Alaskan Village Sues Over Global Warming 670
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."
Mistargeted law suit? (Score:5, Insightful)
Privatize Profits.... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's sad to see this kind of thing going forward because there are too many forces arrayed against it for it to actually be successful.
The funny thing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:5, Insightful)
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... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:4, Insightful)
Enjoin the Sun (Score:4, Insightful)
If anything is substantially responsible for increasing the earth's temperature, it's that nuclear-reactor-in-the-sky.
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:5, Insightful)
IANAL (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They'll be happy to know the Earth is Cooling (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They'll be happy to know the Earth is Cooling (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yes but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Temperature changes are well understood to happen more gradually than a few years. If the next decade would show cooling that still wouldn't mean anything about the long term trend. Short term reversals of some trends can and do happen. A volcano spewed sulfur into the atmosphere? Solar output decreased very slightly? And so on...
This doesn't invalidate the long term warming trend and the science behind global warming, at all.
Re:Who do I cheer for? (Score:3, Insightful)
Bullshit. Global warming is happening. The facts (i.e. temperature readings) show it is. The question is whether the warming is normal, man-made or some combination of both. No, the melted ice caps have not reformed. Take a look at Kilimanjaro, Greenland and the fact there may be a Northwest Passage through the polar ice.
2) If drilling were allowed in Alaska and other locations, the price of oil would come down, jobs would be created, there would be more wealth in the economy, we would not be supporting the UAE.
Double bullshit. The same thing was said when oil drilling was first introducted in Alaska. Know what happened to oil prices? Nothing. Know why? Because the bulk of the oil had high sulphur content and so was shipped to Japan where their environmental laws were more lax than ours were at the time. Very little went to the U.S.
Yes, some jobs would be created but in the grand scheme of things, not enough to make up for the staggering losses to manufacturing jobs that have been experienced in the last ten years, let alone since the Carter administration.
As far as wealth, the vast majority of wealth would go to three populations: the oil companies themselves, the heads of those oil companies and the shareholders of the companies. A small amount would go to the Treasury but certainly not enough to change people's lives, especially with all the tax breaks and credits that oil companies still receive despite there being no need for the breaks.
Ok, so we don't support the UAE. How about Saudi Arabia where they wanted to flog a woman because she was with an unrelated man even though she had been gang raped?
3) No matter how much you dislike an entity, frivolous lawsuits are harmful to everyone.
Finally, something we can agree on though with one minor quibble. The only ones not harmed are the attorneys. They get paid either way.
I wonder how much global warming... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Yes but... (Score:5, Insightful)
You answered:
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... (Score:2, Insightful)
That's called an ad hominem [nizkor.org] attack, in case you didn't know.
Re:Yes but... (Score:4, Insightful)
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... (Score:4, Insightful)
The simple facts that elude everyone on each side of this argument (regardless of which side is correct) are:
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:Yes but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Enjoin the Sun (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yes but... (Score:3, Insightful)
"Doubt is our product" was the strategy used by the tobacco companies to pollute public understanding of the science about cancer. More than 100 million people have been killed by tobacco.
Now the oil and coal companies are using the same strategy - even some of the the same people and PR firms - to try to keep people from understanding what is happening with global warming.
So I think it IS important for people to know who is spreading this stuff, and why.
Re:Erm (Score:1, Insightful)
So, basically more of the same that's been happening since before humanity even existed?
Spare me.
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:5, Insightful)
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:It's not "mis-targetted" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:2, Insightful)
Between his large house (high electricity usage), usage of multiple fuel-ineffecient vehicles (gas guzzlers), and frequent usage of commercial airliners (the horror... the horror...) he is a perfect example of the "do as I say, not as I do" mentality that one often sees in/with politicians. To top off his outlandish claims, he was captured on camera saying that he "took the inititive in creating the internet."
With all that we had best make sure he stays the hell away from San Fransisco.....
Re:Erm (Score:3, Insightful)
But how much of the change is anthropomorphic?
Is climate change driven by solar activity or CO2 levels or other or all?
Is humanity responsible for an appreciable amount of the CO2?
At one point I thought hurricanes were going to kill us all and we were blaming global warming. The last two years have been very quiet... You should not extrapolate noisy data.
In a time long ago(the 70's) (Score:3, Insightful)
SOme people thought there would be cloaud cover, and therefore less heat on the earth, some believed the heat would be absorbed. both would create significant climate change.
As time marched on, more and more data was collected, many ideas were discarded.
Now we have gone from a split, to a consensus. It is working exactly like science should, data is collected, tested, Theories get refined, or discarded.
Bearing in mine the 'global warming' i.e. climate change doesn't mean everything stays the same, it's just a few degree's warmer. It means the flow of the Ocean will change; which can radically change the overall climate.
Being skeptical is fine, as long as it's balanced by studies.
Re:Who do I cheer for? (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? You are saying that because it hasn't been proven, then it isn't true. That's just stupid. Even the "global warming sceptics" have a consensus that the average temperature is increasing. I get handed radical right stuff by coworkers all the time, and I actually manage to read more of it than they do. Most global warming nay-sayers are really nay-saying the contribution by man, or CO2, or whatever, and the number of people that say "Here is proof that the world is getting colder" is roughly 0, and the number of people saying "here is proof the world is the same temperature" seems to be about 5% of the anti-global warming nuts. All the rest are "we don't know, so it can't be true" or "it is true, but we didn't cause it" or "it is true, but it isn't going to be a problem". Most documents I've seen "proving" global warming doesn't exist really end up being personal attacks on Al Gore or something else like that, and contain absolutely zero content about what is happening.
2) If drilling were allowed in Alaska and other locations, the price of oil would come down, jobs would be created, there would be more wealth in the economy, we would not be supporting the UAE.
Drilling is allowed in Alaska. How are you oil prices doing right now? There is an area that was deemed to be protected land about 100 years ago with zero proven oil reserves which it is suspected holds oil. There are some arguemnts over how much the protections should cover or whether to find out how much is there before determining what to do about the protections. And even if we went there and started extracting it now, it would be years before a pipeline was finished to connect it with the existing Alaska Pipeline. So, for your oil prices next year, ANWR has nothing to do with them. Any statements to the contrary are lies.
3) No matter how much you dislike an entity, frivolous lawsuits are harmful to everyone.
What's frivilous about it? If they can prove in court that global warming exists, is caused by CO2, and the defendants contributed CO2 to the atmosphere knowing that it could or would cause problems, they should win. This is the perfect example of Libertarian pollution controls. Someone gets harmed by pollution, so they sue. Keep the government out of environmental regulations and let the free market sort it out. If you don't like this, then it is a great example of how Libertaniranism is doomed to failure. I point this out because so many people that I've seen against this suit also say things that make them appear to be Libertarian.
Re:Yes but... (Score:3, Insightful)
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)
If you did, though, please consider! The Earth's atmosphere already has billions of tons of carbon dioxide. Human emissions have increased this some, and this increase may or may not be Bad and Cause Global Warming, but calling CO2 "pollution" is like calling the ocean "polluted with salt".
CO2 is there. Naturally. In far, far greater quantities than Man ever put there.
Re:They'll be happy to know the Earth is Cooling (Score:5, Insightful)
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" (Score:5, Insightful)
they aren't living in igloos. They have rifles, snowmobiles, 4x4s, satellite tv, etc.
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:4, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Yes but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But they are targeting everyone! (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you have any idea how many trees he would have to plant for even ONE flight? And how much energy would be used to plant those trees?
If Gore really wanted to reduce his carbon footprint, he'd use the internet to "meet" with people - but that wouldn't generate as much $$$$ as personal appearance do.
Then add up all the extra energy used by people who drive to each of his "events".
Al Gore really is a "do as I say, not as I do" politician. Maybe that's what it takes, but it is hypocritical to some of us. Want to encouraging telecommuting at work? Point to Gore as an example of how telepresence works ... oh, wait - he doesn't do that sort of thing - he wants ATTENDANCE and MEETINGS and MONEY!
Re:Yes but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They'll be happy to know the Earth is Cooling (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's not "mis-targetted" (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, keeping agriculture advances or not, billions of cavemen starve to death and you no longer have six billion.
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, if you're a large company or a government considering future development, the slick oil exec with a private jet is going to win you over if the only alternative voice is an eccentric vice-president who lives in a one-room apartment trying to videoconference with you over iChat. Gore, like many people, needs air travel to do his work. Since Gore isn't asking anyone to forego air travel entirely he's not at all a hypocrite for not doing so himself--especially when his doing so is part and parcel of convincing others to take action against global warming.
Re:It's not "mis-targetted" (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:2, Insightful)
Using current technologies and given current resource consumption patterns, 100 years is optimistic, but we aren't stuck with those, hence the ongoing part of the experiment.
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:3, Insightful)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm going to sue the Sun! (Score:3, Insightful)
The culture isn't being destroyed (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm sorry, culture is a function of the people who create it, so unless you're going to fabricate some great genocide here, the culture isn't destroyed at all, just altered.
Hyperbole like yours is for weak ass arguments.
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:4, Insightful)
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...)
Cult of the Church of Gore modding today (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course, they know what the answers to the questions I asked are, and would hope to see me modded off the plant in order to avoid answering them.
Re:Yes but... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's called an ad hominem [nizkor.org] attack, in case you didn't know.
"An Ad Hominem is a general category of fallacies in which a claim or argument is rejected on the basis of some irrelevant fact about the author of or the person presenting the claim or argument."
I'd say the fact the entity making the claims about global warming is funded by an oil company is pretty damn relevant.
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:4, Insightful)
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Library/CarbonCycle/carbon_cycle4.html [nasa.gov] (NASA's Earth Observatory site is currently offline)
(alternate link) http://www.visionlearning.com/library/module_viewer.php?mid=95 [visionlearning.com]
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 [mps.mpg.de]
http://www.pmodwrc.ch/pmod.php?topic=tsi/composite/SolarConstant [pmodwrc.ch]
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Sunspot_Numbers_png [globalwarmingart.com]
ftp://ftp.ngdc.noaa.gov/STP/SOLAR_DATA/SUNSPOT_NUMBERS/MONTHLY.PLT [noaa.gov]
http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Solar_Cycle_Variations_png [globalwarmingart.com]
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:3, Insightful)
As for cost of disposal, don't forget you also have to factor the eventual cost to decommission a nuclear power plant.
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:3, Insightful)
Please.
You could just as easily say the reverse: Al Gore doesn't just buy carbon offsets, he participates in an entire company whose whole purpose is to replace CO2-emitting activities with equivalent non-CO2-emitting ones.
Actually, come to think of it, that wouldn't even be a frame [wikipedia.org] on the issue -- it would be the truth.
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Yes but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Right... that's what they all say when reproducing the experiments fails to verify that data you wanted us to ignore. Oh, you haven't reproduced the experiments? Wow, so you're saying their experiment is junk only because of who paid to have it done? Well then... classic ad hominem.
Re:Mistargeted law suit? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Your trend is too short (Score:2, Insightful)
I guess it is good that we had this cooling period then because according to the article the cooling was "a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years."
Re:They'll be happy to know the Earth is Cooling (Score:3, Insightful)
He never claimed it was, you made that strawman. What the GP DID claim was that if you are in a position where you are unable to comprehend the actual science ( as most people probably are ) then it is more rational to trust a vast majority of climate scientists, peer reviewed articles in scientific journals, and our national institutions, than Joe Blogger making a random claim without backing it up at all.
With regards to how large the consensus about global warming is... well, all science will have disputed points, always, even gravity ( yes , we are not completely certain how gravity works ) but this doesn't mean that you can't have an overwhelmingly large consensus that a certain phenomena is real, and while you will likely find that climate scientists may disagree about the effects of global warming, it will be about things along the lines of "will it take 20 years or 100 years to get X degrees of warming?" or "will sea levels rise 1m or 10m within the next 100 years?" what very few scientists question is that human emissions of CO2 have an impact upon the climate, and that these effects are in many cases going to cause quite severe damage. Sea level rise alone is enough to justify a sentence along the lines of "There is an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that anthropogenic CO2 emissions will cause severe damage to ecosystems and human populations across the globe.".
My main point is that, yes, there are disputed features of global warming, but these are about finer points. That human CO2 emissions will cause widespread damage across the globe is doubted by a VERY tiny minority of climate scientists.
And nuclear only produces 30% of the greenhous gas (Score:2, Insightful)
.
And nuclear only produces 30% of the greenhous gasses for the same amount of energy put into the grid. As the resources deplete rapidly in the next 50 years, the less economic the minerals, the harder it gets to extract the uranium, the more CO2 will be produced.