Yesterday The Guardian website had an article on climate change denialists entitled, Here’s what happens when you try to replicate climate contrarian papers[1].

The article is headed with this portrait of Galileo

And it opens with the following paragraph:

Those who reject the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming often evoke Galileo as an example of when the scientific minority overturned the majority view. In reality, climate contrarians have almost nothing in common with Galileo, whose conclusions were based on empirical scientific evidence, supported by many scientific contemporaries, and persecuted by the religious-political establishment. Nevertheless, there’s a slim chance that the 2–3% minority is correct and the 97% climate consensus is wrong.

Now it is true that climate change denialists, like denialists in many other areas of scientific consensus, commonly use what is now known as the Galileo Gambit. This involves claiming in some way that Galileo was persecuted for his theories, although he was proved right in the long run. Implying that the denialist will also be proved right in the long run and hailed as another Galileo. Bob Dylan provided the perfect answer to the Galileo Gambit in his song Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream way back in 1965.

I said, “You know they refused Jesus, too”

He said, “You’re not Him

I would not object to the author’s comments on the contrarians misuse of the name of Galileo if her his comment had stopped at, climate contrarians have almost nothing in common with Galileo, however she he goes on to spoil it with what follows.

Although Galileo’s views on heliocentrism, and that is what stands to discussion here, had their origins in empirical observations made with the telescope he unfortunately did not stop there and they were not supported by a consensus of his contemporaries by any means. In fact at the time of Galileo’s trial by the Catholic Church the majority of astronomers qualified to pass judgement on the subject almost certainly rejected heliocentricity, most of them on good scientific grounds.

In his Dialogo, the book that caused his downfall, Galileo knew very well that he did not have the necessary empirical facts to back up the heliocentric hypothesis and so he resorted to polemic and rhetoric and brought as his pièce de résistance, his theory of the tides, which was fatally flawed and contradicted by the empirical evidence even before it hit the printed page.

Although it became largely accepted by the experts by around 1670, the necessary empirical evidence to substantiate heliocentricity didn’t emerge until the eighteenth and in the case of stellar parallax the nineteenth centuries.

I have written about this historical misrepresentation of Galileo’s position on various occasions and I don’t intend to repeat myself in this post. However anybody who is interested can read some of my thoughts in the post collected under the heading, The Transition to Heliocentricity: The Rough Guides. I also strongly recommend Christopher M. Graney’s recently published Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo, my review of which should, hopefully, appear here in the not to distant future.

Addendum: Seb Falk has pointed out that Dana Nuccitelli is a he not a she and I have made the necessary corrections to the text. I apologise unreservedly to Mr Nuccitelli for this error.

[1] h/t to Seb Falk (@Seb_Falk) for drawing my attention to this latest misstatement of Galileo’s scientific situation.