The scorn of the US far-right 'Tea Party' fringe for science, particularly relating to sustainability, climate change and biodiversity, stems from a perceived threat to its idealized views of how the world should be (Nature 467, 133; 2010).

The great (and undervalued) psychologist George Kelly described threat as “the awareness of an imminent comprehensive change in one's core structures”. Science opens up our culture's core structures to criticism and calls their importance into question — one example being non-sustainable approaches to managing the planet.

The far-right's response to the threat posed by modern environmental science goes roughly like this. First, discredit a piece of scientific data — the 'hockey-stick' graph, for example. When that fails to remove the threat of climate-change science, discredit the scientists (as happened in 'Climategate'). When that doesn't work either, discredit science as a method for understanding the world.