I really like Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, which is a documentary series on Fox that features eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. It does an excellent job of communicating, in a clear and understandable way, the cutting edge of what science has revealed about world and the universe . . . and, perhaps just as important, it communicates the sense of awe and wonder about our existence that drives so many of our scientists to probe into the unknown. It is a worthy successor to Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the classic 1980 documentary featuring the late astrophysicist Carl Sagan.

Up until the most recent episode, my only complaint about the new series was its oversimplified presentation of the Galileo Galilei affair. It was a typical, secularist, ‘church bad, science good,’ kind of take. I’m not making apologies for the Catholic Church’s behavior at the time, which was horribly misguided and wrong, but there was more to it than ‘evil church stands against science.’ Nicolaus Copernicus—who first developed the heliocentric model that Galilei helped refine and confirm—suffered no such repercussions from the church, and in fact was much more strongly criticized by Protestants than by Catholics. Copernicus was himself a Catholic [and possibly a priest, although historians are divided on whether he was ever ordained]. His book, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, was only censored by the church during the Galileo affair—more than seventy years after publication—and only until a few sentences indicating complete certainty could be revised or omitted, after which it returned to publication with the church’s imprimatur.

Regardless, I do have to raise some issues the most recent episode, “The World Set Free,” which focused primarily on carbon dioxide (CO2) and climate change.

In one segment, Tyson explained that permafrost in the arctic is melting due to human-caused global warming, which then releases the carbon stored in that permafrost from the remains of ‘animals and plants that lived thousands of years ago.’ This release then causes a CO2 feedback loop and worsens climate change. Okay, sounds reasonable. I’m with you. Except . . . most of the plants and animals buried in the permafrost must have gotten there when it wasn’t permafrost, right? A few species of plants and animals are able to survive on permafrost, true, but not many. The quantity of carbon that Tyson implied would be present would, I assume, have required a thriving ecosystem leaving huge quantities of carbon behind, which would mean that what’s melting now is stuff that, at some point in Earth’s relatively recent history, wasn’t permafrost at all. And that would indicate to me that the Earth has recently been as warm (or warmer) than it is today. Perhaps there is some other scientific explanation for this, but Tyson didn’t address it . . . which left his astute viewers to wonder about the apparent contradiction and, perhaps, begin to examine the credibility of the other assertions in the episode.

Read more . . .