Following the death of Alexander Cockburn, Spiked-Online.com republish his spiked piece on what happens to leftists who challenge climate-change alarmism:
‘I have committed intellectual blasphemy’ – Alexander Cockburn on ‘Climate Change’
The Irish-raised, America-based rabble-rousing journalist Alexander Cockburn, a columnist for The Nation and co-editor of Counterpunch, has died at the age of 71. In tribute, spiked republishes this piece on climate-change catastrophism that he contributed in 2008.
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 Warm 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 manmade, 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…
