Idiot conspiracy-theory leftists
I'm not talking about the wide world of WTC conspiracy theory (at least this time) today. No, today I'm talking about the The Nation, which appears to be coming down off their post 9/11 journalism high and reverting back to their old conspiracy-laden selves with the publication of a Wall Street Journal-style pack of lies by that gasbag Alexander Cockburn, who, when he realized that one of the kludges that's been proposed to deal with global warming is to build lots of (loathed by stupid liberals since the experimental reactor at the UofC went critical for the first time) nuclear reactors, decided that it was better to leap on the conservative bandwagon and become a climate change denialist.
I particularly liked the pompous (and either ignorant or deliberately deceptive) handwaving contained in the statement "It’s a notorious inconvenience for the Greenhousers that data also show CO2 concentrations from the Eocene period, 20 million years before Henry Ford trundled out his first Model T, 300 to 400 percent higher than current concentrations." Well, first of all that wasn't 20 million years ago; by 20 million years ago, the co2 levels had already dropped like a stone and reglaciation was well in progress. Go back 45 million years, when the co2 levels were that high and the earth was warm enough so that the poles were basically ice-free, which would seem to indicate that, yes indeed, co2 levels are tied to the greenhouse effect (which we already know, because if co2 didn't produce a greenhouse effect, the earth would be a huge iceball with a narrow ice-free band around the equator.)
The rest of this pack of lies isn't any better sourced, but pointing at the Eocene maximum and saying "ha! there was a lot of co2 around, so nothing is our fault" at a time when Alaska was tropical is classic 9-11 style denialist bullshit.
I don't buy a subscription to pay for tripe like this. When The New Republic became a bunch of genocidal neocons, I dropped my subscription like a hot potato. If The Nation is going to cater to climate denialists ("we like to drive around in SUVs, so that means that there's no such thing as anthropogenic co2 warming!!!!") I'll be more than happy to file them in the same circular bin as the rest of the kooks.
(The argument of "yes, there's co2 warming but it's not our fault!!" is so laughably wrong that I'm not even going to talk about it. Try realclimate if you want to play that particular game of whack-a-mole.)