Earthtalk

The key piece of information was the part about  personality types and political views with conservative brains tending toward authoritarian politics.  If data disagrees with your beliefs then suppress the data.   This attitude underlies all sorts of political thinking that influences policy, especially when the GOP is in power. 

One of the most conservative places I have lived was Richland, Washington, home of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation and probably has more PhD's per capita than nearly any other city of comparable size (about 90,000 back in the 1970's).  In spite of all those highy educated folks, a liberal friend who recently retired from Battelle NW  lab in Richland, tells me the city and entire area is rampantly conservative and pro-creationist, including  many of the professionals on the reservation. 

Starting with the Manhattan Project, data suppression and secrecy was a way of life for Hanford managers (think coverups of radioactive waste spills and decades  of deliberate stack emissions of radioactive iodine).  Up until the late 1970's, Hanford geologists denied the presence of any significant faults on the reservation (faults = earthquakes = problems for waste disposal = cutting of funding).  At the same time it was increasingly clear to outside geologists that significant faults where present.  By the early 1980's a new generation of Hanford geologists (including  my friend) were mapping faults all over the reservation.  Last year a university geologist documented an active fault crossing the reserve, the Cascade Range, and ending near Seattle.  This is a seemingly small example of data manipulation but it was highly relevant to the future disposal of high level radioactive waste, a problem we have yet to solve and one for which Obama took a huge step backwards by ignoring science and cancelling the Yucca Mountain project.  

Multiply this type of behavior, self-preservation via denial of facts, across all our government agencies and you have a huge problem.  Overlay this innate agency behavior with an administration whose policy is to distort data and reality for political gain (weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) and the costs and dangers become immense.  Add to that a private sector doing the same thing (ignoring all data indicating trickle-down  economics does not work or that tax breaks for the wealthy do no improve the economy) and our downward spiral seems inevitable.   Universities,  once a counterbalancing force for questioning authority and seeking truth have evolved into job trainers feeding bodies into the status quo machine.  A great way to control the message is to replace live professors with cookie cutter on-line courses.  Besides a cheaper alternative, you eliminate off-the-cuff remarks and spontaneous classroom discussions fraught with questions that the university-industrial complex does not want to hear.   The next 50 years will be ugly as we wade around in rising sea water wearing blindfolds and wondering why our feet are wet.

Here is a classic example of how a scientist with a revolutionary idea was ridiculed by his peers for nearly 3 decades but eventually proven correct.  The geologic community at that time refused to believe his "radical" explanation for what he had been mapping in eastern Washington.  In 1923 J. Harlen Bretz, a University of Chicago geologist, published his first 2 papers on the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington.  His detractors were viscous in their criticisms since Bretz was proposing the Scablands were formed by a gigantic flood and not by glaciers as was the popular notion at the time.  He was proposing a catastrophic event had occurred at a time when geologists had replaced the idea of “catastrophism” to explain geologic processes with the more believable principle of “uniformitarianism”. 

    Bretz continued his research through the 1920's and 30's undeterred by the nay-sayers, many of whom were the leading geologists of their time. As the years passed opponents found it increasingly difficult to explain away his evidence that a gigantic flood (eventually the number increase to 24 flood events) swept across eastern Washington, scouring out broad, deep channels called coulees in what was a split second of geologic time.  The coulees were far too large (several hundred feet deep in some cases and over a mile wide), to have been carved by the tiny streams flowing through them.  He mapped deposits of sands and boulder gravels at elevations too high for any modern-sized stream or normal-sized glacial meltwater stream to have deposited.  There was plenty of additional evidence piling up that I will not describe but Bretz had one huge problem, he had no idea where the water came from!

    During that same period, another prominent geologist, Joseph Pardee, was mapping glacial lake deposits and shorelines in western Montana.  When he heard Bretz describe his flood hypothesis at a conference he knew instantly where the water came from, his Glacial Lake Missoula.  He estimated the lake to have been about half the size of Lake Michigan and nearly 2000 feet deep at the glacial dam that blocked the Clark Fork River east of Spokane Washington, easily large enough to at least once to have burst through the glacial dam and pour across Washington. He did not share this information with Bretz at first, waiting until he had completed his own research on the lake.  Eventually they did collaborate and Bretz finally had his water source and the rest is history.  It is now recognized as the largest known flood in earth history and is still being studied.  At its peak, the largest of the floods, the Bretz Flood, discharged water at 45 mph and volumes that were ten times greater than the combined flow of all the rivers on earth!  The flow was so great that it could not readily flow through Wallula Gap along the present Columbia River even though the gap is several thousand feet deep and over a mile across.  A huge lake formed above the gap as the flood waters poured through at reduced rates.  Sediments deposited in this lake were shown in the 1970's  to represent at least 24 individual flood events. 

    My point in this example is that it illustrates well how science works.  With perseverance, sound hypotheses will eventually be accepted as fact even in the face of strong opposition.  Bretz had the data and was not prevented from publishing it and turned out to be proven correct by hundreds of geologists since his last published work in 1959.  Beliefs based on faith are not science and can never be proven or disproved and have no place in a serious, factual-based conversations on the origins of the universe, earth, global warming, or life.  By-the-way, the great Missoula Flood story offers no support for the idea of Noah’s flood.  There is zero scientific evidence for Noah’s flood and by now some latter day Bretz certainly would have found it if it existed, after all, it supposedly covered the entire earth.

It is my belief that a significant number of off road vehicle owners are selfish, arrogant, and aggressively antisocial. These people assume that their so-called freedoms take precedent over all others, even when they destroy resources held in common by us all.  As a geologist, I have spent a substantial amount of time conducting field research in the wilderness and near-wilderness over the years. During the past two decades this work required that I drive thousands of miles of jeep trails in  four-wheel drive vehicles during which time I have encountered the full range of ORV owners from ranchers herding cattle to yahoos shredding hillsides for the fun of it.  There are legitimate, work-related uses for ORV’s and, in my experience, such users are overwhelmingly courteous and law-abiding on the trails. With 36 million ORV owners, it is clear that regulations are needed, including requiring adequate noise abatement devices.  It is the estimated 15 to 20 percent of the users who are hell-bent on tearing up public lands who need to be punished and the federal government must provide the resources to do so.