Bad Republican Reasoning: Galileo and Anti-Global Warming

If you watched the Republican Presidential debate between candidates, there was a moment where Rick Perry was using an analogy with Galileo to justify why it's more reasonable to accept that global climate change is not a man-made occurrence.

Mr. Perry's reasoning, Galileo was just one man who stood up against a dominant majority of people who believed in a less rational truth to the universe.  The same is true with people who disagree with global climate change.  They disagree with the dominant majority of scientists who have this consensus that global climate change is actually taking place, in spite of their evidence.

The fault in Mr. Perry's reasoning, just because you are a minority in your beliefs does not mean that you are automatically correct.  Galileo was up against a body of society that refused to listen or even see what evidence he had.  If anything, the vast majority of people back then would not have understood the evidence he had due to its complex mathematical nature.  The difference is that today there is evidence to suggest that global climate change is taking place and that the causes of such changes are the result of industrialization and our dependence on fossil fuels.

There may be some small portion of the scientific community who stand strong against the global climate change argument simply because they do not believe enough evidence exists to assume that it is of man-made causes.  There's a difference between the nay-sayers of global climate change who are scientists and the nay-sayers who are common folk and haven't the foggiest idea who to believe so they turn to the clear experts on scientific thought (the Republican party).

The Republicans seemed to have picked their battles this time around.  Last time they were dancing around the notion of teaching non-scientific alternatives to evolution in science class but in doing so they looked like morons.  Now they actually picked a scientific topic that has a lot of people on the fence, global climate change.

I won't take a definitive position on this matter other than to suggest this alternative scenario: according to nay-sayers, if man were not on this Earth and producing these emissions through industrialized practices then the Earth's climate would naturally get warmer leading to the changes in climate we observe today (according to Republicans)?  That's a pretty bold prediction. I can't stand it when people don't seem to understand that just because you cannot directly observe the changes we make to our immediate environment doesn't mean it's not significant.

At one point in Earth's history, the atmosphere contained no oxygen (anaerobic).  Then the evolution of blue-green algae slowly (over millions/billions of years) converted the atmospheric composition from an anaerobic one to an aerobic one.  During this transition, the Earth faced a massive extinction of species (which is what many people don't seem to recognize).  Changing the atmospheric composition can have a significant affect on the life that lives on this planet.  Blue-green algae slowly converted the atmosphere from anaerobic to aerobic and it led to the extinction of a large percentage of anaerobic life on the planet.  We're doing the same but we don't have the luxury of millions or billions of years to see what will happen as a result...  I doubt humanity will last that long anyway.