Leftwing environmentalist Washington Post columnist Chris Mooney has made something of a cottage industry out of lampooning what he considers conservatives’ “science denial” in four books. Count ’em:

• The Republican War on Science, 2005
• Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle over Global Warming, 2007
• Unscientific America—How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, 2009 (with Sheril Kirshenbaum, who holds Ph.D.’s graduate degrees in meteorology and climatology marine biology and policy)
• The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality, 2012

It appears that what Mooney means by “deny science” and “war on science” and “scientific illiteracy” is any disagreement with what Mooney thinks about science—especially Green, environmental science, and super-especially “climate science,” which Mooney takes to be some monolith of unanimous opinion among all persons qualified to talk about, oh, physics, chemistry, geophysics, solar physics, atmospheric physics, atmospheric chemistry, meteorology, climatology, oceanography, paleoclimatology, astronomy, and any other scientific specialty that might contribute insight into what happens if we add a little carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

Mooney, of course, already knows what happens when we add a little CO2 to the atmosphere. Catastrophe!

And anybody who disagrees is a “science denier” engaged in a “war on science” driven by “scientific illiteracy” that is the peculiar trait of Republicans and other conservatives.

Mooney has outstanding qualifications to make these judgments. He earned his most advanced only degree, a Ph.D. in Physics B.A. in English, from Yale in 1999. His parents were a meteorologist and an oceanographer English teachers. His expertise in climate science derives from his grandfather, whom Wikipedia identifies as one of the world’s foremost climatologists “a biologist … and author of Textbook of Limnology” (the study of the global climate system biological, chemical, and physical features of lakes and other bodies of fresh water).

Mooney’s long professional experience tops off his outstanding scientific credentials. Before joining WaPo, he wrote about science and the environment for Mother Jones and hosted a weekly podcast. Before that he spent a decade as a freelance writer, podcaster and speaker, with his work appearing in Science, Nature, Journal of Climate, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Wired, Harper’s, Slate, Legal Affairs, The Los Angeles Times, The Post and The Boston Globe.

So obviously New York Times columnist John Tierney has no business taking Mooney on about “the Republican war on science” in an article in City Journal that I came across after reading his “Trump and Science,” also in City Journal. Although Tierney, like Mooney, is a Yale graduate (subject unnamed in his NYT bio and Wikipedia entry), he lacks the many years of Mooney’s experience between 1999 and 2005, when Mooney’s first book, The Republican War on Science, appeared. Tierney only graduated from Yale in 2002, three years after Mooney 1976, the year before Mooney was born. He spent the 1993–94 academic year as a fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center in New York researching media coverage of environmental issues, when Mooney was in high school.

Tierney joined The Times in 1990 as a general assignment reporter. He worked on assignments covering AIDS in Africa, the 1992 Presidential election, and new information technologies. From 1995 to 1998, as a staff writer for The Times Magazine, he wrote about with topics such as the Internet, recycling, the history of Brooklyn, rent control, a human-computer Scrabble championship, political advertising, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a hypothetical expedition to Mars, and a real expedition by dogsled in the Arctic.

His 1990 article “Betting the Planet,” describing a wager about natural resources between the economist optimist Julian Simon and the ecologist pessimist Paul Ehrlich (Simon won), has been widely cited and reprinted. His 1996 article, “Recycling Is Garbage,” which called recycling one of the most wasteful activities in America, attracted more letters than any article ever published in The Times Magazine.

Obviously Mooney’s degree in English and sixteen-year career as a journalist make him better qualified than Tierney, with his unidentified degree and measly forty-year career as a journalist, to write about science.

Nonetheless, Tierney, like little David confronting mighty Goliath, takes Mooney on in “The Real War on Science,” in City Journal. It isn’t pretty. Here’s how he begins:

My liberal friends sometimes ask me why I don’t devote more of my science journalism to the sins of the Right. It’s fine to expose pseudoscience on the left, they say, but why aren’t you an equal-opportunity debunker? Why not write about conservatives’ threat to science?

My friends don’t like my answer: because there isn’t much to write about. Conservatives just don’t have that much impact on science. I know that sounds strange to Democrats who decry Republican creationists and call themselves the “party of science.” But I’ve done my homework. I’ve read the Left’s indictments, including Chris Mooney’s bestseller, The Republican War on Science. I finished it with the same question about this war that I had at the outset: Where are the casualties?

Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced? Yes, the book reveals that Republican creationists exist, but they don’t affect the biologists or anthropologists studying evolution. Yes, George W. Bush refused federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but that hardly put a stop to it (and not much changed after Barack Obama reversed the policy). Mooney rails at scientists and politicians who oppose government policies favored by progressives like himself, but if you’re looking for serious damage to the enterprise of science, he offers only three examples.

All three are in his first chapter, during Mooney’s brief acknowledgment that leftists “here and there” have been guilty of “science abuse.” First, there’s the Left’s opposition to genetically modified foods, which stifled research into what could have been a second Green Revolution to feed Africa. Second, there’s the campaign by animal-rights activists against medical researchers, whose work has already been hampered and would be devastated if the activists succeeded in banning animal experimentation. Third, there’s the resistance in academia to studying the genetic underpinnings of human behavior, which has cut off many social scientists from the recent revolutions in genetics and neuroscience. Each of these abuses is far more significant than anything done by conservatives, and there are plenty of others. The only successful war on science is the one waged by the Left. [emphasis added]

The danger from the Left does not arise from stupidity or dishonesty; those failings are bipartisan. Some surveys show that Republicans, particularly libertarians, are more scientifically literate than Democrats, but there’s plenty of ignorance all around. Both sides cherry-pick research and misrepresent evidence to support their agendas. Whoever’s in power, the White House plays politics in appointing advisory commissions and editing the executive summaries of their reports. Scientists of all ideologies exaggerate the importance of their own research and seek results that will bring them more attention and funding.

But two huge threats to science are peculiar to the Left—and they’re getting worse.

From there things just, well, get worse—for Mooney and other Lefties who accuse conservatives of “science denial.” Tierney lists and documents some of the Left’s sins against science, such as confirmation bias (“the well-documented tendency of people to seek out and accept information that confirms their beliefs and prejudices”) and the resulting groupthink, both of which are ubiquitous among advocates of Mooney’s catastrophist view of manmade global warming. In the process he identifies casualties to scientists, scientific endeavor, the reputation of science, and ordinary people harmed by bogus science.

I only have a B.A. in interdisciplinary studies (University of Southern California, 1978, the year after Mooney was born)—oh, yes, and a M.A. in economic ethics (International College, 1983, when Mooney was six) and a Ph.D. in history of political thought (University of St. Andrews, 2003, four years after Mooney earned his only degree), ten years as a newspaper and magazine reporter, editor, and publisher, eight as a college professor (in history, economics, environmental ethics, and worldview, among other subjects), eight as a graduate-school professor (in history, ethics, theology, logic, and political philosophy, among other subjects), and ten years leading a network of over sixty scholars (natural scientists—including climate scientists—economists, and theologians) addressing environmental stewardship and economic development for the poor (all superimposed on 30 years as a freelance writer, author of a dozen books, including three on the interplay of population, resources, and the environment, and editor of about twenty books—including one on the philosophy of science). Shouldn’t I therefore bow and scrape before the magnificent Mooney?

But Tierney’s article, the whole of which rewards reading, reassured me: I need not bow before Mooney. Neither need you, dear reader.