[Peace-discuss] AGW and the Left

[John W.]

As usual Stuart hits the nail more or less precisely on the head, finding 
the balance without veering too far toward one extreme or the other.

So what's "AGW", for the uninitiated?  "Anthropogenic Global 
Warming"?  It's obviously not Cockburn's initials.

Cockburn's iconoclasm is most refreshing, of course, as manifested in his 
proper placement of quotation marks.

John Wason



At 05:40 PM 2/26/2008, Stuart Levy wrote:

>On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 04:20:41PM -0600, 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
>
>Cockburn has important points to make.  He's absolutely right to point out
>that we're blaming India and China for their up-ramping CO2 emissions while
>ignoring the oceans of it we've already produced.
>
>But he'd make a much stronger case if he made those points without simply
>dismissing the whole IPCC scientific community.  Doing that only aids the
>commercial interests who want to do the same so that they can continue 
>unhindered
>pursuit of fossil-fuel extraction, fossil-fueled agriculture, etc. businesses,
>and leave existing power relations intact.
>
>I'm glad you bring up the 911<->Global Warming connection you mentioned,
>because I'd like to argue against it.  What difference does it make
>if each notion's proponents are right?
>
>In the 9/11 case, it means that our government was complicit in
>a terrorist attack on us.  Sure, that would be a bad thing.
>But not much worse than if they just took political advantage of an
>attack (which no one doubts they did) and perhaps hoped that one would 
>come along.
>And it's not as if our gov't wasn't already guilty of many terroristic
>attacks on other people.  Why not one on us?
>
>But in the Global Warming case, it's liable to mean widespread change of
>habitability of land around the world.  Where people can live,
>whether they have water to drink, where food can grow,
>where serious diseases propagate.  This is what induces mass
>migrations of desperate people.  This kind of change would start
>wars even among peoples with sound political systems, if we could find any.
>(I should think there's a good case to be made that a driving force
>in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, not just access to land,
>but access to water.)
>
>So dismissing sound science which suggests that anthropogenic global 
>warming is
>happening, and that our industrial society needs to change to limit its 
>effects,
>is more than irresponsible.
>
>
> > 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/