Le Mot Juste: Anti-science

Richard Cohen reviewed "An Inconvenient Truth" today (18 April). He says we should all see it; he says it'll scare us to death; he says it's probably the most important thing Al Gore has ever done - or anyone, maybe, in case you're tempted to snark that comment.

Read the column for why the movie matters.

I want to focus on this bit of it:

You cannot see this film and not think of George W. Bush, the man who beat Gore in 2000. The contrast is stark. Gore -- more at ease in the lecture hall than he ever was on the stump -- summons science to tell a harrowing story and offers science as the antidote. No feat of imagination could have Bush do something similar -- even the sentences are beyond him.

But it is the thought that matters -- the application of intellect to an intellectual problem. Bush has been studiously anti-science, a man of applied ignorance who has undernourished his mind with the empty calories of comfy dogma. For instance, his insistence on abstinence as the preferred method of birth control would be laughable were it not so reckless. It is similar to Bush's initial approach to global warming and his rejection of the Kyoto Protocol -- ideology trumping science.

This is as scary as anything in the movie - the drowing of Florida and Manhattan and Calcutta, the Katrina refugee crisis writ not just large but stunningly, hugely, devastatingly enormous.

Our President and his administration actively reject science. Whether it's because they don't understand it, or don't trust it, or truly don't think it matters, because the End Times are upon us, they actively attack science and all it stands for.

This is where we live. At the moment, it's the only place we've got.

We must do better.