Metacentricities

I’ve been a reader of The Nation on and off over the past 20 years or so. I’ve subscribed several times. These days, I pick it up once a month or so at newstands to read it (because I can’t keep up with it weekly.) I picked up this week’s Nation, and Alexander Cockburn had a column, called “Is Global Warming a Sin?” It was such an atrocious article, I felt I needed to write a letter to them.

Here’s my letter:

So I’m assuming Alexander Cockburn’s column on carbon credits is mostly a joke. Certainly, the part about the carbon credit trade was serious. Buying carbon credits does certainly serve to make people feel better, without a whole lot of evidence yet that it works. It might work, but it probably won’t.

However, I’m assuming the rest of the column, suggesting that human-caused global climate change is a hoax, is a joke. The same kind of joke that one might play on April fool’s - suggesting, for instance, that the theory of evolution is a hoax. Or, perhaps, that the world is flat (really, it is, if you look all the way out to the horizon, you don’t see any curvature! How can it be round?)

It’s not worth spending my effort to describe in detail the mass of data that shows the role of human activity on the climate. Others perhaps have done that. Scientists have reached a consensus that human beings have caused the current change in climate and CO2. Picking out one single graph, to suggest that this graph invalidates the huge mountain of other data is absurd. Suggesting scientific expertise by his discussion of CO2 and the atmosphere doesn’t make a difference. Alexander Cockburn isn’t a scientist, and there are virtually no reputable scientists left who don’t think that human activities have caused current increases in CO2 and temperature.

Human caused global climate change is, in many scientists’ opinions, a threat to the very survival of human beings on the planet, at worst. At best, it will kill, and disrupt the lives of millions of people, mostly poor, in all parts of the world. And this is mostly due to the lifestyles of us here in the United States. If you are going to continue to print Alexander Cockburn’s series suggesting that the idea that humans are changing the climate is a hoax, I’m going to stop reading The Nation. It no longer counts as a reliable progressive voice.

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