

Harry:

There you go again, clouding the issue with facts.

Harry:

Academic snobbery is noted for its bared teeth, and for its permanence. While science is the least afflicted branch, envy and aspersion no doubt are there as well.

Just look at the recent flap over who actually deserved the Nobel for the invention of MRI technology. And the fight over who first discovered HIV (NIH or the French).

Actual battles over "heresy" in science are usually resolved pretty quickly, because repeatability is paramount. However, today theories are bandied about (and treated as absolutes) without any repeatability possible. Global warming is just one. Electro-magnetic fields causing cancer was another (which now should be in the graveyard, but is not). Exposure to low levels of gamma radiation and the certainty of resulting injury is another (some scientists speculate very low levels are actually helpful, but their work probably isn't sponsored by DOE). The turmoil over ALAR 20 years ago is another example. I am fairly sure all the fuss over arsenic in the water supply is another.

A lot of people just don't want to believe in a slight (or more) cause and no effect. So things get politicized. Somebody has to be at fault.

Harry:

The only places science has taken power were those like Nazi Germany and the murders were legion.

Wrong on the facts, Orrin. Aside from the fact that the Fuhrer knew nothing of science, it is also the case that none of the satraps did either.

Nazi Germany was run by busted chicken farmers, defeated philosophy majors, heroin addicts, drunkards and the like. Not one had 5 minutes of scientific education.

As for Jim strictures, they are all right as far as you can take them, which is not too far. Alar was cooked up as a scare by a PR firm hired by the Natural Resources Defense Council. EMF poisoning was based on a study published in a deservedly obscure Norwegian journal. It was, at best, exploratory, and anyone who read the protocol would have immediately recognized that it was no more than an hypothesis.

Newspapermen, except yours truly, don't know how to read protocols, so they got snookered. I know of no scientist who did.

"With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed."

They simply tried applying this wisdom and dispelling the ignorance.

That did not make them scientists, any more than a subscription to the National Geographic makes you an explorer.

Sorry, didn't realize you were the exclusive judge of the scientific community--wanna dig them up and try them for heresy?

Harry:

Get off it. Of course the only criteria for being a scientist is self appellation. Take Christian Science for example.

They are all scientists doing science, right? And getting published in peer reviewed journals all the time, right?

Not.

Theoreticians of science often define science as what scientists do.

So I, for example, though I have studied some sciences and even understand them, am not a scientist.

Putting a white coat on the baby formula sellers in Bolivia didn't make them doctors.

Not even a scientist yourself and you get to keep the rolls?

Most good bouncers are teetotalers.