how Bill Gray lost his way

The emotional center of the book is the story of how Bill Gray lost his way. Mooney demonstrates a lot of respect and interest in Gray’s career as a hurricane specialist, a man who helped point to the various cycles in weather that give us El Nino blips, a man whose empirical methods have helped create a superior system for predicting hurricanes. Gray’s a smart guy, no doubt, but his intellectual blind spot of irrational loathing for computer modeling has led him to abandon all pretense of scientific willingness to adjust your opinions based on evidence. Instead, he’s allowed the red carpet treatment given to him by right wingers who are only using him as an excuse to ignore global warming to harden his opinions against global warming because he personally doesn’t see a trend within his small sphere of research on hurricanes. Mooney sets you up to really appreciate Gray’s lifelong accomplishments, which makes it all the more pathetic to see him performing like a dancing pony for Republican ideologues whose respect for any science is based strictly upon partisan loyalties, and who don’t know about or care about niceties like the different between empirical science and more theory-heavy science. Gray’s got a lot of genuinely interesting scientific experience under his belt and is even an old-fashioned science-atheist, but nowadays he’s playing house with the very same people who believe that they can safely ignore reams of evidence for evolution and claim that a story about a snake in a garden should be treated as more likely because it soothes their egos more. Gray pisses a lot of people off with his ridiculous denials of global warming, but in Mooney’s hands, his story becomes something of a tragedy—a once-great man reduced to partisan circus tricks to distract and confuse the public.

http://pandagon.blogsome.com/2007/08/12/5878/