[Peace-discuss] AGW and the Left

Tue Feb 26 15:50:47 CST 2008

He continues to go down hill.  --mkb

On Feb 26, 2008, at 1:20 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> 	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.
>
> http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/printable/4624/
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