The Republicans Are Now the Anti-Science Party

By Paul Krugman, Guardian UK

04 September 11

On climate change and evolution, the party's presidential hopefuls are wilfully ignorant.

on Huntsman Jr, a former Utah governor and ambassador to China, isn't a serious contender for the Republican presidential nomination. And that's too bad, because Mr Hunstman has been willing to say the unsayable about the Republican party in the United States, namely, that it is becoming the "anti-science party." This is an enormously important development. And it should terrify us.

To see what Mr Huntsman means, consider recent statements by the two men who actually are serious contenders for the Republican nomination: Rick Perry and Mitt Romney.

Mr Perry, the governor of Texas, recently made headlines by dismissing evolution as "just a theory," one that has "got some gaps in it," an observation that will come as news to the vast majority of biologists. But what really got people's attention was what he said about climate change: "I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. And I think we are seeing almost weekly, or even daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change."

That's a remarkable statement - or maybe the right adjective is "vile."

The second part of Mr Perry's statement is, as it happens, just false: the scientific consensus about man-made global warming - which includes 97% to 98% of researchers in the field, according to the National Academy of Sciences - is getting stronger, not weaker, as the evidence for climate change just keeps mounting.

In fact, if you follow climate science at all, you know that the main development over the past few years has been growing concern that projections of the future climate are underestimating the likely amount of warming. Warnings that we may face civilisation-threatening temperature change by the end of the century, once considered outlandish, are now coming out of mainstream research groups.

But never mind that, Mr Perry suggests; those scientists are just in it for the money, "manipulating data" to create a fake threat. In his book Fed Up, he dismissed climate science as a "contrived phoney mess that is falling apart."

I could point out that Mr Perry is buying into a truly crazy conspiracy theory, which asserts that thousands of scientists all around the world are on the take, with not one willing to break the code of silence. I could also point out that multiple investigations into charges of intellectual malpractice on the part of climate scientists have ended up exonerating the accused researchers of all accusations. But never mind. Mr Perry and those who think like him know what they want to believe and their response to anyone who contradicts them is to start a witch hunt.

So how has Mr Romney, the other leading contender for the Republican nomination, responded to Mr Perry's challenge? In trademark fashion: by running away. In the past, Mr Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts, has strongly endorsed the notion that man-made climate change is a real concern. But last week he softened that to a statement that he thinks the world is getting hotter, but "I don't know that" and "I don't know if it's mostly caused by humans." Moral courage!

Of course, we know what's motivating Mr Romney's sudden lack of conviction. According to Public Policy Polling, only 21% of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35% believe in evolution). Within the Republican party, wilful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So it's now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party's base wants him to believe.

And the deepening anti-intellectualism of the political right, both within and beyond the Republican party, extends far beyond the issue of climate change.

Lately, for example, the Wall Street Journal's editorial page has gone beyond its long-term preference for the economic ideas of "charlatans and cranks" - as one of former president George W Bush's chief economic advisers famously put it - to a general denigration of hard thinking about matters economic. Pay no attention to "fancy theories" that conflict with "common sense," the Journal tells us. Because why should anyone imagine that you need more than gut feelings to analyse things like financial crises and recessions?

Now, we don't know who will win next year's presidential election. But the odds are that one of these years the world's greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges - environmental, economic, and more - that's a terrifying prospect.