NYT’s Dennis Overbye is just a little bit verklempt:

All right, I was weeping too.

To be honest, the restoration of science was the least of it, but when Barack Obama proclaimed during his Inaugural Address that he would “restore science to its rightful place,” you could feel a dark cloud lifting like a sigh from the shoulders of the scientific community in this country.

As Overbye himself admits, this is just a few pixels in the big picture, where issues like healthcare, economic stimulus, and troop levels rule the headlines, but it has great symbolic and practical import.

Great symbolic import, because the scientific ethos is so diametrically opposite to BushCo’s faith-and-propaganda-based approach:

[Scientific] values, among others, are honesty, doubt, respect for evidence, openness, accountability and tolerance and indeed hunger for opposing points of view….

Nobody appeared in a cloud of smoke and taught scientists these virtues. This behavior simply evolved because it worked.

How refreshing that is after eight years of secrets and lies, of ideology trumping reality.  If we’re lucky, this same mindset will be applied to a wide range of problems, not just the obviously scientific ones.  Although I would counsel wariness on the tolerance and hunger for opposing points of view.  It’s okay to hear them out, but you don’t have to actually go along with them if they’re total rubbish that’s been empirically disproved (I’m looking at you, economic team).

And great practical import, because if we drift another eight years without meaningful action on global warming, Earth will have a lot more desert and a lot more ocean for centuries to come.  Letting scientists back on the bus means an administration that takes the climate crisis seriously and looks for practical solutions, rather than the climate equivalent of abstinence education ("we’ll just adapt to our new underwater desert planet and become mer-Fremen!").  It also means an administration that might actually lead on global warming, rather than passively observing or actively obstructing.

Not everyone likes the honest, questioning, truth-seeking approach, but it’s probably the only way out of the various messes in which we find ourselves.  It’s also more consistent with the ideals of democracy:

It is no coincidence that these are the same qualities that make for democracy and that they arose as a collective behavior about the same time that parliamentary democracies were appearing. If there is anything democracy requires and thrives on, it is the willingness to embrace debate and respect one another and the freedom to shun received wisdom. Science and democracy have always been twins.

More science, and more democracy, please.  If something’s not working, I want a president who will admit the error and fix it, not double down on it and spin it as a success.