Keith Kloor: The Science Police

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

On highly charged issues, such as climate change and endangered species, peer review literature and public discourse are aggressively patrolled by self-appointed sheriffs in the scientific community. […]

The academic climate

Until recently, Roger Pielke Jr. spent most of his career teaching in the Environmental Studies program at the University of Colorado, Boulder. An interdisciplinary scholar, his research for over two decades was at the intersection of public policy, politics, and science—largely in the treacherous climate arena, where every utterance can be weaponized for rhetorical and political combat.

Thus, it is perhaps not surprising that Pielke has come to be defined not so much by his actual research, but by his public commentary and barbed jousting with peers and the reaction that has spawned on Internet forums, influential blogs, and elsewhere.

To the casual observer, his story is a puzzling contradiction. Pielke is among the most cited and published academics on climate change and severe weather. Yet he says he has been told by a National Science Foundation (NSF) officer: “Don’t even bother submitting an NSF proposal, because we won’t be able to find a reviewer who will give you a positive score.”

Pielke defies categorization. He believes that global warming is real and that action to curtail human emissions of greenhouse gases is justified. He is in favor of a carbon tax. At the same time, he has for many years openly feuded with climate scientists. As Science magazine noted in 2015, “Pielke has been something of a lightning rod in climate debates, sometimes drawing attacks from all sides as a result of his view on research and policy.” The controversy centers on his research finding that although the climate is warming, this does not necessarily result in the increased frequency or severity of extreme weather disasters.

If you canvass scholars in the environmental and climate policy world, a number of them will say they cross swords with Pielke, but they also respect him and teach his work. “I disagree with him about many things, but think he is someone who is worth reading and taking seriously,” says Jonathan Gilligan, an environmental sciences professor at Vanderbilt University. “I teach his book The Climate Fix every year precisely because I want my students to read someone who is smart and disagrees with me, in order to encourage them to think for themselves.”

This intellectual caliber is presumably what led the statistics whiz Nate Silver to hire Pielke in 2014 to write for FiveThirtyEight, the data journalism website that Silver created that year. Pielke’s first column questioned the strength of the evidence supporting the widely shared assertion among climate scientists that extreme weather disasters had become more prevalent in recent decades because of human-caused climate change. The uproar in the climate advocacy community was immediate and furious. Although Pielke had previously presented the same argument in the scholarly literature and in comments to science reporters, advocates were seemingly incensed that this perspective would now receive widespread public attention on Silver’s popular new website.

The Center for American Progress, a left-leaning Washington, DC-based think tank, used its influential blog, Climate Progress, to spearhead a campaign to discredit the column and Pielke’s reputation (something its lead blogger had already turned into a pet cause). The effort worked. After it became clear to Pielke that FiveThirtyEight would not let him write about climate issues anymore, he left the site within months of being hired. When news of his departure became public, the editor of the center’s blog bragged in an e-mail (disclosed in a 2016 WikiLeaks dump) to one of its wealthy donors: “I think it’s fair [to] say that without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538.”

The episode followed on the heels of Pielke’s clash with John Holdren, then President Obama’s science advisor. Holdren had testified to Congress that on the issue of climate change and severe weather, Pielke’s interpretation of the data was “not representative of mainstream views on this topic in the climate science community.” Pielke found this offensive. He responded on his blog: “To accuse an academic of holding views that lie outside the scientific mainstream is the sort of delegitimizing talk that is of course common on blogs in the climate wars.” It is perhaps understandable why Pielke bristled at being characterized as outside the “mainstream.” His harshest critics have branded him a climate “skeptic” or “denier,” a pejorative tag that has made its way into blogs and some media outlets.

The cumulative effect of the controversies and assault on his reputation by detractors has taken a personal and professional toll. He’s become radioactive even to those sympathetic to him: “I’ve had people tell me, ‘I can’t be seen working with you, because it might hurt my career.’” Pielke mentions how one “very close colleague” said he had wanted to come to his defense on social media, then admitted: “But I don’t want them [Pielke’s critics] coming after me.”

“I get it,” Pielke says.

Unable to escape the tar flung at him in the climate world, he’s recently pivoted from climate research to sports governance, also at the University of Colorado. “Yeah, I have a new career now,” Pielke says. “I’m sitting in the athletic department. I’ve moved on.” Still, Pielke finds it difficult to let go of his old life completely. Several months ago, he testified before Congress about his climate research and the efforts to silence him. He also remains an active participant on social media, with about a quarter of his tweets climate related.

In December 2016, he penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled, “My Unhappy Life as a Climate Heretic.” In the column, Pielke said that he is on the right side of the climate-severe weather debate in terms of where the evidence lies, but that this is an “unwelcome” view because it is perceived to be undermining the climate cause. He went on to say that the “constant attack” on him over the years is a form of bullying that was intended to “drive me out of the climate change discussion.”

After Pielke’s op-ed was published, Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, essentially rolled his eyes on Twitter. He said that Pielke “playing the victim card” doesn’t cut it and that, in any case, “what goes around, comes around.” Schmidt’s tweet (which was part of a larger thread) suggested that Pielke’s situation did not owe to qualms about his research; it was more a Karmic reckoning.

Michael Tobis, another climate scientist who has locked horns with Pielke, posted a more judicious response on a widely read climate science blog. “Roger is a problematic figure, who is quick to criticize while being quick to take offense,” Tobis wrote. “He’s often right and often wrong, which can be a useful role in itself, but he ought to be able to take as well as he gives if he wants the net of his contribution to be constructive.”

These views by Schmidt and Tobis are echoed by others in the climate science community. To understand why Pielke has experienced such a backlash, it is necessary to rewind the story more than a decade, to a time when climate scientists were feeling as deeply and unfairly maligned as Pielke feels today.