It was linked in my first response but since it did not agree with the warming belief system, was discounted as a useless site. You again with the infantile name calling. When you grow up, perhaps a debate will be worth it, until then, keep showing yourself as a name caller rather than an adult with something worthwhile to say.
Warming is not a belief, it's a reality.
The earth is warming and the ice is melting.
BULLSHIT its not a belief..
A few hundred years ago, the most educated minds in Europe was certain the earth was flat... Ya know who in Europe at the time knew it was round? Sailors.... They knew it and it showed in their charts and navigation... But the church was in control of education back then and the church didn't want to have to accept they were wrong or the Bible didn't mention it so it had to be wrong...
So no scientists or educated people at the time would even consider it in public... in private however they knew better and even helped and traded knowledge with the navigators and map makers....
That sound familiar fool????
It's the age old fear tactic to control the masses you twit.. nothing new here... The game is the same only the players have changed.. now its not the church because they do not hold power like they did. Today its the governments who hold power so this time its used to get a CO2 tax on life....
Grow up dreamer you are the same ignorant people who thought Columbus was going to sail off the edge of the world way back when. They believed it because their presumed betters or the ones deemed holiest and wisest, told them so. And no amount of common sense, sound logic, and deductive reason based on everyday sensory input, and the words of the very men who actually had the most knowledge on it was enough to sway them..
you are the peasants back then all buying into bullshit. This time its not fear of gods wrath that motivates you, its the fear of natures wrath.... hello???? Getting any of this yet?
You ******* idiots crack me up.... You get told by your own sources how it is but you fail to read it. You take a headline or a claim made out of context or just simply made up, and yell "Eureka! I have it" like an idiot....
It is hardly surprising that a retarded ideologue like the slack-jawed-idiot, for whom all of this is political (or perhaps just deranged) and not scientific, would be ignorant enough to make these claims. He is always making completely unsupported claims about subjects he knows nothing about because he heard Rush or some other denier cult propagandist say it. Once again he has displayed his ignorance and imbecility for all to see.
Myth of the Flat Earth
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For mythologies involving the belief in a Flat Earth, see
Flat Earth.
Illustration of the spherical Earth in a 14th century copy of L'Image du monde (ca. 1246).
The myth of the Flat Earth is the modern misconception that the prevailing cosmological view during the Middle Ages saw the Earth as flat, instead of spherical. During the early Middle Ages, virtually all scholars maintained the spherical viewpoint first expressed by the Ancient Greeks. By the 14th century, belief in a flat earth among the educated was essentially dead. Flat-Earth models were in fact held at earlier (pre-medieval) times, before the spherical model became commonly accepted in Hellenistic astronomy.[1].
According to Stephen Jay Gould, "there never was a period of "flat earth darkness" among scholars (regardless of how the public at large may have conceptualized our planet both then and now). Greek knowledge of sphericity never faded, and all major medieval scholars accepted the earth's roundness as an established fact of cosmology."[2]
David C. Lindberg and Numbers point out that "there was scarcely a Christian scholar of the Middle Ages who did not acknowledge [Earth's] sphericity and even know its approximate circumference".[3][4]
Jeffrey Burton Russell says the flat earth mythology flourished most between 1870 and 1920, and had to do with the ideological setting created by struggles over evolution. [1]
* "... with extraordinary [sic] few exceptions no educated person in the history of Western Civilization from the third century B.C. onward believed that the earth was flat."[5]
* Russell concludes that Irving, Draper and White were the main writers responsible for introducing the erroneous flat-earth myth that is still with us today." [2] [3]
In 1945 the Historical Association listed "Columbus and the Flat Earth Conception" second of twenty in its first-published pamphlet on common errors in history.[6]
Contents
Origin
In Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, Jeffrey Russell (professor of history at University of California, Santa Barbara) claims that the Flat Earth theory is a fable used to impugn pre-modern civilization, especially that of the Middle Ages in Europe.[7]
James Hannam wrote:
* The myth that people in the Middle Ages thought the earth is flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of the campaign by Protestants against Catholic teaching. But it gained currency in the 19th century, thanks to inaccurate histories such as John William Draper's History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Atheists and agnostics championed the conflict thesis for their own purpose ... [4]
Conflict between religion and science
The 19th century was a period in which the perception of an antagonism between religion and science was especially strong. The disputes surrounding the Darwinian revolution contributed to the birth of the conflict thesis,[2] a view of history according to which any interaction between religion and science almost inevitably would lead to open hostility, with religion usually taking the part of the aggressor against new scientific ideas.[8]
[edit] Irving's biography of Columbus
The first accounts of the legend have been traced to the 1830s. In 1828, Washington Irving's highly romanticised and inaccurate biography, The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus,[9] was published and mistaken by many for a scholarly work.[10] In Book III, Chapter II of this biography, Irving gave a largely fictional account of the meetings of a commission established by the Spanish sovereigns to examine Columbus's proposals. One of his more fanciful embellishments was a highly unlikely tale that the more ignorant and bigoted members on the commission had raised scriptural objections to Columbus's assertions that the Earth was spherical.[11]
But in reality, the issue in the 1490s was not the shape of the Earth, but its size, and the position of the east coast of Asia. Historical estimates from Ptolemy onwards placed the coast of Asia about 180° east of the Canary Islands.[12]. Columbus adopted an earlier (and rejected) distance of 225°, added 28° (based on Marco Polo's travels), and then placed Japan another 30° further east. Starting from Cape St. Vincent in Portugal, Columbus made Eurasia stretch 283° to the east, leaving the Atlantic as only 77° wide. Since he planned to leave from the Canaries (9° further west), his trip to Japan would only have to cover 68° of longitude.[13]
Furthermore, Columbus mistakenly used a much shorter length for a degree (he substituted the shorter 1480 m Italian "mile" for the longer 2177 m Arabic "mile"), making his degree (and the circumference of the Earth) about 75% of what it really was.[14] The combined effect of these mistakes was that Columbus estimated the distance to Japan to be only about 5,000 km (or only to the eastern edge of the Caribbean) while the true figure is about 20,000 km. The Spanish scholars may not have known the exact distance to the east coast of Asia, but they certainly knew that it was significantly further than Columbus' projection; and this was the basis of the criticism in Spain and Portugal, whether academic or amongst mariners, of the proposed voyage.
The disputed point, therefore, was not the shape of the Earth, nor the idea that going west would eventually lead to Japan and China, but the ability of European ships to sail that far across open seas. The small ships of the day (Columbus' three ships varied between 20.5 and 23.5 m or 67 to 77 feet in length and carried about 90 men) simply could not carry enough food and water to reach Japan. In fact, the ships barely reached the eastern Caribbean islands. Already the crews were mutinous, not because of some fear of "sailing off the edge", but because they were running out of food and water with no chance of any new supplies within sailing distance. They were on the edge of starvation.[15] What saved Columbus, of course, was the unknown existence of the Americas precisely at the point he thought he would reach Japan. His ability to resupply with food and water from the Caribbean islands allowed him to return safely to Europe. Otherwise his crews would have died, and the ships foundered. The academics were right: it was not possible for a 1492 ship to sail west across open oceans directly to Japan; mariners would die long before their proposed arrival.
