[Peace-discuss] AGW and the Left

[Morton K. Brussel]

Cockburn indeed rejects the best scientific evaluation of global  
warming, and attempts to deride it with such cute phrases as  
"environmental catastrophism" and implies a conspiracy of scientists  
and peer reviewers.  He doesn't understand science I'm afraid. In  
particular that we know that C02 is an important ingredient that  
would cause global warming and it has reached record levels. He and  
Fred Seitz, after whom an appendage to the physics department, MRL,  
is named seem strangely allied. Seitz, a real savage liberalism  
advocate seems to be in the first stages of dementia.

Since the ultimate consequences of climate change are so serious, it  
is of course now urgent to be prudent and limit fossil fuel  
emissions. I'm dubious whether it will be done, but it's important to  
try by diverse strategies.

Monbiot had it right about Cockburn. I think Cockburn is hurting, and  
this is his response. Pitiable.

--mkb


On Feb 26, 2008, at 4:20 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> 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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