Real Climate Science

When lawyers and insurance companies are both pushing something, you better reach for your wallet.

Climate change: Dogs of law are off the leash
By Richard Ingham (AFP) – 8 hours ago

PARIS — From being a marginal and even mocked issue, climate-change litigation is fast emerging as a new frontier of law where some believe hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake.

Compensation for losses inflicted by man-made global warming would be jaw-dropping, a payout that would make tobacco and asbestos damages look like pocket money.

Imagine: a country or an individual could get redress for a drought that destroyed farmland, for floods and storms that created an army of refugees, for rising seas that wiped a small island state off the map.

In the past three years, the number of climate-related lawsuits has ballooned, filling the void of political efforts in tackling greenhouse-gas emissions.
Eyeing the money-spinning potential, some major commercial law firms now place climate-change litigation in their Internet shop window.

Seminars on climate law are often thickly attended by corporations that could be in the firing line — and by the companies that insure them.
But legal experts sound a note of caution, warning that this is a new and mist-shrouded area of justice.

Many obstacles lie ahead before a Western court awards a cent in climate damages and even more before the award is upheld on appeal.

“There’s a large number of entrepreneurial lawyers and NGOs who are hunting around for a way to gain leverage on the climate problem,” said David Victor, director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of California at San Diego.

http://www.google.com/

“The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyer.”
– Shakespeare –  Henry VI

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnI3Hp0fJhE]

“Global temperature is rising as fast in the past decade as in the prior two decades, despite year-to-year fluctuations associated with the El Niño-La Niña cycle of tropical ocean temperature,” Hansen and colleagues reported

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20110112/

http://www.woodfortrees.org/

Al Gore claims he is concerned about poor people being hit by global warming. Now he has a chance to make an honest man out of himself.

http://www.tennessean.com/

http://news.asiaone.com/

In other words, they are looking for an excuse to raise premiums.

“Like any large civilization — including the civilization we have today — it (Roman Empire) was highly dependent on predictability of natural resources,” Mann says. “It was very heavily adapted to the climate conditions that had persisted for centuries.”

http://www.npr.org/

The Roman Empire extended from Hadrian’s Wall to the Red Sea, but no doubt the climate was consistent across the entire region, and for centuries at a time. Apparently the Romans were very sensitive, and could only survive temperatures between 24 and 27C. Thank you Mike for another work of mind-numbing drivel.

For years, scientists have recorded the gradual march of plants and animals up mountain slopes and toward higher latitudes as global warming has forced them to chase their climatic comfort zones.

A new study suggests that for plants, however, a warming climate can send them downhill as well

http://www.csmonitor.com/

the already arid southwestern U.S. could become a permanent dust bowl, while Australia will see intensified droughts and agricultural decline throughout the country’s populated south and east.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1607652,00.html

h/t to Jimbo

http://www.guardian.co.uk/

A November 2006 United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization report found that livestock accounts for 18 percent of global warming emissions worldwide, more than the entire transportation sector.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/10/22/peta

http://bigthink.com/idea_feed_items/4496

The Arctic  has been warming at an incredible rate, and there just isn’t any more cold air left.