Attached for your interest is my letter to the editor of the Nation Magazine in response to
Naomi Klein's latest article there. There is little or no chance that it will be published by the Nation. A very
detailed critique of the Klein article can be found in Joanne Nova's web site.
A Skeptic’s Reply to Naomi Klein's "Capitalism vs. the Climate"
What Naomi Klein fails to understand in her "Capitalism vs. the Climate" article is that weather and climate are controlled by the laws of Physics and Chemistry on a macroscopic scale. They engender forces and motions that are beyond human control, and the scrawny human constructs of Capitalism, or Communism, or Fascism, or Socialism have absolutely no role in weather or climate.
Weather and Climate existed long before humans appeared on Earth and they will exist in the same way long after we disappear either individually or collectively as the human race. What should have been an objective evaluation of climatological data, and a respectful scientific dialogue on whether or not CO2 and other "greenhouse gases" are causing global warming or climate change, has unfortunately degenerated into a partisan political harangue.
While right wing reactionaries like Limbaugh and the Koch brother's "think tanks" are partly responsible for that degeneration, some of the blame is shared by the Gore-Hansen-IPCC clique of fear mongers, environmental lobbyists, and progressive Democrats. Klein's article is only the latest example of that degeneration.
She simply swallows the dogma that the "consensus" of the self proclaimed "climate scientists" who are motivated by the noblest of motives, is correct. Thus, the thousands of knowledgeable meteorologists and climatologists throughout the world who disagree with that phony consensus are wrong and motivated by money given to them by the fossil fuel industry. Thus, she claims that the "scientific theories presented here (the latest Heartland Conference) are old and long discredited" even though she knows absolutely nothing about those theories. She claims that we have just experienced "the end of the hottest decade in recorded history": a statement that reveals her ignorance of the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, the Holocene, and the five Interglacial Warming episodes that preceded them during the last 450,000 years. Those periods were all considerably warmer than today in the absence of any significant human CO2 emission.
The underdeveloped world will have to depend on the use of fossil fuels to improve their standard of living just as the developed nations have. Draconian measures of "carbon control" to address the non-existent problem of "global warming / climate change" will significantly impede their development just as the fiscal draconian measures imposed on them by the IMF and the World Bank did.
The overwhelming weight of scientific and cultural evidence shows clearly that the theory that human emission of CO2 and greenhouse gases is causing "global warming/climate change" is one of the greatest frauds in the history of science. Klein's fact-deficient political harangue is thus totally out of touch with reality.
Dr. Martin Hertzberg, coauthor of
"Slaying the Sky Dragon - Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory"
Stairway Press (2011).
Copper Mountain, CO
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