Nate Silver’s new "science" writer, Roger Pielke, Jr., ignores the data on climate science

Nate Silver

CREDIT: AP PHOTO/NAM Y. HUH

by Kiley Kroh, Climate Progress, March 19, 2014

Nate Silver’s highly anticipated "data-driven" news site FiveThirtyEight launched on Monday, with a controversial figure covering science issues. Silver has brought on Roger Pielke, Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, as a contributing writer – a political scientist who comes with a long history of data distortion and confrontations with climate scientists.

“Given Nate’s professed obsession with rigorous statistical analysis, it is rather disappointing to see him hire for his new venture an individual who has displayed a pattern of sloppiness when it comes to the analysis of climate data,” said top climate scientist Michael Mann via email. Pointing to a chapter in Silver’s recent book that addresses climate change (for which Mann was interviewed) he adds, “Sadly, this isn’t the first time Nate has been led astray when it comes to dealing with the science of climate change.”

Pielke routinely seeks to minimize the impacts and severity of climate change and in the process, has been repeatedly criticized as inaccurate and misleading by some of the nation’s top climate scientists.

Most recently, Pielke tangled with Obama science advisor and former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, John Holdren, over the relationship between the severity of California’s epic drought and climate change. In February, Pielke slammed Holdren for offering a scientifically-grounded explanation of how climate change is worsening western drought. As Joe Romm observed, “Holdren’s views are right in the mainstream of climatologists’ view of drought. I can think of no climate scientists who share Pielke’s startling assessment of Holdren’s views as ‘zombie science.’ ”

Holdren responded to the jabs with an unprecedented six-page response debunking Pielke’s muddling statements and detailing how climate change is in fact exacerbating drought in the west. “Dr. Pielke’s statements about global drought trends, while irrelevant to my comments about drought in California and the Colorado River Basin, are seriously misleading,” Holdren wrote.

The takedown from Holdren is far from the first time Pielke’s confusionist views on climate science have been debunked by actual climate scientists. And Pielke’s numerous distortions of data and statistics would seem to be particularly troubling for a site that has set out to “critique incautious uses of statistics when they arise elsewhere in news coverage.”

Stefan Rahmstorf, Head of Earth System Analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, and his colleagues were targeted by Pielke upon the release of their 2011 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) examining the increase of extreme events in a warming world. The paper found that the record-breaking Russian heat of 2010 in particular “is, with 80% probability, due to the long-term climatic warming trend.”

Pielke took issue with the conclusions and methodologies, saying he stood by his critique — even after Rahmstorf provided clarification that disputed Pielke’s claims — and accusing the authors of “cherrypicking.”

“Faced with this kind of libelous distortion I will not answer any further questions from Pielke now or in future,” Rahmstorf
commented. “As an aside, our paper was reviewed not only by two climate experts but in addition by two statistics experts coming from other fields.”

James Annan, another climate scientist, has written numerous takedowns of Pielke’s flawed analyses. “There’s obviously a simple conceptual misunderstanding underlying Roger’s attempts at analysis,” Annan observed. For example, Annan debunked a 2008 post by Pielke that called into question whether actual observed trends are consistent with the climate models employed by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its projections. Pielke concludes that they are inconsistent, but Annan is quick to point out the lack of a foundation on which to base that claim. “I challenged this obvious absurdity and repeatedly asked him to back it up with a calculation,” Annan wrote. “After a lot of ducking and weaving, about the 30th comment under the post, he eventually admits ‘I honestly don’t know what the proper test is.’”

While many prominent climate scientists view the IPCC’s climate change projections as overly cautious, it is widely acknowledged that the panel is comprised of a large number of accomplished scientists whose conclusions are heavily scrutinized. Pielke takes the opposite approach, telling the Wall Street Journal in 2010 that “it’s very much an advocacy organization that’s couched in the role of advice … He [Pielke] says many IPCC participants want ‘to compel action’ instead of ‘just summarizing science.’”

After Pielke mistakenly maligned James Hansen, top climate scientist and former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, based on a draft study that had not been completed or publicly released, ScienceBlog wrote that “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.”

And in a rather comical error, Australian scientist Tim Lambert noted that a Pielke blog post claiming “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” was based on a Google search that included results for a film director named Michael Mann. “Soon after I posted this, Pielke finally made a correction, allowing that being out by a couple of orders of magnitude was a ‘bit sloppy,’ ” Lambert wrote.

Though he took issue with the distinction, Pielke was included in Foreign Policy’s 2010 Guide to Climate Skeptics.

While discourse amongst scientists is necessary and beneficial, Pielke has a track record of consistently cherry-picking and mischaracterizing the work done by climate scientists and has made a name for himself by disparaging their work. Pielke’s methods echo a key problem observed by leading climate scientist Stefan Rahmstorf: “blind application of statistics, without understanding of the science (both in terms of the physics and in terms of knowledge of the technical literature) is very dangerous​.”

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/19/3415984/nate-silver-science-writer-ignores-data/

Presidential Science Advisor John Holdren schools political scientist Roger Pielke, Jr., on climate and drought

by Joe Romm, Climate Progress, March 3, 2014

In an unprecedented move, the President’s Science Advisor, Dr. John P. Holdren, has published a devastating 6-page debunking of one of the country’s leading climate confusionists, Roger Pielke, Jr.

I’ll excerpt Holdren’s comprehensive critique, “Drought and Global Climate Change,” below. Worsening drought may be the climate impact that affects the most people in the coming decades, as I discussed in my 2011 literature review in the journal Nature. It is valuable to see the the subject laid out so clearly by the nation’s top scientist.

Our understanding of drought and climate change is evolving pretty rapidly, so even the latest IPCC reports are already out of date. Having read much of the recent drought literature and interviewed many of the leading drought experts in the last few years, I can say that Holdren’s views are right in the mainstream of climatologists’ view of drought. I can think of no climate scientists who share Pielke’s startling assessment of Holdren’s views as “zombie science.”


In fact, some drought experts believe the situation is considerably worse than is widely understood. As one top researcher on the climate-drought link confirmed with me recently, “The U.S. may never again return to the relatively wet conditions experienced from 1977 to 1999.” 


HOLDREN AND PIELKE
 
John Holdren is one of the most distinguished scientists in America. He is a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Author of over 200 articles and papers, Holdren is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and a foreign member of the U.K.’s Royal Society.

I have known Holdren for more than two decades, and not only does he have more breadth of knowledge on all things climate than most, he is very judicious in his choice of words.

Roger Pielke, Jr., is a political scientist who has publicly questioned the scientific integrity of more climate scientists than just about anyone else on the planet. He has smeared literally hundreds of scientists (as I document here).

That is no doubt a key reason Pielke was included on Foreign Policy‘s “Guide to Climate Skeptics.” No doubt that’s why the websites that most prominently feature or reprint Pielke’s attacks are climate denial sites like WattsUpWithThat and ClimateDepot. It is also why he is probably the single most disputed and debunked person in the science blogosphere, especially on the subject of extreme weather and climate change (see here and here). 

Typical are:

• A Few Things Ill Considered: “His [Pielke's] 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.”
• James Annan’s blog: “The consistently wrong chronicles…. Roger Pielke has been saying some truly bizarre and nonsensical things recently.”
• Tim Lambert (Deltoid) has a whole category on Pielke: “Roger Pielke Jr has attempted to trash me using innuendo, fabrication and outright misrepresentation. I correct the record.”

Before his death, the widely revered climatologist Stephen Schneider described one of his run-ins with Pielke this way five years ago:

It is typical of a trickster and a careerist – which is how I personally see him – and so do most of my colleagues these days who I have discussed it with.

Now Pielke has embraced the widely discredited Bjorn Lomborg argument that climate action is bad for the poor, when the science makes clear that climate inaction would be devastating to the poor. Climate action is the only sustainable path out of poverty, as climate expert and development practitioner John Abraham explains in a UK Guardian piece that Pielke has yet to respond to.

It should be obvious that if you’ve garnered a 6-page debunking by the nation’s top scientist, then you’ve moved into the elite ranks of climate confusionists.

If you want the full story on how Pielke has attempted to scandalize his personal quibbles with Holdren (to use a phrase Dr. Stefan Rahmstorf first applied to Pielke), HotWhopper has a must read post. Here’s the short version.

Back in December, Pielke criticized Holdren for pulling his punches on climate science, tweeting, “Since becoming sci advisor Holdren has always stayed on safe (boring) ground in his public remarks.”

Then, in mid-February, when Holdren offered some straightforward well-grounded scientific statements about how climate change is worsening Western droughts, Pielke slammed him, tweeting “it is brazen for zombie science to show up in the White House!”

Talk about damned if you do and damned if you don’t!

As Holdren explains, in a February 25 hearing, “Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) suggested that I had misled the American people with comments I made to reporters on February 13.” In particular, Sessions quoted testimony Pielke had given in July:

It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.

Drought has “for the most part, become shorter, less, frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century”. Globally, “there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years.”

The first quote in the second paragraph is from the U.S. Climate Change Science Program’s 2008 report, “Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate,” and the second is from a 2012 paper by Sheffield et al. in the journal Nature.

As an important aside, Sheffield’s paper has been disputed. I recently interviewed Aiguo Dai, and he thinks the Sheffield analysis is flawed. Dai stands by his conclusion in a 2012 paper in Nature Climate Change that “Historical records of precipitation, streamflow, and drought indices all show increased aridity since 1950 over many land areas.”

When Holdren rebutted Pielke’s charges in Senate testimony, Pielke demanded “If you do indeed believe that my views are ‘outside the scientific mainstream’ could you substantiate that claim”?
 
Holdren’s full devastating reply is “Drought and Global Climate Change: An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr.”
 
Besides reviewing the drought literature, Holdren makes a crucial point that “any reference to the CCSP 2008 report in this context should include not just the sentence highlighted in Dr. Pielke’s testimony but also the sentence that follows immediately in the relevant passage from that document and which relates specifically to the American West.” Here are the two key sentences from the report in their entirety):

Similarly, long-term trends (1925–2003) of hydrologic droughts based on model derived soil moisture and runoff show that droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century (Andreadis & Lettenmaier, 2006). The main exception is the Southwest and parts of the interior of the West, where increased temperature has led to rising drought trends (Groisman et al., 2004; Andreadis & Lettenmaier, 2006).

Amazingly, Pielke’s testimony did include the second sentence about rising drought trend in the SW and West — which would seem to render most of his attack (and Sen. Sessions’ attack) on Holdren moot — but Pielke buried it in a footnote. Again, Hotwhopper explains just how head-exploding this all is.

Holdren makes a key point that I have made repeatedly — severe drought is much more than just a reduction in precipitation. He explains: “In my recent comments about observed and projected increases in drought in the American West, I mentioned four relatively well understood mechanisms by which climate change can play a role in drought. (I have always been careful to note that, scientifically, we cannot say that climate change caused a particular drought, but only that it is expected to increase the frequency, intensity, and duration of drought in some regions ― and that such changes are being observed.)”

These four mechanisms are:

1. In a warming world, a larger fraction of total precipitation falls in downpours, which means a larger fraction is lost to storm runoff (as opposed to being absorbed in soil).
2. In mountain regions that are warming, as most are, a larger fraction of precipitation falls as rain rather than as snow, which means lower stream flows in spring and summer.
3. What snowpack there is melts earlier in a warming world, further reducing flows later in the year.
4. Where temperatures are higher, losses of water from soil and reservoirs due to evaporation are likewise higher than they would otherwise be.

Holdren reviews the scientific literature on those statements in his reply, noting “the second, third, and fourth mechanisms reflect elementary physics and are hardly subject to dispute (but see also additional references provided at the end of this comment).” Holdren states:

As I have also noted in recent public comments, additional mechanisms have been identified by which changes in atmospheric circulation patterns that may be a result of global warming could be affecting droughts in the American West. There are some measurements and some analyses suggesting that these mechanisms are operating, but the evidence is less than conclusive, and some respectable analysts attribute the indicated circulation changes to natural variability. The uncertainty about these mechanisms should not be allowed to become a distraction obscuring the more robust understandings about climate change and regional drought summarized above.

Holdren is being characteristically conservative in his language here. As I’ve written, climate scientists specifically predicted a decade ago that Arctic ice loss would bring on worse droughts in the West — and California is now in the death-grip of a brutal, record-breaking drought, driven by the very change in the jet stream that scientists had anticipated.

But Holdren’s main point is the important one — quite separate from any changes in precipitation that climate change may cause, there is little dispute that human-caused climate change is worsening droughts in the West and Southwest. I recommend his entire paper to readers interested in this important subject.

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/03/3349411/john-holdren-roger-pielke-climate-drought/

Tim Lambert: Yet another example of Wegman plagiarism [and George Mason University's tattered academic reputation continues its decline as 18 months have passed and there has been no result from its "investigation" of Wegman's plagiarism]

Yet another example of Wegman plagiarism

by Tim Lambert, Deltoid, September 21, 2011

Andrew Gelman details yet another case of apparent plagiarism by Edward Wegman. This one is a copy and paste from Wikipedia that manages to introduce an obvious error, claiming that a d-dimensional cube has only 2d vertices instead of 2^d. Gelman gets all sarcastic:

[Note to Drs. Wegman and Said: You can replace "2^n" by "2n" only if n=1 or 2. I checked by following the principles of statistical computation and making a graph in R: curve (2^x-2x, from=-2, to=5). I know it's a pain to do superscripts in Word, but next time you should really put in the effort to do it right.]

Hat tip: John Mashey.

Comment by JM:

There are many more problems in that article (detailed writeup soon at DC's place).

But while people are awaiting that, here's a related topic to discuss. Somehow, some people started with Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report, and claim that the WR was unscathed, except for some possible minor copying of text, easily fixable by a few quotes.

This was fairly bizarre, given that 20-25% of the pages of SSWR showed plagiarism, but even there, much of the analysis was of the biases and errors introduced, often in support of Memes and Themes.

As I wrote, p.3: "Obvious plagiarism needs so little explanation that fabrications are not generally enumerated, especially as some errors might be attributed to incompetence. Either issue is taken seriously in academe."

For the sake of simplicity in academic misconduct committees (although GMU has now just passed the 18-month mark and still counting, without an inquiry report to anyone), Ray had just focused on the plagiarism, not the falsification/fabrication.

For that, I later wrote the 12-page Strange Falsifications in the Wegman Report. When someone is not just plagiarizing but falsifying, those cases are much easier to find and display amidst the plagiarized text.

Posted by: John Mashey | September 22, 2011 2:23 AM

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/09/yet_another_example_of_wegman.php

Deltoid: Pearcegate -- Fred Pearce fabricates quote by Gavin Schmidt [or why has the New Scientist gone down the same wacky road as Scientific American?]

Pearcegate

by Tim Lambert.Deltoid, February 3, 2011

Fred Pearce is going down the David Rose road publishing fabricated quotes. Gavin Schmidt in a letter to New Scientist (so far unpublished there) writes:

In the piece entitled "Climate sceptics and scientists attempt peace deal" Fred Pearce includes a statement about me that is patently untrue.

"But the leaders of mainstream climate science turned down the gig, including NASA's Gavin Schmidt, who said the science was settled so there was nothing to discuss."

This is completely made up. My decision not to accept the invitation to this meeting was based entirely on the organiser's initial diagnosis of the cause of the 'conflict' in the climate change debate. I quote from their introductory letter:

"At this stage we are planning to have a workshop where the main scientific issues can be discussed, so that some clarity on points of agreement and disagreement might be reached. We would try to stay off the policy issues, and will also exclude personal arguments.

The issues we have in mind are Medieval Warm Period, ice, climate sensitivity, and temperature data. We would hope to have smaller groups discussing these in some detail, hopefully with scientists who are very familiar with the technical issues to lead the discussion."

Since, in my opinion, the causes of conflict in the climate change debate relate almost entirely to politics and not the MWP, climate sensitivity or 'ice', dismissing this from any discussion did not seem likely to be to help foster any reconciliation.

At no point did I declare that the 'science was settled' and that there was nothing to discuss. Indeed, I am on record as saying the exact opposite

Pearce might well note that even I am included in the "spectrum" that "disagree[s] with Schmidt"!

Fred Pearce did not interview me for this piece. I should like to request that in future, if my views are of interest, that he (or anyone else) should actually ask me directly. I am not hard to contact.

Yours respectfully,

Gavin Schmidt

PS. I am not a 'leader of mainstream climate science' either.

Commenting on Pierce and the workshop are:

Things Break:

I'd ask whether New Scientist wants this kind of indefensible behavior associated with their brand, but clearly they've given Pearce free reign to troll for page views however he sees fit.

William Connolley:

And... if you haven't been part of the climate wars, you might wonder why exactly any of this matters. But "the science is settled" has been one of the mantras used almost exclusively by climate denialists as a term of insult for those actually doing science. (Pearce is fully aware of all this back story, of course. He isn't using the phrase accidentally or carelessly.) It is a feeble attempt at a double bind: is the science settled? ha ha, then you can't be a scientist because real science is never settled. Is the science not settled? Oh great, then we don't need to do anything until it is. The answer, of course, is that we know now (and indeed have for years) enough about the science to know that the world is warming now due to human activity, and will be warming more into the future from more anthro stuff.

Tamino: "This isn't a misquote -- it's just a fabrication."

Joe Romm:

Any conference where most of the participants are obsessed with the Hockey Stick, consider it "totemic," and think its underlying science is unresolved simply isn't a serious scientific meeting. Similarly, no serious journalist should simply publish two sentences questioning the underlying science without any quote from a real climate scientist or citation to the NAS and the multiple, confirming studies.

Scott Mandia:

Pearce states ...

Equally contentious is the charge - the pet subject of several in Lisbon - that the IPCC is "in denial" about whether ocean oscillations, which can absorb and release heat from the atmosphere but are not well represented in climate models, could explain the global warming of the past 40 years.

How does a warming ocean cause nights to warm faster than days, the troposphere to warm while the upper layers are cooling, winters to warm faster than summers, measured increases in downwelling heat, and measured decreases in outgoing heat from the planet?

What magic are the oceans performing that are mirroring the effects of greenhouse warming while simultaneously stopping the effects of massive increases in heat-trapping gases?

Eli Rabett:

Many have placed their bets on Fred. Eli is not quite so sure, where, better put, from whom would Pearce have gotten his information. Jerry Ravitz who is trying to muscle his way in springs to mind and, of course, luminaries such as the Steves are right up there.

Update: At Judith Curry's blog tallbloke writes

To set the record straight:

Because I was an ad hoc member of the invite committee I got an email asking my advice on who to invite in lieu of Gavin Schmidt and some other prominent people who had declined. The organisers inadvertantly included Gavin's response on that email, and when I was asked one evening in Lisbon why certain people weren't there I gave a quick praisee, including a brief reference to Gavin's response. This made it's way to Fred, hence the reference in his blog piece reporting on the conference.

I would just stress at this point that what I said constitutes my opinion and not what Gavin said verbatim. However I would also like to say that Gavin's complaint to the New Scientist does not include any praisee of the passage in his original response which gave rise to my brief summary. I therefore reject Gavin's claim that I 'made stuff up', and respectfully suggest that we can lay this one to rest if in a spirit of openness Gavin simply reproduces his response so people can see for themselves what he said.

If I am assailed by accusations that I have wrongfully maligned Gavin with my brief summary comment I may feel obliged to defend myself with a closer paraphrase.

Yes, they had an ether crank on the invite committee.

Update 2: Gavin Schmidt posts his actual email:

Thanks for the invitation. However, I'm a little confused at what conflict you feel you are going to be addressing? The fundamental conflict is of what (if anything) we should do about greenhouse gas emissions (and other assorted pollutants), not what the weather was like 1000 years ago. Your proposed restriction against policy discussion removes the whole point. None of the seemingly important 'conflicts' that are perceived in the science are 'conflicts' in any real sense within the scientific community, rather they are proxy arguments for political positions. No 'conflict resolution' is possible between the science community who are focussed on increasing understanding, and people who are picking through the scientific evidence for cherries they can pick to support a pre-defined policy position.

You would be much better off trying to find common ground on policy ideas via co-benefits (on air pollution, energy security, public health water resources, etc.), than trying to get involved in irrelevant scientific 'controversies.'

I don't think it is accurate to summarise this as "the science is settled."

http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/2011/02/pearcegate.php#comment-3218354