Similarly, Perry’s skepticism on man-made global warming surely has much to do with the uses to which the scientific consensus on warming is put. It is enlisted as support for sweeping carbon controls that fail any cost-benefit analysis and gets spun into catastrophic scenarios that are as rigorous as Hollywood movie treatments. For all their talk of fidelity to science, global-warming alarmists bring to the issue an evangelical zeal to match that of the participants in Rick Perry’s Houston prayer meeting a few weeks ago.

Science is often just an adjunct to the Left’s faith commitments. A Richard Dawkins takes evolutionary science beyond its competence and argues that it dictates atheism. An Al Gore makes it sound as if there is no scientific alternative to his policy preferences. They are believers wrapping themselves in the rhetoric of science while lacking all the care and dispassionate reasoning we associate with the practice of it.

It is in this vein that Rick Perry is branded anti-science.