Although the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in carbon dioxide levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy.

In magazine articles and essays I have described in fairly considerable detail, with input from the scientist Martin Hertzberg, that you can account for the current warming by a number of well-known factors having to do with the elliptical course of the Earth in its relationship to the sun, the axis of the Earth in the current period, and possibly the influence of solar flares. There have been similar warming cycles in the past, such as the Medieval Warming Period, when the warming levels were considerably higher than they are now.

Yet from left to right, the warming that is occurring today is taken as man-made, and many have made this opinion the central plank of their political campaigns. For reasons I find very hard to fathom, the environmental left movement has bought very heavily into the fantasy about anthropogenic global warming and the fantasy that humans can prevent or turn back the warming cycle.

This turn to climate catastrophism is tied into the decline of the left, and the decline of the left’s optimistic vision of altering the economic nature of things through a political program. The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice.

This is a fantasy. In truth, environmental catastrophism will, in fact, play into the hands of the sinister-as-always corporate interests. The nuclear industry is benefiting immeasurably from the current catastrophism. Last year, for example, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission sped up its licensing process, and there is an imminent wave of new nuclear plant building. Many in the nuclear industry see an opportunity to recover from the adverse publicity of Chernobyl in the story about carbon dioxide causing climate change.

More generally, climate catastrophism is leading to a re-emphasis of the power of the advanced industrial world, through its various trade mechanisms, to penalize Third World countries. For example, India has just produced an extremely cheap car, the Tata Nano, which will enable its poorer citizens to get about without having to load their entire family onto a bicycle. Greens have already attacked the car, and it won’t take long for the World Trade Organization and the advanced powers to start punishing India with a lot of missionary-style nonsense about its carbon emissions and so on.

The politics of climate change also have potential impacts on farmers. Third World farmers who don’t use seed strains or agricultural procedures sanctioned by the international ag corporations, major multilateral institutions, and banks controlled by the Western powers, will be sabotaged by attacks on their “excessive carbon footprint.”

Here in the West, the so-called “war on global warming” is reminiscent of medieval madness. You can now buy indulgences to offset your carbon guilt. If you fly, you give an extra 10 quid to British Airways; B.A. hands it on to some non-profit carbon-offsetting company, which sticks the money in its pocket and goes off for lunch.

But what is truly sinister about environmental catastrophism is that it diverts attention from hundreds and hundreds of serious environmental concerns that can be dealt with – starting, perhaps, with the nitrous oxide emissions from power plants. Here in California, if you drive upstate you can see the pollution from Los Angeles all up the Central Valley, a lot of it caused, ironically, by the sulfuric acid droplets from catalytic converters! The problem is that 20 or 30 years ago, the politicians didn’t want to take on the power companies, so they fixed their sights on penalizing motorists, who are less able to fight back.

Emissions from power plants could be dealt with now. You don’t need to have a world program called “Kyoto” to fix something like that. The Kyoto Accord must be one of the most reactionary political manifestos in the history of the world; it represents a horrible privileging of the advanced industrial powers over developing nations.

The marriage of environmental catastrophism and corporate interests is best captured in the figure of Al Gore. As a politician, he came to public light as a shill for two immense power schemes in the state of Tennessee: the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Oak Ridge Nuclear Laboratory. Gore is not, as he claims, a non-partisan green; he is influenced very much by his background. His arguments, many of which are based on grotesque science and shrill predictions, seem to me to be part of a political and corporate outlook.

In today’s political climate, it has become fairly dangerous for a young scientist or professor to step up and say: “This is all nonsense.” It is increasingly difficult to challenge the global warming consensus, on either a scientific or a political level. Academies can be incredibly cowardly institutions, and if one of their employees were to question the discussion of climate change he or she would be pulled to one side and told: “You’re threatening our funding and reputation – do you really want to do that?” I don’t think that we should underestimate the impact that kind of informal pressure can have on people’s willingness to think thoroughly and speak openly.

One way critics are silenced is by accusing them of ignoring “peer-reviewed science.” Yet oftentimes, peer reviews are nonsense. As anyone who has ever put his nose inside a university will know, peer review is usually a mode of excluding the unexpected, the unpredictable, and the unrespectable, and forming a mutually back-scratching circle. Through the process of peer review, of certain papers nodded through by experts and others given a red cross, the controllers of the major scientific journals can include what they like and exclude what they don’t like. Peer review is frequently a way of controlling debate, even curtailing it.

Since I started writing essays challenging the global warming consensus and seeking to put forward critical alternative arguments, I have felt like the object of a witch-hunt. One individual who was once on the board of the Sierra Club has suggested I should be criminally prosecuted. A series of articles on climate change issues I wrote for The Nation elicited a level of hysterical outrage and affront that I found astounding – and I have a fairly thick skin, having been in the business of making unpopular arguments for many years.

There was a shocking intensity to their self-righteous fury, as if I had transgressed a moral as well as an intellectual boundary and committed blasphemy. I sometimes think to myself, “Boy, I’m glad I didn’t live in the 1450s,” because I would be out in the main square with a pile of wood around my ankles.

This experience has given me an understanding of what it must have been like in darker periods to be accused of being a blasphemer, of the summary and unpleasant consequences that can bring. There is an element of witch-hunting in climate catastrophism. That is clear in the use of the word “denier” to label those who question claims about anthropogenic climate change. “Climate change denier” is, of course, meant to evoke the figure of the Holocaust denier.

In my forthcoming book, A Short History of Fear, I explore the link between fear-mongering and climate catastrophism. For example, alarmism about a population explosion is being revisited through the climate issue. Population alarmism goes back as far as Malthus, of course; and in the environmental movement there has always been a very sinister strain of Malthusianism. This is particularly the case in the U.S. where there has never been as great a socialist challenge as there was in Europe. I suspect, however, that even in Europe, what remains of socialism has itself turned into a degraded Malthusian outlook. It seems clear to me that climate catastrophism represents a new form of the politics of fear.

I think people have had enough of peer-reviewed science and experts telling them what they can and cannot think about climate change. Climate catastrophism, the impact it is having on people’s lives and on debate, can only really be challenged through rigorous open discussion and through a “battle of ideas,” as the conference I spoke at in London last year described it. I hope my book is a salvo in that battle.

Alexander Cockburn is a columnist for The Nation and a co-editor of the political newsletter CounterPunch.