Whereas good science is rewarded for being painstaking and nuanced, politics is the enemy of subtlety. - Chris C. Mooney

You can't prove what's going to happen in the future," explains Naomi Oreskes, who has written extensively on the uses of modeling. "But that doesn't mean you don't have a rational basis for action.

The emergence of the religious right onto the political stage in the 1970s—motivated in part by its adherents’ resentment of the nation’s intellectual and scientific elites—was also a major factor in curtailing the role of science in public policy.

At the same time (i. e., 1994), the Republican party continued to define itself in adulation of Reagan and in opposition to mainstream science.