IT'S MORE FUN THAN WATCHING RERUNS OF AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH
If it hadn't happened, South Park would have had to invent it. Invoking the authority of Fox TV regular Pat Michaels, Gonzo Climatology Sweepstakes entrant Alexander Cockburn has called man's impact on climate "a fart in a hurricane" and declared:
" the human carbon footprint is of zero consequence"
Is Cockburn , an Old Labour Lefty ,bent on becoming the first Really Red Red State Climatologist ? He's been amplifying Rush Limbaugh's effort to liberate benighted geoscientists from the delusional belief that a billion years carbon accumulation can possibly have created enough fossil fuel to upset the chemistry of the Earth's atmosphere. To him, scientists are just poseurs wielding " primitive rhetorical pandybats."
He dismisses the contradictory evidence of geochemistry with the elan of a creationist denouncing Carbon -14 dates older than 4004 BC as the Devils work. Rejecting the reactionary first law of thermodynamics , which insists that hot things tend to grow cold over time, Cockburn insists global warming's real cause is 'the Earth's increasingly hot molten core."
Untroubled by the conservation of mass , or the variability of the Earth's orbit, he avers that:
" Once again, the greenhousers have got it ass-backward. The 100 ppm increase in CO2 can't be uniquely attributed to humans because at least as plausibly it could be the effect, not the cause, of the warming that started after the Little Ice Age."
Never mind CO2's subversive failure to spike in response to the Medieval Warm Period.
The late Revered Falwell warned that global warming is "Satan's attempt to redirect the church's primary focus," Cockburn's Beat The Devil column cottons to old time religion too. He could be the man the left needs to rally Moonies, Marxists and moonbats to forge a weird new populism from Opinion Journal's anti-elitism and the dim politicization of popular science on PBS. if the threshold of scientific expectation in the Climate Wars falls, and warming drives Siberia's collective farm die hards to plant popcorn, expect to see Cockburn demanding the seed be vernalized in fulfillment of Comrade Lysenko's anti-Deviationist five year plan.
Last year , his hosts at The Nation castigated those who deny a jet liner struck the Pentagon for sinking into self parody as they :
"proffer what they demurely call "disturbing questions", though they disdain all answers but their own. They seize on coincidences and force them into sequences they deem to be logical and significant. Like mad Inquisitors, they pounce on imagined clues... torturing the data - as the old joke goes about economists -- till the data confess. Their treatment of eyewitness testimony and forensic evidence is whimsical. Apparent anomalies that seem to nourish their theories are brandished excitedly; testimony that undermines their theories... is contemptuously brushed aside.
Cockburn really should reread this- after all. he wrote it.
I've been a fan for a long time. But you knew that. Keep up the good work, sir.
Best,
D
Posted by: Dano | May 29, 2007 at 08:22 PM
Great post with which I totally agree. If only Cockburn were not such an entertaining writer!
Posted by: Don Thieme | May 31, 2007 at 04:48 PM
Your link leads to Cockburn columns but not anything similar to these quotations. I want to read the original column. Can you provide a link?
Having read some Cockburn, I wonder if he was taking you for a ride?
RESPONSE:
They're quite straight quotes , albeit with para long ellipsis , from The Nation , and , Counterpunch- as he ran three such, I'm afraid he may be as serious as Kit Monckton . enjoy
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Posted by: Health News | January 29, 2011 at 12:37 AM
Fussell's book is good EXCEPT for his assessment of David Jones's epic poem In Parenthesis, which he misreads as glorifying war by allusions to romance. The truth is that these allusions provide an emotional correlative to the horrors and loss of war--allusions, for the mostpart to legendary loss
Posted by: Stainless Steel Fabrication | April 11, 2011 at 02:55 AM