Galileo promulgated the notion, at the time heretical, that the earth revolved around the sun. However, in 1615 the Inquisition knocked on his door and demanded he recant his heresy.

Threatened with torture, Galileo swallowed hard and recanted has blasphemous notion. However, he later published the idea of a sun-centered planetary system, and, thereafter spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Considering the alternative, things could have gone worse for Galileo. (Heresies against money draw even harsher responses than those against god: 900 environmental workers have been killed in the past decade, mostly because they threatened profits).

I had thought that things are different now and that new ideas, which threatened the “conventional wisdom,” were no longer met with resistance, especially in the scientific community. I had thought scientists were trained to ask questions, and they are, but that does not mean that they embrace the answers.

For example, in the book, “The Sixth Extinction,” Elizabeth Kolbert describes a more up-to-date version of an example of resistance to new ideas.  

In 1980, Walter Alvarez discovered a strata of clay in the earth, in a certain area that he was investigating. Walter got a job at Berkeley, where, co-incidentally, his father, Luis, worked as physicist.  

The father and son team, by way of measuring the iridium in the clay, hypothesized that a huge asteroid had hit the earth, causing a large amount of dust to enter the atmosphere. This cataclysmic event, the team hypothesized, led to an extinction of dinosaurs as well as other animals.

The notion of a catastrophe wiping out the dinosaurs was not readily accepted. In fact, many scientists found it fanciful, one even calling it “codwaddle.”

Eventually, other scientists found similar strata of clay in other parts of the world, and, the crater where the asteroid struck has been located, in the Yucatan Peninsula, in Mexico. Eventually, the notion of a catastrophic event on earth leading to extinctions became accepted wisdom.

Similarly, the idea of global warming, which does have scientific consensus, is being met with intense indifference, in the main.

If we accept the consequences of global warming we would be compelled to act. And yet, we are able to ignore terrible things that are happening to the planet, even as I write. The oceans are acidifying, and as a consequence, the coral reefs, and the teeming life they support, are dying.  

The temperature on the surface of the earth has remained constant for the last decade because the ocean has absorbed the added heat from greenhouse gases.

However, excepting that glitch, the earth has steadily warmed, graphed as a steep incline, since the industrial revolution; in other words, as a result of human activity. And, it will begin to rise again.

We have to come to terms with the simple fact that we have to find joy and comfort in our lives without burning fossil fuels, or we won’t have lives at all.

The issue of life trumps all others. It is time for what Freud called a “reality check.”

Nelson Strasser lives in Lakeport, Calif.