[Peace-discuss] AGW and the Left

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Friday 22 February 2008
	Intellectual blasphemy
	Alexander Cockburn tells spiked that
	when he dared to question the climate change consensus
	he was met by a tsunami of self-righteous fury.
	Alexander Cockburn

While the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence 
that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say 
this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy.

In magazine articles and essays I have described in fairly considerable 
detail, with input from the scientist Martin Hertzberg, that you can 
account for the current warming by a number of well-known factors - to 
do with the elliptical course of the Earth in its relationship to the 
sun, the axis of the Earth in the current period, and possibly the 
influence of solar flares. There have been similar warming cycles in the 
past, such as the medieval warming period, when the warming levels were 
considerably higher than they are now.

Yet from left to right, the warming that is occurring today is taken as 
being man-made, and many have made it into the central plank of their 
political campaigns. For reasons I find very hard to fathom, the 
environmental left movement has bought very heavily into the fantasy 
about anthropogenic global warming and the fantasy that humans can 
prevent or turn back the warming cycle.

This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, 
and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic 
nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into 
environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade 
the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency 
response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and 
environmental justice.

This is a fantasy. In truth, environmental catastrophism will, in fact 
it already has, play into the hands of sinister-as-always corporate 
interests. The nuclear industry is benefiting immeasurably from the 
current catastrophism. Last year, for example, the American nuclear 
regulatory commission speeded up its process of licensing; there is an 
imminent wave of nuclear plant building. Many in the nuclear industry 
see in the story about CO2 causing climate change an opportunity to 
recover from the adverse publicity of Chernobyl.

More generally, climate catastrophism is leading to a re-emphasis of the 
powers of the advanced industrial world, through its various trade 
mechanisms, to penalise Third World countries. For example, the Indians 
have just produced an extremely cheap car called the Tata Nano, which 
will enable poorer Indians to get about more easily without having to 
load their entire family on to a bicycle. Greens have already attacked 
the car, and it won’t take long for the WTO and the advanced powers to 
start punishing India with a lot of missionary-style nonsense about its 
carbon emissions and so on.

The politics of climate change also has potential impacts on farmers. 
Third World farmers who don’t use seed strains or agricultural 
procedures that are sanctioned by the international AG corporations and 
major multilateral institutions and banks controlled by the Western 
powers will be sabotaged by attacks on their ‘excessive carbon 
footprint’. The environmental catastrophism peddled by many who claim to 
be progressive is strengthening the hand of corporate interests over 
ordinary people.

[...]

What is sinister about environmental catastrophism is that it diverts 
attention from hundreds and hundreds of serious environmental concerns 
that can be dealt with - starting, perhaps, with the emission of nitrous 
oxides from power plants. Here, in California, if you drive upstate you 
can see the pollution all up the Central Valley from Los Angeles, a lot 
of it caused, ironically, by the sulphuric acid droplets from catalytic 
converters! The problem is that 20 or 30 years ago, the politicians 
didn’t want to take on the power companies, so they fixed their sights 
on penalising motorists who are less able to fight back. Decade after 
decade, power plants have been given a pass on the emissions from their 
smoke stacks while measures to force citizens to change their behaviour 
are brought in.

Emissions from power plants are something that could be dealt with now. 
You don’t need to have a world programme called ‘Kyoto’ to fix something 
like that. The Kyoto Accord must be one of the most reactionary 
political manifestos in the history of the world; it represents a 
horrible privileging of the advanced industrial powers over developing 
nations.

The marriage of environmental catastrophism and corporate interests is 
best captured in the figure of Al Gore. As a politician, he came to 
public light as a shill for two immense power schemes in the state of 
Tennessee: the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge Nuclear 
Laboratory. Gore is not, as he claims, a non-partisan green; he is 
influenced very much by his background. His arguments, many of which are 
based on grotesque science and shrill predictions, seem to me to be part 
of a political and corporate outlook.

In today’s political climate, it has become fairly dangerous for a young 
scientist or professor to step up and say: ‘This is all nonsense.’ It is 
increasingly difficult to challenge the global warming consensus, on 
either a scientific or a political level. Academies can be incredibly 
cowardly institutions, and if one of their employees was to question the 
discussion of climate change he or she would be pulled to one side and 
told: ‘You’re threatening our funding and reputation - do you really 
want to do that?’ I don’t think we should underestimate the impact that 
kind of informal pressure can have on people’s willingness to think 
thoroughly and speak openly.

One way in which critics are silenced is through the accusation that 
they are ignoring ‘peer-reviewed science’. Yet oftentimes, peer review 
is a nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university 
will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, 
the unpredictable and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually 
back-scratching circle. The history of peer review and how it developed 
is not a pretty sight. Through the process of peer review, of certain 
papers being nodded through by experts and other papers being given a 
red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include 
what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is 
frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it. Many people 
who fall back on peer-reviewed science seem afraid to have out the 
intellectual argument.

Since I started writing essays challenging the global warming consensus, 
and seeking to put forward critical alternative arguments, I have felt 
almost witch-hunted. There has been an hysterical reaction. One 
individual, who was once on the board of the Sierra Club, has suggested 
I should be criminally prosecuted. I wrote a series of articles on 
climate change issues for the Nation, which elicited a level of 
hysterical outrage and affront that I found to be astounding - and I 
have a fairly thick skin, having been in the business of making 
unpopular arguments for many, many years.

There was a shocking intensity to their self-righteous fury, as if I had 
transgressed a moral as well as an intellectual boundary and committed 
blasphemy. I sometimes think to myself, ‘Boy, I’m glad I didn’t live in 
the 1450s’, because I would be out in the main square with a pile of 
wood around my ankles. I really feel that; it is remarkable how quickly 
the hysterical reaction takes hold and rains down upon those who 
question the consensus.

This experience has given me an understanding of what it must have been 
like in darker periods to be accused of being a blasphemer; of the 
summary and unpleasant consequences that can bring. There is a 
witch-hunting element in climate catastrophism. That is clear in the use 
of the word ‘denier’ to label those who question claims about 
anthropogenic climate change. ‘Climate change denier’ is, of course, 
meant to evoke the figure of the Holocaust denier. This was contrived to 
demonise sceptics. The past few years show clearly how mass moral panics 
and intellectual panics become engendered.

In my forthcoming book, A Short History of Fear, I explore the link 
between fearmongering and climate catastrophism. For example, alarmism 
about population explosion is being revisited through the climate issue. 
Population alarmism goes back as far as Malthus, of course; and in the 
environmental movement there has always been a very sinister strain of 
Malthusianism. This is particularly the case in the US where there has 
never been as great a socialist challenge as there was in Europe. I 
suspect, however, that even in Europe, what remains of socialism has 
itself turned into a degraded Malthusian outlook. It seems clear to me 
that climate catastrophism represents a new form of the politics of fear.

I think people have had enough of peer-reviewed science and experts 
telling them what they can and cannot think and say about climate 
change. Climate catastrophism, the impact it is having on people’s lives 
and on debate, can only really be challenged through rigorous open 
discussion and through a ‘battle of ideas’, as the conference I spoke at 
in London last year described it. I hope my book is a salvo in that battle.

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