Nate Silver’s new ESPN
venture has hired political scientist and blogger Roger Pielke Jr. as
one of its first contributing writers, Silver
announced
Friday. Pielke Jr., a fellow at the University of Colorado’s
CIRES program, is known primarily for
defending climate deniers like Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and attacking
climate scientists and environmental advocates in the public sphere.
Pielke Jr. is the son of climate scientist Roger Pielke Sr., one of the
handful of contributing climatologists who question the scientific
consensus of the threat of anthropogenic warming. Silver’s embrace of
Pielke Jr. is surprising, as Pielke’s record of misusing statistics and
misinterpreting scientific information goes against Silver’s record of
data-based analysis and reporting.
In 2009, prominent climate scientist Stephen Schneider harshly criticized Pielke Jr. for engaging in “sleazy” semantic games to mislead the public.
I can’t figure him out, except that one consistent pattern emerges-he is a self-aggrandizer who sets up straw men, knocks them down, and takes credit for being the honest broker to explain the mess-and in fact usually adds little new social science to his analysis.