Alexander Cockburn ‘I have committed intellectual blasphemy’

Yes... RIP indeed... He lived in a beautiful community on the lost coast of California... He was loved by many... His writings will endure!!!

 

About the CO2, some will also remember that Murray Salby has given presentations that atmospheric CO2 increase comes from warming the ocean. Same idea, but neither help us to understand were the now 9-10 PgC-CO2 from fossil fuel combustion are going. Have gone.

Cockburn was an iconoclastic writer and we can all appreciate that. But when you form your opinions based on ignoring conservation of mass, well, it won't end nicely.

BTW Salby is also an expert on atmospheric physics and meteorology. Writes books on it

Amazon.com: Fundamentals of Atmospheric Physics, Volume 61 (International Geophysics) (9780126151602): Murry L. Salby, Roger A. Pielke Sr., Renata Dmowska: Books

Preview the CO2 section and you will find no evidence that his "wow" presentations ever existed. Are there 2 Murray Salbys?

Anyway I hope this is not considered off-topic for a thread on Cockburn's epitaph. Yes, be uninhibited and fearless in exploring climate change, or anything else. But basing those explorations on physics, chemistry, and biology is scarcely inhibition. Good sense, rather.

 

When that author published his first column on global warming on the CounterPunch site, I emailed him to point out the numerous significant errors he had made. It was a really unpleasant exchange and a total waste of time. Apparently, his views on the subject were formed by chatting with a retired engineer on some type of cruise. The engineer was convinced that the modern CO2 increase was from CO2 being released from the oceans as they warmed. And so, no anthropogenic CO2. Near as I can tell, that's as deep as his analysis went on this. When it came to global warming, he put his faith in some very stupid people. For as much as I appreciated his writings on CounterPunch (I liked them enough to donate), and miss them now, on the science of this topic, he was one inch deep.

From his later columns, I got the impression that he was so enamored with his analogy between carbon offsets and the selling of indulgences that he had no interest in anything that would contradict that. Now, that was a great insight. I mean, the column must have been written four years ago and I can still remember it, so it clearly was "sticky" in the modern parlance. It just happened to be wrong on the basics. But he had a view of the world that suited him, and that was good enough. In the field of writing essentially political essays, that may even have seemed sufficient. For science, though that's not enough.

 

Please notice that Pielkle Sr. is the co-author of the Atmos Phys text. His name comes up here also, from time to time. Both of them are obviously experts on the subject.

But this may link in some way to chogan2's comment. Experts are experts, but they also have opinions. If those opinions fall far outside the area of expertise, or (worse) if they are dissonant with the expertise, again, it may not end well.

The "retired engineer on some type of cruise" is a bit further described in Cockburn's wikipedia article

 

It should be noted that Pielkle Sr. accepts that human generated ghg has an impact on climate. He would thus also disagree with Alexander Cockburn.

 

I suppose that both of them would also agree that other issues (air pollution, extreme weather events not necessarily caused by climate change) should at least compete with CO2/climate change as a thing that we ought to spend money on. And so would I.

But funds appear to be in short supply. So we must prioritize. Start with science; if that is incomplete, do some more. Then prioritize the thing-doing according to apparent benefits.

Funds would not be so tight, in the absence of fossil-fuel subsidies. Or in the absence of unwise military adventures. But that's just me, speaking iconoclastically, in Cockurn's tradition.