An Interesting Dissent
The Nation magazine is not the place you would expect to see a full-bore attack on Al Gore and the First Church of the Presumptuous Assumption of Global Warming™. The Nation describes itself as the "flagship of the Left". Yet today, Alexander Cockburn delivers a world-class drubbing on the "science" of global warming and especially the strip-mining, energy guzzling Al Gore. This is as harsh as it is unexpected.
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. A second, equally predictable retort contrasts the ever-diminishing number of agnostics with the growing legions of scientists now born again to the "truth" that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the earth's warming trend.
Actually, the energy companies have long since adapted to prevailing fantasies, dutifully reciting the whole catechism about carbon neutrality, repositioning themselves as eager pioneers in the search for alternative fuels, settling comfortably into new homes, such as British Petroleum's Energy Biosciences Institute at UC, Berkeley.
In fact, when it comes to corporate sponsorship of crackpot theories about why the world is getting warmer, the best documented conspiracy of interest is between the fearmongers and the nuclear industry, now largely owned by oil companies, whose prospects twenty years ago looked dark. The apex fearmongers are well aware that the only exit from the imaginary crisis they have been sponsoring is through a big door marked "nuclear power," with a servants' side door labeled "clean coal."
The world's best-known hysteric and self-promoter on the topic of man's physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear and coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge National Lab. White House advisory bodies on climate change in the Clinton/Gore years were well freighted with nukers like Larry Papay of Bechtel.
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.
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.
It actually gets even more brutal from there. Wow. Not everyone on the left is at all happy with the Gorebots and the hysterical alarmists, apparently. And Cockburn is not exactly without credentials as a card-carrying "progressive". Welcome to the "global warming deniers database", Mr. Cockburn.
Energy, Environment, Left Wing | Gaius Saturday, 12 May , 2007
By NortonPete, Saturday, 12 May , 2007 @ 1:23 pm
This is from an interesting perspective but the Emperor (Al Gore) still is without clothes.
Very interesting indeed.
I can’t find where I read it, but I remember reading that the some Russian Scientists have a large bet with I believe some British scientists that the next 6-8 years will be cooler.
By bird dog, Saturday, 12 May , 2007 @ 4:43 pm
Good find, Marcus Valerius. I try to remember to check The Nation regularly, for their long-winded book reviews, but I just as regularly forget to.
By feeblemind, Saturday, 12 May , 2007 @ 4:53 pm
A saw that piece as well, Nortonpete. I saw the link at junkscience.com sometime back. I believe the Russian is quite sure of cooling by 2018 due to decreased solar activity.