'Companies could be sued over climate change'

The scare

In early December 2008, The Guardian, a newspaper of the British Left and an unquestioning true-believer in the catastrophist version of climate alarm, quoted Professor Myles Allen, a physicist at Oxford University, as saying computer models such as one that he has developed can now ascribe individual extreme-weather events to anthropogenic "global warming", allowing environmental pressure groups to sue the corporations they believe are to blame for the catastrophic heating of the planet. Professor Allen joked, "We are starting to get to the point that when an adverse weather event occurs we can quantify how much more likely it was made by human activity."

The truth

Even the UN's climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, admits in its 2001 report that the climate is a "complex, non-linear, chaotic object" whose long-run evolution cannot be predicted by any method. In this the panel echoes the celebrated paper Deterministic Non-Periodic Flow, with which the mathematician Edward Lorenz founded the new mathematical discipline of chaos theory in 1963. Precisely because the climate is, in mathematical terms, a chaotic object, it is altogether impossible to predict the likelihood, timing, magnitude, duration, or even the sign of any "phase transition" that disrupts the steady state of the object. For this reason, it is not possible to ascribe individual extreme-weather events to "global warming", as the IPCC makes explicitly clear in both its 2001 and 2007 reports.

In practice, the international, alarmist Left has taken very great care not to get into court battles over the science behind "global warming", because the courts, unlike the majority of the news media, are obliged to give a full and fair hearing to both sides of the story. Therefore, all of the "global warming" court cases instigated by the alarmist faction have been sweetheart cases, where both sides secretly want the same outcome. The recent case by lavishly-funded environmental groups against the US Secretary of the Interior to order him to make a decision on listing polar bears as an "endangered species" was a prime example: Mr. Kempthorne was as much a true-believer as those who were apparently suing him, and the court was in effect used as a mere rubber-stamp, in which no real argument was heard.

The alarmist faction knows that, if it were to bring a case against a corporation whose executives were not minded merely to believe in the extremist presentation of "global warming" just because it is temporarily in fashion, they would lose. The case of Dimmock v. Secretaries of State for Education and for the Environment in the UK in 2007 was a very clear warning. The UK Government threw all of the resources of the taxpayer and of the Meteorological Office at the case, attempting to defend Al Gore's sci-fi comedy horror movie against the plaintiff's allegation that it was serially and seriously inaccurate. The judge, having heard both sides, said bluntly of Al Gore that "the Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view". A few more judgments like that and the "global warming" fantasy would rapidly collapse. End of scare.

Slowly but surely, the number of news media willing to give credence to fantasies such as those which Professor Allen puts forward is declining as the truth dawns: carbon dioxide's impact on "global warming" is small, harmless, and largely beneficial.

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