According to NASA, 97 percent of actively publishing climate scientists agree that global warming is due to human activities. Despite this fact, Donald Trump advisor and total non-scientist Anthony Scaramucci compared climate change to the idea that the world is flat on the CNN program New Day.
The topic came up after the show’s host, Chris Cuomo, asked Scaramucci why Trump’s transition team has asked the Department of Energy for the names of individuals working in the department on climate change. Scaramucci evaded the question, choosing instead to explain that Trump’s team doesn’t want climate change to be “ideologically based” and that maybe 97 percent of scientists have gotten climate change wrong.
“There was an overwhelming science that the Earth was flat, and there was an overwhelming science that we were the center of the world,” Scaramucci said. “We get a lot of things wrong in the scientific community.”
But comparing climate change to the beliefs of flat-earth truthers like B.o.B and Tila Tequila is an inaccurate and very bad analogy, reminiscent of the time Ted Cruz compared “global warming alarmists” to Galileo. To equate a scientific reality like climate change to the disproved theory that the world is flat not only compares fact to fiction but gives a semblance of credibility to the idea that the world is flat.
Despite what conspiracy theorists believe, we know that the Earth is not disc-shaped with discrete edges, and we know the sun does not zoom around it in orbit. Galileo, Cruz’s scapegoat, supported the idea that the Earth rotated around the sun way back in 1543. We have photographic evidence that the world is round from ISS astronauts. Ships disappear on the horizon, star constellations are in different regions around the world, and the sun illuminates areas on Earth at different times. The Earth is not flat.
Meanwhile, there are numerous pieces of evidence that mankind has exacerbated climate change. Furthermore, Scaramucci’s claim that climate change science is swung by ideology betrays his very own party. While there is skepticism concerning climate change, one in ten Republicans say they deeply care about climate issues, and the majority of Republicans believe scientists should have a part in shaping climate policy.
Climate change science isn’t like the idea that the world is flat, but saying so is very much like the attitude that caused the 16th-century clerics to punish Galileo for saying that it is round.
