Consider the following:
There are lessons in all this for America’s scientists, beginning with the reminder that politicians are always going to be better at politics than scientists are. The scientific community invested a great deal of its prestige ? its standing as an objective, non-partisan reporter ? in a public account of X that is now discredited. … Many of the nation’s most prominent X researchers openly joined one side in a partisan political debate, with all the demagogueries, lies, and exaggerations that partisan politics creates.
There are lessons, as well, for the rest of us, beginning with the reminder that politically useful science is always suspect.
The X in question is “stem cells.” In a new First Things article (not yet posted online), Joseph Bottum and Ryan T. Anderson explain how in November 2007 “the stem-cell wars came to a sharp and sudden end when leading scientists announced that they had discovered ways to create pluripotent stem cells without using ? much less killing ? human embryos.”
I replaced “stem cell” with an X, though, because I’m struck by the way in which the words “global warming” would fit within the same quotation. Experts such as Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, John Christy, Marlo Lewis, and Joel Schwartz have helped shed light on the way in which science has been misrepresented to support potentially harmful global warming policies.
