Scientists and Engineers for America

Thanks to Steam Geek I happened to be looking at the Scientists and Engineers for America website and saw their latest bit of humor:

Here is a list of questions for candidates issued by the brand new organization Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA). If this seems to be coming a little late it is because SEA is about a month old! They were formed to counteract attacks on and censorship of science by politicians, much of which I have reported on here.

I urge you to contact all candidates offices in your area and quiz them on these questions and take note of their answers. I have sent them to three pairs of candidates: Steve Harrison vs. Vito Fossella (NY-13); Clarie McCaskill vs. Jim Talent (MO Senate); and Tammy Duckworth vs. Peter Roskam (IL-6). I choose these races because either they are close to me, or because one side accuses the other of being anti-science and I want to report on what BOTH sides have to say. I will report any responses (if any!) Monday. If you do the same, please let me know.

Scientists and Engineers for America Candidate Questions:

1. Do you support the Science and Engineering Bill of Rights (www.sefora.org)?

2. Do you support lifting the President's ban on the use of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research given appropriate ethical guidelines

3. Should emergency contraception as recommended by FDA scientific staff and advisory committees be available over the counter for all women of childbearing age?

4. Do you endorse immediate and significant actions to diminish the effects of global warming caused primarily by burning fossil fuel and other human activity?

As I recently reported, Republican attacks on science have led pissed off scientists, including some fourteen Nobel Prize winners, to form an organization called "Scientists and Engineers for America (SEA)."

SEA has gotten off to a good start, though it remains to be seen if they can get going fast enough to affect this year's elections. But SEA has already done what has become a nearly necessary ritual for politics rgese days: gone on the Colbert Report.

If you want to see a Nobel Prize winning scientist talk with Colbert (and sit there watching him flip nis Nobel Prize like a coin), here's the footage:

It is good to see my fellow scientists finally realizing the threat right wing fanaticism poses in America today. I joined SEA two weeks ago and have already had some email discussions with them regarding Congressional races. Come on and support science but joining Scientists and Engineers for America.

As a scientist, one of the things that has horrified me the most about the current practices of the Republican Party is their anti-sceince, almost "Dark Ages" thinking. I have previously written about the right wing Intelligent Deception campaign against the teaching of Evolution, and the right wing Denial Lobby that falsely claims that global warming science is "junk science" and that scientists don't agree about whether global warming is real.

Peter Roskam (a personal injury lawyer running against Iraq vet and Democrat Major Tammy Duckworth in the IL-6 CD) is the latest Republican to publicly make these claims.

For the record, according to people I talk to at GISS, a joint NASA/Columbia U program, about 90+% of scientists agree that global warming is happening and the debate now among climatologists really comes down to just how fucked we are and how short our window of opportunity is to mitigate the effects,

But what horrifies me the most is the outright censorship of science that the Republicans are engaging in. The head of GISS, Jim Hansen, went public on 60 Minutes&lt describing the censorship he faces in his scientific reports and lectures from the Bush Administration. Republican Joe Barton (TX-6) threatens global warming scientists with loss of funding and Congressional investigations if they don't toe the Republican denial line on global warming. Hell, the Bush Administration has even quietly removed study of "the Home Planet" from the NASA mission statement, thus potentially hampering more research into climate change.