From the Oakland City Attorney: (h/t to Dr. Willie Soon)
Oakland Climate Change Lawsuit
City of Oakland sues top five oil and gas companies to make them pay the cost of protecting human life and property from climate change
On September 19, 2017, Oakland City Attorney Barbara J. Parker and San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera filed separate lawsuits on behalf of their respective cities against the five largest investor-owned producers of fossil fuels in the world.
The lawsuits ask the courts to hold these companies responsible for the costs of sea walls and other infrastructure necessary to protect Oakland and San Francisco from ongoing and future consequences of climate change and sea level rise caused by the companies’ production of massive amounts of fossil fuels.
The defendant companies – Chevron, ConocoPhilips, Exxon Mobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell – have known for decades that fossil fuel-driven global warming and accelerated sea level rise posed a catastrophic risk to human beings and to public and private property, especially in coastal cities like San Francisco and Oakland. Despite that knowledge, the companies continued to aggressively produce, market and sell vast quantities of fossil fuels for a global market, while engaging in an organized campaign to deceive consumers about the dangers of massive fossil fuel production.
Oakland coastline showing eight feet of sea level rise.
Court Documents & Tutorial Presentations
Alameda County Superior Court Case No. RG17875889
San Francisco County Superior Court Case No. CGC-17-561370
Understanding Climate Emissions
Myles Allen, Environmental Change Institute, School of Geography and the Environment & Department of Physics, University of Oxford
Sea Level Rise and the San Francisco Bay Shoreline
Gary Griggs, Distinguished Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences, UC Santa Cruz
A Tutorial on Climate Change Science: the 4th National Climate Assessment
Don Wuebbles, Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois
Reference Documents
Answers to Questions Posed by Judge Alsup
Don Wuebbles, Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois
An Update on Sea Level Rise Science, April 2017
Additional documents:
http://climatecasechart.com/case/people-state-california-v-bp-plc-oakland/ (FULL LISTING)
Amicus Briefs from climate skeptics:
A source which is coninually updated is the following:
http://climatecasechart.com/case/people-state-california-v-bp-plc-oakland/
Worth bookmarking and using to keep up to date. If it ain’t appearing here, its not real.
Thanks for the link – I didnt want to pay for pacer to access the docs from the ND of Ca court website.
I did notice that there is no order granting any motion to dismiss any thing.
Specifically, there is no order dismissing the conspiracy claim, every though it has been reported at Wattsup at least 3 times and at lease once at the daily caller
Yes, it never happened. Fake news. Download the all parties motion to dismiss from the link, worth reading carefully.
Don’t read the electricity users amicus brief while drinking coffee!
Frustrating since the this site is usually pretty good.
The misreporting is something more common with skeptical science. Though I do have to say that I got banned from SK science when I pointed out errors on that site.
Professor Myles Allen’s diagram of CO2 actually shows 260,000 parts per million instead of 400 ppm.
“Professor Myles Allen was illustrating how much Co2 was now in the atmosphere when the judge rebuked him for using a misleading illustration that made the atmosphere appear to have more than 400 parts per million of Co2.
“It’s 400 parts per million but you make it look like it’s 10,000 part per million,” he said.
Wow, that judge has gone right to the point. I’ve often wondered how many climate “activist”, not to mention your average “man-on-the-street”, has any conception of how small “400 ppm” is. I bet less than one in a hundred. And each molecule only absorbs less than 20% of the infrared spectrum.
Let the oil companies stop producing if you want to see a real cataclysmic event.
What the hell is that?
In a spreadsheet I have counted the 1438 air molecules in Professor Myles Allen’s diagram that he showed the judge, and 374 of them appear to be CO2, i.e. 26% of them. That is 260,000 parts of CO2 per million parts of air. CO2 is really only 400 parts per million. The diagram has 650 times as many CO2 molecules as it should.
For the model spheres shown, not one single modeled sphere would be CO2 at that quantity. If you doubled the amount then you could have 1 Cyan sphere
Exactly what to expect from Oxford University
I have added a yellow sphere to represent what the actual proportion of CO2 should be in Professor Myles Allen’s diagram.
I can’t imagine what the blue, red and cyan spheres are supposed to represent. Perhaps Oxford University could clarify, or issue a new diagram.
Here’s MY diagram of what 400 ppm looks like, along with the HUMAN percentage of THAT:
In case anyone does not get the above diagram, the BIG cube consists of a million smaller cubes, … the pink volume represents the number of those million smaller cubes that are CO2, … and the red volume represents the number of those million cubes within the pink volume that are HUMAN-produced CO2.
If you go to the image link, and keep zooming in on it,then you can see the individual small cubes within the entire million small cubes that make up the large cube (“Earth’s atmosphere”).
Now imagine distributing that red volume of small cubes equally throughout the whole million small cubes.
Very sparse.
And THIS is what is supposed to control the entire fluid dynamic mass of Earth’s atmosphere in such a manner as to produce catastrophic effects.
Magical !
Mr Watts, I’ve written a rebuttal to Dr. Myles Allen’s presentation, but because you have a much larger following, it would be great if you or one of your frequent guests would do the same.
Sophistry In San Francisco; Half-Truths are Twice the Lie
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2018/03/24/sophistry-in-san-francisco-half-truths-are-twice-the-lie/
From your link:
From your link:
On page 6 from the above you will find this line:
Taken as a whole, the average climate is becoming “milder” across most of the United States.
I love it.
Thanks, I’ll use that.
Truth! “Global” warming isn’t really very global. It doesn’t much affect tropical highs (which is nice, because the tropics are warm enough already). Instead, it mostly makes harsh northern climates a little bit milder, because it disproportionately warms cold winter nights at higher latitudes.
Also, thanks to their absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere, the oceans are becoming (very slightly) less caustic.
What’s not to like? 😃
Here’s what I don’t understand about this suit.
Are they seeking for the conduct, the production and sale of oil based products, to continue indefinitel, but essentially paying a tax to the cities for the harm caused?
Or are they seeking for the conduct to cease, ie the companies are to stop production and sale?
The first seems to be what the claims are demanding, but its not in the least an environmental remedy. We would not, for instance, allow particulate pollution as long as a tax was paid. We seek to stop it, on health grounds. London does not allow burning of coal, but tax the coal. It only allows burning of smokeless fuel. Hence the end of smog.
The want the oil companies to give the city billions of dollars.
The cities will claim that the money is for sea walls and such, but like the tobacco settlement money that was supposed to be spent on health care and education, it will end up being spent on whatever will buy the most votes for the politicians involved.
Those “oil” companies exhibit great care to burn as little portion of the precious product as possible.What they burn they cannot sell. It is those lawyers, and all of us, who burn the stuff to heat/cool offices, schools, dwellings, the courtrooms for those frivolous lawsuits, making products in factories, …. why not to sue the energy users instead of producers?
If I lived in the SF Bay area, I’d be utterly terrified of the rapidly rising sea…oh wait; scratch that.
https://www.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=9414750
Try the 50 year trend it is more interesting:
https://www.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?stnid=9414290
It shows a clear acceleration signal. This must be due to global heating.
When did the oil company’s start? 1900? It must be correlated.
BART system took over transportation at 1970 so this is the turning point!
Could it been shown more clearly?
oppi wrote, “Try the 50 year trend [for San Francisco] it is more interesting: It shows a clear acceleration signal.”
It’s not real. It’s an artifact of the “apparent datum shift” circa 1897. The apparent acceleration vanishes in the part of the graph which does not include 1897 within the 50-year window.
NOAA helpfully marked that “apparent datum shift” with a dashed vertical line on their “Relative Sea Level Trend” page for San Francisco, but they did not bother to do that on their “Variation of 50-Year Relative Sea Level Trends” page for San Francisco.
Here’s quadratic regression (in orange) for San Francisco sea-level, starting the month after the 1906 earthquake, and continuing to present (January 2018), juxtaposed with CO2 (in green); I also enabled 3-month “boxcar” smoothing:
http://sealevel.info/9414290_SanFrancisco_2018-01_since_1906-05_quadratic_3mo_smoothed.png
Here’s an interactive version (but without smoothing enabled):
https://sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=9414290&c_date=1906/5-2019/12&lin_ci=0&linear=0&quadratic=1&quad_ci=1
That orange line looks looks perfectly straight, doesn’t it? Hold a ruler up to it and you can detect that it curves downward ever so slightly. That’s deceleration, but it is not statistically significant:
−0.00296 ±0.01385 mm/yr²
Thanks-but it does not change anything after 1922!
It is the same change today for the 50 Years as then. (1,4 mm/year) and it has been twice as high (2,58 at 1945 that is mean of 1920 to 1970)
Water circulation might give the periodic change.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/jisao-pdo
(Sorry about the botched </i> tag in my previous comment.)
opti wrote, “Thanks-but it does not change anything after 1922! It is the same change today for the 50 Years as then. (1,4 mm/year) and it has been twice as high (2,58 at 1945 that is mean of 1920 to 1970)”
Yes, here’s NOAA’s sea-level graph for San Francisco:
http://sealevel.info/9414290_san_francisco_msl_noaa_2018-03.png
Here’s their “50 year trends” graph, which I’ve annotated to show the parts which are distorted by the “apparent datum shift.” Note that NOAA only did their 50-year trend calculations at 5-year intervals; I’ve circled the “1945” period in orange:
http://sealevel.info/9414290_san_francisco_50yr_trends_noaa_2018-03_annot1.png
The 50-year trends which aren’t distorted by that 1897 “apparent datum shift” are all pretty close (within about ±0.6 mm/yr) to the long-term 2.0 mm/yr rate. I think that the variation is just an artifact of the starting and ending years for each calculation period. The 1945 period shows a higher than typical rate because it happens to start with a transient “slosh down” and end with a transient “slosh up,” which I’ve circled here:
http://sealevel.info/9414290_SanFrancisco_2018-01_since_1906-05_with_1920-25_and_1965-70_circled.png
From the above link – Alameda, California, which is right between San Francisco
& Oakland, CA:
“The relative sea level trend is 0.79 millimeters/year with a 95% confidence
interval of +/- 0.41 mm/yr based on monthly mean sea level data from
1939 to 2017 which is equivalent to a change of 0.26 feet in 100 years.”
0.26 feet = 3.12 inches. I guess the sea wall only has to be a little over 3″ (inches) to keep up with the SLR over the next 100 years, not the 7 inch wall I mentioned earlier in this thread…
Should probably start the evacuation now….
😉
Here is the map:
https://www.google.com.mx/search?q=alameda+california+map&oq=Alameda%2C+California&aqs=chrome.3.69i57j0l5.3967j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
If Alameda, California is only going to rise a little over 3 inches in the next century, where is the source from Barbara J. Parker that it is going to be around 8 feet, or whatever they say??
I’ve completed the rebuttal of Dr. Myles Allen’s presentation and would appreciate any comments, edits, additions, etc etc. Please share and pass it on.
Climate Sophistry In San Francisco; Half-Truths are Twice the Lie
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2018/03/24/sophistry-in-san-francisco-half-truths-are-twice-the-lie/
Submit it to WUWT for posting . . .
Thank you for the link to the Happer, Koonin, Lindzen amicus brief. I’ll take it as authoritative. Only an extremely stupid arrogant fool would try to pull the wool over the eyes of a federal judge – unless they like living in a tiny concrete room with a metal sink and toilet.
The brief deserves wide distribution. Even white trash such as myself can understand most of it. I was surprised to learn that the atmospheric temperature rises above 20 km, then goes down then up again. I must’ve been sleeping in class the day the teacher talked about that.
Climate Alarmist is Playing San Francisco Judge as a Complete Fool
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2018/03/25/climate-alarmist-is-playing-san-francisco-judge-as-a-complete-fool/
Dr. Myles Allen must think that the San Francisco Judge is a complete fool. I just finished a post refuting many of his claims, but one example needed to be singled out. In his presentation, Dr. Myles Allen replaced the poster child Mt. Kilimanjaro, which was exposed as a $%$ in the Climategate emails, with the Glacier National Park Glacier. He claimed that man-made global warming is the cause of the decline of the glacier.
FOI request against Oakland to provide an explicit list of how Oakland has suffered consequences of climate change.
https://oaklandca.nextrequest.com/requests/RT-23205
No response yet …
The 8 feet of sea-level rise was taken from page 25 in:
Rising Seas in California
AN UPDATE ON SEA-LEVEL RISE SCIENCE:
http://www.opc.ca.gov/webmaster/ftp/pdf/docs/rising-seas-in-california-an-update-on-sea-level-rise-science.pdf
Local jurisdictions do not have to utilize the Federal flood elevations as established through FEMA and shown on the FIRM maps … they may adopt more stringent rules.
For example, Oakland could require construction around the bay, and in areas that are subject to potential future flooding, to be built higher that the minimum federal requirements. They could require construction to be five feet above the BFE if they wanted to. Have they initiated this requirement?
The City of Oakland is required to manage the floodplain development in a manner that keeps the development reasonably safe from flooding. If they have signed off on any FEMA LOMA of LOMR-F applications (“knowing”, as they do, that the flooding will be much higher than the model as developed by FEMA), then they (Oakland CFM’s) should be subject to the penalties outlined in the CFR under floodplain management.