Salt Lake City Tribune Wonders Why Just 6% of Scientists are Republicans

We Wonder How The Number Can Be as High as 6%

Apparently the scientific community has deserted the Republican party.  One poll showed that only 6% of self described scientists supports Republicans.

Barry Bickmore, a professor of geology at Brigham Young University and onetime Republican convention delegate in crimson-red Utah County in the nation’s reddest state, has pondered the issue at length.  . . .

He points to the 6 percent statistic from a 2009 Pew poll, and wondered aloud if any other voting group offered lower GOP support.

(There was, it turns out. Just 3 percent of black women voters gave their support to GOP candidate Mitt Romney in the last election, and the percentage of all blacks voting for him was double that.)

So is it reasonable to assume that the 6% of scientists who are staunch Republicans are a little wacko?  Well here’s the case for that theory.

Jim Callison says he’s not sure what’s behind the change.

A Republican and water scientist who oversees Utah Valley University’s Environmental Management Program, he suggested the rift is overblown. In his personal dealings with politicians, he said, he hasn’t perceived tension.

"The GOP is not as anti-science as they are portrayed," he said, pointing to the media as a big part of the perception. "It casts [Republicans] as uninformed and uneducated."

Callison is disappointed to see how science has become politicized, though he understands how climate change, for instance, became a sore point for the GOP, since the "cure is worse than the disease" with the prospect of carbon taxes or greenhouse gas trading.

Wow, the carbon taxes and carbon credits/trading is worse than global warming which can produce huge changes in the world’s climate, massive famine, destruction of all coastal property and the end of civilization as we know it. 

Yep, only the wacko scientists are left for the GOP.