Dissing science

Jon Huntsman, responding to Rick Perry's claim that climate change is bunk and climate scientists are manipulating data to make money:

I think there's a serious problem. The minute that the Republican Party becomes the party - the anti-science party, we have a huge problem. We lose a whole lot of people who would otherwise allow us to win the election in 2012. When we take a position that isn't willing to embrace evolution, when we take a position that basically runs counter to what 98 of 100 climate scientists have said, what the National Academy of Science - Sciences has said about what is causing climate change and man's contribution to it, I think we find ourselves on the wrong side of science, and, therefore, in a losing position.

The Republican Party has to remember that we're drawing from traditions that go back as far as Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, President Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush. And we've got a lot of traditions to draw upon. But I can't remember a time in our history where we actually were willing to shun science and become a - a party that - that was antithetical to science. I'm not sure that's good for our future and it's not a winning formula [emphasis added].

I appreciate what Huntsman is doing here, and it's a rather sad state of affairs that Perry is perceived as courageous for endorsing the scientific consensus. But I can't help noting that what Huntsman keeps suggesting is that by taking such anti-scientific stances, the Republicans might lose. Let me just suggest a bigger problem: they might win. That is, it is far from implausible that a president and a substantial chunk of the majority party in Congress could be sworn in in 2013 believing (and publicly avowing) that scientists are con artists and any finding that undermines the beliefs of the petroleum industry is criminally suspect.

Regardless of the absurdity of these allegations, they are substantially more extreme than what Bush was pushing in the last decade. To be sure, the Bush White House was not particularly welcoming to scientists, but it rarely demonstrated the profound hostility that Perry and others are demonstrating today.

What of Huntsman's suggestion that these stances hurt his party electorally? I think Perry is calculating, correctly, that such stances help him among voters in the early Republican primaries, and they help him win over Bachmann's supporters when her campaign folds, as it almost surely will. Yes, such stances might help to portray him as an extremist in the general election, but I think the short term bonus is more certain than the long term penalty.

Death in space

A while back I noted that the Space Shuttle had something like a 1% failure rate -- roughly one out of every hundred launches resulted in catastrophic failure. Here's another way to think about it: Of the 355 astronauts who have flown on the Shuttle, 14 have not returned. That's a 4% mortality rate. In most election years, a House incumbent has roughly the same chance of being defeated as a Shuttle astronaut has of dying.

Forgive me if this is disrespectful to bring up on the anniversary of the Challenger disaster, the day after the anniversary of the Apollo 1 disaster, and three days before the anniversary of the Columbia disaster. (What is it about this time of year?) But this strikes me as a pretty good time to ask what exactly we're trying to accomplish with the manned space program and whether what we've been doing is the best way to accomplish it.

Are conservatives turning against manned spaceflight?

Tom Coburn:

The problem is we’ve had countless Sputnik moments in recent decades that have created little more than space junk.

Sarah Palin:

[Obama] needs to remember that, uh, what happened back then with the communist U.S.S.R. and their victory in that race to space.... Yeah, they won but they also incurred so much debt at the time that it resulted in the inevitable collapse of the Soviet Union.

Okay, Coburn's comment may be more of a metaphor about government waste. But I'm surprised to hear him even metaphorically dismissing the space race as wasteful. And Palin is technically right that the Soviets were the first into space, although I don't think I've ever heard a politician -- no less an America-firster like Palin -- suggest that the Soviets "won" the space race or that too much investment in a space program can kill your country.

I'm not suggesting that these folks are wrong to question the value of a manned space program, but I'm surprised to read it. The manned space program has always enjoyed bipartisan support. Ike pushed it, JFK strongly identified himself with the moonshot, Nixon's signature (unlike Brezhnev's) is on the friggin' moon for the next five billion years or so, Reagan was closely tied with the Space Shuttle, etc. Are conservatives now giving up on this program? Even if it's a simple case of Obama's-fer-it-so-I'm-agin-it, it's kind of surprising.

Damned, dirty scientists

A recent Pew survey finds that 55 percent of scientists consider themselves Democrats, 32 percent call themselves independents, and only six percent claim to be Republicans.  Thus it's not terribly surprising that the GOP would occasionally demonize scientists, although it's not clear whether GOP hostility to science causes scientists to leave the party or whether the GOP just feels safe demonizing them because so few of them are in the party in the first place.

For a prime example of this sort of demonization, please refer back to Bush White House spokesman Tony Fratto's response to a study by Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz suggesting that the Iraq War would ultimately cost $3 trillion:

People like Joe Stiglitz lack the courage to consider the cost of doing nothing and the cost of failure. One can’t even begin to put a price tag on the cost to this nation of the attacks of 9/11.... Three trillion dollars? What price does Joe Stiglitz put on attacks on the homeland that have already been prevented? Or doesn’t his slide rule work that way?

Update: On further reflection, I'm questioning just how representative this survey is.  Pew surveyed 2,533 members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  Who are they?

The American Association for the Advancement of Science, "Triple A-S" (AAAS), is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world by serving as an educator, leader, spokesperson and professional association. In addition to organizing membership activities, AAAS publishes the journal Science, as well as many scientific newsletters, books and reports, and spearheads programs that raise the bar of understanding for science worldwide.

The AAAS claims to be "open to all," meaning, presumably, that one does not need a PhD or an MD or any other advanced degree to join.  And from the description above, they sound like an advocacy group on behalf of scientific research.  It's entirely possible that the membership is somewhat more inclined toward, say, government-funded research than the entire population of scientists.  Thus the survey sample would probably appear more Democratic than a truly representative sample of American scientists.