If someone had asked me before the talk with Gregory Sloan, I doubt I ever could’ve found a link between Galileo and global warming. However, after listening to the professor talk, he connects to dots between a religious persecution on science to the modern day special interest against global warming.
Centuries ago, Galileo discovered that Earth was not in fact the center of the universe. His theory was that the sun was the center and all the planets orbited it. The church didn’t respond too kindly to this because it completely contradicted scripture and challenged their ideals. Eventually, the Roman Catholic church put Galileo on trial and threatened to exile him if he didn’t take back his scientific theories. Eventually, he retracted. This was only the tip of the iceberg of people in power challenging proven scientific facts because it conflicts with their personal interest.
This brings us to global warming. Whether someone believes in it or not, global warming has (according to the professor) been completely proven. However, the country, and the world, doesn’t really seem to be doing anything about it. This is because the corporate world doesn’t like to be environmentally regulated and are throwing everything they can against the cause. I rarely give thought to global warming because I’m usually preoccupied with prelims and what I’m going to eat for dinner, but for once I sat and thought about the consequences of our actions, and why we aren’t doing too much about it.
History repeats itself, and it has been displayed over and over again that change takes time and is usually followed by a facepalm of “why didn’t we do this sooner”. I hope eventually we trust science and change our ways for the better.
It is an interesting dilemma that you allude to of how to actually make important changes to prevent something like global warming and its resulting consequences. Not everyone is a scientist or interested in engineering a solution to prevent global warming through measures like carbon capture and such. Will doing small things like using public transportation as opposed driving a car really make a difference? The world hasn’t completely changed their mentality to one that would be prevent global warming but we won’t even know if we are actually having a positive effect and it isn’t in vain. It will be a long time before we see any meaningful trend or evidence that global warming is slowly not becoming a problem. Uncertainty, lack of immediate impact and essentially ignorance play a role in the immense resistance of people towards major change so it will be interesting to see if we can change our ways. We eventually accepted Galileo’s ideas but I’d imagine global warming is more of a serious issue.