Essay by Eric Worrall
Greens are trying to redefine “climate lockdown” as meaning a weather even which makes it unpleasant to be outdoors.
‘Climate lockdown’ anger drives Swiss grandmother to sue government at EU court
Last summer, while dozens of Swiss pensioners were campaigning in the Alps to save their fast-melting glaciers, 85-year-old Marie-Eve Volkoff was instead stuck inside her small Geneva apartment watching TV programmes.
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Switzerland’s punishing triple heatwaves in 2022 compelled Ms Volkoff to stay at home for 11 weeks with just short outings, which she says was worse than COVID-19 and a violation of her human rights.
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Before buying an air conditioner in 2019, Ms Volkoff said she used to hover near her bed for fear of passing out.
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The Swiss government declined to comment on the case. It told the court that the changes to the women’s lives during heatwaves like staying at home were “quite common” and that everyone, including plants and animals, was affected.
More broadly, Switzerland said it recognised that climate change was a problem for the country, where temperatures are rising at about twice the global rate. But it says solutions need to be found at home.
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Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-03-28/climate-lockdown-anger-drives-swiss-grandmother-to-sue-gov/102156662
I’m really shocked Marie-Eve Volkoff has the chutzpah to sue the government for climate harm, when she has been running a planet wrecking air conditioner since 2019.
What’s wrong with hiring a team of workers to take a camel train to a high mountain, and cut some ice from one of Switzerland’s permanent glaciers? That way she could cool her apartment the way some of her pre-industrial ancestors dealt with the summer heat.
Hand cutting ice might cost more than running an air conditioner, but we shouldn’t be thinking about cost when it comes to climate action, right? /sarc
This old Harvard trained lawyer could not help but laugh. She is Swiss, suing the Swiss government—in an EU court. Only problem is, Switzerland is NOT
a member of the EU, so the EU court has no jurisdiction. Moreover, since grandma is also Swiss, she does NOT have standing in an EU court. Only EU citizens do. These jurisdiction and standing basics are taught in 1L first semester.
Grandma needs to get a better lawyer. Expensive PR value, but NO legal merit.
The Swiss have been signing lots of treaties lately, who knows what sovereignty they signed away.
Yes. The Swiss signed and ratifies the European *Convention* on Human Rights in the 1970s
https://www.eda.admin.ch/eda/en/fdfa/foreign-policy/international-organizations/council-europe/european-convention-human-rights.html
So there is jurisdiction for the court which isnt an EU only body and is considered separate to jurisdiction of the EU . Its mistake in the headline that says EU
That argument is a classic logical fallacy; argumentum ad ignorantiam (the argument from ignorance or the appeal to ignorance).
Switzerland is where a lot of the private money behind the whole climate scam resides.
“More broadly, Switzerland said it recognised that climate change was a problem for the country, where temperatures are rising at about twice the global rate.” (emphasis mine.)
This is getting truly hilarious. Better yet, it is worth noting that the global rate is zero for 8 years now if you take the UAH data using the Monckton method.
No, that cannot be. By pure arithmetic, 2×0 is still 0. What is poor Switzerland to do? ( Hint, nothing would be a good start.)
2×0 = 0
They should have said …
where studies show temperatures are rising at about 7.638 X the global rate.”
sounds much more scary & scientific
Scare the hell out of hypochondriacs with bogus figures. Wonderful! A stroke of genius!
And twice the global rate means the same as everywhere else!
I’ve never figured that one out.
Every Place On Earth Warming Faster Than Every Other Place On Earth
Oh, my! 😉
David D,
Excessive, unscientific cherryn piucking has led many countries to claim that they are warming faster than average. How silly can it get before truth strikes?
Geoff S
https://andrewromanviews.blog/2019/11/06/every-country-is-warming-twice-as-fast-as-the-average/
“cherryn piucking”
Sounds painful.
Good article at that link! Thanks Geoff S.
Everyplace warming up faster than the global average is a great example of how to lie with statistics. Consider: 71% of the Earth is water. The heat content of water consigns it to heat up slower than land. So any land-based area can be expected to heat up faster than 71% of earth. What you will never see is a headline saying that the South Pacific is heating up faster than average!
I think the UK Government should be sued for Not Preventing cold weather this winter !!
They tell us the world has too much heat, so they should be importing some of that heat to keep us warm … then we wouldn’t have to – eat so much meat; wear so many clothes: burn so many trees; go to warmer climates in the winter; Reducing – methane production, slaves who make clothes in sweat shops, air born pollution, CO2 from flying; All very green & woke !!
They could move all the wind turbines (that only work part time) into a line from Africa to the UK (re-wire them so they run as motors) & blow warm air up to “Blighty” .
Anyone who knows Geneva, and the fabulous Lac Leman, knows all problems are caused by France, especially the Föhn, 1 hot wind of 12 that blows up the Rhone Valley to harass the poor Genevois.
This is likely why it is a EU court case.
It is a wonder that it is not a ICC (not to be confused with the International Chamber of Commerce) court case (not recognized by Russia, China, US, India) , as the Föhn is violating human rights to balmy weather.
Just to be clear, the Föhn has nothing on the Santa Anna Red wind :
PHILIP MARLOWE Private Eye – S1E6 – Red Wind – Powers Boothe – 1986
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vbdWSw0w4s
Anything can happen when the Santa Ana wind blows through town.
A movie Grandma likely knows, should watch before shooting from the hip!
Foehn winds, which bring hot, dry weather, blow from high altitude to low, compressing the air and warming it, while any moisture previously in the air is precipitated out on the other side of the mountains (where the air is rising).
A foehn wind in Geneva would likely blow from the southeast (from the Alps along the French/Italian border), whereas the Rhone river flows southwest out into the plains toward Lyon, France.
But you can’t really blame a hot wind on the upwind country. Toulouse, a large city in southwestern France at the foot of the Pyrenees, frequently gets hot southerly foehn winds blowing over the Pyrenees into Toulouse. But should the Toulousains blame the wind on Spain?
I was listening to one of these stupid Swiss women (and her lawyer) last night.
The amount of claptrap spewing out the mouths of these people was something to behold. Their basic argument is that their government should have stopped the potential of getting too warm by stopping some (not all – some) of this….
CO2 or GDP?
And that co2 in the graph is per capita – so the Swiss influence is even less than the graph shows!
Blaming 2-3°C/century warming (probably natural anyway) on a heatwave is like blaming the Sun for a forest fire.
I suspect that the Swiss definition of heatwave may differ from a Houstonian’s definition.
The Swiss don’t have broad-brimmed straw hats like your Texas belles. They’re unprepared. So they reach out and sue someone!
It’s probably a set-up anyway – eco-nazis must have searched for months for some little old lady to take advantage of and use as their lawfare (law-warfare) ammunition.
You always have to watch out when Europeans claim there is a heat wave.
We were in England a few years ago in may. It was warm and sunny with a high of 81°F (27°C). the locals were muttering darkly about the heat wave. I told them that this was not a heat wave, it was a lovely spring day.
The problem is that they do not have the tools or the technology to deal with heat. Ice for drinks is almost unheard of. Air conditioning is rare. Most importantly, cold lager is unavailable and bottled lager is not kept properly cold.
Ask them to define a heat wave. Tell them that you will not accept claims of heat wave unless the temperature is over 38°C (100.4°F)
Some sixties years ago I grew up in semi-desert area where summer days were often above 38°C (100.4°F). We never complained about a heat wave and I do not remember elderly people dying like flies. Very few people could afford air conditioning.
Sure. it depends on what you are used to. Humans are a tropical species that evolved in equatorial Africa.
I used to follow an Englishman on social media. He complained once about the prostrating heat, by which he meant the low 80’s. I said, “Dude, that’s a standard summer overnight low in Dallas.”
Last time i was in Dallas it was late August and it didn’t get much below 90 at night. But Dallas has good air conditioning.
The average summer temperature in the UK is somewhere around 16°C. With a maritime climate that has relatively little variation, we just aren’t used to temperatures much higher than that. You don’t just get to set some arbitrary definition, based on your own experience, and then complain that other people, with differing expectations, aren’t sticking to it. Might as well declare there’s a single, global temperature and whine when it changes.
“The average summer temperature in the UK is somewhere around 16°C. With a maritime climate that has relatively little variation, we just aren’t used to temperatures much higher than that.”
Yes, I keep an eye on the arctic air temperatures using Nullschool, and I’ve noticed that as the arctic air swings around the northern hemisphere, and it gets close to the UK, the air temperatures start to moderate, presumably by the warmer ocean, and the UK doesn’t get many arctic cold blasts like we do here in the USA.
“Switzerland said it recognised that climate change was a problem for the country, where temperatures are rising at about twice the global rate.”
Everyplace on the planet is warming twice as fast as everywhere else.
Well about halfway through last year the Grauniad started saying the Arctic was warming three times faster than anywhere else and I’m expecting them to upgrade that to four times in the near future 🙂
probably a good time to invest in real estate up there!
Your next headline might be:
“Climate hypochondriac sues climate bureaucracy for not having godlike powers.”
This could get interesting. The lawyers will be able to afford winter vacations in the Maldives if this keeps up.
Speaking of Switzerland- the following YouTube video popped up in my feed.
Nobel laureate William Nordhaus: The economics of climate change
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DG5i8BGaXo&t=157s
I’m not familiar with him- heard of him- but don’t know his work. According to Wikipedia, “Nordhaus takes seriously the potentially catastrophic impacts of climate change.”
I haven’t watched that video yet- maybe tomorrow.
Apologies Ms Floggalot but, you brought this entire thing down upon yourself.
All of it,
You did it.
You caused the heatwave
All the rest of (geographical) Europe should be suing you
You did it over the course of the last 40 and 50 years and you did it by your own consumption of sugar.
We know you’ve been eating sugar all that time – that is how you got the cardio-vascular disease that you so freely admit to having.
(Watching a lot of TV didn’t go a bundle on saving you from it either)
All the sugar you ate did not ‘just fall down from the sky’ – quite the opposite in fact.
It came out of the land/ground/soils of the agricultural land surrounding where you live. Within a radius of 100’s of miles
The production of that sugar involved tractors, ploughs and tillage machines, also immense amounts of chemicals including not least, ammonium nitrate.
What happened over that time, slowly, immeasurably, intermittently, un-noticed but inexorablby was that that ground/land/soil suffered from ‘Aridification’
It lost not only all the water that it originally contained but also the very means by which it could store and retain any water.
And with that water went any thermal inertia that all that land/ground/soil had – also any control it had over how much sunshine might (haha) rain down on it.
By being dessicated and dark in colour, when the sun did shine, It Got Hot
No matter winter, spring, summer or fall.
The principle is now well understood via what happened to Mt Kilimanjaro when most of the forest on its foothills were chopped.
The perpetual snow vanished and the peak of that mountain endured heatwaves.
Just like you are doing right now and are broadcasting your woe around the whole world.
I’d have kept my mouth shut if I were you. When folks work out the damage you’ve done via your ‘sugar habit’ – they are NOT going to be very happy little bunnies
Effectively hun, you have created a desert for hundreds of miles around you – you are very sensible to be cowering under your bedsheets.
For everyone, watch the heatwaves unfold here:
https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/IEGGIW1/graph/2022-07-31/2022-07-31/monthly
When you get there, flip forward through the months with the little right-facing blue arrow labelled ‘Next’
IOW: See the climate of a desert in action
You too Floggalot – you did that yet have the gall to blame everybody else and, expect THEM to give you money in return.
How did *everything* go sooooo wrong
FFS
The government needs to keep its cotton picking nose out of our business. They do NOT know better than us. Where I live it can get down to 20 F degrees below zero with no wind in winter and pushing 105 F during summer. I’ve lived with it my whole life and I damn sure don’t need no stinking politician or anyone else telling me how to handle it. My grandkids are living through it, my kids are living through it, my wife and I are doing fine, my parents lived through it, my grandparents lived through it and my great grandparents lived through it. So bugger off government.
Imagine the disdainful ridicule with which the Arabs and Africans observe, watching these poor melting snowflakes in the ‘developed world’.
I recently completed the book Over The Edge: Deaths in Grand Canyon. The authors speculate in the epilogue on just why, with all the information available today, people continue to die there. The suggested reason is that people just might have become so domesticated that they deliberately go out of their way to take extreme risks that might give their lives meaning.
Here this gal had one handed to her for free, and yet she still bitches. Huh.
With all these places warming at twice the global rate we should be told about those places that are warming at half the global rate to balance things out, surely.
I am no lawyer but if I were the Swiss Gov, my defence would be “I can’t control the climate so it is not my fault”
To have the fact that Governments can’t control climate, recognised in court would be a great win.
Switzerland’s temperatures rising at twice the global rate?
A global rate that includes the polar regions where most warming occurs?
Well, that claimed rate of warming sure isn’t caused by CO₂.
Switzerland has plenty of mountains, so why didn’t she cool off in a mountain resort, where it’s cooler than in the valleys? She could even run into lots of like-minded people in Davos.
She could also take the advice of Spaniards, who are long accustomed to summer heat. Go out and run errands early in the morning, take a siesta in the early afternoon, then come back out in the evening, when it’s cooler outside.