Strange Bedfellows

You know the climate change deniers have officially joined the Flat Earth society when their major spokesperson publishes his work in Lyndon LaRouche's conspiratorial publication; Executive Intelligence (sic) Review.

Yep that puts them squarely in the camp of conspiracy nutbars and folks who believe that humans lived with dinosaurs.

Of course LaRouche and his followers are the original climate change deniers, who have spent the past thirty years promoting nuclear power.

Of course it is all about the company you keep. And it seems that when it comes to Climate Change there are those on the American left who also embrace the flat earth ideal.

Alex Cockburn for instance, who in keeping up with his fellow ex-Trotskyist, ex-Brit compatriot and former Nation fellow writer; Christopher Hitchens, has decided to be a contrarian.

“Peer Review” and Global Warming

There were yelps of alarm and the rustle of skirts being hoist knee-high after I published a note on sources in my column last week, Dissidents against Dogma. The panic was caused by one of the references to the work of Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski who, as I wrote, has written devastating onslaughts on the IPCC rallying cry that CO2 is higher now than it has ever been over the past 650,000 years. Jaworowski has pointed out the enormous inaccuracies in the ice-core data and the ease with which a CO2 reading from any given year is contaminated by the CO2 from entirely different eras. He also points out that from 1985 on there’s been some highly suspect editing of the CO2 data, presumably to reinforce the case for the “unprecedented levels” of modern CO2. I offered a couple of references to Jaworowski, one of them to an essay, "Ice Core Data Show No Carbon Dioxide Increase", published in 21st Century Science & Technology, Spring 1997.

It turns out that this is a publication put out by the LaRouche crowd. Next thing you know, poor Jaworowski was being accused oif being a neo-Nazi cultist, with kindred vitriol hurled at CounterPunch co-editor Cockburn.

Of course this makes sense since LaRouche is also an ex-Trotskyist. Heck isn't everybody who makes up the American neo-con right.

The problem with Hitchens and Cockburn is that they could have posed a libertarian alternative to the war in Iraq (which Hitchens supported) or to Kyoto and the capitalist crisis of the environment, which Cockburn denies. But they didn't. Instead they have like their former Trotskyist predecessors, embraced the neo-con right. Just as some of those in the so called Libertarian movement in the U.S. have over the issue of climate change.

Take Lew Rockwell, for instance. He is incredibly insightful when discussing the over bearing power of the state to make war, or the intrusion of the state into our lives. But he happily links to articles such as this one by Alexander Cockburn at Counterpunch, regurgitates the most of the so-called scientific evidence against global warming, every single bit of which has been debunked and refuted before.

It is clear from the preponderance of evidence, from the vast majority of climate scientists (a number that is growing, not shrinking) that global warming is really happening and is caused by human activity. Why, then do libertarians and anarchists refuse to accept it?

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
Fraser Institute, climate change, environment, global warming,
Kyoto, UN, IPCC,
John Birch Society, Creationism, nuclear power, flat earth, Lyndon LaRouche, right wing, conspiracy, conspiracy theory, climage change denial,