PopSci: Why We're Shutting Off Our Comments
...If you carry out those results to their logical end--commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded--you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the "off" switch. Even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story.

A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science....

Welcome to the Age of Denial
...Meanwhile, climate deniers, taking pages from the creationists’ PR playbook, have manufactured doubt about fundamental issues in climate science that were decided scientifically decades ago. And anti-vaccine campaigners brandish a few long-discredited studies to make unproven claims about links between autism and vaccination.

The list goes on. North Carolina has banned state planners from using climate data in their projections of future sea levels. So many Oregon parents have refused vaccination that the state is revising its school entry policies. And all of this is happening in a culture that is less engaged with science and technology as intellectual pursuits than at any point I can remember.

Thus, even as our day-to-day experiences have become dependent on technological progress, many of our leaders have abandoned the postwar bargain in favor of what the scientist Michael Mann calls the “scientization of politics.”...

The Scientization of Politics
The politicization of science—or, as Michael Mann calls it, the scientization of politics—is a familiar reality for Americans concerned about climate change. Instead of focusing on how to address the problem, we've spent years debating whether there's scientific consensus that there is one (the answer is yes). That's the result of a dedicated campaign by corporate interests to spread doubt and discredit scientists.

Michael Mann has more experience with the process than most. Mann is a climatologist, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, and author of the books Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming and The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. In this talk, he discusses how to approach climate science in a politicized world....

Republicans Block Proposal For National Science Laureate, Fearing Science
...The proposal should have passed easily. But last week, Larry Hart, a former Republican congressional aide and current representative of the American Conservative Union (the country's oldest politically conservative lobbying group), sent a letter to House Republicans claiming that this position is far from benign. Hart writes that the laureate, appointed by President Obama, "will share his view that science should serve political ends, on such issues as climate change and regulation of greenhouse gases."...