Robert W. Endlich provides the back story on the flimsy complaints from kids suing the US government for the right to a stable climate. He writes at Master Resource Sixty Minutes on the Kiddie Climate Lawsuit: Hypocrisy Squared. Some excerpts in italics wth my bolds to encourage you to go read the whole article.
Plaintiff #1: Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana, Oregon
Her activist parents stopped government from managing the forests. Now she blames wildfires on “climate change.”
Figure 1. Left line graph: timber sold and harvested 1905-2016. Right bar graph: dollars spent on firefighting. The red arrows represent the year 1995. The green arrow shows when the Pacific Decadal Oscillation shifted from its warm and wet period in the US West, to its cold and dry period.
Now a college student, Kelsey Cascadia Rose Juliana tells us that the often-severe forest fires that plague the Pacific Northwest are a result of “Climate Change,” because, “that’s what the scientists tell us.” That this might have been a result of the fuel buildups when logging was stopped in the Spotted Owl case has not entered her head; nor the thought processes of Sixty Minutes’ producers; nor the thinking of scientists, teachers, professors and politicians who “taught” her and Sixty Minutes about fires and climate change.
Although many other scientists could have explained the clear link between fuel buildups and massive conflagrations in forests where timber thinning and cutting are prohibited, they were not consulted.
Juliana says, “We have everything to lose if we don’t act on climate change.”
Evidently, no one ever told Juliana it is just as impossible to “stop climate change” as it is to “stop continental drift,” stop the progression of tides, or stop sea level changes and land subsidence. All of these are a result of natural environmental processes that are (or once were) taught in basic Earth Science courses – processes that were carelessly or deliberately left out of the reporting by CBS reporter Steve Croft and CBS Producer Dragon Mihaljevic.
Figure 2. Temperature time series from the GISP2 ice core, showing the past 5,000 years of temperatures with Minoan, Roman, Medieval and Late 20th Century warm periods highlighted [Source]. The likelihood that humans can “stop climate change” that is a natural aspect of Earth’s environment should be obvious.
Plaintiff #2: Levi Draheim, Florida
He lives on a barrier island off the hurricane-prone Atlantic coast. The government is supposed to protect him from storms and rising sea level that have always eroded coastal islands.
Figure 4. Graphic showing the features of Barrier Island Systems from the University of Texas showing they are characteristic of flat coastal plains. That Sixty Minutes should not recognize the peril of exposing permanent resident children to life on barrier islands seems studied ignorance of obvious environmental hazards.
Plaintiff #3: Jayden Foytlin, Louisiana
Her home was flooded in Rayne, LA, about 20 miles from the Gulf Coast and a mere 20 feet above sea level. She claims a right against rainstorms, even though her home is called the “Frog Capital of the World,” with numerous houses elevated on blocks.
Climate Kid 15-year-old Jayden Foytlin, from southern Louisiana, found her home flooded in August 2016. Mr. Mihaljevic speaks of flooding rains in southern Louisiana as somehow an unexpected new phenomenon that young Jayden suddenly experienced when she woke up and “put her foot into climate change.” Not into a frequent weather event on the Louisiana Coast, but into “climate change.” It’s not very subtle propaganda, but most viewers must be prepared, or they will miss it.
She lives in Rayne, LA, about 20 miles from the Gulf Coast and a mere 20 feet above sea level. This is very flat outer coastal plain with poor drainage. That she has no clue that flat-lying land adjacent to the Gulf Coast would be subject to flooding when a hurricane strikes and some 16 inches of rain can occur within two days – is an artifact of inadequate education, and lack of self-awareness that might be attributable to her tender years.
That a fifteen-year old student would have no knowledge of even the possibility of flooding during a hurricane (or spring melts after heavy snows in the Upper Mississippi Basin) strains credulity. But perhaps her expectations were shaped by the 12-year absence of any Category 3-5 hurricane making US landfall between Wilma (2005) and Harvey (2017) – virtually her entire perceptive lifetime.
That the Sixty Minutes report makes it seem as if sixteen inches of rain within two days is somehow related to climate change, rather than a result of the climate and weather we have today, and have had for decades and centuries, is yet another willful study in ignorance by the talking heads seen on MSM and CBS.
Just a few minutes of internet searching will uncover substantial data on extreme rainfall events in the USA. Some are displayed below in Figure 5. Ironies of History, Concerns for America’s Future
The irony here is too rich not to discuss. Juliana’s parents and environmentalists, along with politicians and courts teamed up a few decades ago to file lawsuits that blocked timber sales and cutting, thereby causing a gradually enormous buildup of diseased, dying and dead trees, brush and other highly inflammable materials.
Huge, deadly conflagrations inevitably ensued – and now the same parties blame climate change for the infernos, enlist their (indoctrinated) children as sympathetic plaintiffs, focus on the kids’ deep fears, and sue fossil fuel producers for damages. Is there such a thing as criminal hypocrisy?
I have no great hopes that lawyers and courts will come up with the right answer.
We need only look at the results of the Massachusetts vs. EPA lawsuit, which was filed by Massachusetts based on the notion that sea level rise is caused by or accelerated by our use of fossil fuels. For “authority,” the U.S. Supreme Court accepted a political document, the IPCC Working Group I report, which considers only human factors in climate change and now asserts that only humans are causing climate change, with natural factors relegated to the sidelines as essentially irrelevant.
That such ignorance, stupidity and anti-science are now central elements of our legal system is simply breathtaking.
Indeed, had EPA attorneys been competent, and had they presented appropriate sea level data and other real-world evidence during trial and on appeal, the Supreme Court could have examined data like that from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA’s) tide gage in Boston harbor. As Figure 8 illustrates, the rate of sea level rise is essentially unchanged over the past century and longer, even as CO2 levels climbed, then accelerated, in their rate of increase, especially since the 1960s.
Carbon dioxide from burning hydrocarbon fuels and human exhalations is the same colorless, odorless gas that plants use, in combination with energy from sunlight, to create carbohydrates. It is not a pollutant, but the elixir of life. Humans, animals and plant life are all carbon-based life forms.
The Supreme Court was just as wrong in its 2007 Massachusetts vs. EPA decision as it was in its infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision – which held that no “negro whose ancestors were imported into [the United States] and sold as slaves” could be an American citizen, and therefore had no standing to sue in federal court. Dred Scott, it can be argued, eventually led to the Civil War.
I have no great hope that today’s Supreme Court or lower courts can be depended on to arrive at the right answer when it comes to science in this case. I just hope cases like the “climate kids” Juliana vs the USA will not cause such energy, economic, societal and political disruption that our nation becomes embroiled in another civil war over our energy, livelihoods, living standards, and whether courts and bureaucrats will have the right to dictate Americans’ rights and choices in these matters.
Robert W. Endlich served as Weather Officer in the USAF for 21 Years. From 1984 to 1993, he provided toxic corridor and laser propagation support to the High Energy Laser Systems Test Facility at White Sands Missile Range. He has published in the technical literature and worked as software test engineer at New Mexico State University. Endlich was elected to Chi Epsilon Pi, the national Meteorology Honor Society, while an Air Force Basic Meteorology student at Texas A&M University. He has a bachelor’s degree in Geology from Rutgers University and a master’s in Meteorology from the Pennsylvania State University.
“The lesson is clear. We don’t have to choose between growing our economy and caring for our environment. By embracing innovation over regulation, we canbenefit both. And THAT is the heart of our New Energy Realism.”
At yesterday’s CERA conference, DOE Secretary Rick Perry did not quite come out and say it. But it’s a fossil-fuel world. Some bones were thrown out for the politically correct, economically incorrect energies (grid wind and solar, as well as batteries/electric vehicles), but make no mistake. The philosophy of the US Department of Energy is let the US-led global boom in oil, natural gas, and coal continue.
Oil, gas, and coal? Yes …. Ethanol? Not mentioned…. Domestic production? Yes…. Domestic usage? Yes…. Exports? Yes….. Regulation? No …. Sacrifice? No…. Pessimism? No.
Climate change? No mention….
Read between the lines. The fossil fuel boom is great for America and the world. Peak Oil and “the limits to growth” are refuted. Energy reliability (versus intermittency) is key. Heavy regulation of oil and gas is failure. New regulation and pain are unnecessary.
And you don’t even need to mention the Green New Deal.
The Obama era’s creeping radicalism to “keep fossil fuels in the ground” is being reversed. The CO2 mitigation window for the activists is closing rapidly, with the world energy market leaving the Paris accord in shambles. It’s a fossil-fuel world.
Excerpts from his speech follow:
“Just the other day the Meridian Spirit embarked from Sabine Pass with an LNG shipment to India. And just last week a LNG tanker left Cove Point, Maryland with its first shipment. These shipments underscore the Trump Administration’s desire to export more natural resources and innovation technologies to the world.”
“DOE [recently] met with producers and midstream developers to identify the next generation of technologies to unlock more of our nation’s resources. Whether carbon capture, developing new solar technology or stepping up efforts on storage, there is a tremendous amount of optimism in the energy sector and for obvious reasons.”
The Meridian Spirit loading a cargo for India’s Gail at Sabine Pass LNG. (Cheniere)
“Energy security is a roadmap to economic prosperity.”
“But today, we have the opportunity to reaffirm a new direction which I call the New Energy Realism. This ‘new energy realism’ rests on the fact that America is in the midst of incredible energy progress.”
“Due to a cascade of technological breakthroughs driven by innovation, America is producing abundant, affordable energy from a wider range of sources than we ever thought possible … and we are using this energy more cleanly and more efficiently as well.”
“… our successes refute old myths, debunk false choices, and transcend limitations, pointing the way to global energy security and shared prosperity. This dramatic progress is a decisive break from the 1970s, when America began pursuing a fundamentally flawed energy policy for which we paid dearly.”
“Those who believed in it claimed that the days of energy abundance were over. It was said we had a permanent energy shortage. It was said that even if we discovered new reserves, they would be too costly to produce or impossible to use without harming the environment. And the solution proposed was a bleak one — draconian regulation of energy.”
“Truth be told, we had no shortage of energy. What we had was a shortage of imagination and a loss of confidence in our ability to innovate. Clearly, the naysayers weren’t realists at all… they were pessimists blinded to the reality of America’s innovative capabilities. And unfortunately, this blindness ruled in one of the least innovative places on earth….Washington, D.C.”
“In a place that so obviously favored regulation over innovation, it was no surprise when the government used one thumb to promote a favorite technology and the other hand to regulate those they didn’t like.”
“In states like Texas, taxes were cut and regulations kept simple and transparent, giving people both the freedom and the incentive to innovate. And with innovation came a revolution in energy technology.”
“As a former Texas governor, I’m proud that the major breakthroughs in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling – leading to our historic natural gas boom — began right here in this state.”
“From fossil fuels to renewables…supply rose…costs fell…efficiencies increased…and diversity blossomed. And something else happened as well. Our environment did not become worse. By nearly any measure, it became better, even as our economy expanded and energy development reached new heights.”
“The lesson is clear. We don’t have to choose between growing our economy and caring for our environment. By embracing innovation over regulation, we can benefit both. And THAT is the heart of our New Energy Realism.”
“Over the past year, President Trump and his Administration have brought this realistic view to Washington… and we are seeing its benefits. He has cut taxes and reduced regulations by historic numbers, putting Washington squarely on the side of innovators and investors.”
“… this can only help the President’s plan to spur the construction of more infrastructure. Tax reductions will cut a major cost of doing business, while his proposal to reduce the permitting process to just two years will give investors the confidence to provide the necessary capital and communities visibility on project completion.”
“The President has also signed off on critical new pipelines. He has removed draconian oil-and-gas restrictions on responsible exploration, supported clean coal technologies, and seeks to reinvigorate civilian nuclear energy.
“America is now on the cusp of energy independence, but the President would like to go farther. He would like to share our energy bounty with the world and let the spirit of competition benefit consumers by providing more choices in the marketplace. Already, we are sharing our natural gas.”
“Last year, we became a net natural gas exporter. Today, we export LNG to 27 nations on five continents.”
“We are increasing our coal exports substantially. These exports rose by an estimated 61 percent last year over 2016, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Last August, the first shipment of Pennsylvania thermal coal bound for Ukraine left the Port of Baltimore. In the coming years, we will be exporting multiple fuels.”
“And not only that. We will export the same technologies that made us a clean, abundant, and diverse energy producer in the first place. By exporting our energy, we can free our friends and allies from fuel dependence on unfriendly nations.
“And by exporting our energy technology and know-how, we can help developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia create their own energy renaissance and harness more energy to improve the lives of their citizens.”
“And that includes access to electricity. Over a billion people live without it. We want to reduce that number substantially in the coming years.”
“Now some aren’t happy with us exporting this technology because they oppose most energy production, specifically that of fossil fuels, which comprise 80 percent of world energy usage and continue to produce carbon emissions. I fear that this is the mindset of the Paris Agreement.”
“And while studies show that even by the year 2040, fossil fuels will still comprise 77 percent of world energy use, I believe that continued technological breakthroughs will help us defy this prediction.”
“What are the people without electricity supposed to do? Remember what we have done through technology…..we have not only produced more fossil energy with it; we’ve made that energy cleaner.”
“Since we’re making coal cleaner and since our technology can affordably extract massive amounts of lower-emissions natural gas, we’re likely to continue to reduce the overall emissions of our fossil fuels. That, again, is the New Energy Realism.”
“Thanks to the amazing power of human ingenuity and innovation, we don’t have to tolerate the intolerable…we don’t have to accept hideous sacrifices that harm the poorest among us.”
“And so let us reject the old energy pessimism – and embrace the New Energy Realism…. We would welcome – and help lead – a global alliance of countries willing to help make fossil fuels cleaner, rather than abandoning them. This will help nations diversify their energy supply…a key to achieving energy security.”
“And from that energy security… comes prosperity: affordability, economic growth…rising opportunities…optimism…and, most importantly, the freedom for each individual to pursue and achieve their dreams.”
“Combining opportunity with the freedom to design your own energy future, will enable the production of more energy from more sources, more affordably, and in a cleaner way than it ever could have in freedom’s absence.”
“It is by embracing this New Energy Realism that we will all move toward greater energy security and a brighter, more prosperous future. Let all nations embrace it – and the spirit of imagination and innovation that drives it – for their own sake and for the sake of the world.”
Spencer Walrath writes March 12, 2019 at Energy In Depth. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
(Left) New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced her office’s lawsuit against Exxon for climate fraud. October 24, 2018.
(Right) Attorney General of New York, Letitia James took over January 6, 2019 and has opened a civil investigation into President Donald Trump’s business dealings.
The New York Attorney General’s Office (OAG) is refusing to comply with ExxonMobil’s discovery requests even after the New York Supreme Court ruled the company could proceed with discovery related to the AG’s investigation of its climate change disclosures. The company is seeking documents that would support its allegation that the OAG is pursuing its investigation in bad faith.
Since the OAG initiated its investigation into ExxonMobil more than three years ago, its arguments have shifted multiple times, as each of the allegations of fraud has lacked evidence. However, in addition to highlighting the questionable legal agenda, recent court filings demonstrate how the OAG has methodically denied ExxonMobil’s discovery requests in an effort to delay the exercise, possibly in the hope that the OAG can convince the judge to dismiss the company’s defenses.
Right to Discovery Upheld by New York Supreme Court
Justice Barry Ostrager ruled in February that the OAG could file a motion to dismiss ExxonMobil’s defenses, but that in the meantime, “Exxon Mobil is privileged to pursue discovery on its defenses.”
“Civil litigants may not avoid their discovery obligations by challenging the legal viability of an adversary’s claims,” ExxonMobil writes in one letter to the OAG. “Therefore, ExxonMobil maintains that OAG’s objections are improper to the extent they are predicated on a legal challenge to ExxonMobil’s affirmative defenses. OAG may not credibly withhold documents responsive to the Affirmative Defense Requests.”
The OAG’s efforts to hinder ExxonMobil’s right to discovery stand in stark contrast to the actions of the defendant. For instance, the OAG claims that documents requested by ExxonMobil are protected by various privileges, “without identifying each document withheld and the basis for invoking any privilege,” according to one letter from ExxonMobil. In another letter, the company writes that the OAG’s reluctance to turn these documents over suggests that certain privilege assertions appear to be “facially dubious.”
Conversely, ExxonMobil has provided the OAG with more than 2,800 pages of privilege logs. In fact, throughout the entirety of this investigation, ExxonMobil has turned over more than four million pages of documents; so many pages that they would stand taller than the Empire State Building if stacked on top of each other.
New York’s Conflicting Statements
In letters to senior officials in the OAG, ExxonMobil refutes the legal basis of numerous discovery objections and highlight inconsistencies and contradictions made by the state’s top law enforcement office.
A prime example of New York’s attempts to stonewall the company is their failure to provide documents regarding their communications with third parties. According to one letter, ExxonMobil’s lawyers had phone call with the OAG in November during which the OAG denied conducting any “Third-Party Interviews,” stating that they “emphatically and unequivocally informed ExxonMobil that no such interviews had taken place.” However, in a letter written just two weeks later, the OAG contradicted its previous claim, noting that “OAG did communicate with third parties in the course of the investigation” and that it would “respond appropriately to any document requests that Exxon propounds” seeking “notes associated with those communications.”
However, when ExxonMobil asked for the identities of third-parties the OAG communicated with, the OAG claimed that the requested information was shielded by various privileges and protections from disclosure – without articulating how “the mere identity of persons or entities it communicated with constitutes privileged information.” As ExxonMobil states in a letter sent at the end of January:
“Apparently, the clarified understanding OAG claimed it achieved roughly a month earlier vanished by the time OAG responded to our document requests…OAG’s attempt to deflect our document request on vagueness grounds lacks credibility.”
New York Seeks Protective Order
The evidence provided in the dueling letters between ExxonMobil and the New York Attorney General’s Office suggest that the OAG is hoping to run out the clock and convince Justice Ostrager to dismiss the company’s defenses before the OAG runs out of delaying tactics.
“Further delay smacks of gamesmanship and an effort to engage in trial by ambush,” the company’s lawyers wrote in a letter to the OAG.
In early March the OAG notified ExxonMobil of its intent to motion to dismiss the company’s defenses or ask for a protective order, adding that they were no longer obligated to comply with ExxonMobil’s discovery request while their motion is pending. The OAG adds that they intend to continue to collect and review documents in accordance with a severely reduced list of custodians and search terms they proposed to ExxonMobil back in February.
The Lancet joins other once-respected science journals falling into disrepute at the hands of alarmists. Alex Berezow writes at the American Council on Science and Health ‘The Lancet’ Has Gotten Really Weird.Excerpts in italics with my bolds. A footnote at the end provides a timetable for the Lancet’s demise.
The Lancet is a highly respected biomedical journal that rightly carries a lot of clout in the scientific community. That’s what makes its recent turn toward sensationalism and clickbait so incredibly odd.
We first noticed that something was strangely amiss in 2017 when the editor-in-chief of The Lancet praised Karl Marx in a bizarre editorial. The piece made multiple dubious claims, such as, “Medicine and Marxism have entangled, intimate, and respectable histories.” The 100 million (or so) graves of the victims of communism beg to differ.
Then, in 2018, The Lancet went on an ideological bender against alcohol. First, it hyped a study that purportedly showed that every additional glass of alcohol above roughly 5 per week decreases a person’s life expectancy by 15 to 30 minutes. Think about that for a minute. Many people around the world have a nightly glass of wine with dinner. In The Lancet’s opinion, that’s precisely two too many, and anyone who does that is slowly killing themselves.
When a scientist reaches an absurd conclusion, that should serve as a warning to take a closer look at the methodology, the data, or both. Instead, The Lancet decided to double down. Later that year, it published a study that declared that any alcohol whatsoever is bad for your health. Somebody, please notify the French.
This year, the weirdness continued. A paper in The Lancet argued that certain food experts should be banned from food policy discussions. (Of course, the experts that should be banned are any that are associated with industry, because industry = bad.) And then, The Lancet slandered surgeons, using shady statistics to blame them for killing millions of people every year. The study was so bad that our typically calm, cool, and collected Dr. Charles Dinerstein worried that his head would explode.
The Lancet on Twitter: The World Is Worse Now than Ever Before
Apparently, whoever is operating The Lancet’s Twitter feed said, “Hold my beer, and watch this.” Here is what the organization posted today:
The study itself may be fine, but The Lancet’s tweet about it is misleading at best. Disease, violence, and inequality threaten more adolescents than ever before. Really?
The statement is absurd on its face.Violence has decreased all over the world. The Medieval period was a particularly rough time to be alive. Not only were people dying of things like the Black Death (which killed 1/3 of Europe in the mid-1300’s), homicide rates were incredibly high. (See chart below from Our World in Data.)
As recently as the 20th Century, smallpox is thought to have killed 300-500 million people. Likewise, measles killed millions. But vaccines have prevented millions, if not billions, of deaths.
Inequality? Well, that’s getting better, too. Yes, in some places, the rich are getting richer, but in a lot of impoverished regions, the poor are getting richer. In fact, poverty has fallen from around 90% of the global population in 1820 to under 10% today. (See chart below from Our World in Data.)
Putting this all together, it’s easy to see that humanity has never had it better than in 2019. To quote The Beatles, “It’s getting better all the time.” So, what on Earth is The Lancet talking about?
The only possible explanation for the tweet is that the journal decided to ignore the indisputable trends and instead hyped absolute numbers. That’s extremely misleading in this case because there are more people on the planet now than ever before. (It would be like comparing the cost of a TV in 1960 versus 2019 without adjusting for inflation.) The data need to be standardized, which is why percentages are really the only honest way to do this analysis.
Of course, The Lancet knows this. They just chose to put out a sensationalist tweet, instead. That is troubling.
Footnote: Timetable of Lancet Demise
Lancet May 2015 Regarding health and climate, the Lancet published in May 2015 an evidence-based report Gasparrini et al: Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multicountry observational study. Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries. The findings, published in The Lancet, also reveal that deaths due to moderately hot or cold weather substantially exceed those resulting from extreme heat waves or cold spells.
Lancet June 2017 Lancet sets the facts aside in order to prostrate itself before the global warming altar. Lancet says in a press releaseThe Lancet Countdown—delivering on the promise of Paris The collaboration is therefore delighted to announce that Christiana Figueres will join as Chair of its High-Level Advisory Board. Much as she did with the Paris Agreement, Christiana Figueres will help guide the Lancet Countdown to maximise its impact and deliver on the promise of the Paris Agreement.
Christiana Figueres, chair of the Lancet Countdown’s high-level advisory board and former executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said, “The AR5 report lays bare the impact that climate change is having on our health today. It also shows that tackling climate change directly, unequivocally and immediately improves global health. It’s as simple as that.’’
Lancet January 2019 Lancet publishes Food in the Anthropocene:the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems.
Following environmental objectives by replacing animal-source foods with plant-based ones was particularly effective in high-income countries for improving nutrient levels, lowering premature mortality (reduction of up to 12% [95% CI 10–13] with complete replacement), and reducing some environmental impacts, in particular greenhouse gas emissions (reductions of up to 84%). However, it also increased freshwater use (increases of up to 16%) and had little effectiveness in countries with low or moderate consumption of animal-source foods.
Nutritional experts immediately took issue with Lancet’s claims: We all want to be healthy, and we need a sustainable way to feed ourselves without destroying our environment. The well-being of our planet and its people are clearly in jeopardy, therefore clear, science-based, responsible guidance about how we should move forward together is most welcome.
Unfortunately, we are going to have to look elsewhere for solutions, because the EAT-Lancet Commission report fails to provide us with the clarity, transparency and responsible representation of the facts we need to place our trust in its authors. Instead, the Commission’s arguments are vague, inconsistent, unscientific, and downplay the serious risks to life and health posed by vegan diets.
On March 1, 2019 the Ninth Circuit Court was hit with a coordinated deluge of briefs by “Friends of the Court” in support of continuing the kid’s lawsuit. As you will see from the names below, these are actually “Friends of Climate Crisis Inc.” who are fully aware that a dismissal of this case would be a mortal wound to their cash cow. In addition to various and sundry Big Green organizations (Sierra Club, Greenpeace, etc.) there are a distressing number of lawyers who are apparently blinded by climate ideology. More on that later. First the list of briefs dumped on the court March 1 from Climate Change Litigation
Brief of business amici curiae filed in support of plaintiffs-appellees.
Brief filed by Center for International Environmental Law and Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide—US in support of plaintiffs-appellees.
Brief filed by EarthRights International, Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife, and Union of Concerned Scientists in support of plaintiffs-appellees.
Brief of amici curiae environmental history professors filed in support of plaintiffs-appellees’ answering brief.
Brief of amici curiae Food & Water Watch, Inc., Friends of the Earth – US, and Greenpeace, Inc. in support of plaintiffs-appellees.
Brief filed by amicus curiae law professors.
Brief of Leagues of Women Voters filed in support of plaintiffs-appellees.
Brief of members of the United States Congress filed in support of plaintiffs-appellees.
Brief of amicus curiae Niskanen Center filed in support of plaintiffs-appellees.
Brief of amici curiae public health experts, public health organizations, and doctors filed in support of plaintiffs-appellees seeking affirmance.
Brief of amicus curiae Sierra Club filed in support of plaintiffs-appellees.
Brief of amicus curiae Sunrise Movement Education Fund filed.
Brief of amicus curiae Zero Hour on behalf of approximately 32,340 children and young people filed in support of plaintiffs-appellees.
Brief of amicus curiae International Lawyers for International Law filed in support of plaintiffs-appellees.
Now that is a impressive display of the multi-Trillion dollar industry whose skin is on the line in this legal gambit. Distressingly it seems the legal profession has joined the dash for climate cash, along with doctors, investment managers, and so on. A previous post (Kangaroo Klimate Kourt Ruling) gave a synopsis of the argument from the defendants (US Government) for dismissing on appeal the Juliana vs. US lawsuit. Here are excerpts in italics with my bolds from none other than law professors who are standing on their heads, twisting the law and logic in order to join this children’s crusade. The brief in its entirety is Amicus Curiae Law Professors
Amici law professors are of the view that Plaintiffs have pled legally cognizable causes of action under the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.
The Magna Carta produced the Carta de Foresta (Forest Charter) in 1217, which guaranteed the “liberties of the forest and free customs traditionally had, both within and without the royal forests,” and obliged all “to observe the liberties and customs granted in the Forest Charter.”
By way of the common law, the public trust doctrine passed to law in the United States through England and the Romans from natural law: “the following things are by natural law common to all – the air, running water, the sea and consequently the seashore.”
The Supreme Court in Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007), held that the very harms caused by climate change are constitutionally cognizable injury in fact traceable to U.S. policies that can be redressed by a federal court under Article III.
Plaintiffs have alleged and provided evidence of sufficient injury in fact that is fairly traceable to Defendants’ conduct and can be redressed by the court.
The emissions for which Defendants are alleged to be responsible, and their direct effects, far exceed those in Bellon, and even those in Massachusetts v. EPA.
Administrative Procedure Act is not jurisdictional and there is no need for litigants to pursue constitutional claims under it.
Rather than violating separation of powers, the district court’s assertion of jurisdiction over Plaintiffs’ Fifth Amendment claims implicates the core function of the federal courts in our system of separation of powers: to determine the meaning and scope of constitutionally protected fundamental rights. This is, essentially, the power to say what the law is, a power that has been allocated to the federal judicial department since Marbury v. Madison and repeated ever since.
The liberty clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth amendments include interests of similar fundamental importance to the right to a stable climate system asserted here.
The District Court and Plaintiffs are correct that an unstable climate system can adversely affect many profound extensions of liberty, including occupation, education, family, food, shelter, travel, drinking water, residence, and relationships.
The climate context of this case makes it all the more amenable to judicial resolution. The constitution protects what is of fundamental importance and what cannot be relegated to protection in the political branches alone. A stable climate system satisfies both of these, arguably more than anything else in history. Protection against the degradation of the environment is precisely the kind of thing that the political branches are least likely to be able to protect: it requires long-term thinking for the benefit of those who have no political voice.
Plaintiffs have pled constitutionally cognizable claims under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment, again for three reasons: (1) The Fifth Amendment encompasses Plaintiffs’ claim that government action has deprived them of a constitutionally-cognizable liberty interest in a stable climate system; (2) Plaintiffs’ due process claim for government inaction falls within the “statecreated danger” exception to government immunity; (3) Plaintiffs have also pled a constitutionally cognizable equal protection claim under the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.
Lastly, the logical extension of the Defendants’ arguments would virtually immunize government action from judicial review, and therefore should be rejected.
Summary
Of course this brief is written by lawyers who share the suppositions of “consensus” climate scientists like those working with IPCC. Lawyers argue from authorities listed at the beginning of their briefs, those being decided cases setting some kind of precedent relevant to the case at hand. The scientific proof is not questioned, it is assumed as a social proof. In the above brief, 87 law professors agree that everyone knows extreme weather is caused by people burning fossil fuels, which will destroy our planet unless the federal government stops us.
Postscript:
Note also the sad irony of members of Congress filing a brief looking to offload their responsibility onto the courts, and agreeing that Judges should make laws rather than acts passed by elected representatives.
This post summarizes a useful set of categories for positions on global warming/climate change that are advocated in the public square. H/T Richard Drake for pointing me to an extensive and illuminating discussion by Edward Ring at American Greatness The Politics, Science, and Politicized Science of Climate Change. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
Climate alarm shouldn’t be a hard sell, and it isn’t. The horror inspired by natural conflagrations taps into primal, instinctual fears; when vividly imagining terrifying acts of nature, even the most hardened skeptic might have a moment of pause.
And every time there’s a hurricane, or a flood, or a wildfire, we’re reminded again by the consensus establishment; we caused this. We are to blame. And nothing, absolutely nothing, is too high a price to pay to stop it.
But rarely explored, and difficult to find, is data on how much it costs to adapt to climate change versus how much it would cost to stop climate change. Equally hard to find is information about the extent to which climate change might actually benefit humanity.
Political Categorizing of Today’s Eco Intellectuals
In 2014, Matthew Nisbet, a professor of communications at Northeastern University, in a paper titled “Disruptive ideas: public intellectuals and their arguments for action on climate change”made an interesting attempt to classify influential activists and experts on climate change into three categories: Ecological Activists, Smart Growth Reformers, and Ecomodernists. The focus of Nisbet’s analysis was how these public intellectuals “establish their authority, spread their ideas, and shape public discourse.”
While retaining Nisbet’s framework, it is useful to speculate as to how each of the mass political ideologies and major political movements in 2019 America would align with each of Nisbet’s three categories. After all, how “climate action” is implemented, now and in the future, arguably is the most significant variable determining how Americans and everyone else in the world will cope with challenges relating to energy development, economic growth, technology deployment, individual freedom, property rights, national sovereignty, international cooperation, and, of course, environmental protection.
Click on image to enlarge.
Making this leap, a plausible match for each of Nisbet’s categories would be as follows: The “Ecological Activists” are mostly socialists, the “Smart Growth Reformers” are mostly liberals, and the “Ecomodernists” are mostly libertarians. It is important to reiterate that this only roughly overlaps with the influencers Nisbet has characterized in his three groups. Moreover, there is a fourth important category that Nisbet ignored (or dismissed), which might be defined as practical skeptics. More on that later. Here is Nisbet’s chart depicting his three categories of environmental influencers:
Socialist Environmentalists
The first of Nisbet’s three categories are the Ecological Activists. Based on Nisbet’s description, their political ideology is most likely socialist. This group has the most negative perspective on climate change, seeing it as a consequence of capitalism run amok. They argue that the carrying capacity of planet earth has reached its limit and that only by radically transforming society can the planet and humanity avoid catastrophe.
This group is Malthusian in outlook,and the solutions they advocate—returning to small scale, decentralized infrastructure, “smaller scale, locally owned solar, wind and geothermal energy technologies, and organic farming”—are not practical or even internally consistent for several reasons.
“Ecological Activists argue on behalf of a fundamental reconsideration of our worldviews, aspirations, and life goals, a new consciousness spread through grassroots organizing and social protest that would dramatically re‐organize society, decentralize our politics, reverse globalization, and end our addiction to economic growth,” Nisbet writes. It must be a very selective subset of globalization the Ecological Activists wish to reverse, however, because this most radical of Nisbet’s cohorts tend to be the same people who favor open borders and the erasure of national governments. Can they truly believe small communities will constitute what remains of governance when nation-states and multinational corporations wither away?
But in their commitment to achieving 100 percent decentralized, renewable energy, the Ecological Activists make their greatest departure from reality.
Not mentioned in Nisbet’s paper, but easily fitting into the Ecological Activists category, are the “deep greens,” a group typified by the “Deep Green Resistance.” They reject “green technology and renewable energy,” both in terms of its ability to meet the total energy requirements of modern civilization, and in terms of how “green” it actually is. Their solution is to “create a life-centered resistance movement that will dismantle industrial civilization by any means necessary.”
Most Ecological Activists believe in phasing out the use of fossil fuel in a manner they perceive to be as benign as possible. But to achieve this, and unlike the Smart Growth Reformers, the Ecological Activists do not believe in market-based solutions. They support carbon rationing and carbon taxes as the means both to curtail the use of fossil fuel and to fund development and deployment of renewable energy solutions.
In Congress today, the Ecological Activists would be most represented by the Democratic Socialists, led by their media-anointed leader, Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-N.Y.). The policies promoted by Ocasio-Cortez and her allies in the “Green New Deal,” in its undiluted form, read like a socialist manifesto.
It is impossible to catalog the profusion of activist groups and activist websites now promoting the Green New Deal. There are too many. But almost invariably they perceive “social justice,” socialist economics, environmentalism, and abolition of fossil fuels as interlinked goals sharing common values. One of the explicitly political online promoters of a congressional Green New Deal is the Sunrise Movement. The group claims already to have secured the endorsements of 45 members of Congress, along with hundreds of environmentalist organizations.
But how can Americans possibly expect to replace conventional energy with more expensive renewable energy, at the same time as they pay additional trillions to secure the “economic rights” for everyone living in the United States? The very idea is so preposterous it is difficult to take the socialist environmentalist movement seriously. That would be a mistake.
Liberal Environmentalists
If the Ecological Activists tend to lean socialist, the second of Nisbet’s groups, the Smart Growth Reformers, appear to be conventional liberals. They are more business-friendly, and while they agree that a climate catastrophe is inevitable without dramatic changes in policy, they believe “market forces” can be harnessed to change the energy economy of the world. Where the Ecological Activists support carbon taxes and carbon rationing, the Smart Growth Reformers support carbon trading.
The best known of the so-called Smart Growth Reformers is former Vice President Al Gore, who has enjoyed a career since 2000 that, if anything, eclipses his accomplishments as a politician. In addition to producing Oscar-winning documentaries on climate change, writing bestsellers on the topic, and receiving a Nobel Prize for his proselytizing on the issue, he has become fabulously wealthy. As a co-founder of Generation Investment Management, with over $18 billion in assets under management, and as a senior partner at the elite venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Gore falls firmly into the pro-business political camp,along with plenty of other liberal democrats. A likely Gore ally among the Smart Growth Reformers would be U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose net worth is estimated at $29 million.
It isn’t hard to see why emissions trading would appeal to pro-business liberals, although embracing this terminology requires a very specific sort of definition for the phrase “pro-business.” Why enact a carbon tax, where only the government gets to be the middleman, when with emissions trading, you can engage the global financial community, and create completely new categories of economics, as armies of accountants, economists, environmental scientists, and myriad additional, highly-credentialed ancillary experts engage in cradle to cradle assessments of carbon molecules?
Emissions-trading schemes pose all kinds of problems. Think of the subjectivity inherent in measuring significant variables, the stupefying complexity, the huge, nonproductive overhead, consisting of a veritable army of bureaucrats, consultants, experts, and, of course, financial middlemen. Or consider the vast potential for corruption, or just multiplying schemes that turn out to do more harm than good, saturate the prospect of emissions trading from end to end.
A recent ignoble example would be how carbon emissions trading in the European Union funded palm oil plantations. To purchase the right to emit more CO2 than their allotment, European companies bought “carbon credits,” investing in “carbon neutral” biofuel plantations in Indonesia, Malaysia, and elsewhere in the tropics. Thousands of square miles of tropical rainforest, valuable wildlife habitat, were incinerated to accommodate the new market for biodiesel made from palm oil. By the time the Europeans realized what they were doing, it was too late. Just ask the orangutans of Borneo, if there are any left.
The “smart growth reformers” advocate more than just carbon trading, but it is difficult to overstate its centrality to their much broader agenda. And it’s important to emphasize that the scope of its implementation will go far beyond regulating energy. Because there is a “carbon footprint” to virtually every development—all housing, all infrastructure, all transportation; not just power plants, but bridges, dams, water and wastewater treatment plants, solid waste management, the energy grid, inland waterways, levees, ports, public parks, roads, rail, transit, schools, every durable good, every gadget, everything.
In the hands of a creative carbon accountant, there isn’t any human activity that might not have earnings potential, taxation potential, or become a target for regulation. Government agencies view this as a gold mine. Code enforcement departments and planning commissions will become profit centers—so long as people are forced by law and ordinance to use less and consume less. And to enable, monitor, and enforce the great ratcheting down: the internet of things.
Libertarian Environmentalists
It may not be entirely accurate to claim that most Ecomodernists are libertarians. While libertarians appear to overlap more with the Ecomodernists than with Smart Growth Reformers or Ecological Activists, there are plenty of libertarians who have been seduced by the “market-based” solutions of emissions trading. Moreover, according to Nisbet’s paradigm, Ecomodernists “argue for ‘clumsy’ policy approaches across levels of society, government investment in energy technologies and resilience strategies,” hardly something you would expect from a Libertarian. Nonetheless, many self-proclaimed Ecomodernists identify as libertarians. One of the public intellectuals who is cited by Nisbet as an Ecomodernist is Michael Shellenberger. An apt choice, as Shellenberger co-authored “An Ecomodernist Manifesto” along with 17 other notables.
The Seven Key Sections of the Ecomodernist Manifesto
(1) Humanity has flourished over the past two centuries.
(2) Even as human environmental impacts continue to grow in the aggregate, a range of long-term trends is today driving significant decoupling of human well-being from environmental impacts.
(3) The processes of decoupling described above challenge the idea that early human societies lived more lightly on the land than do modern societies.
(4) Plentiful access to modern energy is an essential prerequisite for human development and for decoupling development from nature.
(5) We write this document out of deep love and emotional connection to the natural world.
(6) We affirm the need and human capacity for accelerated, active, and conscious decoupling. Technological progress is not inevitable. Decoupling environmental impacts from economic outputs is not simply a function of market-driven innovation and efficient response to scarcity.
(7)We offer this statement in the belief that both human prosperity and an ecologically vibrant planet are not only possible but also inseparable.
Ecomodernists may not all embrace the libertarian desire to let the unfettered free market solve every challenge facing humanity (note point No. 6), but perhaps in a more important sense they are very libertarian, in their commitment to encouraging a free market of ideas.
All in all, the Ecomodernist category is an intriguing way of gathering together an eclectic group of thinkers. Also included on Nisbet’s list of Ecomodernists is Roger Pielke Jr., a political science professor at the University of Colorado and another co-author of the “Ecomodernist Manifesto.” Pielke’s situation is one that many Ecomodernists (and Practical Skeptics) face, he is condemned by the “consensus” community merely because he is occasionally willing to criticize their work.
Where Pielke is attacked for exposing politically motivated hyperbole that violates the integrity of the scientists that produce it or condone it, Danish economist Bjorn Lomborg (who is not on Nisbet’s list of Ecomodernists but perhaps should be) is attacked for exposing the deeply flawed economic logic underlying many of the most urgently promoted policies designed to mitigate climate change.
What Pielke, Lomborg, and many others have in common is their overt, unequivocal agreement with the fundamental premise—Earth is warming, and anthropogenic CO2 is the cause. And yet they are at times marginalized because they question certain critical assumptions or conclusions relating to that premise. As these two examples show, the twin hearts of the climate change movement—the science and the economics—have hardened against the voices of contrarians. Along with being eclectic, contrarian might be another widely shared quality of the Ecomodernists.
The Ecomodernist, or, if you will, the Libertarian Environmentalist, as a category, is elusive and heterogeneous. These qualities make its output less predictable, its potential greater. It is best defined simply as not belonging to the two preceding categories, nor willing to cross the red line into overtly questioning the theory of anthropogenic global warming. It has much to offer.
Practical Skeptics
The failure of Nisbet to include climate skeptics as a fourth category may be a forgivable oversight on his part, because climate skeptics almost have been erased from public dialogue. As a result, it makes sense that Nisbet would not consider the members of this group to qualify as influential public intellectuals.
Another reason Nisbet may not have included climate skeptics would be because he was analyzing differing approaches by “public intellectuals arguing for action on climate change.” It’s certainly debatable, but understandable to assert that climate skeptics are arguing for no action on climate change. Equally likely, of course, was that Nisbet chose to avoid the opprobrium he would invite if he legitimized climate skeptics by including them in his analysis.
Climate skeptics have been demonized and ostracized by the socialist and liberal environmentalists. The Ecomodernists, for the most part, scrupulously avoid allowing their laudable contrarianism to overflow into questioning the theory of anthropogenic global warming.
Practical Skeptics have a range of positions that earn them the “denier” label, and everything that comes with that: suppression of their work, savaging of their reputations, and banishment from the public square. Some of them, such as “Climate Etc.” host Judith Curry, former professor and chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, maintain that while anthropogenic CO2 is contributing to global warming, the likely amount of warming is far less than what alarmingly is being projected. Curry has also criticized the growing calls by congressional Democrats to criminalize the free speech of skeptic scientists, by attempting to expose their links, if any, to fossil fuel corporations.
One of the most distinguished, and most demonized, of living climate skeptics is Richard Lindzen, an American atmospheric physicist who is a senior fellow with the Cato Institute. Until his retirement in 2013, Lindzen was the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen was one of the early participants in the early IPCC reports on climate change, but became disillusioned because he perceived the organization had become politicized.
Lindzen’s specific criticisms of conventional climate change theories are many: He acknowledges there are moderate warming trends, but that it is merely our emergence from the “little ice age” of the 19th century. He claims that if the earth were warming significantly, extreme weather would diminish, not increase. He questions the assumptions built into the computer programs that model global climate and produce predictions. He believes predicted warming is overstated. He states that the natural feedback mechanisms governing the global climate have offsetting impacts, and that if they did not, the earth would have experienced catastrophic warming eons ago.
There are dozens of credible climate skeptics, credible enough, that is, to deserve a place on panels at climate conferences or congressional testimony, editorial pages, scientific journals, and press coverage, on what are arguably the most consequential policy decisions of modern times. Along with Curry and Lindzen, other skeptical scientists include Roy Spencer, Fred Singer, and Anastasios Tsonis along with many others who are keeping their heads down.
Lindzen has said that many climate scientists will criticize alarmist pronouncements in whatever may be their specific area of expertise. A glaciologist will challenge a press release predicting an ice-free Himalayan mountain range by 2035. A meteorologist will challenge a press release asserting an increase in extreme weather. But none of them will take the further step of criticizing the overall “consensus.”
There remains a handful of organizations that will provide equal time, or even promote, climate skeptics. They include Cato, AEI, The Heartland Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. But these scientists, these online reporters, and these nonprofit organizations are vastly outgunned by most of the political establishment (with the major exception of the Trump administration), the media and entertainment communities, prestigious scientific journals, the K-12 public education system, higher education, local, state, federal, and international government bureaucracies, virtually every major corporate or financial player, and spectacularly wealthy nonprofit educational foundations including powerful environmental pressure groups.
But scientific “consensus” does not constitute scientific truth. Just ask Galileo. And the overwhelming institutional consensus on a course of action, even if there is such a thing, does not mean that course of action is the optimal course of action.
Solutions Require Renewed Debate
Even if anthropogenic CO2 emissions are driving the planet headlong into an apocalyptic nightmare, climate skeptics should be heard. Because as it is the scope of acceptable debate is relentlessly narrowing. Should Bjorn Lomborg’s valuable economic analysis be ignored, simply because he’s willing to point out the absurdity of spending trillions for the remote possibility of slowing warming by a half-degree? Should Roger Pielke, Jr. be silenced, when the data he presents suggests extreme weather may not be the primary type of havoc for which we need to prepare?
The Heartland Institute Sent 300,000 Teachers Books and DVDs Presenting Evidence Contradicting Alarming Man-Made Climate Change
A healthy policy synthesis would be to promote and invest in projects and technologies that make sense no matter what climate outcome is destined to befall the planet. But the chances of getting that right are improved if skeptics are allowed to rejoin the conversation.
The notion that skeptics are the beneficiaries of vast sums of dark money is by now ludicrous. Every major corporation, certainly including the oil companies, has worked out their lucrative pathway into a profitable “carbon-free” future. But which set of public intellectuals, along with their powerful institutional allies and grassroots constituents, will prevail?
Will it be the Socialist Environmentalists, who are funded by a European-style leftist oligarchy, backed up by populist agitators, with growing support from the electorate? And if so, will any of the stupendous sums of new tax revenues they collect actually make it onto the ground in the form of renewable energy, and if so, will it do any good? Or will climate change just be the Trojan Horse of socialism that finally made it through the gates?
What about the Liberal Environmentalists, the “Smart Growth Reformers”? Will they win? And if so, do we want to live in their hyper-regulated world, where the “free market” survives in the form of cronyism, and every aspect of our lives is monitored in order to ensure we each maintain our “carbon neutrality”? And will that do any good? And when the predicted climate disasters don’t happen, will any of them admit those disasters weren’t going to happen anyway, or will they claim the green police state they built saved the world?
The Ecomodernists, we hope, will excuse being associated in any context with the Practical Skeptics, but here goes: in terms of divergent, undogmatic thinking, and general optimism regarding the ultimate fate of humanity, these two groups have much in common. It used to be accepted that the person holding the sign on the street corner, proclaiming the imminent doom of mankind was the crazy one, and the person suggesting that actually, mankind is probably not doomed, was the sane one. But in the crazy world of climate alarmism, those roles have been inverted.
Shock. Despair. Change everything, overnight, or else. We’ve got five years. When it comes to climate change, that is the prevailing message, and deviation from that message invites demonization, banishment, erasure.
In a recent and very typical development, the BBC, in response to pressure from activists, announced in September 2018 they would no longer cover the arguments of climate skeptics. This is a natural progression that began in 2007 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled—in an ominous endorsement of politicized science and a staggering violation of common sense—that CO2, part of our atmospheric blanket against the cold cosmic emptiness, the food of all plant life, whose rise perhaps delays the past-due next ice age, is a pollutant. Nisbet’s omission of climate skeptics from his panoply of public intellectuals driving the climate debate is just another part of this sad, possibly misanthropic, potentially tragic course.
It is unclear who is right, nor whether reason will prevail. But it would be far better if every voice was heard.
Summary
What a strange twist. Marx gave us the notion of ideology, which he understood to be the system of beliefs and values that the ruling class used to control the working class and ensure continued power and privileges. Today’s Marxist wannabes who are mostly in the entitled class are employing the ideology of environmentalism to mount an anti-capitalist crusade under the banner of Climate Change, advocating policies which will further the misery of the downtrodden.
A kangaroo court is a court that ignores recognized standards of law or justice, and often carries little or no official standing in the territory within which it resides. The term may also apply to a court held by a legitimate judicial authority who intentionally disregards the court’s legal or ethical obligations. (Wikipedia)
The latest example is provided last month by Chief Justice Preston of the New South Wales Land and Environment Court dismissing on appeal the proposal to construct a new open-cut coal mine in the state’s Hunter Valley. His ruling rested on dubious suppositions.
The Chief Justice found that “all anthropogenic GHG emissions contribute to climate change”.
The Chief Judge invented a “wrong time test”. To pass that test, a fossil fuel proponent must now establish why their project should be allowed to proceed at this time in history, when it is clearly recognized that there is an urgent need for rapid and deep decreases in greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve this, most fossil fuel reserves need to remain in the ground unburned. The test asserts that a practical consequence of reaching the emission reductions required by the Paris Accord to achieve the 1.5 to 2°C goal is that coal production needs to reduce rather than expand.
So we have come to this. A sitting judge declares a prevalent social opinion regarding the future is the law of the land. A legal business venture is blocked on ideological grounds, because some believe now is the “wrong time” in history for such an undertaking. Kangaroos are hopping around like crazy.
It is fortunate indeed that this judge is not hearing the Juliana vs. US case. But then that is actually a legal proceeding where kangaroos or unicorns do not have standing. The precedents and body of law stacked against these climate cases is summarized in the most recent brief by the appellants (US Govt.) arguing against the claims of activists/alarmists (plaintiffs).
“the unprecedented nature of this ambitious attempt to throttle important government functions superintending broad swaths of the national economy”
“The injuries identified by Plaintiffs arise from a diffuse, global phenomenon that affects every other person in their communities, in the United States, and throughout the world.”
“Plaintiffs “simply ignore that Defendant agencies and officers do not produce greenhouse gases, but act to regulate those third parties that do: innumerable businesses and private industries.”
“Plaintiffs have not even begun to articulate a remedy within a federal court’s authority to award that could meaningfully address global climate change as the claimed cause of their injuries.”
“Plaintiffs ask the district court to review and assess the entirety of the representative branches’ decisions relating to climate change and then to pass on the comprehensive constitutionality of those policies, programs, and inaction in the aggregate and then enter and enforce a sweeping decree against the government writ large.”
“Thus, the Due Process Clause imposes no duty on the government to protect persons from harm inflicted by third parties that would violate due process if inflicted by the government.”
“Every instance” in which this Court has “permitted a state-created danger theory to proceed has involved an act by a government official that created an obvious, immediate, and particularized danger to a specific person known to that official.”
“Plaintiffs seek to remedy carbon emissions, myopically attributing them to the U.S. government and ignoring that the global mix of carbon levels is (even on their own theory) predominantly the product of the actions of foreign actors the world over.”
“All of Plaintiffs’ claimed harms result from what they allege is the government’s general failure to protect the environment. Yet Plaintiffs have no constitutional right to particular climate conditions, and they may not resort to the state-created danger exception to circumvent that limitation.”
“This allegation of slowly-recognized, long-incubating, and generalized harm by itself distinguishes their claim from all other state-created danger cases on which they and the district court relied.”
“First, there is no fundamental right to a “climate system capable of sustaining human life.”
“The Supreme Court definitively rejected an attempt to use the federal common law of nuisance to centralize the management of carbon dioxide emissions in a single district court, operating outside the purview of the comprehensive Clean Air Act.”
“It is not clear how much of this sea level rise can be avoided by slowing down climate warming or even cooling the planet again.”
“Plaintiffs’ reliance on their self-described “deep anger, frustration, depression, and feeling of betrayal,” Motion 23-25, is likewise insufficient to establish irreparable harm. First, if this Court were to recognize feelings as irreparable injury, then every plaintiff who passionately disagrees with government action — i.e., most if not all plaintiffs — would satisfy the injury requirement.”
“Because Plaintiffs cannot demonstrate that their requested relief pending appeal would concretely impact climate change, the balance of equities tips heavily in favor of denying Plaintiffs’ motion.”
Does all that sound ridiculously arrogant and scientifically illiterate? Of course it does. Yet, that’s basically how new Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has responded to the critics of her Green New Deal. We’re all idiots. She’s a visionary.
AOC’s remark to “come up with your own ambitious, on-scale proposal” is precisely the sort of uneducated statement a person who knows literally nothing about a topic says. It’s reminiscent of the anti-vaxxers who say, “If vaccines are so safe, show me the evidence!” There are entire research papers and books dedicated to energy policy. AOC just hasn’t bothered to read any of them.
As it turns out, the solution to climate change isn’t all that complicated. It won’t be accomplished in 12 years; we couldn’t even rebuild the World Trade Center in 12 years. But it can be done. I wrote a brief, 550-word articlethat gives a general outline. If even that’s too long, here’s the TL;DR version. [ I had to look it up; TL:DR means Too Long; Didn’t Read]
Start building Generation IV nuclear power plants right now. Not next year. Not tomorrow. Right now. They are meltdown-proof and the best source of carbon-free energy on the planet. Research suggests that the entire world could be on nuclear power within 25 years.
In the meantime, phase out coal while embracing natural gas. Natural gas burns cleaner than coal. If you object to this, then do #1 faster.
Upgrade our energy infrastructure with a smart grid, smart meters, better capacitors, and better transmission lines. All of this is necessary if we want to rely at least in part on solar and wind. (But solar and wind aren’t really necessary; see #1.)
Invest in solar and fusion power research. Current solar technology is too inefficient. The breakthrough we’ve been seeking in solar hasn’t happened yet, but it could. Similarly, fusion is theoretically the best source of energy (even better than nuclear), but scientists haven’t figured this one out yet. It turns out that recreating the sun on earth is kind of hard.
As our energy infrastructure improves, electric car technology will improve along with it, making fossil fuels largely obsolete. (Airplanes might always need fossil fuels, though, much to AOC’s chagrin.)
That’s it. It’s not a sexy plan, but it’s a realistic one. We could actually accomplish this, but so far, there has been no political will whatsoever to do it. Oddly, the biggest opponents are environmentalists, people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Another display of monotonic Climate Science is the uproar over a proposed White House panel of scientists to review and advise on statements about climate change appearing in various and sundry Federal Executive Branch organizations. Witness the sanctimonious John Kerry: Disband Your Climate Denial Panel, Mr. President.
Like spoiled children thwarted, warmists are throwing a tantrum at the prospect of being held accountable for parroting climate nostrums. After all, before now they have had no challenges to anything they say. So they are outraged; Outraged, I say! Sen. Schumer says he pledges to defund the panel to silence them
Lost in the uproar over forming a red team to peer review climate science pronouncements on behalf of the WH is the existence of the Climate Blue Team operating uncontested for many years at NOAA Climate.gov. Having had the field to themselves for so long, the idea of another viewpoint seems unthinkable and wrong.
Introducing the Climate Blue Team (formed in 2010)
The Leaders
The Team General Manager is Thomas Karl, infamous for his hurried adjustment of the NOAA sea surface temperature dataset in order to erase the inconvenient “pause” this century. For the background on his actions prior to retiring see Bob Tisdale’s Open Letter to Tom Karl of NOAA/NCEI Regarding “Hiatus Busting” Data
Karl is joined by Richard Rosen who pushed for a NOAA press release to challenge Chris Landsea’s study on the issue of hurricane intensity and climate change, since it “takes a position that is supportive of the Bush administration’s view on the issue.” He also published a paperThe economics of mitigating climate change: What can we know?, which concluded: “Because of these serious technical problems, policymakers should not base climate change mitigation policy on the estimated net economic impacts computed by integrated assessment models. Rather, mitigation policies must be forcefully implemented anyway given the actual physical climate change crisis, in spite of the many uncertainties involved in trying to predict the net economics of doing so.”
Wayne Higgins heads up NOAA’s Program Office and is on the record attributing extreme weather events to man-made global warming: “So where we’ve looked forward decades, even out to a century and using those climate models with scenarios in which we actually ramp up the levels of greenhouse gases, we are able to confirm that human-induced climate change is something that is occurring now and that is actually likely to continue in the future,” he said.
Eileen Shea led NOAA’s Climate Services program and sings from the same hymnbook:
“No scientist worth their salt will blame any individual event on climate change, but these storms are certainly being exacerbated by climate change, partly because hurricanes, especially, take their energy from the ocean, their energy and their moisture from the ocean, and the warm the water, the stronger the hurricane can grow. And the more expansive the warm water, the further the hurricane can go and stay strong.” Shea is one of the many climate scientists working in Asheville, sometimes referred to as “climate city.” For them, the debate over climate change has been long-settled.
Ko Barrett is Deputy Director of NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research Office and also a Vice Chair of the IPCC. In the latter role, she led the effort to produce SR15, the call to prevent 1.5C of warming. “This is the first time the IPCC has undertaken a focused report on the processes that drive change and the resulting impacts to oceans and the frozen parts of our planet,” said IPCC Vice-Chair Ko Barrett. “There is a huge volume of scientific information for us to assess, which can help policy makers to better understand the changes we are seeing and the risks to lives and livelihoods that may occur with future change.”
Louisa Koch is NOAA Director of Education. “Not only does such coordination minimize duplication among these programs, but the overall effort is enhanced also because each agency brings a complementary mission-driven focus to this complex, large-scale issue,” added Louisa Koch, director of education for NOAA. Why should the public care? Put simply, climate change affects everyone on Earth. Climate is “changing in ways that are going to impact society across the board,”said Louisa Koch, the director of NOAA’s Office of Education. “Communities need to understand what changes they are going to experience most intensely and how that’s going to impact them.”
The Blue Team Panel of Players
NOAA has a science panel comprising the players that review papers and articles, and ensure the warmist viewpoint is protected and reinforced. The Head Coach appears to be Wayne Higgins (above)
Jessica Blunden: Even though it was a relatively quiet hurricane year in the Atlantic, there were 36 major tropical cyclones worldwide – 15 more than average, said NOAA climate scientist Jessica Blunden, co-editor of the reportpublished Tuesday in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. And at the heart of the records is that all three major heat-trapping greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide – hit record highs in 2015, Blunden said. “This impacts people. This is real life,” Blunden said. ‘Earth’s fever rises’: New report shows many symptoms of climate change
Tim Boyer: “From this [study] we can better understand the effects of natural and man-made variability to the climate system,” said co-author Tim Boyer of NOAA’s Ocean Climate Laboratory. “Decision-makers can gauge what needs to be done to ameliorate the situation, or, if not that, to plan for the consequences of the excess heat.” The studywas published in the journal Science Advances. The findings are important because the world’s oceans provide one of the best records of the excess energy trapped on Earth by increased greenhouse gases, largely from the burning of fossil fuels. As the seas heat up from climate change, the water expands and rises, causing coastal flooding and, in Antarctica, ice shelves to disintegrate.
Christopher Burt is a lucky man. As with others fascinated by weather records, his once obscure passion has been thrust into one of the central conversations of our time. Burt’s audience is surprisingly large. On average, 10,000 people a day read his postings on Weather Underground. Though he writes about all sorts of weather extremes, heat records are one of his greatest passions.
In 2010, two climate-change researchers using computer modeling and calculations of human cooling capacities predicted that large parts of the earth may become uninhabitable during heat waves in future centuries. The studywas based on a scenario of rapid global warming and was probably a bit shrill in its view of the consequences—mass migrations and war—but the science was solid and easy to believe. After all, large parts of the planet are already uninhabitable, at least for some percentage of the population some percentage of the time. And the heat waves are hitting harder, and coming more frequently than ever before.
Leo Donner: Donner has also served as a reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose reports help world leaders make decisions on dealing with the issue. The research scientist will discuss some IPCC conclusions, such as how humans have increased greenhouse gases through agricultural activity, burning fossil fuels and decimating forests in the Amazon. “One conclusion of the IPCC is that most of the observed change in global temperature is the result of human activity,” Donner said.
NOAA Scientist David Fahey in Boulder: a Lead Author of National Climate Assessment: The government’s National Climate Assessment cited human influence as the “dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.” The reportaffirms that climate change is driven almost entirely by human action, warns of a worst-case scenario where seas could rise as high as eight feet by the year 2100, and details climate-related damage across the United States that is already unfolding as a result of an average global temperature increase of 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since 1900. When it comes to rapidly escalating levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the report states, “there is no climate analog for this century at any time in at least the last 50 million years.”
Alarmist All Star Katharine Hayhoe is a professor in the department of political science at Texas Tech University and director of its Climate Science Center. She was a lead author on the Climate Science Special Report, part of the fourth US National Climate Assessment. She writes books, produces videos, documentaries and gives interviewsto raise awareness of climate change concerns. Katherine Hayhoe: “The most important thing is to accelerate the realization that we have to act. This means connecting the dots to show that the impacts are not distant any more. They are here and they affect our lives. It means weaning ourselves off fossil fuels, which is challenged by the fact that the majority of the world’s richest companies have made their money from the fossil fuel economy, so the majority of the wealth and power remains in their hands.” “Climate change is a long term trend superimposed over natural variability. There will be good and bad years, just like there are for a patient with a long term illness, but it isn’t going away. To stabilize climate change, we have to eliminate our carbon emissions. And we’re still a long way away from that.”
Sarah Kapnick is a scientists at NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. Global warming is going to steal away some of those postcard-perfect weather days in the future, according to a first-of-its-kind projection of nice weather. “The changes are more dramatic in parts of the developing world, where you have high concentrations of populations,” said NOAA climate scientistand co-author Sarah Kapnick.
High Scoring Meteorologist Jeff Masters co-founded Weather Underground: “The Climate Has Shifted to a New State Capable of Delivering Rare & Unprecedented Weather Events.”Stronger hurricanes, bigger floods, more intense heat waves, and sea level rise have been getting many of the headlines with regards to potential climate change impacts, but drought should be our main concern. Drought is capable of crashing a civilization. We’ve set in motion a dangerous boulder of climate change that is rolling downhill, and it is too late to avoid major damage when it hits full-force several decades from now. However, we can reduce the ultimate severity of the damage with strong and rapid action.
Richard Rood is a Professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences at the University of Michigan where he teaches atmospheric science and climate dynamics.
“If we stop our emissions today, we won’t go back to the past. The Earth will warm. And since the response to warming is more warming through feedbacks associated with melting ice and increased atmospheric water vapor, our job becomes one of limiting the warming. If greenhouse gas emissions are eliminated quickly enough, within a small number of decades, it will keep the warming manageable and the Paris Agreement goals could be met. It will slow the change – and allow us to adapt. Rather than trying to recover the past, we need to be thinking about best possible futures.”
Scott Weaver is a Research Meteorologist at NOAA.s Climate Prediction Center and member of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). “Today’s Climate Science Special Reportis our most comprehensive and definitive look yet at the massive amount of sound scientific research on climate change, and it’s conclusions are inescapable – climate change is happening right now, it’s hurting American families, and it will get worse unless we act,” said EDF Senior Climate Scientist Scott Weaver. “This report should put any doubts about the existence or the severity of climate change to rest. We cannot afford to ignore this threat.”
Kandis Wyatt, Designated Federal Officer for US Climate Change Impact Reports, eg. 2014:
“Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present. Corn producers in Iowa, oyster growers in Washington State, and maple syrup producers in Vermont are all observing climate-related changes that are outside of recent experience. So, too, are coastal planners in Florida, water managers in the arid Southwest, city dwellers from Phoenix to New York, and Native Peoples on tribal lands from Louisiana to Alaska. This National Climate Assessment concludes that the evidence of human-induced climate change continues to strengthen and that impacts are increasing across the country.”
Summary
What hypocrisy to criticize skeptics for finally attempting to organize and claim a bit of airtime to tell the other side of the story. Apparently the case for man-made global warming is so weak, no objections can be allowed.
Now that Kelly Craft, US Ambassador to Canada is Trump’s nominee for UN Ambassador, let’s return to the interview for which she will again be persecuted by climate alarmists/activists.
The Greek word for “one tone” is monotonia, which is the root for both monotone and the closely-related word monotonous, which means “dull and tedious.” Monotone is a droning, unchanging tone. A continuous sound, especially someone’s voice, that doesn’t rise and fall in pitch, is a monotone. Nothing can put you to sleep quite as effectively as a teacher talking in a monotone.
Monotonic climate science was on full display as journalists, pundits and tweeters freaked out over a comment by the new US ambassador to Canada. Her offense: saying there were two sides on the climate issue and she respects them both.
The story from CBC: The new U.S. ambassador to Canada said Monday that she believes “both sides” of climate change science.
In an interview with Canada’s CBC News, Kelly Knight Craft said that she believes there is “accurate” science on “both sides” but did not specify what sides she was referring to.
“I believe there are sciences on both sides that are accurate,” Craft said. “Both sides have their own results from their studies, and I appreciate and respect both sides of the science.”
President Trump appointed Craft, a prominent GOP fundraiser, to the ambassadorship earlier this year.
Craft told CBC that even though Trump has pledged to pull the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, she thinks the U.S. can “absolutely” fight climate climate change.
“We all have the same goal, and that is to better our environment and to maintain the environment,” she said. “I feel like our administration has been on top of this regardless of whether or not they’d be pulling out.”
It is true Ambassador Craft had the look of a deer in the headlights. She is from Kentucky where one doesn’t encounter sanctimonious warmists as frequently as in Ottawa, and especially not ones determined to get a “gotcha” quote from her.
All the comments at alarmist websites dissed her for thinking the issue could have two differing points of view. Going further, they repeatedly claim “science” does not have two sides, not now, not ever. And, of course, she offends them by saying she respects people on both sides of the matter. As an Ambassador, she sought common ground by pointedly not mentioning the specifics of how the US is actually reducing its CO2 emissions while Canada has not.
The damage here goes beyond climate science to the degradation of all scientific disciplines. These smug journalists and their audiences know that on all kinds of issues reasonable people can disagree. But somehow they have been brainwashed with the notion that science is a catechism with only one right answer. That idea is false and a threat to modern civilization.
They hear only about Jim Hansen, Al Gore, Mike Mann and their ilk, and think their pronouncements are universally and eternally true. Many, many scientists see things differently. Hard as it is to go from simplicity to complexity, let us enlighten these folks to some of the other sides of climate science . First, meet Richard Muller who shares some concerns and not others. Below in italics is his answer to a question raised on Quora: What are some widely cited studies in the news that are false?
Answer by Richard Muller, Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley.
That 97% of all climate scientists accept that climate change is real, large, and a threat to the future of humanity. That 97% basically concur with the vast majority of claims made by Vice President Al Gore in his Nobel Peace Prize winning film, An Inconvenient Truth.
The question asked in typical surveys is neither of those. It is this: “Do you believe that humans are affecting climate?” My answer would be yes. Humans are responsible for about a 1 degree Celsius rise in the average temperature in the last 100 years. So I would be included as one of the 97% who believe.
Yet the observed changes that are scientifically established, in my vast survey of the science, are confined to temperature rise and the resulting small (4-inch) rise in sea level. (The huge “sea level rise” seen in Florida is actually subsidence of the land mass, and is not related to global warming.) There is no significant change in the rate of storms, or of violent storms, including hurricanes and volcanoes. The temperature variability is not increasing. There is no scientifically significant increase in floods or droughts. Even the widely reported warming of Alaska (“the canary in the mine”) doesn’t match the pattern of carbon dioxide increase–it may have an explanation in terms of changes in the northern Pacific and Atlantic currents. Moreover, the standard climate models have done a very poor job of predicting the temperature rise in Antarctica, so we must be cautious about the danger of confirmation bias.
My friend Will Happer believes that humans do affect the climate, particularly in cities where concrete and energy use cause what is called the “urban heat island effect.” So he would be included in the 97% who believe that humans affect climate, even though he is usually included among the more intense skeptics of the IPCC. He also feels that humans cause a small amount of global warming (he isn’t convinced it is as large as 1 degree), but he does not think it is heading towards a disaster; he has concluded that the increase in carbon dioxide is good for food production, and has helped mitigate global hunger. Yet he would be included in the 97%.
The problem is not with the survey, which asked a very general question. The problem is that many writers (and scientists!) look at that number and mischaracterize it. The 97% number is typically interpreted to mean that 97% accept the conclusions presented in An Inconvenient Truth by former Vice President Al Gore. That’s certainly not true; even many scientists who are deeply concerned by the small global warming (such as me) reject over 70% of the claims made by Mr. Gore in that movie (as did a judge in the UK; see the following link: Gore climate film’s nine ‘errors‘).
The pollsters aren’t to blame. Well, some of them are; they too can do a good poll and then misrepresent what it means. The real problem is that many people who fear global warming (include me) feel that it is necessary to exaggerate the meaning of the polls in order to get action from the public (don’t include me).
There is another way to misrepresent the results of the polls. Yes, 97% of those polled believe that there is human caused climate change. How did they reach that decision? Was it based on a careful reading of the IPCC report? Was it based on their knowledge of the potential systematic uncertainties inherent in the data? Or was it based on their fear that opponents to action are anti-science, so we scientists have to get together and support each other. There is a real danger in people with Ph.D.s joining a consensus that they haven’t vetted professionally.
I like to ask scientists who “believe” in global warming what they think of the data. Do they believe hurricanes are increasing? Almost never do I get the answer “Yes, I looked at that, and they are.” Of course they don’t say that, because if they did I would show them the actual data! Do they say, “I’ve looked at the temperature record, and I agree that the variability is going up”? No. Sometimes they will say, “There was a paper by Jim Hansen that showed the variability was increasing.” To which I reply, “I’ve written to Jim Hansen about that paper, and he agrees with me that it shows no such thing. He even expressed surprise that his paper has been so misinterpreted.”
A really good question would be: “Have you studied climate change enough that you would put your scientific credentials on the line that most of what is said in An Inconvenient Truth is based on accurate scientific results? My guess is that a large majority of the climate scientists would answer no to that question, and the true percentage of scientists who support the statement I made in the opening paragraph of this comment, that true percentage would be under 30%. That is an unscientific guestimate, based on my experience in asking many scientists about the claims of Al Gore.
Then esteemed climate scientist Richard Lindzen, in a short video introduces you to more sides to the climate change issue:
Summary
Science in general, and climate science in particular is not monotonic, but polyphonic. There are and have always been differing voices and tones in the search for objective truth. Only the illiterate think otherwise.
Ironies of History, Concerns for America’s Future
The Lancet joins other once-respected science journals falling into disrepute at the hands of alarmists. Alex Berezow writes at the American Council on Science and Health 
Science Matters 