[Peace-discuss] AGW and the Left

Tue Feb 26 16:20:41 CST 2008

I don't know whether Cockburn's on to something or not, but I got my 
radio partner quite annoyed a few weeks ago when I suggested that the 
affect behind AGW looks like that behind 911-Truth -- and I like 
Cockburn's suggestion that in each case it may be a displacement from a 
largely non-existent Left. --CGE

Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> 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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