R.I.P. Alexander Cockburn, 1941-2012
great articles below by a outspoken liberal who knew that the proponents of Anthropogenic Global Warming were deceitful.
Marc Marano, Willie Soon, and others noted the passing over the weekend of Alexander Cockburn, at the age of 71. A farewell letter from Cockburn’s long-time friend and collaborator, Jeffrey St. Clair, appears at the bottom of this email message.
Cockburn was that rarest of creatures, a liberal skeptic of man-made global warming. Even though he understand that much of the liberal policy agenda could be rationalized in the name of “stopping global warming,” he knew anthropogenic global warming was a scientific fraud and that pretending otherwise would hurt rather than advance the left’s cause.
He attended one of our International Conferences on Climate Change (ICCCs) in New York – either 2008 or 2009 — and was a joy to talk to, as interested in what others had to say as he was in sharing his own very well-informed views. I maintained a correspondence with him up to just a few months ago. He said he was considering writing about the Peter Gleick affair, which illustrated so well the hypocrisy and moral corruption of the left that he so often wrote about.
Some of his excellent writing on climate change can be found on PolicyBot, Heartland’s online database and search engine:
Feb 2, 2010
Copenhagen Summit was Based on Deceit
Alexander Cockburn
The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was an outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing. Shortly before the Copenhagen summit, the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the Web more than a thousand emails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia …
Jun 8, 2007
Alexander Cockburn
We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. The claque endorsing what is now dignified as ” the mainstream theory” of global warming stretches all the way from radical greens through Al Gore to George W. Bush, who signed on at the end of May. The left has been swept along, entranced …
May 26, 2007
Alexander Cockburn
I began this series of critiques of the greenhouse fearmongers with an evocation of the papal indulgences of the Middle Ages as precursors of the ” carbon credits” -ready relief for carbon sinners, burdened, because all humans exhale carbon, with original sin. In the Middle Ages they burned heretics, and after reading through …
May 18, 2007
Who Are The Merchants of Fear?
Alexander Cockburn
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. A second, equally predictable retort contrasts the ever-diminishing number of agnostics to the legions of scientists now born again to the truth that anthropogenic …
May 12, 2007
Alexander Cockburn
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. A second, equally predictable retort contrasts the ever-diminishing number of agnostics to the growing legions of scientists now born again to the ” truth” that anthropogenic …
Apr 28, 2007
From Papal Indulgences to Carbon Credits
Alexander Cockburn
In a couple of hundred years, historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then, as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet’s rapid downward …
Here’s an excerpt from the April 28, 2007 essay:
In a couple of hundred years, historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then, as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet’s rapid downward slide.
Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church was a bank whose capital was secured by the infinite mercy of Christ, Mary and the Saints, and so the Pope could sell indulgences, like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in “carbon credits” is in formation. Those whose “carbon footprint” is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others, less virtuous than themselves.
The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely oversimplified computer models to finger mankind’s sinful contribution. Devoid of any sustaining scientific basis, carbon trafficking is powered by guilt, credulity, cynicism and greed, just like the old indulgences, though at least the latter produced beautiful monuments. By the sixteenth century, long after the world had sailed safely through the end of the first millennium, Pope Leo X financed the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica by offering a “plenary” indulgence, guaranteed to release a soul from purgatory.
Right on, Alex! The collective IQ of the left has just fallen two points. Where will we find another liberal willing to be so brave and outspoken?
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