February 22, 2008
WHENCE HIS CONFUSION?:
Intellectual blasphemy: Alexander Cockburn tells spiked that when he dared to question the climate change consensus he was met by a tsunami of self-righteous fury. (Alexander Cockburn, January 2008, spiked review of books)
While the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy.In magazine articles and essays I have described in fairly considerable detail, with input from the scientist Martin Hertzberg, that you can account for the current warming by a number of well-known factors - to do with the elliptical course of the Earth in its relationship to the sun, the axis of the Earth in the current period, and possibly the influence of solar flares. There have been similar warming cycles in the past, such as the medieval warming period, when the warming levels were considerably higher than they are now.
Yet from left to right, the warming that is occurring today is taken as being man-made, and many have made it into the central plank of their political campaigns. For reasons I find very hard to fathom, the environmental left movement has bought very heavily into the fantasy about anthropogenic global warming and the fantasy that humans can prevent or turn back the warming cycle.
This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political programme. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice.
What's more natural than that coercive utopians imagine they can control the biosphere? Posted by Orrin Judd at February 22, 2008 6:42 PM
It's easy to find evidence that humans have influenced Earth's climate in various ways, but the big question is: how much? We might well have something to do with the warming trend, but there are so many factors and interactions that I doubt we are causing most of it.
And even if we are causing most if it, the climate change alarmists don't want to listen to various possible fixes, such as nuclear power or fertilizing the ocean.
Posted by: PapayaSF at February 23, 2008 12:59 AMThe left is not in decline, on the contrary, it has found the ideal vector to install its global tyranny in the current climate hysteria.
Posted by: Peter at February 23, 2008 5:04 AMThis is a religious controversy.
The witches have been attacking the Bibical lesson of man's place as subduer of the Earth. The climate change error is of a cloth with predator reintroduction.
Posted by: Lou Gots at February 23, 2008 7:43 AMOdd that they can't win any elections then.
Posted by: oj at February 23, 2008 7:46 AMEasy to find, just false.
Posted by: oj at February 23, 2008 7:52 AMOrrin, let's talk again when Obama has obliterated McCain.
Posted by: Peter at February 23, 2008 8:00 AMNote that he and she are running as conservatives, not Leftists.
Posted by: oj at February 23, 2008 8:29 AM1938: Leftism is the best way to create massive smoke-spewing factories everywhere.
1978: Capitalism turns out to be the best way to create massive smoke-spewing factories everywhere.
1988: Leftism is the best way to prevent massive smoke-spewing factories everywhere.
2008 All the smoke spewing factories are clustered in the remnants of the Communist empire.
Posted by: erp at February 23, 2008 10:21 AM2038 Capitalism turns out to be the best way to prevent massive smoke-spewing factories, but only after reversing a two decade long detour into Green-land.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at February 23, 2008 2:03 PM"Note that he and she are running as conservatives, not Leftists."
Eh? The candidate whose campaign is defined by the (maddeningly vague) mantra of "CHANGE" is a conservative?
There are no conservatives running in this presidential election.
Peter:
Obama couldn't beat Romney, much less McCain.
Posted by: ratbert at February 24, 2008 12:55 AMThere is no policy he proposes changing. Indeed, he'd turn back the clock on the Third Way changes W has already made or proposed. The Left is reactionary these days.
Posted by: oj at February 24, 2008 8:02 AM"There is no policy he proposes changing."
That's all fine and well. But he's running as the candidate of "change." He has made it the overwhelmingly dominant theme of his campaign. Thus he is not "running as a conservative," which was the assertion to which I was responding.
Unless "conservative" no longer means all that standing-athwart-history-yelling-stop stuff.
Posted by: Tom at February 24, 2008 2:30 PMNo, he's running as the change. He's not running on changing any policy.
Posted by: oj at February 24, 2008 7:08 PM