Of course, you are correct in saying that they can’t stop research elsewhere. I don’t see how that helps the cause of humanity much when it comes to preparing for and mitigating the effects of AGW. We are a major contributor of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. If we don’t lower that contribution it’s bad for everyone else too and it also favors the argument: why should we cut our emissions if the Americans don’t. That very argument was used here vis a vis China.

Unlike IWIH, that wasn’t one I made up on the spur of the moment, it’s a term of art ™ in blogs and op ed pieces with comments.

ATL: the stuff written by the oped which the comments are about
BTL: Below The Line: the comments.

The line being the line separating the oped from the comments.

Oh, they’re already trying. See ATL for example.

“Do they take the results at face value?
Double check?”

Well they didn’t take Piltdown Man as real, though that may partly have been because NIH, and for the Europeans, IWIH (It Was Invented Here). Though look at the crying about Pluto and there’s a lot of american identity politics in their discoveries, even to the extent (as exemplified by Apple Corp) of expropriating other people’s work as if they invented it.

So, a mixed bag, pretty much like every other country of moderate sanity.

ATM, though, with the nutjobs in power, expect a lot less sanity and a lot more North Korea/Cold War Kremlin outpourings. Once you have self-deception, you can do any shit that “feels right” because you just have to tell yourself it feels right. Or even just pisses off those you think are The Bad Guys ™, because for the authoritarian and mean minded, anything that griefs “the bad guys” is justified by the ends.

Undoing the work of protecting the environment or welfare or anything Obama did is “right” because it MUST be that anything that nigger (and I use that term precisely because that is the term they are thinking when they think of any black guy who doesn’t play subservient, I’m not going to pretend they’re less irrationally racist than they are merely so I don’t use the terms they would when presenting their “feels”, even if I think the term is terrible. They use it BECAUSE it’s terrible, and censoring them in description only makes them seem less batshit) did MUST be wrong. Because he’s both the wrong party and, more importantly, the wrong race.

Whether their anti-science really extends beyond taking a massive public shit on anything Obama did remains to be seen, but I don’t see them being really worried about long term killing of the USA by killing science because they don’t like the inconvenient ramifications of the conclusions.

Cut funding for any scientist who dares to accept the reality of AGW, and fire any who insist on doing so.

Remember all that whining about how it’s a scam for grant money? Remember the number 1 tell of the rightwingnutjob, projection? They were just saying what they’d be doing if they were in power.

Well, now they’re in power and they’re gonna do it.