Another nail in Cockburn's credibility: Didn't believe in global warming

[HamdenRice]

Here is an interesting find from the site that shall not be named. Do you really think Cockburn has a capacity to fit facts to political, economic or ecological theory? Considering how long ago Al Gore became convinced that the evidece of global warming was convincing, how much can you trust the judgment of Cockburn who wrote this just five years ago?

From "The Nation"
August 23, 2001 (September 3, 2001 issue)

http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20010903&s=cockburn

Hot Air Is Bad for Us
Alexander Cockburn

The current uproar over the posture of the Bush Administration on global warming and, most recently, on power-plant emissions vividly illustrates the political hypocrisy and opportunism imbuing debates on environmental issues. Take first global warming. The charge that the current phase of global warming can be attributed to greenhouse gases generated by humans and their livestock is an article of faith among liberals as sturdy as is missile defense among the conservative crowd. The Democrats have seized on the issue of global warming as indicative of President Bush's willful refusal to confront a global crisis that properly agitates all of America's major allies. Almost daily, the major green groups reap rich political capital (and donations) on the issue.

Yet the so-called anthropogenic origin of global warming remains entirely nonproven. Back in the spring of this year, even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which now has a huge stake in arguing the "caused by humans" thesis, admitted in its summary that there could be a one-in-three chance its multitude of experts are wrong. A subsequent report, issued under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences, is ambivalent to the point of absurdity. An initial paragraph boldly asserting the caused-by-humans line is confounded a few pages later by far more cautious paragraphs admitting that the thesis is speculative and that major uncertainty rules on the role played in climate equations by water vapor and aerosols.

[LARED]

1. Just for you Hamden

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4480559399263937213&q=penn+and+teller

[Bolo Boffin]

4. Pleasantly surprised.

Dang that dihydrogen monoxide. Where can I sign up?

[mirandapriestly]

2. Good find!

I think, as someone else posted, he is afraid of not getting mainstream approval so he won't take any position that might get him labeled as "kook". But whenever there is a campaign to discredit those who take stands as there once was with global warming, you usually have the only things that really matter at all.

[John Q. Citizen]

3. That is interesting, HamdenRice. Sort of a big oil take on things...