Nate Silver Hires Climate 'Trickster' Roger Pielke Jr
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.
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.