I've had my issues with Counterpunch.org's allegedly progressive pundit Alexander Cockburn over the years, but I think he's finally completely jumped the shark. Talk about strange bedfellows, he's flung himself wholeheartedly into the arms of the global warming deniers.
Follow below the fold for the gory details and some responses:
Last weekend, Cockburn penned this screed against the theory of anthropogenic global warming.
He leads off with an evocative but fact-free analogy between the modern idea of carbon credits and the tenth century sale of Papal indulgences for absolution from sin. This falls flat in two respects: First none of the many climate scientists I've known through the years views carbon consumption as "sin" but rather as a practical, real-world problem to be solved. Second, Papal indulgences made no claim of having any physical effect - the result was purely spiritual whereas carbon credits, properly structured, have a very clear physical effect in reducing overall carbon emissions.
But from there on he leaves the precipice of the merely fact-free and plunges into the abyss of the absurd and totally false:
The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. 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.
This is the old "models cannot reproduce everything perfectly and therefore they are of no value" fallacy. In fact, enormous effort goes into verifying the performance of models by running them on past conditions and verifying the results relative to what really happened. Modern general circulation models (GCMs) perform very well in these verifications. And while it's true that 15 years ago or more the GCMs were "crudely oversimplified" that's not at all the case any more.
Furthermore, it's simply false to claim that there's "zero empirical evidence" of mankind's contribution to warming. The function of greenhouse gasses in affecting the radiative balance of planets is very well established physics. We understand it both on a molecular level and the macro level. The heat budgets of not only Earth but many other planets like Venus and Mars simply cannot be explained without invoking this effect. And that the observed increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is due to human activity is incontrovertibly demonstrated by isotopic analysis.
Then he launches into a comparison of the carbon emissions due to human activity (which he correctly points out dipped considerably during the great depression) and the total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which has been increasing for over a century. He concludes that:
The two lines on that graph proclaim that a whopping 30 per cent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn't even cause a 1 ppm drop in the atmosphere's CO2. Thus it is impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from human burning of fossil fuels.
What this ignores is that the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere is on the order of centuries and also that while human production declined during the depression, it did not cease. There is absolutely no reason to expect that a reduction in output like that which occurred during the depression would cause a drop in atmospheric CO2. What one woud expect is that the second derivative of the atmospheric CO2 curve would go negative for that period of decline, as indeed it did.
He then trots out a series of discredited denialist arguments: the urban heat island effect, the water vapor is a much bigger greenhouse gas nonsense (again ignoring the lifetime of these gasses in the atmosphere, ) etc.
He claims:
It's a notorious inconvenience for the Greenhousers that data also show carbon dioxide concentrations from the Eocene period, 20 million years before Henry Ford trundled his first model T out of the shop, 300-400 per cent higher than current concentrations.
Of course it's not an "inconvenience" at all, let alone a notorious one except in the addled minds of climate deniers. Nobody claims that there isn't a CO2 feedback - and the Eocene was much warmer than today for a very long time. Such extended warmth leads to outgassing from the oceans which can raise atmospheric CO2 far higher than present-day values. Indeed that feedback, along with the water vapor feedback plays a big role in the modelling of our present and future climate.
This leads us to the current favorite silly argument among deniers: the paloclimate record shows an approximately 800 year lag of CO2 relative to temperature and therefor today's CO2 increase can't be leading temperature:
Water covers 71 per cent of the surface of the planet. As compared to the atmosphere, there's at least a hundred times more CO2 in the oceans, dissolved as carbonate. As the postglacial thaw progresses the oceans warm up, and some of the dissolved carbon emits into the atmosphere, just like fizz in soda water taken out of the fridge. "So the greenhouse global warming theory has it ass backwards," Hertzberg concludes. "It is the warming of the earth that is causing the increase of carbon dioxide and not the reverse." He has recently had vivid confirmation of that conclusion. Several new papers show that for the last three quarter million years CO2 changes always lag global temperatures by 800 to 2,600 years.
This argument is so illogical it's hard to know where to begin ...
Yes, in the past temperature did lead atmospheric CO2. That's because the primary forcing in past warming phases was changes in the Earth's orbit. As deniers love to point out, there were no SUVs to pump carbon into the atmosphere back then. But so what? The fact is we are pumping carbon into the atmosphere today. So why would anyone expect CO2 to lag temperature now, given this entirely novel forcing? What the paleo record tells us, however, is that as the Earth warms in response to anthropogenic forcing, there will be feedbacks which amplify this effect.
Anyway, I hope anyone here who considers using Counterpunch.org as an authoritative source for any story reconsider that in light of this demonstration of Cockburn's complete lack of critical thinking ability.
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