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America's First Terror War

From Pirates to Enemy Combatants: R.T. Naylor traces the birth of the American Military-Industrial Complex and illustrates the striking parallels between Thomas Jefferson's naval war on the Barbary Coast states and Bush's War on Terror. Oil Company U?: Ali Tonak takes apart the big merger between British Petroleum and Cal-Berkeley and reveals BP's plot to saturate the Third World with GM crops, all in the name of oil conservation.

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Today's Stories

May 26, 2007

Michael Donnelly
Green Sabotage as "Terrorism"

May 25, 2007

Robert Jensen
What the Finkelstein Tenure Fight Tells Us About the State of Academia

David Vest
So You Thought They'd End the War

John Stauber
Democratic Spin Won't End the War in Iraq

Evelyn Pringle
Congress Gives War Profiteers Another $100 Billion

Corporate Crime Reporter
Why Corporate Social Responsibility Programs are a Fraud

Susan Rosenthal, MD
What's Missing from the Health Care Debate

Roberto Rodriguez
Us vs. Them in the Immigration Debate

Steve Fournier
Goodie, Goodie Goodling

Patrick McElwee
Venezuela and RCTV: Is Free Speech Really at Stake?

Robert Weissman
Resisting the Commercialization of Public Schools

Website of the Day
New DNC Motto: "We Suck"

 

 


May 24, 2007

Franklin Lamb
Who's Behind the Fighting in North Lebanon

Corporate Crime Reporter
House Democrats Buckle to Big Oil: Strip Down Price Gouging Bill

Robert Fantina
Giuliani: Righteous, Indignant and Wrong

Norman Solomon
Deadly Illusions, Rest in Peace

Dave Lindorff
Kerrycrats All!: Now It's a Democratic War

Sen. Russell Feingold
We are Moving Backwards on Iraq

Fred Gardner
Doctor of Last Resort

Mike Whitney
Paulson in China

Kevin Parsneau, Arjun Chowdhury and Mark Hoffman
Becoming Imperialist: a Warning to Iraq War Critics

Caroline Paul
My Brother the "Terrorist": Animal Liberation and Prosecutorial Overkill

Eva Liddell
In Defense of Lying on Job Applications

Website of the Day
Johnny's Jumped the Shark


May 23, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Opium: Iraq's Newest Export

Rev. William Alberts
Faith-Based Imperialism

Joe DeRaymond
Colombia's Civil War and the US

Sudhanva Deshpande
and Vijay Prashad

The Political Economy of a Crisis

Paul Craig Roberts
Republicans in Self-Destruct Mode

Glen Ford
A Less "White" USA

Rannie Amiri
The Great Bank Heist of Tripoli

China Hand
China's Great Wall of Cash?

Zoe Blunt
Tales from the Tree Tops: Veteran Tree Sitter Tells All

Nivien Saleh
Who's to Blame for Iraq?

Website of the Day
Debating the Israel Lobby


May 22, 2007

Robert Fisk
A Front Row Seat for the Bloodbath in Lebanon

Joshua Frank
Hillary Clinton's Achilles Heel?

Harvey Wasserman
Drop Dead, New Yorkers: Giuliani and the Toxic Fallout from 9/11

David Mos Masumoto
An Orchard Without Workers

Sonja Karkar
Israeli Forest Named After Australian Prime Minister

Conn Hallinan
The Afghan Quagmire

Dave Lindorff
A Widening Chasm on Impeachment

Jeffrey Kolakowski
Meet Us in Detroit: an Open Letter to John Konyers

Evelyn Pringle
A Misleading Suicide Warning

Jim Baumer
Politics Gary, Indiana-Style

Website of the Day
Should the Democrats Fear Mike Gravel?


May 21, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
The Secret US Plot to Kill Sadr

Nicole Colson
Much Ado About the Fort Dix Pizza Plot

John Ross
Shooting for the Top: Mexico's Drug Gangs Take Aim at Calderon

Stephen Fleischman
Werewolf of Washington: Wolfowitz Comes Full Circle

M. Shahid Alam
Chosenness and Israeli Exceptionalism

Ron Jacobs
Green Mountain Days: Return to Vermont

Peter Rost, MD
Pfizer CFO Resigns

Alan Farago
Can the Everglades Save Florida?

Paul Buchheit
The Dark Side of Democracy Promotion

Website of the Day
Code Monkey: Live!


May 19 / 20, 2007

Andrew Cockburn
Why America Lost the War in Iraq

Uri Avnery
The Next War

Peter Gelderloos
My Arrest in Spain: The Easy Road from Tourism to Terrorism

Saul Landau
Bush's Accomplishments

Robert Fantina
Iraq's History: Lessons for the Present and the Future

Fred Gardner
Hemp vs. Pot, a False Dichotomy

Ralph Nader
Timid Democrats and the Antiwar Movement

Jean Daniels
Waiting for Obama

Reza Fiyouzat
Vietnam Syndrome: Dead or Alive?

Missy Beattie
Ron Paul, Rudy Giuliani and Osama's Fatwah

Robert Alvarez
Magical Thinking About Nuclear Waste

Sonja Karkar
The Palestinians of Iraq

Dave Lindorff
Mumia Case on Hold

Jeff Sher
Keep Workers Healthy and Reduce Health Care Cost: Eliminate Co-Pays

Julian C. Holmes
Torture, Maine Style

Clancy Sigal
Red Mutiny: 11 Fateful Days on the Battleship Potemkin

Prairie Miller
The Murder of Fred Hampton

James Murren
The Dog Ate Karl Rove's Homework: When Turd Blossom Met the Teachers of the Year

Poets' Basement
Davies, Valentine and Engel

Website of the Weekend
Yellowstone's Shame: Harassing Newborn Bison

 

May 18, 2007

Adam Jones
When Does Genocide Purify? Ask the Pope

Sharon Smith
The Death of Triangulation Politics?

Christopher Brauchli
Cheney's Middle East Adventure

Peter Rost, MD
Bribes and Spies in the Drug Industry

Denise Maloney Pictou
The Murder of Our Mother, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash: After 31 Years, It is Time for Justice

David Swanson
Of Snoops and Dupes

Ali Khan
The Lawyers' Mutiny in Pakistan

Susan Rosenthal, M.D.
Cho Seung-Hui Delivers His Message

Samer Assad
Israel and the Refugees: Fifty-Nine Years of Dispossession

CP News Service
Bidding for Extinction: Ivory Trade on eBay Threatens Survival of Elephants

Website of the Day
Another War Criminal Goes to Harvard

 

May 17, 2007

Tariq Ali
The General vs. the Judge

Yifat Susskind
Honor Killings in the New Iraq: The Murder of Du'a Aswad

Dave Zirin
Being Ali or Being Owned: an Open Letter to LeBron James

Brian J. Foley
Hell, No, Harry Won't Go!

W. John Green
The Godfather of Colombia: Uribe and the Para Scandal

Eric Johnson-DeBaufre
Challenges for the New Sanctuary Movement

Badruddin Khan
Rebirthing the Neocons: Bernard Lewis' Latest Call to Arms

Martha Rosenberg
From Cockfighting to Foie Gras: On the Menu and on the Docket

China Hand
Pope Rat in Brazil: "The Amazon Tribes Longed for Christianity!"

Dan Vojir
Falwell's Tinky Winky Legacy: Who Will Battle the Telebubby Threat Now?

Website of the Day
Welcome to the Terrordome


May 16, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Chalabi Speaks

Ashley Dawson
Who's Afraid of Wolfowitz?

Joshua Frank
Obama's Cash Flow: Maverick or Kidder?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Corporate Drug Pushers

Ray McGovern
A Four-Letter Word for Tenet

Glen Ford
Black Labor and the Big Mission

Joe Bageant
The Ghosts of Timothy Leary and Hunter S. Thompson

Sonja Karkar
The 59-Year Catastrophe

Mickey S. Huff
Preaching Hate: Farewell, Falwell

John Chuckman
Falwell's Lone Act of Kindness

Kaz Dziamka
What Ever Happened to Rogerian Argument?

Website of the Day
We're All Going to Hell

 

May 15, 2007

Michael Neumann
Two States, One State and Snake Oil

Patrick Cockburn
An American Nightmare

Ashley Smith
How the US Set Iraq on Fire

Marc Gardner
Parole and the Long-Distance Trucker

Dave Lindorff
and Linn Washington, Jr
Mumia Case Reaches Its Climax

Ben Terrall
Benchmark as Theft: Iraq Oil Workers Strike to Stop Privatization

Ron Jacobs
Cheney Threatens More War

Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Seabrook

Marcus Mabry
Shopping During Katrina

Dr. Susan Block
Cheney and the DC Madam's Cookie Jar

Website of the Day
Save Jean Klock Park from the Mega-Developers!

 

May 14, 2007

Jennifer Roesch
Giuliani Time: the Mussolini of Manhattan

Jeffrey St. Clair
Humans, CO2 and Climate Change

George Bisharat
For Palestinians, Memory Matters

Diane Wachtell
The Real Imus Lesson

Ramzy Baroud
From Palestine to Rotterdam

Rosemary and Walter Brasch
When the National Guard Goes Missing: An Ill Wind and American Policy

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
Blair's Exit

Roberto Rodriguez
The Elusive Bars of Justice

Jonathan Culp
Cutting Out Collage: Copyright and Art in Canada

Website of the Day
Uranium Rock


May 12 / 13, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Who are the Merchants of Fear?

Patrick Cockburn
State of Surge

Jeffrey St. Clair
High Line Fever: a Trip Across the Dark Side of Montana

Diane Farsetta
Untold Stories from the Pat Tillman / Jessica Lynch Hearings

Ralph Nader
Strip Mining the Newsroom: Mr. Zell and the Tribune Company

Jean Bricmont
The Great Illusion: Sarkozy and the "Decline" of France

Marcus Breen
Cheering Sarkozy: the US Media and the Rightwing Takeover of France

Joe Bageant
Rising Above Politics

Conn Hallinan
European Missiles and the Camel's Nose

Fred Gardner
The Unreported I-880 Fire

Juan Santos
and Leslie Radford

Public Terror: Escalating the War on Migrants

Eve Bachrach
Inside Colombia's Flower Industry

Missy Comley Beattie
Shame

Ron Jacobs
The Bitterness of Regis Debray

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Sepoy Mutiny After 150 Years

Susie Day
Jesus Christ Weds Pat Robertson

Poets' Basement
Newberry, Engel, Landau, Katz and Davies

Website of the Weekend
The Shipyard: Recycling as Art

May 11, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Blair's Depature: the View from Baghdad

Kathleen Christison
Playing at Peace

Mike Ferner
Collateral Genocide

John Holt
Gating Montana: A Ghastly Disneyland with High Rise Outhouses

Laurie Hasbrook
This Minute and Then the Next: a Plea from an Antiwar Mother

Christopher Brauchli
The Children of Limbo: Will the Pope Finally Set Them Free?

Margaret Kimberley
GOP Openly Embraces Gipper Values: Racism, Violence and Control

Dave Lindorff
Use It or Lose It: The Democrats and the Impeachment Clause

Nicole Colson
Anger Erupts at Conditions in For-Profit Indiana Prison

John V. Walsh
Beware the Do-Gooders in Body Armor

Website of the Day
Take the Terrorist Quiz!

 

May 10, 2007

Tariq Ali
Adieu, Blair, Adieu

Patrick Cockburn
Killing of Teachers Turns Iraqi Sunnis Against al--Qa'ida

Neve Gordon
and Yigal Bronner
In Israel Not All Blood is the Same: The Death of Samir Dari

Marjorie Cohn
Fighting Terror Selectively: Washington and Posada Carriles

David Rosen
The New Disappeared: Sex Offenders, Civil Confinement and the Resurrection of "Evil"

Alan Farago
Why the Everglades Have Dried Up: Developers and the South Florida Drought

John Hellman
France: From Pétain to Sarkozy

Kathy Rentenbach
A 100 Days of Rafael Correa

BANCO
The Stage is Set for Sentencing Another Innocent Black Man

Richard Rhames
Is Paris Burning?

Website of the Day
Tame the Corporation


May 9, 2007

Jeff Leys
Iraq and Afghanistan Supplemental Spending, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
An Interview with Iraq's Foreign Minister on Iran and Iraq

Glen Ford
No Black Plan for America's Cities

Paula Rothenberg
Feminism Then and Now

Kathryn Weber
A Conversation with Norman Finkelstein

John Chuckman
The Likely Historical Significance of the War in Iraq

Jordan Flaherty
Looking for Justice in Jena, Louisiana

Dave Lindorff
Pelosi's Toothless Threat to Sue Bush

Stephen Lendman
Criminalizing Speech: the War on Free Expression in a Post-9/11 World

Website of the Day
"Fifth and Market": a Short Film About the Iraq War

 

 

May 8, 2007

Dave Lindorff
The Great Oil Robbery

Patrick Cockburn
The Horrific Stoning Death of a Yazidi Girl Sparks Waves of Revenge Killings

Corporate Crime Reporter
Snuff Politics: Democrats Escalate Attack on Single Payer

Ralph Nader
The People's Crusade of Mike Gravel

Malini Johar Schueller
Decoding Harlan Ullman: Shock and Awe as Sexual Fantasy

Juan Santos
The Hate Equation: Targeting Migrant Children in LA

Dave Zirin
Jason Whitlock, the Clarence Thomas of Sportswriters?

Joshua Frank
The Price of Fire in Latin America

Evelyn Pringle
Serotonin Syndrome

Eamonn McCann
Irish Peace Dividend for Discredited Premiers

Website of the Day
The Pagan Science Monitor

 

 

May 7, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
The Great Wall of Baghdad Rises

Monica Benderman
Land of Opportunity

Greg Moses
Hutto Prison Rebuffs UN Rapporteur

Rannie Amiri
The Sham at Sheikh: Iraq Regional Conference a Flop

Fitrakis / Wasserman
Media Silence on Kent State Revelations

Fred Wilhelms
Another Royalty Forfeiture From SoundExchange: And This Time It's Secret!

Ramzy Baroud
The Hourglass of Blood: Darfur Revisited

Bruce K. Gagnon
The Democrats Don't Own the Antiwar Movement

T. W. Croft
Home Movies from a Weekend in Paris--And Related Dreamscapes

Sonja Karkar
Prizes for Supporting Israel?

Website of the Day
Posada Carriles: the Declassified Record



May 5 / 6, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Trying to Catch Up with the Voters

William Blum
How America Has Changed Iraq

Uri Avnery
Exercise in Escapism

Franklin Lamb
Harvard's Twisted Report on Israel's Invasion of Lebanon

Fred Gardner
Elective Surgeries Kill

Lawrence R. Velvel
The American Moral Meltdown Accelerates

Missy Beattie
Lying and Dying: The Moral Sensibility of Military Recruiters

Robert Fantina
Bush's Veto: Hypocritical Words and Actions

Carla Blank
American Massacres and the Media

Linn Washington, Jr.
The Long Ordeal of Harold Wilson

Stephen F. Jackson
Taking It to Drummond: Paramilitaries and Mining Companies in Colombia

P. Sainath
The Jailing of Indian Farmers

Anthony Papa
Time to End New York's War on Itself

James T. Phillips
Blather Cancer

John Ross
Last Days of the Willie Loman of the EZLN

Stephen Lendman
Chavez's Oil Policy Sparks Panic at Wall Street Journal

Ben Terrall
Iggy Pop at 60

CounterPunch Newswire
Advice from a Geezer Assassin

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Engel and Davies

Website of the Weekend
Mountain Justice Summer

 

May 4, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
How the Surge is Failing

Col. Dan Smith
From Watergate to Gonzogate

Norman Solomon
FOX on Wall Street

Azmi Bishara
Why is Israel After Me?

Ron Jacobs
Sitting in on Senator Kohl and the War

Dave Lindorff
Clinton and Byrd are Calling for Revocation of the Wrong AUMF

Kevin Zeese
The Democrats Cave to Bush

Bob Fitrakis
Why Four Died in Ohio: Kent State, Gov. Rhodes and the FBI

Janet Kauffman
"Stop the Mudness!" Bare Earth is Scorched Earth

Website of the Day
Let Us Gather in Missouri!

 

May 3, 2007

Jeff Halper
The Livni-Rice Plan for the Middle East: a Just Peace or Apartheid?

Christopher Brauchli
Bush's Best and Brightest: From Dr. Keroack to Bernard Kerik

Dave Zirin
Talking Sports from Death Row: an Interview with Kevin Cooper

Corporate Crime Reporter
Big Pharma Gets Its Hooks into Seton Hall Law School

Robert Fisk
Olmert Comes Undone

Mike Ferner
Bush Veto, Right for the Wrong Reasons?

Mike Whitney
A Stock Market Post-Mortem

Pham Binh
The Democrats and War Funding

Dave Lindorff
Kucinich's Impeachment Train: Look Who Just Stepped Aboard

Michael A. Johnson
Tenet on 60 Minutes

Website of the Day
Olivia Wilde: the Interview

 

May 2, 2007

Saul Landau
Would Jesus Wear a Rolex on His TV Show?

Dr. Susan Block
Hookergate II: Madame Julia's Big Black Book of Cheesy Republican Sex Acts

Carla Blank
Historical Amnesia: Worst U.S. Massacre?

Margaret Kimberly
The Candor of Mike Gravel: "These People Frighten Me"

Kevin Zeese
Durbin Gives Edwards More to Apologize For

Carlos Villareal
How "Law and Order" Covers for Bigotry in the Immigration Debate

Michael Dickinson
Trouble in Turkey: Criminalizing Political Art

Tim Shorrock
A Raw Deal Between Washington and Seoul: Corporate Interventionism as Trade Policy

Alevtina Rea
The Myth-Makers of Estonia

William S. Lind
General Incompetence: Col. Yingling and the Military Brass

Website of the Day
Good News: Rost's "ZubeGate Exposé Prompts Congressional Inquiry


May 1, 2007

Andrew Cockburn
How Rumsfeld Micromanaged Torture

Fred Gardner
Affirmative Abstinence: Adios, Randall Tobias, the Man Who Turned His Wife's Suicide into a Sales Pitch for Prozac

Chase Madar
Are Working Class Jobs Bad for Your Health?

Ralph Nader
Cheney and the BYU 25: Faith, Accountability and Protest in Utah

John V. Walsh
Edgy Dems Snarl at Their Antiwar Base

Joshua Frank
Obama, Incorporated

Leslie Radford
The Migrant Trap and the Migrant's Way Out

Shaun Harkin
An Interview with Nativo López on Immigration Bills and Protests

Dave Lindorff
Murtha Talks Impeachment

Peter Rost, MD
Inspector General Requests Meeting with Pfizer Whistleblower

Peter Linebaugh
May Day and Magna Carta

Website of the Day
Impeachment? Why Bother?

 

 

 

 

Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition
May 26 / 27, 2007

Explosion of the Fearmongers

The Greenhousers Strike Back and Out

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

I began this series of critiques of the greenhouse fearmongers with an evocation of the papal indulgences of the Middle Ages as precursors of the "carbon credits"-ready relief for carbon sinners, burdened, because all humans exhale carbon, with original sin. In the Middle Ages they burned heretics, and after reading through the hefty pile of abusive comments and supposed refutations of my initial article on global warming I'm fairly sure that the critics would be only to happy to cash in whatever carbon credits they have and torch me without further ado.

The greenhouse fearmongers explode at the first critical word, and have contrived a series of primitive rhetorical pandybats which they flourish in retaliation. Those who disagree with their claim that anthropogenic CO2 is the cause of the small, measured increase in the average earth's surface temperature, are stigmatized as "denialists," a charge which scurrilously combines an acoustic intimation of nihilism with a suggested affinity to those who insist the Holocaust never took place.

The greenhousers endlessly propose that the consensus of "scientists" on anthropogenic climate change is overwhelming. By scientists they actually mean computer modelers. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and their computer-modeling coterie include very few real climatologists or atmospheric physicists. Among qualified climatologists, meteorologists and atmospheric physicists, there are plenty who do not accept the greenhousers' propositions. Many others have been intimidated into silence by the pressures of grants, tenure and kindred academic garottes.

Peer review, heavily overworked in the rebuttals I have been reading, is actually a topic on which the greenhousers would do well to keep their mouths shut, since, as the University of Virginia's Pat Michaels has shown, the most notorious sentence in the IPCC's 1996 report ("The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate") was inserted at the last minute by a small faction on the IPCC panel after the scientific peer-review process was complete. Here's how Dr Fred Goldberg describes the probable culprit, Professor Bert Bolin, a politically driven Swede who was the first chairman of the IPCC, from 1988 to 1998. Goldberg's very interesting paper is entitled, "Has Bert Bolin fooled us all concerned climate change caused by humans?":

"In 1995 IPCC presented its second report: The Science of Climate Change". In this report a large number of researchers work through hundreds of scientific reports and delivers a comprehensive report where they conclude that there is no evidence that human beings have had an influence on the climate. This conclusion is of course very important for politicians and policymakers around the world. But what happened? The editor of the IPCC ­report then deleted or changed the text in 15 different sections of chapter 8 (The key chapter concerning whether human influence exists or not) which had been agreed upon by the panel of contributors involved in compiling the document. In practice politicians and policymakers only read the so-called Executive Summary for Policy Makers. In this document consisting of a few pages it is clearly stated that humans have influenced the climate, contrary to the conclusions of the scientific report.

"Professor Fredrik Seitz, former chairman of the American Science Academy, wrote in the Wall Street Journal already the 12th of June 1996 about a major deception on global warming: "I have never before witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report." He gave many examples of changes and redefinitions and finished by demanding that the IPCC process should be abandoned.

"Had somebody subordinate to Bert Bolin within IPCC made these changes it is reasonable to think that Bert Bolin himself would correct the errors. That he has not done is why I draw the conclusion that it must be Bert Bolin himself who is responsible for the changes and no subordinate person has dared interfere with his boss."

I should acknowledge one imprecision in my description of Dr. Martin Hertzberg's graph in my first column-"the smoothly rising curve of CO2"-that prompted several intemperate responses, charging that I couldn't possibly expect CO2 or carbon levels to drop just because of a one-third cut in manmade CO2. Indeed, I should have written "one could not even see a 1 part per million bump in the smoothly rising curve." Even though such transitory influences as day and night or seasonal variations in photosynthesis cause clearly visible swings in the curve, the 30 percent drop between 1929 and 1932 caused not a ripple. Empirical scientific evidence that the human contribution is in fact less than a fart in a hurricane, as Dr. Hertzberg says.

As for the alleged irrefutable evidence that people caused the last century's CO2 increase, the "smoking gun" invoked by one of my critics, Dr. Michael Mann, and his fellow fearmongers at realclimate.com, the claim is based on the idea that the normal ratio of heavy to light carbon-that is, the Carbon-13 isotope to the lighter Carbon-12 isotope, is roughly 1 to 90 in the atmosphere, but in plants there's a 2 percent lower C13/C12 ratio. So, observing that C13 in the atmosphere has been declining steadily though very slightly since 1850, they claim that this is due to man's burning of fossil fuels, which are generally believed to be derived from fossilized plant matter. On the naïve and scientifically silly assumption that the only way that plant-based carbon can get into the atmosphere is by people burning fuels, they exult that here indeed is the smoking gun: decreases of C13 in the atmosphere mean that our sinful combustions are clearly identifiable as major contributors to the 100 ppm increase in CO2 since 1850.

This is misguided, simply because less than a thousandth of the plant-based carbon on earth is bound up in fossil fuel. The rest of the huge remaining tonnages of plant-based carbon are diffused through the oceans, the forests, the grasslands and the soil. In other words, everywhere. Obviously, lots of this C13-deficient carbon has the opportunity to oxidize into CO2 by paths other than people burning fuel, i.e., the huge amount of plant material that's naturally eaten or decayed by the biosphere.

Perhaps even more significantly, cold ocean waters absorb lightweight C12 preferentially, resulting in lots of C13-deficient carbon in the oceans. This low-C13 carbon most certainly would have been released massively into the atmosphere over the course of the world's warming trend since 1850, when the Little Ice Age ended. All of these larger natural pathways for emitting low-C13 carbon into the atmosphere have been considerably accelerated by this same warming trend. So once again, the greenhousers have got it ass-backward. The 100 ppm increase in CO2 can't be uniquely attributed to humans because at least as plausibly it could be the effect, not the cause, of the warming that started after the Little Ice Age denied by Dr. Michael "Hockey Stick" Mann.

I had promised that this third column would pose the question "Are things really so bad," a theme I will take up in this series, along with a continuation of these rebuttals. Originally I had hoped to deal with criticisms at the end of the series. I have changed my plans since committed greenhousers like George Monbiot (honorary chairman of the King Canute Action Committee, committed to beating back non-existent anthropogenic global warming by tactics which would have zero impact anyway) that I have ignored their rebukes. In actual fact I was offline, in Russia, flying thither over the Arctic and thus able to make a direct review of the ice cap. So wait a couple of weeks for my next column before you critics let fly again. Coming up: how greenhouser theologians deal with the global water cycle and the highly embarrassing and persistent lag between temperature and subsequent atmospheric CO2 change. After that, I'll offer a real treat: the nightmare visions of the greenhousers and how many of their quavering predictions have fallen under the implacable guillotine blade of reality.

A shorter version of this column ran in the print edition of The Nation that went to press last Wednesday.



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"The Case Against Israel"
Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz

WHAT'S INSIDE
Grand Theft Pentagon:
Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror

by Jeffrey St. Clair

 

 

 


The Occupation
by Patrick Cockburn

 

 


CITY BEAUTIFUL
By Tennessee Reed

 


Bruce Springsteen On Tour
By Dave Marsh

 

The Book on 9/11 the White House Denounced as "ABSOLUTE GARBAGE"