Pants on fire and all that – but well deserved. Kudos to Pielke Jr, for speaking out.
http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2012/05/joe-romm-is-liar.html
He says it isn’t the first time. It will be interesting to see Joe Romm’s reaction spin to this charge.
It seems that Heartland has listed Roger Pielke Jr. as one of their experts here:
http://heartland.org/roger-pielke
But from Pielke’s tone and description, I think both Heartland and Romm have erred.
As I see it, Romm put a question mark on the end of his post, suggesting he’s unsure…but went ahead with the story anyway and used the question mark as his “out”.
I think what Pielke Jr. is saying is that he has no professional relationship with Heartland, and on that point I believe him. He’s never been to one of the conferences that I know of. Nether has Pielke Sr. I think Heartland has listed a number of people in that page that aren’t necessarily part of any official relationship.
Lately, much of the climate debate has devolved into personal attacks/smears and tit for tat infowars. It’s not doing anyone any good.
UPDATE: In May 2011, RP Jr. wrote this about Romm:
It is long overdue for the environmental community to start pushing back on Romm as he continues to stain their entire enterprise. His lies and smear tactics, which are broadly embraced and condoned, are making enemies out of friends and opponents out of fellow travelers. Vigorous debate is welcome and healthy. Lies and character assassination not so much.
I concur. Romm and the whole ThinkProgress team use poisonous tactics, but that’s part of the MO for the Soros funded center for American Progress. On the plus side, most reasonable people with critical thinking skills can see right through these guys, so they tend to turn off the very people they are trying to reach, leaving ThinkProgress left with the bereft.
Tom~ I am interested to know, if you don’t mind, just what you think HI should do, to settle this situation with Pielke Jr?
REPLY: What Pielke is saying is that he has no professional relationship with Heartland, and on that point I believe him.
I clicked the link ( http://heartland.org/roger-pielke ) and my first impression was that Pielke *was* in their stable of experts. However, nowhere in the short bio does it list any connection with HI at all, which it surely would have if he were connected to it, even if only a dues-paying member. My impression is that HI meant to say, “HI considers Roger Pielke, Jr., an expert in his field.” but for aesthetic reasons, decided *not* to do that in the header. It would have made more sense to run him in a blogroll on the sidebar, broken down much as the Lukewarmers, Politicals, Pro-AGW, and Skeptical blocs are here at WUWT.
HI flubbed the dub through ambiguity, but it does not explicitly claim that Pielke is on staff.
Tom says:
May 9, 2012 at 9:20 pm
@ur momisugly Smokey — So just to be extra clear, you are doubling down (or is it tripling, I got lost in all the personal attacks, sorry) that in order to properly understand what Heartland is saying you need to interpret the page after going through convoluted and inconsistent navigation and then cross-correlate on the “experts” personal blog to properly understand the affiliation?
Odd — I didn’t have to go through all those gyrations. Did you right-click or left-click on the links?
And “just to be extra clear,” Smokey said nothing of the sort..
I’m not sure what to think of some of the comments here except, perhaps to remind you of a quote from Bertrand Russell:
“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”
Romm and the other fanatics see themselves as saviors of the earth, all is justified in their world. Lie, cheat, and steal is just another day at the office for a CAGW progressive. I, for one, intend to keep kicking until the CAGW beast is dead. Appeasement never works on fanatics, they have no honor. More power to Pielke, can I loan you a steel toe boot?
@ur momisugly Bill Tuttle;
Smokey said “Apparently your tactic is to blame others for your failure to understand what Heartland is saying
Bill said “I clicked the link ( http://heartland.org/roger-pielke ) and my first impression was that Pielke *was* in their stable of experts.”
Apparently it is misleading / confusing, and you do have to cross-correlate to arrive at the correct understanding. Now why would they make you do that when it could all be resolved with a simple word or two if they were interested in accuracy?
M Courtney says: May 10, 2012 at 2:32 am
This is smoke and mirrors.
… Wave red rags at the bulls to get them running after the politics and you can publish the bull-waste behind.
Well said.
Well, I too care about the science being put back on track.
My current conclusions are that the very foundations of Climate Science are questionable, even those foundations that most climate skeptics accept, and I did too, earlier on. But to challenge them, I need to go fairly deeply into four things in particular:-
Scientific Method and its appropriate practice
The Second Law of Thermodynamics and its history
Current experimental evidence and the state of play re theoretical backup, comprehension, etc
Sticking-points all round, myself included
and until I’ve done that I’m staying fairly quiet. So this is just f.y.i. without further comments.
Tom is still trying to hijack this thread, which is about the lying and theft comitted by Tom’s heroes. If I were in Tom’s shoes, I would also be very uncomfortable discussing the total lack of ethics and honesty endemic to the alarmist crowd.
Anthony says “Lately, much of the climate debate has devolved into personal attacks/smears and tit for tat infowars. It’s not doing anyone any good.”
Smokey says “total lack of ethics and honesty endemic to the alarmist crowd.”
So, to be clear, you are disagreeing with Anthony’s (important in my opinion) observation above in choosing to make personal attacks rather than discuss that Heartland was confusing even to people familiar to the actors involved?
Tom:
I am stating facts, not “opinion”. Until/unless the alarmist crowd [which includes you] speaks out forcefully against the actions of Peter Gleick and the lies of Joe Romm, like skeptics did when Heartland ran their billboard, then you are condoning those actions and lies by your silence.
Obviously Romm is a sleazeball, etc. but if Roger Pielke Jr feels as he does should contact Heartland and have them remove him. I’m not sure if he has any legal recourse but he seems to make it clear that he has no relationship with H.I. (and does not want one) yet hasn’t seemed bothered by the fact that they at least make it appear like he supports them/they rely on him/etc. It lists him as a “Heartland Expert” for crying out loud, easy for commoner to make a mistake here, though Romm obviously is just doing his normal mudslinging.
@ur momisugly Smokey – waiting on your attack/smear on Jeff above. Or, do you reserve that for people who dare question what is posted here. And if that is the case are not engaging in the very behavior that is anti-science that your rail against?
Smokey says:
May 9, 2012 at 7:23 pm
I attack pseudo-science, and the climate charlatans who hide out from debate.
Spot on. Real Climate for example. Shown time and time again to be cherry pickers. Science perverted to promote a cause.
Try and actually have a debate on the science, and they will censor your questions. They won’t even allows anyone to see the question. Completely opposite to the scientific method. We had a recent example of this on Twitter.
That is how you can separate scientists from pseudo-scientists. The pseudo-scientists are afraid of the truth and will fight to the end to hide the facts. They will censor your questions, they will evade FOI, they will not publish their data so their results can be verified.
In all other fields of science, if you can’t recreate the results, you can’t trust the results. In climate science, so long as the results show that humans are bad, that industrialization is destroying the earth, the results are accepted without question.
That isn’t science, it is environmentalism using the appearance of science to justify its beliefs. Not much different than the church 500 years ago, with the inquisition and excommunication to prevent new findings from reaching the general population.
Environmentalism is big business these days, with hundreds of millions in funding at risk. These folks will fight to the bitter end to protect this. Truth went out the window long ago.
@ur momisugly Fred et al – so you are going on the record that cherry picking is inherently misleading and unscientific?
Can we all agree, that in the interest of valid science, we will all here roundly condemn and reject any instance of cherry picking data?
I believe that would be quite a reasonable thing to all agree to and hard to argue against, no?
So…Tom…to be clear…you agree that the folks at RealClimate routinely censor questions, cherry pick data, evade FOI requests and pervert science to promote a cause.
Thanks for clearing that up.
look – heartland’s deliberately ambiguous name dropping was meant to make them seem more important and authoritative than they are. face that fact. there is no need to rationalize their attempt to glue somebody else’s reputation to their own cv.
and romm is a professional troll who spotted this and has everybody squirming – why to squirm? flak when one is over the target, obviously.
all this shovelling to feed a troll makes fools out of the shovellers.
now, i’m happy i broke the climate, but i’m not happy to see my brothers in arms behaving like stooges.
tom wins his point. smokey shamed himself. that’s self evident. it will take a day and a half and 10 thousand words of the lamest denial to obfuscate that – and it still won’t work cuz truth is truth.
On the plus side, most reasonable people with critical thinking skills can see right through these guys
Which is to say, not many people today can see right through these guys. Face it, with todays education, children are deliberatly not taught any critical thinking skills, I don’t think there is even a token attempt to teach it. Heck, I am not even sure if they teach The Scientific Method in science class anymore. There might be a few colleges that teach something like it, but I would not bet even on that.
Thus, if you present reasons why one should not believe in global warming, even simple and easy to understand ones like that fact that it is not warming, do not be suprised if many people are not convinced (if it can even be called convinced without reason).
The tactic, rally the mob, then burn the books.
Do not feed the Troll.
There is simply no answer you can give Tom that does lead to more questions, or to them asking the same ones. They’re not interested in ‘results as they are’ but as they ‘should be ‘, which is after all the standard approach of the Team in the name of ‘the cause ‘
“most reasonable people with critical thinking skills”? Anthony, you assume too much.
There are not many people who fit that description hanging out at Think Progress, Media Matters or Daily Kos.
There is no critical thinking involved with most of their readership.
Parroting of talking points.
That’s about it.
“…leaving ThinkProgress left with the bereft.”
I think you need an editor here Anthony. That clause makes no sense because it is an improper use of “bereft”. Just trying to help. Feel free to delete this if you like.
KnR,
You’re right. Tom is trolling.
Next, I don’t understand what “gnomish” means about “shaming” in his incoherent post. Shamed?? WTF? I stand by everything I have written: Heartland told the truth. Romm is, and always has been a liar. And Tom has posted nothing of substance. I’m not ashamed to point any of that out.
Tom is taking advantage of the light moderation here by hijacking the thread, asking incessant questions, but never answering the questions that others ask. If Tom thinks being able to comment here as much as he wants is a good thing, then I challenge him to post a series of demands on Romm’s blog, on RealClimate, on Skeptical Pseudo-Science and on similar alarmist blogs, demanding that they start to allow skeptics to post there the same way, instead of their usual heavy censoring of skeptics’ comments.
Finally, I have no problem with Jeff. Tom is the problem; he won’t have a conversation, he demands that his questions must be answered, but he avoids anyone else’s questions. That’s trolling.
@Tom,
I find it really funny that every single post you make ends with a question mark. Do you really have that much trouble interpreting the posts of others?
Oh wait… that ended in a question mark… my bad!
More to the point though – were the Heartland billboards truthful? Sure. Were they a good idea? No. Also, if they wish to list Dr. Pielke Jr. as a person whom they respect as an expert in the field, fine, but they should do so clearly and in a way that does not make it appear (falsely) that he is in any way ASSOCIATED with The Heartland Institute.
Heartland got what they wanted recently if they simply wanted even more publicity after the Gleik affair, but if I were running Heartland, I would have done a much better job of seeking POSITIVE publicity rather than NEGATIVE publicity. It seems these days that organizations think that ANY publicity is good publicity, but I don’t share that opinion. Heartland should be seeking the respect of honest skeptics, and shouldn’t care whatsoever what the alarmists/warmists think of them, as it is patently obvious that regardless of what Heartland does, the proponents of AGW will never respect Heartland. The great gaffe by Heartland with both the billboards and the distinct lack of clarity on their website when it comes to experts is that in both cases they risk losing respect among the sanest of the skeptics. What would be so difficult in listing website links of experts that they trust under a heading such as: “Trusted climate expert blogroll” or something of the sort? In that way, it would be pretty darn clear that Heartland trusted those experts, but those experts did not necessarily have any connection with Heartland itself. I have visited the webpage, and the way they did things, that is NOT abundantly clear.
I know that compared to the “climate scientists”, Heartland has a shoestring budget, but I think they could do a lot better when it comes to ad campaigns and website design IMHO. Their main focus should be on solid, scientific-method-based science which refutes the shoddy, unscientific “findings” and models of the “climate scientists”. I know much of the public would find that a lot more boring than unabomber billboards, but a strong case built on fundamental science will ultimately be a lot more powerful than publicity-seeking by questionable means.
Roger Pielke no longer appears on the Experts page at Heartland.
Tom says:
May 10, 2012 at 7:36 am
Can we all agree, that in the interest of valid science, we will all here roundly condemn and reject any instance of cherry picking data?
…aaaaaaand…
Tom says:
May 10, 2012 at 6:09 am
@ur momisugly Bill Tuttle; Apparently it is misleading / confusing, and you do have to cross-correlate to arrive at the correct understanding. Now why would they make you do that when it could all be resolved with a simple word or two if they were interested in accuracy?
Since you cherry-picked my statements, I expect you to roundly condemn and reject all of your previous comments.
Kidding — I actually expect you to continue trolling.
Tom says:
May 10, 2012 at 6:40 am
Smokey says “total lack of ethics and honesty endemic to the alarmist crowd.”
So, to be clear, you are disagreeing with Anthony’s (important in my opinion) observation above in choosing to make personal attacks rather than discuss that Heartland was confusing even to people familiar to the actors involved?
He wasn’t making a personal attack, he was stating an empirical observation.