I stole my headline from RP Jr, who links to the Nature article. RP Jr modestly makes no comment; RP Sr is so modest as to not even mention it (though he is puffing the distinctly dodgy Scarfetta and West paper).
So its up to me to comment, who else? Its a very soft article, nice and gentle. Most (all?) of what is written is true, but the impression left is… well. “To be frank, that irritates the hell out of me,” says Gavin Schmidt is definitely true.
The CCSP report gets a mention: Pielke Sr argued that members of the CCSP committee were focusing on their own work too much, and not including other perspectives that could explain possible discrepancies in the observed temperatures5. RP Sr resigned because he couldn’t get *his* POV across: the Nature article makes it sound like a noble attempt to get diversity in, which is wrong, it was *his* research and views he wanted more prominently.
In fact, neither father nor son thinks that predicting global average climate trends is possible or useful. Sounds odd, and if interpreted literally makes them both skeptics (assuming by “possible” we mean to the degree and within the error bounds that people like the IPCC does).