re: #8 Political Atheist

That would be what in your view?

Admitting the scientific in the original article, admitting that Pielke is a ‘soft’ denier in the vein of Lomborg, and that getting a political scientist to lead off writing about climate change was not a good idea.

They have said they’ll publish a rebuttal and they have a specific dude in mind, who’s ‘travelling’ and can’t do it, but one of the main problems is something they actually allude to in their note to the readers: The entire article was missing the forest for the trees. There is some debate about the extent to which the energy added to the climate system through AGW has already affected natural disasters. There is no debate that it will, in the future.

Good journalism on Climate Change doesn’t involve political scientists nitpicking at the edges of the claims; this is a classic soft denier tactic, one Peilke is well-known for, and 538 appears to still somehow be in the dark about that.