Inside the mind of Alexander Cockburn

I've written before about Alexander Cockburn's feverish hooting and hollering at anything connected to global warming.  Given that background, it was an absolute certainty that the recent awarding of the Nobel peace prize to the IPCC and Al Gore would be irresistible to him--and sure enough, he pounced like a dog on a ham bone.  I found this paragraph particularly interesting:

Anyone who has studied the antics of [Gore's] co-winner of the peace prize, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, will know that the IPCC's prime role every three years has been to ignore the work--some of it respectable scientific research--of its expert panels and issue entirely mendacious and to issue alarmist [sic] press releases designed to win headlines in the New York Times.

If you've read CounterPunch for as long as I have, you know that they're not too careful about editing their articles; there's a continual stream of typos, botched formatting, and superfluous words or phrases.  In this case we've got the latter: note the "issue entirely mendacious [press releases]" followed immediately by "issue alarmist press releases".  Oops!  So Cockburn apparently wrote one phrase and then changed it, but forgot to delete the other one.  But which one did he actually want to leave in the final article?  This is a deeply perplexing question which requires our careful consideration.  Here are the possible scenarios:

1) Cockburn might have written "entirely mendacious" and then thought, "No, that's going way too far--I need to be more judicious in my phrasing and fair in my characterizations."  And now he's filled with embarrassment and horror to see his original draft in published form on the web site.  Or,

2) Maybe he wrote "alarmist" and then thought, "No, no, no, that will never do--it's so pedestrian, and it's not nearly as snide and overstated as it needs to be."  So he puffed it up with a 25-cent insult phrase (which may or may not have started out as the bare word "mendacious" and then metastasized into "entirely mendacious" just moments later).

So which one is it?  Let's see if the phrases he chose elsewhere in the article give us any subtle clues to help us penetrate this conundrum: "hucksters and falsifiers", agitprop", "bogus science", "toxic alarmism", "cooked statistics", "demagoguery"...yes, I'm getting the distinct feeling that he really did mean to write "entirely mendacious".  In fact I'd say the only question is what would have possessed him to type something as mild as "alarmist" in the first place--even if it only survived for a few seconds before being replaced by a suitably hyperbolic phrase.

In any case, if you set aside the standard issue global warming tantrum, Cockburn's reminders of Gore's history are well worth reading--especially as liberal veneration for Gore is reaching such a breathless crescendo.

Comments

[Mark G. Miller]

Gore said in An Inconvenient Truth that there is no dissent from scientists that mankind is causing global warming. None. If I remember correctly, Gore said there are no scientific studies refuting human-caused warming. Did Gore lie? Is Cockburn cracked? Who's telling the truth?

[John Caruso]

I think this is what Gore said that you're citing:

There was a massive study of every scientific article in a peer reviewed article written on global warming in the last ten years. They took a big sample of 10 percent, 928 articles. And you know the number of those that disagreed with the scientific consensus that we're causing global warming and that is a serious problem out of the 928: Zero.

So Gore was talking only about a sample of peer-reviewed articles, but not ruling out all dissent.

Though I can't vouch for Gore's facts, Cockburn is most definitely cracked (on this topic). Setting aside his extraordinary invective, there's his sourcing: I'm not sure if you've seen it here before, but Cockburn's main source for his skepticism is Dr. Martin "the explosion expert" Hertzberg, a combustion scientist with three years of Navy meteorology experience who Cockburn met on a cruise. And Cockburn's primary citation from Hertzberg was a talk Hertzberg gave at a Colorado brew pub. I know it beggars belief, but I swear I'm not making this up.

[Scruggs]

That would most likely be a reference to the study by Naomi Oreskes. He's not quite picture perfect right.

"The 928 papers were divided into six categories: explicit endorsement of the consensus position, evaluation of impacts, mitigation proposals, methods, paleoclimate analysis, and rejection of the consensus position. Of all the papers, 75% fell into the first three categories, either explicitly or implicitly accepting the consensus view; 25% dealt with methods or paleoclimate, taking no position on current anthropogenic climate change. Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position."

But he is correct that there were no disagreements on the consensus.

Cockburn is way off base.

[John Caruso]

Scruggs: Nice catch--thanks for the link(s). Actually Gore's summary appears to be more accurate than I thought it would be.

[MFB]

What I'd like to know is, where is this coming from? Cockburn doesn't appear to be actually insane. He must be aware as a leftist that there is a strong movement supported by large corporations to discredit anthropogenic global warming and that should make him suspicious. His co-editor is Jeffry StClair, who isn't a global warming denialist. He must also be aware that no matter what the West might be doing in terms of spinning global warming against third-world development, there ain't gonna be no development if the ecology collapses.

It's bizarre. It's as if a section of his brain is channelling Christopher Hitchens contrarianism.

[John Caruso]

Regarding "contrarianism": in my original article on this, that's exactly what I said as well. I think your Hitchens comparison is (depressingly) apt, and though I don't think Cockburn is likely to go quite as far off the rails as Hitchens has, I do think his seemingly reflexive contrarian streak is his greatest weakness.

[Ajit]

I admire Cockburn. But I don't agree with him on this Global Warming business. We should know to separate wheat and chaff.He is still great in almost everything except on this Global Warming.