Alexander Cockburn: CO2 debunker

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Alexander Cockburn's been, in the past, harmlessly, if not effervescently, off base about the blogs:
In political terms the blogosphere is like white noise, insistent and meaningless, like the wash of Pacific surf I can hear most days. But MoveOn.Org and Daily Kos have been hailed as the emergent form of modern politics, the target of excited articles in the New York Review of Books.

Beyond raising money swiftly handed over to the gratified veterans of the election industry both MoveOn and Daily Kos have had zero political effect, except as a demobilizing force. [...] They glance at the New York Times and rush to their laptops to rewrite what they just read. Hawsers to reality soon fray and they float off, drifting zeppelins of inanity.

But lately, Monsieur Cockburn has been much less harmlessly off-base on CO2 emissions and Global Warming. With this:

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...

And this:
Man-made global warming theory is fed by pseudo quantitative predictions from climate-careerists working primarily off the big, mega-computer General Circulation Models which include the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the Department of Commerce's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab...

These are multi-billion dollar computer model programming bureaucracies as intent on self-preservation and budgetary enhancement as cognate nuclear bureaucracies at Oakridge and Los Alamos.

Alexander Cockburn reports that he met the man who persuaded him to become a CO2 "debunker," Dr. Martin Hertzberg, (presumably the same man linked above as an "internationally recognized expert on combustion, flames and explosions") on a Nation-magazine sponsored cruise. From the rhetoric displayed above, that sounds about right: Hertzberg and Cockburn saving mankind from the delusional work of legions of greedy career scientists while taking in some tropical sun.

That's a scene worthy of Graham Greene. This zeppelin of inanity prefers to stick with the scientists.

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