UPDATE: Roger Pielke, Jr. is a Senior Fellow for an organization that is dedicating all of its resources to killing any chance of either a national or international effort to avert catastrophic global warming and to spreading disinformation about Obama, Gore, Congressional Democrats, and the environmental movement. My bad. I keep forgetting how many people who come to CP on any given day aren’t regular readers and so don’t have the full context for some of my posts. Back to the humor.
Now that they* have shut down his original popular blog Prometheus, I don’t read his new obscure blog, cleverly named “Roger Pielke Jr.’s Blog.” As an aside, I’m guessing Pielke’s gonna follow up his book, The Honest Broker, with one titled Roger Pielke’s book. But I digress.
So it wasn’t until googlealerts pinged me this morning that I learned about Pielke’s July 31 plea to his readers to “Please Read Climate Progress.”
Yes, I know what you’re thinking, “he’s got a dwindling number of readers, Joe, so what does it really matter if he asks them to Please Read Climate Progress?” But I say it does matter when any blogger uses his or her precious real estate to reach out and selflessly urge people – plea with them, really – to read someone else’s blog.
Yes, I still know what you’re thinking, “RPJ, has a tiny little problem with falsehoods – he simply can’t stop uttering them over and over and over again.”
Now you’re just trying to hurt my feelings. I mean, he even ends his post:
I’m pleased for people to read what I write here and also to read Climate Progress (which I strongly encourage) and come to their own conclusions about the arguments that they encounter.
That’s as sincere RPJ gets!
Yes, I still know what you’re thinking, “RPJ is just trying to pretend that he’s more reasonable than you are, so the media will continue to be suckered into believing his contrarian bullsh!t, believing he is an honest broker.”
To which I reply, I don’t think anybody’s going to be fooled into thinking Roger is reasonable when he still seems to be his old vicious self, writing:
To give Joe a bit of a break, he has a role to play for CAP as a bulldog cheerleader for the Waxman-Markey bill. His salary depends upon playing this role….
Now anyone would say that accusing somebody of not blogging what they believe but merely what they are paid to say or suggesting that what they write is policed by their bosses under threat of firing is the most outrageous form of attack on one’s professional integrity. And of course, an utter falsehood, as anyone who knows me or CAP. And if I were like RPJ, I’d demand he offer any proof of that libelous statement.
But I’m just going to take that apparent smear to be good ole’ Roger’s obscurely wry sense of humor. After all, if Pielke really believed half the crap he writes, if he really believed that sentence, for instance, he couldn’t possibly “strongly encourage” people to read my blog. It would be intellectually dishonest to recommend the blog of someone you really thought was blogging a certain way because “his salary depends” on it. No honest broker could do that. And of course my regular readers know that I’m no bulldog cheerleader for the B- Waxman-Markey bill as I’ve noted many times.
No, this is just Pielke having fun with everyone. He’s a real kidder.
Even funnier, Pielke claims that since I began writing about him, “Sales of The Honest Broker jump as well.” Who else but Roger would brag that my critiques have sent his book soaring all the way to #279,894 on Amazon. He cracks me up!
Yeah, Pielke humorously asserts “he has falsely accused my university of violating my academic freedom by shutting down our blog, Prometheus.” But anyone who reads the posts knows that I never did any such thing. I wrote
Now that they’ve shut down his original blog…
True, I carelessly didn’t explain who I meant by “they” – although I clearly did say in the comments section that I was trying to be snarky, to needle someone who had so viciously humorously misrepresented what I wrote, which I thought would be obvious to anyone with a sense of humor like Roger. After all, nobody voluntarily shuts down a blog to start a new one with maybe one tenth the readers just for the fun of it. Since Roger asserts he did so voluntarily, but has never offered a rational explanation for why he did that, let me offer my explanation for what I meant, why I put an asterisk next to “they” in the second paragraph above.
By “they” I meant “all of Rogers different personalities.” You know, the personality that allows him to say on the one hand that he believes the IPCC science and that we must stabilize around 500 ppm and the other personality who only offers policies that would lead to 1000 ppm and who trashes anybody who suggests policies that would get close to 500 ppm or better. Or the personality that told Nature “Clearly since 1970 climate change (i.e., defined as by the IPCC to include all sources of change) has shaped the disaster loss record” and later praised a study that finds there is a better than 50% chance that human-emissions are contributing to increased losses from hurricanes since 1971. That personality is clearly a whole ‘nother person than the one who harshly smears the professional reputation of any scientist who says anything remotely similar and even more harshly attacks the professional reputation of hundreds of scientists who merely sat quietly in an audience listening to someone say something similar.
So whenever I write, “now that they have shut down his original blog,” you’ll all get the joke that I mean “now that Roger’s various personalities have agreed to shut down his original blog” – but of course it won’t be funny anymore now that I’ve explained it. Darn.
The bottom line is that other than his plea to his readers to read Climate Progress, you should just make it your working assumption that every single thing Roger Pielke Jr. writes is a joke. That’s why I have filed this under “Humor.”
