The discussion continues over at TPM Cafe; check it out here.

I do have a few other “down in the weeds” reactions to Mooney’s response to my first post.

First, Mooney is caught up on passing a judgment on which political party is better or worse at the politicization of science. He writes, “just because science is always to some extent politicized, that doesn’t mean that today’s Republicans and Democrats are equally guilty.” On this point we seem to be talking past each other. If the issue was campaign finance reform, Mooney would be talking about which party exploited the rules to a greater degree while I’d be talking about how to reform the system so that it works better for all participants. But to get past this, lets just postulate that Republicans have been more effective at exploiting science to achieve political ends. I have discussed this before here.

Second, Mooney’s better/worse tendency results in his mischaracterizing my perspective. He writes, “Pielke suggests that I am just as bad on this issue as Senate Environment and Public Works committee chair James Inhofe.” I suggested no such thing. Here is what I wrote, “Mooney’s argument adopts the exact same tactics of cherry picking and relying on convenient experts as does Senator Inhofe”. Mooney’s cherrypicking is not as significant as Senator Inhofe’s, clearly, given that Mooney is a pundit and the Senator is a policy maker. Without a doubt cherrypicking is endemic (even here at Prometheus!).


Third, Mooney demonstrates that he doesn’t get what Dan Sarewitz is arguing when he writes, “Sarewitz more or less suggests that we should just shrug off the political misuse or abuse of science–it’s no big deal.” Sarewitz does not say this at all, and given that Sarewitz writes often about science and politics, he clearly thinks that it is a big deal. Sarewitz argues that there is no point in trying to achieve political ends through realizing some agreement on scientific facts. I am sure that Sarewitz thinks, as I do, that we should always strive to have the best knowledge possible when making deicsions, but we would be foolish to think that we can adjudicate values discputes through debates over science. I discuss this in my secod post at TPM Cafe here.

Fourth, Mooney (and several commenters at Slate) asks us to “Consider the “intelligent design” movement, a well organized, PR-savvy crusade against evolution that masquerades as science even as it seeks to redefine science itself to include supernatural explanations within the fabric of inquiry. This goes far beyond mere “cherry picking,” and becomes a more fundamental assault on the nature of scientific knowledge itself.” Well lets consider ID. If you look at the data, a similar number of Democrats as Republicans support the teaching of ID in public schools, with only a slight advantage to Republicans. So are these Democracts who support ID also a party to the “war on science”? It is baffling to me how Mooney can just ignore such data that is inconvenient to his thesis. If anything, data on ID clearly supports my argument that we are looking at a phenomena that is much more complicated than can be described as Rep/Dem.

Finally, let me again thank Chris for the chance to discuss these topics at TPM Cafe. It is a pleasure to participate in an open and wide-ranging discussion of these important topics, even though Chris and I disagree.