https://wmbriggs.substack.com/p/lawyers-get-excited-suing-over-climate
“It bears repeating over and over,” opened a recent Nature editorial on suing over “climate change”. “The science is not in question.”
Now why would a “the science” that is not in question bear repeated assertions, over and over? That question is not rhetorical. Do you hear editorials, over and over, proclaiming that electricity and magnetism are aspects of the same phenomenon? Are politicians mounting rostrums to insist in passionate rhetoric that blood circulates in the body? Do propagandists devote entire broadcasts on how the sun rises in the east? Over and over?
Those questions are rhetorical.
There is no need to trumpet, over and over, a science that has proven itself. What needs repeating, over and over, is advertising for products people don’t want or need, but which some entity who stands to make a profit is pushing. Who stands to profit from blasting, over and over, the possibility of a slight increase in modeled average global temperature?
Lawyers, for one. Nature says “By the end of last year, 2,666 climate-litigation cases had been filed worldwide”.
Climate litigation?
Yes: “under the legally binding Paris climate agreement, nations pledged to keep average temperatures within 1.5 °C of pre-industrial levels.” Of course, if you have followed the stats (blog/Substack), it would be next to impossible to measure the difference of the tenth of a degree from times historical, given the imprecision in measuring what temperatures were—and are. (This involves proxy modeling, which should be put in predictive terms, yet is instead put in parametric language, which introduces vast over-certainties; see the links.)
But never mind that. Let’s think about these “law”-suits instead. Here’s a picture of their number:
This is an astonishing increase. All predicated on the premise that countries, and businesses with money inside countries, can not only control the climate, and control it with micro-, tenth-of-a-global-degree precision. Ludicrous isn’t in it. I don’t know how else to say this except to insist there is no way to know.
