Krugman also backed his argument with data, notably the exact same data that Silver is disparaging by hiring people like Roger Pielke Jr. as staff writers. The data is in, and has been analyzed in a multitude of different ways: climate change is real. To ignore that is to ignore the role that expertise sometimes has to play in understanding and interpreting data.

While it's superficially true that this expertise can be used to enshrine unscientific dogmas in the trappings of science, to reject expertise period is to reject the role that knowledge can and must play in forming an understanding of our world. Data do not exist in a vacuum, but are collected in actual experiments, the complexities of which must be understood to gain insight from that data in a way that reflects reality. Not being wary of (or even intentionally misconstruing) how data is collected and represented leads to mistakes like normalizing away trends, then claiming those trends don't exist; this is precisely what Pielke Jr. did, and what Krugman was criticizing.