{"id":24895,"date":"2014-03-29T10:24:26","date_gmt":"2014-03-29T15:24:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=24895"},"modified":"2014-03-29T10:24:26","modified_gmt":"2014-03-29T15:24:26","slug":"nate-silver-in-the-shark-tank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/03\/29\/nate-silver-in-the-shark-tank\/","title":{"rendered":"Nate Silver … in the shark tank"},"content":{"rendered":"

Statistician-to-the-stars Nate Silver<\/a> can shrug off attacks from Republicans over his 2012 electoral forecast or from Democrats unhappy with his latest forecast for the 2014 mid-terms, but he’s finding himself under attack from an unexpected quarter right now:<\/p>\n

Ever wondered how it would feel to be dropped from a helicopter into a swirling mass of crazed, genetically modified oceanic whitetip sharks in the middle of a USS-Indianapolis<\/em>-style feeding frenzy?<\/p>\n

Just ask Nate Silver. He’s been living the nightmare all week \u2013 ever since he had the temerity to appoint a half-way skeptical scientist as resident climate expert at his “data-driven” journalism site, FiveThirtyEight<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Silver has confessed to The Daily Show<\/em><\/a> that he can handle the attacks from Paul Krugman (“frivolous”), from his ex-New York Times<\/em> colleagues, and from Democrats disappointed with his Senate forecasts. But what has truly spooked this otherwise fearless seeker-after-truth, apparently, is the self-righteous rage from the True Believers in Al Gore’s Church of Climate Change.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t pay that much attention to what media critics say, but that was a piece where we had 80 percent of our commenters weigh in negatively, so we\u2019re commissioning a rebuttal to that piece,\u201d said Silver. \u201cWe listen to the people who actually give us legs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The piece in question was the debut by his resident climate expert, Roger Pielke, Jr.<\/a>, arguing that there was no evidence to support claims by alarmists that “extreme weather events” are on the increase and doing more damage than ever before. Pielke himself is a “luke-warmer” \u2013 that is, he believes that mankind is contributing to global warming but is not yet convinced that this contribution will be catastrophic. But neither his scientific bona fides<\/em> (he was Director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado Boulder) nor his measured, fact-based delivery were enough to satisfy the ravening green-lust of FiveThirtyEight’s mainly liberal readership.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Statistician-to-the-stars Nate Silver can shrug off attacks from Republicans over his 2012 electoral forecast or from Democrats unhappy with his latest forecast for the 2014 mid-terms, but he’s finding himself under attack from an unexpected quarter right now: Ever wondered how it would feel to be dropped from a helicopter into a swirling mass of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,28],"tags":[245,86,240,290],"class_list":["post-24895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-media","tag-climatechange","tag-criticism","tag-globalwarming","tag-statistics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6tx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24895"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24895\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24896,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24895\/revisions\/24896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}