Galileo became famous not only because he invented a telescope, or was the first human being to see the four large moons of Jupiter, or all sorts of other things. He became famous because he managed to force a trial before ecclesiastical big-wigs that ended up with him spending the rest of his life locked in his house, retracting everything he claimed, and (according to one legend) muttering as he walked out after the final verdict was read, "Still, they move".
What's interesting about the whole Galileo episode, as Thomas Kuhn pointed out in The Copernican Revolution, was the theory of optics under review - Galileo's that is - was not only hardly established, it was indeed quite dubious. That it resulted in findings at variance with accepted cosmology was not the only issue; it seemed to violate common sense. Galileo had no answer to the counter-question that the "stars" he saw moving about Jupiter might not just be a trick. They only had his word on the matter, and an optical theory that wasn't even fully fleshed out.
Now, it is clear from the vantage point of several centuries, the whole thing makes the church look bad. The thing is, it could very well have turned out otherwise. What the optical theory Galileo used had going for it was the possibility of being improved upon through the use of tools of various kinds. All the Church elders had was Aristotle and Ptolemy.
I bring up this sad chapter of the history of the science/religion divide because we are experiencing it now. Rather than science/religion, though, it is a conflict between science and industry, science and politicians, and science and blabbermouths. All of the global-warming-deniers seem to rely on the same argument, which always boils down to, "Well, it isn't very warm here, so it's all crap." Which, in a way, was all the Church court had against Galileo; "We don't feel the earth move, and if it did move we'd all go flying out in to space. Besides that, you say you saw those stars move, but we didn't, and besides that, we have no way of proving it's anything more than a trick."
In the long-run, the climate-change deniers are going to look venal, ignorant, and power-mad. The major difference between then and now is the fate of millions of people didn't hang in the balance on the question of whether or not there were moons orbiting Jupiter. While there is little on the table right now that will address the issue as aggressively as it needs, at the very least an acknowledgment the problem is real would be nice.
