I'm not going to go into the Algore movie, you can infer how I feel about that from my previous posts. What I will go into is a critic taking the opportunity of Algore's release to take a cheap shot at the Catholic Church. Of course this also gives me the opportunity to vet a bit on the "Galileo controversy" within the Church. Jules Brenner, who writes for The Filmiliar Cineaste, had this to say about the movie: A flat earth was inconvenient to Papal authority in Galileo's time. Now, what heresy is Gore committing with a scientifically based argument against contributing further to relentlessly damaging natural forces? If he's right about this, a cabal of the irresponsible who resist a sea change in energy sources and established structures of global economy may be bringing us disasters greater than a biblical plague. It's clear Jules is no fan of the Church, and has taken this opportunity to take a shot. Well, here's "an inconvenient truth" for you, Mr. Brenner: Centuries earlier, Aristotle had refuted heliocentricity, and by Galileo’s time, nearly every major thinker subscribed to a geocentric view. Copernicus refrained from publishing his heliocentric theory for some time, not out of fear of censure from the Church, but out of fear of ridicule from his colleagues. That's right, not unlike today where a small army of scientists trumpet their view that human caused global warming is a legitimate concern, an overwhelming vocal majority believed that the universe was geocentric. Also like today, anyone who opposed that view was to fear the rejection of their colleagues, not that of the Church. The debate was helio/geo centricity, not the shape of the Earth, so skip a movie and read a book for once. Regarding Galileo and his relationship with the Church: Many people wrongly believe Galileo proved heliocentricity. He could not answer the strongest argument against it, which had been made nearly two thousand years earlier by Aristotle: If heliocentrism were true, then there would be observable parallax shifts in the stars’ positions as the earth moved in its orbit around the sun. However, given the technology of Galileo’s time, no such shifts in their positions could be observed. It would require more sensitive measuring equipment than was available in Galileo’s day to document the existence of these shifts, given the stars’ great distance. Until then, the available evidence suggested that the stars were fixed in their positions relative to the earth, and, thus, that the earth and the stars were not moving in space—only the sun, moon, and planets were. Given the opportunity, he couldn't prove it with the resources available to him. Brilliant theory, but unprovable in that time.