The G.O.P.’s War on Science Gets Worse - by Elizabeth Kolbert

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.

The vote on the NASA bill came just a week after the same House committee approved major funding cuts to the National Science Foundation’s geosciences program, as well as cuts to Department of Energy programs that support research into new energy sources.  As Michael Hiltzik, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, noted, the committee is “living down to our worst expectations.”

The practical implications of the proposed cuts are certainly disturbing.  (It’s going to be hard for D.O.E. to find new energy sources if it isn’t even looking for them.)  But perhaps even more distressing is the mindset that led to them.  The “I’m not a scientist” line is basically a declaration of willed ignorance.  You might think people entrusted by voters to craft public policy would be embarrassed to acknowledge, to paraphrase Colbert, that they have no idea what they’re talking about, and don’t want to.
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Cutting NASA and the N.S.F.’s climate-science budgets isn’t going to alter the basic realities of climate change.  No one needs an advanced degree to understand this.  Indeed, the idea that ignoring a problem isn’t going to make it go away is one that kids should grasp by the time they’re six or seven.  But ignoring a problem does often make it more difficult to solve.  And that, you have to assume, in a perverse way, is the goal here.  What we don’t know, we can’t act on.

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