> The scientific consensus used to be that the sun revolved around the earth ... Ever thought about why it took so long for this particular "scientific consens

> The scientific consensus used to be that the sun revolved around the earth ... Ever thought about why it took so long for this particular "scientific consensus" was reverted? Because geocentrism could explain the motions of planets pretty accurately, and the easiest actual evidence of heliocentrism was that apparent locations of stars should move very slightly following the motion of the Earth (i.e., parallax) - the effect was so small that the first measurement was made in 1838, about 200 years after Galileo's death. Until then, the apparent absence of parallax was a scientific evidence against heliocentrism. The lesson to draw is that it's not sufficient to have its proponent put under house arrest in order for a new theory to be accepted by the scientific community. Your new theory has to first explain all the things explained by the existing theory, and then some more that can not be explained by the existing one. I'll leave it to readers to conclude what that means in the context of global warming. Honestly I'm depressed by the level of discourse here. Otherwise mostly intelligent people are basically resorting to "Well some groups of people have been wrong about various things before, which proves that this particular (unrelated) group of people can be wrong, so instead of addressing the problem they say we have, let's debate for the umpteenth time whether the problem is real, again." It's a classical stalling tactic, and IMHO the only proper response is "Get out, adults are talking."