If conservatives are wrong to be skeptics of climate science, why won’t liberals accept the science around the safety of GMOs? Most of us learn in grade school that religious authorities in the 17th century condemned Galileo as a heretic for arguing, based on astronomical observations, that the earth revolves around the sun. One of the morals of the story is that those who oppose science end up looking foolish in history books. But that lesson has somehow failed to take hold in our modern politics. On scientific issue after scientific issue, it is not objective reality but people’s passions and biases that tend to color the debate.
Take the oddly contradictory issues of climate change and genetically modified organisms (GMOs). There is near-universal consensus among the world’s scientists that man-made pollutants are trapping heat in the atmosphere and wreaking havoc on the environment. Yet when pollsters ask voters whether they believe temperatures are climbing because of human activities, most Democrats say yes and most Republicans say no. Democrats may wag their fingers contemptuously at this, but the pot would be calling the kettle black, because many of them are just as stubbornly skeptical on the issue of genetically improved foods, even though the scientific consensus about their virtues is no less universal. Either way, such denials of scientific consensus read like newly discovered scenes from a 17th century play. Why is this still happening?