Chris 'n Roger

An interesting little back-and-forth appears to be developing between Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and Roger Pielke Jr., director of the University of Colorado's Center for Science and Technology Policy Research. I follow both of their blogs like a hawk and suggest to anyone interested they do the same (links on the right sidebar), this week however, should be particularly interesting because it promises lots of excellent insight from two of the best minds and writers on the subject of politics and science.

Roger is no shill for Bush, quite on the contrary, but I do have to take issue with some of his critique of Chris' book (Chris will have his own insights which I'm quite certain will sound different from my own). Part of Roger's critique is based upon the dual premises that every political party will attempt to politicize science in one way or another and currently Republicans are in power in all three branches of government so politicization will appear to be Republican-dominated. In a way this is probably partially true, however, Chris does a fairly good job in his book pointing out how we came from the Gingrich-era Contract with America to today's Congress and the White House by way of very specific, repeated abuses of science often involving think tanks that manufacture a scientific "controversy" where there is none and Republican politicians using that to avoid acting on the best scientific information in a reasonable way.

This is of course not an across-the-board thing: Roger points out total R&D budgets have increased under Bush. But then again NSF has been severely slashed. What I believe strikes many scientists today is how very specific issues are hammered at by Republicans: global warming, ecological, reproductive health, and evolution teaching in schools to name a few. The style of how this is done is the same with each of these, as mentioned above: manufacture controversy, use that as an excuse not to act. While Democrats probably have politicized science in the past as well--let me be a bit crass here--they exaggerated things in the direction of the scientific community's consensus. Even if "everyone is doing it" which I don't believe is entirely true, most of us were fine with an exaggeration towards our consensus opinions. In other words, Al Gore jumping up and down about global warming and going a bit overboard was OK even though we winced at the inaccuracies (Chris has some other examples of Democrats in his book), but bringing BushCo around from denying global warming and opposing action to at least admit it's happening and proposing voluntary steps in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions made most of us somewhat disgusted at the whole damned party and their ways. Now add to that a handful of other issues and you've got yourself a justified bias away from a particular political party in the scientific community!