Dec. 2, 2016, "My Unhappy Life as a Climate Heretic," Wall St. Journal, Roger Pielke, Jr. opinion. (Saturday, Dec. 3, 2016 print ed.)
"My research was attacked by thought police in journalism, activist groups funded by billionaires and even the White House."
"Much to my surprise, I showed up in the WikiLeaks releases before the election. In a 2014 email, a staffer at the Center for American Progress, founded by John Podesta in 2003, took credit for a campaign to have me eliminated as a writer for Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website. In the email, the editor of the think tank’s climate blog bragged to one of its billionaire donors, Tom Steyer: “I think it’s fair [to] say that, without Climate Progress, Pielke would still be writing on climate change for 538.”
WikiLeaks provides a window into a world I’ve seen up close for decades: the debate over what to do about climate change, and the role of science in that argument. Although it is too soon to tell how the Trump administration will engage the scientific community, my long experience shows what can happen when politicians and media turn against inconvenient research—which we’ve seen under Republican and Democratic presidents
.
I understand why Mr. Podesta—most recently Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman—wanted to drive me out of the climate-change discussion. When substantively countering an academic’s research proves difficult, other techniques are needed to banish it. That is how politics sometimes works, and professors need to understand this if we want to participate in that arena.
More troubling is the degree to which journalists and other academics joined the campaign against me. What sort of responsibility do scientists and the media have to defend the ability to share research, on any subject, that might be inconvenient to political interests—even our own?
I believe climate change is real and that human emissions of greenhouse gases risk justifying action, including a carbon tax. But my research led me to a conclusion that many climate campaigners find unacceptable: There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally. In fact we are in an era of good fortune when it comes to extreme weather. This is a topic I’ve studied and published on as much as anyone over two decades.
My conclusion might be wrong, but I think I’ve earned the right to share this research without risk to my career.
Instead, my research was under constant attack for years by activists, journalists and politicians. In 2011 writers in the journal Foreign Policy signaled [2/26/2010, "The FP Guide to Climate Skeptics,"] that some accused me of being a “climate-change denier.” I earned the title, the authors explained, by “questioning certain graphs presented in IPCC reports.” That an academic who raised questions about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in an area of his expertise was tarred as a denier reveals the groupthink at work.
Yet I was right to question the IPCC’s 2007 report, which included a graph purporting to show that disaster costs were rising due to global temperature increases. The graph was later revealed to have been based on invented and inaccurate information, as I documented in my book “The Climate Fix.” The insurance industry scientist Robert-Muir Wood of Risk Management Solutions had smuggled the graph into the IPCC report. He explained in a public debate with me in London in 2010 that he had included the graph and misreferenced it because he expected future research to show a relationship between increasing disaster costs and rising temperatures.
When his research was eventually published in 2008, well after the IPCC report, it concluded the opposite: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.”
Whoops.
The IPCC never acknowledged the snafu, but subsequent reports got the science right: There is not a strong basis for connecting weather disasters with human-caused climate change
.
Yes, storms and other extremes still occur, with devastating human consequences, but history shows they could be far worse. No Category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane has made landfall in the U.S. since Hurricane Wilma in 2005, by far the longest such period on record.
This means that cumulative economic damage from hurricanes over the past decade is some $70 billion less than the long-term average would lead us to expect, based on my research with colleagues.
This is good news, and it should be OK to say so. Yet in today’s hyper-partisan climate debate, every instance of extreme weather becomes a political talking point.
For a time I called out politicians and reporters who went beyond what science can support, but some journalists won’t hear of this. In 2011 and 2012, I pointed out on my blog and social media that the lead climate reporter at the New York Times , Justin Gillis, had mischaracterized the relationship of climate change and food shortages, and the relationship of climate change and disasters. His reporting wasn’t consistent with most expert views, or the evidence. In response he promptly blocked me from his Twitter feed. Other reporters did the same.
In August this year on Twitter, I criticized poor reporting on the website Mashable about a supposed coming hurricane apocalypse—including a bad misquote of me in the cartoon role of climate skeptic. (The misquote was later removed.) The publication’s lead science editor, Andrew Freedman, helpfully explained via Twitter that this sort of behavior “is why you’re on many reporters’ ‘do not call’ lists despite your expertise.”
I didn’t know reporters had such lists. But I get it. No one likes being told that he misreported scientific research, especially on climate change. Some believe that connecting extreme weather with greenhouse gases helps to advance the cause of climate policy. Plus, bad news gets clicks.
Yet more is going on here than thin-skinned reporters responding petulantly to a vocal professor. In 2015 I was quoted in the Los Angeles Times, by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Paige St. John, making the rather obvious point that politicians use the weather-of-the-moment to make the case for action on climate change, even if the scientific basis is thin or contested.
Ms. St. John was pilloried by her peers in the media. Shortly thereafter, she emailed me what she had learned: “You should come with a warning label: Quoting Roger Pielke will bring a hailstorm down on your work from the London Guardian, Mother Jones, and Media Matters.”
Or look at the journalists who helped push me out of FiveThirtyEight. My first article there, in 2014, was based on the consensus of the IPCC and peer-reviewed research. I pointed out that the global cost of disasters was increasing at a rate slower than GDP growth, which is very good news. Disasters still occur, but their economic and human effect is smaller than in the past. It’s not terribly complicated.
That article prompted an intense media campaign to have me fired. Writers at Slate, Salon, the New Republic, the New York Times, the Guardian and others piled on.
In March of 2014, FiveThirtyEight editor Mike Wilson demoted me from staff writer to freelancer. A few months later I chose to leave the site after it became clear it wouldn’t publish me. The mob celebrated. ClimateTruth.org, founded by former Center for American Progress staffer Brad Johnson, and advised by Penn State’s Michael Mann, called my departure a “victory for climate truth.” The Center for American Progress promised its donor Mr. Steyer more of the same.
Yet the climate thought police still weren’t done. In 2013 committees in the House and Senate invited me to a several hearings to summarize the science on disasters and climate change.
As a professor at a public university, I was happy to do so. My testimony was strong, and it was well aligned with the conclusions of the IPCC and the U.S. government’s climate-science program.
Those conclusions indicate no overall increasing trend in hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or droughts—in the U.S. or globally.
In early 2014, not long after I appeared before Congress, President Obama’s science adviser John Holdren testified before the same Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. He was asked about his public statements that appeared to contradict the scientific consensus on extreme weather events that I had earlier presented.
Mr. Holdren responded with the all-too-common approach of attacking the messenger, telling the senators incorrectly that my views were “not representative of the mainstream scientific opinion.” Mr. Holdren followed up by posting a strange essay, of nearly 3,000 words, on the White House website under the heading, “An Analysis of Statements by Roger Pielke Jr.,” where it remains today.
I suppose it is a distinction of a sort to be singled out in this manner by the president’s science adviser. Yet Mr. Holdren’s screed reads more like a dashed-off blog post from the nutty wings of the online climate debate, chock-full of errors and misstatements.
But when the White House puts a target on your back on its website, people notice. Almost a year later Mr. Holdren’s missive was the basis for an investigation of me by Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva, the ranking Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee. Rep. Grijalva explained in a letter to my university’s president that I was being investigated because Mr. Holdren had “highlighted what he believes were serious misstatements by Prof. Pielke of the scientific consensus on climate change.” He made the letter public.
The “investigation” turned out to be a farce. In the letter, Rep. Grijalva suggested that I—and six other academics with apparently heretical views—might be on the payroll of Exxon Mobil (or perhaps the Illuminati, I forget). He asked for records detailing my research funding, emails and so on. After some well-deserved criticism from the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union, Rep. Grijalva deleted the letter from his website. The University of Colorado complied with Rep. Grijalva’s request and responded that I have never received funding from fossil-fuel companies. My heretical views can be traced to research support from the U.S. government.
But the damage to my reputation had been done, and perhaps that was the point. Studying and engaging on climate change had become decidedly less fun. So I started researching and teaching other topics and have found the change in direction refreshing.
Don’t worry about me: I have tenure and supportive campus leaders and regents. No one is trying to get me fired for my new scholarly pursuits.
But the lesson is that a lone academic is no match for billionaires, well-funded advocacy groups, the media, Congress and the White House. If academics—in any subject—are to play a meaningful role in public debate, the country will have to do a better job supporting good-faith researchers, even when their results are unwelcome. This goes for Republicans and Democrats alike, and to the administration of President-elect Trump.
Academics and the media in particular should support viewpoint diversity instead of serving as the handmaidens of political expediency by trying to exclude voices or damage reputations and careers. If academics and the media won’t support open debate, who will?"
"Mr. Pielke is a professor and director of the Sports Governance Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder. His most recent book is “The Edge: The Wars Against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports” (Roaring Forties Press, 2016)."
"Appeared in the [Saturday] December 3, 2016, print edition".
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Foreign Policy, 2010, linked above: "Whereas An Inconvenient Truth
presented worsening storms as reason to support greenhouse gas
mitigation, Pielke thinks that increased costs of disasters in recent
years are due to "one overriding factor — more wealth, more people, more
property in harm’s way."
"ROGER PIELKE, JR.*
Who is he? Environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder and a fellow of the university’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences; author of The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics
Chief beef: Hurricanes and the bottom line
Telling quote: "We cannot make a causal link between increase in greenhouse gases and the costs of damage associated with hurricanes, floods, and extreme weather phenomena." —interview with FP
Role: Pielke, whose father is also a scientist and an outspoken critic of the IPCC, is emblematic of just how confusing traditional labels are: For his work questioning certain graphs presented in IPCC reports, Pielke has been accused by some of being a climate change "denier." Meanwhile, for his work on adaptation, he has been accused by others of being an "alarmist."
One of Pielke’s main additions to larger climate debate has been participation in studies and workshops that have concluded, in his words, "We cannot make a causal link between increase in greenhouse gases and the costs of damage associated with hurricanes, floods, and extreme weather phenomena." Whereas An Inconvenient Truth presented worsening storms as reason to support greenhouse gas mitigation, Pielke thinks that increased costs of disasters in recent years are due to "one overriding factor — more wealth, more people, more property in harm’s way." He took issue with the IPCC for one chart in its 2007 report, which seemed to imply causation when there was, if anything, only circumstantial evidence in his eyes. "Mine is an argument against using disasters as a justification for greenhouse gas emissions."
But his refutation of what he saw as sloppy logic certainly does not imply skepticism about climate change and the need to take mitigation and adaptation efforts seriously, he insists. In outlets like The New Republic and Yale Environment 360, Pielke has articulated a more nuanced point of view, often arguing for greater distinctions between debates about scientific integrity and those about public policy. For his part, he thinks, "Climate change is a huge problem, and it’s a problem linked to human activity. Greenhouse gases are an important part of that, but it’s not only greenhouse gases. And we need to respond accordingly."
*Editor’s note: Pielke has informed the editors of FP that he strongly objects to being included on a list titled "Climate Skeptics." The aim of the list was, as the introduction states, to separate "the noise from the serious concerns" with regards to those offering critiques of either climate science or institutions charged with presenting climate science to the public or policy-makers; the article was explicitly not intended to equate the viewpoints of all people contained on the list. Pielke has been quoted in the mainstream media voicing concerns about the IPCC, as in today’s Wall Street Journal, ["Even some who agree with the IPCC conclusion that humans are significantly contributing to climate change say the IPCC has morphed from a scientific analyst to a political actor. "It's very much an advocacy organization that's couched in the role of advice," says Roger Pielke, a University of Colorado political scientist. He says many IPCC participants want "to compel action" instead of "just summarizing science." as well as questioning sloppy logic on the part of some environmentalists, for instance objecting to overstatements about hurricanes being linked to global warming."
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2/26/2010, Wall St. Journal, reference to Pielke Jr. (linked by FP): "Push to Oversimplify at Climate Panel," by Jeffrey Ball and Keith Johnson
"Even some who agree with the IPCC conclusion that humans are
significantly contributing to climate change say the IPCC has morphed
from a scientific analyst to a political actor. "It's very much an
advocacy organization that's couched in the role of advice," says Roger
Pielke, a University of Colorado political scientist. He says many IPCC
participants want "to compel action" instead of "just summarizing
science.""
The IPCC's budget, about $7 million this year, comes mainly from contributions from the U.S. and other industrialized nations....
Regarding conflict of interest, Mr. Pachauri [then UN IPCC chief] said, "I don't take a single penny" from the consulting work. Proceeds go to his energy institute and not to him personally, he said....
Many conversations with policy makers—including Mr. Gore, the senators in Greenland and Christian Gaudin, a French senator—left the clear impression that "we scientists had better get better numbers," said Mr. Alley, adding that he understands their desire for detail."...
[Ed. note: There was a "big caveat" (reported below) in 2007 UN IPCC report. Scientists had no idea what to predict about Greenland and Antarctica--among the most sensational and financially promising items on the climate danger menu. It was too tempting to ignore the caveat, so much of the world was lead to believe that very likely these ice masses would melt, sea levels would skyrocket, and water would wash over land around the world (creating millions of climate refugees).]
(continuing, WSJ): "So the scientists put numbers into the 2007 study, along with a big caveat--what Mr. Alley calls a "punt." The study took into account things like glacier melt in most of the world, but it noted that it excluded what's happening in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, which "we can't predict," Mr. Alley said.
Inevitably, Mr. Alley said, some people have cited the numbers without that caveat.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Gore said he understands the uncertainties, and that he pointed out in statements "that there was essentially an asterisk" on the 2007 report's sea-level projections. "As he understands the situation from the ice-science community, the uncertainty in sea level applies in both directions," meaning sea-level rise could be greater or smaller than projected, her statement said."...
[Ed. note: Below, the article's last paragraph is about a George W. Bush "science adviser" who makes clear he should be advising no one about anything.]
(continuing): ""Mr. Marburger, the former Bush science adviser, said he frequently heard policy makers express frustration at the lack of certainty in many areas of science, including climate. "'Why can't we get better numbers?' Everybody asks that," he said. "But science rarely gives you the right answer. Science tells you what the situation is, but it doesn't tell you what to do.""
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Added, re: Hurricanes and the insurance industry, also linked in FP Pielke Jr discussion. (Some links in 2009 Forbes article below are inactive, may still be live elsewhere):
12/29/2009, "Stormy Times For Global Warmists," Forbes, Michael Fumento, opinion
"The cover of Al Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, features a satellite image of the globe showing four major hurricanes–results, we’re meant to believe, of man-made global warming.
"The cover of Al Gore’s new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, features a satellite image of the globe showing four major hurricanes–results, we’re meant to believe, of man-made global warming.
All four were photoshopped [11/9/2009, WUWT]. Which is nice symbolism, because in a sense the whole hurricane aspect of warming has been photoshopped.
True, both greenhouse gas emissions and levels in the atmosphere are at their highest, but this year [2009] had the fewest hurricanes since 1997, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the first time since 2006 no hurricanes even made landfall in the U.S.; indeed hurricane activity is at a 30-year low.
None of which is really all that remarkable. What’s remarkable is that the hurricane hysteria essentially reflects a “trend line” comprising a grand total of two data points in one year, 2005.
Those data points were named Katrina and Rita.
In a 2005 column, I gave what now proves an interesting retrospective.
“The hurricane that struck Louisiana yesterday was nicknamed Katrina by the National Weather Service. Its real name was global warming.” So wrote environmental activist Ross Gelbspan in a New York Times op-ed that one commentator aptly described as “almost giddy.” The green group Friends of the Earth linked Katrina to global warming, as did Germany’s Green Party Environment Minister.
The most celebrated of these commentaries was Chris Mooney’s 2007 book Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics and the Battle Over Global Warming. Mooney, for the record, is also author of the best-selling book The Republican War on Science.
Yet there were top scientists in 2005 such as Roger Pielke Jr., a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, publishing data showing the Rita-Katrina blowhards had no business building a case around two anomalies.
Pielke published a report in the prestigious Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (written before Katrina but published shortly afterward) that analyzed U.S. hurricane damage since 1900. Taking into account tremendous population growth along coastlines, he found no increase. His paper was dutifully ignored by the powers that be. [August 2005, "Hurricanes and Global Warming," Pielke Jr. with Landsea, Mayfield, Laver, and Pasch. "An interdisciplinary team of researchers survey the peer-reviewed literature to assess the relationships between global warming, hurricanes, and hurricane impacts." "Debate over climate change frequently conflates issues of science and politics. Because of their significant and visceral impacts, discussion of extreme events is a frequent locus of such conflation. Linda Mearns, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), aptly characterizes this context: “There’s a push on climatologists to say something about extremes, because they are so important. But that can be very dangerous if we really don’t know the answer” (Henson 2005). In this article we focus on a particular type of extreme event—the tropical cyclone—in the context of global warming (tropical cyclones are better known in the United States as hurricanes."...]
(continuing, Forbes): "But the so-called Climategate scandal, which illuminated efforts by climate change scientists to squelch opposition viewpoints, has now caught up to one scientist, Kevin Trenberth, who vociferously and influentially demanded that Pielke’s paper be shunned.
Trenberth works in the same town as Pielke and is one of the top researchers on the strongly warmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In a leaked e-mail from two months ago, he admitted to colleagues what he had hidden from the outside world: that there’s been no measurable warming [dead link, Junk Science blog] over the past decade.
Yet two years earlier he told Congress [dead link] that evidence for man-made warming was “unequivocal” and things were “apt to get much worse.” And in 2005 he told the local newspaper [dead link] that Pielke’s Bulletin article was “shameful” and should be “withdrawn.”
“Our paper shouldn’t have been controversial,” notes Pielke today, “and since then our conclusions have been reinforced by the IPPC.”
The panel’s latest report, from 2007, concluded that whether warming is causing increased hurricane activity is “pretty much a toss of a coin.”
Yet Pielke’s paper was excluded from that report. Why? Says Pielke, “a scientist at a high level of the IPCC saw fit to disparage a paper in his domain, said it should be ignored by the panel, and subsequently it was.” He added, “After seeing [leaked] e-mail discussions in which the scientists talked about keeping literature out of the report … well, you can connect the dots.”
But it wasn’t just Trenberth. In one of the hacked e-mails, Phil Jones, director of the British climate center from which the e-mails were stolen (and who has since resigned) wrote to colleagues about Pielke’s complaints of not being published, “Maybe you’ll be able to ignore them?”
For many millions of American homeowners, the 2005 tempest tirade was hardly just academic. Half a year later, a company called Risk Management Solutions (RMS) issued a five-year forecast [generic link to site] of hurricane activity predicting U.S. insured hurricane losses would be 40% higher than the historical average. RMS is the world leader in “catastrophe modeling,” and insurance companies use those models to set premium rates charged to homeowners as well as by reinsurance companies and others.
With four years of data in, losses are actually running far below historical levels and at less than half the rate that RMS predicted. A lot of individuals and a lot of companies have grossly overpaid.
This hardly supports rushes to judgment on global warming consequences. “If you overestimate or underestimate risks there will be costs,” says Pielke. “It’s honesty and accuracy that count.”"
"Michael Fumento is director of the nonprofit Independent Journalism Project, where he specializes in science and health issues. He may be reached at fumento@pobox.com."
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Added:
Added:
July 18, 2013, Roger Pielke, Jr. testimony before the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works,
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/2013.20.pdf
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