The left is in trouble as their shrill polemics about dangerous man-made global warming are about to blow up in their face. Aided by ignorant and unquestioning journalists in the main steam media, their 24-7 fear mongering has actually worked to focus attention on their claims and the claims simply are not holding up. It turns out the Sun warms the solar system and Mars and Neptune are slightly warming, as is Mother Earth.
Since the advocates of green socialism are heavily invested in their “destroy the oil economy” crusade, they simply can’t just stop and apologize for getting their facts wrong. Admitting their life changing and expensive proposed solutions address non-existent problems would kill all their credibility. The leftists want power for powers sake so they will never take the mea culpa pathway.
Instead, you need to apply the brakes from within the progressive movement and this means appointing an inquisitor with impeccable left wing credentials. It also means finding a scapegoat to bear all the blame thus leaving the movement pure and true. How else do you explain Alexander Cockburn taking on Al Gore in the socialist media?
Who are the Merchants of Fear? As a denizen of Washington since his diaper years Gore has always understood that threat inflation is the surest tool to plump up budgets and rabblerouse the voters. By the mid Nineties he positioned himself at the head of a strategic and tactical alliance formed around "the challenge of climate change", which had now stepped forward to take Communism's place in the threatosphere essential to all political life.
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. They are as unlikely to develop models confuting the hypothesis of human-induced global warming as is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to say the weather is possibly getting a little bit warmer but that there's no great cause for alarm and indeed some reason for rejoicing, since this warming (whose natural causes I discussed in that recent column) gives us a longer growing season and increased CO2, a potent plant fertiliser. Welcome global greening.
When measured reality doesn't cooperate with the lurid model predictions, new compensating "factors" are concocted, such as the briefly popular sulfate aerosols of the 1990’s, recruited to cool off the obviously excessive heat predicted by the models. Or the existing, inconvenient data are water-Xboarded into submission as happened with the ice-core samples that fail to confirm the modellers' need for record temperatures today as opposed to half a million years ago. As Richard Kerr, Science magazine's man on global warming remarked, "Climate modelers have been 'cheating' for so long it's become almost respectable."
