The Wall Street Journal’s opinion page continues to function as a home for wayward lukewarmers with a new piece by Roger Pielke Jr. (You know it’s a solid, fact-based and totally accurate piece because it’s covered in the Daily Mail.)
In it, Pielke complains about the harsh treatment he received for his first post at FiveThirtyEight back in 2014. This is in the news again because in one of the leaked Podesta emails, a Climate Progress editor told a funder that the group’s many debunkings of Pielke were responsible for Pielke’s exit from the website. (This is obviously not the first time leaked emails have been part of the climate debate; see this great comparison of Climategate and Wikileaks for more.)
Pielke uses this reheated story as an excuse to play the victim, a favorite pursuit and talking point of deniers who get called out for being wrong. But as ATTP points out, Pielke is no stranger to criticizing others, despite his own work regularly being “worthy of criticism.”
His complaint about getting pushed out of FiveThirtyEight, for example, might have merit if his piece were accurate. But it wasn’t, and required the solicitation of a rebuttal. Not long after Pielke’s post, FiveThirtyEight published a response from Kerry Emanuel, who wrote he didn’t “see how the data [Pielke] cites support such a confident assertion.”
In his WSJ piece, Pielke laments the “intense media campaign to have me fired.” Yet he says nothing of the real reason for why FiveThirtyEight soured on him- his own attempts to get his critics fired. In response to their criticism of his post, Pielke contacted the bosses of two climate scientists who pointed out his flaws- Drs. Michael Mann and Kevin Trenberth- and threatened legal action. For this, Nate Silver apologized, and Pielke likely sealed his fate.
Having since turned his focus to sports, Pielke’s happy that “No one is trying to get me fired for my new scholarly pursuits.” The question remains though, is he still trying to get others fired for pointing out the errors in his “scholarly pursuits?”
But if they do point out his flaws, will Pielke once again run crying to the WSJ to try pretend the critique is an attack and a correction is bias, in a shameless play to work the refs?
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