Czech Physicist Dr. Lubos Motl on Nate Silver & Roger Pielke Jr.: ‘Spineless Nate Silver has apologized to the working class for his anti-revolutionary, anti-socialist provocation’
Nate Silver, Roger Pielke, and journalism ethics
Nate Silver is a statistician who has analyzed baseball and elections. I don’t know him but it seems that some other people do. At any rate, he started a new expensive online news server FiveThirtyEight.com (the number is 538). Some mostly left-wing pundits have criticized the new server and made its childhood a rocky experience.The first study he happened to publish on that server was one by Dr Roger Pielke Jr, a “climate lukewarmer” [in the middle between skeptics and alarmists] who does research into damages caused by meteorological phenomena:Disasters Cost More Than Ever — But Not Because of Climate Change (by Pielke)His main point is simple: the absolute amount of money destroyed by natural disasters is increasing but so is the total GDP. The ratio stays pretty much constant – as he demonstrates by some graph from the Munich Re reinsurance company – and it should. (Well, there is even some decrease that seems statistically insignificant; if it ever became significant, it would probably be due to people’s increasing ability to protect their assets.) There exists no scientific or otherwise rational reason to think that the “losses to GDP” ratio should be significantly changing with time. As people are getting wealthier, they have more assets that may be destroyed by unpleasant weather and so on.Needless to say, a “lukewarmer” like Pielke Jr is a sufficient heretic for the climate activists to go ballistic; his claims – self-evidently correct claims – were a blasphemy. So they have spammed the comment section with tons of negative comments (80% of comments were claimed to be negative), posted a long pseudoscientific rebuttal at SkepticalScience.COM, a rant at Salon.COM mentioning the grilling of Silver by Jon Stewart, a diatribe at HuffPo, and dozens of other anti-Pielke replies on assorted far left-wing servers and blogs.Spineless Nate Silver has apologized to the working class for his anti-revolutionary, anti-socialist provocation.Of course, fine folks like James Delingpole know where the wind is blowing from. All the data I can access are consistent with the hypothesis that all these insane anti-skeptic “fireworks” you can see on the Internet and in the media are the result of an orchestrated campaign by 25 or fewer unhinged alarmist trolls, at least 90% of the “fireworks”.This is actually the mean value of my estimate. Such a claim may sound remarkable but people who don’t have …