Rare Self-declared ‘Conservative’ Scientist Thinking of Leaving the GOP Over Denialism
According to the conventional wisdom that liberals accept climate change and conservatives don’t, Kerry Emanuel is an oxymoron.
Emanuel sees himself as a conservative. He believes marriage is between a man and a woman. He backs a strong military. He almost always votes Republican and admires Ronald Reagan.
Emanuel is also a highly regarded professor of atmospheric science at MIT. And based on his work on hurricanes and the research of his peers, Emanuel has concluded that the scientific data show a powerful link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change.
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“I am a rare example of a Republican scientist, but I am seriously thinking about changing affiliation owing to the Republicans’ increasingly anti-science stance,” he wrote in an e-mail. “The best way to elevate the number of Republican scientists is to get Republican politicians to stop beating up on science and scientists.”
Prof. Emanuel is very well known among those who follow climate science, and he has often found himself in the middle of the tug-o-war over AGW.
As the McClatchy story discusses (at the link), very few scientists are self-declared as Republicans.
Given what looks like a now irreversible process of the atavists in this country coalescing around the Republican party and kicking out the modernists (who, historically, started the GOP), I find it hard to believe that any highly-educated, self-respecting, practicing scientist will want to remain affiliated with the GOP in the near future.