Journalists should treat fringe scientific claims with considerable skepticism and find out what major peer-reviewed papers or assessments have to sa… - Chris C. Mooney

When politicians use bad science to justify themselves, rather than good science to make up their minds, we can safely assume that wrongheaded and even disastrous decisions lie ahead.

To be sure, it remains up to policymakers to decide whether the economic costs of such preventative measures outweigh the benefits. But that key question isn’t even being properly debated. Instead, climate change has become an issue on which conservatives have elected to fight over science at least as much as over economics, relying on stunning distortions and a shocking disregard for both expertise and the most reputable sources of scientific assessment and analysis.
If this situation is maddening, it is also tragic. There may be no other issue today where a corruption of the necessary relationship between science and political decision-making has more potentially disastrous consequences. And together, James Inhofe and the Bush administration have made that corruption systematic and complete. Not only do they strive to prevent the public from understanding the gravity of the climate situation, but in sowing confusion and uncertainty, they help prevent us from doing anything about it. And this—this—is what the Right calls “rational, science-based thinking and policy-making.”

And then there’s religion, the source of the deepest fissure in the science-society relationship.