1. Intentional and negligent creation of public nuisance. The nuisance appears to be extreme climate events, and I'm doubtful that you could actually show sufficient action on the part of the oil companies to link them to the extreme climate events (the standard is probably that you need to show that but for the actions of the companies, those events wouldn't have happened and... yeah, that kind of direct attribution isn't possible).
2. Negligence. I mean, this section is a mere page long, and doesn't go into any detail whatsoever, so it's hard to even figure out what is the supposed duty that wasn't done. So... almost certainly going to die on a motion for dismissal.
3. Fraud and deceit, in that they covered up the effects of climate change. Except that's not fraud--fraud requires that someone be reliant on the lie to do something. So you'd need to show that, e.g., someone only bought a tank from gas from Exxon because Exxon said climate change didn't exist. I suppose it's possible that's true--there's millions of people in the country after all--but... that's not really something that happens (least of all, anything actually alleged in the complaint, so far as I can thing).
4. Trespass. Wildfires caused by climate change constituted trespass. Cute legal theory, but cute legal theories are almost always tossed out of court quickly.
So out of four claims, three of them are dead on arrival, and the first one has an uphill fight. And even if they win, the $50 billion for "abate the nuisance" definitely isn't going to happen, and you're looking more at the actual damages which is apparently around $50 million.
> Journalists who discuss a lawsuit without linking to the actual lawsuit in question...
The website seems like a PR dumping ground. Given the incomplete byline I would highly doubt they are an actual journalist —- more likely a freelance blogger.
I wish there were some law like "if you waste the court system resources for PR and virtue signaling, you are personally liable for triple costs" but it's likely impossible. So the incentive to pull stunts like this is always there.
Sadly, that likely wouldn't deter this, as the county doesn't really "make" money, it relies on taxes. So it's not their money they're playing with, and the ones pushing this lawsuit probably aren't elected anyway, so they don't risk much.
No, I mean personal liability for whoever signed under initiating this suit (and maybe sanctions against the lawyers too). US legal system is, however, maximally removed from this - instead, we have a concept of immunity where it is very hard to prosecute a government officer for something they did while executing their office.
Ancient Athenians had it simpler - if you bring a lawsuit and less than 1/5 of jurors vote in your favor, you get a heavy fine for wasting everybody's time. Unfortunately, wouldn't work in the US - about 1/3 would vote for anything if it helps their tribal interest and hurts the opposite tribe, even if it's ruinous for the society in general.
With regards to 1, I think these companies are the wrong ones to target. Oil companies are not the ones who are emitting CO2, they just bring the hydrocarbons to the surface and put it in containers. It's the big buyers of those containers that make the decision to burn the hydrocarbons. Targets of these lawsuits should be energy companies, trucking, shipping, flying, transporting companies.
As to 2 it certainly seems like a hard one, but not entirely without merit. Wouldn't it be negligence if you sell a product knowing that your customers are going to use that product to hurt the environment? It's not like a hazardous chemical where you can assume the buyer has processes in place to deal with the results. These companies did the research and they know their product negatively affects the environment when burned, they know the government is not enforcing any checks and balances and still they sell the product to customers who 100% are going to burn the product. In my opinion it's for sure the government and the customers themselves who bear the greatest blame, there's some negligence there.
I'm not sure why you're going back on your own argument in 3. I'm sure you could find people whose belief that their buying of oil doesn't affect the climate was cemented by the deceit of those companies. And if someone would start suing companies for negligent burning of hydrocarbons, I'm sure there would be CEO's that would happily point their fingers at the oil companies in accusation of deceit.
The trespass one seems ridiculous, I guess because a judge isn't supposed to let frivolous things affect their judgement it's a freebie to throw in?
Anyway, 2 and 3 seem to at least have some merit to my untrained eyes. Maybe it's more about sending a message than actually winning a lawsuit? If a judge takes the suit seriously and the oil companies are forced to publicly weasel out of these charges, wouldn't that be some sort of a win for the movement?
For #3, not that I agree but they commissioned several studies that showed the effect of fossil fuels on climate change and went to lengths to keep it a secret. Gov/state policy could have changed if that information was made public earlier.
I am surprised they didn't mention manipulation of research at unis.
This is an emotionally and politically charged topic that can be hard to discuss with any clarity. The Skeptoid episode What the Oil Companies Really Knew, part 2 of which can be found here: https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4877, can be a good starting point because it is at least an attempt to try and provide a fair and factual overview.
I think this passage is particularly relevant:
> The message received from actually reading all of these documents is not — as is commonly reported — that oil executives' own scientists were warning them of the true nature of climate change. Instead, what they indicate is a broad pattern of scientists who were either outside their discipline or among the outliers who were unconcerned with the anthropogenic portion of CO2 buildup, advising those executives that no action was currently warranted. They were wrong, make no mistake; but that's what they were saying, and that's the information the oil companies were acting upon, at least through the end of the 20th century.
> There's a point I've tried to make any number of times on Skeptoid, and that's if you want your argument to be robust and persuasive, don't include any bad evidence. Include only strong evidence that has been proven to survive scrutiny. If you present cherrypicked quotes, like the authors of so many of these articles have been doing, it is very easy for your opponents to discover that; and when they do, the only point you will have made is that your argument is weak and easily countered — and thus probably false. It's a bad time in human history to harm the cause of educating people about global warming.
> scientists who were either outside their discipline or among the outliers who were unconcerned with the anthropogenic portion of CO2 buildup, advising those executives that no action was currently warranted. They were wrong, make no mistake; but that's what they were saying, and that's the information the oil companies were acting upon, at least through the end of the 20th century.
Except that's way too convenient to be a coincidence.
You mean to tell me that for decades all of the top scientists at all the major oil companies just so happened to be heterodox or hold highly conservative opinions about climate change? And all important decision-making executives just so happened to take them at their word, and never heard a contrary opinion? And if only they weren't so incredibly unlucky as to get consistently bad advice all consistently and conveniently giving them the answer they wanted to hear, they'd have acted on climate change sooner?
That's an utterly absurd hypothesis, particularly coming from a "skeptical" source. It ignores the obvious incentive for oil executives to deliberately and exclusively seek out such scientists.
This article is far far too accepting and apologetic, beyond the point of credible gullibility.
Yeah, reminds me of the scene in the previous Spiderman film where he tries to intentionally flunk out of a class and the teacher points out that the only likely way to get 0 out of 100 on a multiple choice quiz is to know the right answers and intentionally avoid them.
And this is the same oil majors that put lead in gasoline because ethanol was a competing fuel, blatantly lying about the safety of this and poisoning several generations.
I meant it in the general sense, not the political one.
Beyond that, you're not really making any new point here. Yes, there was controversy and uncertainty and scientists in general were not prepared to give strong recommendations. But if you were hired by an oil company to research this topic, realistically, what would you tell the CEO? Maybe you'd be candid off the record, but certainly there is a huge incentive to ensure that any official/public communication remains equivocal and scientifically conservative. Rational corporations do not willingly expose their own existential threats.
> Secondly, you're assuming that those oil company scientists were wrong and academics were right. But that's a product of media-driven loyalty to academia. Dig into the details and you'll see that those oil scientists were saying true things like "the models aren't reliable, we can't predict the impact" and in fact academics agreed
There’s a lot to unpack, first is an implicit assumption “media driven loyalty to academics” even exists as a thing to discuss. I’d go as far to say the words are meaningless in this context. I can say the moon is a collection of ghost farts. Just because I can say something does not make it true, or worthy of debate. What you’re saying here is akin to a moon made of ghost farts, it’s just dressed to look and sound less absurd.
Next you state that the models were unreliable and that only the “oil scientists” stood up to the grizzly academics. This too is weird. As like, you know, science progresses. Just because they were wrong with a specific model doesn’t mean they were wrong about the overall outcome. I don’t understand how that refutes anything. It feels very black and white, and the world isn’t just shades of gray but color, beeb.
> Thirdly, you assert that oil companies must have been selecting such scientists deliberately, but ignore that academia also selects its scientists. You aren't going to get anywhere in academic climatology if you think industrial activity doesn't have much impact on the climate. Not only will you struggle to get funding but you'll also be attacked and driven out by other academics. Any argument that a consistency of views must be driven by selection bias has to be applied fairly.
I don’t have much to say here other than, like the obvious difference is one group is paid extremely well and the other group isn’t. The group paid extremely well, oil scientists, are incentivized to fall in line with the needs of whoever writes their paychecks.
Finally, you talk about empirical observations but provide a single link to a popular science type article. I’d expect at least a literature review or something meaningful. The mention of Covid also kind of shows your hand, your interest and expression seems to be based on “sides,” breaking it up as an us versus them. Combining issues you find to be related because of your world view. I’d really encourage you to take a step back, and really look at the world. You might just find that color, instead of black and white, makes for a more descriptive and accurate existence.
Emotions are not reasoning, pure and simple. When what you want is to get to the truth, especially in the context of reading words on the screen, getting emotional is purely an impediment to the goal.
You can't have thoughts without emotions. There is such a thing as being too emotional and letting the emotions take control and prevent you from using proper reasoning, but this isn't the absence of emotions. Emotions are highly useful, but like anything it is more about balance. Don't try to be a Vulcan Mr Spock, you're human too.
Sure you can. What emotion do you feel when evaluating the correctness of the statement 2+2 = 4? More importantly, if you can even name one, what impact does it have on the outcome?
Again, the claim was that emotions are an impediment to truth-seeking. They are not reasoning. They are useful for interpersonal relationships, but absolutely worthless when determining whether something is true or false. If we are going to play at tired pop-culture references, here is another: facts don't care about your feelings
Generally bordem? Sometimes if I'm doing a lot of these types of work I get sloppy and can transpose numbers or make small errors.
For example, my comment obviously made you feel upset. There is no reason to believe I have not understood the claim correctly. I just disagreed with it. Which should be okay. Not everyone has to agree with you, right? That would be egotistical.
But let's look at a clear example that is much harder to dispute in how emotions play a role. You know that _joy_ and _excitement_ you get when you solve a really tough problem? How you overcame all that _frustration_ and _disappointment_? That dopamine hit that makes you feel on top of the world? That also is part of what drives you to keep pursuing these things. That makes you _stubborn_ and _focused_ because you have _pride_ and you're _curiosity_ _driven_. Without emotions you wouldn't be doing this in the first place.
The thing is that your biological machine was designed with emotions into the operating system. It is part of the language itself. But we are probably instead thinking of the definition of emotions differently. Just because you don't notice your feelings doesn't mean they aren't there. Indifference, seriousness, sincerity, ennui, indigence, self-confidence, reluctance, calmness, annoyance, insightfulness, and perseverance are all emotions, some of which you are exhibiting right now as you read this. What I propose instead is that recognizing this you can in turn control your emotions rather than let them be in control of you, which I think you'd fully agree upon. Emotions don't have to be extreme but nor do they need to be depressed (diction chosen with intent). They don't have to cleanly fit in a bin. Instead, emotions to us are like water to a fish. Rather than ridding yourself of emotions, you harness them. I'd suggest that it is a far better way to reach your goals as your working with the wetware you've been given instead of working against it. You don't need to install a new operating system but just learn to exploit the one you have. That's why I say that you are human too Mr Spock.
Last time someone made this claim about "probable billions of dollars" here, I asked for examples and the best anyone could show was a $10k donation to a tiny charity run by one guy that campaigned against offshore wind farms, with a stated justification that there were better ways to help the environment.
Can anyone show an accounting of these billions? Because you can't spend that kind of money without leaving a lot of paper trails.
From the desmog link in the comment you replied to:
> “Fear and anger have to be a part of this campaign,” Berman said. “We’re not going to get people to like the oil and gas industry over the next few months.”
> Berman also advised that executives continue to spend big. “I think $2 to $3 million would be a game changer,” he said. “We’ve had six-figure contributions to date from a few companies in this room to help us get to where we are.”
> But always cover your tracks, he suggested, adding that no is better equipped at doing so than his firm. “We run all this stuff through nonprofit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity,” he said. “People don’t know who supports us. We’ve been doing this for 20-something years in this regard.”
> Berman, whose tobacco ties were profiled yesterday by DeSmog contributor John Mashey, is the founder and chief executive of the Washington-based Berman & Company consulting firm. He attended the conference in Colorado, hat in hand, looking to raise money from energy companies for an advertising and public relations campaign he started called Big Green Radicals.
There's the Koch brothers[0]. Here's one of their foundations[1] which you can see IRS filings for[2]. Idk what to tell you, it seems pretty easy to find money that is being spent against climate action. If you're having trouble finding it then I'm not sure what to tell you. Use Google in incognito?
> climate doesn't even appear in their list of issues at all:
Did you look at the link name? Here, we can use the wayback machine to check it around the same date as the New Yorker article[0]. I feel like I have to say you need to specifically also check the about page where you'll confirm it is the same organization.
> why are you claiming this is the best example?
I claimed this was a 30 second googling example where I could find more than a $10k donation from a small charity.
> the Koch Brothers aren't an oil company anyway.
That's weird, because the head image of one of their companies is an oil refinery and that company provides gasoline among other things[1]. Not even the only company they have that works with fossil fuels.
> All these replies are reinforcing my point
Are your points movable? Because I'm assuming not. It does not seem like you're willing to allow for alternative viewpoints. I saw in another reply that you just didn't accept someone's source. It does not seem like you're engaging in good faith and willing to look at what people are presenting to you with more than a glance. That doesn't allow for your beliefs to be changed as you're not even actually considering alternative viewpoints. If you want to engage and actually discuss things, we can. But clearly people are giving you a shovel and pointing to a place to dig and you're coming back and complaining about how you found nothing digging with a spoon.
Complain about the Gates Foundation all you want. Fine. I'm not talking about them. They aren't relevant. Propaganda can happen from more than one side too. But you have to actually look at the facts and get some expertise knowledge. You have to challenge your own beliefs, not just find evidence that supports them. There's always evidence to support yours, or any belief. Even of flying spaghetti monsters. But "evidence" is a loose term and not a binary thing.
The New Yorker article doesn't provide support for the claim of "probable billions of dollars" being spent on "increasing public ignorance", which is what I'm asking for. I didn't ask for examples of donations of more than $10k, that's obviously an irrelevant amount anyway, I just pointed out that it was the only example anyone could find last time I challenged this claim.
And it still stands, because the climate part of the New Yorker piece isn't about spending on propaganda. It says the brothers
"succeeded in persuading many members of Congress to sign a little-known pledge in which they have promised to vote against legislation relating to climate change unless it is accompanied by an equivalent amount of tax cuts"
So apparently climate change legislation is fine as long as it's tax neutral, which is also what the old version of the "noclimatetax" website says too. The New Yorker is biased as hell and tries to frame this pledge as making climate legislation impossible, which is clearly not the case. These are guys who hate tax rises a lot more than anything climate related, it seems. The New Yorker can't even tie any spending directly to this pledge, with all mentions of amounts and donations being about many different topics.
Yes, my views are movable. I'll happily accept a source that backs up the original claim about billions of dollars spent on public ignorance, but it has to do that. The other guy was reduced to something like, "ok but if this guy got 5x the money he asked for, for 20 years, then that's 1/5th of a billion so that's kinda like billions being spent right now", which is just hilarious.
I really don't get why anyone is trying to defend this claim that billions of dollars are being spent by oil companies on climate related advertising. It's just transparently untrue. All the most effective stuff arguing against climatology is by individual authors, bloggers, journalists and scientists. And they're doing it for peanuts, or nothing at all.
I think your specific bar is too high. We're talking about a specifically covert operation with subterfuge. You're looking for a smoking gun in the murder's hand at the scene of the crime. There are smoking guns, but the murder's fingerprints, and a man running away, but that's not the bar you're asking for.
You'll also find these useful as they help you understand subterfuge. I mean your arguments aren't consistent. You're saying that Gates Foundation is playing subterfuge and willing to dig into that but you aren't with these other foundations. Idk why you think that if you want to make a "grass roots" campaign why you wouldn't incorporate other topics and set up a bunch of shells that are hiding your name. I mean no one is going to donate to "Exxon Mobile thinks the scientists are dumb" charity.
I'm not convinced you can change your mind. I'm convinced you're seeking validation and like rolling around in the mud arguing with people on the internet. We're done.
We're looking for a smoking gun because the original poster said there were "billions of dollars spent in an effort to increase public ignorance". For that claim to be true you'd need an entire battlefield of smoking guns. The idea that there's billions of dollars spent on influencing the public and the whole thing is entirely covert is a conspiracy theory. It can be true, but requires good evidence, not a light-year sized goalpost move.
> You're saying that Gates Foundation is playing subterfuge
No I haven't said that. I've said, quite clearly, that the Gates Foundation is an example of spending vast sums very openly and non-subtly. You can even search their website to learn about their spending. Which is my point! I can evidence my claims because a billion dollars spent on influencing the public is about as non-subtle as you can get and easily proven when true.
This is the second time you've quite seriously misinterpreted clear statements by me in this thread. Firstly you read 60 seconds as 1 second, now you think I've said the Gates Foundation is an example of "playing subterfuge", but that's not a claim even its critics make of it. You've projected your own biases onto my posts and read things that aren't there.
"ExxonMobil‘s $33 million campaign to sow doubt and denial about global warming"
> [...] We know this $33M figure is an underestimate of the total spending by Exxon to fund opposition work on climate policy. For example, the Chamber of Commerce appears for the first time on Exxon’s Worldwide Giving report in 2014 at $1 Million. We assume this is not the first (or the last) contribution Exxon has made to the US Chamber of Commerce.
> On this page, you’ll find the total amount of funding from ExxonMobil and its foundations to dozens of organizations that worked to spread climate denial. Hyperlinks will take you to further detail about each organization’s funding specifics and activities.
1. That list contains items like "Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory", "Congress of Racial Equality", "Chemical Education Foundation", the "Independent Women’s Forum" and so on, in fact not one of these organizations is specifically about climate, yet your source claims all $33M was spent exclusively on climate change. So already this website is lying to you in its very first sentence. Not a great start.
2. This $33M appears to be all charitable giving by Exxon spread over more than 20 years. That's not much, nowhere close to billions of dollars.
3. The tiny amounts are a problem for them, so they say they "know" it's really a lot more. As befits a site that just makes things up, the reason they "know" is: "We assume this is not the first (or the last) contribution Exxon has made to the US Chamber of Commerce". Brilliant. Assumptions, facts, what's the difference?
Again, this isn't evidence for "billions of dollars" being spent on "increasing public ignorance". It's not even evidence for any money being spent on climate, because the reasons they donated to these various foundations isn't really known to the desmog guys. It's just more assumptions.
But I'm not asking you to find me credible. Why would I, this is an anonymous account, as is yours. If you can't reason about things except via who's saying them, then this really isn't the site for you. That's why we have to debate issues and facts.
Your "facts" are not, as you appear to believe, counter evidence but merely misleading and goalpost-shifting distractions from the claim that inordinate sums have been spent by the fossil fuel industry supporting organizations whose entire purpose is to produce insidiously distorted argumentation and PR, aimed at producing misinformation and disinformation on fossil fuel impact on climate change.
For example, your argument that one incomplete list of a single company's "charitable activity" is "nowhere close to billions of dollars" when the claim was "probably billions" across the entire industry, where "probably billions" is pretty obviously no more than a vague gesture at "huge amounts of money".
That you find a climate-disinformation spend even in the $10s of millions acceptable is something you might ponder before you start lecturing people on what sites they should post on.
Projection, your honor! We started with "probable billions" on climate-related PR and you replied with evidence of millions, much of which isn't on climate related stuff. Now you're saying what you meant wasn't billions at all. That's goal post moving!
Yes you hedged your claim, but so what? It's still wrong. You don't get to make wild and totally false claims by sticking "probable" onto everything.
> That you find a climate-disinformation spend
You haven't shown that or even laid the groundwork for that. Even if these firms were spending the amounts you claim, which they apparently aren't, did it occur to you that they might be right? Nope. You just assume anything they say must be wrong, because you've been brainwashed by propaganda. You can't even find any specific campaign!? If you could we could then debate the real issues, but didn't even get that far.
> We started with "probable billions" on climate-related PR and you replied with evidence of millions,
Again you omit the salient detail that "probable billions" referred to an entire industry and the (conservative) $33m (offered as a simple example in relation to your claim of "I could only find $10k!") is the contribution from only a single component of that industry. Classic goalpost shifting, which is why it's fruitless to engage.
> There's a point I've tried to make any number of times on Skeptoid, and that's if you want your argument to be robust and persuasive, don't include any bad evidence.
I often have to wonder, how are these highly intellectual people able to have a world view like that?
From my experience, bad evidence works wonders in arguments, because they're generally driven by emotions. It doesn't even matter if they're disproven later on, as the person will have moved on to new arguments.
Rational discourse like this person seems to take for granted is - from my experience - beyond rare.
> From my experience, bad evidence works wonders in arguments
It is because people have different goals and are using different metrics. They are just getting confused and thinking they are aligned with the same goals. If you are seeking truthful arguments with debates between good faith and purely rational parties, then weak evidence isn't great, because (like the parent said) it just creates a man made of straw than can easily be torn down. BUT if your goal is to perpetuate arguing and drive up emotions, the tool is fantastic. Because it creates a man of straw which can easily be torn down! Everyone likes burning a big man. I hear they even do it yearly out in the desert.
So people just aren't able to properly communicate because language is fuzzy and filling in gaps. That we're assuming those gaps are filled in the same way, but they aren't. Weak evidence is either very useful or very hurtful, but it depends on your settings and goals.
As much as I'd love this to be true, evidence suggests otherwise. We wouldn't be in a lot of this mess in the first place if this were true. In certain settings (e.g. academic) you're absolutely correct, but in public I don't think you are.
We're currently living in the age of misinformation precisely because this isn't true.
The onlookers are the people that generally don't understand the topic that's being discussed, which creates this illusion of making a rational decision, even though it's entirely driven by emotion.
I'm going to assume good faith. So let's look at the data and see how to read it. We'll even use the same sources!
> Since the movie “Inconvenient Truth” the amount of ice of the world has increased significantly toward the mean.
Let's go to that link (or read the top reply) and verify ourselves![0] Should be easy, right? Let's click "hide all years" on the side and also uncheck the median and ranges (so we have nothing). Then one by one, let's click the decade averages in the top right. Where does the graph move? We could also click every 5 years, or even 1 year and watch each line be drawn. Is there a trend? The one I see completely disagrees with that tweet.
But why is the tweet misleading? That's a better question. Well, click 2022 and you'll see something interesting. In Jan-April there's actually a bit more ice than in 2006, with about 0.5 million km2 as a max differential. But July through December it goes far below, with a differential of about a million km2. But let's check other years, to see if there's a bias. Just select 2022, we'll add 2023 and down to 2017. Okay, we see 2022, 2017, and 2020 are a bit different, so let's keep those in mind. Now let's do the same thing around 2006. We see here that 2006 is a bit abnormal for the years surrounding it. Now let's select the bounding years and then compare the two. Does this make sense and agree with the averages? It should.
Your alarm bells should have gone off in the first place because 2023 doesn't even have a full year to plot. Not even half of one.
> Additionally nearly every climate sensor is located on the tarmac of an airport.
Yeah! That's actually exactly right! We need a lot of thermometers and placed in a lot of locations. (I should also mention that there are a lot of thermometer systems that aren't based on airports though but we could also get deep into wet bulb vs dry bulb and all kinds of things. We'll just stay here for now) So we look for existing ones to work with and then use that data. What I find interesting about this tweet is that usually we're criticized for "manipulating" data rather than this. There's a surprisingly good and approachable article on all this here[1]. You'll find how we adjust surface temperature data to account for being near a black body, how ocean temperatures are adjusted based on the measurement techniques that are used (because each one introduces a different bias), and so on.
Actually one thing you'll frequently find me complaining about is how difficult analysis actually is (though usually in the context of ML). This is quite similar. You can't ever really work with "raw" data, because your measurements have biases in them and if you don't account for them you'll get biased results which do not align with observations. But the best first check that you can actually do is look at prediction model and then look at the results and see how good the predictions were. Luckily with something like climate science we've had decades of this going on and so we can verify this pretty well. We just need to look at models created in the 80's, 90's, and 00's and see how good they predicted the subsequent decades of temperature rise[2,3,4].
So I can get the misunderstandings here and the reason to be skeptical. But I think we've thoroughly shown that the two tweets you linked to are either by people that are misunderstanding a highly complex thing (pretty understandable) or are not acting in good faith (which if they're claiming expertise with lacking knowledge, this too is not in good faith). Climate is a pretty complicated topic with a lot of moving parts that can appear to contradict one another if you aren't careful. I highly suggest drawing charts to keep track of how things connect. Most people aren't trained in these things and so it is understandable. But you also should focus on asking questions when you don't understand rather than asserting "facts". There's no reason to feel embarrassed for not knowing things. We all are pretty fucking stupid, myself included. But let's also try to not trick ourselves. The best way to do that seems to be to challenge our own beliefs. You set up a challenge of "how would I disprove myself" and then see if you can do so. If you can't, then congrats, your opinion should get stronger. If you do, dang, let's update our beliefs. Usually it is somewhere in between though and you don't have to tear everything down. But I have to admit, when the whole perception changes, it is kinda exhilarating. Finding out new things is quite a lot of fun.
That wall of text doesn’t address what I said which was
“Since the movie “Inconvenient Truth” the amount of ice of the world has increased significantly toward the mean.”
That is 100% accurate. You’ve assume I said something else and constructed a straw man argument.
Additionally, as mentioned by another poster, secondary weather sampling stations were built by the government to audit the warming trends reported and the result was way less increase in temperature.
Additionally it was reported that the BBC reported a historic increase in temperature and after bloggers spent a year doing FOIA requests to audit the data it was found that the entire temperature anomaly was due to a 60 second spike of a single temperature sensor placed in the pathway of airplane jet exhaust which was triggered by three military jets landing right after another.
Additionally, the earth is not the only planet experiencing global warming, every single planet in the solar system is experiencing global warming.
And this warming coincides with the warming trends on Earth.
I could go on… the Bell curve controversy with climate alarmist Michael Mann who’s defamation case against Tim Bell was dismissed because Michael refused to reveal his climate alarmism data to the court for 9 years despite the Judge ordering him to do so.
I could also mention how prominent climate scientists like Judith Curry get evicted from the “Club” once they go against the alarmism narrative.
This whole thing stinks like a religion where heretics are burned at the stake and any contradicting data is ruthlessly silenced.
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
> “Since the movie “Inconvenient Truth” the amount of ice of the world has increased significantly toward the mean.”
> That is 100% accurate. You’ve assume I said something else and constructed a straw man argument.
No, I assumed you said that. I think what you intend to now say is "Comparing the arctic sea ice levels between 2006 (the year "An Inconvenient Truth" came out) and today, there is little to no difference in levels." That statement is true and unarguable. It is fact. But it is also very precise and I'd argue not useful.
You are extrapolating by using the word "trend" as that incorporates a more continuous nature of things. That is why we looked at multiple years. Because we need to see a trend. Systems are noisy and if we just take two samples we can't compare them that well because we haven't really incorporated the error/uncertainty associated with those data points. By incorporating more years we are doing just that. We could be much more rigorous and tighten our error bounds, but the process we did is sufficient to discredit your claim.
The truth is that 2023 is only just starting. If we look at 2020-2022 we see that up until... July 1st, that they are near identical to the 2006 values. But that's when they all diverge and there becomes a large gap (July 1st till about Dec 1st).
The 60s comment is addressed in the other comment. Let's not merge two threads.
Re Mars: That article is about methane and not about global temperatures. I'm not sure why this is relevant. Doesn't even mention the delta.
Re Pluto: It explains the difference right there in the article. Earth's eccentricity: 0.017; Pluto's eccentricity: 0.249. A 15x difference seems to play an important role and makes for good explanations about different mechanisms. I mean the fucking thing gets closer than Neptune during its orbit and this was one of the reasons it was downgraded to a dwarf planet.
I'm no longer assuming good faith. You're not even reading your own sources and considering other opinions. I have made the mistake of trying to play chess with a pigeon. I should have expected my board to be full of shit, but I tried to be nice.
None of the claims zackees is making are new or obscure. They're well known problems proven many years ago. For example so many thermometers are located next to runways because climatologists collect data from weather stations that were never intended for them. Airports need this data but then it gets mixed into datasets that are claiming to measure general change in climate.
This can lead to absurd outcomes. The UK had a very hot day last year, with the Met Office reported a "record breaking" temperature. The problem is that this temperature was recorded by a thermometer right next to a military airbase runway at the exact moment three fighter aircraft were landing. The temperature spiked up to the record level for 60 seconds and then dropped again, with the spike+drop being quite massive. Finding this out took a year of FOIA requests, done by independent bloggers of course, not journalists.
Jet exhaust shouldn't be reported as climate change, but it is, because climatologists don't seem to care much about data quality. The underlying networks they use have a lot of corruption in them from various sources and the error bars are wide, but the uncertainty is never reported or shown to the public.
A couple of decades ago this problem flared up in the US and Congress spent the money to build out a new state of the art weather station network just for climatologists, with very carefully sited stations. It's called the Climate Reference Network and climatologists refuse to actually use its data. If you review the thermometer readings it generates you can see why:
> This can lead to absurd outcomes. The UK had a very hot day last year, with the Met Office reported a "record breaking" temperature. The problem is that this temperature was recorded by a thermometer right next to a military airbase runway at the exact moment three fighter aircraft were landing. The temperature spiked up to the record level for 60 seconds and then dropped again, with the spike+drop being quite massive. Finding this out took a year of FOIA requests, done by independent bloggers of course, not journalists.
I'm going to need a source on this. This doesn't even really make sense to me, because a single 1s spike (in either direction) should be filtered out. It also doesn't make sense how this would significantly affect a model which is performing a multi-decade analysis unless that single 1s spike was used to represent at least a month's worth of temperature. Which as far as I know the data is being pulled at at least a daily rate if not more, so the spike would disappear.
For the "no warming" part, let's adjust things a little bit to be more clear. First, let's clear that noise. It is all jiggly and difficult to read and trend going on. Let's select the month of June (middle of the year) and then select a 12-month time scale. Interesting, the beginning and end have the same point. Let's now find out if this is a coincidence or not (current window should be 2006-2022). If we move our window to 2010-2022 we see a clear trend line up over the last decade, but it is noisy (-1.07 -> +0.96). So let's go in the other direction. 2000-2022 seems down, slightly. Let's keep going. 1990-2022, okay, very clear upwards. 1980-2022, very upwards. 1970-2022, we're now at -1.65 -> +0.96. 60's, seems we've stabilized. 50's, oh, difference is decreasing again. And we keep going and see a clear trend of increasing.
I think when we're talking about a multi-decade effect we need to look at... multiple decades and be a bit more careful to not only look at one single window. Especially with numbers jumping around a lot.
> 'm going to need a source on this. This doesn't even really make sense to me
I was in London all last summer, as I am now. You are correct. The idea that the record breaking temperature of 19 July 2022 (1) was some kind of fake or artifact of measurement, is horseshit, plain and simple. There's no other way to put it. This is a glib but nonsensical assertion. It's just deliberately wrong.
That 1 day was the worst of it but the whole several weeks were bad. I myself measured 41C in my back yard on the 19th. Others had similar.
OK here are the sources. Note that I said the spike was 60 seconds, not 1 second, not sure where you got a 1 second spike from. Re-reading the stories it seems it was more like a few minutes rather than one minute. Anyway, the RAF Coningsby investigation was done by Chris Morrison over the course of about a year. I suspect you or others will reject the source for ideological reasons, but here's how he developed the story. This brief spike mattered because it was widely covered in the UK as irrefutable evidence of climate change, it being the hottest temperature ever recorded there. It's not about inclusion in monthly averages.
It begins here, with the BBC lying about where the record temperature was observed. Not a great start:
"The BBC noted on Radio 4 last night that the record temperature arose in the “village” but co-ordinates on the Met Office site place the device halfway down the runway at RAF Coningsby, home of two squadrons of frontline, combat ready squadrons and a training base for Typhoon pilots."
Here's where they discover the record was set during a brief spike:
"Over six minutes, the temperature jumped suddenly by 1.3°C to 40.3°C at 15.12 (3.12pm), and was 0.6°C lower just a minute later. In just two minutes from 15.10 the rise was 0.6°C."
Here the Met Office claims that they have a rigorous verification process, and maybe a break in clouds was the reason for the spike, but Morrison got a satellite photo that showed it was a cloudless day:
Re: no warming. Someone else was confused by this, maybe my language wasn't clear enough. The US CRN only has data back to 2005 because that's when it was opened. The point is that the older network is garbage, with lots of heat-causing corruption in the record and very low data quality. Climatologists in the 1990s were drawing totally different temperature graphs to today's, yet they are both supposed to be based on the same observations. This is clearly a terrible situation to be in for any field, and a big driven of distrust in climatology. Good scientists care about instrument accuracy, they don't collect low quality data and then constantly rewrite the collected data in a never ending attempt to retroactively fix it! So if we restrict our view to the data collected by the trustworthy weather station network, what do we see? No warming at all, even though CO2 rose constantly over the time period in question. That's a serious problem and the attempts at debunking it aren't convincing.
So I'm not buying it from the articles. They are unconvincing and not really saying too much. They keep point back to satellite data and that surface temperature stations are biased. I actually addressed some of this in this comment[0]. The arstechnica article actually discusses a lot of this. We know that airport data is biased. No one has claimed otherwise. It's also why the data is pre-processed before being used. It doesn't make it garbage, it just makes it biased. If you know the direction it is biased, you can unbias it. I'm not sure what Watts is talking about and I can't read his report. Even using the wayback machine I can't load it. But if he did what he's saying he did then it looks like he just unbiased the debiased data, not the raw. The arstechnica post even goes through this btw.
Processing data is pretty common. I mean we aren't fucking idiots. If you can figure out an issue in 2 seconds, you bet it has been addressed. Other sources are just other blog posts so forgive me for not taking them as good value given that I can read articles from scientists and understand all their methods and models (which are open sourced[2]). I mean even the blog you linked me has a graph of arctic sea ice[1] (also addressed in other comment) where they didn't even bother to remove the 1981-2010 mean line. Which both years are below... But if you look at my comment[0] you'll also see why their selection (especially of the time range in months) is deceptive. I walk you through how to verify yourself. It is fine if you don't believe the NOAA data, but if you don't then you also can't believe dailysceptic since they are using that same data to dispute NOAA's claims. Both are dependent on the data being accurate. Which a big irony given our above discussion.
To be more direct with satellite data (because I'm guessing you aren't going to read the arstechnica article), satellites don't measure temperature, they measure brightness. That is then turned into temperature. But they also don't measure ground temperature. So you're biased to that. But this can of course be adjusted and corrected for. But again, if we can do that for satellites why can't we do it for airport thermometers? The reasoning just doesn't line up in a consistent fashion.
I can tell you're really passionate about the subject. I congratulate you on that. We need passionate people and in no way do I want to get rid of your passion. You're trying to seek truth, and that is honorable. But an important part in science and truth seeking is to become your own adversary. Once you feel that an idea is good you have to attack it pretty fucking hard. You can't be sad when things get knocked down, it is just part of the process. You take what's left and rebuild from there and repeat. You need to challenge your own viewpoints. If there is nothing to convince you that would cause you to change viewpoints (even in the hypothetical!) then you aren't actually seeking truth, you're seeking validation.
So if you're seeking truth and you are acting in good faith, tell me just one precise thing that would get you to change your mind if the data suggested. I'll go first: I would doubt the weather models if I saw a constant or increasing trend of arctic sea ice that was outside variance levels.
[2] https://berkeleyearth.org/archive/about-data-set/ (btw, their skeptics guide also addresses all these issues. I hate to break it to you, but these are the same talking points from skeptics over the last decade. So it tends to be fairly easy to refute because noting additional has to be done. Just reapply the previous method to the newer data)
Your posts are quite confusing, do you realize that? I started a reply asking if you had mixed up different locations in the thread, because it seemed like none of the stuff you were writing was connected with the topic or people being discussed. Now I look carefully you seem to have gone off on a tangent and started replying, without any setup or intro, to random other parts of the linked articles, instead of treating them as a citation for the claims being made and sticking to that. I was like, Anthony Watts? Huh? Why is he suddenly appearing? What report? What are you talking about? Going back it seems you've picked a fight with paragraph 9 in the second link when the relevant information for answering your query is in paragraph 1?!
We can discuss other unrelated stuff, that's fine. But please accede first to these three requests:
1. Let's resolve the RAF Coningsby discussion before moving on. You appear to have mis-read the initial claim and then decided it didn't make sense and asked for sources. You now have the evidence. As you don't mention RAF Coningsby or the record breaking temperature in your reply, is it OK to assume you accept that evidence and thus that this reporting problem is real and did in fact occur as stated?
2. Please make it clear what the heck you're actually replying to! Quotes would avoid a lot of confusion here. Remember that some of these articles came out a year ago and I dug them up to satisfy your request for sources, I don't remember every single sentence in them by heart.
3. Finally, please cut out the attempts at philosophical lessons. You seem to be a climatologist, from your posts saying "we" when talking about that group? If so then that's a small community and one with a poor track record of accepting when its theories and evidence have been successfully knocked down by others. Before lecturing others about epistemic humility and truth seeking you may wish to take on Mann and other famous grifters that clutter up the scientific landscape, before random internet commenters of no note or impact.
Moving on.
> If you know the direction it is biased, you can unbias it. Processing data is pretty common. I mean we aren't fucking idiots. If you can figure out an issue in 2 seconds, you bet it has been addressed.
If you know the direction and magnitude of the bias, which the Met Office clearly do not, and if the bias is constant and well characterized, etc. That's important! As you seem to have accepted by choosing to debate something different, climatological agencies are happy to report momentary blasts of jet exhaust as evidence of climate change. That's an issue that literally anyone can figure out in two seconds the moment they discover the thermometer isn't in the village as claimed, but rather right next to a place jet fighters take off, and yet, unambiguously, the Met Office had not figured this out. They even claimed they'd used a rigorous verification process!
So please forgive us if we assume that you guys are in fact not addressing issues that any "fucking idiot" can spot in two seconds, because this would seem to be one of them.
More generally, your field's attitude to data quality is guaranteed to create train wrecks like this. If your data is poor quality you often won't know how to characterize the corruption, which is exactly why good scientists obsess over how to collect data with high quality instruments and setups in the first place. They don't just scrape whatever data they find on the internet and then assume with 100% confidence that 100% of the measurement error both can be well characterized and actually will be. That's an absurd methodology that is guaranteed to lead to continuous disasters like this, as well as the entirely reasonable lack of trust when people discover that you constantly rewrite the historical record. You guys can't even change the data once, you keep doing it, meaning that the vast majority of the climate literature is based on measurements you later decided were wrong! Most of the climate literature should have been retracted by now! This is inevitable when you can't reliably characterize measurement error. Thermometers aren't advanced tech and it's easy to build networks to a standard that satisfies even critics so why do you persist in "fixing" and then constantly "refixing" corrupted data sets?
I'm sorry, this conversation won't continue. Good faith is needed and it is required that you actually also read the sources you link. Good faith is also a requirement of the site. Otherwise you'll be confused as to what I'm responding to, as has happened.
I'm trying my best to "argue in good faith", but if you want to change the topic or respond to different parts of an article than what's relevant to the topic it's really helpful to clarify that. I did figure it out, but it'd have been faster if things were clearer.
Feel free to not respond to any of the points made, but the arguments so far are in good faith. If you think they aren't then the problem is on your side.
The topic hasn't changed. I'm just getting down to the root of where your arguments come from. That's why it looks a bit different. If you're arguing about the health of a tree by nature of the leaves and I am saying that the roots and foundation are problematic then the conversation will look different. The articles you reference, and thus where your evidence for your claims come from, have self inconsistencies and claims that are verifiably false. Look back at what I have said from this lens. Look back at what you have linked and actually read (or reread) the articles for more context. I put in the effort to read everything you sent me, it would necessitate that you do so in kind (including your own sources. I mean if you link me things that aren't relevant then of course we'll digress, but that mistake is on you, not me. You have even demonstrated this by admission of the confusion about Watts).
I want to also clarify that good faith doesn't just mean that you have good intentions. The bar is far higher than that. You have to have a willingness to change opinions given countering evidence. You have to do your best to interpret my words as to their intended meaning, not to the literal (because language is fuzzy and imprecise). It does require you to take time and process to the best of your ability, to ask for clarification where you are confused. But I assure you that everything I have wrote is not only connected to the responses, but strongly so. If you can take time to see this then you'll demonstrate good faith. But if you also do so then the conversation need not continue further anyways. So that's kinda where we'll stand because frankly I don't have the energy to continue. You can put that on me. But maybe you should attempt to understand why that is so.
Well, I haven't yet seen you change any of your opinions, but obviously that isn't proof you're unwilling, so I don't think trying to figure out other people's willingness is very productive. How would anyone ever know? If someone is putting in the effort to cite sources and defend their position, it makes sense IMO to assume a default of good faith argumentation. The alternative is a kind of nihilism. Indeed, I'm willing to continue. It's you who aren't! So, who is most willing to change their views?
Let's agree that our disagreement here stems originally from a disagreement over the nature of citing sources. I'd prefer to discuss the original claims (the leaves, as you put it), or at least finish discussing them, with the source excerpts being there to back up those claims only. You'd prefer to debate the entirety of the sources themselves as part of determining the validity of the original claims. Am I right in understanding this is because you don't (yet) believe the specific claims about the airport, the logbooks, etc? Or do you accept that this problem did occur and now wish to have a broader debate? Also how wide does this go? Will you bring up non-cited articles by the same author? Non-climate articles on the same site?
Getting more towards the roots. There seem to be three "branches" of this tree. (1) the RAF airport, I believe this has been proven conclusively unless you think Morrison is inventing FOIA requests and things out of whole cloth so let's put that to one side now, (2) data adjustment vs improved instrument quality and (3) the sea ice chart.
I've already laid out my views (and those of zacharees I guess and lots of other people) when it comes to (2). We don't accept the idea that scientists should just suck up data of arbitrarily low quality, do some processing and then demand the public blindly trusts that the data is fixed. Jet exhaust spikes being declared climate change are clear evidence that this fixing process doesn't work properly, but there's also a logical circularity issue. Anyway. No need to repeat all that as I wrote it out above.
That leaves (pun intended har har) (3) the sea ice chart. It helps to have context here about what Morrison believes. His line is that global warming was real, but "started to run out of steam 20 years ago" as he put it. He thinks that CO2 saturates i.e. climate response isn't linear but logarithmic and that whilst there was indeed some industrial warming in the 20th century, in the last 20 years most impact on temperatures has been a mix of natural factors like El Ninos and poor data handling by climatologists. The 1980-2010 trend line remains because, firstly, climate skeptics don't like tampering with charts! These charts are generated by government provided websites and the standard in that community is to use the generated images as-is. And secondly, because it doesn't contradict his views on what's happening. Indeed he calls it out specifically, "As can be seen in the graph above, the decline rate of the sea ice extent is not far off the 1981-2010 average and well above 2012" so I don't understand why you say he didn't even remove it. Why would he? He goes on to talk about natural cycles and the AMO/PDO, so it's a part of his argument. The chart supports that view because if sea ice were driven purely by human activity (the standard line we're fed) then sea ice should continue to decline year-on-year but there's been no effect from the last 10 years of emissions, apparently. So clearly natural variation is dominating here.
> You'd prefer to debate the entirety of the sources themselves as part of determining the validity of the original claims.
No, because I'm discussing the data. That's why it is the roots. My claim about the sources you mentioned are the stalk, which is rotten. Because they are misinterpreting or misunderstanding the data and making conjecture that isn't validated. I haven't really discussed (1) but I've extensively discussed (2) and (3).
Did you actually look at the data or just immediately Google for a rebuttal? The page you link to asserts there to be a trend, but then links back to the page I linked to, which:
a. Doesn't plot trend lines. What are they trying to link to, exactly?
b. Has no observable trend in it. You can see that with your own eyes.
Look at the graph!
BTW, in the text there's a claim there's a trend but, "the warming rate (trend) in USCRN annual temperatures is 0.86°F per decade, with uncertainties ranging from -0.58°F to 2.31°F per decade."
In other words the trend is so tiny the uncertainty bound includes zero, which means they can't actually say if there's a trend at all. It might even be going down. This is all another way to say there's no observable problem in this data. It's called global warming, but in the country with the best temperature network it doesn't happen.
> A couple of decades ago this problem flared up in the US and Congress spent the money to build out a new state of the art weather station network
> For nearly 20 years it's shown no warming in the USA whatsoever.
i.e. since the construction of a high quality network, warming doesn't happen anymore.
If you zoom out to the 1950s you're incorporating data from the old network. The US government built a new one because data from the old network was being extensively modified by climatologists post-collection, and they were even modifying data long in the past, using the low quality of the network as a justification for doing so. More than half of all observed warming comes from these administrative adjustments and aren't actually visible in the original data, so you can see why you'd want to fix that.
With all due respect, you can't claim half a dozen links are compromised of "invalid data" if you're not going to provide a proper source that states this data is invalid. You are a single commenter on HN, why would anyone read your posts and then invalidate the entirety of modern climate science? You need to give a little more to go off here.
The sources have been posted and you can see for yourself that the climate sensors are located at the tarmac airports, many in the pathway of airplane exhaust jets.
What you are looking for are “authoritative” analysis from the same in group perpetuating this scam, which is circular reasoning and a logical fallacy.
Many authoritative sources outside of this club are rightly pointing out with hard data that this warming is so overstated, fraught with integrity problems (to put it lightly) and conflicts of interests that the entire narrative needs an audit and inclusion of climate scientists that have been locked out of this debate.
Sorry, it's easy to forget that many people have never encountered these facts before. Climatologists continuously rewrite history which is why it's so confusing. In 1999, NASA climatologist James Hansen was wondering why the USA hadn't got any warmer in the 20th century:
This is a very interesting historical article which NASA has long since deleted from their website. Look at the two graphs, in particular the graph of US temperatures on the left. The text says this:
How can the absence of clear climate change in the United States be reconciled with continued reports of record global temperature? Part of the "answer" is that U.S. climate has been following a different course than global climate, at least so far. Figure 1 compares the temperature history in the U.S. and the world for the past 120 years. The U.S. has warmed during the past century, but the warming hardly exceeds year-to-year variability. Indeed, in the U.S. the warmest decade was the 1930s and the warmest year was 1934.
OK, so in 1999 the historical record said there was no clear climate change in the USA and the hottest year was 1934. Temperature declined from +1.5F (anomaly) to about -0.2F in 1970. Now look at the modern NASA temperature graph:
If you look at the 1900-2000 period in both graphs, the story is very different. Now 1999 is hotter than 1934. In the old graph, the period between 1980 and 2000 doesn't do much. In the modern graph you see rapid warming.
So what's going on? As you can see, by the year 2000 climatologists were getting seriously bothered by the US data. It can't really be called global warming if it isn't global. Also, the US temperature network had a lot of problems but it is by far the most comprehensive for 20th century data. Much of the world doesn't have any data at all for much of the 20th century! Theory and observed data didn't match, so they went looking for reasons to change the data. If you look hard and long enough you can find such reasons, and they had plenty of time. The weather stations were never intended for climate monitoring so their siting and procedures weren't good enough for that. More and more adjustments started being made until the picture you see today: they cooled the dustbowl years and warmed the most recent history. Fast forward 20 years and they're so comfortable with changing historical data that some temperature records rewrite the entire history of every thermometer reading, every month.
This isn't really kosher, obviously, hence the construction of the new Climate Reference Network. Unlike the historical network this one is built for climatologists, with very careful siting away from heat sources. It shows no warming. So to recap: in 1999, the weather stations show no warming in the 20th century. A few years later a new network opens, and it shows no warming either. The appearance of warming comes from big piles of FORTRAN that reprocess the old data. Although this is about the US data, the global thermometer network has even bigger problems with siting, rewritten histories etc.
Hopefully that's enough to go on, if you feel like researching the topic further!
“We are confident that, once we show what the fossil fuel companies knew about global warming and when, and what they did to deny, delay and deceive the public, the jury will not let the fossil fuel companies get away with their reckless misconduct.”
Oil companies also know that their products are critical to the production and distribution of food and a long list of other modern day necessities. Should they cease operation and let us starve ?
I think the argument here is that they shouldn’t deceive the public about the realities of their operations in order to raise or sustain their profits.
If the service is essential, the consumers of said goods can make their own decisions about how essential they are without all the smoke and mirrors.
"An inconvenient truth" and Greta Thunberg hardly had any effect in changing policy.
So don't tell me the lies of the oil companies had any effect on policy. Congress saw the conflict of interest, but didn't want to do anything that raise gas prices.
Have you considered the possibility that Gore and Thunberg have had little success in changing policy because of things like the lies of oil companies?
I don’t disagree with you, but I also don’t believe allowing or continuing to normalize deception of the general public is an acceptable status quo.
Congress and the public may decide what level of non-renewable energy sources is acceptable to them. But they should not need to do so while being burdened by deliberate campaigns to misinform them or muddy the waters.
That's a brilliant excuse: Lie about the effects of emissions, lobby (and pay) Congress to not do anything about it (or change incentives to maybe use less gas rather than more) and then, when you are getting sued, just argue that the lying didn't affect policy, so it was perfectly fine.
you can’t definitively prove or disprove that. What you can prove is that oil companies actively deceived consumers about negative externalities associated with their product.
By that logic everything that has any positive externality at all would be legal. The plaintiffs specifically argue that the companies behaved recklessly motivated by profit seeking. They actively misled the public about a negative externality associated with their product. That is basically the same argument that plaintiffs made against tobacco companies. Cigarettes were legal, they brought satisfaction to consumers, but the producers actively misled their customers about negative side effects in a reckless manner.
Cigarettes are still legal and oil should remain so but the price of oil should include its cost to society, not only profit maximization considerations.
The argument should be that these externalities get priced into oil to help with climate change effects and transitioning to clean energy. The analog I think are cigarettes and how we have taxed them out of existence
Sadly, the solution we adopted for cigarettes, namely letting them still profit by poisoning the children of the developing world, won't work for climate change as we share the same atmosphere with them.
The word “critical” used in this sentence suggests there is no way to produce or distribute food or other commodities without fossil fuels, which is plainly, obviously false.
If it’s plainly false you’ll have no trouble explaining how, plainly. How do we feed the worlds population without fossil fuel produced fertilisers and fossil fuel distribution
No but they should at least not do buybacks and pay dividends, before cleaning up the mess that their production & product causes. This way an even competition field would form. Oil drilling is not a ludicrous business if you consider the actual costs for production (aka capturing carbon, decommissioning rigs, cleaning up production sites).
Let's say Shell suspended all dividends indefinitely. What would your advice to your pension fund be? Sell Shell and buy BP? Would Shell's ability to function exist if they became a non-profit and a share price of 0?
Does Saudia-Arabia pay for the clean-up of say Australia? Does the US pay for the clean-up of Uraguay? Does the explorer, producer or consumer bear the clean-up responsibility?
Investors do whatever is optimal for them. The duty of the market regulators is to ensure an even playing field, so that the investors are not deceived about the profitability of businesses.
Thankfully the US has a lot of say in the global oil supply and demand market. We already have rules & taxes in place for all the producers and importers of oil in the US (aka they need to buy certificates for blending renewable fuels mostly from US produced corn).
We didn’t. Not at the scale seen in the 20th and 21st centuries. You could use every acre of land to produce food for humans using the best traditional farming techniques, and only feed 4 billion people. There literally wasn’t enough biomass and replenishing reactions. The other half would have to starve.
What feeds the world today? Fixed nitrogen fertilizers made out of the combination of air and fossil fuels.
If only we had never increased in population count that much. We would have spared the planet from many ecological disasters. A population of 4 billion sounds like a dream right now.
Are you really saying the universe would be better off without 4 billion people? Each with their own hopes, dreams, families, and hobbies. Whatever value you ascribe to nature only exists because we people are here to witness it. Doubling the number of people doubles the number of sentient beings bringing light and value to the world.
I seriously cannot fathom how someone could say that the world is better off if people didn't exist. What value system justifies that mass murder through erasure?
I agree with the value of people but would factor quality of life in. We’re currently projected to have something like a billion people seriously disrupted by climate change and all of us noticeably worse off which puts you in questions like how much human misery undercuts that.
Obviously the solution isn’t “kill 4B” and especially because the climate impacts and causes are very unevenly impacted - 300M Americans have generated more greenhouse gases than the billions in Africa or Asia who are being impacted first.
It’s equally true that the number of miserable people in the world is greater, too (lower percentage of a bigger number, but it’s not evenly distributed. If you’re a Bangladeshi farmer getting wiped out multiple years running due to climate change-amplified flooding, you probably aren’t comforted by the fact that even poor Americans can watch Tik Tok.
For the past couple of decades, at least, more people have been lifted out of poverty than have been added to it through population growth. So no, even by that metric things were worse off in the 70's or 80's than they are today.
Better off? Maybe. Probably. Murder or erasure? No.
Lets be a bit careful about putting words into other people's mouth or implying things. I intentionally phrased it that way, that it would have been nice to have avoided the current status in the first place.
I don't subscribe to the believe that more living humans equals better for the universe or even for the planet. Certainly not for the planet or other living beings on our planet.
I said murder through erasure, and I stand by that accurately describing what you wrote.
You are saying that the moral value of many/most human beings is a net negative. I don't know if you don't see, or if you choose to ignore the repugnant conclusions which must necessarily derive from this viewpoint.
It is funny how you try to doctor your "erasure" thingy into what I wrote. It still doesn't fit.
If for you the only possible conclusion is, that we have to fix it after the fact by applying some erasure, then that conclusion is on you, not on me. I find the conclusion from "net negative" -> "must erase now!" premature at best. To imply or state, that I voted for any "erasure" is plain wrong.
I personally would rather go about it like this: "Shit happened. We were collectively very stupid. What can we do now, so that in the future we don't make it any worse?"
Personal attacks will get you banned here, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Please don't post like this to HN again.
Edit: could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait generally? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
Though I'm not supporting oil companies, this is very wrong. Without oil (or vehicles in general), the manpower required to produce same amount of food will increase multiple times, and food won't travel much from the place where it grows, limiting the distance that people can reside.
So yes it's a necessity but as other have said, oil companies can keep operating without lying about climate effect though they'll get less profit as impact.
There were tens of millions of bison freely roaming America before we absolutely purposefully decimated them all. They existed "without oil". Grazing, pooping, making some of the most fertile soil in the entire world.
Maybe if we had built a society around respecting, honoring, and preserving an incredible evolutionary product we'd be just fine.
We wouldn't. This is a straight up math calculation. If we dedicated all arable land in the entire world to optimal food production using traditional agricultural techniques (the stuff which doesn't involve fossil fuel products), we'd only be able to generate less than 1000 calories per person. The world would starve.
Respect and honor doesn't magic food into existence.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to this because oil companies suppressed research, but society has known about this risk for a long time and benefited from oil. I put more of the fault with consumers, voters, and lawmakers. Oil companies just produced when they asked for.
There is enough blame to go around but simply ignoring the responsibility of oil companies doesn't serve the debate, either. By that logic, the producers of Zyklon-B should have been cleared of any wrongdoing because they simply satisfied the Nazi regime's demand for a nerve agent to kill people in concentration camps. Simply ignoring severe known negative externalities associated with your product should always come with legal liability.
You are correct sorry for the mixup (I guess "blood agent" would be more correct). Its primary use is of no consequence for this analogy, though. The company that manufactured Zyklon-B did provide it to concentration camps knowing it would be used to harm people and the executives responsible for this decision were sentenced by allied justices to death and prison terms as a consequence.
Shareholders of companies should be held accountable, no?
They’re the ones asking for more profits…
Or what about our current government who recently demanded oil companies produce more to lower prices? Am I as democratic voter morally in the wrong? If not, why not?
If you build a city in the Sahara who do you blame for it being hot? If you build a city where the geography creates a heat dome who do you blame for it being hot?
- you are morally wrong if you don't factor climate change and its repercussions on you, your children and other people into your voting decision
- shareholders should be held accountable
- companies should be held accountable
- governments should be held accountable
The lawsuit in question attempts one of these approaches, but feel free to work on any of the others, many others already do ;-)
Regarding the specific "but what about Joe Biden asking for cheaper gasoline" question: Joe Biden was without a doubt the better candidate for combating climate change in the last U.S. presidential election. No need to doubt your morality (if you voted for him) in that regard. But of course there are many (primary) elections and climate change should probably be a factor for you and everybody else.
> Multnomah County is seeking $50 million from the defendants for actual damages from the 2021 record-breaking heat wave. Temperatures in the region reached 116°F, killing 69 people in the county. This is the hottest temperature ever recorded in the county’s history.
$51B of damages for ostensibly killing 69 people in that county? This seems farcical, they're shooting for the moon to make headlines, they can't be serious with this. It's a PR/political stunt.
Also, surely those four companies cannot be solely responsible for the emissions that allegedly caused that heat wave — which is assuming we can even attribute that heat wave solely to global warming. Surely this isn't the first heat wave that have killed people in that area.
Theres actually a whole thing in the law about who to sue and how damages are dealt with, specifically that one goes for the Big offender for the full amount and then that party can pursue the smaller offenders to repay thier share of the costs.
I'd be very interested in the testimony in this case as it seems that the plaintiffs argue that 100+ deaths during 2021 PNW heatwave were caused by global warming.
I'm not sure what argument you make. Climate is different from weather and there have been extreme temperature events throughout history. Furthermore, how do you account for natural releases of methane or the whole cow farting angle? How do you establish responsibility, etc.
Climate change increases the number and severity of extreme weather events in a given year. That is well documented by now. So you can’t attribute all heat wave deaths to climate change, but you you can have a high confidence in attributing some of them. You can also quantify the contribution of individual companies to historical CO2 emissions. As long as the court follows that basic logic (and courts in other countries have done so) I don’t see a problem.
Ah, but do you ascribe blame to the fuel producers? Or the fuel burners? As a liquid it's not a problem. Burning it is the problem. Therefore should it not be the burners who are responsible?
Perhaps the county should just ban the burning of fool fuels. If its causing do many local deaths then surely that's the logical first step? Or would that just be political suicide?
The plaintiffs in this case do not argue that one or another party is responsible for the ultimate emission of CO2. They argue that the oil companies recklessly and with the aim of increasing their profits deceived the public about negative externalities associated with burning oil/diesel/gasoline/etc. And that this reckless behavior led to certain damages for which the companies should now be punished both to help pay for consequences and to deter similar behavior by these and other companies in the future. I am not a lawyer so I don't know if this legal theory will hold up in court or if a jury will follow these arguments. But on a personal and moral level it makes sense to me.
Should a few dozen deaths -- as absurd as it is to put the blame squarely on oil producers and not on, for example, Chinese coal-burning plants -- be countered by the enormous number of lives saved because an oil company allowed people to heat their homes during freezing cold winters, to cool them during this heat wave, and enable millions of ambulance rides when people are having heart attacks, etc? I'd say oil, overall, is way net positive in its contributions to society. The fact that this county won't ban oil is evidence that virtually everybody agrees.
People paid for the positive externalities i.e. heating their homes, driving their cars. Those who didn't pay also didn't share in the benefits, their homes remained cold. Society does not owe the companies anything for the positive externalities, any debt was already settled in cash.
But the companies, according to the lawsuit, knowingly and recklessly hid the negative externalities (CO2 emissions and hence global warming) from public scrutiny. These externalities potentially impact everyone, no matter how much oil they actually consumed or how much they benefited from society's oil consumption. The county does not have to ban oil (which it wouldn't be empowered to, anyway) to make that point. You don't have to agree with it, but the arguments you have brought up do not address the complaint that plaintiffs have brought here.
No, they paid for the direct results, i.e. heating oil, gasoline. The externalities that result include having a functional society where millions of people don't die every year due to the weather, where innovative goods (many of which are produced using large amounts of oil) can be produced anywhere in the world and still end up on a store shelf very close to you (or even delivered), and where the majority of people are freed up from having to produce their own food supply. Whereas a few deaths are countable (and the connection from oil production to these specific deaths is highly specious), the positive benefits of oil and electricity are so massive and so embedded and crucial to society that they are literally incalculable.
Further, the amount paid is massively reduced due to the incredibly efficient global infrastructure dedicated to producing, refining and transporting oil, thanks (in part) to Exxon, BP, Shell, etc. Instead of paying $60 for a gasoline fillup, imagine the costs of finding oil-producing land, independently drilling for oil and personally refining it into gasoline. The fact that you don't have to do any of that, is the true "externality" that you've benefitted from, but no, you have not paid for.
Every single positive aspect of the production of oil you listed has been paid for by some consumer at the pump or in the store at some point. And by governments/taxes through subsidies for oil companies. Consumers and citizens not only paid for the cost of everything you listed, they also paid for the (substantial) profits of the oil company's shareholders. Yes, some of that value creation also benefited overall economic growth but that is the same for literally every kind of business transaction and economic innovation.
Overall, the quality of life for most people at the moment is certainly higher than it would have been if oil has never been developed as a natural resource. But the risk of unmitigated climate change (which largely is due to humanity's consumption of fossil fuels) is that this equation will shift in the coming years and the use of oil, coal, etc. will turn out to have had a net negative impact on human quality of life.
"will shift"? "will turn out to have had a net negative"?
They are suing today, it hasn't even happened yet, and you're lacking proof it will. "Might" is the word you should be using, not "will." "Might not" is a lot more probable, however.
The effects of climate change are already apparent and are impacting millions of people negatively every year. That is exactly what the lawsuit in question alleges regarding this single county. And on a global level, waiting for a risk to turn into a certainty before acting is how you get your civilization destroyed, so I’d rather listen to the best available data and act immediately.
If 50% of fossiful fuel consumption is necessary and beneficial and 50% costs more than people benefit then getting rid of the latter will make everyone better off.
Well documented? This claim about extreme weather gets repeated and echoed by people who assume that it must be true because they keep hearing it, so they don't check. But it's not actually true.
There's a summary paper here that explores the data and shows this to be true:
The analysis is then extended to some global response indicators
of extreme meteorological events, namely natural disasters, floods, droughts, ecosystem productivity and yields of the four main crops (maize, rice, soybean and wheat). None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events
There are other indicators you could use but they also don't show any crisis of extreme weather, often the opposite. Examples:
- Wildfire burn acreage is drastically down over the past 100 years.
- Hurricanes are in decline, both in frequency and energy.
- Rainfall is also down slightly.
You can google those claims to find them if you like because the datasets are all public, except maybe the third which is a bit obscure so I'll give it here:
the small- and medium-size precipitation systems both exhibit significant decreases during 2001–2020 with trends at −1.13 and −2 mm/h per century, respectively. The large-size precipitation systems exhibit nonsignificant increasing trends during 2001–2020.
The study you are linking is written by four authors, three of which are without any climate science credentials (at least two are nuclear physicists). One of those three has been disowned by a former institute he has worked at because of his unfounded claims regarding climate change (or the supposed lack thereof): https://it-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Franco_Prodi?...
These quotes are from the IPCCC (which represents the consensus of thousands of climate scientists) sixth assessment report from 2021:
"The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (including heatwaves) have increased, and those of cold extremes have decreased on the global scale since 1950 (virtually certain). This also applies at regional scale, with more than 80% of AR6 regions1showing similar changes assessed to be at least likely."
"The frequency and intensity of heavy precipitation events have likely increased at the global scale over a majority of land regions with good observational coverage. Heavy precipitation has likely increased on the continental scale over three continents: North America, Europe, and Asia. Regional increases in the frequency and/or intensity of heavy precipitation have been observed with at least medium confidence for nearly half of AR6 regions, […]"
"More regions are affected by increases in agricultural and ecological droughts with increasing global warming (high confidence)."
"The average and maximum rain rates associated with tropical cyclones (TCs), extratropical cyclones and atmospheric rivers across the globe, and severe convective storms in some regions, increase in a warming world (high confidence)."
This stuff is complex, as is correctly interpreting the available data. But sure, go with the opinion of four random Italian dudes over the consensus of literally thousands of subject matter experts.
I am not a climate scientist so my ability to adjudicate the finer details of climate science is very limited. But I have a decent understanding of how science works in general. If I am confronted with two rivaling interpretations of the data and one side is supported by the consensus of 99% of the subject matter experts from virtually every country in the world, while the other is brought forth by four dudes, at least three of which are not subject matter experts, I know which side I trust.
I'm not sure if you understand how the IPCC reports are put together. There are working groups for each specific subject matter, comprised of subject matter experts. They put together their findings and open up the draft for comment to the entire scientific community. The version that is published in the report is the lowest common denominator that all involved experts in a given field (literally hundreds of people from around the world for each chapter) can agree on.
If I read the 2023 study you cite correctly (I am not an hydrologist and my guess is you are neither), it looks at a very specific set of data and interprets it under a narrow set of questions, bringing up some potentially interesting questions that would need to be studied further. At no point do the authors claim that it fundamentally contradicts established scientific consensus. They argue that their results could help better understand the phenomenon of climate change and its effects, which might well be the case. My guess is that their findings will be considered as we speak by some of the people involved in the IPCCC reports and matched with other studies that have studied aspects of the issues in question.
Global climate change is an incredibly complex subject and I do not claim to understand more than a sliver of it. But having followed this topic intensely for 20+ years, there has never been a scientific subject of this complexity that at the same time was supported by such a broad consensus of the actual subject matter experts. If you say that a fundamental aspect of this consensus is false, that claim is extraordinary and demands extraordinary proof. A couple of random studies one of which you haven't researched the authors for and the other which you probably do not have the required knowledge to understand just won't cut it.
> I have a decent understanding of how science works in general. <consensus>
That's not how science works, that's the opposite of how science works. This is the first reason we cannot get anywhere in this thread.
Science is not some academic claiming everyone agrees with him, some random journalist reporting that as gospel, therefore it's true. That's the pre-scientific approach. Science is a method for arriving at the truth regardless of what people's titles are, and regardless of how popular they are or claim to be. It's about data and theories, not social support, that's why it works. The alternative you're trying to use here is a mishmash of tribal signals combined with strange attempts to do title-based reasoning, like trying to decide whether physicists, hydrologists or climatologists are more "expert" for any given topic. The world doesn't neatly break down that way.
> If you say that a fundamental aspect of this consensus is false, that claim is extraordinary and demands extraordinary proof.
This is the second reason we can't get anywhere. I've already given you proof of all these claims in the form of data. Even data in the form of peer reviewed studies, by scientists, although that isn't actually necessary for it to be proof.
You're rejecting it because you seem to be reasoning purely on the basis of social signals. That's a problem, because for a claim of the form "those people over there are making false claims", no level of proof can ever be accepted if you think that way, no matter how extraordinary. It's a form of circular reasoning: These guys says they're experts and every other expert agrees with them. Those guys says they're also experts and the first group are wrong, but the first guys told me every expert agrees with them, so therefore the others must not be experts, and therefore I must not listen. If you think that way it's just a race to see who can get to you first.
The way out is to recognize that it's not really that complicated. You can engage with the science on its own terms quite easily. If the news says extreme weather is getting more common, and charts of extreme weather events show otherwise, the data should win unless you have some reason to believe it's wrong.
Besides, how can you ascertain that CO2 causes GW? It’s been shown in a small-scale model, absolutely, but can a 2m3 box model be used in court to demonstrate Earth-sized climate changes? Are petrol companies responsible for all weather events starting from now? And for how long? Are they non-responsible when we come back to 400ppm of CO2?
Perhaps they should adopt contract terms to prevent their products from being sold or used in Multnomah county, it's only reasonable that they should seek to mitigate the risk of the plaintiffs claiming an ever increasing amount of damages.
1. Start by having an official State/County/City forcibly takes money from taxpayer.
2. Lawyer Golf Buddy of said ^ official mentions his yacht isn't new anymore.
3. Said official hires golf buddy to do the legal stuff for some frivolous lawsuit, billing at a discount rate of $750/hour. Good frivolous lawsuits are ones that get the constituents excited yet are completely hopeless.
4. Lawyer golf buddy attempts to milk the hopeless court case as long as possible, as he gets paid no matter what happens.
5. Buy new yacht. Invite government official over after he retires.
The county should've done their research, that heat dome was a natural occurrence and they will become less common with climate change. But everything is climate change to some people. Perhaps the county owes the oil companies 51 billion for the heat dome that won't happen to them that otherwise would've?
I actually hope more of these types of lawsuits come, so that people will begin to cite actual climate science and begin to become aware of what is the result of it and what isn't, like this heat dome.
I can see the evidence that some parts of the oil companies tried to hide the concept of global warming and oil's impact on it. However, considering the fact that global warming has been well known to the public for decades, and we still haven't taken any kind of drastic action to prevent it, can any damage really be attributable to the oil companies?
Should the oil companies have hid the data on global warming? No. Would the world be any different if they didn't try to hide the data? Also no.
The point is that they systematically tried and succeeded to create doubt about climate change, when they knew well, that climate heating is happening. They actively mislead many people, who would rather grasp for the comfortable alternative lies than face the reality. They actively spent and did spend huge amounts of money to influence politicians to tell their "there is no climate change" or " it is all natural and normal" or "this would have happened even without humans" naratives.
Better be careful or the attorneys could end up like Steven Donziger, an attorney who won a huge settlement from Cheveron, and has been fighting them in court ever since.
Future headline: Supreme court decision (9-3) says Oregon County can go f*k itself. Majority opinion by Justice Thomas written after he rents his garage out to oil-execs for $10M.
President Biden literally just gave a speech months ago demanding oil companies increase production and lower prices.
Energy companies would have been happy to push solar or nuclear everywhere if there was any market/regulatory demand that justified the effort.
Even if oil companies decided that "oops, we shouldn't exist" and decided to cut production to zero and give back their shares to everyone (which is arguably what they have been trying to do until the current administration began threatening them), that vacuum would have to be filled with something. And it would probably be filled with a nationalized oil company that is un-sue-able like most of the rest of the world has.
It isn't illegal for oil companies to produce oil, so they have no legal obligation to refuse such a demand from the POTUS. The superior orders defense for producing oil isn't relevant because producing oil isn't an offense in the first place.
Maybe it should be illegal to produce oil, but even if such laws are eventually passe they won't be retroactive. Ex post facto laws are unconstitutional for good reason.
To the best of my mind there is not a developmental need or even a market demand for war crimes and genocide. I really have no idea what kind of equivocation you are trying to make.
An externality is a value (or a cost) which accrues to an entity other than the buyer of a good or service.
"Not freezing to death" is not an externality, it is consumer surplus, that is, surplus value from a transaction which accrues to the consumer in the transaction.
You are aware that in economics, prices are supposed to reflect differences in utility and marginal costs, right? If there is an overproduction of a given product then prices tend toward marginal costs, if there is a shortage they tend towards marginal utility. Oil companies tend to be very profitable because they get to monetize their land usage rights over oil bearing land. Their marginal costs are very low, basically just the cost of extraction of what was already there. They don't have to pay the plants. The marginal utility is defined by the best possible uses and guess what, saving a live is one of the best possible uses for a resource so people are willing to pay for it, possibly up to everything they have. Your objection is that the price is somewhere between what the marginal cost and utilities dictate. There is a consumer and a producer surplus and you argue that oil is cheap in comparison to how much people are willing to pay to save a life and this must be some huge consumer surplus that the oil company is responsible for. Except the company isn't responsible for its low marginal costs, it didn't pay the plants it is digging up. The market for life saving oil is oversaturated because there is not much oil that is directly allocated toward saving lives. Burning oil to keep yourself warm on an especially cold day isn't the same as heating your home every winter day so it is as comfortable as the summer. Nor is heating an overly large house life saving. You could have used an electric blanket instead to save your life. Since you only need to heat your own body, the amount of energy is insignificant.
So the price of oil is mostly reflecting its low utility (compared to saving a life) and low marginal costs. So it appears that in very specific circumstances the consumer surplus is really high. An objection against consumer surpluses isn't an argument against carbon taxes because they tax the usage, aka the burning, of fossil fuels and not its production. For taxing production you would need a land value tax or a resource extraction tax. Carbon taxes reduce globally harmful uses of fossil fuel at the expense of reducing individual consumer surpluses.
Saving a life isn't an externality though. It's very much an 'internality' - it's the reason why people use oil for heating when it's extremely cold. You can't claim people used oil to keep warm and then claim 'not dying from cold' is an external benefit of the product.
Edit: Actually you can claim that but only if Exxon weren't aware that not dying from cold is a benefit of heating, like they claim they weren't aware that climate change is a downside of their products. Are you saying people who work in the oil industry are really that stupid?
William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
What are you even attempting to argue? From your source:
"However, if—as the data seem to show—extreme cold is relatively unimportant, then a few degrees of warming will not yield a large reduction in cold-related mortality. Moreover, if extreme heat is important, then the same few additional degrees might cause a substantial increase in heat-related mortality."
My point is if you want damages from energy companies for deaths from warming then they should bill you for deaths prevented from cold. It's preposterous to think humans would be better off with less or more expensive energy. In a broader historical context, the only people who believe this are the most privileged people to have ever lived.
And maybe the people who never had reliable access to energy but suffer the consequences of excessive CO2 emissions? There are quite a few of them.
As is argued elsewhere in this topic, energy companies already have billed everyone for the benefits provided by their product. What the lawsuit is alleging is that they haven't taken responsibility for recklessly misleading the public about negative externalities associated with their product and that they should be punished for it.
Why stop at suing energy producers? Let's sue energy consumers too! Everyone knows their energy consumption contributes to emissions contributes to warming, so aren't consumers similarly liable?
Utterly asinine. One of few legitimate roles of government regulation is to address issues of externalities. This is an issue to address with regulation, not litigation.
You can sue people for illegal behavior. Simply consuming (or producing) hydrocarbons likely isn’t so nobody will sue over it. Recklessly disregarding a negative impact of a product you are peddling potentially is illegal, so people sue over it. Same as with cigarettes and opioids. Not sure why so many people are so averse to letting a court work out if oil producers can be held liable in this way.
What is pretty sure in my view is that future generations will hold us morally responsible for thoroughly wrecking the planet, between climate change, the mass extinction, micro plastics, cruelty against farm animals, etc.
The lawsuit appears to be available at https://multco-web7-psh-files-usw2.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.co.... Heading straight for end and looking at the causes of action:
1. Intentional and negligent creation of public nuisance. The nuisance appears to be extreme climate events, and I'm doubtful that you could actually show sufficient action on the part of the oil companies to link them to the extreme climate events (the standard is probably that you need to show that but for the actions of the companies, those events wouldn't have happened and... yeah, that kind of direct attribution isn't possible).
2. Negligence. I mean, this section is a mere page long, and doesn't go into any detail whatsoever, so it's hard to even figure out what is the supposed duty that wasn't done. So... almost certainly going to die on a motion for dismissal.
3. Fraud and deceit, in that they covered up the effects of climate change. Except that's not fraud--fraud requires that someone be reliant on the lie to do something. So you'd need to show that, e.g., someone only bought a tank from gas from Exxon because Exxon said climate change didn't exist. I suppose it's possible that's true--there's millions of people in the country after all--but... that's not really something that happens (least of all, anything actually alleged in the complaint, so far as I can thing).
4. Trespass. Wildfires caused by climate change constituted trespass. Cute legal theory, but cute legal theories are almost always tossed out of court quickly.
So out of four claims, three of them are dead on arrival, and the first one has an uphill fight. And even if they win, the $50 billion for "abate the nuisance" definitely isn't going to happen, and you're looking more at the actual damages which is apparently around $50 million.