i think the core of cockburn's reasoning is contained in his conclusion: "The logic of the caused-by-humans models installs the coal industry as the savior of 'global warming'? You want to live by a model that does that?"
the real reason to accept essenhigh's argument, then, is not that his science is somehow more conclusive, but that the political consequences of rejecting him put coal in the driver's seat. now, there are several obvious problems with this: (a) what about nuclear? (b) why does a belief in the necessity to *do* something about global warming have to result in such stark, obvious, simplistic, if-not-oil-then-coal-or-nuclear choices, the kinds of choices we would not allow to be foisted on us in other similar kind of cases? and (c) here is precisely politics masquerading as science, which is what cockburn is ostensibly exposing.
in the end, my impression (also from reading another cockburn piece on this) is that cockburn tellingly still feels the need to qualify essenhigh's science. he's taking the *possibility* that global warming is essentially and permanently unaffected by human activity ("it's arguable" he says in the other piece) as license to see "global warming" as nothing more than a chink in oil's political armor that would allow coal or even nuclear to slip back in. this view of the situation seems to me steeped in the politics of the first half of W's administration and not really to address the long view.
j
> From: "Lawrence" <lawrence at krubner.com>
> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 01:20:35 -0700
> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
> Subject: Re: global warming as political science
>
> From: "Brad DeLong" <jbdelong at uclink.berkeley.edu>
>> So what does Cockburn think is "not proven"?
>> --That human activity is dumping a lot of CO2 and CH4 and other
>> things into the atmosphere?
>> --That over the next century human activity is going to dump a lot
>> more CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere?
>> --That human activity-produced CO2 and CH4--like other CO2 and CH4
>> molecules--in the atmosphere trap heat?
>> What remains to be proven?
>
> What remains to be proven is whether the human race produces enough green
> house gases to have any influence on the global tempature, and if it does,
> does nature have no compensating factors that might take that excess green
> house gas back out of the air.
>
> The last ice age ended around 10,000 BC. Since then the Earth has warmned.
> Antartica started melting around 7,000 BC. The Earth remains much colder
> than it was during the age of dinosaurs; at the end of the Mesozoic there
> were no ice caps at the poles. The warming part isn't the part that's in
> doubt. What's in doubt is whether humans have, since 1850, added anything to
> overall warmning trend.
>
> This is how they put it at climatesolutions.org (and they very much believe
> that humans add to global warming, but they admit the evidence is
> suggestive, not conclusive):
>
> " In 1990, over 2,000 of the world's top climate scientists working under
> the auspices of the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on
> Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that the surface of the Earth had warmed
> over the last century. The evidence was not clear enough, however, to
> conclude that this global warming was human-caused and not natural in
> origin. The evidence for a human role grew stronger in the next five years,
> and in 1995 the IPCC issued its second state-of-the-science report5, adopted
> by 157 national governments. It concluded that, "The balance of evidence
> suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This is one
> reason why Dr. Jane Lubchenco, past president of the American Academy for
> the Advancement of Science, says, "In the last few decades, humans have
> become a force of nature." "
> http://climatesolutions.org/global_warming_is_here/index.html#sure
>
> Scientific American also has a good article up on the web, which also uses
> the conditional when stating that humans may influence the climate.
> http://www.sciam.com/0597issue/0597karl.html
> and linked from that article:
> http://www.gcrio.org/gwcc/part1.html
>
> All these article are in favor of the idea that human behavior is effecting
> the planet's tempature. But they admit there is room for doubt. If you want
> to read that case against human's having an effect,
> there is this up over at the Cato Institute:
> http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg15n2g.html
> by Richard S. Lindzen of MIT.
>
>
>
>
>
> --lk
>
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>
>
>
> -- krubner
> -- helping web designers program
> -- http://www.krubner.com/
> -- netscape im screenname: lkrubner
>
>
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>