Would you expect a former writer for the Village Voice and The Nation to be harshly critical of soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore and his band of not-so merry manmade global warming alarmists?

Neither would I.

Yet there it was in the leftwing newsletter CounterPunch, written by editor Alexander Cockburn.

*****Critical Update: Cockburn's article published by The Nation.

Entitled “Hot Air, Cold Cash; Who are the Merchants of Fear?,” the piece absolutely eviscerated all those advancing the theory of anthropogenic global warming for what Cockburn believed to be financial and political gain (emphasis added throughout):

No response is more predictable than the reflexive squawk of the Greenhouse fearmongers that anyone questioning their claims is in the pay of the energy companies.

[…]

In fact, when it comes to corporate sponsorship of crackpot theories about why the world is getting warmer, the best documented conspiracy of interest is between the Greenhouser fearmongers and the nuclear industry, now largely owned by oil companies, whose prospects twenty years ago looked dark, amid headlines about the fall-out from Chernobyl, aging plants and nuclear waste dumps leaking from here to eternity. The apex Greenhouse fearmongers are well aware that the only exit from the imaginary crisis they have been sponsoring is through a door marked "nuclear power", with a servant's sidedoor labeled "clean coal".

Surprising statements from someone that supported Ralph Nader for president in 2000 and 2004, wouldn’t you agree?

Yet, Cockburn’s sharpest attacks were directed at Al Gore:

The world's best known hysteric and self promoter on the topic of man's physical and moral responsibility for global warming is Al Gore, a shill for the nuclear industry and the coal barons from the first day he stepped into Congress entrusted with the sacred duty to protect the budgetary and regulatory interests of the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oakridge National Lab. White House "task forces" on climate change in the Clinton-Gore years were always well freighted by Gore and his adviser John Holdren with nukers like John Papay of Bechtel.

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. Indeed, it was in the New Republic, a tireless publicist of the Soviet menace in the late 70s and Reagan 80s, that Gore announced in 1989 that the war on warming couldn't be won without a renewal in spiritual values.

How delicious. But don’t go to the snack bar for Goobers and Raisinets yet, sports fans, for there was more:

All Al Gore has ever needed is a hot day or some heavy rain as opportunity to promote the unassailable theory of man-made global warming. Come a rainy summer ('95), a perfectly routine El Nino ('97) or forest fire in Florida ('98) and Gore was there for the photo op, the uplifted finger warning of worse warming to come. '97 also found Gore in Glacier National Park, pointing at Grinnell glacier and telling the press gravely that it was melting, which indeed it has been since the end of the Little Ice Age,1450 to 1800. Mid-latitude glaciers expanded then, just as they contracted in the Medieval Warming Period, hotter than today and thus so vexing to climate alarmists like Michael Mann (now a reigning weather bureaucrat at the IPCC) that they had wiped it off their historical temperature graphs, just like an editor in Stalin's time cropping a team photo of early Bolsheviks to get rid of recently anathematized undesirables.

How marvelous. Yet, Cockburn was also disdainful of the United Nations, something rather uncommon amongst liberals:

Back in the early 1970s, in agencies such as its Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) the UN did nourish some quite radical plans for a new international economic order, one establishing more favorable terms of trade for the poorer nations. By the late 70s all such hopes were vanishing under the neoliberal tide and the Reagan-Clinton era finished them off. By the late 1980s the UN high brass clearly perceived the "challenge" of climate change to be the horse to ride to build up the organization's increasingly threadbare moral authority, and to claim a role beyond that of being an obvious American errand boy. In 1988, the United Nations Environment Program, originally formed in 1972, was united in unholy bureaucratic matrimony with the UN's World Meteorological Organization, giving us the IPCC.

The cycle of alarmist predictions is now well established. Not so long before some new UN moot on What To Do About the Weather, a prominent fearmonger like James Hansen or Michael Mann will make a tremulous statement about the accelerating tempo and dimensions of the warming crisis.
The cry is taken up by the IPCC, (and in the 1990s, by the Clinton/Gore White House), with the press releases headlined by the New York Times, with exactly the same intentional lack of critical evaluation as that newspaper's recycling of the government's lies about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Months and years later come the qualifications and the retractions, long after new contracts and grants have been awarded, and fresh legions hired to staff the ever-expanding empires of the threatmongers.

Cockburn crescendoed to the following conclusion:

As with the arms spending spiral powered by the Cold War merchants of fear, vast amounts of money will be uselessly spent on programs that won't work against an enemy that doesn't exist. Meanwhile, real and curable environmental perils are scanted or ignored. Hysteria rules the day, drowning urgently needed environmental cleanup in our backyard while smoothing the way for the nuclear industry to reap its global rewards.

Regardless of the differences inherent in Cockburn’s politics and those of the average NewsBusters reader, the reality is that if more left-leaning writers begin disseminating skeptical views on this important issue, maybe Gore and the alarmists will be defeated.

We can only hope.

—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters.