An Inconvenient Lawsuit: Teenagers Take Global Warming to the Courts

The Atlantic ^ | May 9, 2012 | Katherine Ellison

[Twotone]

Alec Loorz turns 18 at the end of this month. While finishing high school and playing Ultimate Frisbee on weekends, he's also suing the federal government in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.

The Ventura, California, teen and four other juvenile plaintiffs want government officials to do more to prevent the risks of climate change -- the dangerous storms, heat waves, rising sea levels, and food-supply disruptions that scientists warn will threaten their generation absent a major turnabout in global energy policy. Specifically, the students are demanding that the U.S. government start reducing national emissions of carbon dioxide by at least six percent per year beginning in 2013.

[allmost]

You spread that garbage? The millions that are to be subjected to it you must understand. Are you stupid or just fucking evil?

[allmost]

The billions that are subjected to it. Correction.

[palmer]

Keep in mind that WattsUpWithThat rarely censors alternative views, and Beck himself posts in the Under the Volcano thread I linked to. I don’t think there is a strong case for fluctuations above 300 ppm before preindustrial times. But there is a case for some fluctuation based on ocean temperature fluctuation and the Keeling curve may have some exaggerated smoothness. But I don’t think it is a strong enough case to explain the current 390 ppm and rising.

[allmost]

Do you understand that warmer liquid holds less gas? Do you understand that the estimated age of our Sun is over 4 billion years old. She might fluctuate a bit. I know that dissolved gasses release in warmer water. I've had it blow up in my face. :) You are still talking parts per million, and neglecting the Sun. You cannot be right.

Have you ever owned or had the pleasure to live around a greenhouse? The water vapor holds the heat.

[palmer]

Beck has documented those measurements in a presentation: http://www.wasserplanet.becsoft.de/CO2-Dateien/Summary-bayreuth-e.pdf and paper http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/q46551865h237235/

But read the comment here: http://cio.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/2007/EnergyEnvironMeijer/2007EnergyEnvironMeijer.pdf to see some of the flaws in the Beck paper. AFAIK, Beck has not written a new paper since then.

[Chode]

high school students... is there anything they don't know???

[texas booster]

From the article:

While teenagers serve as the public face of the lawsuit, the idea itself came from Julia Olson, an attorney based in Eugene, Oregon. Olson founded an organization called Our Children's Trust after watching the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth while she was seven months pregnant. Her idea to invite kids to become plaintiffs in a suit against the government was partly inspired by her colleague Mary Christina Wood, director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Program at the University of Oregon. Wood has spent her career studying the public trust doctrine, most recently devising a strategy she has dubbed Atmospheric Trust Litigation to apply that theory to the climate.

From the wiki:

The public trust doctrine is the principle that certain resources are preserved for public use, and that the government is required to maintain them for the public's reasonable use.

Since we all share oxygen, the government can regulate our every breath, if taking it to the extreme as she is doing.

[allmost]

What they believe, guides them.

[palmer]

Yes, warmer liquid holds less gas. The dependence shows up in the temperature dependence of the Henry constant, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry%27s_Law The fluctuations from the sun explain a lot of the warming in the 80's and 90's as I explained above. There is also a steady increase due to CO2. The reason is that CO2 absorbs some wavelengths of IR that water vapor does not and increasing the CO2 causes a small increase in the temperature of the atmosphere.

The warming inside a greenhouse is partly due to trapping the warm air (preventing convection). The rest is due to the absorption of outgoing IR by the glass, just like CO2 in the atmosphere. The glass then emits about 1/2 of that heat back into the greenhouse. The water vapor inside the greenhouse helps hold some heat too but that is mostly an increase in thermal mass. It is even better to have many gallons of water in the greenhouse for thermal mass to hold the heat through the night or cloudy days.

[allmost]

I've read compelling arguments that refute the greenhouse effect altogether. Your numbers on CO₂ absorption are bullshit. I would go so far as to call them a lie. Linking me to anthropogenic greenhouse warming links does not help your case. I've shown you, with 2 bottles or cans, that something else is going on. Refute my eternal observation before I read your paid plant.

[palmer]

A bottle of soda water stuffed with CO2 has much more gas than the ocean has dissolved in it. I mainly linked to WattsUpWithThat which is the world's largest site for disputing man made global warming. They post articles on everything from refuting man made CO2 to refuting the greenhouse effect itself to refuting that the increase in CO2 causes increases in temperature.

Mainly though they refute the idea that small increases in average temperature that come from increases in CO2 are in any way harmful. Mostly the articles there show that warming is beneficial and point out that occurrences of drought and other alleged effects of global warming are natural phenomena. That's where I stand, I acknowledge the greenhouse effect and the manmade increase in CO2 but believe it is net beneficial to plants, animals and mankind.

[allmost]

Tell me about our Sun.

[allmost]

I stipulated two bottles. One hot, one cold. Clearly.

[Bob]

‘Alec Loorz turns 18 at the end of this month.

’ And knows all things.

Don't all 18-year-olds think they know all there is to know? Just ask them - Actually, you don't need to ask them; they'll tell you anyway. I think it's part of the job description.

As I told my son at that point: "It's really easy to think you have all the answers. You don't even know what half the questions are yet."

[Rocky]

It’s California. What do you expect?

Probably graduates of Commie Martyrs High School.

[palmer]

The ocean didn’t go from cold to hot, it rose 2 degrees C which is about a 1% rise in temperature. We expect an equally small rise in outgassing of CO2.

[allmost]

It has been a pleasure to disagree with you. You have maintained civility beyond mine.

[allmost]

You have no idea what you are talking about, do you.

[palmer]

The sun increased in total irradiance up to the 80's and has fluctuated a bit down since then. The oceans delay solar warming so the warmer sun in the 80's continued to warm the atmosphere in the 90's. Now in the 2000's that warming has run out (basically temperatures are flat). Recently the sun went into a funk, so the alarmists say the atmosphere should have cooled in response. Not true! The drop will again be delayed by thermal inertia from the oceans. We will see only see that cooling in the next decade or so.

Another oversimplification is looking at total solar irradiance and not the other effects of an inactive sun. For example the lack of sunspots and solar wind may allow more galactic cosmic rays to hit the earth which in turn causes more clouds which may cause cooling over the long run (that science is not settled). Another example is the lack of solar ultraviolet may allow extra blocking patterns. That certainly changes our weather (more storminess in winter for example). Again the jury is out whether that also causes global cooling.

In short the sun has a lot of effects on weather and therefore on climate which are generally not considered or oversimplified by the scientists in charge of the models. For that and other reasons I do not believe models that predict "catastrophic" warming.

[palmer]

My knowledge of greenhouse effect and man’s creation of CO2 is consistent with all the facts that I know about. For example the CO2 we create is fairly accurately estimated by economic statistics related to oil production and consumption. It is possible any of my underlying facts could be wrong. Also there is no certainty in science, it can all change. But I can say that, apart from some small errors which I noted, what I said in this thread is consistent with all of the facts that I am aware of.