When Copernicus first advanced the idea of a heliocentric universe in the mid-16th century, the theologian and Christian reformer Martin Luther declared it to be heresy. Speaking for most of the western world at the time, Luther believed, in accordance with the literal interpretation of The Bible, that it was clear that the planets and moons encircled the globe and that the bodies of the stars were “fastened to the firmament like globes of fire.” According to Luther, men like Copernicus were guilty not only of blasphemy, but of vanity, as their ideas were so outlandish that they could have only been conceived to ruffle a few feathers in an attempt to seem clever and turn astronomy on its ear. Today, there are but a scant few holdouts from Martin Luther's camp and the scientific merits of the heliocentric universe have triumphed over its geocentric predecessor. However, it took a couple of centuries for the evident wisdom of this worldview to prevail upon many scholars and a general public who remained opposed to scrapping a conception of the universe that had been common knowledge for millenia and in which everything revolved around their planet in favor of one that was not only new and unfamiliar, but also turned Earth into a mere satellite.
Humanity was able to take its sweet time in coming to believe in the heliocentricity of our universe, but we will not be afforded the same luxury when it comes to global warming. Fifty years ago, in his Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty, President Lyndon Baines Johnson became the first US President to warn the of the harmful consequences that would accompany its increasing consumption of fossil fuels. “This generation,” Johnson said, referring to the generation of our parents and grandparents, “has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through radioactive materials and a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels...The longer we wait to act, the greater the dangers and the larger the problem.” Later that year, the President's Science Advisory Committee released a report that would more or less predict the state of our planet's climate today, broadly outlining the effects that our fossil fuel consumption would have on everything from carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures to the melting of the polar ice caps and rising of sea levels. As far back as 1965 the threat of climate change was clear and it was menacing and yet, the main debate in Washington and in statehouses across the country today is not on the best ways to stymy it, but on who's to blame for it and whether it exists at all.
Last week, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) stood up in Congress and took a large snowball out of a plastic bag he had brought with him. Inhofe, who is the 7th most senior senator in the Republican Party, then proceeded to hold the snowball aloft before a scantly populated Senate floor as proof that global warming was a hoax. “You know what this is?” Inhofe asked. “It's a snowball, from outside here. So it's very, very cold out...very unseasonable...so here, Mr. President, catch this.” And with that, the Oklahoma Senator tossed the snowball to on of his underpaid, baby-faced congressional aides and continued on peddling his ignorant, climate change-denying drivel propless. Inhofe's reasoning, that, since it's cold and snowing in the place where I live at the end of February—a time when it's often, but not always, not cold and snowing—global warming must be a sham, is the sort of myopic, pigheaded logic one would expect from a 10 year old. But James Inhofe is not a 10-year old. He is 80 year old man who was recently reinstated as the chairman of the Senate's Committee on Environment & Public Works and whose chairmanship all but guarantees fossil fuel-friendly partisan gridlock in Congress for at least the next 2 years—gridlock we can ill afford, because mother nature's about to drop the hammer.
