On 5/13/07, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Cockburn's hostility to the global warming alarmists, especially Al Gore, is driven by a kind of conspiracy theory of the sort associated with vulgar Marxism. He believes that all the global warming alarms are meant basically to push nuclear energy.
I am very disturbed by the hostile reception to Cockburn, Rancourt and Noble. They may be guilty of overplaying the nuclear energy angle, but their basic argument is not so easily dismissed. This main argument can be summarized as follows: A group of climate scientists are currently promoting the idea of anthropogenic global warming far more than the weight of evidence would reasonably justify. This carries a huge risk of "crying wolf" and also does a disservice to other much better established and more urgent environmental issues such as soil erosion, land use, water-table depletion etc, and above all the appalling state of the food supply infrastructure. There are many many excellent reasons to advocate for CO2 reduction and fossil fuel conservation. Why should "global warming" get a mindshare monopoly among environmental issues? This attitude is especially surprising among PEN-Lers who are so scathing about the uncertainties and dubious statistical models of neo-classical economics. As even the zmag article concedes: "The first problem for leftists trying to understand climate science is that they cannot trust Gore and they cannot automatically trust the scientific consensus." http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=57&ItemID=12796 So what's the solution? Silence dissenters by calling them conspiracy theorists?
This involves major leaps of the imagination. Just as I always found it difficult to picture CIA agents agreeing to planes (or cruise missiles) being flown into the WTC or the Pentagon, I can't quite get my mind around the idea that scientists are involved in a huge con job.
This is a contrived analogy and really not worth responding to. I'd just request that such distracting rhetorical devices be avoided for the sake of intelligent discussion. -raghu.
