'Eppure, si muove': Yes, Sen. Inhofe and Rep. Upton, the earth circles the sun, not the other way around

Climate Cranks Gin Up the Right Wing Noise Machine

Mark Hertsgaard, author, 'Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth'

Huffington Post

The right-wing media machine is a large part of the reason why denial of climate change persists in the United States long after the rest of the world has acknowledged the problem. Over the past few days, I've gotten a close-up look at how the machine works, because I've been its target.

Last Tuesday, February 15, I went to Capitol Hill on a mission: to confront the climate cranks who still refuse to accept what virtually every major scientific organization in the world, starting with our own National Academy of Sciences, has concluded: man-made climate change is real, happening now and extremely dangerous.

I also wanted to highlight a fact I have often marveled at during my twenty years of writing about climate change in books and for leading publications around the world, including Vanity Fair, Time, The Nation and most recently Politico. That fact is: virtually every major political party in the world -- except for the Republicans in this country -- accepts this mainstream scientific conclusion.

Yet the average American would not know this is the case. Why not? Because discussion about climate change in the U.S. is dominated by how the issue is framed by politicians and the media in Washington. And inside the Beltway, denial of mainstream climate science is regarded as a legitimate opinion rather than as an unfounded oddity.

(More here. The Politico article he refers to is below.)

Climate change: GOP Galileo moment

By: Mark Hertsgaard
February 15, 2011
Politico

Will it take the Republican Party as long to accept modern science as it took the Roman Catholic Church? The church waited 359 years to admit Galileo was right — the earth does move around the sun. Not until 1992 did the Vatican officially withdraw its condemnation of the man Albert Einstein called the father of modern science.

Today, even children know that the earth revolves around the sun. But that idea was heresy to the 17th-century church. When Galileo would not abandon his views, the Inquisition put him on trial in 1633. He was forced to recant under penalty of death, then lived under house arrest for the rest of his life.

Now the House Republican majority is launching its own attack on Galileo’s scientific descendants. Rejecting mainstream climate science became a GOP litmus test during the 2010 midterm elections. Republican leaders then floated the idea of putting mainstream climate science on trial in congressional hearings.

This week, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House Energy Committee, introduced legislation that would “repeal” the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific determination that greenhouse gases threaten human health and welfare.

After Galileo reluctantly recanted, legend has it that he muttered, “Eppure, si muove” ["and yet it moves"]. In other words — censorship and repression could not change physical fact: The earth moves around the sun, whether the church agreed or not.

(Continued here.)