This is quite something. Darn those Canucks. As we saw with his defense of eco-vandals in England, I wonder if Dr. James Hansen will rush to The Hague to testify for this one? And if by some furthest stretch of the imagination, this lawsuit is successful, what then? Will Pachauri use the spoils to whittle down the number of lifetimes if will take to erase his own carbon footprint? I wonder if Danny Bloom is related to omnipresent blog commenter, and Sierra Club representative, Steve Bloom? BTW Steve, we are still waiting, over a year now for your answer.
NOTE: The article below is reposted in entirety from the blog Northward Ho(t) The opinions are those of the author of that blog, Mitchel Anderson, not of myself nor of any WUWT contributor. – Anthony
Ballsy.
That is perhaps best word to describe a class action lawsuit filed this week in the International Criminal Court in The Hague in Holland against national governments refusing to act on reducing carbon emissions.
The suit was filed by climate activist Danny Bloom who is asking for “US$1 billion dollars in damages on behalf of future generations of human beings on Earth – if there are any”
No Joke
The lawsuit is specifically seeking damages from “all world leaders for intent to commit manslaughter against future generations of human beings by allowing murderous amounts of fossil fuels to be harvested, burned and sent into the atmosphere as CO2, causing possible apocalyptic harm to the Earth’s ecosystem and the very future of the human species.
The point of the suit of course is not to wring money out of carbon emitters, but to embarrass the legions of laggard governments in advance of upcoming international climate negotiations next month in Poland. According to Bloom, the legal action “is about trying to protect future generations of mankind, humankind, and a positive judgment in this case will help prod more people to take the issues of climate change and global warming more seriously. We fully intend to make all world leaders of today responsible for their actions in the present day and age.”
This case is a legal long shot no doubt, but Bloom’s team said “”it’s up to the court to decide whether this case has any merit. We fully expect the court to agree to at least hear the case and make a responsible and measured decision later.”
It would also be the first case of its kind to seek to act on behalf of future generations for the irresponsibility of their ancestors. The need to put world leaders on the hot seat is very real. International climate talks like the one happening next month in Poland have happening for over a decade yet global emissions just keep climbing. A recent report showed that in spite of international commitments, carbon emissions of 40 industrialized countries rose by 2.3 percent between 2000 and 2006.
That said, those countries that signed Kyoto saw their overall emissions fall by 17% below 1990. The disgraceful outlier among those nations is Canada, whose emissions ballooned by over 20% in spite of having ratifying Kyoto. Canada’s Prime Minister Harper has called Kyoto a “mistake” and he seems openly contemptuous of such international efforts to reduce greenhouse gases. Mr. Harper is of course not alone in the responsibility for Canada’ terrible climate change record. The Canadian public recently handed him another mandate in a general election.
Back to Mr. Bloom. His lawsuit seems directly targeted towards such irresponsible nations like Canada that have refused to take this issue seriously. If he wins, Bloom is planning to donate the $1 billion in damages to the Nobel winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Godspeed Mr. Bloom.
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Nick makes an excellent point.
Lucy Skywalker (13:14:08) :
Wow. If the “advanced statistical multiregression analysis” addressed in the item (2) paper is solid, the conclusions could be a “killer”….
“Therefore it is likely that there is no anthropogenic climate change on a global scale. The natural exchange of CO2 between ocean, biomass on land and the atmosphere is very large. In only four to five years all the CO2 in the atmosphere has been recycled through the oceans and the biomass system. The annual anthropogenic human production of CO2 is neutralized by nature in as little as 12 days. Recent studies of the solar forcing, changes in cosmic radiation and its role in cloud formations explain the global warming that has taken place since 1910.”
Someone, above, has the nerve to complain about stupid but then posts this doozy: “CO2 is plant food and does humans no harm. We exhale over 40,000 ppm CO2, so just how exactly is this going to exterminate us? ”
Well, it’s like this. The human body has certain threshholds for nearly all substances, from pure atoms to molecules to mixtures and right up the line. Once you exceed that threshhold, zoop, that’s all she wrote. You die.
This holds as true for CO2 as it does for pure oxygen as it does for water as it does for CO.
And that’s where the harm lies and how Darwin Award-winners get exterminated.
Danny Bloom (18:55:13)
5) More superstorms, like Katrina
Danny,
I am glad you are on here posting! It is good to see your arguments. Next time you list your reasons you should not mention this one about Katrina. Not on this site. The readers on this post have a much better grasp of history and weather than the general population, and so including this item will cause you to lose credibility. I am fairly certain that you do not have much credibility with these readers anyway, but still, every bit helps. This is a tough audience, my man, and you should try to get to know them so that you will be better able to sell your arguments.
It is tough to argue climate with specific weather here. The readers are just too educated. Still, if you must try, you should use a storm that is really an outlier, not just a regular category 3 hurricane that hit a poorly constructed city. I would suggest the March storm of 1993. Or, if hurricanes are your flavor, there was a truly amazing storm in the pacific a couple years back that had a 250 mile across eye wall. Now that was a storm!
danny, how do you know what the right temperature is and how do you know if we are fixing it? from 1940 to 1980 in the usa it cooled. the temp went up a little in the next decade, more in the next and came down to where it started from 3 decades ago in the third.
if we had reduced our co2 output from the year 2000, we would be telling ourselves, look here is proof positive, we reduced c02 and we cooled the planet.
but we would be very wrong Danny, wouldn’t we?
there is no way to measure the success of taking out co2, since temperature changes occur independently of co2.
And there fore you can never know if you are doing the right thing or the wrong one, and
you can not make a predicition of how much co2 to take out.
Invent a better bio measure or physical measure of harm for c02 effects. I will be glad to study it
wowser there’s some very misinformed people commenting here with little clue about science.
There won’t be an international court case right now, but will there ‘climate criminals’ be brought to some kind of rough justice in 10 or 20 years???
Something to think about.
Danny,
To take your list:
1) Arctic goes ice free before 2020. I have bets out on this. It would be a big, visible global shock.
-Arctic ice is cyclical, and driven by currents. It is rebounding. By 2020 it will be more. Check Cryosphere, the daily satellite report. Get out of your bets.
2) Rapid warming over next decade, as recent Nature and Science article suggests is quite possible
(posts here and here)
-Why should it? It has been cooling for awhile, and the PDO looks like temps will continue down for awhile. And, more importantly, none of the changes over the last 100 years up or down have been significant.
3) Continued (unexpected) surge in methane
-Uexpected by whom? Describe ‘surge’.
4) A megadrought hitting the SW comparable to what has hit southern Australia.
-Please study the history of droughts. Droughts come and go. They did before AGW, and they will long after AGW.
5) More superstorms, like Katrina
-Danny, you do realize that Katrina was not a ‘super storm’? That its damage was due to levee failure? It was a cat3 storm when it hit Mississppi/Louisiana
6) A heatwave as bad as Europe’s 2003 one.
– While your list is sort of morbid the way you depend on betting on bad things to get your way, betting on summer heat waves, when summer is when heat waves happen, is sort of sad. If heatwaves mean AGW is ‘real’, then harsh winters mean AGW is not real.
7) Something unpredicted but clearly linked to climate, like the bark beetle devastation.
-Bark beetles were due to monoculture forests and poor land use management.
8) Accelerated mass loss in Greenland and/or Antarctica, perhaps with another huge ice shelf breaking off, but in any case coupled with another measurable rise in the rate of sea level rise,
-You do hope for doom. The mass budget is of Greenland is not in dangerous shape, and Antarctica is growing. Worldwide sea ice is growing.
9) The Fifth Assessment Report (2012-2013) really spelling out what we face with no punches pulled.
So the political program of the IPCC has done its best to scare us, and we just won’t get sacred enough?
If I was actually concerned about something really bad happening to the world, and I kept finding out that my fears were not being confirmed by reality, I would be glad.
It seems that you and many others involved with promoting AGW are very distressed when the apocalypse keeps getting delayed, and predictions about it keep getting proven wrong.
Why?
No matter how shrill the global warming fanatics become, the natural fact remains that CO2 is plant food… and that every time every human on this planet exhales… they exhale (guess what folks) this ‘pollution’ they call the primary global climate change catalyst C O 2.
Danny,
“3. What is your evidence?
Oh, Evidence? Good question. Best question yet. I will let Dr Lovelock and Dr Hansen answer that. Personally, I have not noticed the temps going up at all yet, or the sea levels rising yet.”
It is the Best question yet. So what in your view is the evidence. OK, leave it to others to put the detailed case but surely you have some idea what they are going to put as evidence on your behalf. We hear so much about “the experts” agreeing, but what exactly is it that they agree on. No-one ever says.
1, That would be in just 11 years time, but somehow they did not even predict this year correctly or even close.
2. Rapid warming over the next decade, you know i have been hearing this already over the past 25 years, but after 1995 the temperatures somehow leveled out and the last year we actually saw a drop in temperatures.
3. The surge in methane came after ±10 years of constant levels (while we continued to produce more year after year), and the surge was worldwide and happend on both hemispheres wich baffeled climatologists because this would indicate a natural cause.
4. Don’t know about the megadrought, but i will look it up.
5. Studies show that a warmer world will actually see a decrease in storms, this backed by realworld data and observations.
6. Aha the 2003 heatwave wich mainly hit France in august and showed that it was much more of social problem than it was a natural one. BTW i probably won’t hear you about the 25.000 deaths in the UK a year later because of a rather cold winter.
7. The bark beetle devastation, people who work in those forrest claim its rather bad management of those (production) forrests, mass transport of logs out of the area on wich the those bad flying beetles can hitch a ride over barriers like rivers, all in all it is manmade disaster, but not because of globalwarming but of mismanagement of those forrests.
8. huge ice mass loses, in order to achieve the sea levelrises claimed by Al Gore in his powerpoint presentation we need to melt about 30.000 CUBIC km of ice, EVERY YEAR from now on.
9 If there is ever going the be a fifth report. The last report claims a sea level rise between 30-60 cm’s wich is no problem accoording to our engineers over here in the Netherlands, we can manage it. Strange though that politicians claim that the sea level rise will actually be somewhere between 1 and 2 meters.
People, Danny is not reading your replies. He is the classical case of:
I have made up my mind, do not bother me with facts
All this is part of his publicity gimmick.
Anna V, above, said: “Danny is not reading your replies….:”
Anna,
I am reading all the comments here, from A to Z, from 1 to 201, yes I am. Everyone here knows this, except you. Anna, I am reading everything here. I am very interested in all points of view. That’s why I am here.
Now then, just What do we call the anti-global warming crowd?
James Hrynyshyn on his blog suggests:
Over at ”A Few Things Illconsidered”, the commenters are debating what to call those folks who just can’t bring themselves to accept the science of climate change. You know, the science that says we have to stop spewing the products of the combustion of fossil fuels into the air if we want to keep the planet’s ecology close to something we’d consider habitable.
Denialists? Skeptics? Scoffers?
I’d like to weigh in with a defense of the term that I now use regularly in this space: “Pseudoskeptics.”
The reason is simple. Pseudo means false. And false skepticism is what we’re talking about. It captures the essence of the attitudes exhibited by those who refuse to accept the science of climate change. Such people consider themselves skeptics, in that they aren’t convinced by the evidence. But of course, a true skeptic is willing to be convinced by the evidence. For whatever reason — ideology, stupidity, stubbornness — such ilk are not only unwilling to accept solid science, but are unwilling to subject their own positions to skeptical or critical analysis. No matter what evidence you supply, it just won’t meet their standards, usually because they consider the entire climatology community corrupt.
They are false skeptics. Hence: Pseudoskeptics.
I first came across the term at Orac’s blog, ”Respectful Insolence”, but it seems the term can be traced back a ways to one Marcello Truzzi, a sociologist who defined pseudoskepticism as:
“a variety of pseudoscience: the behavior of highly biased ‘sneering scoffers’ who try to legitimize their prejudice by donning the mantle of science and proper skepticism. They claim to support reason/logic while in fact filling their arguments with plenty of ad-hominems, straw-man, poisoning-the-well, and numerous other emotion-enflaming fallacies and debating tactics.”
Now, I recognize that those I call pseudoskeptics will charge that those of us who do accept the climate science are the true pseudoskeptics, but that’s the nature of the beast. I’m not expecting to change any minds through the use of labels, just use the most precise terms for the purpose of the discussion.
http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2008/11/what_do_you_call_the_antigloba.php
Reply: Rude and condescending, but since you are essentially the subject of this thread I will allow the post unedited. Please try and be more respectful. ~ charles the moderator.
Gimmick or not, I see great virtue in a global warming show trial. Much like the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ it could pit advocates for the Alarmists against advocates for Skeptics.
I want Lord Monckton on my legal team, and could name some others as well. Let the Alarmists pick their own champions, such as Gore and Hanson.
Televise the trial. Call witnesses and ‘experts’. Make it last for weeks. Do it up royal. Heck, sell advertising during the commercial breaks. We all could make some coin.
I have every confidence my (our) side will win, because just by holding such a trial Skeptics would attain equal status with Alarmists. Furthermore, our arguments are superior and will prevail.
Altogether a good idea. I hope Danny can pull it off.
Danny Bloom,
Until the GISS, Hadley Center, NCDC, and other promoters of AGW dogma (consensus) become truly open with data and methodology, open to a real review and replication, nothing resembling solid science is occurring. End of story. The fat lady has sung.
As long as there is any obfuscation, and it continues unabated, they cannot be taken seriously as science.
What they are pushing out under the guise of “science” and incestuous “peer review” is simply incantations, nothing more.
Danny, the globe is cooling. The new deniers are those who refuse to look at the thermometer.
=============================================
Well – since I just read danny’s most recent post, I’m done with this thread.
Yeah, I deal with idiots all day in the real world, I’m going to just stop dealing with same on the net.
It will, however, always amaze me how the “useful idiots”, those who are marginally brainwashed into promoting a cause that they have no idea about, can be so easily manipulated.
There is absolutely no proof or evidence, ABSOLUTELY NONE, only hyperbole and projections for the alarmists… but that doesn’t stop these guys. I have in mind that weirdo that was seen crying about Britney Spears on YouTube, or maybe the “obama girl”. Sure, they’re promoting a cause, but they have absolutely no idea what the cause is, or who is pulling the strings, or what the ultimate outcome will be.
Cooling. Warming. Cooling. Warming. Who knows? Who knew? Go figure.
I have truly learned a lot from this long 200 plus comment discussion, and as a guest at this blog, I thank the comment section for all the good input. THEM versus US, US versus THEM. They. We. You. Me.
I like Mike’s idea, above. A globally televised court hearing, with both sides well represented. Let the judge decide. May the best arguments win.
Meanwhile, we ALL have a lot of work to do. Godspeed!
Charles the Mod
RE:
Reply: ”Rude and condescending, but since you are essentially the subject of this thread I will allow the post unedited. Please try and be more respectful.” ~ charles the moderator.
Charles, Those were not my words or my blog. I just wanted to show commenters here what THEY think of YOU. Not me. I like you guys. You have
spirit and pizzaz, and you put up with me for this long, so I salute you all. Charles, again, that was not ME, that was just a link. Sorry if it appeared rude. — Danny the commeter
Danny,
No regulars on this blog are pseudo-anything. The people here are loving caring individuals who want the best for mankind. It distresses me that you would try to demonize those who want people to live rather than die. I fear that the momentum has switched to your view, and the great “experiment” will soon be underway. As these changes begin to take place, I hope you will begin to see the folly of the de-industrialization of humanity. Like other great “experiments” many will have to die and the movement will eventually come to naught. I am about your age, and I can barely believe that you could fall for such an obvious ploy.
Vaclav Klaus has not been fooled. The temperature is not the issue. It is all about what happens to the people. It is really about freedom. Please watch this short video from someone who has been through this before.
Great, Danny has posted a link to here on DotEarth. ‘Waves’ to the crowd. Hey, Dot Earthers, the globe is cooling, for how long even kim doesn’t know.
=======================================
I noticed you haven’t addressed my comment, Mr. Bloom. I’m afraid you cannot deny what you and your ilk have done to my father, and by extension, myself and my family. For me, it is personal. Kim is absolutely correct. It is you who are the deniers. Deniers of free speech, deniers of equity in science, deniers of the right to earn a living. You know that all that desmogblog has written about my father has been lies, heaped upon lies. Is it your contention that the “means justifies the end”? If so, it is a frightening stance to take as I have been personally affected by your misguided need to “do good” . Good is the furthest removed from what you and you “friends” are doing. Reality and truth will reveal you for what you are.
Danny: “Now then, just What do we call the anti-global warming crowd?”
Why not skip to the point and call them heretics?
Pseudoscience: When you, rather than answer your critics, devote your time to arguing about what name to call those critics.
Thanks for playing, Danny. As for the rest of you:
Obvious troll is obvious. So stop feeding it.
Should be fun proving intent. Can we countersue for wasting our time?
“Now then, just What do we call the anti-global warming crowd?” How about: Realists? The well-informed? The not-easily-misled crowd? And for some here, Scientists.
Thanks for showing your true colors with your last post, Danny. I believe your personal likability index just took a big hit.