More On European Climate Change Litigation: These People Are Crazy

/

  • It’s easy to look at “climate change” litigation in the U.S. and conclude that a good percentage of our environmental bureaucrats and judges who get involved in these things are crazy.

  • Thus many courts around the country (mostly state courts) have allowed lawsuits seeking damages against oil companies over greenhouse gas emissions from their products to proceed at least beyond the preliminary stages. And the EPA, early in the Obama administration (2009) issued what is called the “Endangerment Finding,” declaring CO2 and other GHGs to be a “danger to public health and welfare” — a ridiculous determination that the Trump administration nevertheless did not attempt to undo, and which substantially ties the government’s hands in contesting wacky climate-related cases. Not that the Biden Administration can be counted on to contest these cases at all, no matter how preposterous.

  • We do have in the U.S. this thing called the doctrine of “non-justiciability.” The doctrine has been around for a long time, and is well-established in many precedents. As discussed in my most recent post, it was the non-justiciability doctrine that sank the Juliana case, which sought to get a court to order the end of the use of fossil fuels in the U.S. on the basis of the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment and the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Even two of three Obama-appointed judges on the Ninth Circuit panel agreed with that rationale.

  • But let’s consider Europe.

Read More

Update On The International Efforts To Save The Planet Through Climate Litigation

/

  • Having had a long career in the litigation business, I have a well-developed appreciation for the limits on what can be accomplished through lawsuits. Among litigators, the line “Let’s sue the bastards” is always good for a laugh, in rueful recognition of the enormous amounts of effort that can be expended for little, or even negative, results.

  • But the green environmental movement appears to have both near infinite funding and legions of adherents filled with crazed religious zeal. When somebody in this crowd blurts out “Let’s sue the bastards,” the funding immediately emerges, and ideologue lawyers line up to compete for the gig.

  • So somehow these guys got the idea of suing national governments on the theory that “fundamental human rights” are threatened by climate change.

  • Would that allegation be enough to get one or a few judges to order the judicial takeover of entire national economies to force the lowering of CO2 emissions?

Read More

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXVIII

/
The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part XXVIII

  • What I refer to as the “Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time” is the systematic alteration of historical world temperatures to make it appear, falsely, that the most recent months and years are the “warmest ever.” The basic technique of the fraud is the artificial lowering of previously-reported data as to world temperatures in earlier years, in order to erase earlier warmth and amplify the apparent warming trend. This is the 28th post in this series. The previous post in the series appeared on October 5, 2020. To view all 27 prior posts, you can go to this composite link.

  • The deliverable products of the temperature fraudsters are purported charts of world temperatures derived from a thermometer-based surface record (called GHCN, or Global Historical Climate Network), generally going back to about 1880. The charts are engineered to appear in an iconic “hockey stick” shape, with relatively flat earlier years followed by a sharply rising “blade” in the most recent years.

  • Every few years the government (this is a joint effort of NASA and NOAA) comes out with a new version of these data. The latest version is called GHCN version 4, which began in 2018.

Read More

More From Murray's "Facing Reality"

/

  • I’ve now finished Charles Murray’s “Facing Reality.” It’s not a long book — 125 pages pre-footnotes. There are extensive references to online data archives and scholarly articles that you can review if you are so inclined; but as far as text goes, that’s it.

  • The core of the book is a summary of readily-available statistical data as to differences between and among racial groups in the U.S. The two areas of statistics on which Murray focuses are those relating to “cognitive ability” and “violent crime.” The racial categories that he uses are the ones generally used by government statisticians, including the Census, although he has adopted somewhat different nomenclature — European, African, Latin and Asian.

  • The group differences found in the statistics are not small.

Read More

Initial Reaction To Charles Murray's "Facing Reality"

/

  • As you may be aware, Charles Murray is out with a new book, “Facing Reality: Two Truths About Race In America.” I picked up a copy today. It’s not a long book, and I am already much of the way through it.

  • For those curious about how I got the book, I bought it at my local independent bookstore, Three Lives on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village. Of course, they did not have it in stock. But they took my order, and after a couple of weeks, the book arrived, and I went over and bought it. (This is in contrast to Abigail Shrier’s “Irreversible Damage” which, although I ordered it about two months ago, somehow has still not arrived; and to Ryan Anderson’s “When Harry Became Sally,” as to which, the clerk informed me, after studying his computer screen intently for several minutes, “we can’t get that.”)

  • The gist of Murray’s book is not complicated to summarize. The “two truths about race” that Murray refers to are, in the words of the Table of Contents, “race differences in cognitive ability,” and “race differences in violent crime.”

  • Murray’s point is that it is impossible to have an intelligent discussion about race in America without recognizing the truths about the large differences between and among races on these two metrics.

Read More

Requiem For Afghanistan

/

  • In the Archive section of this blog, I actually created a tag for Afghanistan. There are four posts under that heading, the first one on July 1, 2017, and the most recent on December 22, 2019.

  • Thinking I might write something about the subject today, I went back and looked over those posts. The truth is that I don’t have much to say that I didn’t already say in one or another of those posts.

  • So most of this post will consist of excerpts from those earlier posts.

  • But think of Afghanistan as the perfect metaphor for the main theme of this blog, which is the absurdity of a highly-credentialed American elite that thinks it can solve all human problems and bring the world to an egalitarian progressive utopia through unfettered access to the infinite resources of the American taxpayer. This one small piece of the grand enterprise has just fallen to pieces. The rest of the grand enterprise continues. It too will eventually suffer the same fate, but the process could take a long time.

Read More