Here’s something that took me completely by surprise. In the most recent edition of The Nation, columnist Alexander Cockburn did a left wing smack down of Gore and the entire Global Warming solutions and carbon business model.
The article, titled “Who Are the Merchants of Fear?” Lobs some heavy artillery in the direction of the Goreacle. Here’s a few excerpts:
“These are multibillion-dollar computer modeling bureaucracies as intent on self-preservation and budgetary enhancement as cognate nuclear bureaucracies at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. They are as unlikely to develop models refuting the hypothesis of human-induced global warming as is the IPCC to say the weather is getting a little bit warmer but there’s no great cause for alarm. Threat inflation is their business.”
And about Gore:
“The world’s best-known hysteric and self-promoter on the topic of man’s physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear and coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge National Lab. […] As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years, Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump budgets and rouse voters.”
And this quote:
“…Richard Kerr, Science’s man on global warming, remarked, “Climate modelers have been ‘cheating’ for so long it’s almost become respectable.”
For those of you that don’t know this journal, The Nation is quite to the left. For example, on their main page today, you can find a web poll on “Who most deserves to be impeached?” (Bush Cheney, or Gonzales)
When such a clearly left and prominent journal starts taking shots at Gore, the IPCC, and climate modelers like James Hansen as the article written by Cockburn does, you have to wonder if the whole house of cards isn’t about to start falling down.
Wow.
The Nation is and has always been little more than a vacuous, nasty slur machine propped up by members of the eastern “liberal” media elite, the more illustrious of which sit on the directors board. I could be wrong but I don’t believe The Nation has ever turned a profit and exists solely on the munificence of its left wing benefactors.
That said, sometimes even a blind squirrel occasionally gets a nut. Rats slamming a big rat, it doesn’t get any better than this. But to equate the intense, self preservation junk science of the Global Warming crowd to the brain trusts of our National Laboratories is a despicable, undeserved and twisted hyperbole. As such The Nation implies that Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and by implication any National Laboratory would commit scientific fraud to further their own funding interests. Nothing could be further from the truth and to say such is an enormous and vile slur typical of The Nation’s output.
As the evidence for CO2 warming declines and solar solutions gain more credibility, more scientist who once supported AGW, are now becoming skeptics. Here is a list who have changes their minds as the evidence grows: http://tinyurl.com/2dc9ea
I give zero weight to The Nation in general and Alexander Cockburn in particular. (Cockburn once published an admiring memoir about the time his father faked a whole battle during the Spanish Civil War so that the commies could win one — the Fascists were winning all the real battles.)
However, David Walton’s observation re: “blind squirrels,” applies here. In case you were wondering whether Cockburn is being unfair to global warming modelers, take a look at this paper: http://www.jamstec.go.jp/frcgc/research/d5/jdannan/GRL_sensitivity.pdf
“A subjective estimate that climate sensitivity (defined as the globally-averaged equilibrium temperature change in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2) is likely to lie in the range of 1.5–4.5C was originally proposed in 1979 [NAS, 1979], and this estimate has essentially remained unchallenged ever since [eg Houghton et al., 2001].”
So in 2007, we are still working with a *subjective* estimate from 1979, calculated using computers with less number crunching power than your cellphone.
Well, if all you had to do was say “1.5 to 4.5,” and people threw more money at you every year, would you change? Could you change?
And the paper quoted above? “1.7 to 4.9” (95% confidence). That’s… not really any improvement.
[NAS (1979), Carbon Dioxide and Climate: A Scientific Assessment, Washington D.C.]
[Houghton 2001 is the IPCC Third Assessment Report WG1]