Sometimes you put things in the platform of a political party because it's a lot of drama to exclude them even if you don't really believe. So we get hilarity like last week, with Republican candidate Mitt Romney disavowing some of his own platform (he doesn't believe it all personally, he said) and then this week the Democrats had the same problem; The official platform of the Democratic National Convention decided Jerusalem was no longer the capitol of Israel and they removed any mention of God.
If you, like me, are possessed with that gene that makes people eat the whole bag of chips (don't laugh - somewhere in
that 100,000 words of ENCODE public relations blitzing, I saw it), there is good news; not all of science is busy curing cancer and solving the big mysteries of the universe.
If you've been in science media for any length of time, there are two arguments you will hear invoked to support almost any questionable position; that Einstein did his best work while he was a patent clerk and that Galileo was oppressed by the Catholic Church.
One of those is wrong; Galileo was not actually oppressed by a Church, he was really oppressed by fellow scientists(1) , the Pope was actually quite supportive of Galileo but fellow scientists were looking for ways to torpedo him. Yet colloquially, Galileo is held up as this sort of 'religion against science' example in a way that shows many people believe it was some sort of unscientific Dark Age prior to his arrival. Not true at all.
Being on a UN committee to discuss climate change must be a lot of fun; you get to fly to exotic locations and no one ever expects you to get anything done. I guess that applies to the UN overall.
Bangkok held the latest meeting that accomplished nothing and everyone is gearing up now for the annual UN summit in Doha later this year, where the exciting news will be that they will take no further action on climate change this decade. Countries of the world, witness your tax dollars at work.
Since the early 1970s, all aspects of academia have skewed left. With that political shift, the confidence that scientists are neutral arbiters for the public good has also declined on both sides.
More Republicans than Democrats think the fix is in regarding a green 'agenda' and global warming whereas more Democrats than Republicans think scientists are shills for Big Ag, Big Pharm, etc. regarding food and vaccines. Basically, science can't win but there was a time when being an academic, and certainly a scientist, was impressive and not a presumption about a political world view. Getting into the political muck - and plenty of advocates for science recommend doing more of it, not less - has been a bad thing for credibility.
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