According to Julia Olsen, the fires that plague the American West are “fueled by fossil fuel pollution.” That’s the claim of the director of the nonprofit Our Children’s Trust, the group that won a recent court case against Montana over the state’s laws that allowed the use of fossil fuels without assessing carbon emissions. * They won the case on the grounds that a Montana law violated its constitution, which states:
“The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.”
So, buying into the argument that carbon dioxide is a pollutant—pity the status of future plants; they’ll look back to say: “In the old days we could photosynthesize”—the judge accepted the argument that releasing that gas is a violation of the constitutional mandate to “maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment.” I guess the health of Montana’s plants don’t count. Who needs plants?
The Fires, Oh! The Fires! And the Smoke!
The plaintiffs aged between 5 and 22. I could not find any statement from the five-year-old, but Claire Vlases, 20-year-old plaintiff, said: “When I think about summer, I think about smoke. It sounds like a dystopian movie, but it’s real life.”
How one connects Montana’s carbon dioxide emissions to fires and their consequent smoke is a difficult stretch to me, but that’s the logic of alarmists (see yesterday’s blog on conflation). Oh, I know the argument: Anthropogenic emissions lead to global warming that leads to droughty conditions and incessant fires. Not only are we humans warming the planet, we are also burning it.
Having done the first emissions study for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, one that the USEPA said it was using as a model for other states to follow, I have enough background to note that Montana is not an industrial giant spewing a billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Its fossil fuel production leads to about 70 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. Obviously, that comes from its fossil fuels being used in other states or countries, those industrial states hungry for fuel to run their businesses.
Protect the Helpless Little Gretas of the World
“Today, for the first time in US history, a court ruled on the merits of a case that the government violated the constitutional rights of children through laws and actions that promote fossil fuels, ignore climate change, and disproportionately imperil young people,” Olson said.
You might be tempted to mouth sarcasm here: We wouldn’t want the children of Montana benefitting from the wealth generated by fossil fuel production. We wouldn’t want the child victims of Montana obtaining any of the thousands of byproducts of fossil fuel production, including medicines. Poor kids, victimized by the land exploiters, they cannot breathe air free from smoke caused by fossil fuel emissions that generated fires.
But sarcasm never convinces anyone in a debate. As Dr. Samuel Johnson noted in the eighteenth century, one can’t reason someone out of something he or she hasn’t been reasoned into. And although the alarmist will argue that “science” and “97% of scientists” are on their side, they have turned the argument into an emotional response devoid of scientific doubt and Popper’s famous principle of falsification.
Can Popper’s Principle of Falsification Apply to Climate Change?
How does one falsify “climate change that might take not just decades or centuries, but maybe even millennia. Keep in mind that the Wisconsin Glacial Episode ran from about 70 millennia ago to about 10 thousand years ago and that the current interglacial episode has been, therefore, ten thousand years in the making. Climate is among the most complex topics we humans attempt to understand, involving not just atmospheric composition, physics, and chemistry, but also land-water distribution, orographic influences, latitude, solar energy, albedo, clouds, and ocean circulation—and that list isn’t all inclusive. Climates have changed repeatedly without any human intervention. Should we blame plate tectonics for the current distribution of climates because the crustal movements have raised the high Himalayas that subsequently affected the climates of not only India, but also of other regions?
But the alarmists like to keep it simple. To them, it’s all about the anthropogenically caused “greenhouse effect,” and not patterns and anomalies going back not just millions, but billions of years.
Numbers. Isn’t That What Science Is?
What’s the quantity of Montana’s emissions? The state’s extraction results in an annual seventy-million tons of emissions. Compare that to the 37 billion (metric) tons emitted annually across the world. Isn’t 70,000,000 just 0.00189 % of the world total emissions? Montana produces just 5% of US coal, far less than states like Wyoming, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The greenhouse gases wafting over the state are probably derived from other states and countries. And as for fossil fuel emissions affecting Montanans, maybe they should consider closing down tilling the land and grazing on it. Phew! Those cattle…that methane…those nitrogen compounds…
That, I readily offer to plantiff Claire Vlases, is “real life.” So, also, is this: Montana contains state forests and significant parts of national forests that cover millions of acres. The Nez Perce forest alone is 4,000,000 acres. If an acre sequesters two or more tons of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis annually, that one forest absorbs more than eight million tons of Montana’s 70,000,000 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Add into the acreage of the Nez Perce, the 1.5 million acres of the Bitterroot Forest, the Beaverhead-Deerlodge Forest’s 3.3 million acres, the Kaniksu National Forest’s total area of 1,627,833 acres, and other state and federal forests, and you get carbon sequestration that cannot be ignored in the climate debate—unless one is an alarmist.
Constitutional Mandates
Since the Renaissance and the rise of the modern world, populations across the world wrote, junked, and revised constitutions. The reasons for revisions vary: Change in ruling class, for example, or popular amendments that won majority approval. And the need to revise also arises from the modern world’s rapidly advancing technologies: Freedom of Speech had to be adapted from oral speech to newspaper speech to radio and television speech and film speech to internet speech that eventually included social media speech. The writers of the First Amendment could not have foreseen today’s variations in speech delivery.
We could ask whether the court read the Montana state constitution too literally because it accepted terms like “clean” and “maintain” without qualification. Should the state return the land to its pre-Colonial condition when Montana’s twelve native tribes roamed the land? Would that mean “maintain”? Then the judge should have included an order to unpave the roads, destroy any dams, and eliminate any landfills.
Couldn’t the plaintiffs’ lawyers have made a better argument by citing mining’s potential release of mercury and lead into the environment? Obviously, what counts is what wins, no matter the logic of the argument. But the judge should have reasoned that carbon dioxide, the gas without which photosynthesis cannot occur, is neither a pollutant nor a cause of fires however loosely the plaintiffs said it was.
But let’s blame the state’s lawyers for a weak defense. Shouldn’t the state have argued that every Montana child can benefit from fossil fuels? Is there any way to quantify the “damage” done to the “clean” environment by fossil fuel production in Montana?
No doubt the state will appeal the ruling. It did not call its climate expert, Judith Curry to testify in its defense. I don’t know why; her testimony would have devastated the plaintiff’s argument. Curry is well known for her opposition to the climate alarmists’ claims of existential danger.
If Judges and Juries Are Uninformed…
Complex issues require complex thinking.
We’re off the deep end, here, folks. No reasonable argument applies. “The science is settled,” alarmists say. And their proof is a very hot summer and fires. Imagine what they might have concluded during the Dust Bowl Years that ruined farmers, the Medieval Warm Period that enabled the Vikings to settle in Greenland, or the 16th-century droughts in the American Southeast that might have contributed to the fate of the Lost Colony vying for food resources with stressed native inhabitants.
The next time a climate alarmist makes the claim of “science,” ask how that science can be falsified (Popper’s test). What can their answer be? “Wait and see.” To which you should respond, How long?”
Of course, alarmists will reply that once the “tipping point” is reached, it will be “too late to turn back.” But turn back from what? Will a warmer world be definitively bad for all or just for some in selected places while benefitting others in other places?
I wonder whether the denizens of the interglacial period that preceded the Wisconsin Glacial Episode knew their world was about to turn colder or the subsequent denizens of the Wisconsin Glacial Episode knew their world was about to turn warmer. Climate is only briefly, as Earth time goes, in equilibrium. It’s hard to keep a teeter board horizontal. Only the slightest variation in weight shifts the balance. The imbalance can occur for natural, as well as for artificial, reasons.
*https://www.breitbart.com/news/montana-court-rules-for-young-people-in-landmark-us-climate-trial/
“The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.”
So, buying into the argument that carbon dioxide is a pollutant—pity the status of future plants; they’ll look back to say: “In the old days we could photosynthesize”—the judge accepted the argument that releasing that gas is a violation of the constitutional mandate to “maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment.” I guess the health of Montana’s plants don’t count. Who needs plants?
The Fires, Oh! The Fires! And the Smoke!
The plaintiffs aged between 5 and 22. I could not find any statement from the five-year-old, but Claire Vlases, 20-year-old plaintiff, said: “When I think about summer, I think about smoke. It sounds like a dystopian movie, but it’s real life.”
How one connects Montana’s carbon dioxide emissions to fires and their consequent smoke is a difficult stretch to me, but that’s the logic of alarmists (see yesterday’s blog on conflation). Oh, I know the argument: Anthropogenic emissions lead to global warming that leads to droughty conditions and incessant fires. Not only are we humans warming the planet, we are also burning it.
Having done the first emissions study for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, one that the USEPA said it was using as a model for other states to follow, I have enough background to note that Montana is not an industrial giant spewing a billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Its fossil fuel production leads to about 70 million tons of carbon dioxide annually. Obviously, that comes from its fossil fuels being used in other states or countries, those industrial states hungry for fuel to run their businesses.
Protect the Helpless Little Gretas of the World
“Today, for the first time in US history, a court ruled on the merits of a case that the government violated the constitutional rights of children through laws and actions that promote fossil fuels, ignore climate change, and disproportionately imperil young people,” Olson said.
You might be tempted to mouth sarcasm here: We wouldn’t want the children of Montana benefitting from the wealth generated by fossil fuel production. We wouldn’t want the child victims of Montana obtaining any of the thousands of byproducts of fossil fuel production, including medicines. Poor kids, victimized by the land exploiters, they cannot breathe air free from smoke caused by fossil fuel emissions that generated fires.
But sarcasm never convinces anyone in a debate. As Dr. Samuel Johnson noted in the eighteenth century, one can’t reason someone out of something he or she hasn’t been reasoned into. And although the alarmist will argue that “science” and “97% of scientists” are on their side, they have turned the argument into an emotional response devoid of scientific doubt and Popper’s famous principle of falsification.
Can Popper’s Principle of Falsification Apply to Climate Change?
How does one falsify “climate change that might take not just decades or centuries, but maybe even millennia. Keep in mind that the Wisconsin Glacial Episode ran from about 70 millennia ago to about 10 thousand years ago and that the current interglacial episode has been, therefore, ten thousand years in the making. Climate is among the most complex topics we humans attempt to understand, involving not just atmospheric composition, physics, and chemistry, but also land-water distribution, orographic influences, latitude, solar energy, albedo, clouds, and ocean circulation—and that list isn’t all inclusive. Climates have changed repeatedly without any human intervention. Should we blame plate tectonics for the current distribution of climates because the crustal movements have raised the high Himalayas that subsequently affected the climates of not only India, but also of other regions?
But the alarmists like to keep it simple. To them, it’s all about the anthropogenically caused “greenhouse effect,” and not patterns and anomalies going back not just millions, but billions of years.
Numbers. Isn’t That What Science Is?
What’s the quantity of Montana’s emissions? The state’s extraction results in an annual seventy-million tons of emissions. Compare that to the 37 billion (metric) tons emitted annually across the world. Isn’t 70,000,000 just 0.00189 % of the world total emissions? Montana produces just 5% of US coal, far less than states like Wyoming, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The greenhouse gases wafting over the state are probably derived from other states and countries. And as for fossil fuel emissions affecting Montanans, maybe they should consider closing down tilling the land and grazing on it. Phew! Those cattle…that methane…those nitrogen compounds…
That, I readily offer to plantiff Claire Vlases, is “real life.” So, also, is this: Montana contains state forests and significant parts of national forests that cover millions of acres. The Nez Perce forest alone is 4,000,000 acres. If an acre sequesters two or more tons of carbon dioxide through photosynthesis annually, that one forest absorbs more than eight million tons of Montana’s 70,000,000 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Add into the acreage of the Nez Perce, the 1.5 million acres of the Bitterroot Forest, the Beaverhead-Deerlodge Forest’s 3.3 million acres, the Kaniksu National Forest’s total area of 1,627,833 acres, and other state and federal forests, and you get carbon sequestration that cannot be ignored in the climate debate—unless one is an alarmist.
Constitutional Mandates
Since the Renaissance and the rise of the modern world, populations across the world wrote, junked, and revised constitutions. The reasons for revisions vary: Change in ruling class, for example, or popular amendments that won majority approval. And the need to revise also arises from the modern world’s rapidly advancing technologies: Freedom of Speech had to be adapted from oral speech to newspaper speech to radio and television speech and film speech to internet speech that eventually included social media speech. The writers of the First Amendment could not have foreseen today’s variations in speech delivery.
We could ask whether the court read the Montana state constitution too literally because it accepted terms like “clean” and “maintain” without qualification. Should the state return the land to its pre-Colonial condition when Montana’s twelve native tribes roamed the land? Would that mean “maintain”? Then the judge should have included an order to unpave the roads, destroy any dams, and eliminate any landfills.
Couldn’t the plaintiffs’ lawyers have made a better argument by citing mining’s potential release of mercury and lead into the environment? Obviously, what counts is what wins, no matter the logic of the argument. But the judge should have reasoned that carbon dioxide, the gas without which photosynthesis cannot occur, is neither a pollutant nor a cause of fires however loosely the plaintiffs said it was.
But let’s blame the state’s lawyers for a weak defense. Shouldn’t the state have argued that every Montana child can benefit from fossil fuels? Is there any way to quantify the “damage” done to the “clean” environment by fossil fuel production in Montana?
No doubt the state will appeal the ruling. It did not call its climate expert, Judith Curry to testify in its defense. I don’t know why; her testimony would have devastated the plaintiff’s argument. Curry is well known for her opposition to the climate alarmists’ claims of existential danger.
If Judges and Juries Are Uninformed…
Complex issues require complex thinking.
We’re off the deep end, here, folks. No reasonable argument applies. “The science is settled,” alarmists say. And their proof is a very hot summer and fires. Imagine what they might have concluded during the Dust Bowl Years that ruined farmers, the Medieval Warm Period that enabled the Vikings to settle in Greenland, or the 16th-century droughts in the American Southeast that might have contributed to the fate of the Lost Colony vying for food resources with stressed native inhabitants.
The next time a climate alarmist makes the claim of “science,” ask how that science can be falsified (Popper’s test). What can their answer be? “Wait and see.” To which you should respond, How long?”
Of course, alarmists will reply that once the “tipping point” is reached, it will be “too late to turn back.” But turn back from what? Will a warmer world be definitively bad for all or just for some in selected places while benefitting others in other places?
I wonder whether the denizens of the interglacial period that preceded the Wisconsin Glacial Episode knew their world was about to turn colder or the subsequent denizens of the Wisconsin Glacial Episode knew their world was about to turn warmer. Climate is only briefly, as Earth time goes, in equilibrium. It’s hard to keep a teeter board horizontal. Only the slightest variation in weight shifts the balance. The imbalance can occur for natural, as well as for artificial, reasons.
*https://www.breitbart.com/news/montana-court-rules-for-young-people-in-landmark-us-climate-trial/
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