[dilligras]

I ran across this just now at the Annoyed Man dot com:


"Sources and Authorities
Dissidents Against Dogma"
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

(From Counterpunch.com)

Back in the 1970s, as the oil companies engineered a leap in prices, the left correctly identified and stigmatized the the conspiracy. Some thirty five years, here's the entire progressive sector swallowing, with religious fervor, a far more potent concoction of nonsense to buttress a program which will savagely penalize the poor, the third world and the environment. The marquee slogan in the new cold war on global warming is that the scientific consensus is virtually unanimous. This is utterly false. The overwhelming majority of climate computer modelers, the beneficiaries of the $2 billion-a-year global warming grant industry, certainly believe in it but not necessarily most real climate scientists-people qualified in atmospheric physics, climatology and meteorology. Geologists are particularly skeptical. Peter Sciaky, a retired geologist, writes to me thus: "A geologist has a much longer perspective. There are several salient points about our earth that the greenhouse theorists overlook (or are not aware). The first of these is that the planet has never been this cool. There is abundant fossil evidence to support this--from plants of the monocot order (such as palm trees) in the rocks of Cretaceous Age in Greenland and warm water fossil in sedimentary rocks of the far north. this is hardly the first warming period in the earth's history. The present global warming is hardly unique. It is arriving pretty much "on schedule." One thing, for sure, is that the environmental community has always spurned any input from geologists (many of whom are employed by the petroleum industry). No environmental conference, such as Kyoto, has ever invited a geologist, a paleontologist, a paleoclimatologist. It would seem beneficial for any scientific investigatory to include such scientific disciplines. "Among all my liberal and leftist friends (and I am certainly one of those), I know not a one who does not accept that global warming is an event caused by mankind. I do not know one geologist who believes that global warming is not taking place. I do not know a single geologist who believes that it is a man-made phenomenon. "There are hundreds of reasons--political, pragmatic and economic, health and environmental--for cleaning up our environment, for conservation of energy, for developing alternate fuels, cleaning up our nuclear program, etc. Global warming is not one of them."

As you were.