Hmm. Jailing politicians and scientists for failing to conform to the orthodoxy. Doesn't that sound familiar? At least one journalist thinks it does.
The Calgary Herald reports:
David Suzuki may be right about global warming. He also may be only partially right, and there's a faction of actual climate scientists who think he's dead wrong.
Science, by it's very nature, should never be held hostage to orthodoxy of thought -- unless that orthodoxy has to do with remaining open-minded and embracing the scientific method and scientific enquiry.
Yet, what sort of enquiry will take place if people are jailed for holding "wrong" scientific opinions -- as Suzuki now proposes for politicians who ignore the particular view of the world he holds? History provides the answer. In 1633, in Italy the Vatican asserted the sun revolved around the Earth rather than vice versa, and ordered heliocentrism's chief prophet Galileo to answer for his views to the Inquisition.
As enforcers of orthodox conventional wisdom, the Inquisition had something in common with today's human rights commissions, except that it could also torture people. No fool was Galileo, who made a strategic recantation.
(Although, he ended up under house arrest for the rest of his life, anyway.) Other Italian astronomers took the hint, and that was that for science in Italy for a while.
No time for scientific discourse. The apocalypse is nigh!
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