Thread by @RogerPielkeJr

Short🧵

The reverberations of my 2014 column on disasters @FiveThirtyEight continue in 2020

Here Harvard's Dennis Thompson writes about it in Daedelus amacad.org/publication/pr…

I appreciate Prof Thompson's interest in my work, but he gets some things badly wrong, some thoughts

Prof Thompson certainly isn't the 1st academic to write about a colleague w/o reading their work or asking their views, hence

"He presumably thought..."
"His post was seen as..."
"Some critics question..."

How does this sort of uninformed speculation get published in a journal?

I hear this a lot:

"Witnessing professionals would do better to emphasize instead the long-term harms rather than getting involved in controversies about the causes of particular weather disasters."

IOW: "Your good science makes my political advocacy more difficult. Shut up."

Prof Thompson completely misrepresents my arguments in THB

I can't imagine that @greenprofgreen actually said this, as she is a careful scholar

I am explicit in THB that a healthy democracy requires all four roles (discussed in THB) to be well populated, including advocacy

These are some of the challenges academics face in climate research, good science is frowned upon if it doesn't help how some view the cause

Misrepresenting others' views is common place

Good guys, bad guys distinguished by perceptions of politics

Anyway, interesting times as usual

You can read my 538 piece here: fivethirtyeight.com/features/disas…

It is still accurate & as it was then perfectly consistent with IPCC, USNCA, WMO etc

Even stronger support for it in 2020: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

And as chance has it, I wrote a bit on The Honest Broker framework just yesterday @EScAPE_Covid19 blog

blog.escapecovid19.org/2020/10/08/wha…

To end, I'd just ask fellow academics to actually read the material they are purporting to be critiquing. That goes for professional ethicists like Prof Thompson as well as everyone else. 😎
/END