Alexander Cockburn (writing in the Nation) has become the latest contrarian-de-jour, sallying forth with some rather novel arithmetic to show that human-caused global warming is nothing to be concerned about.

This would be unworthy of comment in most cases, but Cockburn stands out as one of only a few left-wing contrarians, as opposed to the more usual right-wing variety. Casual readers may have thought this is a relatively recent obsession of his (3 articles and responses over the last month), however, Cockburn has a fairly long history of ill-informed commentary on the subject of global warming.

Here’s a sample of Cockburn’s latest rant (“We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. The claque endorsing what is now dignified as “the mainstream theory” of global warming stretches all the way from radical greens through Al Gore to George W. Bush…”)