...and will be for a long time, no doubt. Proving that his last diatribe on climate change was only a taste of things to come, Alexander Cockburn is back with yet another batch of vitriol hurled at those who accept the scientific consensus on global warming--only this time he's ramped it up to near-hysterical levels. Now he's regularly referring to the "Greenhouse fearmongers" who subscribe to "crackpot theories about why the world is getting warmer" (corporate-sponsored crackpot theories, no less). The article is peppered with references to "prevailing fantasies," "craniology" (yes, really), "climate alarmists," "lurid model predictions," etc, etc, ad nauseum. His tirade against the IPCC deserves a full quote:
The footsoldiers in this alliance have been the grant-guzzling climate modelers and their Internationale, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose collective scientific expertise is reverently invoked by all devotees of the Greenhouse fearmongers' catechism. Aside from the fact that the graveyard of intellectual error is stuffed with the myriad tombstones of "overwhelming scientific consensus", 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.
Well that takes care of that, doesn't it?
The article's premise--as far as I can detect one through the unending stream of perfervid invective--is actually a classic case of projection, exemplified by this volley in the first paragraph: "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." Given that it's Cockburn who's carving himself a niche as the leftist who derides the "Greenhousers" for acting as useful idiots for the coal and nuclear industries--a trope which he deploys not just in this same article but in the very next paragraph of this same article--the irony is overwhelming.
There's not much point in spending the effort to dissect it any further than that, because there's little of substance and less of interest. Cockburn's given up even the slightest pretense that he's willing to engage in a reasoned debate on this issue. I don't momentarily think that he's "in the pay of the energy companies"; I think he's in thrall to the sad joy of exercising his unparalleled command of intellectualized name-calling. Whatever the reason behind it, there's so much fertilizer there that you can't even find the flowers anymore, and there's no longer any point in trying. There are serious, thoughtful people writing about global warming, but unfortunately--by his own choice--Alexander Cockburn is not one of them.
If you want to see someone who is worth reading (on this and any other topic), take a look at George Monbiot's response to Cockburn's new pet project.
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