Alaskan Village Sues Over Global Warming

hightower_40 writes to mention that a small Alaskan village has sued two dozen oil, power, and coal companies, blaming them for contributing to global warming. "Sea ice traditionally protected the community, whose economy is based in part on salmon fishing plus subsistence hunting of whale, seal, walrus, and caribou. But sea ice that forms later and melts sooner because of higher temperatures has left the community unprotected from fall and winter storm waves and surges that lash coastal areas."

Comments

Mistargeted law suit?

[DrLang21]

IANAL. It would seem to me that if you are going to sue someone for causing you harm, you would need to sue everyone involved. In this case, that would mean sueing almost everyone in the world. It's not fair to target one small group just because they have money. IANAL.

Re:Mistargeted law suit?

[MyNymWasTaken]

This parallels the "Big Tobacco" cases. The oil companies are the ones who have profited and lied about the side effects of their product.

Re:Mistargeted law suit?

[snarfer]

In fact they're even using some of the same people and organizations that the tobacco compa nies used. "Doubt is our product" is the famous quote from a tobacco memo about their front-groups. They managed to put off a reckoning for decades by making people think that the science about cigarettes causing cancer was not clear.

Re:Mistargeted law suit?

[zippthorne]

The main difference is that smoking tobacco doesn't really benefit anybody wheras burning coal and oil has literally driven the engines of production creating tremendous wealth for the whole world. We still have some distribution problems resulting in a number of people not being able to take full advantage of this wealth, but that number is decreasing all the time.

Even if coal and oil use is causing noticeable and net deleterious effects, there is some argument that they should be forgiven past liability and even protected from some amount of current liability, as long as they are taking reasonable steps to mitigate deleterious effects, now.

The earth can support 6 billion modern people. It already does. It cannot support 6 billion cave-men.

Re:Mistargeted law suit?

[SacredByte]

Offsetting one's "carbon footprint" is just about the stupidest thing I've heard in awhile. Its called riding a bicycle. I do it (durring the summer, anyway). I live in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in a comfortable home (4 bedroom, 2.5 bath). Mr. Gore's home is several times the size of mine, and uses more electricity in a month than my home uses in a year.

My comment was not meant to say "Gore does no good" but was meant to say "Gore says there are things you should do, like using fuel-efficient vehicles, and he doesn't even follow his own advice."

I have absolutely no problem with someone telling me that they think I should so something--Like drive a fuel efficient car (I do BTW: 1994 Corola)--just as long as they follow their own advice. Mr. Gore does not but, as you say: Why let the facts get in the way?

Re:Mistargeted law suit?

[SacredByte]

And here is why it is stupid:

To create these solar/wind farms is a net loss in terms of environmental impact. Not only do you have to use "fossil fuels" to construct them, you also have to clear large amounts of land.

Couldn't those cute little bunnies and spotted owls use that land better?~

But I digress: Nuclear is much better for the envioronment than wind/solar power. It is that simple.

Re:Mistargeted law suit?

[Penguinisto]

My question: Why not?

Sibling caught the first one: Food.

#2 would be living space. Cities exist today because transportation can support them. Cities are also where the vast majority of people happen to live overall.

Put it this way - if the laws of electricity were somehow revoked tomorrow morning at 9am sharp, within a year at least 1/2 of humanity would be dead, even if everyone knew up-front how to live like a caveman. Starvation, Disease (no medicines anymore), exposure (wanna live in a cave up in North Dakota? Me Neither, but all the ones in southern California are taken), dehydration (places like Las Vegas and Phoenix only exist because we can send a whole lot of water there), predation (from both animals and from really hungry humans), etc etc.

I'm not even counting the wars that would immediately generate because of new scarcities like food, salt, firewood, and the like.

By the by, the resource demands would certainly drop for things like petroleum, but they would rocket for things like plants (for food, clothing and fuel), animals (food and clothing), clean water (no modern sewage treatment anymore, and everybody taking a dump outside will eventually affect the local water table)... Also clean air would be hard to come by. Nobody wants to die of hypothermia, so everyone's gonna burn whatever wood and plants are handy come winter... this means way less trees to go around once everyone gets done stripping the forests for whatever they can lay hands on.

The Gaia worshippers can talk a good game, but the stark fact is, you'd have to reduce the population to roughly 10% of what it is now in order to have any sort of sustainable hunter-gatherer type of lifestyle. This means 90% of everyone else has to go.

(personally, I'd like to see that 90% eventually living in space colonies w/ Earth as one gigantic recreational park, but that's going to take some time...)

/P

Re:Mistargeted law suit?

[MyNymWasTaken]

The oceans are currently absorbing 7 billion tons of CO2 more than they outgas each year, with terrestrial absorption at 5 billion tons net per year.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/CarbonCycle/carbon_cycle4.html (NASA's Earth Observatory site is currently offline)
(alternate link) http://www.visionlearning.com/library/module_viewer.php?mid=95

Solar irradiance does directly track historical temperatures; however, the past 30 years have shown increasing temperatures with steady solar irradiance.

Direct satellite measurements of solar irradiance find no rising trend since 1978, the start of measurements. Sunspot numbers have leveled out since 1950. The Max Planck Institute reconstruction shows that irradiance has been steady since 1950 and solar radio flux or flare activity shows no rising trend over the past 30 years.

An increase solar irradiance would warm all layers of the atmosphere as there would be more heat radiating through all atmospheric layers back out to space. An increased greenhouse effect would reflect more heat to the surface, thus warming the lower atmospheric layers and cooling the upper atmospheric layers. The second case is what is being observed.

http://www.mps.mpg.de/dokumente/publikationen/solanki/c153.pdf
http://www.pmodwrc.ch/pmod.php?topic=tsi/composite/SolarConstant
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Sunspot_Numbers_png
ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SUNSPOT_NUMBERS/MONTHLY.PLT
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Solar_Cycle_Variations_png

Re:Mistargeted law suit?

[Wandering Wombat]

1: A wind turbine needs space--air free of foliage or other debris that could damage it.
It goes up about 80 feet, so... check.

2: A wind turbine needs to be situated on real estate that actually gets wind.
It goes up about 80 feet, so... check.

3: You need to spend time (and by extension money) maintaining the conditions of my first point.
Right... once a year, trim some branches. Oh, the humanity.

4: The environmental cost of manufacturing & erecting the turbine.
Some aluminum tubes, some plexiglass vanes, and a simple motor. Check.

5: The environmental cost of disposing of the turbine at the end of its lifespan.
Less than toxic waste, heavy water, and radioactive gasses. Check.

6: The environmental cost on wildlife due to lost habitat.

Sixty four square feet. Check.

Seems fairly simple to me.

The funny thing...

[Otter]

The funny thing is that villagers like these use enormous amounts of fuel and create tremendous pollution (per-capita, anyway) with their snowmobiles and poorly insulated houses. And how many times do you figure the lawyer pushing them into this suit has flown in from Boston?

I do love the part where they're complaining that global warming is keeping them from hunting "whale, seal, walrus, and caribou". Maybe Leonardo diCaprio should make a movie about that!

More about money grubbing lawyers...

[bagboy]

than anything else. I live in Alaska and can tell you the driving force behind this is actually "The Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment and the Native American Rights Fund -- plus six law firms." The natives in the village use gas-powered vehicles for transportation and (generator) electricity for their homes, suing the people who provide the source for those items.

Shoot, why don't we all climb on board. Oh, wait - I drive a car to work and use natural gas to heat my home, plus electricity to power my net activities...

Re:Yes but...

[sheepofblue]

Yes it is http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Worldwide+Global+Cooling/article10866.htm The same idiots were screaming ice age in the late 70's to early 80's. Further they are using it to proposed government initiatives at a global level. Good bye freedoms and even the pittance of accountability we have now have once the UN (majority tyrants) get control. This is junk science at its worst.

Re:Yes but...

[bunratty]

Of course. I always value the scientific opinion of the founder of The Weather Channel over the consensus of hundreds of climate scientists.

Enjoin the Sun

[Migraineman]

I hope they enjoined the Sun as a co-defendant.

The lawsuit invokes the federal common law of public nuisance, and every entity that contributes to the pollution problem harming Kivalina is liable

If anything is substantially responsible for increasing the earth's temperature, it's that nuclear-reactor-in-the-sky.

Re:They'll be happy to know the Earth is Cooling

[Black Parrot]

I'm sure they'll be delighted to know that last year was not only one of the coolest on record, but that the trend was so pronounced as "to wipe out nearly all the warming recorded over the past 100 years. All in one year's time. For all four sources, it's the single fastest temperature change ever recorded, either up or down."[dailytech.com] So, we're supposed to reject the nigh-universal consensus of climate scientists because a blogger tells us to?

Re: Yes but...

[ArcherB]

I asked if you would believe raw data.
You answered:

Not in the absence of competence to interpret it. Then you say:

Meanwhile both poles are melting faster than anyone feared. What TFA I linked says:

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on. What the Goddard Space Flight Center shows:

While recent studies have shown that on the whole Arctic sea ice has decreased since the late 1970s, satellite records of sea ice around Antarctica reveal an overall increase in the southern hemisphere ice over the same period. Of course, it wouldn't be fair to bring up the opposing argument (from 2003):

Australian scientists yesterday revealed new evidence of global warming, suggesting that sea ice around Antarctica had shrunk 20% in the past 50 years. So if decreasing sea ice proves global warming, wouldn't increasing sea ice DISprove global warming? I mean, I am not a climatologist and all, but I am a thinker.

I'm not saying that the climate didn't change or isn't changing. It is always changing. I'm saying that it is natural, not man made and that the "hockey stick" predictions of future climate models were dead wrong.

Re:Yes but...

[snarfer]

"attack the group"

I just pointed out that you were linking to an Exxon-funded front-group, so people can evaluate what they are seeing.

Re:Yes but...

[RobertM1968]

The simple facts that elude everyone on each side of this argument (regardless of which side is correct) are:

• As a species, we should be trying to make our technology be as harmonious with nature (and it's built in checks and balances) as possible to avoid creating these or similar issues (thus, drastically or even not so drastically but still noticeably changing the composition of our atmosphere is "probably" not a good idea).
• Humans live better, longer and with less health issues when breathing a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere - unpolluted with CO emissions and such other byproducts (regardless of which are possible causes of global warming)
• While trees may thrive in an atmosphere with higher CO2 levels, humans don't. And with the amount of deforestation we do, increasing CO2 levels for the sake of plants is not the solution... keeping them at a balanced level to support animal and plant life would be far more wiser (in conjunction with proper care of our plant kingdon).

It does baffle me that instead of looking at the other valid reasons (and I listed only a few that quickly came to mind) people dismiss this "issue" because it is possibly targeting the wrong problem created by the issue. Lowering emissions is still just as relevant simply to maintain a clean, properly balanced atmosphere... anyone remember SanFran a few decades ago? It is obvious we can make a difference in our environment - negative or positive - but it is up to us to choose - and pretending CO2 and CO emissions aren't a problem simply because they may not cause global warming; when we know they do cause various other health and environmental problems is not the step in the right direction.

Re:It's not "mis-targetted"

[timeOday]

Oh, you think $1e6 per capita is too much? Wait until you see the claims of people with eroding property in California, Florida, and New York in a few years. I'm not saying the lawsuit is just or winnable, but I'll bet it is the first of many larger ones to come.

Re:They'll be happy to know the Earth is Cooling

[ncc74656]

So, we're supposed to reject the nigh-universal consensus of climate scientists because a blogger tells us to?

Consensus != science...and even if it were, it's hardly as universal as Algore and his Grünsturmabteilung would have you believe.

Re:It's not "mis-targetted"

[trolltalk.com]

they aren't living in igloos. They have rifles, snowmobiles, 4x4s, satellite tv, etc.

Re: Yes but...

[ncc74656]

"Climate change" means that we will see more extreme weather, including more regional snowfall in some places. So yes, more snowfall in North America actually shows that global warming IS occurring.

...and now we get to the core of the Grünsturmabteilung's argument: the unfalsifiable hypothesis. It's the intellectual equivalent of "heads we win, tails you lose." What's next? Are you going to tell us that anthropogenic global warming turned you into a newt, but that you got better?

Re:But they are targeting everyone!

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

See also: Brilliant plan by Democrats, announced today, to tax the profits of the evil oil companies.

Quite frankly, if I were an oil company, and had politicians getting elected promising to ram a pitchfork up my ass, all the while they claim they're gonna decimate oil with alternative fuels, I'd be dragging ass too in constructing new oil pipelines, infrastructure, refineries, and the like, when, if said politicians have their way, much of that new stuff'll be useless in a few years as oil use decreases and thus you cannot recoup your billions.

Screw that government and the people that elect it. Raise prices!

Do not mark this flamebait. This is a serious analysis. That it upsets you, well, read my .sig.

Re:They'll be happy to know the Earth is Cooling

[MyNymWasTaken]

A scientific consensus describes, not proscribes, the accumulated data & scientific theories. Read that again; descriptive, not proscriptive. Denying a consensus with nothing more than bluster and ad hominem retorts is a blatant denial of science. Provide relevant & complete evidence or you are no better than the creationists.

Re:It's not "mis-targetted"

[EvilNTUser]

Cultures don't have a right to live. People have a right to live.

If your culture becomes unviable, you move on. It's not the rest of the planet's job to help you to live like a carbon copy of your father. We find this self evident with business models, but cultures evoke silly emotional reactions.