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Several sites are reporting on the European Court of Human Rights' decision that failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions is a violation of our basic human rights. Specifically holding global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement, is a necessary step in preventing the serious, adverse effects on their lives, health, well-being, and quality of life which come with the direction climate change has been moving.
On Tuesday, a group of 2,000 Swiss women won a significant ruling on holding governments accountable for addressing climate change.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found that Switzerland failed to implement sufficient climate policies — violating the women's human rights.
The case could influence other European countries, as well as other international bodies, in their decisions about the legal ramifications of inadequate climate policies.
- — Swiss senior women win ECHR case, Vox.
In a historic judgement, the court ruled that Switzerland's failure to do enough to cut its greenhouse gas emissions breached the rights to life and respect for family and private life of some of its most vulnerable citizens.
It is the first time this court, which is responsible for interpreting the European Convention on Human Rights, a treaty signed by all members of the Council of Europe (including the UK), has ruled on a climate change-related matter.
A group called Senior Women for Climate Protection, whose average age is 74, had argued that they were particularly affected because older women are most vulnerable to the extreme heat that is becoming more frequent.
"The court recognized our fundamental right to a healthy climate and to have our country do what it failed to do until now: that is to say taking ambitious measures to protect our health and protect the future of all," said Anne Mahrer, a member of the group.
SoylentNews has covered ECHR decisions before, though mostly in the context of privacy in a digital context.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RamiK on Friday April 12, @11:17AM (20 children)
Actually not only did we fail to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement 1.5°C goals already, they were too optimistic to the point that climate scientists are now saying it's necessary to get to net zero carbon emissions with nuclear power and then top it off with climate engineering just to mitigate the worst of it:
( https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889 [oup.com] )
Make sure to compare and contrast to the The Newsroom 2014 skit [youtube.com] for a not-so-hearty gallows-humor laugh.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by ChrisMaple on Saturday April 13, @12:55AM (2 children)
An emergency is something that comes about rapidly and unexpectedly. Even if true, climate change fits neither of those criteria.
Climate change "scientists" are paid to promote panic. Their pay comes in large part from politicians who increase their power from that panic.
If they want to be taken seriously, make serious estimates of possible changes and their effects, accounting for costs and including error bands. Crying "we're all gonna die!" is neither credible nor helpful.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 13, @01:17AM (1 child)
According to your own dictionary?
From Wiktionary [wiktionary.org]:
So climate change fits both criteria, therefore is true.
There, I’ve argued as well as you. Even better, since I have one hyperlink.
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Saturday April 13, @02:47PM
Where's the evidence that it fits both criteria?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday April 13, @07:00PM (8 children)
Present knowledge of real world equilibrium climate sensitivity - which is better than "improved knowledge" BTW - yields a value of around 2 C for doubled CO2 - could be higher, but we don't see evidence of that feedback at present. Also, given that the last time climate sensitivity rose this high [soylentnews.org] which was merely a few years ago, it was due to an erroneous interpretation of cloud dynamics, perhaps this is as well.
It will take more than a biased study from people who have a stake in climate change hysteria to convince me that there's an actual problem.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Sunday April 14, @07:00AM (7 children)
The entirety of the first section "Climate sensitivity (ECS and ESS)" and the "LGM-Holocene and PGM-Eemian evaluation of ECS" subsection is dedicated to telling you what you call "present knowledge" is what was measured and calculated around 2015 for the Paris Agreements that has, since then, been remeasured and recalculated:
( https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false [oup.com] )
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday April 14, @04:15PM
These all have the failing that present day climate doesn't achieve these rates of warming. Future climate is one of the tests that such research can't fake. There're an awful lot of backloaded claims in climatology that conveniently can't be confirmed in the near future. Thus, I'm willing to wait till the far future to see if these claims are accurate.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 15, @04:09AM (5 children)
That's not the case with climatology. We don't magically start knowing things we have yet to observe, like alleged far future climate sensitivity. So it should be suspicious when there are repeated well-funded attempts to make the same claim. Here, it's particularly suspicious because the two approaches have little overlap. How did they manage to reach the same conclusions?
What's worse is that we just aren't seeing that level of climate sensitivity. For example, I observed [soylentnews.org] that almost all built in near future warming has already happened:
In addition, that corresponds to a possibly short term climate sensitivity of around 2.2 C per doubling of CO2 equivalent (ignoring that there are warming effects from the end of the last glacial period and solar activity which will drop that climate sensitivity number somewhat). So when someone predicts long term warming of up to 6 C per doubling, we have to ask first: why aren't we seeing any of that crazy warming yet? At the 3.6 to 6 C per doubling range of your study, we should see somewhere around 2.1 to 3.5 C of long term warming from what we have put in the air so far. So why are we seeing only a quarter or so of it so far?
As to the alleged support from the geological record, perhaps this is a sign that some of those estimates need fixing? After all, why suppose that the problem is a huge error in modern climate models that hasn't been seen yet rather than a similar error in estimates of the geological past?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RamiK on Monday April 15, @03:27PM (4 children)
The reason I didn't respond then or now is because I have no idea what "previous attempts" you're referring to or what you mean about "exaggerated response from cloud cover" since you're not citing anything.
In general, my post and position is that the IPCC is underestimating and taking an extremely overly-conservative stance in their reports. To that effect, I've linked a recent paper detailing specific issues with the IPCC models on points covering oceanic chemistry (vs. microbiology), cloud albedo, aerosols etc... You, on the other hand, are saying climate change is overblown without any citing at all and certainly nothing peer-reviewed while disregarding literally everything ever written on the subject going back at least to Arrhenius's 19th original paper. I mean, "some insulation"... "deviates a little"... That's literally a whole field being treated like a spherical cow, rounding error fudge factor.
Look, if you insist on wilful ignorance of over 100 years of scientific research and stick to basic thermodynamics, there's a pretty decent book by Thomas Murphy called "Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet" (that follows up on his well known Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist [ucsd.edu]) that breaks down those exact same numbers you're been napkin math'ing around by the 19th page (end of the introduction "Exponential Growth" chapter and the beginning of the "Economic Growth Limits" chapter): https://staging.open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/980 [umn.edu]
To be clear, the real relevance of the book to this particular discussion starts around the 5th chapter "Energy and Fossil Fuels" (~p70) where the actual greenhouse gasses figures are broken down into simplified models... But I'm hoping the first chapter will be enough to grab your attention.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 15, @10:37PM (3 children)
And half or less of the warming that predicted by your cited model. That is the problem here. Arrhenius predicted warming of around 1.5 C per doubling of CO2. That fits as well with the real world as the 3.6-6 C per doubling of the above paper does (by harmonic mean). What is there to cite BTW? Merely by reasoning about what we observe in the world, I don't need to cite beyond what I have already cited (and you failed to acknowledge).
Further, the IPCC has actually consistently exaggerated climate change and its harm. So I'm particularly unimpressed by the "IPCC is being conservative" narrative.
Show it. Don't just claim it. Frankly, I doubt there is anything in the past 100 years to support your assertions - especially the relevant recent past.
As to this book, neither chapter you listed was relevant to this discussion. And I'm not impressed by the title either. Nobody claims that the Earth is infinite and infinite exponential growth is more of that straw man. For example, the entire developed world would be negative population growth without immigration from the still growing developing world. So for a good portion of the world we're not even talking about infinite population growth in the first place - that indicates irrelevance of the first chapter.
My take is that just because a hypothetical infinite growth forever is bad doesn't mean that finite duration growth in our current scope is bad. It's a model that works now. And it's not like we don't have any reason for that growth - longer life spans, live in more interesting/challenging places, more people at developed world standards, better infrastructure, need for knowledge and better cognition, etc are all needs that create growth when satisfied.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Monday April 15, @11:18PM (2 children)
1896: 295 CO2 ( https://sealevel.info/co2.html [sealevel.info] )
2024: 421 CO2 ( https://sealevel.info/co2.html [sealevel.info] )
2024-04-09:
( https://climate.copernicus.eu/march-2024-10th-consecutive-record-warm-month-globally [copernicus.eu] )
Considering this has been in the headlines for months now and you've yet to produce a single citation to any of your claims other than your own math, I'm leaving this discussion.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 16, @12:43AM
And I've accepted that there is global warming. So of course, I have accepted that there will be months now that are warmer than pre-industrial months. So what?
I suggest coming back with evidence next time. These contrived examples from the biased Hansen paper to a cherry picked extreme month undermine your arguments.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 16, @02:19PM
Where are your acknowledgements of those citations? Moving on there are multiple fallacies driving your arguments such the above argument from authority or comparing the temperature of a cherry picked month to a long term average (fallacy of comparing unlike statistics among other things). Then the real deal breaker: the large, growing gap between models with aggressive warming predictions and the real world. For example, from the Yale Climate Connections story, the models with the new cloud physics models did a poorer job of predicting near future climate ("meaning the warmest models were the ones with weaker historical performance").
Finally, climate research has a peculiar habit of coming up with ideologically convenient research on demand: such as the hockey stick paper (which was a claim that global climate was very stable prior to the industrial era), extreme weather claims, and the present repeated insistence that climate sensitivity must be higher than observed. Throwing spaghetti repeatedly on a particular ideological wall and hoping some of it sticks is not good science.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Sunday April 14, @11:01AM (4 children)
I recommend readers to actually follow and read ramiK's link.
We are currently at 421 ppm CO2, and we'll be going much further.
(Score: 3, Informative) by RamiK on Sunday April 14, @03:27PM (3 children)
Keep in mind that while the 1.5°C vs. 1.2°C climate sensitivity remeasurements and recalculations are "strict" math and physics that aren't disputable, once you get into Hansen's 10°C GHG assessments, you're looking at his critiques on the widely used climate models (for not including feedbacks) which isn't within the scientific mainstream.
There's a good video reviewing the paper with some historical background covering this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-ArA_xYxfs [youtube.com]
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(Score: 2) by quietus on Sunday April 14, @04:37PM (1 child)
You're not making my weekend any better, ramiK.
Met a director of a philanthropic organisation funding climate change research, set up by the family behind Canada's biggest supermarket chain, last fall. One of the things he told me was that climate anxiety is now a thing with school children, and they were looking into how to mitigate that. People are bombarded with doom-and-gloom media reports, in part with reason, but this runs the serious risk of them giving up and tuning out.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Sunday April 14, @08:45PM
Bear in mind environmental research philanthropy was largely captured around 70s as an adversarial process where different industry members, whole industry lobbies and even nation states try to direct research away from examining themselves and towards examining their competitors. e.g. All the money going into plastic recycling research is coming from plastic users (like supermarkets) to propagate the myth plastic packaging is recyclable while giving busy work for scientists so they won't take the money from their competitors (paper and wood industry) to write against them.
Even from a standalone viewpoint (as opposed the market wide, game theory viewpoint I took in the previous paragraph), expecting a charity to succeed at anything other than preservation efforts is expecting the hired professional working at that charity to make themselves obsolete. e.g. The Linux Foundation works because it aims to preserve and develop Linux and the Linux ecosystem but at the cost of preventing superior designs and system languages from being introduced to the market. Conversely, the other side of the coin to "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime" is that there's nothing more effective than food relief charities in preserving poverty and corrupt governments. Which, of course, why the industries most involved in the hiring of the working poor are so involved in such philanthropic efforts.
Tobacco lobbies argue the same thing against the labeling of cigarette packets as health hazards... The food industry... ISPs... Social networks... Automakers... Pharmaceuticals... It's a very old straw man.
e.g. A variation of this argument was used against Hansen's opposition to cap-and-trade over carbon taxes as too uncompromising and politically unsound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Hansen#Criticism [wikipedia.org]
Well, ~20 years later and here we are: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00343404.2023.2194315 [tandfonline.com]
And if we're talking about realpolitik, don't forget industry is colluding to prevent green tech from being introduced to the market: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/08/eu-fines-vw-and-bmw-750m-for-colluding-with-daimler-on-fumes [theguardian.com]
All-in-all, scientists softening up their findings and policy recommendations in fear of backfiring is just setting themselves up to fail. Worse, if you look at how the Chinese got into electric cars and solar panels, you'll realize that by compromising with existing polluting industry, the potential non-polluting competing industry was prevented from entering the market resulting in net national and climate loss.
Sorry I don't have a TL;DR. Charity "science" happens to be a pet peeve of mine.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 16, @02:24PM
So why did you bring that paper into the discussion? As I have noted above, it's not consistent with observations of modern climate, but that lack of mainstream acceptance would be a warning sign.
(Score: 2) by quietus on Sunday April 14, @11:21AM (2 children)
Not much humor in that Newsroom clip from ten years ago, I'm afraid.
After watching, youtube recommended Carl Sagan's Congress testimony about the greenhouse effect, of 1985 [youtube.com]. Fifty (50) years ago.
(Score: 2) by janrinok on Sunday April 14, @12:25PM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by quietus on Sunday April 14, @01:44PM
Since the introduction of the hand calculator, and kids forgetting how to do simple additions in their head, properly, yes.
Get with the probabilistic times, janrinok: a second career with Boeing beacons.