My family camped in the remote and isolated basin formed by this 3-mile-wide and 12-mile-deep glacier, its lake and forests separated from Resurrection Bay by a long sand-spit, a few miles from Seward, Alaska, down the road about 100 miles from now-famous Wasilla. Of the many things that moved me during our 3 days there was that without science you would never know there was such a thing as global warming.  I went to Alaska expecting to be saddened by what I thought would be obviously melting glaciers. What I found, as here, were endless masses of ice everywhere, enormous creaking glorious beings, not at all showing signs of frailty.  I realized that without the long and patient natural sciences, cataloguing the shrinkages over time, the microchanges of temperatures around the globe, the dislodging of creatures and plants, one would not know the apocalyptic dangers ahead.  When people with a far-reaching voice, like Sarah Palin, stir up populist feelings against the importance of science, they are undercutting the very source of knowledge that we desparately need to preserve our magnificent home.