[[“the breathtaking inanity of people trying to vote on reality.”
Such as pointing to an “overwhelming scientific consensus” about anthropoegenic global warming?]]

The scientific consensus isn’t a “vote.” It’s a general agreement, a consensus, among people qualified to understand the subject. The scientific consensus is part of how modern science works; it enables scientists to spend their time doing science and not waste it in blind alleys.

The greenhouse effect was discovered by Jean Joseph Fourier in 1824. In 1859, lab work by John Tyndall showed that it was due mostly to the trace gases water vapor and carbon dioxide. In 1896, Svante Arrhenius made the first quantitative estimate of global warming under doubled carbon dioxide. The saturation argument derailed the consensus for about forty years, but high-altitude observations made during World War II shot holes in that argument, and when Gilbert Plass made the next estimate of global warming under doubled carbon dioxide, in 1956, there were no remaining valid arguments against it. Since then, the evidence that the world is warming, that it’s due to artificially produced greenhouse gases, and that it’s a serious problem, has become overwhelming, and denying any of the three is on a par with denying relativity or evolution. The scientific consensus has been wrong on occasion in the past, but that’s not the smart way to bet.

Such as pointing to an “overwhelming scientific consensus” about anthropoegenic global warming?

My 8th grade Earth science teacher was actually a psychotic drill-team coach who was put in the position of teaching a science class by a tight-fisted school district trying to save money rather than hire more qualified personnel. Like the teachers of the hapless subjects in your anecdote, she likewise announced, to my stupefaction, that gravity was the result of a planet spinning on its axis.

(There was no such claim in our textbook, of course, but I doubt she ever even opened it; she also reversed the positions of Venus and Mars in the order of planets from the sun, as well as hopelessly confusing the nature of Uranus and making other blunders as well, all with perfect conviction. The woman belonged in charge of a science class about as much as Stephen Hawking belongs in an Olympic gymnastics competition.)

I was a major astronomy buff at the time, and I would have corrected her if I hadn’t been terrified of the woman — she really was violently nuts and fearlessly irrational. Until now, I thought she was the only person who espoused this lunatic notion!

Since it is obviously much more widespread than I first thought, I wonder now what the source of this nonsense could possibly be. Does anyone have a clue how one would go about researching the origin of such a weird false belief successfully masquerading, obviously for years, as scientific fact?

~David D.G.

[[Given the widespread belief in Something, they are wondering if that belief isn’t the “default” setting in humans, and does atheism require extra effort.]]

Not extra effort, just a genetic deficiency. Turns out atheists have a defective copy of the theism gene on chromosome #3. It’s a recessive Mendelian trait, which explains why most people are theists.

I was having trouble with some of the bigger, less common words.

Kisses

Given the widespread belief in Something, they are wondering if that belief isn’t the “default” setting in humans, and does atheism require extra effort.

And it’s all financed by the John Templeton Foundation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Templeton_Foundation

Since they support DI, the Disco ‘Tute and Gonzalez, should be interesting…

~David D.G.