Federal Judge OKs Global Warming Lawsuit
A federal judge here said environmental groups and four U.S. cities can sue federal development agencies on allegations the overseas projects they financially back contribute to global warming.
The decision Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White is the first to say that groups alleging global warming have a right to sue.
“This is the first decision in the country to say that climate change causes sufficient injury to give a plaintiff standing, to open the courthouse door,” said Ronald Shems, a Vermont attorney representing Friends of the Earth.
That group, in addition to Greenpeace and the cities of Boulder, Colo., Santa Monica, Oakland and Arcata, Calif., sued Overseas Private Investment Corp. and the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Those government agencies provide loans and insure billions of dollars of U.S. investors’ money for development projects overseas. Many of the projects are power plants that emit greenhouses gases that the groups allege cause global warming.
Given the projected $7 billion surplus for Alberta this year, can Jack Layton and David Suzuki be far behind?
You know, as much as I deplore the direction Canada has been taking the past 30 some years, the U.S. does some equally kooky things that border on the bizarre. This is one of them.
That Judge is a complete moron.
After thinking about it a little more there could be a silver lining here. There needs to be proof that Global Warming exists AND is caused by human activity. The question is whether or not the onus is on the environmental groups to prove that human activity causes global warming or whether the onus is on the defence team to prove that human activity does NOT contribute significantly to global warming.
If Global Warming gets debunked in court (and if the MSM is paying attention) then there could be some significant ammo arising out of that case in favour of us redneck non-believer types.
Who are the Martians going to sue? Odd how Mars is experiencing planetary warming without any soccer moms or suv’s.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36049
Agreed, Bacardi Breezer. The onus is on these groups to prove not only that global warming has occurred and was caused by human activity, but also that harm has been caused.
I think they will have as much success as the Russian astrologer who is trying to sue NASA over Deep Impact. She claims it has ruined the natural balance of forces in the universe.
TimR, please tell me you made that up about the astrologer. Please.
Candace. TimR didn’t make it up.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4649423.stm
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050705/D8B578DG0.html
And Bacardi Breeze is dead on right. And don’t wait for the proof. There isn’t any.
Candace, you know darn well that truth is always stranger than fiction.
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1120573752039_115982952/?hub=TopStories
Just went on a Google News search for updates on the story.
http://en.rian.ru/russia/20050728/41050080.html
MOSCOW, July 28 (RIA Novosti) – The Moscow Regional Court has postponed a hearing on the lawsuit filed by Russian astrologer Marina Bay against NASA for psychological damages caused by a NASA probe slamming into the Tempel-1 comet, a Presnensky Court spokesman said.
“The hearing has been postponed again due to the absence of representation from NASA.”
“The hearing has been postponed again due to the absence of representation from NASA.” And they were supposed to dignify this case because ….
I’d be afraid of the courts weighing in on the debate about global warming. Courts in Canada are way more likely to believe David “I’m a windbag” Suzuki than any of the real science behind this. Thank god, at least for now, that this is happening in the states.
I read the headline
“Maurice Strong will be Pleased”
I thought it was a story about Saddam being returned to power.
I feel mislead.
If you’re surprised to hear news like this out of the U.S., you might be surprised to hear that President Bush takes climate change seriously:
http://www.pi.energy.gov/enhancingGHGregistry/statements.html
http://www.climatetechnology.gov/
http://www.climatescience.gov/
Some of the strongest new evidence of global warming and its human causes is coming from U.S. initiatives. Go figure.
Why just sue the U.S. federal government for supporting new (presumably cleaner and more efficient)powerplants? Why not go after the world’s automakers too…the suit could even be launched in Ontario.
Also why not go after those that support growth in developing countries like China and India? Their newly minted construction and manufacturing industries have got to be a scourge against Kyoto. Why would anyone want to give another 2.3 billion people enough development to climb out of the 3rd world cesspool so they can pollute the earth with more greenhouse gases?
But why stop there? Let the environmental gods sue those families in the world that have given birth to more than the 2 children. Having a 3rd child will only increase the world’s population and therefore result in more greenhouse gas emissions!
By the time the smokey greenhouse gases have cleared the Environmental groups will have sued everyone and saved the world for everyone not human to enjoy and prosper in. My guess is that Lawyers will get to enjoy the world they saved the most!
There’s a difference between air and water pollution and large changes like earthquakes and melting ice caps. Some things are natural cycles. A study of geology will confirm this. In a book by Andersen and Borns for instance, called ‘The Ice Age World’, they say that 25% of the land surface of the planet was covered with glacier ice about 18,000 years ago. Today about 10% of the land is covered with ice.
Times change and it is not possible to compare climate now with climate even 100 years ago. It isn’t all man’s fault. But the supporters of Kyoto wants us to believe it is because it supports their agenda.
The biggest problem I have with pollution is, well, pollution. Suffering from asthma, I know what it feels like to breath the air of the Lower Mainland, Toronto or LA on a bad day, or even on a good day. But I don’t think this pollution amounts to more than a drop in the bucket in the climate change debate, compared to natural causes.
I do kinda think, however, that pulling all this oil out of the ground ain’t necessarily a good thing.
Climate change is undisputed. The issue is greenhouse gas warming, which at the moment has the scientific status of an unproven hypothesis. It has that status for two reasons, one which global warming true believers will like, the other which they will not.
The good news for moonbats is that so far, no one has been able to demonstrate conclusively that greenhouse gas warming, as hypothesised, violates some natural law and therefore could not possibly ever happen.
The bad news is, it cannot be shown ever to have happened, and it has been shown six ways from Sunday that it certainly isn’t happening now. Fifteen years ago it was reasonable to postulate that we might be entering a period of greenhouse gas warming. That hypothesis has been falsified by all, that would be ABSOLUTELY ALL, observations made since.
Time to call me a liar, a stooge of big oil, etc. etc, quack quack…
25 years ago we were going into another iceage–now global warming–which will do nothing about the real danger to the planet which is particulate pollution.
Kyoto is nothing but wealth transfer and another project that the Liberals can skim taxdollars from. Also a way to grab money from Alberta through a carbon tax–which a Parliamentary committee refused but the Cabinet instituted anyway
Greenfleece
AP: A federal judge here said environmental groups and four U.S. cities can sue federal development agencies on allegations the overseas projects they financially back contribute to global warming.What's ironic here is that had these same plain…
George, there has been a lot of that riding roughshod over the votes and opinions of the majority. Nast habit.
We have had a couple of colder than average winters in the last two or three years.
A phrase we often heard around here goes something like: *If global warming keeps up we are going to freeze to death.*
If the judge gets wind of this, it will be sufficient grounds to throw all the sillies out of court. eh? 73s TG
Can anyone tell me if Global Warming is the same as Global Wetting?
Seems to me every time I turn on the radio, I’m hearing about another record rainfall somewhere. Look at Western Canada this year.
Geez!
old squid….you could rightly say that.As any scientist worth more than a few socialist bucks will tell you(and confirm)common H2O vapor is the biggest contributor to the greenhouse effect anywheres,be that on earth or in your little backyard tomato-growing house.The use of CO2 in the fromulae is just a shell game to nail the oil-producing regions whle supporting the socialist agenda.As the saying goes…Capitalism..the uneven distribution of wealth. Socialism..the even distribution of poverty.
John, you’re right, there have been many cycles of glaciation in the past, with warming in between, and of course that warming couldn’t have come from human causes.
Ebt, I think we could even go so far as to say that the “greenhouse effect” is undisputed; it’s a natural effect of having an atmosphere, and if the atmosphere did not do its job as an insulating blanket, the average temperature on Earth would be something well below freezing. (I forget the figure I heard, but frozen is frozen.) The dispute is about whether human activities can add enough greenhouse gases to the atmosphere to change this effect, AND change it enough to override natural cycles.
Well, if you look at the Vostok Ice Core data (Google it, you can examine the data yourself), you won’t find any CO2 levels above 300 ppmv (parts per million by volume) in over 400,000 years, that is, through the last four major cycles of glaciation and deglaciation. Current CO2 levels are around 360 ppmv, or 20% higher than the maximum level detected over that entire time span.
So we’ve shown that we can add the greenhouse gases fast enough to outpace Mother Nature’s mop-up crew.
The dispute then moves on to ask whether these new CO2 levels are producing global warming. Ebt, you say ALL observations have falsified the hypothesis. You must not have seen this map:
http://www.climatehotmap.org/
But I’m always happy to hear that global warming isn’t happening. Have you got some links for all these observations? I need some good news. Or a good laugh, that works too.
Btw, I work for big oil. And I don’t support Kyoto, John, I support the goal of reducing CO2 emissions, because I’m a biologist and I was concerned about climate change before Kyoto, before Rio in fact.
As for the wealth transfer aspect of Kyoto, George, you might be surprised to learn that emissions trading was a U.S. idea, based on their very successful Clean Air Act cap-and-trade system. The U.S. was in on the 1997 Kyoto negotiations and pushed to have emissions trading added to the accord. You might also be surprised to hear that the environmentalists who gathered for the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 started out by claiming that developing countries were the problem. Representatives from those countries naturally got a little sour about being told that they would have to find some other way to climb out of poverty, without the messy coal-and-petroleum-intensive industrialization that got us our present prosperity.
Carbon tax? If it replaced income tax, that would be great. Then the free market could really go to work on the problem and solve the problem exactly as much as it needed to be solved. And with income tax phased out, there would be a real incentive to work and create solutions. But no, we’re not getting a carbon tax, whatever you may have heard. We’re getting a cap-and-trade system with all sorts of government manipulations to be made in setting levels etc.
Tony, a couple of cold winters – you’re falling into the same trap that Kate has complained about in the MSM, treating every little fluctuation in the weather as if it’s evidence of climate change.
Sorry about the long rant. I just hate that the government is keeping everyone distracted with Kyoto while our CO2 emissions continue to rise.
Justthinkin, H20 vapour is the biggest contributor, but it just cycles into and out of the atmosphere in response to temperature and solar radiation. CO2 doesn’t condense and rain out of the atmosphere; it stays and keeps on doing its work, so it drives the process much more than H20 vapour does.
Sorry, that should be H2O, not “H twenty”…
Well, how timely. I went from this discussion to ENS-Newswire and the top story was a brand new report from a team led by a U.S. geoscientist:
“Climate warming across the Arctic is pushing the Arctic system into a seasonally ice-free state for the first time in more than one million years, concludes a new report by U.S. and Canadian scientists. The melting is accelerating, and the researchers could find no natural processes that might slow or reverse the thawing of Arctic glaciers and ice sheets.”
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2005/2005-08-25-03.asp
Leftist Jurisprudence, The Gift That Keeps on Giving — PART II
Just when think that the extremes of nutball, moonbat, lawyer-enrichment, mind-blowingly absurd lawsuits have reached a high-water mark, some asshat of a judge has to come along and prove me wrong.
A federal judge here said environmental groups an…
Laura, the article you just cited is exactly why many remain very skeptical about the whole climate change industry. On the one hand, this group of academics states that:
“The Arctic is “highly complex, with a tightly coupled system of people, land, ocean, ice and air that behaves in ways that we do not fully comprehend, and which has demonstrated a capacity for rapid and unpredictable change with global ramifications,” the NSF Arctic System Science Program declares on its website.”
But admitting that they don’t understand the system and that it can change unpredictably, doesn’t stop them from predicting that ONE HUNDRED YEARS from now the Arctic will be ice-free.
Now in my way of thinking, anyone who thinks that they can predict what the future will be in 100 years should no longer be called a scientist, but rather a charlatan.
Laura, good to have you on board. This is a good discussion. I wish some of these important posts could go on for a few days. It’s also good to see that you work for big oil. I have family in that business so I’m not against it altogether. But we need to do better. I noticed that Moodys has reduced the debt of both GM and Ford to junk status. That’s good. Maybe they’ll re-organize and start building automobiles that are not olny more efficient but also cleaner. Then can.
Tim, did you notice that the 100-year prediction was only in the headline? Without seeing the scientists’ report itself, we’re relying on a journalist’s interpretation, and possibly a headline writer’s interpretation beyond that. It’s possible that the report itself made no such claim, just stated a range of possible outcomes foreseen from the current trends. As for the admission that the system is complex and not entirely predictable, yes, you’re absolutely right, statements like that make people doubt science. But that’s the way scientists talk, because that’s the way science works. As a scientist, I can’t even state positively that the keyboard I’m typing on exists; I can only state that repeated observations have failed to disprove its existence. Scientists are always making statements about the uncertainties in their research, but unfortunately, many people hear these statements and assume that there’s a big weakness in the science. Personally, I find it encouraging that these scientists were willing to come out with some quite definite statements about what we can expect. If we want to ignore climate change, we could go on using the uncertainty argument even while watching New York flood; just wait, the flood might go away, and the resilience of Americans might make it a minor incident…
wrt climate change, I’m not a scientist, just a person. But my friend living in New Zealand has to wear 45 block ALWAYS since, due to the (nonexistent) hole in the ozone layer, she will burn in 6 minutes. (And she grew up in NZ in the 60s and that wasn’t the case then.)
Six minutes, people.
We can argue whether Kyoto is “real” or not, and whether global warming is manmade or a natural, reoccurring phenomena.
Who cares?
Six minutes to burn. Hello?
Something is happening, and it’s different from 20 years ago. We need to address that. Screw politics, we need to either fix it or plan to make it “not spread.” Whatever.
Reality bites. But it’s here. Live with it.
Uncle Moe wants to sell yez a couple of Billion in Carbon coupons. These will be on sale wherever guilt-ridden disingenuous urban liberals gather to salve their hollow conscience with a strawberry latte, a high colonic and a couple of bucks to buy absolution from the earth godess. 😉
Six minutes to burn or you can do what they did in the 60’s and get a suntan. I was down near New Zealand around the time of the end of their summer for a few weeks. I did some fake’n bake preparation before I went and spent a lot of time outside everyday. Although I would use some SPF30 sunscreen if I was going to be outside for an extended time, I didn’t go crazy over it. Often I was outside for times well exceeding 6 minutes without any sunscreen. Guess what…no sun burn. If your skin has a tan (a.k.a. melanin).
I know there’s an increase in skin cancers compared to previous times…but maybe if we MAINTAINED some protective tan instead of shocking our skins every year with a nasty sunburn from sudden over-exposure there wouldn’t be a rise in cancer rates. Of course that means a rise in leather faces.
I call bullshit