uh, Alex...

You might wanna think this through some more:

Now imagine two lines on a piece of graph paper. The first rises to a crest, then slopes sharply down, levels off and rises slowly once more. The other has no undulations. It rises in a smooth, slow arc. The first, wavy line is the worldwide CO2 tonnage produced by humans burning coal, oil and natural gas. It starts in 1928, at 1.1 gigatons (i.e., 1.1 billion metric tons), and peaks in 1929 at 1.17 gigatons. The world, led by its mightiest power, plummets into the Great Depression and by 1932 human CO2 production has fallen to 0.88 gigatons a year, a 30 percent drop. Then, in 1933, the line climbs slowly again, up to 0.9 gigatons.

And the other line, the one ascending so evenly? That's the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, parts per million (ppm) by volume, moving in 1928 from just under 306, hitting 306 in 1929, 307 in 1932 and on up. Boom and bust, the line heads up steadily. These days it's at 380. The two lines on that graph proclaim that a whopping 30 percent cut in man-made CO2 emissions didn't even cause a 1 ppm drop in the atmosphere's CO2. It is thus impossible to assert that the increase in atmospheric CO2 stems from people burning fossil fuels.

It takes decades for reduced emissions to manifest themselves as reduced atmospheric carbon. The reduction of industrial emissions during the great depression lasted about 4 years--from about 1928 to about 1932.

It's one thing for Cockburn to spout off on Counterpunch, it's something else entirely for The Nation to publish this drivvel. If Cockburn and the Nation want to introduce some kind of global warming "debate" to a left-of-center audience, that's fine. But the least they could do is elevate the discussion beyond the crap we find at the National Review and the Weekly Standard and such.