The Church of Global Warming burns another heretic

Talking Points Memo relates the short and unhappy career of Roger Pielke Jr. at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog, as inquisitors of the Church of Global Warming turned up with a wooden stake and plenty of kindling to burn the heretic for daring to question one of the more absurd extensions of their religious dogma:

Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, told Discover Magazine that after editors at the site “showed some reluctance” in publishing his work, he told FiveThirtyEight managing editor Mike Wilson that “it was probably best that we part ways.”

Pielke’s time at FiveThirtyEight got off to a stormy start shortly after the site went live in March. In his first piece for the site, Pielke wrote that the increased cost of natural disasters is not the result of a climate change — a premise that was heavily criticized.

Pielke wrote a follow-up to that article two days later, and Silver commissioned a rebuttal the following week. But Pielke only wrote three more pieces for the site after that, all of which focused on sports and not climate.

The fallout was compounded after two climate scientists who criticized the article, Michael Mann and Kevin Trenberth, said that Pielke responded to their criticism with what they considered to be threatening emails. Mann and Trenberth interpreted Pielke’s emails as possible threats to take legal action.

And if you can’t trust Michael Mann – the guy who cooked up the phony “hockey stick” graph that serves as the primary religious icon for the Church of Global Warming, and who routinely misrepresents himself as a Nobel Prize winner – who can you trust?  How dare Pielke question how the climate change that demonstrably has not happened in eighteen years is increasing the cost of natural disasters?  As we all learned in school, “science” is all about using thuggish enforcement tactics to silence anyone who questions a hypothesis considered sacrosanct by a rigid hierarchy.

Pielke couldn’t help noticing that his good buddies at FiveThirtyEight didn’t have his back:

Pielke dismissed those claims as “ridiculous” but Silver nevertheless apologized, telling the Huffington Post that “Roger’s conversations with [Mann and Trenberth] did not reflect FiveThirtyEight’s editorial values.”

In his interview with Discover, Pielke lamented that Silver and company didn’t give him more support. He said that he hasn’t “spoken with or corresponded with Nate since that first piece.”

“Of course, I do wish that 538 had shown a bit more editorial backbone, but hey, it is his operation,” Pielke said.

A lack of “editorial backbone” is the only reason the climate change cult is still in business, since the real world has so stubbornly refused to live up to their sacred data models.  Why bother preparing rebuttals that might be full of embarrassing hockey-stick mistakes, when you can simply silence those who disagree with you?  There’s a lot of money riding on the global warming scam, so as the Joker put it to Batman in The Dark Knight: “You don’t think I’d risk losing the battle for Gotham’s soul in a fistfight with you?  No, you need an ace in the hole.”