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Displaying results 1 - 50 of 284
Pielke Pity Party
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…
Another Pielke train wreck
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…
RP Jr to world: come on if you think you're hard enough
There's a fair section of the - errm - normally-sane-side-of-the-climate-wars blogosphere that regards RP Jr as the spawn of the devil. Eli weighs in complaining about Nate Silver of 538 getting RP to write for him (Eli has form, dontchaknow). Now I'd be the first to agree that RP has said some silly things , and some disastrously silly things on trends. But that's him playing away. On his home turf, RP is very strong. Because he has a simple message based on good data. As I said in 2011 over SREX, "As usual, Pielke wipes the floor with Romm"; see-also another relevant article from 2009. So…
Claiming the Middle Ground
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…
Pielke train wreck continues
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.
Pielke train wreck
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…
Annals of Possible Cherry-Picking
A very interesting issue--discussed in comments here and here--has arisen over one aspect of Roger Pielke, Jr.'s testimony yesterday. In that testimony (PDF), Pielke suggested that Waxman's committee had cherry-picked science with the following statement in a memorandum (the original of which I have not been able to locate): ". . . recently published studies have suggested that the impacts [of global warming] include increases in the intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms, increases in wildfires, and loss of wildlife, such as polar bears and walruses." The above statement on hurricanes…
Pielke Sr's new statistical technique
You might have learnt in stats class how to use linear regression to estimate trends. Well I'm sorry but you going to have to forget it all and the boring statistics books are going to have to be rewritten because that stuff is obsolete due to revolutionary breakthrough by Roger Pielke Sr. If you use the boring-and-now-obsolete linear regression stuff on the University of Colorado at Boulder sea level data you discover that the trend is positive and highly statistically significant, even if you just consider the data since 2006. But using his revolutionary new technique Roger Pielke Sr…
Guilty until proven innocent
At least this is the standard if you are Roger Pielke Jr and the accused is a member of Real Climate. When pressed as to how he knew an accusation of plagarism he was leveling was really true, in his own words: if the authors provide evidence [...] I'll stand corrected. [...] Meantime, I am perfectly comfortable with the views expressed in this post. This is how he defends his very serious accusation of plagarism against a commenter who expresses surprise at Pielke leveling such a charge with admitted lack of anything more than circumstantial evidence. maybe they were alerted by one or more…
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…
Political science
I like to joke that in Kansas, biology is political science. Even when I'm doing job interviews outside of this grand state, people usually get the joke, or need only slight prompting to get it. I take this to be a sad commentary on the state of politics in Kansas. There is no doubt that the discovery of Tikaalik plays into political battles over creationism in schools. I have even less doubt that the discoverers of that "fishapod" would still have been just as excited by that discovery without the political issues. It's a fascinating discovery, as are the results in thousands of articles…
Peak Pielke
Roger Pielke Jr has stopped blogging. James Annan comments: It had appeared for some time that RPJr's his blog was on the wane, attracting little more than a handful of denialist ditto-heads, and now he's decided to knock it on the head. Personally, I found much of Roger's blogging to be interesting and thought-provoking, although I'm a bit baffled by some of the clangers he dropped (eg his bizarre cheerleading of air capture of CO2, and his lame attempt to discredit Hansen's 1988 forecast). Many of his comments on the politicisation of climate science in general, and the hurricane wars in…
Nature climate blog off to rocky start
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…
The Attacks on John Holdren Are Beginning
John Tierney, Roger Pielke, Jr., and Chris Horner have the knives out. Joe Romm and Tim Lambert have begun the defenses. I find the attacks pretty baseless. But I'd like to hear readers thoughts on all of this, as I may well be writing more about it.... CORRECTION: The Roger Pielke Jr. post is from August. It is not part of a wave of attacks on John Holdren. Sorry about that mistake.
More foam
A little while ago I was ratty at Romm for being ratty at Peilke. All very exciting, but I was challenged to Please identify a single scientifically inaccurate statement in the paragraph that Pielke excerpted from the report. This isn't difficult; Pielke has already done it. Romm also asked me to please identify the scientifically inaccurate statements in my blog post that you trashed. This turns out to be harder: though all the ranting, I can't actualy see any strictly scientific statements in there at all. Can anyone else?
Sea level rise from IPCC '90
This starts from Pielke Jr commenteing at RC that the 1990 IPCC grossly overestimated sea level rise to date, and pointing to his post here as proof. Its nonsense, of course. [Aside: Chinese Cut Back Coal-to-liquids from John Fleck is interesting.] Pielke does the familiar rub-out-all-the-uncertainty estimates stuff, as well as using A.12 rather than fig 12 (p xxx), to try to show that IPCC '90 overestimated current sea level rise. First off, Pielkes graph is a straight line, and the IPCC's clearly isn't, so he hasn't been exact. Secondly, the IPCC graph is obviously not intended to predict…
Mcintyre misunderstood somehow. Yet again.
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 shortsightedness of using short term trends
The good thing for those interested in reality, is that arguments about short tem trends only last for...um short terms. The bad thing for the denialism movement's argument recycling machine is that they can't rely on copy/paste, or at least shouldn't! Check out Things Break for a rather amusing example of this. Morano recylces a moronic argument about how sea levels are falling, which was true on the uninformative timescale of 2006 to mid 2009. But he amusingly links to current data[PDF] which shows that temporary lull is over and 2006 has been surpassed. Also in that article is the…
No war on science?
Roger Pielke, Jr. is a respected scholar of science policy, but he's got a contrarian streak a mile wide that gets him into trouble occasionally, as for instance his feud with Joe Romm of Climate Progress. It is also apparent in his survey of a fight over oyster farming off the coast of Point Reyes. His title, "The War on Science Continues" is, he insists, "a bit of irony, of course, as there never has been a 'war on science,' just politics as usual, sometimes played more hardball than others, especially by the previous Administration." His example of an ongoing war on science involves…
Leakegate: Jonathan Leake strikes back
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…
Speak of the Devil...
...and he puts you on his mailing list! [Please note: Marc Morano is nowhere near as relevant as Beelzebub!! It is just a gimmick for a blog title.] So I poked fun at Marc Morano the other day, and though he thankfully did not pop up in my comments he must have read the post because the next day I started receiving his spam. The first email was approvingly quoting Pielke Jr, which I have no doubt thrills him. Roger's fear? Not that humanity is facing daunting challenges and may not act quickly enough, no what keeps Roger awake at night is James Hansen's belief that politicians should take…
The NYTimes, the IPCC, and Perceived Conflict of Interest
In my remarks as part of a panel at Harvard last week, I predicted that a new public accountability narrative about climate scientists had been locked in by the "ClimateGate" controversy and that each successive event such as the dispute over the Himalayan glacier data would be re-interpreted and amplified through this lens. Partisan segments of the public--whether on the left or the right--pay close attention to accusations of political wrongdoing on the part of officials and scientists are not immune to this interpretation. In fact, public accountability is an enduring theme and focus…
Oh dear oh dear oh dear
Roger is having a spot of trouble: everyone is being nasty to him. Once upon a time the mighty Prometheus bestrode the world like a Colossus and ate big fish for breakfast, but now it seems Roger swims with the minnows and it isn't a nice world down there. Eli shows him no mercy - wabbits are a vicious bunch - and Tim Lambert is not kind either but Whiskey Fire probably has the best take on all this. Incidentally, it isn't really Roger's fault but he does seem to be attracting the wacko septics in the comments, for example Of course DeepClimate consistently refuses to publish my charts…
Global Warming and Hurricane Impacts: A Hypothetical Scenario
Over at Prometheus, Roger Pielke, Jr., has an interesting post taking Kevin Trenberth to task for discussing how global warming may have increased Katrina's total rainfall and thus caused direct damage to New Orleans. Pielke doesn't think Trenberth can justifiably say this, although previously (I forget the exact link) I seem to recall that folks at RealClimate had defended Trenberth's back-of-the-envelope calculation. I don't know enough at this point to have an opinion about the validity of what Trenberth said. However, irrespective of Trenberth's claim, I do wonder whether or not it will…
Roger Pielke Sr. wades into the deep end
For at least as long as I've been paying attention, Roger Pielke Sr. hasn't been all that popular among those are doing their best to convince the world to take the threat of climate change seriously. He's a genuine, and until recently, reputable scientist at a genuine and reputable institution of higher learning, Colorado State University. His hard-line skepticism has at times proven useful when it comes to keeping the rest of the climatology community on its toes. He accepts that humans are contributing to climate change, but is concerned that the general focus on carbon dioxide as the…
Beach and River
I've been a little weighed down with various activities recently. So anyone keenly awaiting the next round of me-vs-Romm-vs-Pielke will just have to wait. Meanwhile, in-joke of the day.
The More Things Change...
For many, it might seem as though all the recent attention to hurricanes and global warming is something new. On the contrary, this topic has been with us for a long time. And debates in the past have sounded surprisingly like debates today. For instance, I just read a 1999 Time magazine story by J. Madeleine Nash, published in the wake of Hurricane Floyd on September 27, 1999. It was entitled "Wait Till Next Time; If a little heated water in the Atlantic can create Floyd, what storms will global warming bring?" The piece quoted MIT's Kerry Emanuel discussing how hurricanes could grow…
More on the Middle Ground
Following up on my previous post on claiming the middle ground, we have: David Roberts didn't like Revkin's article. Revkin replies in the comments. I do think that the media has focused too much on he extremes (Pat Michaels and we're all going to die stuff), but the middle they should be paying more attention to is the IPCC reports and not Pielke Jr. Matthew Nisbet writes about the "Pandora's Box" frame of pending catastrophe. He thinks that it opens scientists up to charges of alarmism from the likes of Inhofe. I think that Inhofe is going to make such charges no matter what. jsk argues…
Who's in, who's out?
Um, I do like my new category of "climate snarking", since it allows me to offend people but get away with it because I'm being ironic. Or something. Anyway: Natures Climate Feedback blog has undergone a quiet revamp. Perhaps they have been listening to Eli? Unlikely I know - no one else does (remember, this is ironic). Anyway, I *still* wish them well, and clearly they have been listening to feedback, and they still have the good taste to include me on their blogroll, but despite that I'm still going to criticise them for silently revising their list of "core contributors", from the original…
My piece of the Pi meme
The Pi meme: If for no other reason than it's good to re-examine one's motives.Thanks to Janet for cooking up this particular indulgent recipe. 3 reasons you blog about science: 1. Nothing better to do with my free time 2. Can't resist a good argument 3. Need somewhere to spew; otherwise my opinions might find their way into something I actually get paid good money to write. Point at which you would stop blogging: 1. When science is no longer a political football 1 thing you frequently blog besides science: The evils of dogma. 4 words that describe your blogging style: Opinionated,…
Entrapment?
Have you seen this paper making the rounds in cyberland? Carbon dioxide production by benthic bacteria: the death of manmade global warming theory? Journal of Geoclimatic Studies (2007) 13:3. 223-231. As suspected, it appears to be a hoax. And you thought the Halloween trickery was over... Details from Pielke.
Cathy Young speaks true on the global warming debate
The global warming debate has been going for a long time, and both sides have become deeply entrenched. Unfortunately, this polarization is beginning to impede the achievement of any reasonable solution. Further, the proponents of steps to fight global warming deride the other side's motives while denying that theirs are in any way tainted. This is not a fair or acceptable behavior, particularly when it is behavior by scientists. Cathy Young -- a contributing editor at Reason -- had this to say about it: There is a growing number of voices in the scientific community that reject both…
Anthony Watts' abuse of the DMCA
When Peter Sinclair made Anthony Watts the subject of his "Climate Crock of the week" video, Watts response was to attempt to suppress the criticism by making a bogus copyright claim against the video. Naturally this hasn't worked, with Desmogblog reposting the video. Better see it in case Watts tries again. Also of interest is Roger Pielke Sr's harumphing about the video.
Climate Audit Comedy of Errors
Eli Rabett chronicles the Climate Audit comedy of errors. One consequence of the error in the RSS satellite data is that the global warming skeptics switched to using RSS, and now they can't switch back without making it look realy obvious what they are up to. Update: McIntyre has a new post where he claims: In the same post that Rabett criticized here, as originally written, I had incorrectly missed a comment in Hansen et al 1988 saying that Scenario B was the "most plausible", an error which I picked up about 8 hours after the original posting (about 9 am EST) and immediately corrected it…
The climatologist survey
An unlikely trio has just made available the results of their quasi-scientific survey of climatologists, who were asked how much they agreed with the latest report from the IPCC. It makes for fascinating reading, even if its response rate of less than 10 % is a bit disappointing. Despite attempts from some quarters at spinning the results to suggest the climate change "consensus" is weaker than often described, the survey actually finds remarkably strong support for the notion that we are headed for trouble. Roger Pielke Sr., one of the authors, supplies a web version of the PDF linked above…
Yet more sports commentary
Roger Pielke Jr has another post promoting the whole Hockey Stick schtick. My "sceptic guide" entry on that is still here, and I don't have much more to say about it still to this day. But as for the meta discussion... I think it is self-serving and a real disservice to humanity for Roger to still be fanning the flames on this issue, but it certainly seems he has found the audience and following he must have been seeking if one is to judge be the plethora of "me too" comments he has received. I don't have much more to observe than that, but Michael Tobis has a more lengthy and well thought…
The return of KK!
KK tweets My latest @ISSUESinST feature just went online. It covers some sensitive issues in ecology & climate spheres. It's kinda standard fodder, headlined "The Science Police" in order to wind you up, like The Fail, bylined On highly charged issues, such as climate change and endangered species, peer review literature and public discourse are aggressively patrolled by self-appointed sheriffs in the scientific community. Provocative or wot? I'll skip the ecology, because I have no expertise there, and come on to the climate. Which is... RP Jr. And if you don't know who he is, KK…
Strangely High Temperatures
David Appell has a rather dramatic graph: It is from Roy Spencer. As DA says: I'm sure those skeptics who pored over every detail of the sea ice this winter will be touting this picture soon :-). [Update: BCL points me to http://bigcitylib.blogspot.com/2009/07/pielke-sr-respnds.html which again suggests problems with UAH. Well, we all know we should use RSS anyway. Hopefully they will provide the funky interface Update: Picture post: 'hottest April ever' says Nurture -W]
Roger has really lost the plot (again)
Roger puts up another post (guest post, gotta love plausible deniability) about James Hansen: blah blah blah....dictator who ordered millions of people to be gassed and then burned in crematoria...blah blah blah No, he isn`t (yet) calling Hansen a Hitler, but we all know how Godwin`s Law works. Or almost all of us... [UPDATE: Things Break has a stronger stomach than I do, and he takes a more thorough look at Roger's latest. As usual with Pielke's positions, the closer you look, the less it holds up.]
Enough already! You're both right!
If there's one thing every environmentally minded American can agree on, it's the complete failure of the Bush administration to recognize the severity of the climate crisis. (Greenhouse-gas emissions stablilization by 2025? You've got to be kidding.) But sometimes it seems that's all we can agree on. Take the ongoing squabbling between Joe Romm of the Center for American Progress (with some help from Dave Roberts at Grist) and the Breakthrough gang (Ted Nordhaus, Michael Schellenberger and Roger Pielke Jr.) Their mutual sniping and name-calling was amusing for all of five minutes. Now it's…
Incestuous
- Hello, Mr. Amman. We have here for you one persecution pizza with pepperoni! - You must be mistaken. I am currently toeing the party line, and thus not persecuted. - Would you like to be persecuted by us? We have Team Member discount. 10 for the price of 1. - No, thanks. - Are you sure? - Yes. - So, what do we do with this persecution pizza? - Take it to Michael Mann. - Where does he live? - In Hollywood. - Where exactly? - Ask Roger Pielke. - Which one? - Whatever. Can I go back to the game now? Lewandowski just scored. (thanks to Neven). Refs * Sunny Afternoon
NAS report
The long-awaited NAS report Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years is out. Roger Pielke says the NAS has rendered a near-complete vindication for the work of Mann et al as a first reaction. I've skimmed the first 4 pages (the summary); seems... err... plausible. Whatever that means. As some of the comments at the RC piece say, moving from IPCC-type semi-formalised probabilities to "plausible" is perhaps a step backwards. Interestingly, none of the methodological complaints from M&M make it into the summary as far as I can see. But thats just me being tribal :-)
And all shall know his name: Michael Tobis mocked by Glenn Beck
Michael Tobis is famous. (Okay, just until the rabid dogs of the right wing noise machine find another bone to obsess over.) For the record: Michael Tobis is an intelligent, thoughtful and concerned man who does not deserve to be ridiculed, but rather read closely and contemplated. Pielke is a **** ****** and ******** ****. (Sorry, I violated my own comment policy) who is simply playing a very different game than the rest of us. Morano and Beck (why that last name??!!) and the rest of the echo chamber are not worth much more than a guffaw. Maybe there will be something to learn or achieve by…
The East is Red
Rather appropriately, with all the murk swirling around Trump's ties to the Commies, Judith Curry and John Christy are looking for new sources of income suggesting that Congress fund “red teams” to investigate “natural” causes of global warming and challenge the findings of the United Nations’ climate science panel according to the WaPo. In case you're in the slightest doubt about where La Curry was aiming her testimony, she concludes Let’s make scientific debate about climate change great again. FFS. This, in case you've been asleep, is all in the context of the House Committee on un-…
Lack of Outcry over India: Hypocrisy?
Roger Pielke Jr is back at his own teapot, blogging up a tempest or two again. Whether you agree with his points or not, he usually makes for provocative reading and comment threads can be very entertaining and informing. I have not hung around there for quite a while but will pay more attention from now on I think. Anyway, this post is about his post from last Wednesday, titled "Climate Science and National Interests" - rather more general than its actual subject. His implicaion would seem to be there is some hypocrisy on the part of the usual climate change activists and the IPCC but not…
Prometheus on Bleak Prospects for Climate Stabilization
Roger Pielke at Prometheus has some back of the envelope calcuations suggesting that the prospects for climate stabilization are rather bleak. His conclusions: 1. Serious thought and research needs to be given to the prospect of stabilization levels much higher that currently being discussed. What are their policy implications for mitigation and adaptation? 2. The EU, for instance, needs to move discussion beyond its fantasy of stabilization at 450 ppm (see Richard Tol on this here). 3. If stabilization at higher than 550 ppm is determined to be "dangerous interference" in the climate system…
The seven signs of pseudoscience: testing climatology
Upon the advice of Roger Pielke Jr., who in a recent post at Prometheus praises the appearance of two new blogs, I checked out William M. Briggs, Statistician. Although the most recent post there, "Is climatology a pseudoscience?" begins with an intriguing premise, it eventually deteriorates into a sad self-parody by invoking the venerable Bob Parks' Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science. Here's how Briggs starts out: ...suppose, if you are able, that significant man-made climate change is false; further, that it cannot happen, and that all changes to the climate system are due to external…
Who are the people in your denial neighborhood?
As regular readers will know, I prefer the term "pseudoskeptic" over "denier" when it comes to those who insist we needn't be worried about climate change. This is because the common denominator among any set of such characters tends to be a misapplication of the scientific method, a failure to apply rigorous skeptical analysis to the subject. Not all of these pseudoskeptics are deniers, as this list from Foreign Policy makes clear. Indeed, the distinctions among the selected "Guide to Climate Skeptics" make it even more important to choose our descriptors carefully. I would argue that…
Pielke Jr vs drafts
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…
It's addictive
Shorter Martin Cothran: Snow in 49 states: Winter proves Al Gore is fat. To quote science policy professor Roger Pielke, Jr. (not always a friend to conventional climate science): What happens in the weather this week or next tells us absolutely nothing about the role of humans in influencing the climate system. It is unjustifiable to claim that a cold snap or heavy snow disproves or even casts doubts [on] predictions of long-term climate change. It is equally unjustifiable to say that a cold snap or heavy snow in any way offers empirical support for predictions of long-term climate change.…
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