Posted on 05/12/2007 10:38:54 PM PDT by neverdem
No response is more predictable than the reflexive squawk of the greenhouse fearmongers that anyone questioning their claims is in the pay of the energy companies. A second, equally predictable retort contrasts the ever-diminishing number of agnostics with the growing legions of scientists now born again to the "truth" that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the earth's warming trend.
Actually, the energy companies have long since adapted to prevailing fantasies, dutifully reciting the whole catechism about carbon neutrality, repositioning themselves as eager pioneers in the search for alternative fuels, settling comfortably into new homes, such as British Petroleum's Energy Biosciences Institute at UC, Berkeley.
In fact, when it comes to corporate sponsorship of crackpot theories about why the world is getting warmer, the best documented conspiracy of interest is between the fearmongers and the nuclear industry, now largely owned by oil companies, whose prospects twenty years ago looked dark. The apex fearmongers are well aware that the only exit from the imaginary crisis they have been sponsoring is through a big door marked "nuclear power," with a servants' side door labeled "clean coal."
The world's best-known hysteric and self-promoter on the topic of man's physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear and coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge National Lab. White House advisory bodies on climate change in the Clinton/Gore years were well freighted with nukers like Larry Papay of Bechtel.
As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years, Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump budgets and rouse voters. By the mid-'90s he'd positioned himself at the head of a strategic alliance formed around "the challenge of climate change," which stepped forward to take Communism's place in the threatosphere essential to political life.
The foot soldiers in this alliance have been the grant-guzzling climate modelers and their Internationale, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose collective scientific expertise is reverently invoked by devotees of the fearmongers' catechism. The IPCC has the usual army of functionaries and grant farmers and the merest sprinkling of actual scientists with the prime qualification of being climatologists or atmospheric physicists.
To identify either government-funded climate modelers or their political shock troops at the IPCC with scientific objectivity is as unrealistic as detecting the same in a craniologist financed by Lombroso studying a murderer's head in a nineteenth-century prison. The craniologist's calipers were adjusted by the usual incentives of stipends and professional ego to find in the skull of that murderer ridges, bumps and depressions, each meticulously equated with an ungovernable passion or a mental derangement.
At least Lombroso and his retinue measured heads. All Al Gore has ever needed is a hot day or some heavy rain as opportunity to promote the unassailable theory of man-made global warming. Come a rainy summer (1995) or a routine El Niño (1997) and Gore is there for the photo op, his uplifted finger warning of worse to come.
Man-made-global-warming theory is fed by pseudo-quantitative predictions from climate careerists working primarily off the megacomputer General Circulation Models, whose home ports include the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Department of Commerce's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab.
These are multibillion-dollar computer modeling bureaucracies as intent on self-preservation and budgetary enhancement as cognate nuclear bureaucracies at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. They are as unlikely to develop models refuting the hypothesis of human-induced global warming as is the IPCC to say the weather is getting a little bit warmer but there's no great cause for alarm. Threat inflation is their business. Think of the culture that engendered the nonexistent missile gap of the late 1950s and you'll get some sense of the political, economic and bureaucratic forces at work today stoking panic at the specter of man-made global warming and the nuclear plants needed to fight it.
By the late 1980s the UN high brass clearly perceived the "challenge" of climate change to be the horse to ride to build up the organization's increasingly threadbare moral authority and to claim a role beyond that of being an obvious American errand boy. In 1988 it gave us the IPCC.
The cycle of alarmist predictions is now well established. Not long before some new UN moot, a prominent fearmonger like James Hansen or Michael Mann will make a tremulous statement about the accelerating tempo of the warming crisis. The cry is taken up by the IPCC and headlined by the New York Times, with exactly the same lack of critical evaluation as that newspaper's recycling of the government's lies about Saddam's WMDs.
When measured reality doesn't cooperate with the lurid model predictions, new compensating factors are "discovered," such as the sulfate aerosols popular in the 1990s, recruited to cool off the obviously excessive heat predicted by the models. Or inconvenient data are waterboarded into submission, as happened with ice-core samples that failed to confirm the modelers' need for record temperatures today. As Richard Kerr, Science's man on global warming, remarked, "Climate modelers have been 'cheating' for so long it's almost become respectable."
The consequence? As with the arms-spending spiral powered by the cold war fearmongers, vast sums of money will be uselessly spent on programs that won't work against an enemy that doesn't exist. Meanwhile, real and curbable environmental perils are scanted. Hysteria rules the day, drowning useful initiatives such as environmental cleanup, while smoothing the way for the nuclear industry to reap its global rewards.
Great article. Great scam artists. And great stupidity that buys into the scam that keeps it going. Quite a cartel of deceit...
A what? Do you mean a liberal?
There is nothing "progressive" about the same old warmed over leftist philosophies of socialism. Call it "regressive" if a new term is needed.
Today's liberals want us to regress to 1917 -- to a time before 30 million people starved to death in the Soviet Union, to a time before 2 million people were slaughtered in the killing fields of Cambodia, to a time before the world witnessed the horrific effects of the Leftist agenda run amok.
=
They were doing ok until this, whether they know it or not this is a slap in the face of the Clintons 'primary colors' because it was the Clintons that cataloged alllll of Saddam's WMD's. I remember wild Bill Cohen on every television show he could get himself on carrying that 5 lb. sack of sugar claiming it was the amount of anthrax that old Saddam had stockpiled.
ping
This article was quoted by Rush a couple of weeks ago.
Wow! Great article.
Cockburn is one of those guys who’s half sane and half crazy. And the Nation has had a bug up their butt for decades about nuclear power. That said, it’s a good sign that even some leftists can see through Algore’s flimflam. The brighter leftists are probably embarassed by the global warming nutters at this point, and don’t want to go down the drain with them when their predictions don’t come true.
Am I in bed with Alexander Cockburn now? Wow!
What ice-core samples, and how does aerosol cooling not work?
Cockburn has sharp ad hominem rhetoric, a pleasure, but very little fact content to discuss in this article.
This world has been one big scam since Satan said “take a bite, it won’t cost you a thing.”
Not the first time Cockburn as a far leftist has published opinions heretical in his circles. See his deconstruction of John Kerry’s Vietnam self-proclaimed Vietnam heroics.
Hail, the Conquering War Criminal Comes!
What Kerry Really Did in Vietnam
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn07292004.html
Thanks for the link on Kerry!
That's a tough name to live up to.
Yup. Once Al's exorbitant personal energy needs were made public, the leftists who actually think were handed a really tough row to hoe on this one.
Vietnam syndrome - The consequences of U.S. defeat in Iraq would be much greater than they were...
Giuliani Takes On G.O.P. Orthodoxy on Social Issues
From time to time, I’ll ping on noteworthy articles about politics, foreign and military affairs. FReepmail me if you want on or off my list.
Is Global Warming a Sin? (You’re not going to believe this!!!)
The Nation ^ | 4/26/07 | Alexander Cockburn
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1826954/posts
Posted on 05/01/2007 10:06:36 PM CDT by Valin
(snip)
Now imagine two lines on a piece of graph paper. The first rises to a crest, then slopes sharply down, levels off and rises slowly once more. The other has no undulations. It rises in a smooth, slow arc. The first, wavy line is the worldwide CO2 tonnage produced by humans burning coal, oil and natural gas. It starts in 1928, at 1.1 gigatons (i.e., 1.1 billion metric tons), and peaks in 1929 at 1.17 gigatons. The world, led by its mightiest power, plummets into the Great Depression and by 1932 human CO2 production has fallen to 0.88 gigatons a year, a 30 percent drop. Then, in 1933, the line climbs slowly again, up to 0.9 gigatons.
And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That’s the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by volume, moving in 1928 from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, 307 in 1932 and on up. Boom and bust, the line heads up steadily. These days it’s at 380. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a whopping 30 percent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn’t even cause a 1 ppm drop in the atmosphere’s CO2. It is thus impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from people burning fossil fuels.
I met Martin Hertzberg, PhD, the man who drew that graph and those conclusions, on a Nation cruise back in 2001. He remarked that while he shared many of The Nation’s editorial positions, he approved of my reservations on the question of human contributions to global warming, as outlined in columns I wrote around that time. Hertzberg was a meteorologist for three years in the Navy, an occupation that gave him a lifelong mistrust of climate modeling. Trained in chemistry and physics, a combustion research scientist for most of his career, he’s retired now in Copper Mountain, Colorado, but still consults from time to time.
(snip)
Water covers 71 percent of Earth’s surface. Compared with the atmosphere, there’s 100 times more CO2 in the oceans, dissolved as carbonate. As the post-glacial thaw progresses the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, like fizz from soda. “The greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards,” Hertzberg concludes. “It is the warming of the Earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse.” In vivid confirmation of that conclusion, several new papers show that for the last 750,000 years, CO2 changes have always lagged behind global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.
It looks like Poseidon should go hunting for carbon credits. The human carbon footprint is of zero consequence amid these huge forces and volumes, not to mention the role of the giant reactor beneath our feet: the Earth’s increasingly hot molten core.
Next: Who are the hoaxers, and what are they after?
Sometimes it seems like the massacres of the twentieth century weren’t good enough for the left and they want to have a do - over, doesn’t it?
“Cockburn has sharp ad hominem rhetoric, a pleasure, but very little fact content to discuss in this article”
Please see.
Is Global Warming a Sin? (You’re not going to believe this!!!)
The Nation ^ | 4/26/07 | Alexander Cockburn
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1826954/posts
Posted on 05/01/2007 10:06:36 PM CDT by Valin
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.