Roger Pielke Jr has stopped blogging. James Annan comments:
It had appeared for some time that RPJr's his blog was on the wane, attracting little more than a handful of denialist ditto-heads, and now he's decided to knock it on the head. Personally, I found much of Roger's blogging to be interesting and thought-provoking, although I'm a bit baffled by some of the clangers he dropped (eg his bizarre cheerleading of air capture of CO2, and his lame attempt to discredit Hansen's 1988 forecast). Many of his comments on the politicisation of climate science in general, and the hurricane wars in particular, were well worth reading. He bowed out in some style with a spectacular brain-fart that (along with a poorly-judged article on the hockey stick written by von Storch and Zorita) effectively ensured the Nature "climate feedback" blog was still-born (hopefully it will recover once they get their act together).
Eli Rabett comments:
If you go back and look at what I have written about Roger and his blogging, what I admired was his early awareness of the uses of the blog. Where (again, in my humble opinion) he failed was getting locked into a model and a number of obsessions and was not willing to change. A strength of his blog was the authority he and his institute brought to it, a weakness was that he took criticism personally, which, of course, some of it was. That is a big advantage of quasi anonymity. The blog lost steam when he tried to control the comments precisely because it was the friction in the comments which gave the flavoring.
On the topic of Pielke Jr's brain-fart we now have a nonsensical correction added to his post:
Because the zones span 10 degrees (or 5 degrees in the case of the 1990 USDA map) and the largest change shown on the difference map is 2 zones (i.e., >10 degrees!, now corrected), then clearly no location has jumped 2 zones! This is just an error.
Because the largest change on the map is two zones, it is clear that nowhere can the change be two zones? Now it is possible that the map is wrong, but it certainly isn't obviously wrong as Pielke Jr claims.
Roger Pielke Sr is still blogging, and William Connolley details Pielke Sr's third failed attempt to knock holes in the IPCC report.
One of the most interesting aspects of Pielke was his complete irony. For example, he began flacking his latest paper at Climate Feedback full of his usual vim and vigor about the importance of peer-review. However, the main citation which supported this paper, was a study that Pielke published in a skeptic journal called Energy and Environment.
When this was pointed out to Pielke, he defended his latest peer-reviewed study while acknowledging that Energy and Environment was "grey literature."
Here's where it gets interesting. And completely "Pielke" in nature.
Pielke has warned that academics sometimes launder grey literature through peer-review.
According to Pielke: "I have noticed recently a number of peer-reviewed papers that reference so-called 'grey literature' (e.g., agency, company, NGO reports) which hasn't itself been peer reviewed. Then the peer-reviewed study that cites the grey literature is subsequently cited in another publication to refer to the information in the original non-peer reviewed source. This is a way to give the veneer of peer review to a non-peer-reviewed study."
The irony!