The New York Times can make even a local museum opening into an opportunity to fight the Trump presidency. On Sunday, Nick Madigan came out fighting for science under a loaded partisan headline: “A Shrine to Science Rises as Science Comes Under Siege.”
Madigan was ostensibly marking the long-delayed opening of a sleek new science museum in Miami with a 500,000-gallon aquarium tank, but waited only three paragraphs before lighting into Florida’s Republican governor for insufficient panic in the face of the theory of “climate change,” the emergency nature of which the paper has been trying to convince the public of for years (that is, when it’s not appealing to its well-heeled readership by sponsoring $135,000 tours “Around the World by Private Jet” on a Boeing 757.)
The museum’s high-profile opening is especially significant in a state imperiled by rising sea levels and overseen by a governor, Rick Scott, who has said he is unconvinced that climate change and global warming are real and whose administration is widely reported to have set an unwritten policy that state agencies refrain from using the terms.
Madigan sold the story on Twitter the same way: “My NYT story re. new science museum in Florida, where the governor dismisses the idea of global warming.”
“The problem is not that people don’t believe in science, but that they pick and choose which science they want to believe,” Frank Steslow, a microbiologist appointed a year ago as the museum’s president, said on a recent morning while walking around the four-acre site. “I don’t know that we need to do anything other than be who we are and present the facts and be a resource for everybody.”
Presumably Steslow's accusation applies to liberals who are irrationally afraid of vaccines, nuclear power, and genetically modified foods, and embrace astrology and U.F.O. citings to a greater degree than conservatives.
As workers swarmed over the site -- near the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts -- Mr. Steslow pointed to interactive exhibits about the fragile South Florida ecosystem, including one on the vast but shrinking Everglades wetlands, and the varied animal species, many of them endangered, that call the region home.
....
“It’s not a good time to be a scientist, unfortunately,” Dr. [Roni] Avissar said. “It seems very strange to me that there is at least a perceived lack of interest in the political community for scientific support.”
The implication seeped into the photo captions: "...The museum’s high-profile opening is especially significant in a state imperiled by rising sea levels.”
