Droplets of condensation may make a cold can of beer look more appealing on a hot day, but they're also making that frosty brew warm up faster. So here's some news you can use: If it's hot and humid, put a cover over your can of cold beverage. And if you want to warm up a frozen can quickly, don't bake it. Steam it.

That's exactly what University of Washington researchers did in a series of experiments to show how the warming power of condensation applies to issues ranging from colder beer to hotter climates.

The beer-can study, published in the April issue of Physics Today, began a couple of years ago when UW atmospheric scientist Dale Durran was looking for a way to explain how condensation produced heat as the flip side of evaporative cooling. The cooling effect is well-known — we feel it when sweat evaporates to cool us off in the summer time, or when we turn on a mist cooler. But the flip side of the effect is less widely understood.

Durran figured out that the condensation on a cold aluminum can might serve as a handy illustration. He did a quick back-of-the-napkin calculation, and found that the heat released by water just 100 microns (four thousandths of an inch) thick should heat its contents by 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius).

"I was surprised to think that such a tiny film of water would cause that much warming," Durran said in a UW news release.

He recruited a fellow atmospheric scientist at UW, Dargan Frierson, to conduct the initial experiment ... in Frierson's basement bathroom. First, they set a can of beverage on the toilet tank and warmed it up with a space heater. Then they took another can, turned on the shower and let the bathroom get nice and steamy. Each time they ran the experiment, the researchers stuck a thermometer through the can's pop-top opening and watched the temperature rise over the course of 15 minutes.

Mariusz Kaldon

Droplets of condensation on a chilly can are a signal that the temperature inside is rising.

Frierson said conditions got a little sticky in the steamed-up bathroom. "I think that's the most uncomfortable my research has ever made me — but it's all for science," he told NBC News.

Even though the air temperature was the same in both cases, the liquid in the steamed-up can warmed up twice as fast. The researchers followed up on the basement-bathroom findings with more rigorous lab experiments. Every time, the cans warmed up more quickly in more humid conditions.

The researchers even charted how quickly 12-ounce aluminum cans of chilled liquid should warm up, depending on different levels of temperature and humidity. For example, in five minutes, the can should get 6 degrees F (3 degrees C) warmer due to condensation amid New Orleans' typical summer conditions. The equivalent warm-up factor would be 3.5 degrees F (2 degrees C) in New York, and 2 degrees F (1 degree C) in Seattle. But in Dhahran, a Saudi city that ranks among the hottest, stickiest places in the world, the can would get about 14 degrees F (8 degrees C) warmer in five minutes.

That's why covering a cold can is a such a good idea on a steamy-hot summer day. "Probably the most important thing a beer koozie does is not simply insulate the can, but keep condensation from forming on the outside of it," Durran said.

The effects of condensation and evaporation are well-known to climatologists, but Durran and Frierson say the beer-can experiments can give the general public a better understanding of atmospheric dynamics.

"Condensation as a heat source is just tremendously important," Frierson said. "It's really like the gasoline that powers hurricanes, thunderstorms and tornadoes."

Some climate models suggest that there could be 25 percent more humidity in the atmosphere by the end of the 21st century, and that could lead to more bouts of extreme weather in the decades to come.

"We want people to appreciate how powerful this effect is," Durran told NBC News. "A very thin film around the can makes a big difference in the temperature of its contents, and that just makes you appreciate the importance of that same heating effect in our atmosphere."

Here's how to run the experiment described in the YouTube video from University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences Outreach:

1. Freeze two cans of your favorite beverage. This should take roughly seven hours, depending on your freezer.
2. Fifteen minutes before taking out the cans, preheat oven to 250 degrees F and start boiling water in a pot. Place a cookie rack on top of pot.
3. Take the cans out of freezer. Place one in the preheated oven. and one over the boiling pot. 
4. Start timer for 10 minutes. 
5. After 10 minutes, carefully remove cans from oven and pot.
6. Crack open both cans and pour into separate glasses.
7. Take a photo/video of the two cans and glasses, go to the UW YouTube page, and post a video response.

More beer-can science:

• Tiny sip of beer can produce burst of pleasure
• Study explains the science of a beer buzz
• Scientists study how beer goes bad

Update for 9:30 p.m. ET April 26: Would wiping off the drops of condensation keep your drink cooler? Sorry, says UW spokeswoman Hannah Hickey. "That will only make your drink even warmer," she writes in a Twitter update.

Update for 2:25 p.m. ET April 27: Some commenters are wondering why there's so much fuss over a relatively simple concept. The point of the exercise wasn't really to break new ground in atmospheric physics (or in summertime beverage consumption), but "to improve our intuition about the power of condensational heating" — which is a huge factor in climate dynamics. Durran explained further in a comment below, and I'm providing an extended version of his comments here to give them a little more visibility:

"In my class, students definitely need to know how condensation causes heating. Here's how. There are bonds that link water molecules together into a crystal lattice to form ice. It takes heat (energy) to break a few of those bonds and turn ice to liquid water. To evaporate the liquid water, the rest of the bonds between molecules need to be broken, which takes a lot more heat. Once all the bonds are broken, the liquid is converted to water vapor, an invisible gas.

"This processes reverses when water vapor is cooled enough to condense as liquid water. Bonds between molecules re-form, and the heat it took to originally break them is released into the surroundings.

"The reason we make a big deal about the power of condensational heating is that it does amazing things in the atmosphere, such as powering the updrafts in thunderstorms. The rising cloud-filled updrafts in the video linked below ascend like hot-air balloons because they are warmed, not by burning a fuel like propane, but by the heat released as water vapor condenses.

"Here's the video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVIwDoogncQ

"Such a visualization might help people understand some of the applications. (Only the last half of the Physics Today article was about the beer can heating.)"

Durran and Frierson are the authors of "Condensation, Atmospheric Motion, and Cold Beer" in Physics Today. Supplemental experiments are described in "An Experiment Uses Cold Beverages to Demonstrate the Warming Power of Latent Heat." Lab experiments were performed by Stella Choi and Steven Brey. Galen Richards and Jaycyl Golding, high school students serving as Pacific Science Center Discovery Corps interns, worked on earlier versions of the experiments. Instrument makers Allen Hart and Steven Domonkos built experimental apparatuses. Funding was provided by National Science Foundation grants AGS-0846641 and AGS-1138977.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The climate change issue has been virtually a non-issue during the presidential campaign — but it's primed to take a higher profile after the elections, in part due to Hurricane Sandy's horrific aftermath. At least that's the view of Shawn Lawrence Otto, one of the founders of ScienceDebate.org and author of "Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science of America."

Otto focused on climate politics during Wednesday night's installment of "Virtually Speaking Science," a talk show airing online and in the Second Life virtual world. You can hear an archived version of the hourlong program, hosted by yours truly, via the BlogTalkRadio archive or iTunes.

Hurricane Sandy already has re-energized the debate over the global effects of escalating greenhouse-gas emissions.

On one side, experts point to the fact that this season's warmer seas helped the storm keep up its strength as it moved northward, and that higher sea levels added to the strength of Sandy's storm surge. Such conditions are expected to be more common if current climate trends continue. On the other side, skeptics point out that Sandy's strength was in line with extreme storms of the past. For more on the back-and-forth over Sandy specifically, check out this posting by Columbia Journalism Review's Curtis Brainard and this one by Dot Earth's Andrew Revkin — and be sure to follow the Web links.

Otto sides with those who believe Hurricane Sandy will bring the climate debate back into the spotlight.

"I do think that, moving forward, it may be a watershed moment, so to speak," Otto told me on "Virtually Speaking Science." However, he acknowledged that the same claim could have been made for Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which didn't end up moving the dial appreciably on attitudes toward climate change.

Hurricane Sandy may not make voters more amenable to cap-and-trade schemes or a carbon tax, but it's more likely to highlight the flip side of climate policy: how to adapt to potential impacts and encourage climate-conscious innovation. More people are talking about the cost vs. benefit of storm surge barriers for the New York metro area, for example. Insurers may add disincentives for coastal development, in anticipation of higher sea levels or more frequent extreme storms. The federal government may provide more support for energy technologies that cut back on greenhouse-gas emissions.

That's basically GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney's strategy on the climate issue. In his response to ScienceDebate.org's questionnaire, he said he favored "robust government funding" for research into low-emission, high-efficiency industrial technologies. He maintained that this kind of "No Regrets" policy would benefit America "regardless of whether the risks of global warming materialize, and regardless of whether other nations take effective action."

President Barack Obama, meanwhile, has long championed the development of renewable-energy technologies as a way to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, even if such efforts have occasionally gotten him into trouble. An example of that is the controversy over Solyndra, a solar-panel company that went bankrupt after receiving more than a half-billion dollars in government-backed loans.

Otto speculates that Obama may have a freer hand to pursue climate initiatives if he wins a second term — and that post-Sandy reconstruction may serve as a rallying point for political allies.

There's some evidence this is already coming to pass: Just today, New York City's independent mayor, Michael Bloomberg, cited the climate challenge and the lessons from the superstorm as reasons for endorsing Obama.

"The devastation that Hurricane Sandy brought to New York City and much of the Northeast – in lost lives, lost homes and lost business – brought the stakes of Tuesday’s presidential election into sharp relief," Bloomberg wrote. "Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be – given this week's devastation – should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action."

Bloomberg said Obama was taking major steps to reduce carbon emissions, while Romney abandoned "the very cap-and-trade program he once supported."

The mayor's endorsement probably won't have much impact on the vote in New York, a state that's as solidly in Obama's column as any state could be. But does it hint at a major change in the political climate?

For more food for thought, watch this archived video from a Capitol Hill debate between Obama surrogate Kevin Knobloch and Republican Mike Castle, who served two terms as Delaware governor and nine terms in Congress. The debate, titled "After Sandy: Climate Change, Science and the Next Four Years," was moderated by Otto and Climate Desk Live's Chris Mooney.

Update for 8:30 p.m. ET: The Guardian's Suzanne Goldenberg sees deep significance in Bloomberg's endorsement, suggesting that it "turned climate change from liability into a potentially winning political issue in this presidential election," and may embolden Republicans who secretly support action on the climate issue to "come out of the closet." Do you agree? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More from 'Virtually Speaking Science':

• Sean Carroll on what lies beyond the Higgs boson
• Alan Stern on the Uwingu mystery space venture
• George Djorgovski on the future of immersive virtual reality
• JPL's Dave Beaty previews Curiosity's mission on Mars
• SETI Institute's Seth Shostak about aliens and UFOs
• Paul Doherty on solar eclipses and the transit of Venus
• Veronica Ann Zabala-Aliberto on spaceflight and Yuri's Night
• JPL's Dave Beaty on the search for life on Mars
• Shawn Lawrence Otto on science and politics
• Ig Nobel impresario Marc Abrahams on silly science
• Rocket scientist Robert Zubrin on Mars exploration
• Propulsion expert Marc Millis on interstellar spaceflight
• Sean Carroll on the puzzling frontiers of physics
• Rand Simberg on the private-enterprise vision for spaceflight
• Martin Hoffert on the future of energy policy
• George Djorgovski on science in virtual worlds
• Alan Stern on suborbital research and NASA's mission to Pluto
• Col. 'Coyote' Smith on the outlook for space solar power
• Tim Pickens on rocket ventures and the Google Lunar X Prize

"Virtually Speaking Science" is hosted in Second Life by the Caltech Virtual Astronomy Group. The Exploratorium's Paul Doherty will be my guest on Dec. 5 for a VSS program looking back at the year's astronomical highlights and looking ahead to 2013.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Files / AFP - Getty Images

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama have answered 14 questions on science and technology issues.

President Barack Obama and his GOP challenger, Mitt Romney, have sent in their answers to the political campaign's highest-profile science quiz — the 14 questions on science and technology issues posed by Science Debate 2012 — and Romney's answer to the climate question is already stirring up some buzz.

The answers distill the candidates' stands on topics ranging from ocean health, to the federal support for innovative research, to the process for developing science policy, to the proper way to plan for a potential pandemic. The territory covered by the questions has shifted somewhat since 2008: For example, stem cell research appears to have become a non-issue, while Internet policy gets its own question this time around.

But it's Romney's response to the question about climate change that has drawn the most attention.

For months, Romney has been criticized for going back and forth on the issue of what to do about global warming. He generally acknowledges that greenhouse-gas emissions have had an effect on climate, but he's backed away from policy responses such as carbon cap-and-trade markets.

Starting with last week's Republican National Convention, Romney has been turning Obama's environmental policy into a punch line: "President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans, and to heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family." (Romney has used the "heal the planet" line at campaign stops since then.)

In his response to Science Debate's climate change question, Romney said it looked as if the world was warming, and human activity was contributing to that trend. But he opposed a cap-and-trade scheme and spoke against "economy-suppressing regulation." Instead he said he favored "robust government funding" for research into low-emission, high-efficiency industrial technologies. Here's the full question as well as the answers from Romney and Obama:

Climate change: The Earth’s climate is changing and there is concern about the potentially adverse effects of these changes on life on the planet. What is your position on cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and other policies proposed to address global climate change — and what steps can we take to improve our ability to tackle challenges like climate change that cross national boundaries?

Mitt Romney: "I am not a scientist myself, but my best assessment of the data is that the world is getting warmer, that human activity contributes to that warming, and that policymakers should therefore consider the risk of negative consequences. However, there remains a lack of scientific consensus on the issue — on the extent of the warming, the extent of the human contribution, and the severity of the risk — and I believe we must support continued debate and investigation within the scientific community.

"Ultimately, the science is an input to the public policy decision; it does not dictate a particular policy response. President Obama has taken the view that if global warming is occurring, the American response must be to slash carbon dioxide emissions by imposing enormous costs on the U.S. economy. First he tried a massive cap-and-trade bill that would have devastated U.S. industry. When that approach was rejected by Congress, he declared his intention to pursue the same course on his own and proceeded through his EPA to impose rules that will bankrupt the coal industry.

"Nowhere along the way has the president indicated what actual results his approach would achieve — and with good reason. The reality is that the problem is called Global Warming, not America Warming. China long ago passed America as the leading emitter of greenhouse gases. Developed world emissions have leveled off while developing world emissions continue to grow rapidly, and developing nations have no interest in accepting economic constraints to change that dynamic. In this context, the primary effect of unilateral action by the U.S. to impose costs on its own emissions will be to shift industrial activity overseas to nations whose industrial processes are more emissions-intensive and less environmentally friendly. That result may make environmentalists feel better, but it will not better the environment.

"So I oppose steps like a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system that would handicap the American economy and drive manufacturing jobs away, all without actually addressing the underlying problem. Economic growth and technological innovation, not economy-suppressing regulation, is the key to environmental protection in the long run. So I believe we should pursue what I call a 'No Regrets' policy — steps that will lead to lower emissions, but that will benefit America regardless of whether the risks of global warming materialize and regardless of whether other nations take effective action.

"For instance, I support robust government funding for research on efficient, low-emissions technologies that will maintain American leadership in emerging industries. And I believe the federal government must significantly streamline the regulatory framework for the deployment of new energy technologies, including a new wave of investment in nuclear power. These steps will strengthen American industry, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and produce the economically-attractive technologies that developing nations must have access to if they are to achieve the reductions in their own emissions that will be necessary to address what is a global issue."

Barack Obama: "Climate change is the one of the biggest issues of this generation, and we have to meet this challenge by driving smart policies that lead to greater growth in clean energy generation and result in a range of economic and social benefits. Since taking office I have established historic standards limiting greenhouse gas emissions from our vehicles for the first time in history. My administration has made unprecedented investments in clean energy, proposed the first-ever carbon pollution limits for new fossil-fuel-fired power plants and reduced carbon emissions within the federal government. Since I took office, the U.S. is importing an average of 3 million fewer barrels of oil every day, and our dependence on foreign oil is at a 20-year low. We are also showing international leadership on climate change, reaching historic agreements to set emission limits in unison with all major developed and developing nations. There is still more to be done to address this global problem. I will continue efforts to reduce our dependence on oil and lower our greenhouse gas emissions while creating an economy built to last."

Romney devotes a lot more space on his answer, but he has a more complex case to make — a case that accepts the idea that industrial activity is changing the climate, but that the right kind of industrial activity can solve the problem. "This is what I call the technology trap, where clean energy technology is used to delay action, rather than to foster action, on climate change," Joe Romm writes on the Climate Progress blog, which has been reliably critical of Romney in the past.

What do you think? Feel free to register your opinion in our admitted unscientific online poll, as well as in your comments below. And be sure to take a look at all 14 questions and answers, either on the Science Debate website or at Scientific American.

Extra credit: The other question that was close to my heart was the one on space policy: Obama sticks to his game plan for sending humans to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars in the 2030s — that is, long after the end of his second term. Meanwhile, Romney complains that America's leadership in space is "eroding" and vows to "bring together all the stakeholders" in the space effort to develop a fresh plan to rebuild NASA. He also says "a strong and successful NASA does not require more funding, it needs clearer priorities." Reminder: NASA receives about 0.5 percent of the federal budget (less than $18 billion in 2012), and some outside observers (including astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson) say that funding level should be doubled.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Mariana Ruiz Villareal

Calculations of dinosaur biomass suggest that plant-eating sauropods like the ones pictured here in an artist's conception could have contributed enough methane to warm Earth's climate 150 million years ago.

Some scientific findings are just too good to leave alone, even if you don't know if they can ever be confirmed: Such is the case for a study saying that plant-eating dinosaurs could have emitted enough digestive methane to warm Earth's climate 150 million years ago.

"It is known that the time of these dinosaurs was warmer than now," said David Wilkinson, an environmental scientist at Liverpool John Moores University who's the lead author of a paper on the subject appearing in the journal Current Biology. "This is explained usually by an enhanced greenhouse effect, mainly carbon dioxide. If we are correct, then methane from sauropods may have been a contributor to this greenhouse effect."

Methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and modern-day livestock are thought to be responsible for about a quarter of the methane released in the United States. Some say that the belches and flatulence of cattle, pigs and sheep are a significant contributor to the warming effect caused by greenhouse-gas emissions. So why wouldn't it have been the same in the age of giant plant-eating dinosaurs, when global biomass density was at least several times what it is today?

"All vertebrates that feed on leaves, etc., use microbes to help digest these, and usually give off methane," Wilkinson told me in an email. "This includes both mammals and reptiles. ... Although details vary within groups, everything around today does this, so the assumption is [that] larger herbivorous dinosaurs did as well."

He and his colleagues ran the numbers, using what they saw as conservative estimates for the total amount of dinosaur biomass and methane production rates per kilogram of body mass. They came up with a figure of 520 million tons of methane emitted per year, which is more than total modern-day methane emissions from all sources, natural and industrial. The current estimate for total methane emission is around 500 million tons a year, with 50 to 100 milllion tons of that coming from ruminant animals such as cows and goats, Wilkinson said.

"Our work certainly suggests biology and climate were involved in a feedback loop," he said.

Biologists have found that most of the modern-day methane emissions from livestock come from belching rather than flatulence. Was it the same for dinosaurs? "We have no particular view which end of the sauropod the methane came out," Wilkinson told me. "Could be either or both."

Chemical analysis of ancient marine sediments has found that greenhouse-gas levels went through a huge rise 201 million years ago, around the time of a mass extinction that set the stage for the rise of the dinosaurs. Scientists suspect that the atmospheric methane levels at that time were pumped up by a massive release of methane from the seafloor. Such evidence suggests that plant-eating dinosaurs weren't responsible for starting the upswing in Mesozoic methane. But did they help preserve the methane-rich atmosphere and toasty temperatures until they were killed off by an asteroid strike?

Wilkinson noted that his paper was titled "Could Methane Produced by Sauropod Dinosaurs Have Helped Drive Mesozoic Climate Warmth?" — not "Did Methane Produced by Dinosaurs Help Drive Climate Warmth."

"What our simple calculations show is that, yes, it could. It's a real possibility. But we don't show that it did happen," he said. "That would require much more work, and indeed it may be impossible to completely prove this without a time machine."

Extra credit: A dozen years ago, the BBC quoted a Chinese news report that quoted an unnamed French scientist as saying the dinosaurs were wiped out 65 million years ago not by an asteroid, but by their own flatulence. This hypothesis proposed that the methane emissions from the giant beasts became so great that the climate changed, the vegetation withered and the dinosaurs all starved. But that's just too silly to consider. Or is it?

More about methane:

• U.S. claims success in fuel source test
• Herb quells cows' methane-laden belches
• Did methane 'burp' clear way for dinosaurs?
• Methane seeping from ice becomes climate concern

In addition to Wilkinson, authors of the Current Biology paper include the University of London's Euan G. Nisbet and the University of Glasgow's Graeme D. Ruxton.

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

GOP hopeful Mitt Romney slipped into scientific doublespeak this week when he told a rally that "we don’t know what’s causing climate change" — seemingly contradicting his earlier statement that "I believe humans have contributed" to the increase in global mean temperatures.

That’s par for the course when it comes to the intersection of politics and science, says Shawn Lawrence Otto, who addresses the topic at length in a new book titled "Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America." Otto said Romney is simply betting that he'll be able to zigzag away from his previous views on climate policy, in order to appeal to the Republican base during the primary season.

"He's doubled down a little bit further," Otto told me today.

Will Romney win the bet? It's hard to say at this point, but the fact that Romney is backing away from a view that has a fair amount of scientific evidence behind it doesn't bode well for the state of science policy ... and politics. "That is clear evidence to me of the level of anti-science among the Republican activists at the ground level," Otto said.

The theme of Otto's book — that politics and science usually don't mix — isn't exactly a bolt from the blue. Other books in the genre include "The Republican War on Science" and "Unscientific America," as well as "Merchants of Doubt," "The Body Politic," "Denialism" and many more. But Otto draws upon his experience on the front lines of the debate over science and politics. And when I say "debate," I mean that literally.

Otto's day job is in Hollywood, and he's perhaps best-known as the screenwriter and co-producer of "House of Sand and Fog" (and writer/director of the upcoming "Dreams of a Dying Heart"). But during the 2008 presidential campaign, he was the co-founder and CEO of Science Debate, a grass-roots effort aimed at getting the candidates to address the tough questions surrounding science and technology policy: What should be done about climate change? What about embryonic stem-cell research? How would you shore up American innovation and promote energy security and sustainability?

Otto and his colleagues didn't get the full-scale, onstage debate they were hoping for, but they did get Barack Obama and John McCain to answer 14 key questions about the science-based challenges facing America.

Otto thinks the candidates got as much out of the exercise as the voters did. "It's arguable that without that, Obama would not have had the science literacy that he had going into office," he said.

Three years after Obama won the White House, Otto says the president's record on those science-oriented issues is a "mixed bag." There are questions about environmental compromises, a less-than-transparent regulatory process and renewable-energy reversals. for example.

"We got on base, that's about all we managed to do," Otto said. "We didn't hit a home run."

But the big problem may be the state of the electorate. In his book, Otto outlines how today's political framework is based on "values" rather than facts, and how that has distorted the debate over issues that touch upon science and technology. If anything, America has slid backward over the past few decades, Otto said.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

President Barack Obama listens to student Alexandria Sutton, 16, during his visit to a classroom at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va., in September.

"In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy had to go out of his way to say that his religion would not interfere with his presidency," he said. "Now we're almost having candidates say the opposite: They're not going to let the science interfere with their religious convictions while they're in office. ... It's not family values that made America No. 1. It's our can-do spirit and our ability to deal with hardheaded science."

So what's the solution? Otto doesn't have any magic formula up his sleeve.

"To me, the question is whether knowledge is advancing to the point where democracy isn't able to handle making good decisions," he told me. "What happens when the level of knowledge required around all these issues that we have to be able to salve is so high that the general public really doesn't intersect with it? I don't really know the what the solution to that is, but it's very concerning."

He may not have the quick fix, but he does have some suggestions. For example, in the book he lays out an "American Science Pledge" that commits the signer to upholding scientific integrity and transparency, freedom of inquiry, open debate and policies based on knowledge rather than personal opinions.

To his credit, Otto avoids blaming religion for the sad state of scientific affairs. "This is a time for churches to reach out to scientists and to speak about science and politics, because these discussions are so important to the future," he writes. "We are in a moral crisis, and it matters little whether a preacher is conservative or progressive if he or she is incorporating knowledge into moral reflections."

Otto also calls upon scientists to get more involved in public engagement.

"I do think that scientists have the opinion that it's not really their job, but I think that's a mistake," he told me. "Right now, the public doesn't understand what they're getting for their money, and they don't appreciate what they're getting for their money. So right now there's a growing science gap, and scientists are the only ones who can do something about that."

You can bet these ideas will be coming to the fore during Science Debate 2012, which is just starting to get off the ground. How do you see the debate over science, technology, innovation and public policy shaping up? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

Further reviews of 'Fool Me Twice':

• Harvard Law and Policy Review: Stop the backward slide
• Science: Eagle Scout's prescription for democracy and science
• Point of Inquiry: Shawn Otto and the assault on science

More on science and politics:

• Climate controversy spotlights GOP science policy
• Funny science sparks serious political spat
• Will our 'Sputnik moment' fizzle out?

For more on the presidential campaign, check out msnbc.com's Politics section.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Dave Martin / AP

A farmer drives his tractor past a flooded field of corn near Yazoo City, Miss. on Saturday, May 21, 2011.

A high-tech crop insurance company aims to make farming profitable — and itself — by writing policies that offer protection against floods, frosts, droughts and other bouts of crop-damaging weather that are on the rise.

Whether the increase in these weather events are due to human-caused climate change, the company said, is not their business, but the events are trending upwards and they have the technology to analyze the risk they pose to individual farmers and price polices accordingly.

"We are not trying to predict exactly what will happen, we are trying to create a distribution of outcomes of what might happen," David Friedberg, the CEO of The Climate Corporation, which is issuing the insurance, told me Thursday.

"It is the probabilistic distribution of things that might happen that allows us to figure out what price to charge for the insurance that we are selling."

High-tech risk analysis
This ability hinges on a system that crunches a deluge of data from state-of-the-art climate models, millions of weather measurements, and billions of soil observations. At any given time, more than 50 terabytes of live data are in its systems.

Farmers purchase policies for specific plantings (such as a field of corn or wheat) and are paid automatically when an identified type of weather hits that is known to cause production shortfalls, such as crop-wilting heat or drought. 

The Climate Corporation was founded by ex-Googlers who believe that these types of weather events are becoming increasingly common. Whether this increase in weather volatility is due to human cause climate change, however, the company doesn't have an opinion, Friedberg said.

"All that we can do is identify trends in climate data and use them to help us predict what is going to happen in the future," he said. 

For example, he said they can look at any city in the United States and see that temperatures have increased slightly over the last 30 years and seem to be continuing to increase, but that's not what they're interested in.

Rather, the impacts they are looking for are droughts, such as the one currently crippling Texas and the floods that hit Midwest farms in the spring.

"Those are the sorts of events that farmers and other businesses care about … and those are the sorts of events that we also see big trends in," Friedberg said.

Changing industry
While climate scientists caution people not to confuse the weather with climate change, the types of extreme weather events experienced this year are consistent with the predictions of climate change models.

Polls show a growing percentage of Americans now believe the planet is warming, but the issue remains a political hot potato. Most Republican presidential candidates — John Huntsman aside — eschew the idea that fossil fuel burning is causing the climate to change, for example.

Meanwhile, legislation to combat climate change has failed to make its way through Congress and climate scientists are routinely accused of manipulating data, though those claims have been proven mostly false.

But for the insurance industry, where money does most of the talking, whether anyone says it directly or not, climate change is decidedly real and will wreak havoc on life, property, and crops. As a result, the industry is becoming proactive in incorporating changing climate into its risk analyses.

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners now, on a state-by-state opt-in basis, surveys companies about the risk climate changes poses to insurers and the actions insurers are taking in response to their understanding of those risks, for example.

Munich Re, a multinational company that insures insurance companies, issued a report in July showing 2011 was already the costliest year on record in terms of property damage.

While natural disasters unrelated to climate change such as the earthquake and tsunami in Japan make up for a big chunk of the losses, flooding in Australia has the fingerprint of climate change, Peter Hoppe, who runs the company's Geo Risk/Corporate Climate Center, told reporters as the report was released.

Natural events such as La Nina and El Nino, ocean cycles that alter weather systems, are certainly factors as well, but warming temperatures appear to be adding a layer "on top" of that natural variability, Hoppe said.

He also cited a climate connection between Australia's severe floods and rising ocean temperatures off the coast there. That means "more evaporation and higher potential for these extreme downpours," he said.

"It can only be explained by global warming," he added. 

Now that this acknowledgement exists, insurers such as The Climate Corporation are creating innovative tools to offer protection from the risk posed by the increased chance that bad weather can wipe out a year's income.

"If you are a farmer, you really can't afford to have another heat wave or another early freeze event or delayed plant period," said Friedberg. "We can really reach in and help."

More on climate change, insurance and farming:

• Warming: A $900 billion insurance risk?
• Insurers paying to rebuild greener homes
• Irene wallops floundering flood insurance program
• Scientists race to avoid climate change harvest

John Roach is a contributing writer for msnbc.com.

Commentators have been surprisingly fast to point to faster-than-light neutrinos as evidence that scientists could be wrong about lots of things, including the causes of climate change. But the most likely scenario is that special relativity — a theory that contends nothing can be accelerated beyond the speed of light in a vacuum — will turn out to be right. Or at least relatively right.

Two weeks after the neutrino experiments first came to light, the prevailing view among physicists is that the observations will somehow be shown to be wrong. The time measurements had to be made to an accuracy of billionths of a second. Synchronizing the time signatures over a distance of more than 450 miles of neutrino flight, from the CERN particle-physics center on the French-Swiss border to Italy's Gran Sasso National Laboratory, is extremely challenging.

Nature News cites one paper questioning whether the clock synchronizations accounted for the varying gravitational force as the neutrinos sped through the planet. General relativity's gravitational time-dilation effect might have reduced the precision of the measurements, Imperial College London's Carlo Contaldi suggested. This wouldn't be the first time that special relativity and general relativity got tangled up with each other: The satellite-based GPS navigation system has to account not only for special relativity (which would make the satellite's clocks look as if they're moving slower from the perspective of earthly clocks) but also for general relativity (which would make them seem to move faster).

Other researchers have wondered whether fluctuations in the composition of the neutrino beam are just making it seem as if some of the particles are flying faster than light, when the effect is actually being caused by those unaccounted-for fluctuations. Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow and a colleague at Boston University, Andrew Cohen, take another tack: They say the OPERA neutrino beam doesn't bear the energy signature that it should have if the particles were exceeding the speed of light.

The leaders of the OPERA collaboration, the team that made the neutrino observations, say they've accounted for the factors that have come to light so far, including the clock-synchronization issue. But Physics World reports that up to half of the collaboration's members think it's premature to submit their findings to a scientific journal for formal publication. (So far, the results have been posted only to the ArXiv.org preprint server.)

While the OPERA physicists continue to double-check and debate their results, researchers from the U.S.-based MINOS collaboration are gearing up to do an independent neutrino-timing check. Re-analyzing the existing MINOS data is expected to take up to six months, and if new experiments are required, that could take more than a year. In the meantime, physicists will continue trying to poke holes in the OPERA observations.

Neutrinos on the air
During this week's "Virtually Speaking Science" chat, Caltech theoretical physicist Sean M. Carroll told me that OPERA's results are "almost certainly not true."

"Even the people who did the experiment will tell you that the chances are very, very small that it's right," Carroll said. "They just want people to understand that it's on the table, it's possible. They don't know what's wrong with their experiment. They would like someone else to check it, to duplicate it, to see what might be wrong."

If the observations turn out to be right, the implications would be "incredibly groundbreaking and earth-shattering," he said. But they wouldn't be beyond the power of theorists to explain, even within the framework of relativity.

"This is what we do," Carroll said. "We come up with new theories that fit crazy, unexpected pieces of data like this."

The OPERA experiment has already given rise to scores of papers on the ArXiv server, many aimed at explaining why the results aren't as crazy as they look. If the results hold up, theorists would have to adapt Albert Einstein's special relativity theory to accommodate faster-than-light observations. But Carroll says they wouldn't start from square one.

"We can say with confidence that there is some sense in which Einstein was right. He might not be the final word, but he wasn't absolutely wrong," he said. "Einstein's theories are not wrong, they've been tested right and left, and there's something right about them. They might need to be improved, they might need to be added to. ... But we're not throwing everything out and starting from scratch."

Some folks have suggested that faster-than-light neutrinos could open the way for backward time travel, reverse causality and other post-Einsteinian weirdness. In fact, folks are already collecting faster-than-light neutrino jokes. Two examples:

• "Neutrino. Knock-knock."
• "I wrote a speed-of-light joke ... but a neutrino beat me to it."

Carroll says that faster-than-light neutrinos would not necessarily disrupt causality and the arrow of time, and he explains why in a posting to his blog titled "Can Neutrinos Kill Their Own Grandfathers?"

"It could be true, but it doesn't have to be true. ... Theorists would have a lot of fun figuring out how the world actually works in that case," he said.

For an hourlong discussion of faster-than-light research as well as other weird frontiers of physics, including the Nobel-winning studies of our accelerating universe, listen to the full "Virtually Speaking Science" podcasts, either online or as an MP3 download. If you're a resident of the Second Life virtual world, you'll also enjoy Saturday's talk on dark energy, presented at 10 a.m. PT / SLT by the Meta Institute for Computational Astrophysics.

The climate connection
Particle physics and climate science rarely mix, but they did get mixed up this week in an opinion piece written for The Wall Street Journal by Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. The essay listed "five obvious truths about the climate-change issue," including this one as No. 5:

"The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might — repeat, might — travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein's theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth's atmosphere."

That argument earned almost instant derision from the science-minded Twitterverse, spawning #WSJscience as a new hashtag. The idea that one weird experimental claim proves that other, completely unrelated scientific claims are shaky came off as laughable. The classic construction for #WSJscience tweets goes like this: "If serious scientists can question relativity, there must be room to debate [whether Earth goes around sun]." (Hat tip to @cqchoi)

Rather than engaging in an extended rant myself, let me just link to a few of the rants elsewhere on the Web, plus a few totally serious articles about the frontiers of physics.

Selected commentaries on #WSJscience:

• LiveScience: What do neutrinos have to do with climate?
• Bad Astronomy: 'Head-asplodey' climate change denial
• Sci-ence: Comic strip about neutrino nuttiness
• Dot Earth: 'Settled science' and CO2
• Real Climate: Unsettled science

More faster-than-light speculation:

• Faster-than-light discovery raises prospect of time travel
• Challenging Einstein is usually a losing venture
• Interactive: Putting Einstein to the test
• Why the speed of light matters
• Nobel physics prize highlights puzzles

Did forecasters, policymakers and media types overhype Hurricane Irene? It's not just a meteorological question: The debate over whether the outlook for damage was overhyped, or hyped just right, touches upon issues of risk perception and even the climate change debate. Like most natural disasters, Irene's deadly sweep over the U.S. East Coast has left behind some important lessons for researchers as well as regular folks.

Here are some of the lessons that Monday-morning commentators are chewing over:

What was right and wrong about storm prediction?
The computer models, and the meteorologists who wielded them, put in a "gold medal" performance when it came to predicting Irene's track — but there was much more uncertainty about the intensity of the storm. That's typical for tropical storms, said Frank Marks, director of the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory's Hurricane Research Division. "Irene really exemplified the issues that we've been trying to tackle," he told me.

Hurricanes typically follow a pattern in which an outer ring of storms will tighten up to replace an inner ring surrounding the hurricane's eye, intensifying the storm system in the process. In Irene's case, that pattern (known as eyewall replacement) was interrupted, and the storm didn't gather as much strength as most of the models suggested. "Some of the models did represent it well," Marks said, but there wasn't enough confidence in those models to change the storm forecast.

Researchers have been working to reduce the error rate for hurricane track and intensity forecasts through the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project, with the goal of a 50 percent reduction from 2008 levels by 2018. The University of Washington's Cliff Mass, an expert on weather modeling, said Irene showed that much more progress still has to be made on predicting a storm's intensity.

"The classic is good forecast for track, bad forecast for intensity," he told me. "Let's face it: This happens all the time. ... To get the intensity right, you have to be able to predict the inner workings of the storm, and that's what we don't do well yet."

But Mass said "we didn't even need the models" to know that Irene would become less intense as it moved up the coast, through the increasingly cool waters of the Atlantic. In fact, Mass contends in a blog post today that "there is really no reliable evidence of hurricane-force winds at any time the storm was approaching North Carolina or moving up the East Coast."

He argued that the National Weather Service should have downgraded the storm much more quickly than it did. "There's a tendency to be conservative," he told me. "We have to learn to be more nimble."

Did forecasters overhype the storm?
In his blog posting, Mass addresses the hype surrounding Irene: "Considering the tendency for media to hype storms, it is crucial for meteorologists to stick to the exact story and not overwarn in the hope of encouraging people ot take effective action. If the storm was known not to be a hurricane earlier, might the mayor of NY have held off closing the city down, thus saving billions of dollars?"

Marks said that the storm was assessed based on readings taken from above as well as on the surface, and that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration followed the standard procedures for those assessments. But he acknowledged that Irene was a tough storm to classify, in part because of its breadth. "From Cape Cod all the way inland to Pennsylvania — just think about the energy," he said. "It's really the energy of the storm, it's not the peak wind."

He said spin control isn't part of NOAA's mission. "We provide as much information as we can, based on what we know," Marks said. "What the public and decision makers do with that information is something that's out of our purview."

Marks acknowledged that some of the reports made the storm sound scarier than it really was. "If you looked at those scenarios that the media was getting ... the disaster scenario was extreme. That was for a major hurricane coming straight at them, not a weakening storm coming up the coast," he said.

How much was lost in translation?
So was this a case of journalists and policymakers making too much of the storm? Maybe so, said David Ropeik, a consultant on risk perception, Big Think blogger and author of the book "How Risky Is It, Really?" But maybe that's not so bad.

"Yes, the information the media presented was wrapped up in breathless alarmism," Ropeik, a former msnbc.com contributor, told me. "But we forget two things: First, surveys show that the public knows that about the media. And second, under all the alarmism was really important information that helped people stay safe: storm track timing, tips for preparedness, evacuation routes. It was alarmist in voice, but an informative tool. And that probably helped more than it hurt. ... There was no panic, there was no hysteria."

Ropeik said government officials also did the right thing: "In my opinion, they were overly precautionary, but most people want them to do that. One can only measure the accuracy of their precaution in hindsight, and you don't want to err on the wrong side. ... The evacuation, the closing of the subways, you don't want to make a mistake on that in the wrong direction."

There were political considerations, to be sure. Just ask New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who faced harsh criticism over the lack of preparedness for last winter's snowstorms — or former President George W. Bush, who was similarly criticized in the wake of Hurricane Katrina almost exactly six years ago.

But beyond the politics, the storm's toll — more than 30 dead, plus an estimated $7 billion in property damage — clearly demonstrates that Irene was more than just hype.

"I daresay the people who are saying there was overreaction are not those who are still without power, or who suffered property losses, or who lost loved ones," Ropeik said. "Risk is a matter of perception. It depends on who you ask."

Some commentators worry that hyping hurricanes will lead folks to disregard future warnings as a case of "crying wolf," but Ropeik said the public response to the warnings about Irene "puts the lie to that."

"Other storms have been hyped, and have not panned out, and yet people still took reasonable precautions this time," he said. "The 'cry-wolf' thing didn't happen."

Do more big storms lie ahead?
The concerns about Irene's effects could hint at the shape of climate debates to come.

Research published last year in the journal Nature Geoscience suggested that global warming was likely to produce fewer but stronger tropical storms. This year, a study in the journal Science came to a similar conclusion.

Such projections have sparked strong debate, as most claims about climate effects have done. It's impossible to link any single event, such as Irene or Katrina, to long-term climate trends. But in a posting to his Desmog Blog, science writer Chris Mooney argues that Hurricane Irene should get people thinking about what lies ahead:

"... Irene focuses our attention on our serious vulnerability, and we need to seize that moment — because too often our default position is to act like nothing bad is going to happen.

"There are several places in the United States, besides New Orleans, where a strong hurricane landfall could be absolutely devastating. These include the Florida Keys, the Miami-Fort Lauderdale area, Tampa Bay/St. Petersburg and Houston/Galveston. But they also include some East Coast locations, and chief among these is New York/Long Island. ...

"So what are our major coastal cities doing to protect themselves? That's the question we should all be asking right now."

What questions are you asking? Share them as a comment below, and we'll see if we can get a discussion going.

Update for 5:30 p.m. ET: One of the first Irene-related research projects to come to light focuses on whether big storms could actually counteract the effects of greenhouse-gas emissions.

Scientists at the Stroud Water Research Center and the University of Delaware are sampling the storm runoff at sites along creeks in Delaware to measure how much carbon is being transported. In a news release, the National Science Foundation says the project could reveal how much of a role soil erosion plays in sequestering carbon to prevent it from re-entering the global carbon cycle.

"The bigger the storm, the greater the disproportionate load, so you might have a single 100-year storm event move 25 percent of the material for an entire decade," said Anthony Aufdemkampe, a scientist at the Stroud Water Research Center. "This is important, because fresh waters and the carbon they transport play a major role in the global cycling of greenhouse gases."

Update for 6:30 p.m. ET: Climate Progress' Joe Romm notes that rising sea levels, which some see as an effect of global climate change, would heighten the destructive effect of coastal storms such as Irene because the storm surge would come on top of those higher seas. (The state of global sea levels is another subject of scientific discussion.)

More about Irene's aftermath:

• Twitter's top lessons from Hurricane Irene
• Readers capture Hurricane Irene
• Hurricane Irene spawns baby boom
• Stocks close sharply higher after Irene passes

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry stirred up a fresh scientific spat today with his claim that scientists were manipulating their data about climate change "so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects" — a view that serves to highlight the differences among the GOP presidential candidates on science-related issues.

During a town hall meeting in Bedford, N.H., here's what Perry, one of the front-runners for the Republican nomination, had to say about the state of climate science:

"I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number or scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. I think we're seeing, almost weekly or daily, scientists are coming forward and questioning the original idea that manmade global warming is what is causing the climate to change. Yes, our climate has changed. They've been changing ever since the earth was formed. But I do not buy into a group of scientists who have in some cases [been] found to be manipulating this information. ..."

The comments are pretty much in line with what Perry has said in the past. He's playing off the suspicions raised by the "Climategate" e-mail controversy that broke in 2009. That flap revealed that the most outspoken climate researchers are all too human when it comes to talking about their intellectual adversaries in private — but in the end, they were mostly cleared of scientific malfeasance (although one published graph was judged to be "misleading").

The criticisms of Perry's view follow well-worn tracks as well: On the left-leaning Think Progress blog, Texas A&M climate researcher Andrew Dessler is quoted as saying that none of the credible atmospheric scientists in Texas agree with the governor. "This is a particularly unfortunate situation, given the hellish drought that Texas is now experiencing, and which climate change is almost certainly making worse," he said.

Think Progress goes so far as to list more than three dozen scientists who disagree with Perry.

Brian Snyder / Reuters

Texas Gov. Rick Perry extends his arm toward a lab worker during a tour of Resonetics Laser Micromaching in Nashua, N.H., on Wednesday. Resonetics CEO Chris Banas is to the left of Perry, and Cliff Gabay, the company's president, looks on from the right.

The Texas governor's views come in contrast with those of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, an early front-runner in the GOP presidential field. Romney has said "I believe, based on what I read, that the world is getting warmer" and added that "I believe that humans contribute to that."

As a result, he said at a New Hampshire town hall meeting in June, "it's important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may be significant contributors." However, he said any measures to stem greenhouse gases should be applied on an international basis. He opposed putting a carbon cap-and-trade system into place because it would put America at a competitive disadvantage.

The Perry vs. Romney climate split may be the latest and buzziest difference to emerge in the race for the GOP nomination, but when you look closely at the candidates, you'll see other differences as well. Here's a rundown on four of the leading candidates, related to four hot-button scientific topics: climate policy, evolution education, stem-cell research and science funding:

Climate policy:

We've already summarized Perry's and Romney's views.

U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota opposes climate change legislation, saying that carbon dioxide is a "harmless gas." During a town hall meeting in South Carolina this week, she said that all the issues surrounding climate change would have to be "settled on the basis of real science, not manufactured science."

U.S. Rep. Ron Paul of Texas has called the concern about Earth's changing climate "the greatest hoax I think that has been around for many, many years, if not hundreds of years," based on the Climategate reports (see above). He's opposed to energy subsidies as well as government efforts to control greenhouse-gas emissions. "Pollution can be better taken care of under a private market system, under private property," he said.

(President Barack Obama, by the way, favors policies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, but the current "climate" in Congress has severely limited any progress on environmental initiatives.)

Evolution education:

Perry says he is a "firm believer in intelligent design as a matter of faith and intellect, and I believe it should be presented in schools alongside the theories of evolution." Intelligent design is the view that the complexity seen in nature is best explained as resulting from the efforts of an intelligent designer — for example, God, or an alien civilization. But in Perry's case, certainly God.

Romney said during his presidential campaign that he believes "God designed the universe" and that he believes God "used the process of evolution to create the human body." As Massachusetts governor, he opposed the teaching of intelligent design in public-school science classes. "The science class is where to teach evolution, or if there are any other scientific thoughts that need to be discussed," he told The New York Times. "If we're going to talk about more philosophical matters, like why it was created, and was there an intelligent designer behind it, that's for the religion class or philosophy class or social studies class."

Bachmann says "evolution has never been proven" and believes that intelligent design should be taught alongside the evolutionary view of biological change. "What I support is putting all science on the table and then letting students decide," Bachmann told reporters at the Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans in June.

Paul says "nobody has concrete proof" for evolutionary theory, although he acknowledges that "it's a pretty logical theory." In his view, the intelligent-design concept has more to do with personal beliefs rather than science. "In a libertarian society these beliefs aren't nearly as critical. When you have government schools, it becomes important," he said. "'Are you fair in teaching that the earth could have been created by a creator or it came out of a pop, out of nowhere?' In a personal world, we don't have government dictating and ruling all these things; it's not very important."

(Obama favors the current legal view that teaching the intelligent-design concept in public-school science classes would be unconstitutional.)

Stem-cell research:

Perry is opposed to human embryonic stem-cell research, which involves destroying human embryos to harvest the therapeutic cells. But he's a strong supporter of less controversial adult stem-cell research. In fact, he was a beneficiary of such research when he received an infusion of his own lab-grown stem cells to speed recovery from a back injury.

Romney has voiced support for embryonic stem-cell research in the past, but he says his position has changed over the years, and he now opposes such research.

Bachmann is opposed to federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, but favors less controversial initiatives that use adult stem cells or reprogrammed cells (also known as induced pluripotent stem cells or iPS cells).

Paul says the federal government should have no jurisdiction over the conduct of embryonic stem-cell research. He has, however, sponsored legislation that would use tax credits to encourage less controversial stem-cell studies, as well as the establishment of stem-cell and cord-blood banks.

(Obama has favored expanded federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research — an issue that has been tied up in lengthy legal proceedings. Most researchers hope that reprogrammed cells will eventually provide a way out of the moral and ethical controversy.)

Science funding:

Federal funding for the National Science Foundation has become something of a hot potato in some GOP quarters, in light of recent criticism of the agency from Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla.

Neither Perry nor Romney has made his views on NSF funding widely known, but in the past the Texas governor as well as the Massachusetts governor have touted NSF grants that came to institutions in their states.

Bachmann has faced criticism from the right-leaning Club for Growth for her "questionable" vote to reauthorize spending by the NSF. However, Bachmann did recently seek to reduce NSF funding to 2008 levels for a budget reduction of $1.7 billion.

Paul voiced strong opposition to federal funding for science education in 2000, saying that "Congress has no constitutional authority to single out any one academic discipline as deserving special emphasis." More recently, Paul was one of two members of Congress voting against a resolution to mark NSF's 60th anniversary.

(After he took office, Obama vowed to double NSF's $6.5 billion budget, but this year's $6.8 billion figure falls well short of that goal.)

What to add?

I realize I'm missing many other worthy GOP candidates, and many other worthy issues relating to science and technology. Feel free to add your comments about the candidates and the issues, but please keep the conversation civil. This isn't the place to talk about the debt crisis, or chew over the immigration issue, or handicap the horse race. That's what the First Read blog is for. Check in with First Read and msnbc.com's Politics section for daily coverage of the 2012 presidential campaign.

Update for 10:30 p.m. ET Aug. 18: Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, another GOP presidential hopeful, stirred the pot by sending along this Twitter tweet: "To be clear. I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy." This follows up on The Washington Post's quote from Huntsman's chief strategist, John Weaver: "We're not going to win a national election if we become the anti-science party."

Although Huntsman accepts the view that greenhouse-gas emissions are contributing to climate change, he told Time's Swampland blog in May that cap-and-trade systems haven't worked and that "putting additional burdens on the pillars of growth right now is counterproductive."

On the stem-cell issue, a spokesman for Huntsman told LifeNews.com that the Republican supports research that involves "adult stem cells, non-embryonic stem cells and certain types of embryonic stem cell[s]" but does not support federal funding for research on new lines of embryonic stem cells. Such a stand appears to be consistent with the policy that was in place during George W. Bush's tenure at the White House.

Huntsman has generally been supportive of science funding: Among the efforts he supported as governor was the Utah Science Technology and Research Initiative at the University of Utah.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. You can also add me to your Google+ circle, and check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds. 

Department of Energy

An anvil cloud looms over the Southern Great Plains where DOE and NASA climate scientists are headed to study the physics of convective clouds in a bid to improve models of the global climate.

As spring storms rumble across the Great Plains in the coming weeks, government scientists will have their heads in the clouds hoping to gain a better understanding of the dynamics at play so they can improve models of the global climate.

"One of the real areas of hot debate in our field these days is what happens to the strength of storms as the climate warms," Michael Jensen, a meteorologist with the Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory, told me today.

Jensen is leading a six week field campaign beginning Friday in Oklahoma to study why these storms form where they do, how they grow over time and what causes them dissipate. The data, to be collected with state-of-the-art radars, wind profilers, NASA aircraft and weather balloons, will allow scientists to improve models they use to predict how these storms will change as the climate warms. 

Convective clouds
Current models are unable to accurately to reproduce these convective clouds. For example, the models tend to start forming them earlier in the day and produce really big storm clouds at the expense of the more common intermediate storms.

Convective clouds, or systems, are the towering masses formed by rising heat that can produce thunderstorms and other severe weather, including tornadoes such as those that swept across the southeast last weekend, killing several dozen people.

These so-called convective processes play a critical role in Earth's energy balance by redistributing heat and moisture in the atmosphere and triggering precipitation.

Although these are the processes that build up the storms that lead to severe weather, such as tornadoes, Jensen's team is most interested in "the much more typical afternoon spring and summer type thunderstorms that you experience in the plains," he said.

Field campaign
The experiment will employ a range of atmospheric measuring equipment on the DOE's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement Southern Great Plains site in Oklahoma, such as a suite of radars to study the properties and evolution of clouds in three dimensions. Other instruments at the facility will measure winds and precipitation.

NASA participants will fly aircraft within and above the cloud systems to collect complementary data on the amount of moisture and structure of the clouds. "Now we need the weather to cooperate a little bit. We need it to rain some while we are out there," Jensen noted.

The suite of instruments all running at the same time should give the scientists a holistic view of convective processes including:

• the atmospheric conditions in which a convective cloud forms,
• how air motions within the cloud impact the subsequent growth and formation of precipitation,
• what types and sizes of cloud and precipitation occur within the different stages of the cloud life cycle
• and how the cloud system impacts the background atmosphere

The end goal is to provide the most complete characterization of convective cloud systems and their environment that has ever been obtained, providing information that has never before been available for representing these processes in global climate models.

"We know that one of the biggest uncertainties in the climate models is the representation of clouds and the feedbacks they have within the climate system," Jensen told me. "This is just one of the cloud types that we need to continue to understand better to improve the climate models even further."

More on climate and clouds:

• How do clouds affect Earth's climate?
• Warming experts stick their heads in the clouds
• Are mystery clouds of Venus a warning sign for Earth's climate?
• Photoblog: Tracks in the sky