Climate Central goes completely off the rails and hires Keith Kloor ("the Glenn Beck of bloggers"): what next? funding from the Koch brothers?

Here is the scoop (literally) on Kloor:

Meet blogger Keith Kloor

by Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, November 1, 2009

UPDATE 1:  Besides smearing my parents on his blog, besides questioning both my honesty and sanity on the same blog, Keith Kloor tried to smear me at Nature blogs, as one of my commenters notes below.  In the original version of that Nature blog post, Kloor wrote that Pielke said “Dubner and his co-author Steven Levitt have indeed been slandered” by me.  I asked Nature to take down that statement.  I pointed out that not only did subsequent reporting by Pooley and others show that my original piece was accurate, Kloor knew the charge against me was false when he wrote it (!) — since later in the same piece he quotes from the Bloomberg piece by Pooley that backed up my account (see “Bloomberg interview of Dubner and Caldeira backs up my reporting on error-riddled Superfreakonomics“).  Nature changed what Kloor wrote, not surprisingly, which is why the current (corrected) version of Kloor’s piece no longer makes much sense:

Roger Pielke Jr., never one to shy away from a battle, believes that Dubner and his co-author Steven Levitt have indeed been criticized by Joe Romm over at Climate Progress.

Yeah, I “criticized” them.  Can’t argue with that.  As the commenter below notes of Kloor’s false charge against me in Nature:

Why else is that Nature would have had to doctor up your first post at their climate blog? Do you think that they were worried about any legal problems you may have brought to their publication by defaming Romm? Or do you think they were simply embarrassed that they had hired someone who doesn’t know the difference between slander and libel?

So yes Kloor has been trying to spread false charges about me — again and again for months, as you will see. But at least Nature intervened to stop him in this case.

So after months and months of Kloor smearing me, misrepresenting what I wrote, and attacking other climate science advocates, I finally decided to do one post to set the record straight.

Some might have you believe that journalists (even those who are really mainly bloggers) should not be the subject of hard-hitting critiques by bloggers (though apparently bloggers can be).  I think even bloggers have the right to set the record straight.

UPDATE 2:   As one of the commenters at Nature blogs wrote in response to the original smear by Kloor:

What a nonsense disclosure, Keith. You haven’t just “weighed in on the matter on my own blog.” There’s almost not a week that goes by in which you don’t have something derisive to say about Joe Romm, often times in concert with Roger Pielke Jr.

So there’s no surprise that when there’s a controversy over a book replete with climate change errors that have been discussed at length across the internet, that you should focus on charges of “slander” by Roger Pielke Jr. against Romm. Are either you or Pielke Jr. lawyers who can speak competently about “slander”? Are you aware that unfairly raising charges of slander is also a form of slander?

This is extremely unprofessional. But par for the course for a blog that got off to an extremely rocky start by having Roger Pielke Jr. as one of its original authors.

Kloor often flaks for Pielke, who just happens to be a Senior Fellow at The Breakthrough Institute (TBI).  As I discuss in “A Breakthrough Institute primer,” TBI has dedicated the resources of their organization to trying to kill prospects for climate and clean energy action in this Congress and to spreading disinformation about Obama, Gore, Congressional leaders, Waxman and Markey, leading climate scientists, Al Gore again, the entire environmental community and anyone else trying to end our status quo energy policies, including me.

Finally, for a complete debunking of the underlying charge that my critique of Superfreakonomics was in any way a smear of the authors, read “One error retracted, 99 to go. Superfreaknomics authors will, in future editions, correct their claim that Caldeira believes “carbon dioxide is not the right villain.” What follows is an updated version of the original post.

Friends, Rommans, countrymen, lend me your ears….

One of the oldest rhetorical tricks is to emphasize a point by pretending to deny it.

This notion is so core to rhetoric that the ancient Greeks even had a few related figures of speech named for it — most broadly, apophasis (from the Greek word for “to deny”), the figure of speech that stresses an idea or image by negating it. As Shakespeare has Marc Antony say to the Roman citizens in the “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech after Caesar’s assassination, “Sweet friends, let me not stir you up to such a sudden flood of mutiny.” He wants — and gets — a mutiny.

There is a related figure, Paralipsis, which Wikipedia describes this way:

Paralipsis, also known as praeteritio, preterition, cataphasis, antiphrasis, or parasiopesis, is a rhetorical figure of speech wherein the speaker or writer invokes a subject by denying that it should be invoked. As such, it can be seen as a rhetorical relative of irony. 

Paralipsis is usually employed to make a subversive ad hominem attack.

The device is typically used to distance the speaker from unfair claims, while still bringing them up. For instance, a politician might say, “I don’t even want to talk about the allegations that my opponent is a drunk.”

… Proslepsis is an extreme kind of paralipsis that gives the full details of the acts one is claiming to pass over; for example, “I will not stoop to mentioning the occasion last winter when our esteemed opponent was found asleep in an alleyway with an empty bottle of vodka still pressed to his lips.”

Paralipsis was often used by Cicero in his orations, such as “I will not even mention the fact that you betrayed us in the Roman people by aiding Catiline.”

This is all by way of introduction to one Keith Kloor, a blogger who week in and week out trashes climate science bloggers, including me, often parrotting the disinformation of Roger Pielke, Jr., “the most debunked person in the science blogosphere.”   Since his blog is obscure, I have ignored him until now, and plan to do so again in the future.  But Nature’s climate blog has started running articles by him [which is no great claim to serious journalism -- one of the first Nature blog posts was by Pielke himself, and Lambert (aka Deltoid) writes a must-read debunking of it here (be sure to read the comments)].

As a result, I looked at Kloor’s website and saw that he went after my parents with the clever rhetorical smear:

I suspect that Romm is trying to rationalize his own behavior with the kind of lazy practice that perhaps happened with regularity in a past era–maybe even at the Times Herald Record in the 1960s and 1970s, which is where Romm first learned all about journalism, when his parents were at the helm of that Hudson Valley paper. But I wouldn’t want to impugn his parents’ legacy or that paper’s reputation with such an accusation. Maybe I’ll just call up some old friends who worked at that fine paper in recent years….

More here and Kloor's comments:   http://climateprogress.org/2009/11/01/keith-kloor-trash-journalist/