Krugman:

According to Public Policy Polling, only 21 percent of Republican voters in Iowa believe in global warming (and only 35 percent believe in evolution). Within the G.O.P., willful ignorance has become a litmus test for candidates, one that Mr. Romney is determined to pass at all costs.

So it’s now highly likely that the presidential candidate of one of our two major political parties will either be a man who believes what he wants to believe, even in the teeth of scientific evidence, or a man who pretends to believe whatever he thinks the party’s base wants him to believe.

What does it say about Americans, or more specifically, about Americans who support a candidate who expresses blatant anti-science beliefs?  What does it say about the future of a country attempting to compete in a world where countries are placing greater emphasis on science and the new technologies fueled by advancements in science?

Science should be a politics free zone safe from manipulation and bias by those who carry a political agenda.  And yet, here we are in 2011 where individuals gets demonized by right-wing ideologues, liars and fools for simply supporting the overwhelming consensus on climate change by the world’s scientists.

Only in a place Galileo could ever fully understand would the science of evolution and climate change be hot topics in a political campaign.

But the odds are that one of these years the world’s greatest nation will find itself ruled by a party that is aggressively anti-science, indeed anti-knowledge. And, in a time of severe challenges — environmental, economic, and more — that’s a terrifying prospect.

Madness.

UPDATE:

Here’s proof that long after rising sea levels have turned New York City into a modern day Atlantis and the last remaining polar bear has left for that big ice floe in the sky, there will still be some climate change deniers screaming out, “Hoax!!”

A few conservative Roman Catholics are pointing to a dozen Bible verses and the church’s original teachings as proof that Earth is the center of the universe, the view that was at the heart of the church’s clash with Galileo Galilei four centuries ago.

“Heliocentrism becomes dangerous if it is being propped up as the true system when, in fact, it is a false system,” said Robert Sungenis, leader of a budding movement to get scientists to reconsider. “False information leads to false ideas, and false ideas lead to illicit and immoral actions — thus the state of the world today.… Prior to Galileo, the church was in full command of the world, and governments and academia were subservient to her.”

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