Thursday, May 17, 2007

RIP Prometheus

No doubt Eli and the mice will be celebrating at the news. It had appeared for some time that RPJr's his blog was on the wane, attracting little more than a handful of denialist ditto-heads, and now he's decided to knock it on the head. Personally, I found much of Roger's blogging to be interesting and thought-provoking, although I'm a bit baffled by some of the clangers he dropped (eg his bizarre cheerleading of air capture of CO2, and his lame attempt to discredit Hansen's 1988 forecast). Many of his comments on the politicisation of climate science in general, and the hurricane wars in particular, were well worth reading. He bowed out in some style with a spectacular brain-fart that (along with a poorly-judged article on the hockey stick written by von Storch and Zorita) effectively ensured the Nature "climate feedback" blog was still-born (hopefully it will recover once they get their act together).

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Please note the comments at Uncle Eli's; notably, the obituary, of which I am justly smug. :)

EliRabett said...

If you go back and look at what I have written about Roger and his blogging, what I admired was his early awareness of the uses of the blog. Where (again, in my humble opinion) he failed was getting locked into a model and a number of obsessions and was not willing to change. A strength of his blog was the authority he and his institute brought to it, a weakness was that he took criticism personally, which, of course, some of it was. That is a big advantage of quasi anonymity. The blog lost steam when he tried to control the comments precisely because it was the friction in the comments which gave the flavoring.

James Annan said...

Fergus,

Yes, that's rather good :-)