Heretics On The Left

The Nation magazine’s Alexander Cockburn has joined the ranks of heretics. He doesn’t believe anthropogenic CO2 is primarily responsible for global warming. That’s an amazing admission from one manning “the flagship of the left’.

No response is more predictable than the reflexive squawk of the greenhouse fearmongers that anyone questioning their claims is in the pay of the energy companies

He calls Al Gore “the world's best-known hysteric and self-promoter on the topic of man's physical and moral responsibility for global warming”.

As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years, Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump budgets and rouse voters. By the mid-'90s he'd positioned himself at the head of a strategic alliance formed around "the challenge of climate change," which stepped forward to take Communism's place in the threatosphere essential to political life.

Cockburn notes the well established cycle of alarmist predictions. It begins with doomsday scenarios from “multibillion-dollar computer modeling bureaucracies … intent on self-preservation”. Next, we get a “tremulous statement about the accelerating tempo of the warming crisis” from a “prominent fearmonger” with a UN imprimatur. Finally, “the cry is taken up by the IPCC and headlined by the New York Times”.

The foot soldiers in this alliance have been the grant-guzzling climate modelers and their Internationale, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose collective scientific expertise is reverently invoked by devotees of the fearmongers' catechism. The IPCC has the usual army of functionaries and grant farmers and the merest sprinkling of actual scientists with the prime qualification of being climatologists or atmospheric physicists.

As Richard Kerr, Science's man on global warming, remarked, "Climate modelers have been 'cheating' for so long it's almost become respectable."

When measured reality doesn't cooperate with the lurid model predictions, new compensating factors are "discovered," such as the sulfate aerosols popular in the 1990s, recruited to cool off the obviously excessive heat predicted by the models. Or inconvenient data are waterboarded into submission, as happened with ice-core samples that failed to confirm the modelers' need for record temperatures today.

The consequence he says is that “hysteria rules the day” and “vast sums of money will be uselessly spent on programs that won't work against an enemy that doesn't exist. … Meanwhile, real and curbable environmental perils are scanted.”