Putin is watching

(picture taken from DailyKos)

Does anyone have a pointer to Sarah Palin's views on climate disruption? She's a creationist so they are probably the least coherent of the 4 people at the top of the ticket.

McCain answers science debate questions

It's only fair to note that McCain's campaign has answered the science debate questions. You can view Obama's and McCain's answers side-by-side here.

I'll just echo what Bob Parks said:

Unable to arrange a face-to-face debate between Obama and McCain on science issues, the dedicated team at Science Debate 2008 asked for written responses to 14 questions. The 35 pages of staff-written responses they got back served only to make it clear why a face-to-face debate was needed – it would have had a time limit. I would wager the candidates didn’t even have time to read their responses. Maybe it should have been multiple-choice questions, or even true-false. We thank the organizers for seeing it through, but the answers didn’t "restore science and innovation to America’s political dialogue" as we all had hoped.

Obama answers Science Debate questions

Late last year, an online movement called Science Debate 2008 was started to try and get all the presidential candidates to have a debate focused on science. I threw my tiny support behind it.

The debate never happened but the organizers did get a list of 14 questions together and the Obama team has been the first to answer them.

On the climate and earth science front, the highlights are:

80% reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2050

cap-and-trade with all credits auctioned

restoring U.S. leadership in tackling climate disruption

Double basic science research budgets in 10 years

Increase reasearch and observations on the oceans

ratify the Law of the Sea Convention

A lot of this we already knew from his energy plan. Overall, I'm happy with the effort to get the candidates to focus on science and Obama's answers. We're still waiting for McCain's.