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Who is Roger Pielke, Jr.?
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Roger Pielke, Jr.
I’d like to correct a growing distortion on the part of the left regarding global warming (that’s right). I’ve been seeing Roger Pielke, Jr.’s name pop up quite a bit on both right wing and left wing blogs (See -- I, too, can play the false-equivalence game!). This comment offers a typical conservative sentiment:
I've been reading and following Roger Pielke, Jr. and his father Roger Pielke, Sr. for quite a while. They are realists, scientists, and professors. Both disagree with the idea that man is causing most global warming and climate change. Also, as this article points out, the cost of trying to control the enormous forces of nature that affect climate are enormous and unrealistic. They propose adaptation as opposed to a quick, technological or legislative fix.
Do a search here for Roger Pielke and you'll find much more.
And from Grist.org, we get, “Lomborg and Pielke are probably the two most debunked non-deniers in the world -- though in fact Lomborg is a denier-equivalent and Pielke is a delayer-equivalent.”
Both are wrong.
I have been following Roger Pielke and Chris Mooney’s work for some years now, who had a bit of a friendly rivalry going as Mooney was writing Republican War on Science that peaked in the showdown between Mooney and Pielke at TPM Café – for us science geeks, it was like anticipating the Lord of the Rings movies was for Tolkien nerds. I spent probably more than a year engaging in a flame war on Pielke’s blog, yet he didn’t seem to let that get in the way of considering me for a job (which I ultimately didn’t get) writing press releases for his department, which certainly doesn’t seem like the action of a closed-minded partisan.
I’ve even interviewed Roger, and although I don’t know him well, all I can say is, I don’t recognize the Pielke the folks over at Grist and Huffington Post keep referring to when they say things like this:
It is Pielke who is prone to exaggerate his expertise. What qualifications does Pielke have to assert that he knows that air capture has any plausible chance of being a practical, affordable, and scalable strategy that can replace serious mitigation? Please, can anybody find a relevant degree that justifies his holding out such false hope, that justifies the New York Times using him as the sole “expert” in an article trashing a Nobel prize-winning physicist and a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
So, before we lump Pielke in with Steven Milloy, I'd like to tell what little I know about him, and hopefully others with more knowledge than me can shed more light. I am one of those who has advocated looking into the credentials of “climate scientists” for years. I had a very simple standard for someone to be considered credible: one must have done research and published in peer-reviewed journals in the field.
Perplexingly, the people who mock Pielke’s credentials link to his page -- did they read his bio when they copied the link? His list of publications include Environmental Science & Policy, Science, Nature Geoscience, Space Policy… 238 in all. He was Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research from 2001-2007, so give it a rest, will you? The man has earned a place in the debate. (He’s only, like, two years older than me, which is depressing because I’m still trying to figure out what to do with my life.)
I fought against false balance and false equivalency before it was cool to do so. The reason I fought for it was frustration over how journalists’ tendency for balance and objectivity were getting used by liars and hacks to trick us into misleading our readers.
Why Pielke appears this way to environmentalists is his aversion to scientists drifting outside of merely providing data into the realm of politics, where they can be perceived as going beyond doing research but advocating policy positions. You can say the earth is warming due to the burning of fossil fuels, but you can’t say science supports
This danger is made clear in this post at Climate Progress, which seems to argue that not advocating a particular policy is tantamount to global warming “denial”. Look, when I talk to climate scientists and can’t find one that questions anthropogenic warming, or one paper published in the past ten years that does so, then I believe a journalist is irresponsible to pretend there is great debate to placate partisans. That is a far different thing from advocating for
In my articles, I haven’t even staked out a position on whether warming is “bad”. How to deal with warming is a question of politics and policy, and is precisely what the debate should be about – not long settled questions of the existence of human caused temperature variations. (What is difficult for people like me to understand is what’s political about pointing out that on the science, Will is deliberately, consistently, wrong, regardless of his ideology.)
The disconnect with Pielke usually comes because people like me can’t seem to pin down exactly where he draws the line, and in his reflexive contrarianism (bred from living and working in the minority of scientific opinion) he comes off as overly forgiving or turning a blind eye to right wing abuses while at the same time engaging in rabid overreaction to minor infractions by someone like Gore. I think he sees himself as a check on the “liberal bias” of climate scientists who can seem like they’re piling on right wing pseudoscientists, simply because the right seems to have a corner on that market these days.
On that point, Pielke, of course, believes both sides are equally culpable, and tries to prove it by bringing up examples he feels scientists are hypocritical for ignoring.
Mainstream journalists like Andy Revkin adore Pielke because he gives them an excuse to continue providing false balance and he said/she said/we’re clueless science stories. Conservatives love Pielke because he lets them write stories like, “Scientist Forces Gore to Back Down”, where Pielke is quoted and used to make Gore’s willingness to correct an error (which demonstrates a concern for accuracy) evidence of propagandizing, whereas George F. Will, who has repeatedly made the same factual errors over and over and over, can continue to pretend there is some “debate” over whether he erred at all, and gets a pass.
Pielke calls himself an Obamaite, eschews the “skeptic” label, and readily admits the overwhelming evidence for climate change. Yet, it is Pielke whose name appears in the list of global warming deniers regularly sent out from Inhofe’s office to the media to contact for the typical faux-equivalence articles like Revkin’s; it is Pielke cited by the right-wing Moonie Washington Times and Tierney’s NYT’s column. It was Pielke who provided Revkin with his Gore infraction to “balance out” his article on Will to allow Revkin to say “both sides do it” and that the mistakes are simply a pitfall of navigating the science of such a complex issue.
Sure enough, when everyone went over to Revkin’s blog to rail him for it, there was Pielke to come to his defense :
Richard Somerville's complaint that there is an asymmetry in comparing Gore and Will is correct. However, this exact point was observed by Prof. Matt Nisbet in the quote in this article.
If you base a political argument by appeals to scientific authority, as Gore has, then your argument suffers a serious blow when that authority is shown to have cracks in it -- however large or small. Will's authority does not rest in appeals to scientific authority, but in punditry.
For this very same reason there is not a level playing field for scientists when they enter the political fray. Politics does not have the same rules as academic science. When the two collide, guess which set of rules will win out?
Even if one accepts that the errors made by Gore are less significant than those made by Will, the political fallout will be larger for Gore than Will. This is a peril of using science to advance a political agenda.
— Roger Pielke, Jr.,
So I’m the first to admit, Pielke can be annoying and frustrating, and can seem to have no sense of proportion. (If scientific research can’t inform policy, why fund it? Is Will really more honest for lying? Did Gore really open himself up to criticism by trying to tell the truth?) Pielke can come off as yet another triangulator, seeking the middle ground of a lopsided argument, the Joe Lieberman/David Broder of science, if you will.
But I have no doubt the guy actually believes what he’s saying, and is acting out of a sincere belief. Him and I are both on an honest pursuit of truth but arrived at different conclusions, without engaging in lies or deception to get there. And that’s exactly the kind of debate I’ve been fighting to have.
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