Joe Romm Lies

If you’re not following the whole climate and anthropogenic global warming controversy, you may not be familiar with the name of Joe Romm:

Dr. Joseph Romm is the editor of Climate Progress and a Senior Fellow at the American Progress. In 2009, Time magazine named him one of the “Heroes of the Environment″ and “The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger.”

Romm is an employee of the Center for American Progress whose job is to maintain political pressure for the AGW hypothesis.

You may not be familiar with Roger Pielke Sr and Roger Pielke Jr; father and son, Pielke pere is a respected and widely published climate scientist (who is now a reviled “climate denialist” because he questions not the warming trend, nor even that it has anthropogenic components, but because he thinks land use patterns are a bigger contributor than CO₂ concentration. He was summarily, and unprofessionally, removed as an IPCC AR4 editor for committing that sin.) Pielke fils is a political scientist who is also tarred with the “denialist” brush because he insists on pointing out errors in the use and attribution of scientific publications involved with climate science. He’s had a number of run-ins on these things, including one where he pointed out that the “Inconvenient Truth” presentation Al Gore turned into a documentary was not doing a good job with its sources. In February 2009, he posted on the issue, in a post that ended:

Now that Gore has admitted that including the slide based on CRED data was a mistake, it raises a more fundamental: How could it be that Al Gore presented obviously misleading information before a large audience of the world’s best scientists, which was then amplified in a press release by AAAS, and none of these scientists spoke up?

I’ve exchanged a number of emails with both of the Pielkes; they’re both eminently reasonable. Pielke Sr’s blog is a lovely example of the old-fashioned style of scientific discourse, careful, so phrased that its the opposite of inflammatory; Pielke Jr is a little bit “hipper” but still the most mild-mannered of writers.

So when Pielke Jr titled a blog post “Joe Romm Lies“, you can practically see live steam emitted from his ears. Go read his whole post, which ends:

It is long overdue for the environmental community to start pushing back on Romm as he continues to stain their entire enterprise. His lies and smear tactics, which are broadly embraced and condoned, are making enemies out of friends and opponents out of fellow travelers. Vigorous debate is welcome and healthy. Lies and character assassination not so much.

(H/T to Anthony Watts.)