Roger Pielke Jr no longer with FiveThirtyEight?

Roger Pielke Jr, who is some form or another of climate change contrarian ... his main schtick is that global warming has no negative effects and he uses questionable analyses to "prove" this ... was brought on to the well respected FiveThirtyEight run by Nate Silver, blog site a while back. Soon after joining the team he seems to have stuck his foot deeply into his mouth a few times and got called on it. One could say that FiveThirtyEight's fame and respect has been earned by being straight forward and methodologically rigorous and professional in its handling of predictions about such important things as elections and sporting event outcomes. One could say that Roger Pielke Jr. is not. One might assume that he was quietly sidelined (let go or just removed as a main contributor, we don't know) because of this.

RL Miller (@RL_Miller) tweeted that he noticed that Roger Pielke Jr was no longer on the FiveThirtyEight main contributors page.

And Roger MT's the tweet in the affirmative:

So, this is what happens when you play fast and loose with the fancy statistical methods. You are seen as an outlier and removed. As it were.

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Good, but hasn't Silver historically been a little sketchy on AGW? Is he coming around or just dodging association with the Egregious Pielke?

By Obstreperous A… (not verified) on 17 Jul 2014 #permalink

I am going to guess that any reticence that Silver may have had to go along with accepted science was out of ignorance not some sort of political motivation, because that would be entirely contrary to what he seems to stand for, and it is in the past. I will further guess that bringing Roger on board to begin with may have been part of that older way of thinking. Finally, that act, of bringing in Roger, resulted in an unignorable flood of valid criticism that he's listened to, and this is why Roger is gone.

"So, this is what happens when you play fast and loose with the fancy statistical methods. You are seen as an outlier and removed. "

How come Mann is still in?

My impression is that Mann is hated because he's willing to stand up for science and his own work in the face of considerable bullying from people who dislike his work for ideological reasons.

The pushback from Krugman was key to this.

Poor RL, "he"d yet again.

By Steve Bloom (not verified) on 19 Jul 2014 #permalink

Kramer, how could you consider Mann "an outlier" when a score of subsequent studies have agreed with and confirmed his results?

Looks like *you*'re the outlier here, Kramer...

By Craig Thomas (not verified) on 20 Jul 2014 #permalink