Why Living In A Dream World Is Dangerous

[Solitary]

It even becomes more dangerous when our leaders are living there instead of the real world we all live in.

y Elizabeth Kolbert
During last fall’s midterm election campaign, “I’m not a scientist” became a standard Republican answer to questions about climate change. The line seemed to invite parody, and Stephen Colbert (among others) obliged. He played clips of House Speaker John Boehner, then Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Florida Governor Rick Scott all offering, more or less word for word, the same refrain. “Everyone who denies climate change has the same stirring message,” Colbert observed. “ ‘We don’t know what the fuck we’re talking about.’ ”

The line workedâ€"or, at least, didn’t not workâ€"and Republicans won both houses of Congress. Now, it seems, they are trying to go one better. They are trying to prevent even scientists from being scientists.

Last week, the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, headed by Texas Republican Lamar Smith, approved a bill that would slash at least three hundred million dollars from NASA’s earth-science budget. “Earth science, of course, includes climate science,” Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat who is also on the committee, noted. (Smith said that the White House’s NASA budget request favored the earth sciences “at the expense of the other science divisions and human and robotic space exploration.”) Johnson tried to get the cuts eliminated from the bill, but her proposed amendment was rejected. Defunding NASA’s earth-science program takes willed ignorance one giant leap further. It means that not only will climate studies be ignored; some potentially useful data won’t even be collected.

The vote brought howls of protest from NASA itself and from wider earth-science circles. The agency’s administrator, Charles Bolden, issued a statement saying that the bill “guts our Earth science program and threatens to set back generations worth of progress in better understanding our changing climate.” In an opinion piece for the Washington Post, Marshall Shepherd, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Georgia and the former president of the American Meteorological Association, said that he could not sleep after hearing about the vote. “None of us has a ‘vacation planet’ we can go to for the weekend, so I argue that NASA’s mission to study planet Earth should be a ‘no-brainer,’ ” he wrote.

Read the full article by clicking the name of the source located below.
VIA Elizabeth Kolbert
SOURCE The New Yorker
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13 COMMENTS
ad nauseam May 19, 2015 at 1:21 pm
If the government isn’t helping to fund the research they want to do, then maybe they should try the private sector.
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obzen May 20, 2015 at 12:51 am
The private sector’s short-sightedness and meddling is why the government isn’t helping funding research.
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ad nauseam May 20, 2015 at 9:42 am
I don’t mean the people that voted in the GOP, I mean people that want to see this research funded.
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Mr DArcy May 19, 2015 at 1:30 pm
I am not a scientist, but I know enough about science (it works), to be a bloody fool to deny humanity’s part in global warming. Where do these idiots think that all that released CO2 goes to ?

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phil rimmer May 19, 2015 at 2:04 pm
Its an interesting ploy to deny your better educated opponents access to even better data.
Of course, knowing the details better will be hugely helpful in deciding how high to jump and how effective we are being.
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aroundtown May 19, 2015 at 7:31 pm
So much for the “good stewards” direction/principle from the holy book they espouse as being of paramount importance. The reality of our condition is a significantly different tale in actuality. The idea that the GOP is stripping funds from NASA’s earth-science budget for any reason other than serving their lobbyist profiteering interests is untenable. It’s all about money and profits, so business as usual really, and the Earth be damned. How these politicians can look their children in the face is beyond me. Selective amnesia is all I can come up with.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3085183/Apocalypse-Shocking-photos-mankind-s-destruction-planet.html
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bonnie May 19, 2015 at 7:55 pm

shocking photos
More shocking, a comment > notice how environmentalists find the worst examples as if it’s the norm.
How these politicians […]
Do the Mr. Burns test â€" serve a three-eyed fish.

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aroundtown May 19, 2015 at 8:07 pm
Yes, it never ceases to amaze how the deeply deluded plumb the depths of ignorance and then turn around and wave it like a flag of honor. When my mother was still alive she sent me a newspaper clipping that touched on the depleted oceans that I was always harping on about. It showed a man sitting at a dinner table looking at an empty plate and he exclaims that he ordered the catch of the day, and the waiter says, that is the catch of the day, sir.

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bonnie May 19, 2015 at 8:23 pm
never ceases to amaze…
Me too.

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obzen May 20, 2015 at 8:35 am
See, they’ll be ok. They’ll sit in the senate, after their daddy, and so on, and so forth.
It’s a bit like wiretapping and mass surveillance. It’s ok to do it, just don’t do it to senators.

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Miserablegit May 20, 2015 at 1:05 am
We appear to live in an era which gives the impression of worshipping ignorance.

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Gerry May 20, 2015 at 2:28 am
Maybe there’s a reason that folks from other nations come to America for university training in the sciences. If this type of nonsense continues, I can see a day when Americans will be travelling overseas for university training in the sciences.

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Stafford Gordon May 20, 2015 at 3:49 am
I’ve seen a video of an exchange between a House Committee “member” and a scientist, and it took my breath away.
The “member” advocated going out onto the street and asking a passer by about their opinion on global warming, pointing out that that would indicate the majority view.

The scientist’s response was to say that he always enjoyed talking to said “member”.
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[AllPurposeAtheist]

Well......

If a man fills his apartment with junk up to the ceiling, we call him crazy. If a woman has 100 cats in her trailer home, we say she's nuts. But when someone hoards enough wealth to impoverish a nation, so that children go hungry and bridges collapse for want of maintenance, that person is called a "success" and featured on the cover of Forbes.

[Solitary]

Most of them are church owners and their cohorts, the politicians, with their followers that own stock the law makers make sure they keep, and bale them out when they are too stupid to run their companies right.  Solitary

[AllPurposeAtheist]

[Unbeliever]

I'd guess that the conservatives all have large holdings in coat-hanger companies and weapons of vast catastrophe. Science and reason don't play into their quest for ultimate power, nor does the suffering of the "huddled masses yearning to breathe."

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Republicans do invest in science, but none that doesn't turn a buck short term or benefits society at large..It's all in weapons and ways to control people..