It wasn't very long ago that a dinner party guest who wanted to spare the hostess any embarrassing contention simply avoided discussing religion or politics and stuck to the weather. Not anymore. In fact, it says something unutterably depressing about the state of the nation that we've finally managed to politicize even the climate.
Take, for example, the controversy that erupted on the eve of the global climate conference in Copenhagen, when hackers skeptical about global warming stole and released e-mails and documents from computers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain. The center is an important source of baseline historical data on climate change, and the hackers claim the e-mails show that scientists there manipulated, suppressed and even falsified numbers to make a case for global warming. Others who've looked at the material say taking e-mails out of context creates misleading impressions, and that the worst you can say about the British climatologists is that they evinced an arrogant desire to keep what they regarded as the skeptics' "junk science" out of peer review journals.
In either case, the unit's chief has stepped down and an investigation is underway. Far more interesting has been the immediate reaction by the enthusiasts who've labeled the affair -- what else? -- Climategate.
This week, former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin said the evidence of wrongdoing was clear and that President Obama should scrap plans to attend the conference. In Hollywood, two conservatives, screenwriter Roger L. Simon and filmmaker Lionel Chetwynd -- yes, Virginia, there are conservatives west of La Brea -- urged the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to take back the 2007 Oscar it gave Al Gore for the documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."
The impact of this autonomic red-
blue division often is amplified by the fact that we Americans are, by and large, technologically advanced but scientifically illiterate. Our national conversation is dominated by a culture of assertion rather than a respect for evidence reasonably assessed. Thus the endless wrangling over self-evident nonsense like creationism. It's precisely the insistence on treating a scientific theory, evolution, and an allegorical notion, creationism, with a faux evenhandedness that creates a situation in which 75% of Americans believe most scientists disagree over global warming.
