Cockburn The Penetrator can't penetrate global warming denial nonsense?

I think I first read leftist Irish-American journalist Alexander Cockburn's writing back in the late 80's or early 90's when I sought out some alternative reading on politics and found several editions of The Nation at the library. Though at the time I wasn't very politically savvy and I didn't understand a lot of what he wrote, even then I knew he was a sharp mind and spoke some penetrating truths.

So in the last 5 or 6 years, as my political awareness has grown by leaps and bounds, Cockburn's become one of the maybe ten or fifteen political observers I most look for and pay attention to, especially on issues of foreign policy. I listen to a metric tonne of progressive / leftist / liberal / independent (you get it) podcasts, and when his name comes up, I make sure I listen. He's a great interview -- lively, funny and sometimes sarcastic. When I found out that he and his brother Patrick -- another excellent political journalist -- are uncles to yet another outstanding journalist, Laura Flanders, that made sense to me.

So when I first heard Cockburn's written several articles denying the human factor in global warming (as well as the severity of the problem) I had a moment of denial myself. I could hardly believe it.

Cockburn The Penetrator? Same guy who went to Baghdad and said "You'd think you'd see some cranes in the sky if there were any actual reconstruction going on"? Yeah, sure enough. Same likeable, irrepressible character.

Recently I heard Alexander Cockburn interviewed on Robert McChesney's program Media Matters and responded this way:

It still baffles me that a crack journalist like Alexander Cockburn so brushes aside the whole idea of global warming being caused by human activity. The way he glibly blows off the contributions of thousands of scientists and observers who say that the evidence overwhelmingly points to human activity... his flip assessment of the "hockey stick"... etc.

I've had a lot of respect for Cockburn (actually, both Cockburns and their niece Laura Flanders) and his intellectual authenticity for some time --- especially on foreign policy --- so the way he doesn't just respectfully differ with the adherents of human-caused global warming science but outright ridicules them makes me wonder. Whose theories does he embrace? Has he done his own scientific study on the subject? What's the deal with the sarcasm?

I'm not a scientist and I haven't done my own research, so I weigh the arguments based on what I hear from people like Al Gore, Thom Hartmann, Bernie Sanders, Tim Flannery and other informed observers who agree on the overwhelming evidence of the human hand in climate change.

Yes, I get the story from one side, by and large, but I hear interviews of and by these people and I don't think they're stacking the deck. In fact, I've heard Hartmann debate openly and fairly with a number of global warming deniers, and I've heard Gore's testimony before the Senate, and I can't believe Hartmann and others are either so hoodwinked or have such a dishonest agenda as Cockburn implies.

I appreciate Bob McChesney's silence when Cockburn makes these dismissive comments. He reminds me of Brian Lamb or Terry Gross at those moments, letting the guest's words stand or fall on their own. In this case it seemed to me the silence was deafening after Cockburn's scorn for thousands of honest scientists and thinkers fell with a shocking thud, like a David Horowitz "Islamofascism" speech at a gathering of Palestinian refugees.