Sen. David Vitter has managed to secure an earmark in an upcoming labor, health and education financing bill for the Louisiana Family Forum, which The New Orleans Times Picayune reports has “taken the lead in promoting ‘origins science,’ which includes the possibility of divine intervention in the creation of the universe.”

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Yesterday’s news:

Via Matt Nisbet, I see that Gallup has asked a pretty careful polling question to determine what the public thinks about the hurricane-climate relationship. As I detail in Storm World, some past polls on this question were so poorly worded that few conclusions could be drawn from them.

Now Gallup has done a better job (although hardly a perfect one, as we’ll see) and the results are very interesting

Chris Mooney is Washington correspondent for Seed magazine and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Storm World. He will contribute to Big Head DC periodically through election 2008.

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Naomi Oreskes has an op-ed in the Post this morning on this subject, in anticipation of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report release tomorrow. I went over a lot of this ground in researching the new book, and there’s one detail I can never get over. John Tyndall discovered what we now think of as the greenhouse effect at pretty much the same time that Darwin published On the Origin of Species. In other words, the theoretical understanding of the behavior of greenhouse gases goes back just as far as the theory of evolution by natural selection.

That’s really something, when you think about it.

Chris Mooney is Washington correspondent for Seed magazine and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Storm World. He will contribute to Big Head DC periodically through election 2008.

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Despite his earlier jury duty concerns, he reports that he made it to part of the climate change hearing this afternoon — and Congress even plugged his book:

Now you know why he’s a BHDC All-Star. 

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Oh well. There’s a very important politicization of science hearing (PDF) on the Hill this morning, and jury duty is going to prevent me from going. I haven’t been picked for a trial yet, but my last “voir dire” also didn’t end by the end of the day yesterday…and the Superior Court has some bizarre rule about not being able to pay staff for any overtime hours. So all the potential jurors have to come back and finish the selection process today instead.

Maybe I’ll make it over for the end of the Waxman hearing if by some miracle I get off early. In any event, it looks like it’s going to be very important…the beginning of a new era for science and politics in Washington, no less.

Chris Mooney is Washington correspondent for Seed magazine and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming Storm World. He will contribute to Big Head DC periodically through election 2008.

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