Perhaps you think that science, of all things, should be above politics.  After all, the whole idea of the scientific method is to divorce our efforts to understand the physical world from the misdirecting influences of political power and groupthink.  In science, there is only one relevant question:  Does the best available evidence support or refute the hypothesis at hand?  How could politics possibly get mixed up in that?

The simple answer is, this is human affairs.  And in human affairs, when money and power are at stake (and sometimes, even when they are not), people are going to form themselves into teams and tribes to fight it out.  Evidence?  What's that?

You probably have seen polls showing very large gaps in opinions on the subject of "climate change" between Republicans and Democrats.  For example, this Gallup poll from March found that 66% of Democrats "worry a great deal about climate change," while only 18% of Republicans do so.  That's rather a huge divide, although not quite complete polarization.  

However, as things are now playing out in our Congress and in the courts, the polarization on the issue of climate change is nearing one hundred percent.  Democrats are in complete unanimity in declaring climate change to be a crisis and demanding massive government-directed "solutions," while Republicans have fewer and fewer non-skeptics in their ranks.  I'm old enough to remember that the Republican presidential candidates in both 2008 (McCain) and 2012 (Romney) had drunk the climate Kool Aid.  (I actually went to a fund-raiser for Romney in 2012, only to hear him deliver a talk that was largely about how he was going to solve the climate crisis by some kind of new coercive regime.)  Those days are over.  Can anybody name a member of the younger generation of Republicans in Congress who is not a skeptic? 

When I went out last night for my walk with the dog, the Empire State Building was lit up in brilliant green, presumably in honor of Earth Day. . . . The spire on the new One World Trade Center was a similar shade of bright green.  We should all join in feeling warm and fuzzy that we are saving the planet!

Call me a grinch, but I don't want to be associated with the people who promote Earth Day.  Not that I have anything against being a good steward of the environment.  I even picked up the litter on the sidewalk as I walked down the block!  But Earth Day has a very unfortunate association with people who have used the promotion of phony environmental scares in the effort to impose authoritarian government on the people.  Forty-eight years after the first Earth Day in 1970, the scares that got the thing going look, frankly, ridiculous in retrospect.  Yet somehow, instead of developing a healthy skepticism of those who promote scary sin-and-redemption fantasies to aggrandize their own power, we've just moved on from the old fantasies to a whole crop of new and equally phony scare stories.  And even more people seem to have bought into them.  Is there any chance that today's environmental scare stories will look any less ridiculous forty-eight years from now?