So climate skeptics of all stripes have an opportunity to demonstrate just how highly they value sound science. As the NY Times reports today, religious conservatives are hitching their anti-evolution agenda to the anti-AGW bandwagon. Now, as the readers of Climate Depot, Planet Gore, Watts Up With That, Reason's Hit & Run, and Tom Nelson well know, the evidence for evolution is indisputable. As the Times puts it, "there is no credible challenge" to Darwin's theory. Yet there persists this movement among Christian conservatives to teach Intelligent Design alongside evolution in public schools. Recent court rulings have blunted those efforts, so creationists are trying a new tack by linking up with climate skeptics. Since climate skeptics often talk about the need for sound science in the climate debate, I'm looking forward to reading in the aforementioned blogs about their distress at being co-opted by religious, anti-science ideologues. UPDATE: Randy Olson, in a recent interview with Marc Morano, elicits this:
RO: Are you an anti-evolutionist? MM: Haha, not at all. In fact, you know it's not an issue. The implication of your question is that somehow the skeptics are aligned with creationists. In all my years of dealing with Senator Inhofe the subject of creationism and evolution never even came up. Someone even did an analysis of it in our scientists report, and I think they may have only found one or two creationists out of 700-some names.
Is Marc Morano a Darwinian evolutionist? If so, that would certainly put him at odds with his former employer, Senator Inhofe. UPDATE: Kate Sheppard at the Blue Marble has a little fun with the emerging union between climate skeptics and anti-evolutionists:
Why stop at joining climate and evolution? Surely gravity and western medicine can't be far behind in the firing line for the "teach the controversy" crowd.
