Nature promotes frivolous lawsuits
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By Andy May
A Dutch joke*:
"The Judge asks an attorney pleading his case: 'Am I ever to hear the truth?'
The attorney responds: 'No, my Lord, only the evidence.'"
It is safe to say that no evidence exists that man-made climate change has harmed anyone. Further man-made climate or climate change has never been observed or measured. Climate-related and extreme-weather-related deaths, whether natural or man-made, have declined 93% since their peak in the 1920s and 1930s. Extreme weather events have declined and their impact on humans has declined even faster. Deaths due to climate change (man-made or natural) reached their lowest point in recorded history in 2019.
Climate models, that purport to estimate our collective effect on climate, have an uncertainty of ±1.5°C or more, according to the latest IPCC report (IPCC, 2021). They place the range of the effect at 2°C to 5°C/2XCO2. The abbreviation "°C/2XCO2" means the warming due to doubling CO2. Three degrees of error is so large that the models clearly have little predictive value, and the range has not narrowed since the 1979 Charney Report (Charney, et al., 1979). Ross McKitrick and John Christy have shown that all models seriously overestimate middle troposphere warming in the critical tropic region (McKitrick & Christy, 2018). One would think that would be the end of the story.
Imagine my surprise when I see a book review in Nature that tells me a court in The Netherlands ordered Royal Dutch Shell to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions on May 26th by 45%, and do so by 2030. The very next day, an Australian court found that the Minister of the Environment had a duty to protect Australian children from harm but declined to grant an injunction to halt the expansion of a supposedly threatening coal mine. The Minister did not contest the plaintiff's case that there would be "foreseeable" future harm caused by greenhouse emissions from burning the extra coal. See the Court orders, page 148, for the details.
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V24/sep/a1.php
