Michele Bachmann’s the GOP’s most prominent candidate. Unfortunately, she also has scientific views from the 15th century.

Most recently she claimed that both the recent earthquake and hurricane Irene were divine warnings. Insane.  And what’s truly frightening, she’s not alone.

To be a Republican is not to be against science by default. There are conservatives across every field of science and there are plenty of doctors and scientists who also vote GOP.  I want to lay that out there.  The problem is that as an institution, the Republican Party of today is determined to subvert, abolish and wipe clean from our memory the progress of science.

Bachmann was frantic and crazy:

“I don’t know how much God has to do to get the attention of the politicians. We’ve had an earthquake; we’ve had a hurricane. He said, ‘Are you going to start listening to me here?’”

And she was also vehemently anti-scientific. Hurricanes and earthquakes are phenomena of the natural world and they’re nothing new. We haven’t yet perfected the art of predicting them, but we do know, to a fairly good extent, how they work. I guarantee you they don’t exist to terrify congress.

Michele’s anti-empirical claims – like that one about magically making gas cost $2 a gallon - that global warming is based on ”manufactured science,” ”all voodoo, nonsense, hokum, a hoax,” that “carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas,” her Dark Ages, fingers-in-ears opposition to evolution—aren’t the exception.

It’s easy to laugh off Bachmann, quite easy.  But, once you realize that it’s the same story across the entire fleet of 2012 GOP contenders – Perry, Romney, Santorum, Bachmann, Gingrich, Paul, Cain – almost all denounce climate change, the existence of the EPA, and the veracity of evolution.

• Perry has described climate change as a fraud perpetrated by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data.”
• Santorum says human caused global warming is “patently absurd.”
• Paul’s stated he doesn’t “accept evolution as a theory.”

Bachmann, Paul, and Santorum all support the adoption of creationism in schools, with Romney and Gingrich taking ambiguous hybrid views on evolution. If one of them is elected president next year, a possibility, anti-scientific policies could make it to legislation.

The GOP’s refusal to believe the world’s smartest people isn’t accidental. It’s a genius strategy really. As the party of business, the GOP has to oppose scientific findings that threaten business.

That means denying climate change—because the reform to fix it would cost corporations money. That means pushing for the abolition of the EPA—because environmental regulations cost corporations money.  In order to fight for a society in which smokestacks flow freely and crude oil can be dumped into rivers, the science that says these things are bad and dangerous has to be suppressed, opposed and dismissed.

Science is crucial to the future of our country.  It’s crucial to our health, the health of our planet, the future economic situation in the United States and it’s incredibly crucial for the education of our children.  To deny science is dangerous, to try and put non-science such as creationism in our schools is ignorant and terrifying.  If the US doesn’t figure out how to bring back proper scientific education and research we will truly fall.

Below is a truly terrifying clip from Fox News:

If you dive into the weeds a little bit on this global warming thing, you see that it seems that facts are certainly on Huntsman’s side on all of this and fact checkers have come out, we’re actually having our own brain room look look at this right now that any of Perry’s comments don’t seem to hold a lot of water. It doesn’t matter. What’s resonating right now in South Carolina is helping Governor Perry tremendously and he fired back at Huntsman on global warming and gaining traction, facts or not.