It's the 21st century...
The status quo believes that carbon dioxide causes CATASTROPHIC global warming.
Galileo is "pulled" out of the sixteenth century and put on the stand.
Armed with science he goes against the status quo.
Would you burn Galileo...
The Inquisitor flipped the pages on his clipboard: "Look! See this graph? It's the temperature curve. See how it is rising at an alarming rate in the last hundred years — the red part? This has been measured and independently confirmed by hundreds, literally hundreds of scientists, around the world, in leading universities."
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Galileo looked at the graph, his eyes narrowed, "But this is only the last thousand years. Where's the rest of the graph?"
"What do you mean the rest?!"
"I want to see the last two-hundred-thousand years. Not just the little sample you have here."
The Inquisitor's lips tightened, his nostrils flared...
"Allright, allright..." he flipped more pages on his clipboard and then held it to Galileo's face, "here is an even bigger graph. This one has been measured by analyzing ice cores that are hundreds of thousands of years old, and actually contain the air—"
"That's marvelous! That is science! You can slice them all the way down through the years and analyse them — amazing!" Galileo greedily eyed the clipboard. His eyes flitted from one diagram to the other, and followed the graphs to the minutest detail. He would have grabbed the clipboard if his hands weren't tied behind his back.
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"So now do you see—"
"Oh yes my friend, I do indeed see. Do you see it too? Those two orange zones there? The earth has been warmer before! And, your first graph literally disappears in this one. Could it be that you are losing 'the big picture'?"
"No, not at all. Because what you don't see here are the possible tipping points."
"Tipping points?"
"Yes, if the Earth warms too much, we could reach a point of no return, a 'tipping point,' where the temperature could keep climbing with no way of coming back down again."
"That's an awful lot of ifs and coulds, is there any evidence to support this?"
"There's a consen—"
"—Oh stop that consensus stuff will you man!? Show me some evidence, or at least give me your argument. Is that all you have is other people's opinions? Can you think for yourself?"
"Ok old man. If the Earth warms too much, the tundra could thaw and release like, huuuge amounts of methane, and this would warm the Earth way more than the carbon dioxide."
"Now you're talking. However, as we see on the big graph here, the orange zones again, the Earth has already been warmer, approximately one-hundred-and-thirty-thousand years ago.
"And no tipping point occurred. Otherwise we would not be here, right?"
"Cut!" Interrupted the director. "Commercial break!"
Galileo looked at the Inquisitor, his eyes contorted in doubt and confusion.
"You know? A commercial break. We're streaming this live on YouTube, and Fox, and CNN, and all over the syndicates. So we gotta take a break for our sponsors."
"Yu-Toob? Sponsors? Will you talk some sense finally?" asked Galileo in his funny Italian accent.
