The Briefing Room

General Category => Politics/Government => Topic started by: Oceander on March 31, 2014, 03:15:22 am

Title: Liberals Attack FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver for Hiring Global Warming Skeptic
Post by: Oceander on March 31, 2014, 03:15:22 am
Newsmax

Liberals Attack FiveThirtyEight's Nate Silver for Hiring Global Warming Skeptic (http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/nate-silver-global-warming/2014/03/30/id/562563/)

Sunday, 30 Mar 2014 09:31 AM

By Elliot Jager

Statistician Nate Silver, who became a darling of Democrats for his accurate predictions that President Barack Obama would win re-election,  continues to face flack from liberal critics for hiring University of Colorado environmental scholar Roger Pielke to write on science and climate for his new FiveThirtyEight website.

The Jewish Daily Forward's J.J. Goldberg calls Pielke "an ornery, combative, smart-aleck" political scientist who may be insincere in claiming to accept the impact of man-made climate change.

Michael Mann, writing in The Huffington Post, said he was "crestfallen" and disappointed that Silver "parrots" the "false arguments" of climate skeptics in his own writing on climate change, which Mann characterized as "marred" and "misguided."

The Daily Kos said that Nate Silver was "pushing a new phase of Global Warming denialism."

Dan Satterfield wrote on the American Geophysical Union blog that "shameless self promotion" motivated Silver to hire Pielke. "Look at all the free publicity he got by announcing the hire, and even more after Pielke's first piece on the new website."

Blogger Peter Sinclair described Pielke's essay as so "catastrophic" that it may have undermined the credibility of Silver's site "right at the start."

By Friday, Silver was backing away from Pielke's post. He asked readers not to judge the site's stance on climate change from that one article; said that the site should not have included Pielke's implied policy recommendations, and he took responsibility for the piece which he said was poorly edited.

Silver also pledged that Pielke would not be the only writer dealing with climate data at the site.