An Inconvenient Lawsuit: Teenagers Take Global Warming to the Courts

The youth -- represented, pro bono, by the Burlingame, California, law firm of former U.S. Republican congressman Paul "Pete" McCloskey, a co-founder of Earth Day -- filed the suit, Alec L. et. al vs. Lisa P. Jackson, et. al, in May of last year. Defendants include not only Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson but the heads of the Commerce, Interior, Commerce, Defense, Energy, and Agriculture departments. This Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Robert L. Wilkins, an Obama appointee, will hear arguments on the defendants' motion to dismiss the complaint.

theatlantic.com

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.

That's all we need. A bunch of ignorant kids bringing real science into more disrepute.

The anti-science religious mob and the global cooling catastrophists will love this!

Btw if these kids have cellphones, if they play computer games, if they ever leave the lights on, if they eat soya products or if they ever fly, can I counter sue them as being a much greater cause of gobal warming and other environmental damage than me?

Emissions need to be cut by 99% if we have any chance of stopping global warming.

Originally posted by Nathan-D
Emissions need to be cut by 99% if we have any chance of stopping global warming.

start by holding your breath and not farting, AGW is a myth, al gores film is a celluloid turd, The sun is a far greater effecter of climate than mankind will ever be.
Mankinds impact is negligible, and ever reducing, the greatest time it could have been a problem the industrial revolution when the entire worlds commerce, industry, and transportation was achieved by burning coal are behind us.
Nuclear energy and its pollutants are a much much greater threat to humanity and ALL life on earth, an ELE in the making.

reply to post by The X

tart by holding your breath and not farting, AGW is a myth

Unfortunately, few people seem to realise that AGW at a fundamental level is perfectly sound and in accordance with well-established physical laws. The greenhouse principle in climate theory is the principle of atmospheric heating by so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which have extraordinary capacities for absorption of infra-red radiation emanating from the planet's surface. Some of this absorbed energy is then recycled back to the surface by various means, including back-radiation and the adiabatic lapse, whereby warming is produced there. CO2 has this characteristic and absorbs IR-radiation. Hence if we increased the atmospheric CO2 concentration it would undoubtedly increase the intensity of back-radiation and increase the surface temperature of the planet accordingly. Please give me your scientific reasons for thinking 'AGW' is a myth. It seems to be in accordance with well-established physics to me.

The sun is a far greater effecter of climate than mankind will ever be.

Since the amount of radiation the Earth absorbs from the Sun is about 237W/sq.m I think no-one disputes that the Sun is the main driver of plantery temperature. Of course it all depends on how much 'radiative forcing' the Sun has contributed to the 0.7C temperature increase since around 1850 (which is when the global temperature is reckoned to have started to increase.)

the greatest time it could have been a problem the industrial revolution when the entire worlds commerce, industry, and transportation was achieved by burning coal are behind us.

Human CO2-emissions are vastly greater than they were during the industrial revolution.

Originally posted by The X

Originally posted by Nathan-D
Emissions need to be cut by 99% if we have any chance of stopping global warming.

start by holding your breath and not farting, AGW is a myth, al gores film is a celluloid turd, The sun is a far greater effecter of climate than mankind will ever be.
Mankinds impact is negligible, and ever reducing, the greatest time it could have been a problem the industrial revolution when the entire worlds commerce, industry, and transportation was achieved by burning coal are behind us.
Nuclear energy and its pollutants are a much much greater threat to humanity and ALL life on earth, an ELE in the making.

the nuke threat is a good point, but you bring up a good point with the fart comment, methane is a dangerous greenhouse gas. but your claim about the coal burning marking the high point for CO2 production is factually incorrect.

why should the survival of mankind be the minimum point where people will take responsibility for keeping the air and water clean and the climate livable ?

I never get that

all I know is I have lived in the same 25 mile radius my whole life, and the climate is changing and changing rapidly, and I have taken steps to minimize my impact

is it so much to ask that everybody chip in ?

One volcanic eruption emits far more emissions into the atmosphere than we humans can even begin to comprehend. On that note there have been volcanos since the inception of time, now i'm not saying we don't do our part, but in turn the earth does far more than we can, even in the long term. As far as greenhouse gases i.e methane releases, underwater eruptions, surface eruptions. Then as mentioned we have the sun that every 11 yrs goes topsy turvy. As much as I would like believe that us humans are the scourge that we are.

I personally feel mother earth and her counter part the Sun have even more of a foot hold on whats to come, than all the cars and factories running full steam for decades. Thats just my deluted thinking though, and if anything we have only seen the tip of the iceberg as far as the earth, just doing what it has done, for a millinia now, and thats hitting reset and starting over, just my own opinion again

SaneThinking

reply to post by SaneThinking

One volcanic eruption emits far more emissions into the atmosphere than we humans can even begin to comprehend.

Let's put some definitive figures on that statement. Quote from Wikipedia: "Modern volcanic activity releases only 130 to 230 megatonnes of carbon dioxide each year, which is less than 1% of the amount released by human activities every year". According to the IPCC's and NASA's carbon-cycle diagram human CO2-emissions amount to about 29 gigatonnes/year and natural CO2-emissions from all sources (including volcanoes) amounts to 771 gigatonnes/year. Apparently the natural CO2-fluxes are in a stable equilibrium, which causes the excess CO2 from humans to accumulate steadily in the atmosphere at the rate of about 2ppmv/year (Google 'Keeling Curve').