So is the sky gonna fall, is Texas gonna sink, and are Florida’s Everglades gonna dry up now that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio each chairs a Senate subcommittee with responsibility for science? Cruz has NASA, atmosphere and science policy in his group, while Rubio has NOAA in his.

Probably not, says Roger Pilke, director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research.

“I think we should expect business as usual, with a few new faces,” he says. “I don’t expect Republican revolution of the sort we saw in ‘94, but who knows.”

[snip]

Even skeptics like Rubio and Cruz don’t have the juice to defund, gut or kill NASA, an agency closely tied to the national identity and scientific research, or NOAA, which provides weather forecasting information to the airline and shipping industries, and has jobs “that show up all over the country,” Pilke says. “It’s not quite pork, but they’re spread around nicely.”

He does suggest that the science community needs to try to figure out how to work with these people. “It’s not easy, I know, but a more confrontational approach going forward doesn’t help the agency and help policy.”

I remain astonished that science has become a partisan issue. It’s now an article of faith in the Republican party that climate change is not happening, that scientists keep saying it is only because they want grants from the federal government to study it, and that it’s squishy Democrats and liberals that believe in that stuff. Manly Republicans and conservatives know better.

What caused this split?