LeftWing Nation Mag. Exposes A.Global Warming

[White_Male_Canada]

Who Are the Merchants of Fear?

No response is more predictable than the reflexive squawk of the greenhouse fearmongers that anyone questioning their claims is in the pay of the energy companies. A second, equally predictable retort contrasts the ever-diminishing number of agnostics with the growing legions of scientists now born again to the "truth" that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the earth's warming trend.

Actually, the energy companies have long since adapted to prevailing fantasies, dutifully reciting the whole catechism about carbon neutrality, repositioning themselves as eager pioneers in the search for alternative fuels, settling comfortably into new homes, such as British Petroleum's Energy Biosciences Institute at UC, Berkeley.

In fact, when it comes to corporate sponsorship of crackpot theories about why the world is getting warmer, the best documented conspiracy of interest is between the fearmongers and the nuclear industry, now largely owned by oil companies, whose prospects twenty years ago looked dark. The apex fearmongers are well aware that the only exit from the imaginary crisis they have been sponsoring is through a big door marked "nuclear power," with a servants' side door labeled "clean coal."

The world's best-known hysteric and self-promoter on the topic of man's physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear and coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge National Lab. White House advisory bodies on climate change in the Clinton/Gore years were well freighted with nukers like Larry Papay of Bechtel.

As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years, Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump budgets and rouse voters. By the mid-'90s he'd positioned himself at the head of a strategic alliance formed around "the challenge of climate change," which stepped forward to take Communism's place in the threatosphere essential to political life.

The foot soldiers in this alliance have been the grant-guzzling climate modelers and their Internationale, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose collective scientific expertise is reverently invoked by devotees of the fearmongers' catechism. The IPCC has the usual army of functionaries and grant farmers and the merest sprinkling of actual scientists with the prime qualification of being climatologists or atmospheric physicists.

To identify either government-funded climate modelers or their political shock troops at the IPCC with scientific objectivity is as unrealistic as detecting the same in a craniologist financed by Lombroso studying a murderer's head in a nineteenth-century prison. The craniologist's calipers were adjusted by the usual incentives of stipends and professional ego to find in the skull of that murderer ridges, bumps and depressions, each meticulously equated with an ungovernable passion or a mental derangement.

At least Lombroso and his retinue measured heads. All Al Gore has ever needed is a hot day or some heavy rain as opportunity to promote the unassailable theory of man-made global warming. Come a rainy summer (1995) or a routine El Niño (1997) and Gore is there for the photo op, his uplifted finger warning of worse to come.

Man-made-global-warming theory is fed by pseudo-quantitative predictions from climate careerists working primarily off the megacomputer General Circulation Models, whose home ports include the National Center for Atmospheric Research, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Department of Commerce's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab.

These are multibillion-dollar computer modeling bureaucracies as intent on self-preservation and budgetary enhancement as cognate nuclear bureaucracies at Oak Ridge and Los Alamos. They are as unlikely to develop models refuting the hypothesis of human-induced global warming as is the IPCC to say the weather is getting a little bit warmer but there's no great cause for alarm. Threat inflation is their business. Think of the culture that engendered the nonexistent missile gap of the late 1950s and you'll get some sense of the political, economic and bureaucratic forces at work today stoking panic at the specter of man-made global warming and the nuclear plants needed to fight it.

By the late 1980s the UN high brass clearly perceived the "challenge" of climate change to be the horse to ride to build up the organization's increasingly threadbare moral authority and to claim a role beyond that of being an obvious American errand boy. In 1988 it gave us the IPCC.

The cycle of alarmist predictions is now well established. Not long before some new UN moot, a prominent fearmonger like James Hansen or Michael Mann will make a tremulous statement about the accelerating tempo of the warming crisis. The cry is taken up by the IPCC and headlined by the New York Times, with exactly the same lack of critical evaluation as that newspaper's recycling of the government's lies about Saddam's WMDs.

When measured reality doesn't cooperate with the lurid model predictions, new compensating factors are "discovered," such as the sulfate aerosols popular in the 1990s, recruited to cool off the obviously excessive heat predicted by the models. Or inconvenient data are waterboarded into submission, as happened with ice-core samples that failed to confirm the modelers' need for record temperatures today. As Richard Kerr, Science's man on global warming, remarked, "Climate modelers have been 'cheating' for so long it's almost become respectable."

The consequence? As with the arms-spending spiral powered by the cold war fearmongers, vast sums of money will be uselessly spent on programs that won't work against an enemy that doesn't exist. Meanwhile, real and curbable environmental perils are scanted. Hysteria rules the day, drowning useful initiatives such as environmental cleanup, while smoothing the way for the nuclear industry to reap its global rewards.


http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20070528&s=cockburn

[specialk]

:P :P

[White_Male_Canada]

This leftist discards an avatar of himself in shame,

gets himself intellectually disarmed, now, being helpless,

desperately hurls the retort of a typical demagogue.

[specialk]

Lemme give it to you plainly ButtBoy :P :P

[White_Male_Canada]

. .

[guyone]

LOL! Excellent!

[trish]

The High Performance Computing and Communication Act of 1991 (HPCA) was a bill created and introduced by then Senator Al Gore (it was thus referred to as the Gore Bill [1]). It was passed on December 9, 1991.

This bill led to the development of the National Information Infrastructure, the National Research and Education Network, the High-Performance Computing and Communications Initiative (an off-shoot of the HPCA),

[guyone]

What does that have to do with his claim of creating the internet?

[trish]

connect the dots. you can do that...connect the dots, i mean...can't you?

[guyone]

Er...

The first recorded description of the social interactions that could be enabled through networking was a series of memos written by J.C.R. Licklider of MIT in August 1962 discussing his "Galactic Network" concept. He envisioned a globally inter-connected set of computers through which everyone could quickly access data and programs from any site. In spirit, the concept was very much like the Internet of today. Licklider was the first head of the computer research program at DARPA, starting in October 1962. While at DARPA he convinced his successors at DARPA, Ivan Sutherland, Bob Taylor, and MIT researcher Lawrence G. Roberts, of the importance of this networking concept.

In late 1966 Roberts went to DARPA to develop the computer network concept and quickly put together his plan for the "ARPANET", publishing it in 1967. At the conference where he presented the paper, there was also a paper on a packet network concept from the UK by Donald Davies and Roger Scantlebury of NPL. Scantlebury told Roberts about the NPL work as well as that of Paul Baran and others at RAND. The RAND group had written a paper on packet switching networks for secure voice in the military in 1964. It happened that the work at MIT (1961-1967), at RAND (1962-1965), and at NPL (1964-1967) had all proceeded in parallel without any of the researchers knowing about the other work. The word "packet" was adopted from the work at NPL and the proposed line speed to be used in the ARPANET design was upgraded from 2.4 kbps to 50 kbps.

In August 1968, after Roberts and the DARPA funded community had refined the overall structure and specifications for the ARPANET, an RFQ was released by DARPA for the development of one of the key components, the packet switches called Interface Message Processors (IMP's). The RFQ was won in December 1968 by a group headed by Frank Heart at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN). As the BBN team worked on the IMP's with Bob Kahn playing a major role in the overall ARPANET architectural design, the network topology and economics were designed and optimized by Roberts working with Howard Frank and his team at Network Analysis Corporation, and the network measurement system was prepared by Kleinrock's team at UCLA.

Due to Kleinrock's early development of packet switching theory and his focus on analysis, design and measurement, his Network Measurement Center at UCLA was selected to be the first node on the ARPANET. All this came together in September 1969 when BBN installed the first IMP at UCLA and the first host computer was connected. Doug Engelbart's project on "Augmentation of Human Intellect" (which included NLS, an early hypertext system) at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) provided a second node. SRI supported the Network Information Center, led by Elizabeth (Jake) Feinler and including functions such as maintaining tables of host name to address mapping as well as a directory of the RFC's. One month later, when SRI was connected to the ARPANET, the first host-to-host message was sent from Kleinrock's laboratory to SRI. Two more nodes were added at UC Santa Barbara and University of Utah. These last two nodes incorporated application visualization projects, with Glen Culler and Burton Fried at UCSB investigating methods for display of mathematical functions using storage displays to deal with the problem of refresh over the net, and Robert Taylor and Ivan Sutherland at Utah investigating methods of 3-D representations over the net. Thus, by the end of 1969, four host computers were connected together into the initial ARPANET, and the budding Internet was off the ground. Even at this early stage, it should be noted that the networking research incorporated both work on the underlying network and work on how to utilize the network. This tradition continues to this day.

Computers were added quickly to the ARPANET during the following years, and work proceeded on completing a functionally complete Host-to-Host protocol and other network software. In December 1970 the Network Working Group (NWG) working under S. Crocker finished the initial ARPANET Host-to-Host protocol, called the Network Control Protocol (NCP). As the ARPANET sites completed implementing NCP during the period 1971-1972, the network users finally could begin to develop applications.

In October 1972 Kahn organized a large, very successful demonstration of the ARPANET at the International Computer Communication Conference (ICCC). This was the first public demonstration of this new network technology to the public. It was also in 1972 that the initial "hot" application, electronic mail, was introduced. In March Ray Tomlinson at BBN wrote the basic email message send and read software, motivated by the need of the ARPANET developers for an easy coordination mechanism. In July, Roberts expanded its utility by writing the first email utility program to list, selectively read, file, forward, and respond to messages. From there email took off as the largest network application for over a decade. This was a harbinger of the kind of activity we see on the World Wide Web today, namely, the enormous growth of all kinds of "people-to-people" traffic.

YOU CAN SPIN IT ANY WAY YOU WANT, BUT HE HAD NOTHING, NOTHING TO DO WITH INVENTING THE INTERNET.

I will give him credit though for inventing 'Global Warming'.

[trish]

okay, i see you're incapable of connecting the dots. there, there...no need to be upset about it, i'm sure there's still plenty of other things you can do.

[White_Male_Canada]

okay, i see you're incapable of connecting the dots. there, there...no need to be upset about it, i'm sure there's still plenty of other things you can do.

Let`s all carefully read algore`s words:

"During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet"

Gore replied when asked to cite accomplishments that separate him from another Democratic presidential hopeful, former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, during an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN on March 9, 1999.

(Sources: Transcript http://www.wired.com/news/news/politics/story/18390.html )

To attempt to state that one took the INITIATIVE to CREATE the interent is blatantly false considering that the internet was already created and in USE when he was elected to Congress. One could simply have not taken the intiative to create something that already existed.

Gore was just 21 years old when the Defense Department commissioned the original ARPANET in 1969. Email was in use and the net was developing without gore using JARGON.

Algore has always exaggerated and one could site statement after statement up to his biggest hoax, AGW.

[tsmandy]

Generally I think Cockburn is dead on, but maybe he's been sampling the local crop a bit much down in the Mittol. Still I agree with him 100% that Al Gore is a fraud and a political opportunist of the worst stripe.

Here is a response to his most recent article written by George Monbiot a British journalist and media critic.

----------------------------------

People who deny that manmade climate change is taking place have this in common: they do not answer their critics. They make what they say are definitive refutations of the science of climate change. When these refutations are shown to be nonsense, they do not seek to defend them. They simply repeat them as if nothing has changed, then move on to another line of attack.

What else can they do? If they have no understanding of science and no means of supporting their claims, they must seek to distract their critics with a barrage of new allegations. It doesn't matter where they might be placed on the political spectrum - whether like James Inhofe and Joe Barton they come from the hard right or, like Alexander Cockburn, they come from the left. The tactic is always the same: never apologise, never explain. Just raise the volume, keep moving, and hope that people won't notice the trail of broken claims in your wake.

Two weeks ago Alexander Cockburn maintained, in an article written for The Nation and reproduced on Counterpunch and Znet, that "there is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend." He claimed to have demonstrated a disjunction between the carbon dioxide emissions produced by human activity and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, which made it "impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from human burning of fossil fuels."

His source for these extraordinary claims was a man he met "on a Nation cruise back in 2001", whose qualification, apparently trumping the tens of thousands of years of collective experience of the world's climate scientists, was that he had once trained as a meteorologist. Cockburn provided no references for the "papers" he said this man had written: we simply had to take his word for it.

On the website realclimate.org, the eminent climate scientist Michael Mann quietly demolished Cockburn's claims. It wasn't hard to do: he had made a concatenation of basic scientific mistakes, and appeared to be unaware that there is, indeed, empirical evidence that anthropogenic CO2 has contributed to the world's present warming trend, and that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from human burning of fossil fuels (see http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/this-week/).

Two days ago, Cockburn responded. Or didn't respond. In a new article for The Nation, he repeated his assertion that "there is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend." He provided neither new evidence to support it, nor a refutation of the evidence which contradicts it. He must be aware of Michael Mann's critique - how, after the correspondence he has received on this issue, could he fail to be? Indeed, for the first time in his writing, Cockburn mentions Mann by name.

But rather than responding to Mann's arguments, he simply accuses him and James Hansen, the head of space studies at NASA, of being "fearmongers". This is an unfortunate choice of targets: both men have been subject to Congressional questioning which could fairly be described as McCarthyite. They have been attacked by people with whom Cockburn should blush to be associated. Not only did they survive this ordeal of fire; they walked out triumphant. Unlike Cockburn, they have answered their critics and seen them off. Their work has been vindicated by dozens of further studies.

But he must keep moving, firing his Parthian shots as he goes. Concern about global warming is a "conspiracy of interest between the Greenhouser fearmongers and the nuclear industry". The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is an "army of functionaries and grant farmers, and the merest sprinkling of actual scientists", whose science is less reliable than Lombroso's craniology. Don't stop. Don't look back. Don't let your opponents draw breath.

It is racy and entertaining, but it is pure distraction. Cockburn continues to rely on an argument which he cannot defend. At what point will he acknowledge this? At what point will he answer his critics? At what point will he stop making claims which he knows are false?

Though I am not a climate scientist, I too presented him with a challenge last week. It should have been much easier to answer than Mann's challenge: provide your references. Cockburn claims to have based his argument on "papers" produced by the man he met on the Nation cruise. If he has any knowledge of science - I mean any knowledge whatsoever - he must know that a scientific claim carries no weight unless it has been published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Publication does not mean it is correct, but it does mean it is worth debating. Where were these "papers" published?

Scientists in the United Kingdom sometimes satirise people who claim to know more about their own subjects than they do by imagining how they would respond if asked to provide their references. "Man I Met in a Bar, A. 2006. Why I am Right and Everyone Else is Wrong. Proceedings of the Inebriate Society, Vol 9991524, no4." So far, Alexander Cockburn's references amount to "Man I Met on a Ship, A. 2001." If he has better sources than that, why won't he reveal them?

I repeat my challenge. Provide your references, or admit that your argument has no merit.

www.monbiot.com

[White_Male_Canada]

Generally I think Cockburn is dead on, but maybe he's been sampling the local crop a bit much down in the Mittol. Still I agree with him 100% that Al Gore is a fraud and a political opportunist of the worst stripe.

Here is a response to his most recent article written by George Monbiot a British journalist and media critic.

----------------------------------



Two weeks ago Alexander Cockburn maintained, in an article written for The Nation and reproduced on Counterpunch and Znet, that "there is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend." He claimed to have demonstrated a disjunction between the carbon dioxide emissions produced by human activity and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, which made it "impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from human burning of fossil fuels."

He must be aware of Michael Mann's critique - how, after the correspondence he has received on this issue, could he fail to be? Indeed, for the first time in his writing, Cockburn mentions Mann by name.



Man plays a minute part in natural warming /cooling cycles. I said minute, not the majority which AGW religionists parrott. And M.Mann is hardly a respectable source.

For simple reasons:

-CO2 is only 0.038% of the atmosphere. Of that only 3.4 to 5% is man-made. Mathematicaly impossible to extrapolate the numbers to claim man causes the majority of GW.

-Mankind (anthropomorphic climate change) IS NOT the primary cause of GW now or for instance during the Medieval period when it was actually warmer than today. Mankind was neither responsible for the little ice age either or the warming taking place on Mars, Pluto or Neptune today.
Greenland was called Green-Land for a reason, it was green. The Vikings lived there during the Medieval warming period and it was hot enough to cultivate grapes. Did the Vikings drive SUV`s !?

-CO2 does not antedate temperature increases. Temperature increases first, CO2 follows behind by up to 800 years. All ice core data has proven so.

-National Research Council report on the UN`s IPCC/Mann chart stated that Mann`s method was biased towards producing hockey stick-shaped temp. chart, that uncertainties had been underestimated. In otherwords, the UN`s IPCC Temp. chart was false.

-Last year the National Academies convened a committee and asked scientists to model temperatures from a thousand years ago to within 0.5 °C (0.9 °F). None claimed they could, except for Mr. "hockey stick" himself, Mike Mann. And we all know his "hockey stick" temp. chart has been debunked long ago,regardless of "peer review" aka, fellow travellers.

-Spending billions if not trillions to redistribute wealth(Kyoto) and creating a precursor to a command and control economy only to reduce the earth`s temperature by about 0.003055225 °C by the year 2050 or so, is just not worth it.

[svenson]

People who deny that manmade climate change is taking place have this in common: they do not answer their critics. They make what they say are definitive refutations of the science of climate change. When these refutations are shown to be nonsense, they do not seek to defend them. They simply repeat them as if nothing has changed, then move on to another line of attack.

person that rote this has met white-male-canada for certain

[North_of_60]

95 % of climate scientists agree on manmade climate change.

Wmc is just one of the few denialist worms still crawling on this planet. They've been debunked a hundred times.

http://www.climate.org/topics/climate/debunk-climate-myths.shtml

Go on this site for some good infos :
http://www.realclimate.org/

[White_Male_Canada]

95 % of climate scientists agree on manmade climate change.

Wmc is just one of the few denialist worms still crawling on this planet. They've been debunked a hundred times.

http://www.climate.org/topics/climate/debunk-climate-myths.shtml



The old " computer generated models prove it" arguement, how jejune.

The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases to allow for climate feedbacks.Correlation is not causation, when you are doing real science. Having two things exist at the same time is not the identification of the cause for their existence.

Water—as a gas, not a condensate or cloud—is the major radiative absorbing–emitting gas (averaging 95%) in the atmosphere, and not CO2;
Determination of the radiation absorption coefficients identifies water as the primary absorber in the 5.6–7.6-µm water band in the 60–80% RH range; and
The absorption coefficients for the CO2 bands at a concentration of 400 ppm are too small to be significant even if the CO2 concentrations were doubled.

The outcome is that the conclusions of advocates of the CO2-driver theory are evidently back to front, it’s the temperature that is driving the CO2.


CLIMATOLOGIST FIRED FOR EXPOSING WARMING MYTHS

University of Washington climate scientist Mark Albright was recently dismissed from his position as associate state climatologist, just weeks after exposing false claims of shrinking glaciers in the Cascade Mountains, says James M. Taylor, managing editor of Environment and Climate News.

According to Albright:

At most, according to reliable datasets, the Cascade Mountains snow pack declined by 35 percent between 1950 and 2000.
Moreover, even that number is misleading; Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels (D) and other global warming alarmists deliberately choose 1950 as the "baseline" for Cascade Mountains snow pack because 1950 was a year of abnormally heavy snowfall resulting in an uncharacteristically extensive snow pack.
The current snow pack is only marginally lower than the long-term average since 1943; moreover, the Cascade Mountains snow pack has been growing since the late 1970s.
Despite being vindicated by subsequent research, Albright was told he would have to submit any emails connected with his associate state climatologist position to another scientist for pre-approval prior to distribution, says Taylor. When Albright refused, he was stripped of his associate state climatologist title.

"Anytime politics intrudes on science, science is degraded and society as a whole is the loser," said H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. "That is why the whole global warming issue is a mess right now. Scientists have not reached a scientific conclusion yet, but the politicians want to jump the gun and be seen as saviors on the issue. This is a recipe for disaster."

[North_of_60]

Even this mother fucker is going green...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/specials/119_wag_climate/page2.shtml

Rupert Murdoch may seem an unlikely member of the climate-positive crew, but it seems to me that his shift in opinion has removed one of the great barriers to acceptance of climate theory - particularly in the US. For many years Murdoch was sceptical that human-caused emissions were influencing the global climate. Murdoch's Fox TV cast environmentalists as hypocrites and scaremongers and his Times of London employed climate-sceptic columnists.

But recently Murdoch himself changed - apparently persuaded by the argument that the risks entailed in a changing climate were so huge that it was irrational to ignore them in the hope that mainstream science was wrong. His Sky TV recently ran a 'Green Week' on climate themes.

Can't wait to watch this on Fox.

[guyone]

I clearly remember watching Al Gore giving a speech on CSPAN where he stated:

"...and everybody knows I (gulp) created the internet."

The '(gulp)' was a realization of the absurd statement he had just made.

[trish]

and Reagan came up with the idea to tear down the Berlin wall and did it with his bare hands too.

[guyone]

Not too many people would disagree with you there.

[trish]

wow...his bare hands!

[tsmandy]

And here is another response to Cockburn (though indirectly) from his co-editor at Counterpunch Jeffrey St. Clair

------------------------------------------------

Since the publication of Alexander Cockburn's latest assaults on the link between the burning of fossil fuels and global climate change, I've been inundated with hundreds of emails from CounterPunchers demanding to know my position. I thought my views had been clear for many years. But I'll take this opportunity to summarize them.

1. The planet is warming once again.

2. This latest period of warming is largely caused by the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere.

3. The CO2 clotting the earth's atmosphere is mostly produced by the burning of fossil fuels and by deforestation and slash burning.

4. So, yes, human activities are largely responsible for the current phase of climate change. Even the most strident scientific critics of the IPGCC reports do not dispute this anymore. Most of the scientific contention is over the rate of future warming, not causality. The most conservative of critics tend argue that the pace of warming is slowing. I disagree, but I'll be ecstatic if I'm proved wrong.

5. Climate change models are models not facts. We should be suspicious of them. Empirical observation, from ice cores and paleobotany, are more valuable. That said, sometimes the models have underestimated the problem, as in the recent evidence on the accelerated rate of Arctic melting. Yes, billions of dollars are being poured into new computer models and hi-tech research tools. Where's the harm? That's less money going into the killing machines in Iraq and Afghanistan. Close the oil depletion allowances, then we can talk about how much money is being wasted on climate change research.

Mike Davis chides me for my aversion to modeling. He contends that the computer models are getting better and better. And he's right. The margins of real contention have also narrowed considerably. Still the emphasis of most modeling is prognostication. Predicting the future is a fun but risky occupation. Instead, I look to the natural history. There the evidence of causality is overwhelming and decisive.

6. As I understand it, the water vapor critique is a recycled canard that circulates through global warming denialist camps with the same feverish import that 9/11 conspiracists attach to Larry Silverstein's infamous quip that he'd "pulled WTC building 7." Water vapor is, indeed, an important greenhouse, but it is a feedback response not a forcing mechanism. Water vapors also reside in the atmosphere for a relatively short time, 14 days or so, compared to 20 years for CO2 emitted from the burning of fossil fuels.

7. Here's where my skepticism comes in. Humans have contributed to global warming, but seem utterly incapable of solving. Al Gore offers rhetoric not solutions. He had his shot for eight years and his administration couldn't even come up with an alternative energy policy. Kyoto was a hollow half measure, weakened even further by the Clinton administration, and Gore didn't even try to push that through the US Senate. Three strikes and you're out, Al. Gore places most of the blame on individual consumption and not on corporate rapaciousness and the capitalist system that is driving nearly every environmental crisis, including climate change. You will search his essays, books, speech and films in vain for any sustained critique of corporate behavior. Instead, he offers the tired neoliberal approach of tax incentives and carbon credits that rewards those with the most blood on their hands.

8. Huge profits are being made from global warming fear mongering, from the do-nothing NGO grant whores to the nuclear power industry to strip miners decapitating the mountains of Appalachia for low sulfur coal to British Petroleum's quest to saturate the Third World with genetically engineered crops for a new generation of biofuels.

9. The environmental movement is dead. (DOA: April 2, 1993.) It is a co-opted exoskeleton of its former self, largely controlled by cautious politicos and neoliberal hacks like Gore, who suckle from grants doled out from oil industry seeded foundations (such as Pew, W. Alton Jones and Rockefeller), and who advance free-market incentives over regulation, lobbying and public relations over real mass movements and direct action.

10. So we're fucked. But don't worry. I hear the Rapture approaching. In any event, this is a human problem, not a planetary one. Last summer floating through Cataract Canyon, I leaned over my little kayak to touch the tortured shapes of rocks from the violent Permian Period, 251 million years ago, when 98 percent of the planet's species went extinct. But the dance of life went on. Now, the question, really, is whether humans want (or deserve) to be part of it. Although if we are intent on checking out, I don't see why we have to take the polar bears with us.

A final caveat. I'm not a scientist. In fact, as a neo-Luddite, I tend be extremely cautious in my relationship to science and technology. There are, however, many climate scientists, working in hostile bureaucratic conditions, whose research I highly value, such as Julio Betancourt. I find the RealClimate.com site to be a very useful archive of articles
distilling hard science on climate issues into readable prose. Yes, the NGO grant hucksters on climate change (or endangered species) are obnoxious, but they haven't killed anyone--except through their indifference and passivity. I reserve my true hatred for the pr thugs and scientific guns-for-hire (going rate: $2,500 a day) at Big Coal, the rapers of West Virginia and Black Mesa, and Shell Oil, the killers of Ken Saro-Wiwa. They can roast perpetually in the Hell's Cul-de-Sac, otherwise known as Phoenix, Arizona, circa 2050.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book is End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate, co-written with Alexander Cockburn. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net