Like father, like son: Roger Pielke Sr. also doesn’t understand the science of global warming — or just chooses to willfully misrepresent it.
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009RealClimate has just eviscerated Roger Pielke, Sr. in an important post, “More bubkes.” I am going to excerpt it at length because:
- It thoroughly debunks some now-standard denier talking points on sea level rise, ocean heat content, and Arctic sea ice that the Pielkes, WattsUpWithThat, Inhofe, George Will and others have been pushing.
- It has some excellent figures, including ones from the recent major peer-reviewed synthesis report of climate science since the 2007 IPCC report (which I wrote about here).
- Pielke Sr. accused me of “a failure to understand the physics of global warming and cooling” in a post (here) about ocean heat content (which was gleefully reprinted by the anti-scientific website WattsUpWithThat), even though, as RealClimate definitively shows, it is Pielke who either fails to understand the science or chooses to willfully misrepresent it.
In my post “Breaking: NOAA puts out ‘El Niño Watch,’ so record temperatures are coming and this will be the hottest decade on record,” I had noted that Pielke Sr. loves to cherry-pick climate data over short time spans to make misleading scientific claims about climate. Climate, of course, is about long-term trends.
The basis for Pielke’s claim I don’t understand the science of climate: “There are peer reviewed analyses that document that upper ocean warming has halted since 2003…. Even the last few years of the Levitus et al 2009 paper shows this lack of warming (see).” And then he links to his discussion of that paper and puts up this figure:
What serious climate scientist would look at that data and have the nerve to tell the public it documents that upper ocean warming has halted since 2003. If you wanted to play this game — and game is a kind word for this willful attempt to mislead the public — you could much more truthfully say “upper ocean warming has soared since 2002.” But both statements are beside the point.
How could any serious climate scientist possibly look at such noisy data, which is full of short-term gyrations and brief, multi-year periods of little obvious warming — but an unmistakable upward trend for decades — and have the audacity to pick the year right after a staggeringly rapid increase in upper ocean warming as the basis of his public pronouncements on this issue? And Pielke Sr. has the chutzpah to say my writing exhibits “a failure to understand the physics of global warming and cooling.” Doctor — heal thyself. It’s sad, really, since, unlike his son, he is actually a “climatologist.”
Pielke Sr. tries the same crap on the climate scientists of RealClimate — and their devastating must-read response should end forever any notion that Roger Pielke, Sr. is a credible source on climate science:







