Comments on: Parsing the White House Climate Report

By: Roger Pielke, Jr.

Roger Pielke, Jr. — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:37:10 +0000

Craig Miller is correct that the CCSP report got some things very wrong. Unfortunately for me, the errors involve my research.

Hank Roberts is very incorrect, I have not moved off campus. I did chair the search that led to Boykoff’s hire and we are all very excited to have him at CU.

By: Anna Haynes

Anna Haynes — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 01:10:55 +0000

Great post alert:

Julian Sanchez and commenters, on practical epistemology, ad hominem arguments and the one way hash problem (“…in such cases, trying to evaluate the arguments on their merits will tend to lead to an erroneous conclusion more often than simply trying to gauge the credibility of the various disputants. “) with some interesting libertarianism-and-climate bits (e.g. “If climate change is actually going to be profoundly harmful, then it’s precisely the sort of problem libertarian principles say the state ought to be trying to solve. … but I don’t mean to deny that as a sociological matter, a general aversion to regulatory solutions has left libertarians too prone to hope the problem can be wished away as long as someone out there with a Ph.D. remains unconvinced.”)

and, re ad hominem, “Most fallacies aren’t really fallacies when you reinterpret them as Bayesian reasons to give an idea more credence rather than iron-clad syllogisms.”

By: Anna Haynes

Anna Haynes — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 00:56:41 +0000

> Pielke “is a social scientist..”

PhD in political science from U. of Colorado.

By: Craig Miller

Craig Miller — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:23:02 +0000

I would suggest that “piffle” is in the eye of the beholder. I had a long conversation this week with Ben Santer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab, lead author of the first chapter of the White House report. His specialty is the “human fingerprints” on climate change and he used the phrase “Beyond a shadow of a doubt” several times to describe the confidence in the link between warming and human activity. Nobody’s disputing that here. He also opined that Roger Pielke has “done well for himself” by maintaining a high profile as the self-appointed “conscience” of the scientific community on climate change (he also points out that Pielke “is a social scientist, not a climatologist.”
And yet it does appear from Pielke’s post that somebody goofed, at least in that particular citation of his work. The report not only appears to get it wrong but get it backwards. That seems noteworthy to me, though even Pielke admits that it doesn’t invalidate the entire report, as I noted in my original post.

By: Hank Roberts

Hank Roberts — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:10:45 +0000

Here, some reading
http://climatecongress.ku.dk/abstractbook/

By: Hank Roberts

Hank Roberts — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:06:21 +0000

Ah, coincidental with PielkeJr moving off-campus, Max Boykoff is moving onto campus in August.

Boykoff is a serious heavyweight and an honest writer. KQED journalists, please read and think.

http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0803/full/climate.2008.14.html

“When journalists and editors do not effectively place the issues in the context of such views, public understanding suffers. As New York Times journalist Andy Revkin writes, “The media seem either to overplay a sense of imminent calamity or to ignore the issue altogether because it is not black and white or on a time scale that feels like news. This approach leaves society like a ship at anchor swinging cyclically with the tide and not going anywhere. What is lost in the swings of media coverage is a century of study and evidence….” Inadequate media translations of climate change have generated, as Revkin puts it, “probably more public confusion and cynicism about what is going on”

By: Hank Roberts

Hank Roberts — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 14:59:55 +0000

This is piffle — puffery from political spinners, faux-libertarian stuff from Tierney and PielkeJr being treated like news.

PielkeJr has moved from his university blog to a personal page on Blogger.

Same old stuff, though he can be less restrained in attacking research he dislikes now:

http://rabett.blogspot.com/2009/06/ethon-rtfr-with-move-of-his-food-source.html

By: Anna Haynes

Anna Haynes — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:42:02 +0000

We need to specify Pielke Jr or Sr; in this case, it was Jr.
…who’s a Senior Fellow at The Breakthrough Institute, the think tank founded by Shellenberger and Nordhaus. My question/link asking about TBI’s funding did not survive Tierney’s blog comment moderation.

re this -
“Asked by a commentator on his blog if he thinks the entire report should be dismissed based on the flawed interpretation of his research, Pielke replied: “I wouldn’t think so and would certainly hope not.”

- it’s unfortunate that this judgement of Pielke Jr’s was not conveyed to Mr. Tierney before he titled the NYT blog post “U.S. Climate Report Assailed”.