[Peace-discuss] AGW and the Left

[C. G. Estabrook]

On AGW and 911-Truth, maybe both you and I (and others) should attend to the 
force of the arguments and abandon speculation on the psychological state of the 
arguers. Motives for holding a position and its justification can have little to 
do with one another (e.g., I believe that 2+2=4 because my first grade teacher, 
Miss White, told me so; but that's not the reason 2+2=4.) --CGE


Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> 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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