Advertisement

Science magazine is confused about who is a “prominent climate scientist” — so is Richard Tol!

UPDATE: Amazingly, economist Richard Tol in the comments section appears to argue repeatedly argues that he and Pielke are indeed climate scientists. Pielke, not surprisingly, makes no such assertion.

In Science magazine’s “News of the Week” section (subs. req’d) they hype a piece on their blog:

Writing in Der Spiegel, three prominent climate scientists have criticized the policies of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its chair, Rajendra Kumar Pachauri. The Wall Street Journal reprinted the column, which says the panel should adopt conflict-of-interest policies, a mechanism for dealing with errors, and more transparent policies for selecting its leadership and authors.

You won’t a surprise to learn that an opinion piece reprinted by the uber-anti-science editors at the WSJ isn’t in fact written by “three prominent climate scientists.”

Advertisement

In fact, as that piece explains, the piece was actually written by “Richard Tol, Roger Pielke, and Hans von Storch.”

Seriously.

Memo to Science: Two of the people you call “prominent climate scientists” aren’t even climate scientists!

Richard Tol is an economist, a Bjorn Lomborg favorite (see “Lomborg’s main argument has collapsed”). His economic analysis strikes me as less than stellar (see Voodoo Economists, Part 3.5: Richard Tol says wildly optimistic MIT/NBER study, beloved of deniers, is “way too pessimistic”). I’m working on my long-promised analysis of his dubious recent work that Lomborg uses to push his message of inaction and delay.

Pielke is … well, he’s Pielke. I’m quite confident that even he would not call himself a climate scientist. Everything that could usefully be said about him has been said by DeLong and Deltoid and Rabett.

Advertisement

The only thing more amazing than the fact that Science bizarrely called them “prominent climate scientists” is that they made that blunder a week ago and haven’t bothered to fix it. Hmm, maybe they need “a mechanism for dealing with errors.”