Climate Obfuscator Roger Pielke Jr. Strikes Again With Misleading WSJ Piece

Hurricane Harvey - merely an "overdue big One"?  So claims Roger Pielke Jr.

"Renowned Climate obfuscator" Roger Pielke Jr. (in the words of the science check website Skeptic Science), is at it again with his latest piece appearing in the WSJ :'The Hurricane Lull Couldn't Last', (Sept. 1, p. A15).  In it he merely used a probability argument to account for a hurricane like Harvey being "overdue" similar to one that I have myself applied to asteroid collisions, i.e..

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2016/10/asteroids-celestial-swords-of-damocles.html

Or, transferred to Pielke Jr.'s case (ibid.):

"Because the world has experienced a remarkable period of good fortune when it comes to catastrophes, we are due".

In other words Harvey's arrival was a statistical probability "after a remarkable 12 years without being hit by a hurricane of category 3 strength or stronger."

Pielke Jr. also dismissed more frequent  flood disasters in the U.S.,  e.g.

"Neither has there been an increase in floods, droughts and tornadoes...."

Despite the fact SAME WSJ  noted this morning (p. A14):

"The U.S. has seen 20 storms causing a billion dollars or more in damage since 2010, not including Harvey, compared with nine billion-dollar floods in the full decade of the 1980s."

Earlier (Aug. 30, p. A1) noting that "seven major storms have hit just since 2016 including October's Hurricane Matthew and February's California flooding."

So the Pielke Jr. take that major climate-related disasters are "getting less"  in the U.S. is already exposed as blatant bollocks. These sort of shallow arguments I will go on to explode citing several sources vastly more authoritative than this fake climate guy. Pielke Jr. goes on to babble:

"For many years, those seeking to justify carbon restrictions argued that hurricanes had become more common and intense. That hasn't happened. Scientific assessments, including those of the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change and the U.S. government's latest National Climate Assessment, indicate no long term increases in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes in the U.S.."

The actual facts are somewhat more complicated than Pielke Jr. portrays.  According to SciCheck, a division of FactCheck.org:

"The most recent analysis of what’s known about the effect of climate change on hurricane activity comes from the June 28 draft of the U.S. Global Change Research Program’s Climate Science Special Report.  One of that report’s key findings said that human activities have “contributed to the observed increase in hurricane activity” in the North Atlantic Ocean since the 1970s. The Gulf of Mexico, where Harvey formed, is part of the North Atlantic Ocean.

The draft report echoes the findings of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2013 assessment report, which found that scientists are “virtually certain” (99 percent to 100 percent confident) that there has been an “increase in the frequency and intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones since the 1970s” in the North Atlantic Ocean."

Adding:

"there is some uncertainty: The projections don’t yet align with the observed data on hurricanes because the data are “not of a high enough quality” to detect human contribution to the trend, the report says."

This is not at all surprising given that assessing human contributions to such a trend is effectively a stochastic analysis, not like one in celestial mechanics.  To nail the links down more securely we need more precise data on carbon depositions - as well as from other greenhouse gases such as methane. The sheer volume of such sources alone is staggering, encompassing the natural (e.g. melting permafrost in the Arctic) as well as the directly man-made (e.g. CO2 released from oil shale fracking operations).

What we DO know lies more in the way of ancillary thermal physics effects: for example, the planet is currently  subject to a radiative heating effect equivalent to 2.5 x 10 ⁷  TJ injected each year into the atmosphere or roughly 400,000 Hiroshima size A-bombs.   This in turn conforms to the observed  addition of 2 ppm  per year  in CO2 concentrations and an associated heating increase per year of  2 W/ m².    Result?  The temperature of the planet is currently out of balance by 0.6W/ m²  and this is almost entirely due to the annual rate of CO2 concentrations increasing. This is not due to any natural phenomenon but to human injection of carbon and other greenhouse gases into the planet's climate system.  

In other words, humans have - by fossil fuel activity -engendered a world with pronounced greenhouse dynamics.  The overall effect of such a greenhouse dynamic is warmer air which can hold more moisture. In addition, the warmer atmosphere causes evaporation to happen more rapidly. However, that alone doesn't explain the full role of the greenhouse effect on Hurricane Harvey.  Another consequence of greenhouse warming is that the oceans are absorbing CO2 and also becoming warmer- which in turn raises sea surface temperatures.

In effect, a large portion of Harvey's energy was fueled by very warm Gulf temperatures which rose to between 2.7 F and 7.2 F above average. Because of these high Gulf surface temperatures the original Tropic Storm Harvey progressed to a Cat 4 hurricane in barely 48 hours.

Climate scientist Michael Mann writing in the Guardian UK, invoked the well known  Clausius-Clapeyron equation  to ascertain that for every 0.5 C increase in warming there corresponds a  roughly 3% increase in average atmospheric moisture content.  For a climate 1 to 1.5C warmer than several decades ago this translates to an enhanced atmospheric moisture content of up to 9 percent. For Harvey, specifically, the sea surface temperatures were 0.5 - 1.0 C higher than current-day average temperatures, translating to 3- 5 % higher moisture content.   That in turn created the potential for the much greater rainfall in tandem with the effect of two subtropical highs which kept the storm in position an overly long time.  But again, this should not be confused with the intensity of the storm per se - tied to global warming - which was estimated yesterday at 1.2 inches of precipitation per hour for Houston.

Rice University climate scientist Jim Blackburn confirmed this connection and asserted that, in tandem with the destruction of nearby wetlands, the destruction wrought by Harvey was almost predicable - and "what all serious climate scientists have warned about". What about Roger Pielke Jr.? It appears he isn't a serious climate scientist at all but a climate science obfuscator along the lines of Willie Soon, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/02/another-climate-scientist-fake-exposed.html

But Pielke Jr's antics precede him and have been pointed in details by Skeptic Science, one of the most useful resources - along with the site www.realclimate.org for exposing fake science and fake science news, as well as distorting, obfuscating op-eds like Roger Pielke Jr's.  

Pielke Jr. didn't come to more national prominence until cited by Nate Silver at his Five Thirty Eight blog, e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2015/03/denver-post-hyprocrisy-on-academic.html

wherein I noted "Pielke Jr. is no more a real climate scientist than I'm the pope."

I further cited one reviewer's take on Pielke Jr's book  The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won't Tell You About Global Warming:

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." 

Skeptic Science picks up on Nate Silver's Pielke attributions and notes, for example:

"Nate Silver has launched a new FiveThirtyEight blog with the intent of applying his data-driven approach to a wide variety of subjects.  The problem is that Nate Silver is himself only one man, so FiveThirtyEight has hired a variety of contributors to write about the subjects that are outside his expertise and comfort zone.  For the topic of climate change, Silver decided to hire the renowned obfuscator Roger Pielke, Jr.

This was immediately disappointing for those familiar with Pielke's work, because FiveThirtyEight is a statistics site, and frankly Pielke is not good at statistics.  Instead, Pielke is known for taking a selective view of the peer-reviewed scientific literature in order to downplay the connection between human-caused global warming and extreme weather.  Predictably, Pielke's first two posts at FiveThirtyEight did exactly that, and included a litany of errors:

• The headline and main point of his post are wrong.
• He misrepresents his own research.
• The references he provides don't say what he claims and don't support his argument.
• Research he neglects contradicts his conclusions.
• He doesn't include all available data.
• He incorrectly claims that weather-related disasters aren't becoming more frequent.
• He fails to account for the costs of improved technology and the damages they prevent.
• He considers only land-falling hurricanes whose damages are highly variable.
• His conclusions are contradicted by the increased intensity of North Atlantic hurricanes, and global warming's contribution to their storm surges and flooding"

In other words, Nate Silver blew it in terms of his information source for climate change.   Other Pielke Jr.  hijinks include:

Pielke's first FiveThirtyEight post begins by plotting global disaster economic losses, from data provided by reinsurance company Munich Re.  Except for some reason Pielke only plots the data from 1990 to 2013, when Munich Re provides data beginning in 1980.

 Most damning in terms of Pielke Jr's WSJ piece:

"The Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters also has natural disaster cost estimates ranging back to the year 1900.  And ironically, when Munich Re published its report, Pielke criticized them for only including data since 1980, saying,

"Thirty years is not an appropriate length of time for a climate analysis, much less finding causal factors like climate change"

Yet Pielke has dismissed climate change as a causal factor using data from just 1990. As it turns out, the positive trend in global disaster losses in the Munich Re data is almost 30 percent larger for 1980–2013 than it is for 1990–2013.  What's more, the trend in disaster losses for 1980–2013 is statistically significant at the 99 percent confidence level, whereas the trend for the 1990–2013 window cherry picked by Pielke is not statistically significant."

SO much for Roger Pielke Jr's. dishonest representations that natural disasters have not become more common and intense.   As Skeptic Science goes on to point out:

"To determine if weather disasters are becoming more frequent, you don't look at economic loss data.  Munich Re also provides data about the number of annual disasters, and the frequency of these events is indeed rising.  Pielke claims,

"When you read that the cost of disasters is increasing, it’s tempting to think that it must be because more storms are happening. They’re not."

They are unequivocally increasing as illustrated in the figures above and below.

Munich Re disagrees with Pielke on the answer to this third question, concluding following a study of "Severe Weather in North America" that (emphasis added),

"Among many other risk insights the study now provides new evidence for the emerging impact of climate change. For thunderstorm-related losses the analysis reveals increasing volatility and a significant long-term upward trend in the normalized figures over the last 40 years. These figures have been adjusted to account for factors such as increasing values, population growth and inflation ... In all likelihood, we have to regard this finding as an initial climate-change footprint in our US loss data from the last four decades."

Does Pielke Jr. deserve to have his work published? Of course!  But mainly in The National Enquirer and perhaps some graphic comics.

See also:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/amy-goodman-and-denis-moynihan/74892/hell-hath-no-fury-like-mother-earth-scorned

Excerpt:

"Writer and activist Naomi Klein has long made the connection between disasters and economic opportunism. A key ingredient, she says, is a compliant media. “You turn on any coverage, and you hear that word over and over again, but what you don’t hear, or you hear very, very rarely, is an explanation for why the word ‘unprecedented,’ ‘record-breaking’ — why these words have become meteorological cliches,” she said on “Democracy Now!.” “We hear them all the time, because we’re breaking heat records year after year. We’re seeing record-breaking wildfires, record-breaking droughts, record-breaking storms, because the baseline is higher.”

Klein continued: “Nobody is saying that climate change caused this storm. What we’re talking about are what are the superchargers of this storm, the accelerants that took what would have been a disaster, in any situation, and turned it into this human catastrophe.”

That is a central tenet of climate science: You can’t attribute any given weather event to climate change, but human-induced climate change is making extreme weather events stronger and more frequent, more costly, more deadly. While the people in Texas and Louisiana suffer the final days of rain and begin recovery, over 1,200 people have been killed by massive floods in Bangladesh, India and Nepal. The planet is drowning in denial. Climate change is real, and needs to be addressed."

Hyprocrisy on "Academic Freedom" Exposed Again In Defense Of Climate Change Denier

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.

 

 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html?_r=0)'

 

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"

 

But this is refuted by Skeptic Science here:Arctic sea ice loss is three times greater than Antarctic sea ice gain.

 

To see a comprehensive rebuttal by Skeptic Science of many other of Pielke Jr. claims - go to this link:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/fivethirtyeight-pielke-downplay-climate-damages.html

 

What Happened to Nate Silver? Why Let A Climate Denier Occupy Space On His Blog?

No, "free speech" isn't the issue!  If a massive terrorist  'dirty' bomb was about to go off - say in Manhattan- we would not applaud those who deliberately gave misinformation, offered denial or other deflections. We'd prosecute them at least for obstruction of justice if not treason. A similar analogy can be invoked for radical climate change denial, now demanding a response  more urgent than ever as we learn (from a leaked IPCC report) that Climate change has already left its mark "on all continents and across the oceans", damaging food crops, spreading disease, and melting glaciers.

According to a UK Guardian Report, e.g.

"Some parts of the world could soon be at a tipping point.  For others, that tipping point has already arrived. "Both warm water coral reef and Arctic ecosystems are already experiencing irreversible regime shifts," the approved version of the report will say."

Adding:

"The gravest of those risks was to people in low-lying coastal areas and on small islands, because of storm surges, coastal flooding and sea-level rise."

This is already being seen in islands like Barbados, where the increasing sea level is reclaiming ever more prime beach land. It's also at work in South Florida, steadily shrinking beach sand unless it's constantly replaced. But tourists sunning themselves on beaches is the least of our concerns. The biggest is catastrophic climate change leading to the runaway greenhouse effect.

NY Times' columnist Nicholas Kristoff,  several weeks ago, noted a contest he'd held for the "Neglected Topic" winner among his columns. By a large margin it was climate change with one person comparing it to "staring down an asteroid". This is not exaggeration, other in terms of the time scale. If we fail to act decisively and dramatically our species will experience as much devastation as if a Torino scale 9 asteroid had hit. What are we doing about it?  Nothing of substance! Even Kristoff admitted:

"We in the news media manage to cover weather very aggressively but we are reticent on climate."

He adds that the coverage of climate has actually declined in American media since 2007 - according to researchers at the University of Colorado. As this media attention factor has declined, so also have the proportion of Americans who accept global warming is real. Of course, the largest divergence is between Republicans (24% accept it) and Democrats (65%).

Into this milieu, statistics guru Nate Silver has entered with his revived 538 blog, now incorporating a climate science section. Unfortunately, Silver picked exactly the wrong person to be the central contributor - a denier named Roger Pielke Jr. who - truth be told - isn't even a climate scientist.   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 Al Roker also demonstrated a couple weeks ago) it's how they're taught. The Review pointed out the following aberrations in its survey of  members of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and why most don't buy climate change:

 

1- Given their familiarity with the defects in their own extended predictions, meteorologists looking at long range climate questions (such as global warming effects) are predisposed to “see a system doomed to terminal unpredictability”.

2- Most skeptic meterologists (like Bob Breck an AMS-certified chief meteorologist at New Orleans WVUE) didn’t properly recognize the limits of their own scientific training – and hence the implausibility of their pronouncing on climate science.

3- Because of (2) the skeptic meteorologists tend to see their own “informed intuition” as the source of some kind of ersatz scientific authority – particularly if the skeptics are also excellent communicators, or fancy themselves so.

Some of the paradoxical statistics that were cited in the article, based on surveys carried out by Emory University Journalism lecturer Kris Wilson, included:

- 29% agreed with Weather Channel mogul John Coleman’s take that global warming was “the greatest scam in history”.

-Only 24% believed that humans were responsible for most of the change over the past half century.

- 50% were certain this wasn’t true and that humans weren’t responsible.

-Only 17% of the opinionated TV weathermen “received a graduate degree, a prerequisite for an academic researcher in any scientific field”.

 

If nothing else, this ought to forewarn any person who purports to have a blog featuring climate change topics to look before leaping and choosing an obfuscator like Pielke Jr. But don't take my word for it.

 

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. His proposal is to tax carbon at such a low and inconsequential rate that even Exxon Mobile agrees to the tax, and then to use the proceeds to fund more research on alternative energy and other mitigation strategies. That's IT. Well almost.

 

 He also spends an inordinate amount of time bashing climate scientists (which he is admittedly not) for being human beings and voicing their intense concern for the future of the planet, which their research has shown is in big trouble if we do nothing or little to decrease carbon emissions in the very near future. This book is not worth reading and I regret the time I spent getting through it. If you want to learn about climate change and our options for dealing with its consequences, there are dozens of other books that really address the issue.”

 

Why didn't Nate Silver know this before hiring the guy for input on his 538 blog? Perhaps he believed Pielke Jr was a climate  "moderate" and he'd be less likely to be criticized if he chose a "middle ground" guy as opposed to say Michael Mann (associated with the specious nonsense called "climategate" see e.g.

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2011/11/climategate-20-or-more-pseudo-climate.html

 

The reviewer's  isn't an exceptional take, but conforms with what most serious climate researchers think of Pielke and his work.  Skeptic Science refers to Pielke Jr as a “classic misinformer” and gives examples.

 

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"

 

 

But this is refuted by Skeptic Science here:Arctic sea ice loss is three times greater than Antarctic sea ice gain.

I also dispatched this nonsense in my own blog post here:

 

http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2012/09/brainiac-goops-screw-it-up-again-on.html

 

To see a comprehensive rebuttal by Skeptic Science of many other of Pielke Jr. claims - go to this link:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/fivethirtyeight-pielke-downplay-climate-damages.html

A recent salon.com article on Pielke Jr. perhaps offers some of the most trenchant observations of the guy, such as:

 

 

One remarkable feature of Pielke Jr.’s discussion is its shrillness. “Clique,” “coup,” and “plotting” are the kinds of terms usually reserved for organized crime syndicates, terrorist organizations, and other conspiracies against the public good. The repeated use of the word “activist” mobilizes a characteristic trope of right-wing ideologues. The term is typically applied to judges, who like scientists are supposed to be neutral when carrying out their duties, but all too often, on this view, betray their professional responsibilities.


Even someone who is sympathetic to the claim that political considerations sometimes find their way into climate science might shrink from Pielke Jr.’s characterization of climate science as “a fully politicized enterprise.” He makes such institutions as the National Center for Atmospheric Research sound like an outpost of the Democratic National Committee, or perhaps something even worse.

What is most troubling about Pielke Jr.’s account is its lack of balance. As we will see, the politicization of science by a handful of climate change deniers and their patrons is extremely well documented, and continues to be a major obstacle to the United States adopting effective climate policy. Yet in a 26-page chapter on the politicization of science, Pielke Jr. devotes only one paragraph to the behavior of those “opposed to action on climate change.” Their worst offense seems to be “[blowing] out of proportion papers at odds with the views of most other scientists.” If only.

The Jewish Daily Forward meanwhile has this take:

 

"Trained as a political scientist, Pielke is an ornery, combative smart-aleck who claims to accept the facts of man-made climate change, but spends much of his time debunking new climate research, downplaying the threats and ridiculing scientists who disagree. He expends so much energy belittling climate experts — he recently accused White House science adviser John Holdren of “zombie science” — that he was listed in Foreign Policy’s 2010 Guide to Climate Skeptics. (The rest of his time seems to be spent crying foul when his victims hit back.)"

The Daily Forward goes on to note:

 

"Critics from columnist Paul Krugman to leading climatologist Michael Mann to liberal bloggers at ThinkProgress and Salon all claim Silver hurt his website’s credibility — fatally, some huffed — by hiring a “climate confusionist” like Pielke"

 

Actually, Pielke Jr is your standard "agnotologist" - one of a species of right wing types who sow deliberate  doubt to postpone critical action on climate, in favor of economic priority. It's exemplified in this 2012 headline and story in the Wall Street Journal:

 Agnotology, derived from the Greek 'agnosis' - the study of culturally constructed ignorance- is achieved primarily by sowing the teeniest nugget of doubt in whatever claim is made.   Stanford historian of science Robert Proctor has correctly tied it to the trend of skeptic science sown deliberately and for political or economic ends . In other words, the supporters of agnotology - whoever they may be- are all committed to one end: destroying the science to enable economic profit and hence planetary ruin. Proctor also notes these special interests are often paid handsomely to sow immense confusion on the issue.

 

The concept is simple: sow enough doubt, portray denial as a "logical" counterpoint to acceptance, and you win. The Neoliberal media then presents both sides - and hails it as evidence of their "objectivity".  As Nicholas Krisfoff pointed out this cynical trend is already paying dividends as the media retreats from the issue, and Americans follow as fewer accept it as real. Would they do the same if a mammoth asteroid approached? I doubt it, but then human brains simply don't process slow moving catastrophes in the same way.

 

The question remains of why Nate Silver would help spread agnotology, and my answer is simple: He himself simply isn't adequately educated on climate change. In many ways it reminds me of SPLC Intelligence Report writer Marilyn Elias, who did a piece on the JFK assassination  (actually on Richard Belzer) for the Winter issue and got it all wrong. Why? Because she let disinformationist Gerald Posner do her thinking for her as opposed to performing her own independent investigation - for example of Jack Ruby's role in the assassination of Oswald.

 

If Silver has learned his lesson, then all the hullaballo may be worth it. In the meantime, bloggers and scientists need to follow the advice of real climate scientist Michael Mann ('If You See Something, Say Something', Sunday Review, NY Times) as he warns:

 

"If scientists choose not to engage in the public debate, we leave a vacuum that will be filled by those whose agenda is one of short term self-interest. There is a great cost to society if scientists fail to participate in the larger conversation - if we do not do all we can to ensure the policy debate is informed by an honest assessment of the risks. In fact it would be an abrogation of our responsibility if we remained quiet in the face of such a grave threat."

 

And as the new IPCC report notes, this is a grave threat indeed. Those like Pielke Jr. drive the impetus to shut us up invoking the nonsense we are "politicizing science" but in reality, when a risk as grave as the runaway greenhouse is around the corner - politics itself is subsumed by science. Since politics' role is first and foremost the disposition of resources via governance, than it redounds on us to ensure science has a predominant role if a scientifically disclosed threat warrants it.

 

Let us hope Nate Silver has learned from this so he uses more discretion in the future in choosing his fellow  538 bloggers.

 

 See also:

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/29/the_rights_new_climate_change_lie_its_all_the_scientists_fault/

http://www.salon.com/2014/03/30/californiapocalypse_once_in_a_millennium_drought_a_wakeup_call_for_america/