The Republican War on Science Chris Mooney Perseus, 352pp, £14.99 ISBN 0465046754

The list of things God tells George W Bush to do may be longer than we thought. Leave the sugar in fizzy drinks; teach children the unreliability of condoms; see through the hoax of global warming. Oh, and stifle embryonic stem cell research and appoint theologically correct policy advisers.

The American conservative movement, as Chris Mooney points out in this fiercely anti-Republican book, has brought together two powerful constituencies - big industry and the religious right - both of which have an interest in skewing scientific advice so that it says what they want to hear. As a result, whenever scientific advisers present anything in terms of probabilities (which is most of the time), these groups rush in and jeer "junk science". What they want instead is "sound science" - certainty beyond doubt. Short of this (unattainable) goal, they feel justified in demanding that any proposed policy harmful to their interests be scrapped.

The "sound science" movement has powerful new legislative weapons at its disposal. For example, the Data Quality Act, which came into effect in October 2002, allows manufacturers of pharmaceutical or tobacco products to ask for "peer review" of any policy recommendations from a federal agency. This usurpation of the custom by which academic papers are vetted credits corporations with the same capacity for intellectual independence as academics.

Mooney's most striking example of the demand for "sound science" is in the case of global warming. Is the phenomenon caused by human activity or is the planet simply fluctuating, as it always has done, between periods of coldness and warmth? Senator James Inhofe, chairman of the Senate environment and public works committee (and one of the arch-villains of Mooney's book), asked the National Academy of Sciences for a report advising US scientists whether or not to believe the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which, in 2001, had concluded that there was "a discernible human influence on global climate"). Yes, said the academy, the IPCC report was right. Unperturbed, Senator Inhofe tweezered out a line from the academy's report which said that "a causal linkage" between greenhouse gases and climate change "cannot be unequivocally established". He used this disclaimer to justify a 12,000-word Senate speech denouncing the theory of man-made global warming as possibly "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people". President Bush, in his re-election campaign last year, took the same line, proclaiming with deceptive blandness that, on global warming, "key uncertainties remain".

So far, so commercial. Yet Mooney shows how religious conservatives have also attacked science head-on, on four issues: evolution ("intelligent design" is their preferred answer as to how we got here); embryonic stem cell research; the alleged link between abortion and breast cancer; and sex education.

President Bush has catered to the religious right by appointing known sympathisers to scientific advisory bodies. His most controversial appointment was to place W David Hager, a known opponent of the "morning-after pill" and co-author of As Jesus Cared for Women, to the Food and Drug Administration's reproductive health drugs advisory committee.

The attack on science has not gone unnoticed. Early last year in Cambridge, Massachussetts, the Union of Concerned Scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, accused the Bush administration of abusing science by misinforming the public on global warming and of removing health information from government websites to appease the religious right. Mooney concludes that the politicisation of science has reached a nadir under George W Bush.

Yet finding the right tone in which to preach to the converted is never easy. Mooney's case is so appealing, his examples so glaring, that one regrets his book is such a heavy read. From this side of the Atlantic, the parade of acronyms - NMFS, CFC, ESA, PLF, PEER - is dizzying. And Mooney's frisky leaps from subject to subject sometimes make it hard to tell the bad guys from the good guys.

Still, with bird flu heading this way, the message is relevant to Britain. Mathematical probabilities are incomprehensible to ordinary people. Scientists and politicians share the duty of getting across to the public that absolute certainty on any matter is unattainable, and that reliable statistics come only from disinterested sources.

Brenda Maddox's most recent book is Maggie: the first lady (Coronet)

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