Most people who pay any attention to the news would only have heard of Roger Pielke Jr. when Nate Silver's 538 blog took him under its wings as some kind of "official" voice re: climate. But as I noted in my March 30 post from last year this is all huff and puff baloney. And Pielke Jr. is no more a real climate scientist than I'm the pope.
According to one profile on Wikipedia:
"Pielke Jr. is an American meteorologist with interests in climate variability and climate change",
Leaving out all the fulsome bollocks on his assorted "numerical modeling" skills this is basically what it all comes down to: his meteorological background. As I noted in a Jan. 2012 post on the climate agnotologists, citing the Jan.-Feb. 2011 issue of The Columbia Journalism Review, most meteorologists have a distorted view on climate change- global warming. They can't help it, as NBC's Al Roker also demonstrated, It's how they're taught, unable to see the "data forests for the trees." In addition, they fail to properly recognize the limits of their own scientific training – and hence the implausibility of their pronouncing on climate science.
As one reviewer of his book The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell You About Global Warming, puts it:
"Pielke Jr. is really astonishing in the way he almost completely denies the urgent need to mitigate climate change by greatly lowering global carbon emissions. He does it in a very slick way by masquerading as someone with real and different solutions, when in reality all he proposes is that society do next to nothing about burning fossil fuels.
He basically brushes aside climate change as if it were a trivial concern."
So no surprise that ultimately someone of authority would wish to investigate Pielke Jr's background and whether he was collecting money from the fossil fuel lobbies or companies. After all. we know Willie Soon - another climate scientist pretender- is in up to his eyeballs with fossil fuel money, e.g.
So the ranking Democratic member of the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources, Rep. Raul M. Grijalva, was quite correct to launch an inquiry into the basis for his academic views. Certainly to see if they were his own or being shaped by $$$ from fossil fuelers, as Soon's views are. Grijalva wrote the University of Colorado demanding information, including Pielke's funding sources, communications and all drafts "of testimony before any government body"
Grijalva's interest was to ferret out conflicts of interest, which was totally justifiable. Again, as we saw with Willie Soon's case, even the Smithsonian - under which umbrella he's allowed to operate at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics- took issue with his failure to disclose funding sources.
But what was the Post's take in its fulsome Editorial yesterday?
"In fact, his gambit amounts to a bold, abusive assault on academic freedom"
Please, Spare me the phony sanctimonious , self-righteous squawking. Because I'd like to know where the hell the Post was some years ago when CU (the same university Pielke's at now) rummaged through all of Prof. Ward Churchill's drafts, academic papers and communications - which they did with no other prof - to find hum guilty of "plagiarism" - after his essay 'On Roosting chickens' came to light. This was an essay written after 9/11 that compared the investment specialists and brokers in the World Trade Center to "little Eichmanns".
Every little anti-free speech dunce in Colorado went batshit crazy calling for Churchill's head, with the university - and the Denver Post - complying in full. The Post hung Churchill out to dry in a number of editorials and op-ed columns, The guy was convicted and hung, drawn and quartered before he could ask why. The whole episode showed the "free speech" meme for the hypocritical bollocks it was, because while someone could depict Muslims as "ragheads" in cartoons, he couldn't dare call into the question the U.S. role in inciting blowback - as Churchill did.
So it's kind of choice now to see the Post going all holier than thou on defending "academic freedom" for Pielke Jr. when they never did it for Ward Churchill. In fact, they wanted him tossed out of CU as rapidly as possible. No way could a critic of government policy in the wake of 9/11 be allowed to continue to publish his work without hyper-scrutiny and kangaroo academic courts.
The Post at the end then quotes Pielke Jr's whining (on his blog) on his departure from climate change research:
"The incessant attacks and smears are effective, no doubt. I have already shifted all my academic work away from climate issues."
Awwwww,,,,boo hoo hoo, cry me a river, and pass the handkerchiefs. Our hearts bleed for the poor little denier rat. Just don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out, Sparky.
And the Denver Post's final take?
"It is a sad day when bullies can push honest brokers such as Pielke into another line of research."
Balderdash. It's a sad day - really sad - when our supposed objective newspapers can't tell an honest broker from a dishonest one like Pielke Jr. A pseudo researcher whose specious science has helped to probably delay effective action that leaves us all at risk. As I said, good riddance he's out of the climate field so he can't pump out any more of his denier BS.
Before anyone sheds a tear for this "honest broker" let's recall
Skeptic Science referred to Pielke Jr as a “classic misinformer. For example, Pielke Jr. claimed:
"Not all glaciers and ice caps are melting. While the Arctic Ice for example has been decreasing, Antarctic ice has not"
To see a comprehensive rebuttal by Skeptic Science of many other of Pielke Jr. claims - go to this link:
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