Roger Pielke Jr

Hi there, folks. This post should have been a tweet in response to Roger Pielke Jr (@RogerPielkeJr), professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder, the guy who got fired by Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight for, as I understand it, his anti-science positions on climate change. This is a response for a tweet by Junior designed to offend, nay, attack, both Professor Michael Mann and moi. But Roger blocks me (and everybody else) on twitter, so this has to be a blog post. Roger is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I suppose I can't blame him for getting every single…
Last week, House Representative Lamar Smith held yet another masturbatory hearing to promote climate science denial. Smith is bought and paid for by Big Oil, so that is the most obvious reason he and his Republican colleagues would put on such a dog and pony show, complete with a chorus of three science deniers (Judith Curry, Roger Pielke Jr, and John Cristy). I don't know why they invited actual and respected climate scientist Mike Mann, because all he did was ruin everything by stating facts, dispelling alt-facts, and making well timed Princess Bride references. The hearings were called "…
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…
Last week I got an email from Amy Turner of the Sunday Times: Dear Tim, I'm writing a piece about Science bloggers and would love to talk to you about yours. Are you free to talk to me today or tomorrow? Hope to hear from you. Turner usually writes celebrity puff pieces rather than about science, so it was pretty obvious that Jonathan Leake was organizing some payback because I had dared to criticize him. I agreed to the interview and, sure enough, it wasn't long before Turner was threatening me (How would I react if Jonathan Leake sued me for libel?) She complained that I had been unfair…
There have been new developments in Leakegate, the scandal swirling about reporter Jonathan Leake, who deliberately concealed facts that contradicted the story he wanted to spin. Deltoid can reveal that Leake was up to the same tricks in his story that claims that the IPCC "wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters". Bryan Walker has the detailed dissection, but the short version is that Leake took one part of the discussion of one paper in the IPCC WG2 report and pretended that this was all it said, entirely ignoring the WG1 report and the discussion of other papers in the WG2…
Esteemed Pielkeologist, Eli Rabett points me to a post from Roger Pielke Jr complaining that he is being persecuted by the "liberal blogosphere". Apparently what prompted this was a comment from Brad DeLong on why he considers Pielke Jr to be dishonest: I do remember that what knocked my view of your work over the edge was one of your attacks on Hansen. Ah. "[Pielke] claims that [Hanson's] scenario B was off by a factor of 2 on CO2. This sounds like a lot until you discover that means that emissions grew by 0.5% per year instead of 1% a year. And that works out to scenario B having the…
Over the past few days we have had another outbreak of stories of how global warming has been totally disproved. For example, James Delingpole: the global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie When finally McIntyre plotted in a much larger and more representative range of samples than used those used by Briffa - though from exactly the same area - the results he got were startlingly different. The scary red line shooting upwards is the one Al Gore, Michael Mann, Keith Briffa and their climate-fear-promotion chums would like you to believe in. The black one, heading downwards,…
The thing about a Roger Pielke Jr train wreck is that you just can't look away. Check this one out. Pielke claims that there were 1,264 times as many news stories about a Michael Mann study that suggests that hurricanes are at a 1,000 year high as about a Chris Landsea study that found no increase in hurricanes over the past century. (Mark Morano , of course, links to Pielke's post.) The fun is in the comments as folks try to explain to Pielke that there is a film director called Michael Mann and that maybe Pielke shouldn't count those stories. Pielke comes back with the claim that…
Last year I wrote about Roger Pielke Jr's abuse of draft reports for point-scoring purposes. Coby Beck catches him doing it again: His latest effort at sabotaging productive discourse on climate science and policy is a really low blow, putting to rest any lingering hopes one might have had that he still had some integrity stashed away in there somewhere. Now I know these are strong words, but I have to confess this really gets my blood pressure up, it is just the slimiest of tactics. John Fleck noticed the same thing, but is more charitable: There's a significant difference between ideas…
Clif at Sadly No mocks some blogger who thinks that because the draft report Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States used a photoshopped picture of flood to illustrate a flood, rather than a picture of a real flood, this casts doubt on the science. Following the links I get to Anthony Watts who reckons that it was photoshopped "for better impact" -- I guess he thinks beautiful clean fake water has a better impact than the disgusting brown water you get in a real flood. From Watts I find, surprise surprise, that this story originated at Climate "mountains out of molehills" Audit…
More carriages have come off the rails in the Roger Pielke Jr train wreck. Pielke finally does a hypothesis test. Trouble is, it's an unpaired t-test, which would only make sense if GISS and HADCRU were independent of each other, i.e. temperature measurements of different planets. Which, uh, they're not. James Annan explains it here. And another Pielke carriage comes off the rails here.
If you haven't been watching the Roger Pielke Jr train come off the rails and the carriages smashing into each other and exploding, I suggest you look at this post from James Annan: Roger Pielke has been saying some truly bizarre and nonsensical things recently. The pick of the bunch IMO is this post. The underlying question is: Are the models consistent with the observations over the last 8 years? Hey, hypothesis testing. First year stats stuff. So Annan carefully explains how it's done. Marvel at Pielke Jr's response: All he does is draw some graphs and wave his hands around. Does he…
Nature has started Climate Feedback, a blog on climate change. One of the first posts is by Roger Pielke Jr, who claims Even the venerable New York Times is prone to completely botching a discussion of the science of climate change. In a front page article today, the NYT reports on how the National Arbor Day Foundation has updated plant hardiness maps to reflect recent changes in climate. (A plant hardiness map presents the lowest annual temperature as a guideline to what plants will thrive in what climate zones.) The NYT misrepresents understandings of variability and trend and in the…
Roger Pielke Jr writes: Andy Revkin has a well-done article on the "middle ground" in the climate change debate. I fully expect that many of the usual suspects on the extremes of the debate (both sides) will respond to this story by saying that they've been in the middle all along. The most prominent of the usual suspects saying that they've been in the middle all along is, of course, Roger Pielke Jr. Since he was in the middle, in the Hansen/Michaels dispute, Pielke Jr was critical of both sides. Oops, no. Sorry, that was wrong. Pielke Jr just made some specious criticisms of Hansen's…
In Paul Krugman's May 29 column he wrote about Pat Michael's "fraud, pure and simple" that James Hansen's 1988 prediction of global warming was too high by 300%. (Michael's fraud was described earlier by Hansen, Gavin Schmidt, Hansen again and me.) Michaels has posted a denial, so I'm going to go back to the original sources so that everyone can see what Michaels did. In Michaels' 1998 testimony he stated: Ten years ago, on June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the House of Representatives that there was a strong "cause and effect relationship" between observed…