Burn the Heretics!

To burn or not to burn. That is the question before the orthodoxy. Take Alex Cockburn. A prominent leftist intellectual, enemy of corporations and right-wing ideologues everywhere. But Cockburn has committed an unpardonable sin--he wants a real climate debate.

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....There have been similar warming cycles in the past, such as the medieval warming 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 man-made, 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. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice. ____Spiked

Of course, Cockburn understands the left better than anyone outside the movement possibly could. He lives, eats, breathes, and drinks leftist thought. Unfortunately, it is not only the left that has fallen for the politically driven cant of catastrophe.

For his sins of revealing the obvious, Cockburn is condemned to the stake by his erstwhile friends and colleagues. Ironic, that one who has devoted his life to a more rational left should be one of the first to be reviled by the irrationalist turnings of the new left.

But that is how the new orthodoxy works. Burn the heretics! Then hang them. Then off with their heads! You know how it goes . . .



H/T Lubos