What goes around

The folks over at Lean Left have posts related to global warming on a fairly regular basis and it always turns into an argument in comments because a couple of the regulars in comments are among the nanny-nanny naysayers who just refuse to accept the inconvenient truth and yes that is a plug. Two recent examples are from May 20 and May 22.

The reason I mention this now is that just a couple of days ago I finished a book called Einstein's Jury. It's about the efforts of astronomers to test general relativity by confirming or refuting some of its key astronomical predictions, including bending of light in a gravitational field and gravitational redshift. The question wasn't regarded as completely settled for more than 15 years.

During the course of that debate, those who refused to accept general relativity found themselves working harder and harder to find a basis for disputing it. Not all of the evidence was clear, indeed not all of it was favorable to Einstein. But as the evidence kept coming in, the sheer mass of it supporting general relativity just kept growing larger. Opponents - some of who called themselves "irreconciliables" and a few of who never did, in fact, reconcile themselves to the theory - began arguing smaller and smaller points, nitpicking at details, claiming relatively small differences between theory and observation disproved the theory, arguing there wasn't "enough" proof, even paying people to produce papers refuting Einstein.

I invite you to go check out those linked threads and see how the same sort of clutching at straws and arguing small details feature in the arguments of the nanny-nanny naysayers. Some things, it seems, truly do not change.